Eat Chocolate to Gain Energy

Posted on 20th April 2011 in Something Daily

If you have trouble keeping your eyes open, typing correctly, or thinking in clearly delineated thoughts, just eat some chocolate. It’ll give you the extra boost you need to keep doing whatever it is that you need to be doing. I’m eating a bag of M&Ms right now, and seriously, it’s doing amazing things for my ability to think clearly. That combined with listening once again to Radical and then Bastard will help me get over my extreme fatigue after staying up until 3 AM two nights in a row.

[citation needed]

This is how my sleep schedule works. I need to go to bed before 1 and wake up before 9 to feel well rested; anything else and I’m a little off. I know some people who are ok with pulling multiple allnighters per week – I just could never do that. I mean I know that they’re not really ‘ok’, but they can function. See I wouldn’t be able to. I did one all-night for the hackathon, and by the end of that, I felt like I was drunk. I couldn’t really walk straight, and Eric, who I was with, definitely noticed that my thoughts and speech weren’t really making sense. I slept for like 14 hours after that. But you knew that.

Also, i just learned that the half of my SNES collection that I was given by my friend last year is now being reclaimed by his older brother. Never has a text message murdered my buzz so egregiously. This is a sad day. I lost Yoshi’s Island, Link to the Past, all 3 Donkey Kongs, Mega Man X, Power Rangers, and Mario Kart. Isn’t that messed up? I’m told that I’ll get them back at the end of the summer, but oh man…it might be a slowish summer.

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Free SNES Sprites? Yes Please.

Posted on 29th March 2011 in Something Daily

I discovered a site called nes-snes sprites a few days ago that has a huge collection of (you guessed it) NES and SNES sprites, often in all of their animation states, available for download. Right now it’s just great for nostalgia value for me, but I’m thinking about making some gifs with them, or maybe putting one on the header of my site. The site also has a decent collection of soundtracks from those two systems, which I’m almost inclined to put on my iPod and listed to for fun. I have a serious thing about chip music.

Posting daily starts to become difficult around the middle of the semester, for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s the increasing workload from classes, but it’s always the “stuff is happening” mindset that starts to kick in soon after midterms. Even if it’s not incredibly busy, there’s this feeling of having places to be and stuff to do. At least there is for me. Of course, I feel like I always have some project or another, and the more enthusiastic I get about whatever it happens to be, the less time I find myself having to do almost anything else. But that’s just me. Also, my living space is quite often much louder than it needs to be, mainly due to myself and my roommates all being close to 20 years old, fans of music, and owning big speakers. This sometimes makes it hard to concentrate on anything, which is a big reason that I’ve been spending more time in the courant library recently.

Speaking of my website, the design/development process is going well. The method I had been using to retrieve a Twitter feed via the Twitter API wasn’t working under Ubuntu, so I figured I’d at least attempt to make that better. As it turns out, I’m able to use a very similar method to the one described yesterday to get the tweet data from an RSS feed. Also, I’ve added some cool-looking stylistic elements to the homepage design, and given the header (my name) the Double Dragon treatment, which I was able to do with a font I found here and a bit of Gimping.

Also, my roommate gave me his GameBoy Pocket today! The stars have aligned in my favor! I was just starting to think about buying one, and then this happens. Seriously, that is awesome. I also picked up Street Fighter II Turbo yesterday, which is of course much harder than I remember it being. Ryu is quite annoying with the Haduoken.

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Favorite #29: Super Mario Kart

Posted on 9th March 2011 in Something Daily

It’s occurred to me that this idea of enumerating my favorite games may be ill-conceived. Even so, I want to finish now that I’ve started, so I’m just going to keep doing it. It’s helpful for when I don’t have stuff to write about (because for some reason I really feel like I have to post every day). Anyway….

Super Mario Kart is, in a relative sense, a new addition to my collection. Having grown up playing Mario Kart 64, I only learned of the existence of Super Mario Kart in the last year or two, when I had huge SNES marathons with my friend who had one from his childhood. The first thing I remember about SMK is that being used to the N64 version predisposed me to being very bad at the SNES version. I picked up the controller expecting it to feel pretty much the same as playing the 3d version, and it certainly isn’t – for the longest time playing this game, I would just get murdered every time I attempted to take on my friend. Even on 50cc (the lowest difficulty) I could get 3rd place at best in the grand prix, despite having mastered Mario Kart 64 years prior. Lesson learned: that kind of assumption makes no sense.

I still find SMK really hard actually; I am reliably awesome at the mushroom cup on any difficulty, but I’ve once again hit a snag with the flower cup on 150cc. I swear they make Luigi cheat on purpose. He wins every race on 150cc, uses about three super stars per lap, and knows how to position himself right in front of you to make you hit him and spin out. Luigi has robbed me of so many victories on the highest difficulty level that I’ve gotten to the point of actually yelling at him when he pulls some jerk move like that. I’ve never really felt that way about a video game before, where one character in particular is the reason that it’s hard. That’s the thing: in my mind, it’s not that SMK is a hard game, it’s just that Luigi is a cheating scumbag.

Screw you, Luigi…seriously. Stop cheating, and stop making me play Super Mario Galaxy 2 twice.

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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.

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Codename: Space Conflict from Beyond Pluto

Posted on 5th February 2011 in Something Daily

I don’t know if you remember the game that I claimed to be working on about three months ago; it’s definitely been a while. I had this idea over the summer to make a sweet and very involved Java game with my CS 101 experience – there were going to be multiple maps and physics and stuff blowing up and dinosaurs and it was going to be sweet. It was originally going to be mostly a learning experience to get me more acquainted with object oriented programming (which it absolutely has been), and it wasn’t really intended to be a project that I’d necessarily make into anything polished. After working on it for a while, though, it started to snowball and I figured “how hard could it be to make an Ikaruga clone?”. As it turns out, it’s both challenging from a programming perspective and time-consuming on the art side. I worked on it for about a month and a half with incredible persistence and then kind of fell off – I think I was intimidated by the huge amount of work I’d set out for myself. I had to program the whole game engine from scratch, draw all the sprites and backgrounds, animate them, and come up with a decent storyline. Basically I lost interest because it seemed kind of impossible. The project never totally left my mind though, I was always a moment away from working on it again. I have a mostly-complete game engine that I’ve made scalable to include more enemies, patterns, and areas, as well as a bunch of enemy sprites and two 8-bit audio tracks. Today, for some reason, I decided to pick it up again, and that I want to be done by the end of the semester. It’ll give me something to do and feel good about. I did significantly alter my initial expectations on how it would be when it was finished – my original project was just really daunting. But if all goes well I’ll have a sweet little Galaga-style arcade game by the end of May. Here are some screenshots of what I have so far (it’s all in the 8-bit visual style minus the background, which I have yet to draw correctly).

Also, Super Mario Kart is so annoyingly tough. Always has a super star regardless of where in the lap he is, and he always uses it right as you’re about to pass him. It’s not cool, and I hate Luigi. He makes it impossible to win the Flower Cup at 150 cc. Seriously, I’ve tried it probably twenty times and on the third course, he always comes from behind at the last moment and screws me. It’s not funny anymore, Luigi. Just go home. We all know you’re awesome at kart racing. Just stop, man. And Chrono Trigger is still taking a year and a day. I’m done two of the side quests and I still have five to go and probably a bunch more training before I try Lavos again…it’s a good thing that’s such a good game, because otherwise I’d probably have stopped playing by now.

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I Made Myself a BASH Greeter the Right Way

Posted on 3rd February 2011 in Something Daily

I am in a state of exhausted delirium right now, or maybe it’s delirious exhaustion. As a result, I decided to make myself a Terminal greeter that tells me a true statement every time I log in to BASH. I coded it in about half an hour just a few minutes ago, with great results. Some I’ve gotten so far are “robots are sick”, “cyborgs are most bitchin’”, “dolphins are the bomb”, “SNES games are nifty”, and “pizzas are radical”. It just picks a random noun and a random adjective, with the occasional modifier and the ultra-rare super secret sentence extension (it’s “to the MAXX”). Also, for some reason, I was in the mood to come up with rhyming couplets based on the ends of my sentences; I’ll tweet them @EmmettButler when I come up with them. My favorite is

I’m a jerkface in the workplace
I keep all my shirts in a shirt case

A good evening.

If I were choosing a movie to watch as the world was ending, I’d have to go with “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

Glamour shot, activate!

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What do you mean, “There’s no sound?”

Posted on 28th January 2011 in Something Daily

The thing about electric gear is that, a lot of times, it doesn’t work right. Hard drives fail, CDs get scratched, files get corrupted, Gameboy screens get cracked, whatever. Accepting these failures as inevitable, it’s the job of the troubleshooter (or “tech”) to correctly diagnose the problem and then efficiently and nondestructively resolve it. Simultaneously working as a studio tech and being poor, I’m beginning to gain some real experience in beating what usually seems like an insurmountable issue upon first inspection, regarding both the school studios and my own personal recording and computer gear.

My new-used copy of F-Zero for SNES, for example, wouldn’t start when I loaded the cartridge, no matter how much air I puffed into the contact. This isn’t an issue for me anymore, though, for any game, as I’ve discovered that a bit of isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab fixes that problem a good deal of the time (in my experience, 100 per cent of the time). I did something similar with my friend’s Double Dragon NES cart, whose contacts were actually coated on both sides with a thick layer of white paint. The paint wasn’t anywhere to be found on the body of the cartridge, which makes me think that someone deliberately painted the contacts to make it unplayable. Who would do that to Double Dragon? Rubbing alcohol got it right off, though.

Of course, this is a very basic example, but it’s indicative of my movement away from the panicked feeling of having something for which I paid a lot of money suddenly not function properly. My tendency is to go into crisis mode as soon as my computer, SNES, microphone, etc. starts not working – a strategy which typically compounds the issue rather than resolve it. As I learn more about the common fixes and methods of discovering the uncommon ones, I move away from this habit. I attempted to repair my $300 condenser microphone not long ago, and though it was panic that drove me to remove the casing, I learned from the experience.

I woke up this morning, booted my Linux partition, and found myself staring at a hung startup screen. I could feel a bit of the old panic, but I knew at least that my files were all safe on the Mac volume. The most important thing I could do at that point was carefully remember any and all changes that I’d made to the system between this boot and the last one. That, combined with a few well thought-out googlings led me to the realization that I’d inadvertently disabled the driver for my GPU, causing a hung boot every time the graphics started to load. At that point, as with most Ubuntu issues, it was just a package download of the right driver to make it all better. This was a scary experience, but I’m a better tech for it.

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I’m A Hunger Artist

Posted on 25th January 2011 in Something Daily

I haven’t read Kafka in a while, at least not until this morning. I don’t think there are any authors in whose life and work I’m more interested, and I used to read his short stories all the time. I have the complete compilation of his stories, which includes all of his known works minus the few novels that he published or started (one of which I’ve read). That was The Trial, which is about a guy named K (who I think it’s safe to assume is essentially Kafka himself) who wakes up one morning to find himself being arrested for a crime he can’t remember committing.

Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne dass er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.

That’s some good stuff. It’s not an intrigue about how he eventually uncovers this big conspiracy of memory erasement or anything like that; rather, it’s an expression of the helplessness Kafka experiences in his interactions with the bureaucracy. K. can never figure out who he’s supposed to see or what he’s been convicted of, but eventually (spoiler alert) is killed for an indiscernible reason. Actually that’s not a spoiler at all if you’ve ever read any Kafka. Some of my favorite short stories of his are In the Penal Colony, of course The Metamorphosis, The Great Wall of China, and A Hunger Artist, among many others. Those especially, though, are all fantastic examples of Kafka’s tendency to represent his own feelings of isolation and separateness from the rest of humanity. I just read one where the narrator is a bridge, sitting alone stretched across two cliffs for ages, when this traveler comes along and destroys him without a word, sending him to his rocky death. Classic Kafka. I love how accepting Kafka is of defeat; so many of his stories end with the narrator dying quietly, becoming less of a burden on his peers and/or family. Why am I drawn to these stories? I hope I don’t find out.

Other news: I’m trying to finish every SNES game I have (14) before I buy any more. Last night I succeeded at completing Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers after trying the final Megazord battle about twenty times. I had been writing down the level passwords in my notebook, and decided to just get it done. Here’s proof (the game’s one “cutscene”, where the five rangers transform into the Megazord)

Oh yeah, and I spooned my roommate Justin last night while he was spooning his girlfriend Melody. Thus, I am King Spoon. Bow before me presently. And then leave my dominion.

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Here We Go

Posted on 12th January 2011 in Something Daily

The resting part of my break is now over. I’m leaving with my family for Las Vegas tomorrow afternoon, and I’m only partially looking forward to it. I got home this evening to a house full of the frantic, stressed-out family trip dynamic, and I’m doing everything I can not to be pulled into that mindset. It happened on both of the other trips that we went on this break, and I’m sure this one will be no different. So as long as I’m able to avoid being affected too much by that aspect of the trip, the rest of it should actually be pretty fun. We’re going to see the Blue Man Group (hopefully I see Tobias) and Penn & Teller, as well as taking some jeep trips to various destinations. I don’t know, I really hope it’s fun. I’m worried. I get worried about stuff. However enjoyable or otherwise this experience ends up being, I do have only eight days until I go back to school…such a long break! I’m looking forward to a nice, long time at school – like, a lot. This has been going on for too long. Time to end it.

I finally managed to catch up with a highschool friend today, who I’d been missing quite a lot, as she goes to school in California. We had a fire and hot chocolate. I also picked up my SNES games today. The end is near.

Well, cool. Family vacations are not my favorite, this is for sure. I hope it goes well. Goodnight.

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The Difference Between the Early 90s and the 2000s

Posted on 5th January 2011 in Something Daily

I played a bunch of really old games for the first time today. A friend of mine got a Nintendo Entertainment System and some games for Christmas, so I got my first taste of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the first Battletoads, and Double Dragon (the contacts of which were covered in white paint when he got the cartridge, allowing me to save the day with the isopropyl alcohol I use to clean tape heads. Surprisingly, it worked with little hassle). Those games are pretty sweet, and playing them makes me realize the difference between how we play games now and how people used to. The typical NES (and even SNES) game had to be designed to be playable in one sitting, due to the lack of persistent memory capability of those early consoles. This resulted in a different brand of replay value than today’s gamer is familiar with: in the early nineties, you had to play the same part of a game over and over until you finally mastered that section, eventually repeating that process over the whole game, which was typically no longer than a few hours. Today, replay value comes in the form of long campaigns and unlockables that require dozens of hours to acquire. In my experience, this typically means a steeper learning curve in the gameplay of older games. I’m not trying to say that one of these is better than the other by any means, only that this difference certainly exists, and as a person used to playing mostly newer games, the chance to try one over and over to finally master it is welcome. I’ve only really done this with Mega Man X before, but I’ll try with Starfox as well.

Those three SNES games that I picked up around Christmas had been sitting on my bedside waiting to be played, as my Super Nintendo is still in New York. I did get a chance to try them all out today, though. Starfox is really, really hard, F-Zero is awesome, and so is Chrono Trigger. Although I couldn’t figure out how to save in Chrono Trigger before my friend ‘accidentally’ jostled the console and froze my game. I guess I’m just going to end up being really good at the first hour of that game…and that’s ok with me.

In other news, I can’t wait to be back in New York. There are a lot of people there I would like to see, my SNES is there, and I’ll get to go learn rad stuff about computers and music. I won’t take the break for granted, but it has been going on for a while now.

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