Archives
April 2006
It's backwards. Deal with it.
April 23, 2006 - Sunday
For the sole break week in my otherwise hectic university semester, I've been awful busy. I could endulge you with the story, but instead I'll provide the roughest of summaries.
My week consisted of spending obscene amounts of effort on a programming assignment not due for another two weeks, reorganising stuff, running around in circles for textbooks, rediscovering Final Fantasy Tactics (Yay! I found the game again!), skipping church, getting my chest X-rayed, and probably a bunch of other stuff that has slipped my mind.
I'm removing the link to LOD's blog, because it doesn't seem to be operating right anymore. I'll repost, possibly with a new link, if it comes back up again.
April 15, 2006 - Saturday
*GASP* Augh... finally, some breathing space. University semesters occur in surprisingly predictable waves. You have the slow start, and then the constant barrage of assignments, then some tests, and then just enough assignments to keep you busy until the final exams, when you realise you haven't clocked in any study at all because of the assignments. That was a mouthful. Anyway, it's the week-long mid-semester break, which gives me some time to update this website, do some work on After Dark, and get a head start on my assignments (hopefully).
First things first: I have done some work on After Dark, after all this time. Hooray! It's not much, and it's nothing quite tangible yet, but read up on it here.
For those keeping an eye on GearHead 2, there's been a new development. The targeter now gives you information about the target. Yeah, now you can view the damage you've caused, and see the different composite parts that make up those weird monsters. I believe that makes the game that much more playable, and as usual, definitely worth a look in.
CastlevaniaRL has seen some progress, and now you can too, since the latest news comes with about sixteen new screenshots. The game now comes with line-of-sight calculation for that explorative vampire killer in us all, and with considerably improved aiming capability, making the throwing daggers oh-so-much cooler.
The Sphere Community Game unfortunately hasn't seen too much progress, though the backend is slowly coming together. I'm not one of the core developers, but I get some creative input in the storyline, the world design and other miscellaneous things.
For the past five or six weeks, I've been faithfully attending the Firefly screening sessions. And I have to admit, I've never watched a television series that hasn't disappointed me at least once. At least, not until now. This science fiction masterwork will always exceed your expectations. It's... just so different to other sci-fi series out there. Such a pity that the TV series didn't continue, though Serenity makes good. Over the weeks, I've laughed, I've felt the hurt of the crew, the moral dilemmas that they face in their line of business, and I've laughed a lot more.
There's a lot of things in Firefly that you never see in other sci-fi shows. The Galactic language which the crew speak is a mix of Chinese and American English, owing to the Anglo-Sino alliance and conglomeration, and it sounds very different from the stiff formality found in just about everything else. Crew members play pranks on each other for cheap laughs. And they aren't uniformed, because they don't need to be. A train robbery would have been outside the realm of sci-fi... or so you would think until you watched Firefly. Or watching a man get kicked into a spaceship engine. Or having two men engage in a swordfight with swords that don't glow. Or seeing primitive shotguns and revolvers. Or so much sarcasm and irony that you don't know which way's up. Or even a simple meal between folk around a wooden table on a spaceship.
And the soundtrack is in a league of its own. The audio is adorned with guitar tunes, violins, banjos (yeah, you heard me), fiddles, and surprisingly little else. None of that pseudo-dramatic orchestration: just a lot of humble instruments reflecting a humble existence.
I could go on for hours, but I'll let you judge for yourself. Here's the Firefly intro video, containing the Ballad of Serenity, a decent Firefly clip adaption of When September Ends by Greenday, and a lovely acoustic of Mal's Song. You judge whether or not this show is special.
Now I have to update the archives page, and the After Dark page to tell you what exactly it was that pushed development a little further.
By the way, I recently installed and configured a program called sitecopy on my Linux box. If I'm right about this proggie, it will make site updates ten times easier than it currently is. Which hopefully means more updates, more often.
If you're reading this, it means the application probably works. (ed: It works! It f***ing works! Ahahahaha!)