The Periphery of the Mind

For the upcoming 2009 movie. Looks like I may have a reason to buy a Blu-ray player soon?

Labels: Geeky

I know comics can get kind of weird, but wow....

Labels: Geeky

So above is the Spore Widget, which lets people see the stuff I've been tinkering with in Spore. I wish it was a little bit clearer, but the last four creatures are shown in reverse evolutionary sequence.

Made it to the Space Stage yesterday, and it really is a whole new game. The learning curve is higher than before, but now things are really taking off. Literally. Exploration, planet changing, colonization of other worlds, research, artifact hunting, and so on. Two of the missions I had really stood out. First I was hunting artifacts for some alien empire. I went to one of the target planets holding these artifacts and found it buried inside the city of a (more primative) alien race. I wasn't sure how to get to it, so I just started burning the city to the ground with my ship's lasers and looted the rubble. As I was doing this the city came under attack from it's continental neighbors, who were waging a holy war against them. While the game said nothing on the matter, I couldn't help but imagine I was seen as a herald of divine favor... or wrath.

Another mission made me realize just how big the space stage is. I had 20 minutes to locate a specific world around a specific star and gather half-a-dozen life different life forms from it (the planet that gave me the mission wanted to increase their biodiversity). The thing is that I spent three minutes just looking at my map of star systems I'd visited (the target was a place I'd already been to). And then, once I found the system, I had to find the world within it. It plays out easily enough, which is impressive in and of itself, but the scale and scope of the space stage is literally astronomical.

Labels: Games, Geeky

Woke up yesterday at 4, unable to sleep. Went to Wal-Mart to get groceries (I always go early in the morning anyway) and saw that they had Spore on the shelves.

After spending yesterday playing it, with occasional input from the Professor, three words describe it: impressive, cute, fun.

Basically you start off as a microbe in the Cell Stage, eating and growing and slowly evolving. It plays kind of like a gorgeous version of Pac-Man really, with you running around and gobbling up creatures and plants, trying not to get eaten in turn. As you grow, you begin to notice giant things in the tide pool with you. And even bigger things lurking in the background. As you get bigger, those giant things start to notice you, and you have to avoid them. Until you get big enough to eat them that is. After about ten minutes or so, you've grown big enough to enter the...

Creature Stage. Here you walk out on land, hunting for food and growing. The big differences of course are that you can really begin to adapt your creature. Growing legs, arms, advanced mouths, wings, and so on. And yes, your critters can fly. And you'll need every edge you can get, as the goal here is to survive and evolve. While you can play it out aggressively, I went for a more social lifestyle, charming and prancing around to impress other species. As you grow, with lots of cutsey mating dances and teaching of babies, you eventually reach sentience and the...

Tribal Stage, which is so far the weakest part of the game for me. Basically you can dress your critter now, domesticate wild animals, and go conquer or ally with other tribes. It's not bad, but I suspect it'll be fairly dull to play through again, as the only real variance seems to be in what critters are randomly evolved to compete with you. There was a lot more player input and variety to be found in the Creature stage, but fortunately that player input returns in the...

Civilization Stage. Here you finally set out to conquer the world and its resources, as well as creating all sorts of things. I'm only about a quarter through it, but I've been using religion to guilt rival societies into defeat with great effect. In Civilization Stage you can design your own buildings, vehicles, and even a national anthem if you want. It's really quite impressive. And what about when the world is conquered? Well, I'm not there yet but that leads to the...

Space Stage. Maybe then I'll get to deal with all the UFOs that have been tormenting my poor world as far back as the Creature Stage. See, back when my peaceful creature was trying to make friends with other species, a giant UFO started flying overhead, scaring them off. And while it didn't abduct my critters, it was apparetly hunting for new species. I think. And in the Civilization Stage, it appeared over a city, bringing the city joy and happiness as my armies were trying to convert them to the worship of a giant holographic frogman yelling at them (fortunately a third party nation appeared and just started attacking the city with its tanks, demoralizing them enough to embrace giant frogman as their god).

Seriously, the game is wacky and fun, and remarkably easy to get sucked into. All that said there are still some gameplay issues that bother me. I found at least one bug that crashes the program when first loading a saved game, but I've also found a workaround for it. And there are some problems I have in that the game isn't as free in letting you tweak your creature's appearance as I think it should be, but that's more of a personal opinion than an actual problem. I suspect that over the next few weeks the problems with game crashes will be fixed, and then it'll be a pretty much perfect product.

Labels: Games, Geeky

These are for the Professor.

First we have a crow making a hook out of a straight piece of wire:



Next we have some crows in Japan being even more creative:



Bait fishing among crows:



They also apparently can teach one another and recognize their own reflections.

Labels: animals, Geeky

Fonts have a conference. It's a computer joke....

Labels: Geeky

While doing some research on a pet project of mine, I stumbled across Haloquadra. A microscopic, square-shaped life form. What's interesting is they will apparently link up to form "sheets". Maybe Spore isn't so out there after all.

And the project? Enh, we'll see what comes of it.

Labels: Geeky, General

This one's for the Professor.

Labels: Geeky

When I was a kid I used to get Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were a neat kind of interactive fiction, where you'd be reading along and suddenly the story would ask you to make a decision! Do you choose to go follow the creepy old man down into the crypt (if so turn to page X) or would you rather call the cops on the guy (if so turn to page Y). After a while of playing you'd learn two things. First, you'd learn to leave your finger as a bookmark while you went to see if your decision killed you or not. And secondly you'd learn which pages lead to a generic death ending, and not to take them.

The stories were kind of neat and weird, with aliens and monsters and such, and illustrated in fairly decent style that drew dumb kids like me in. But truthfully I always like the Endless Quest books better. The stories and writing were usually even worse, but the characters were more memorable, and the art and monsters were a lot of fun back then.

But even they couldn't hold a candle to the weirdness that was the Be An Interplanetary Spy series. You didn't just read the text and randomly pick left or right. You had mazes to solve, pattern-based riddles, and so forth. Not to mention all kinds of gonzo sci-fi goofiness. "Choose the correct sequence to make your disguise suit work or die!"

Now, why am I mentioning all of this?

Well, there was one series that kind of stood out. "Fighting Fantasy". What made it special was that you actually had to keep track of stuff like your health and equipment, and you rolled dice throughout the game to randomize combat and the like. It wasn't a simple "page 14 or page 375" decision any more; you had to pick a choice and then hope the dice would back you up on it. Anyway, there've been fan efforts to start converting the old books into web-based games. I suspect at least one of you out there might be interested, and for me it was a fun walk down memory lane.

Labels: Geeky

So, uhm, there's this thing called "LOLCats" which is basically people posting cutesy pictures of cats with cutesy mispelled captions. There are multiple sites dedicated to this idea but the first one I ran into, and still my favorite, is I can Haz Cheezeburger?

Anyway, continuing this LOLCat idea is the LOLCat Bible. For example, here's Genesis 1:1-5

Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs
1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.
2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

So, uhm, yeah. LOLCats.

I regret ever mentioning this to the ProfessorAnd.

Labels: Geeky

I love Legos. Always have, always will. To me, they are the ultimate toy, combining imagination, innovation, and ease of use. When I was elementary school, my mom and I (but mainly my mom) built this giant heart-shaped box, complete with work crews and lanscaping, out of Legos to hold my Valentine's cards. Nowadays you can get a giant Millennium Falcon, programmable robot sets, or even have the company build your own model boxed sets for you (which -still- requires you to use imagination and innovation to actually design).

Anyway, this all brings me to The Brick Testament. A collection of bible stories, quoted directly from the bible, and "acted out" by Lego people. Since it's faithful to the source material, it's not exactly family friendly.

Labels: Geeky