Plaidophile

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When I got the mover's estimate the other day, I asked about the transport of my wine. The mover said that unless I had a heck of a lot, he'd move it, but he wouldn't guarantee that it'd be any good afterwards, due to the lack of climate control on the trucks and in storage. So I will probably want to just take it in my car, which is starting to get rather a lot of "I'll just take it in my car" items clamoring for space.

Anyway, I decided to just go through my inventory to see what I have, since some of it is probably coming due to being drunk anyway.

I dreamt I was living in a piece of "edutainment" software. My job was to help the two young goldfish (who were living in a deep river) keep their ecosystem in balance. Apparently they liked burying the Chaos Emeralds (which they stole from Sonic the Hedgehog) under giant planks of plywood which they couldn't lift and so I had to solve their dumb puzzles to know where to position this specialized plywood-sheet-lifter. Also I lost the clues for how to unlock the padlocks they put on the last plank, but fortunately the locks were cheap and/or there was a bug in the game so I could force them open by just putting the key into the second hole first.

Apparently, when goldfish get all seven Chaos Emeralds, they are rewarded with electric guitars. Their electric guitars are tiny and hard to play and have built-in cheap reverbs which you can't turn off.

I don't know why there's suddenly a critical mass of cilantro haters on the Internet, but I thought I should point out that just because it tastes like soap to you doesn't mean that cilantro sucks. You suck. To most people, cilantro tastes like a cross between parsley and mint. It is quite nice.

• The PS3 really likes being on a lot. It'd be nice if you could turn it off (well, to a power-saving mode, obviously) and have it still finish up background downloading
• It's way too easy to accidentally turn on while moving the box, and then you can't turn it off until it finishes booting
• It'd be nice if you could turn the console off from the controller (like on the Wii) Oh, okay, you just hold down the PS button for a few seconds and it prompts you.
• It'd be nice if the controller were to turn off automatically after a period of inactivity (like on the Wii)
• In PS2 mode it always tells the game that you have a 16:9 screen, which would be fine, except the few games on the PS2 which pay attention to that do the totally wrong thing; for example, Beyond Good & Evil letterboxes it on a 4:3 frame. This wouldn't be so bad except that in upconvert mode this means I always have a border around it (just like on a mis-encoded DVD), and while I can get my full screen used by just turning off upconverting, then it looks even worse than on a real PS2
• Also, Beyond Good & Evil seems to have some framerate and shader problems, and occasional timing weirdnesses. (Yes, on the 1.90 firmware.)
• Okay, you know how the Wii's games are mostly the same gesture-based minigames with different skins? The PS3's downloadable games are mostly just Robotron with occasional tilt controls.

I am not a hardcore gamer. I also don't play many console FPSes, because the controls tend to suck. FPS controls don't have to suck; look at Metroid Prime, for example. Metroid Prime has great controls on a controller which essentially only has six buttons and one analog stick, as far as the game is concerned. It also ramps up in difficulty as you progress and familiarize yourself with those controls.

Even if you insist on having controls which are basically a direct port of WASD and a mouse to two analog sticks, please don't make the tutorial impossibly difficult. Good games ramp you up in difficulty, especially when the controls are a bit tricky. Tutorial segments in particular should be fairly easy to get through, since the whole point to them is to learn the controls. Additionally, tutorial segments more than any other should be free of sequence bugs (like being able to fall off an elevator which you can't recall), and if you're going to make deaths restart at the most recent checkpoint, it sure would be nice if there were checkpoints other than the very beginning of the tutorial.

While you're at it, if you're going to put such a focus on dialog and close shots on characters' faces while they're talking, you should try to make their mouths move at least remotely convincingly. It would also be nice if the characters had motions other than "talk while gesticulating wildly" and "die." (For bonus points, learn to write dialog which is intense without relying on every other word being a profanity. Yes, I realize they're mobsters, but I'm not exactly Miss Manners but pretty much every line in the intro made me blush. Consider the concept of dynamic range.)

I was really looking forward to your game but now I'm thinking I wasted $60.

Love,
fluffy

I now have a PS3. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My PSN username is 'plaidfluff' (same as on AIM). Add me as a friend. Or don't. Whatever.

While I was in San Francisco I didn't get around to doing most of the stuff I thought I'd do there, but I did at least do the things I went there for and hung out with various friends there.

Also I'm moving down there in a month, as I got a rather cool job.

So now I have so much stuff to do in the next month, like selling my condo, finding another home in the area (probably Oakland), getting moved, quitting my current job... argh.

If anyone's interested in buying my place (a nice, spacious 2bed/1bath condo in a nice part of Ballard, in a really awesome location if you work on the west side), let me know and I'll put you in touch with my realtor.

I dreamt that I was poking around on the Dreamhost control panel and found a little tutorial about how to make a metallic bezel for tables on your webpage. They had a little table-design applet and an accompanying video to explain the process — after designing the table, which involved manually coming up with a connectivity graph, they would use this graph to set up an electroplating rig (by hand) and lovingly plate the table bezel by hand and then take a digital photograph for you to use.

My bike got stolen, right out of my garage.

I'm surprised it took this long, though. I'm pretty upset that the HOA still hasn't gotten around to figuring out a way of making it so we can keep our bikes secure. Every few months we'll have a little security issue and then there's a lot of "OMG we need to get security cameras and better lighting and a place to lock up bicycles!!!" and other such rattle and hum and then within a month, everyone's forgotten about this.

Stupid thing is that my neighbors all have bikes, many of which are much nicer than mine, but theirs didn't get stolen.