Take me to New York

Posted on 20th January 2011 in Something Daily

I started this morning, my last day in Downingtown for the winter, by attempting to install WordPress (where? I don’t know), because I’d read that that was the requirement for installing plugins. Only about three hours later did I discover that without a 3rd party web host, this is impossible. I banged my head against the wall for quite a while only to realize that what I was attempting was impossible. Great job! I did buy a new domain name, though – through WordPress, not a 3rd party. It’s a lot more expensive to get one from an outside source. You’ll notice, though, that it’s no longer “threestegosaurusmoon.wordpress.com” – it’s just “threestegosaurusmoon.com”. For only 17 bucks a year. Sweet. The longer URL still redirects here, obviously, but it’s less to remember now.

I’m now on a bus to New York after winter break slightly overstayed its welcome, listening to Funcrusher Plus and imagining all the Chrono Trigger I’ll be able to play in the next few days. Seriously, it’s such a good game. The only other RPG I’ve ever played is Pokemon, and I feel like a big part of the reason I’m so into Chrono Trigger is that I’m so unfamiliar with the genre. Since I haven’t become desensitized to the idiosyncrasies of RPGs yet, everything that it throws at me seems fresh. I don’t really understand yet why it’s known as such an incredible game – I mean, I’m sure it is, I just haven’t found out the reason yet. So far, I’m just enjoying the ride of leveling everybody up and meeting the enemies. Chrono Trigger does make me feel a bit dorkier than the average game does, probably because to talk about it requires one to at least mention the levels that the characters can go through; it’s pretty likely that I also end up naming a bunch of different weapons they carry (“Yeah, I thought about it, but I decided to switch the red katana to the iron rod – way more HP, dude”). It’s just got a pretty high dork potential. Funny, I don’t think twice about how I talk about the shooters or nintendo games I play.

I’m also looking forward to having my Steam games back again – I made the egregious error of putting the game files on an external drive and then leaving that drive in my apartment over break, so I got home and found myself Team Fortress, Half-Life, and Portal-less. I have a lot of catching up to do, and a lot of new things to start learning and accomplishing. I’m going to skateboard more; skating over break ended up being mostly a fantasy, as it snowed constantly when I was home. I’m going to catch up on some much-needed gaming time, chill with my roomdogs, and get ready for some sweet classes in the coming semester. Data Structures is going to be rad, as is Recording Tech. I can’t wait.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job! is mostly an absurd parody of public access television. It’s really, really funny if you like non sequitur and absurdism (and you have a strong stomach). But seriously, it’s a sweet awesome show. Also, xkcd is quite clever, and Dinosaur Comics…isn’t. But they’re both rad, and I’ve read all of them. Also Amazing Superpowers and Dr. McNinja are sweet. If you were looking for some webcomics to waste your evening on, there you go. You can thank me now or later, whenever is good for you.

Alright, this is it: time to start having some more hilarious and interesting thoughts! I can already feel my creativity returning! Yeah ok…we’ll see about that.

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Turns out Steam games come with a bunch of raw content

Posted on 20th November 2010 in Something Daily

Hello everyone, welcome back to another exciting edition of Three Stegosaurus Moon. We’ve got a great post planned for you today. It has it all. Even dinosaurs.

After a few days of me being mentally elsewhere due to this project that I won’t shut up about, I have returned. I woke up this morning without feeling the uncontrollable urge to start coding and solving problems. I slept in (until 8:45…late, huh?), had a nice long stretch, made myself some breakfast, and have so far had a very relaxing morning. I think I’m going to avoid skating today, in light of what happened last time I did. The scratch on my arm is healing, but it still looks pretty gross. I catch people staring at it sometimes…my eyes are up here, okay?. I believe I’m going to do almost nothing today, as I feel like I deserve it due to the big amount of concentrated effort over the last few days.

Let me just say one last thing about my esync/backup project. Writing a Perl script that recursively traverses directories and copies their contents is something that I didn’t think I could do four days ago. In a way, I still don’t believe that I can. Yet somehow I managed to do it – within the space of three days – and it works exactly the way I intended it to. I must be getting better at programming, or something. I just wanted to make it known that I, Emmett J. Butler, am proud of myself. For once.

As you may know, my roommate London had a recording session for his class last night on which he asked me to assist. The first thing I found out was that the Clive Davis studios are way nicer than the average Music Tech studio. Everything is just cleaner and bigger, and in better condition. But not to compare the two programs or anything. They’re completely different.

The session was to track a woodwind/brass section for London’s hip hop track, which involved seven musicians playing live. So we had lots of mics, gobos, and headphones for everybody. I’ve never engineered a session with that many people on it before, and it really drove home the point that to make one of them work, you have to know exactly what to say to the musicians to get the best performance. It’s like you’re putting on a disguise every time you hit the talkback button. The session was great, and I ended up assisting in a pretty big capacity.

I made the discovery last night that every game you download on Steam uses an unencrypted directory full of the media such as videos, audio and textures that it needs to function. I stumbled on this folder last night during a backup, and literally everything from the games is there in raw form. Every Team Fortress 2 map video, every zombie scream and gun sound effect from Left 4 Dead, the Portal song, everything. It’s just there, in .wav or .mp4, for the taking. I don’t know what I’ll do with this knowledge, if anything, but it’s crazy to see. You definitely don’t get that with a console game.

Check out what I found. I know somebody who’d eat The World’s Largest Gummi Worm (hint: it’s Andrew)

Dinosaurs.

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