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Complete Bullshit | ignore this | Joe Mathlete vs. The Internet
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The Shadowland Prophesy
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Run Hello
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Markov Space
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01/26/12 : Roxy: Break some glass.
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MS Paint Adventures
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01/26/12 : Roxy: Break bottle.
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01/26/12 : Roxy: Retrieve mutant kitten.
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01/25/12 : Roxy: Take cat.
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MS Paint Adventures
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Lewis Black has a new television show called The Root of all Evil in which two "evil" things are compared and then it is decided which is more evil.
"Sounds good to me! Lewis Black is very funny, especially when he's talking about things he hates!" I thought when I first heard of it, but that premise is a filthy lie. This show has almost nothing to do with either evil things or Lewis Black. Oh, sure, Black is the host, but he hardly says anything. Instead, 2 mediocre stand-up comedians take turns talking about the "evils" of the two root nominees, and then Black sums things up at the very end. Basically they tell jokes, in the case of the pilot, about Oprah and the Catholic Church. The jokes are lame. They're LAAAAAAAAME! Oh, Oprah magazine only talks about Oprah! Ha. Ha. Ha. The Catholic church is having trouble with pedophile priests! How edgy.
The worst part isn't even the cascade of old, lame jokes, but the audience. The studio audience can't get enough of this shit! They're laughing and clapping after every single joke, and it sounds incredibly forced. They must have an enormous neon "LAUGH" sign above the set, or possibly the producers are secretly pumping nitrous oxide into the studio. It would be a better show if the audience reacted negatively and the comedians had to deal with it! That's where 60% of the commedy in non-strike Conan comes from, he's a master of turning negative or strange reactions into comedy gold.
Lewis Black, the host of this snooze-fest, asks questions of the other two in the third part of the show. The questions are more lame joke set-ups and sound nothing like anything that should come out of Lewis Black's mouth. His final summation is no better. It boiled down to another lame joke ina similar vein to the earlier ones, and then the show is over. Oprah is the root of all evil. Why? She built a school in South Africa instead of some poor American slum and... well, actually, that's really the only compelling reason outside of the ridiculous, unacceptable egotism of putting herself on the front of her own magazine.
In short, it is a terrible and boring show which is not worth your time. It is not worth anyone's time, least of all Lewis Black and the two comedians forced to do all the legwork.
BUT
It does make me think a little. If I may wax philosophic for a few minutes (and as this is my blog, I believe I can) I'd like to consider the nature of the Evil this show purports to find the root of.
It has been said by... someone, probably many people, that "evil is the absence of empathy." I agree with this, in a certain sense, and it seems to hold in most cases. A perpetrator of genocide does not care about his victims, neither does a murderer or a rapist. But what of terrifying situations such as, say, those portrayed in Misery? Or similar cases in which intended goodwill causes harm to others? Clearly it is far more complex. How many people must one hurt to be considered evil? And how much must they hurt them? If a person accidentally slows down traffic and inconveniences hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, is that equal to hurting a single person far more grievously?
In any case, now I can consider the cases at hand. The Catholic Church is an ancient organized religion, one of the oldest still widely practiced. Throughout it's history it has committed unspeakable crimes, but in what is the church itself actually to blame for these crimes? Outcasts in society are always persecuted, is a centralized church really any different than any other political power?
Gah, I shall have to continue this while I am struggling to write a program to solve sudokue puzzles tomorrow. It's too late, and I cannot think straight.
I had almost completely forgotten about this until I saw it in my bookmarks. Suppose I should start posting again, though I never did post much anyway.
Well, I did it. I stayed up more than 24 hours without sleep for basically no reason other than I drank a Monster at the wrong time and an interesting movie was on a 2 AM. I managed to get my math homework done, easily, and I feel pretty good right now. I'm past the point of being sleepy and am in the calm waters where I can go back to my room and fall asleep instantly, or stay awake for a few more hours in a desperate attempt to realign my sleep schedule.
I've done this a few times before, mostly in settings before or during events with my friends, or when I had to finish a big assignment overnight, but this time it was largely pointless. I simply never went to sleep. I always underestimate how much it sucks to want nothing more than to sleep and be completely unable to do so because you have to go do something. I prefer when I can leave early and collapse when it gets too much for me, I'll try to avoid this shit in the future.
...In The Devil's Advocate, anyway. It's amazing, you'd never think that he'd be any good as a lawyer character, but he's a thousand times better in this than any movie since Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. He's showing emotion! And actually acting!
I wonder what it is about this particular movie that brought this out in him. He wanted to be a lawyer? Maybe? It's so different from everything else he's done. He's this slick souther lawyer who does to New York to work for a suspicious law firm. That's nothing like a stoner or a stoner-esque technological messiah!
PS: Eggnog is delicious.
My dwarves are carving out the dining hall from beneath the black, snow-covered plains of the Massive Infinite Plane. The farms have been planted and my carpenter is hard at work building beds from the limited supply of wood carried form the homeland of Avalvabok. Outside, on ground level, the wardogs tear a raccoon that wandered too close limb from limb, staining the snow all around with it's blood.
Such is the beginning of a game of Dwarf Fortress. All this action is communicated through simple ASCII symbols. Dwarf Fortress, in case you didn't know, is a sort of roguelike version of Dungeon Keeper except it's a thousand times more complex. The game strives for geological accuracy to an incredible extreme, as well as realism with regards to smelting steel and extracting minerals. Amazing things are possible, you can build a mill powered by a local river! That doesn't seem very amazing, or even interesting, out of context, but what makes in incredible is that you can customize every aspect of this construction. It's a real undertaking to get it working, to coordinate all the labor and materials needed and to place it in the correct place.
The ASCII is very off-putting at first, especially if you've never played a roguelike or other old computer game before. But it is actually very necessary to convey everything that's going on in a manageable way. You can glance at a section of your fortress and see that the spring planting is going smoothly, a dwarf is putting a table into place, some soldiers are training in the barracks, and the brewer is busy making wine from the winter harvest. It definitely takes some getting used to, but once you do it's an amazing game.
I love the game, but I can never get very far with any fortress. I always end up starting a new one, usually because I get an idea and then realize it's impossible on the current map. Or I get some migrants and feel too overwhelmed because I was unprepared. Part of the problem is that it's very hard to find a good map for a fortress. There's only magma, which makes forging a snap, near volcanoes now, instead of in any mountain. Otherwise you either have to have a ton of trees or get lucky and strike coal. If you start on a volcano, however, it is very difficult to find metals! And there's almost always a huge aquifer around volcanoes for some reason, which makes digging down to get precious ores all the more frustrating.
I guess I just enjoy setting up the fortress basics in different areas. I'll try a serious multi-year fortress once Toady One the Great fixes some of the current glitches, like goblin sieges not working and problems with fortress liaisons not being able to escape and going crazy.
I recently purchased Mario Galaxy for the Wii, and it is an amazing game. You probably already know this, as it's been all over the internet since it came out that it's an amazing game. But, almost any high-profile game receives hyperbolic praise immediately after release. Even Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was highly praised when it was first released, but is now regarded as one of the worst in the series. Anyway, the real test is if it is still highly regarded in, say, six months. If appeal is truly lasting or if it is truly, as some critics currently say, a stupid gimmick. It certainly won't be lowered to the level of Twilight Princess or Mario Sunshine, but it may be regarded as merely great rather than the best game ever.
Personally, I think it is the best game ever, or at least that I've ever played. It's so well crafted, every single level has a different sort of theme to it, and they're almost all executed perfectly. It recalls Yoshi's Island more than any other game, the sheer variety of mechanics and level themes used once and only once. And so many of the levels are interesting in a spatial way. For example, (spoilers ahoy, level description) the desert level has little planetoids made up of sand flowing endlessly from one end to the other, and another is an ever-expanding sphere of sand.
The music is amazing, the controls are perfect, and it's plenty challenging. A real return to the form of the Nintendo glory days. I hope that it's detractors don't succeed in convincing everyone that it's "not innovative" and has "tacked on" or "not enough" motion controls. Collecting star bits using the cursor is a perfect way to simplify collectathons in 3-D, and the other motion control segments are some of the most fun in the game and control perfectly.
Innovation is not necessary to make a great game. I was thinking about this earlier today when I was reading an article about Unreal Tournament 3. They're completely skipping the story this time, but no one minds. Unreal Tournament is a 100% multiplayer game and everyone knows it. Even the single player game is just multiplayer against good bots. But it doesn't matter because no one expects anything more, and it's a great game because they can focus all their energy into perfecting the multiplayer aspect. Mario Galaxy is primarily a perfection of Mario 64. It feels very similar, but the design is so much more refined that it deserves it's status. Innovative games are never as good as perfected experiences like Galaxy.
So, I hope that Galaxy continues to be as highly regarded as it is right now, and that Nintendo starts making more games as great as this.