Johnny Law's blog

It's been real...

2001-10-28T01:24:53-04:00

...and It's been fun, but not (oh heck you know the drill)...

I'll hopefully be getting a personal site online in a while, and since I've enjoyed a bit of blogging here it only makes sense to do that on my own site. Which means, not here. So no more rampancy blogging from me unless my plans go horribly awry. Carry on!

Beachcombing

2001-10-20T19:37:51-04:00

This morning my housemates and I went tidepooling on a stretch of coast between the Pigeon Point lighthouse and the Año Nuevo reserve, along with a friend of ours who is much more in the know on where to go and what to look for. (And on nearly any wildlife topic in general.) We reached the beach a little after low tide, and it wasn't a super-low tide today anyway, but there were still lots of things to peer at, and we had the area all to ourselves.

It was a fun combination of easy climbing and clambering, examining and sometimes catching various creatures, and just hanging out. Having a guide along was key, since we received tidbits like the fact that it was safe to touch anemones in this part of the world; anemones in spots where the tide has receded will squirt water if you press them with a finger, and anemones underwater will grab at your finger with filaments so tiny you can't really see them, you just feel them as a stickiness. (These would be the filaments that would inject poison, for some other anemone varieties.) We played with crabs from hand-size down to knuckle-size, as well as some of the many little hermit crabs that were responsible for the rather odd visual effect of snail shells migrating hither and yon at (relatively) high speeds. Real snails, chiton, and starfish made guest appearances too, and in a more lively fashion so did a group of pelicans, zooming along the front of a breaking wave like surfers.

On our walk back we were paced by a pod of harbor seals that grew to at least five, just out beyond the breakwater. At one point, one of them closed to about 15 meters from us and bobbed there for a while checking out the funny monkeys on the beach. After climbing up to the car and breaking out the picnic lunch we could still see their heads popping up and down out in the surf while they played or noisily thrashed some helpless fish around.

A little bit of exercise and fresh air, a solid serving of Nature, and no particular expertise or preparation required. Thumbs up.

BVS

2001-10-19T00:41:11-04:00

(Just saw this week's episode on tape delay.) Over the past 2 or 3 seasons Buffy has got to have been the best speculative fiction show on TV, and probably one of the best shows period. Smart writing; great casting/acting/chemistry; lotsa action; much making with the funny, and other emotions too. The increasing budget (and therefore increasing verisimilitude in the bad nasties) certainly hasn't hurt, but that's been the smallest part of what makes it rock.

They're always doing little things to surprise you that ring true in retrospect. I admit I was expecting the Big Revelation presented at the start of this season (i.e., what was up with Buffy while she was dead), but they still managed to fake me out a little just before they dropped the bomb. I was disappointed that they weren't gonna go for the big payoff, and then they did. And Giles' midnight talk with Willow this week was good stuff (not to mention her response); you just know they're going to develop that worrisome issue as the season progresses.

We don't watch a lot of tube in this house, but we do catch Angel on Mondays, then Buffy on Tuesdays. And then Enterprise on Wednesdays, which is a pretty big comedown after that lead-in, but as accredited geeks we're required to give it a fair trial. The Berman/Braga script autopilot hasn't totally kicked on for this series yet, but you can tell It's flickering to life. We've already had one Time Paradox Plot, for crying out loud. And you think they won't be able to have a Holodeck Plot in this series, but they almost did this week, didn't they? It's only a matter of time.

Actions that have consequences; intriguing plots in a self-consistent and evolving world; characters that behave, change, and grow like people actually would; humor that doesn't make you wince; dialogue that hits the mark... I guess it'll be a while before we ever get that in a new science fiction T.V. series. But until then We'll always have Buffy. And a Vulcan science officer with great boobs.

Of mice and men

2001-10-18T19:46:50-04:00

(Apologies for going for the obvious Subject line.)

I've been a mouse aficionado for several years now... I definitely know what I like, and why, in terms of mouse size, shape, weight, and ball position. So I've been a little slow to get on the optical mouse bandwagon. Today though I picked up a Logitech optical wheel mouse with the 2x Optical logo on the box; it has two cameras operating in tandem to get rid of tracking errors, and word on the street is that this actually does work. If you like the big hand-filling style of mouse, reportedly the latest MS optical mouse is also good in this regard, but I like the small narrow form factor myself.

I've been experimenting with it today and It's funny how it reveals all the habits I've unconsciously developed for dealing with a ball mouse. Twitches to get the ball moving for more accuracy on a shot... little sideways lifts and slides to re-center the mouse by getting the wheel off the pad without lifting the whole mouse... partial lifts so that the ball still touches the pad but none of the mouse body does except the very back tip, for sensitivity. Some pretty wacky stuff now that I'm conscious of it.

With the optical, of course, that all goes out the window. I'm pretty happy that the whole issue of dealing with mouse ball inertia/friction is gone; there's a whole suite of weird twitch/swoop/wipe maneuvers for dealing with that stuff while using sniper-type weapons, and I'll be glad to get rid of those. If I want to move the crosshairs a pixel to the left, now I just move the mouse a little and they go there, no funny business. And of course no more ball cleaning. Learning how to re-center the mouse harmlessly doesn't look like it will be too tough, and maybe reducing the amount of grip-and-lift will be kinder to my hand.

So far so good then. The resurrected Razer may be preaching the gospel of the ball mouse for hardcore gamers, but It's looking to me like optical tech may be one of those all-around nice advancements for gamer interfaces, like the widespread acceptance of USB was. And it makes your mouse glow red! You can't beat that. I guess over the next few days I'll find out if there are any hidden pitfalls.

P.S. If you get a Logitech mouse, make sure to also download the mouse registry file for gamers from the MouseWare downloads page on their website, so the mousewheel will work in games.

Tribes 2 game films

2001-10-17T02:57:14-04:00

Speaking of the last Tribes 2 patch... the irony of it is that along with game-crashing errors, the Framerate Hammer, and odd gameplay tweaks, it also added the capability for watching game films so everyone can get glimpses of how great the game could be (or should I say could have been?) by checking out some action from the top players and teams.

If you have Tribes 2 but maybe It's been collecting dust, it might be fun to fire it up and check out a few good game films if you like that sort of thing. You'll have to update to the latest patch, but the autoupdater should take care of that. Game film files must have the .rec extension and be placed in the GameData/base/recordings folder under your Tribes 2 folder (likely you'll need to create the recordings folder). Start up T2 and then use the start menu thingy to get the recordings dialog. Once the recording is playing, hit TAB to get into VCR mode, which displays a progress bar and lets you use numpad-plus for fast forward and numpad-minus for slowmo. I think there are some other commands as well but who needs them. Oh yeah, ESC to quit watching.

So, here's some recordings (not made by me, just some good ones from the Tribalwar archive):

Some funny shocklance offense on Dessicator

Shrike D on Katabatic

Heavy O on Damnation

Light mid on Slapdash

Various O on Sanctuary

Light D on Damnation

Two good players as a tank/bomber team on a Katabatic pub

Light D on Katabatic

Hi?

2001-10-15T15:41:58-04:00

Hey look, It's a blog.

Test blathering about games and stuff...

Threewave was finally released into the wild, this past Thursday. (/me was tester, map contributor, documentator.) Everything has been surprisingly free of major bugs and very well-received. Been a long time since I spent a weekend playing CTF, but that's what I pretty much did the past couple of days. I'd almost forgotten how much fun it is to play through a large selection of great maps on full servers; and, how much I can get pissed off by self-absorbed wankers. Ah, the multifaceted joys of public server gaming.

The best part of course is getting to play real games on one's own map. In a cool bit of synchronicity, not only did I get to traipse around on my Threewave map with other players several times this weekend, but I also got involved in a massive Team Arena game on one of my older maps. As long as the players don't spend the whole game talking about how the map sucks , that's good stuff man.

Anyway I'm glad that Q3 is getting a kick in the pants since my other main squeeze is getting the Death of a Thousand Cuts from its publisher. Hugs and kisses to Sierra for rushing one last Tribes 2 patch out the door and then terminating development work on the game. The patch-induced framerate problems, crashes, and gameplay concerns are a marvellously fitting way to finally put T2 out of its misery. We have no plans for another patch at this time. O potentially wondrous game, we hardly knew ye.