About this Weekend

Posted on 28th February 2011 in Something Daily

One of the busiest weekends in recent memory transpired recently, starting on Thursday evening and not really ending until late last night. Like I mentioned a few days ago, I did in fact attend the taping of VH1 Storytellers My Morning Jacket on Thursday, and I did in fact briefly meet Jim James. I had another big work day (two five-hour shifts) on Friday, which was broken up by a very enjoyable lunch with my friend Ja-Ann at El Cantinero. El Cantinero probably has the best enchilada’s I’ve tried, and the fried ice cream is incredibly incredible. I think I remember getting a lot of work done Friday evening while at work (nobody comes in on Friday evenings), but I was in a bit of a haze as a result of getting about five hours of sleep the previous night. Still, the number of pending objectives before my Spaceratops project is complete is getting slowly smaller and smaller. If I keep up the pace, I’ll be right on track for a mid-March completion (and/or release…yeah, maybe you do want to play it).

Saturday involved walking over to Tompkins Square Park with Sarah and ogling other people’s dogs – going to dog parks is something that, when I think about doing it, I’m all “yeah, that would be fun I guess”, and then when I’m actually there I’m all “OMFG puppies”. So what I’m saying is that it was awesome to go hang out with other people’s dogs and feed fat black squirrels. We also stopped by the flea market on 11th and A, and I picked up the nice white Apple keyboard on which I’m currently blogging this blog for twenty-five bucks (actually it was supposed to be twenty, but I absent-mindedly overpaid, and it’s a flea market, so I’m not going to just say “hey, sorry man, could I have five dollars back please?”). Still a great bargain.

And then yesterday I’m watching Ferris Bueller and the oscars with Jen in between getting my hair cut for free with Sarah’s roommate Claire – I now have a sweet sweet rad awesome smaller mohawk that requires no gel. It’s awesome. And I got a ton of work done in the morning yesterday – my recent Data Structures assignment required a lot of different skills and knowledge of a lot of ADT behavior. But I just now finished that one (infix to postfix conversion and evaluation) and it feels awesome.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , ,

Honorable Mention: Burnout 3

Posted on 27th February 2011 in Something Daily

I have always had a special place in my collection for racing games. Typically, while I devote a lot of time and effort to completing story-based games (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, et cetera), racing games are usually the games I play when I don’t care to think about plot or be forced to attempt the same objective again and again. These days, it’s Super Mario Kart, in my childhood it was Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing, and last summer, when I briefly owned a Playstation 2, it was Burnout 3. One of these things is not like the others.

I really liked Extreme G 2. I also really liked the above mentioned DKR and MK games, and F-Zero. I like these probably because they’re complete fantasy – arcade style controls and/or speeds that no real car could ever achieve. I’m not into playing driving games that attempt to make you feel like you’re actually driving a car. Gran Turismo and Need for Speed have never really been my thing, mainly because I don’t think it’s at all fun to not be able to drift around corners or shove other drivers off the track just because a real car can’t do it. That’s where Burnout 3 comes in: to me it’s quite a good blend of realism and arcade ridiculosity. The cars have real names and look like things that you’d actually drive, but they handle impossibly well (for the most part) and do, in fact shove other cars all over the place. They’ve got you racing through back alleys and on highways and in the middle of street markets. It’s all very fantastic and kind of silly.

The fact that the camera automatically goes into slow motion every time you take another car down by ramming the crap out of it is just one more reason. It’s all really indicative of how arcade-y the game really is. And if I remember correctly, they’ve got a ridiculous radio DJ on announcing the whole thing. It’s a lot of fun. I played through the whole thing last summer when I was bored out of my mind lifeguarding by day and gaming by night. I did notice, though, when I started to play it more and more, that I’d be driving in real life in a real car and have the impulse to do Burnout drifts and knock slow drivers around a little bit – this game is dangerous. The same thing happens to me with Mario Kart, though, so maybe I’m just hypersensitive to it. But anyway. One more honorable mention and then the list can truly begin.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , ,

Honorable Mention: Gears of War 2

Posted on 26th February 2011 in Something Daily

I wasn’t really looking forward to writing about Gears of War. There’s something about it that’s too big-budget blockbusterly for me to get excited about putting in my two cents on it, because so much has already been said about it. Come to think of it, though, that applies to pretty much every game on this list of TSM’s favorites, so I think the real reason is that it’s the newest game on my entire list of 30. I get a bit uncomfortable writing about a game that new. But I digress. Gears of War 2 is sweet.

My first experience with GoW2 was when I was a theater tech in high school. Me (the sound guy, of course), the lighting people, the stage manager, and our assistants all worked from this little booth at the back of the auditorium with windows so we could see the stage. We spent a lot of time in there, so we had posters and christmas lights and jamboxes and more mixed in with the tech equipment, including an XBox 360. We also had a lot of downtime during the average rehearsal, because the cast and crew typically took a lot longer to get ready than the techs did. So we played a lot of GTA III and Gears of War 2. I remember playing it all the way through over the course of a week of five-hour sessions with a tech friend – we’d finish and be totally burned out and bloodshot-eyed, and we’d just come back the next morning, not say a word, and turn on the console. I’ve played it through one other time since then (last year lugging my roommate’s 360 and my friends’ huge TV all over the floor).

This is probably the bloodiest game I’ve ever played…at least I can’t think of any others in which it’s a relatively common activity to chainsaw the crap out of an enemy’s neck while blood sprays all over the camera (see screenshot). Mortal Kombat: Armageddon might win, but the blood in that game is so horribly rendered in this awful cartoony style that looks completely fake, so while there may or may not be more of it in MK:A, it definitely looks loads better in Gears of War 2. I’m not going to say that the blood is why I love this game, but it’s certainly a contributing factor. This really goes hand-in-hand with the more overarching reason, which is that playing GoW2 has a certain feel that, I believe, other games have tried and failed to replicate. In Gears of War, you can practically see each bullet leaving your gun, since they glow orange. The camera reacts to your character taking damage in such a way that it feels much more visceral than the typical analogue in a first-person shooter. The camera wobbles and drifts as if it’s handheld as you move through the environments – what I’m trying to say is that this game has a raw, visceral gameplay experience that’s unlike anything else I’ve played. You feel like you’re there.

I never had too hard a time finishing Gears of War 2; honestly it’s not really as difficult on normal as I expected it to be. Getting the hang of the controls was really the only hurdle for me (and I love to complain about how hard games are). And I’m a big fan of cover-based combat (meaning I’m a big fan of this franchise, essentially). Gears of War 2 will always be around for me if I need to let off some steam and chainsaw some alien dudes, or fry them with a giant sky laser, or just shoot them with my future shotguns. Honestly, this game probably didn’t make the list proper because I have a thing about how a game needs to be seen with a good deal of hindsight before it can really be accepted into the canon (or whatever), but this is really a good game. You’ve probably played it more than I have. But if not, you should play it. It’s really great, guys.

Next on the list of four honorable mentions: a racing game.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , ,

My Ninja Jacket is Black

Posted on 25th February 2011 in Something Daily

The last few days have been quite eventful. On Wednesday I celebrated my roommate’s birthday with him at a restaurant called Ninja. I’d heard vague rumors of the place before, something about the servers being ninja and jumping out at you from behind stuff and being all sneaky. It turns out that’s more or less totally true…we were screamed at and startled on five separate occasions, twice surrounding our traversal of the purposefully terrifying “ninja tunnel”, which we had to go through to get to our table. There were several occasions through the meal on which the servers would reach in the window behind my friends’ heads with their hand or a dull knife and startle the crap out of them. We also noticed on the menu that “If you find a prize in the miso soup, you may be assassinated!?” – so of course we all had to get the miso soup. Our friend Josh ended up getting the prize (a big carrot bit) and spent the whole night really jumpy. That was kind of the point of the place, to make you really really jumpy. There was also a magician who came by to do some sleight-of-hand, and he made a Dragon Ball Z reference which was totally awesome…London, amazed by a trick, said “his power is great!” to which the magician replied “it’s over nine thousand!” That was awesome. Also the food was really tasty. And we got free stickers. Good time.

I also got the rare privilege of attending the taping of the My Morning Jacket edition of VH1 Storytellers last night. Justin and I were in the second row, right on the end, so we’re probably in a ton of the shots. Once it comes out I’ll link to it. The show was incredible though – Jim James was a great speaker and they all completely rocked out. Highlights were “Dondante”, “Smokin’ from Shootin’”, and “One Big Holiday”, which was a huge shredfest of monumental proportions. And since Justin has the coolest father in the known universe, I got to go backstage after the show and meet Jim James. I told him he’s awesome. And I shook his hand. Get at me.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , ,

Honorable Mention: Age of Empires 2

Posted on 24th February 2011 in Something Daily

This is the first of a new, approximately month-long series of posts that I’m plannng that will outline my personal top-30 list of video games. The question of my personal “best game ever” hasn’t really been a question to me for a while (if you’ve read TSM a decent amount you probably know what I’m talking about), but I’ve always been interested in deciding with partial certainty my top ten (in order), or even my top 20 or 30. So I’ve put together an ordered list and I’m going to do one per day, in ascending order, finishing off with number 1.

This isn’t going to be the list of what I think the best games are – just what my favorites are. I’ll probably write about why I think they’re awesome, as well as include anecdotes about my experiences with them. Every game on the list is one that I’ve either finished or come very close to finishing; they’re also games that I’m very familiar with, many of which I’ve played through at least twice. For those reasons, games like Wave Race 64 and Crash Bandicoot: Warped were left off the list, despite the fact that they’re incredible games. I have to know what I’m talking about here. Super Mario Land isn’t on the list because it sucks, despite the fact that it was the first game I ever played. You’ll find from this list that, in general, I think games are getting better as the technology improves. Not in all cases are new games better than old ones, but in general, that’s how I feel.

And I’m not going to do this every day. The auxilliary purpose of the countdown is to help me out when I don’t do anything interesting in a day and still need to write. So I’ll keep up with writing normally when I do fun stuff, and intersperse another game rank when I don’t. It’ll be a journey. And if you want to find them all in one spot, they’ll all be tagged “TSM’s Favorite Games”, which you can just type into the little search bar over on the right. And of course I’ll put up the complete list in a single post when I get to the end. Hope you enjoy. Maybe you’ll learn a bit about a game you didn’t know much about before.

Enough talk. There are a few honorable mentions, the first of which is Age of Empires 2.

This was the first PC game I ever owned. I suppose based on the release date of 1999 that my 8-year-old self was already decently into Nintendo 64 and Gameboy, and I really don’t know what caused me to come across AoE II. Maybe it was a birthday present or something. I wasn’t into realtime strategy really, and I’m still not (other than Starcraft I)…but it’s totally a sweet game.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Age of Empires is how hard this game actually is. I know I say this about every game I’ve ever played, you don’t have to tell me. This is an especially good example, though, of evidence that one of the following has happened: either I was incredibly good at gaming in my childhood and lost a huge portion of that skill in the process of maturing, or I’ve always been really bad and have been deluding myself for my whole life. Replaying a game like Age of Empires II recently, I can’t imagine how I did it when I was eight. Even at 19, I sit down, start a deathmatch game on normal difficulty, and start developing my society at what I think is a decent rate. I’ll be farming pretty quickly, upgrading my technologies and building walls when I think I should be. I’ll have a barracks set up with some normal foot soldiers and a few horse guys, some archers too. I’ll just be upgrading to the castle age when one of the CPU players comes in out of nowhere with an outlandishly sized compliment of calvary and archers, burning down my palisade wall before I can say “regicide” and continuing on until all that’s left of my little town is the single peasant/scout calvary combination I managed to get out during the attack, with no town center, no food, no houses, no anything. And they’ll probably get killed too. My question is: how in the world could I even play this game at all when I was eight? Was I a video game prodigy? I mean I did spend a lot of time playing Pokemon, but come on…

But apart from it making me feel like a quite inferior civil engineer/general/king, Age of Empires II is a good game. I’m not a very knowledgeable RTS fan, so I’m not going to waste space attempting to compare it to others of the genre (it’s also part of the reason that AoE is just a runner up on this list). But every time I play it, I have a lot of fun on my first try – when I think it’s all going great, and then the above happens. But until that point, I’m really into it. I like getting the war elephants and taking them on boats, then attacking from the coast (on easy mode, obviously). This will always be one that I can come back to for a bit of fun (as Roller Coaster Tycoon would be if I hadn’t lost the disc…)

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , ,

Learning New Languages

Posted on 23rd February 2011 in Something Daily

Wednesdays often end up being my busiest days in a given week. For every semester that I’ve been at NYU, they’ve always been the one day of the week that goes from start to finish without a break (I define a true “break” as one where I go back to my dorm and chill out). I’ve got a late class tonight (Electronic Music Performance), and then a friend’s birthday dinner – the combination of which is compelling me to write in the small break between the halves of my Recording Tech class. It’s been a busy two-day week so far – I’m becoming more and more addicted to the MIT OpenCourseWare Computer Science lectures, which take up a decent amount of time and brainpower. It’s sort of an accellerated version of what I’m doing in my own classes, which means that it works as a great counterpart when it’s paired with an in-person lecture and homework assignments. I’m learning a lot. Watching those is increasing my interest in gaining experience with popular algorithms and languages (I wrote binary search in Perl last weekend); this weekend I plan to write something in Python and something in Ruby, somewhere in the realm of the basic sort algorithms (bubble, selection, and merge). They’ll be interesting, and possibly a little tougher than the Perl one was, since I’m even less familiar with Ruby and Python. C++…I’ll get to that eventually. I’m honestly a little bit intimidated. Once I’ve got a few minor projects in a decent amount of other languages under my belt, then I’ll probably face the challenge. It’s a summer thing, since I’ll be taking a class in assembly language in the fall, and C++ is just one step closer to that.

I’m getting really close to the end of Chrono Trigger; after 21 hours, it’s about time. I’m done six out of the seven sidequests, many of which were pretty tough. But it appears as though I may be close to powerful enough to finish the final boss; last time I tried it, I was completely demolished, but that was before doing any of the sidequests. It’s a fantastic game – absolutely one of the best SNES games I’ve ever played. Remind me, tomorrow or later tonight (probably tomorrow) I’m going to put together a semi-definitive “Emmett Butler’s Top 40 video games” list. That’ll be great fun. And then I’ll go see My Morning Jacket for free ninety nine.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Unix/Vim Cheat Sheet

Posted on 21st February 2011 in Something Daily

Like I said I would yesterday, I have completed my conglomeration of two Unix/Vim command cheat sheets that I came across in my travels around the internet (or grape-net, if Justin is to be believed), along with some commands I know and use often that weren’t on the sheets. This hasn’t been spelling- or error-checked much at all, so I dunno….if you happen to take it and use it for yourself…you might, like, tell me if there are any errors that you find…probably? That would be nice of you, if you, the reader, were to use this in such a way. Anyway, here it is…(click the image for the fullsize 1440×900 version)

I tried to include as much as I could think of and fit into the frame – but surprisingly, I have space left over. I may add to it as I come across more useful stuff. But for now, enjoy if you care to do so.

I saw the Upright Citizens again last night. The line was huge because there were rumors that Amy Poehler was going to be involved, but unfortunately she was not. Still it was a sweet show. I also ate some pizza, skateboarded around a little bit in the snow – it was very good. I feel like I’ve been ending a lot of my posts recently by saying that I’m going to go play video games, but that’s actually kind of a rare thing for me these days. I’m being too productive – I gotta get my head in the game. Portal 2 is coming out soon, and I must prepare.

comments: 2 » tags: , , ,

Binary Search, Vim, and Perl

Posted on 20th February 2011 in Something Daily

I just spent a good little bit of time figuring out and writing the basic binary search algorithm in perl. It took me a bit longer than I think it maybe “should have”, but it works now. I’d heard binary search referenced in class, as well as seen it explained in the video lectures from MIT I’ve been watching. In case you don’t know, here’s a brief explanation.

Looking for ways to find a specific element in a presorted ascending list, the first thing you might think of would be to step through the list sequentially. When the element of the list you were currently looking at was greater than the one you’re trying to find, you’d know that the one you’re looking for isn’t there. Another way (binary search) which is a lot faster, is to first check which half (upper or lower) the element you’re looking for is in by finding the midpoint of the list and comparing it to the searched element. If it’s in the upper half, then find the midpoint of that half and do the comparison again. Essentially, you’re dividing the set in half with every time through the loop. Eventually, the top and bottom bounds of the piece you’re looking at will converge, and then you’ve found your element.

So anyway, I wrote that in perl today, which is a language that I’m not abundantly familiar with, using vim, which (apart from crontab) i had my first experience with today. So it took a little while. But I found two great vim/unix cheat sheets that I plan on combining later tonight and making into a sweet background for my external monitor. Learning accomplished. Now time for Chrono Trigger. Most triumphant.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , ,

Learning is great, so is completing games

Posted on 19th February 2011 in Something Daily

Yesterday reddit guided me to the wonderful world of free video lectures from great schools, specifically this introductory programming course at MIT that seems to have been filmed in the last year or two. I’ve watched two of these lectures so far, and it’s crazy how much faster MIT computer science goes than NYU CS does. I’m now in Data Structures, which is the second officially required class for CS majors, third if you count NYU’s “Introduction to Computers and Programming” prerequisite. This single-semester class that I found on MIT’s website covers a lot of mathematical and algorithm-related topics that we still haven’t covered in Data Structures. I know I’m only a month into my course, but it’s at least fair to say that this MIT course is worth two (or more) that I’ve taken at NYU. Crazy. But the great part is that I can watch all the lectures for free. Which I’ve certainly been doing. I’ve found the section of the class that’s right around what we’re currently talking about in Data Structures, as well as another Basic Algorithms class that I can watch after that. Learning is a lot of fun.

That’s been a good part of my day, as has waking up and finally cleaning the kitchen again, which took upward of 90 minutes to do top to bottom. It’s nice, though, because now it looks spiffy and it’s all my fault. I also finally, after many hours, completed Super Mario Galaxy 2 (that is, got 241 stars). The single green star I spent the longest on was the first in the Boo Moon Galaxy, which as you can see from the video is kind of difficult. The last level (Grandmaster Galaxy) was far too easy, I only ended up trying it about ten times before I finished it. I know that sounds like a lot, but it’s not compared to the second-to-last level, which cost me about twenty lives. Still, what a great game. I remember quite a while back I was complaining that I had to do the “whole game over again”, and now it’ finally done. Boom goes the dynamite.

And my Andrew WK shirt is now in my possession and on my body. Again, boom goes the dynamite. Also, there have been rumors going around that the photo I posted of myself in elementary school a few days ago is not actually me. Let me assure you that this is not the case. It’s really me. I know it’s hard to believe I was actually ever that cute. Just deal with it.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , ,

Why I Write Letters

Posted on 18th February 2011 in Something Daily

I like it when people notice my Wu-Tang shirt on the street and call me out on it. I try to do it every time I see a Wu shirt out and about, and it’s sometimes returned, sometimes not. I don’t know why I do it, and I probably appear like a horribly poserish fanboy to a decent number of the people I call out on their shirts, but I will persevere nonetheless. I was longboarding to work tonight and I heard the guy behind me yell “Wu Tang!” as I had just passed him, and I turned around and gave him the W handsign. It’s fun, I think.

I was also at the Chelsea pier today, because it was warm for the first time in a while – I was walking around in my t-shirt and everything was awesome. I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that I was standing around outside in between classes and smiling at people who were walking by. That is true, and it was also very nice. I’m attempting to refrain from doing nothing but complaining here on Fridays about how difficult it is to have two five-hour tech shifts in one day, although the temptation certainly exists. I get next to nothing done on Fridays because I’m at Steinhardt all day hanging around and “being a tech” – I just come home at night really really tired. But enough of that.

I have a sweet awesome rad Andrew WK shirt coming in the mail (hopefully tomorrow), and I’m going to write my friend Monica another letter tonight. Letter writing is a very nice thing to do if you have the discipline and interest to actually sit down and write a letter. I’ve been exchanging letters with Monica since I graduated high school and left her in Downingtown, and it’s continued on and off while she’s been on a year off in France. It’s a great way to communicate with a good friend, especially if you’re like me and you don’t have a facebook account anymore. I do it on and off with a few others as well. It’s nice.

That whole thing started when I had a massive crush on this girl in high school and I got it in my head that it would be totally awesome to just tell her that I thought she was beautiful – not just that I thought she was, but I was phrasing it in my head like it was an objectively self-evident fact. I’d leave English class every day in the second half of senior year thinking I was about to do it and then not doing it, and it got all the way down to graduation. There was a moment when I totally could have, and the fact that I chickened out and didn’t do it is one of my biggest regrets to this day. All I can say is, if you ever have this impulse, DO IT. The regret is not worth it. But I felt horrible about not telling this girl that she was amazingly pretty, so I wrote her a letter that night explaining that I wasn’t trying to hit on her or “pick her up” or anything, but that I just wanted to tell her she was “a babe” (that’s not what I said in the letter, I just like the expression these days). She didn’t respond for several months, but it eventually did happen, and we exchanged about three letters back and forth last year, from Ursinus to NYU. She still hasn’t responded to the letter I sent her about a year ago. But it’s all good. I’m glad I acted on that impulse in some small way.

So that’s why I write letters now. It’s grown on me since that initial exchange. Right now I cannot stop listening to very heavy music, and I’m sure that will have some effect on the nature of the letter I’m about to write. Also, Nike Dunks SBs are so hot on my feet. I want some sandals.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , ,
« Previous