Universal U.S. Politics in a Nutshell

Pick one!

- About half the country is composed of moderate and sensitive liberals. The other half is a bunch of extreme right-wing conservatives.

- About half the country is composed of moderate and sensitive conservatives. The other half is a bunch of extreme left-wing liberals.

Cynical third option: EVERYONE is an extremist.

Good sandwich combos

Sometimes its best to keep things simple. The best barbecue sandwich has white bread, barbecue sauce, brisket, onions, and pickles. The best turkey sandwich is oven-roasted turkey, iceberg lettuce, and mayonnaise on white bread.

Highway construction in a good city simulator

One of the things that makes a good game is that you can get inspiration from other games. SimCity 4 was released in 2003, and the way that highways/roads/etc. are constructed is less than favorable: place something, and it takes a few seconds of going from transparent to usable as workers finish it off.

But while it's an improvement over the "plopping" of the old SC games, it's still not very realistic. In 2004, Evil Genius had a much better way of constructing things: when you planned out something, it wasn't a direct cost to you immediately, it was in "blueprint" mode and you had to actually enable it. So the way that a good city simulator would work, if you say, wanted to build a new highway, you would create a blueprint for free (which is a bit unrealistic, as it takes money to even plan out something) then enable construction. From there, you have to wait a set period while it slowly takes cash to build (in a certain number of increments in a certain amount of time, more expensive, more time). At any point, you can stop, but if you're in the middle of a huge road project, you can't do anything with it: those huge trenches and the like cannot be helped without a bulldozer. If you have to stop due to budget shortfalls, it's especially dangerous, and you'll have to live with your mess until you can backfill things or finish it. When the money is finally paid off, the road opens, any detours disappear, and you have a new highway/subway/public works project.

With the "blueprint" mode, you can have any number of projects in various states of completion, and you don't run the risk of accidentally developing an area with residential you wanted to put a highway through. If that happens, then you'll have to pay market price for the land value, so if you want a highway to run through an upper end development, expect to lose tons of money (and popularity). Of course, there would be other ways to get around it: buy one house at market value, demolish it, don't maintain the lot, and let land values plummet, but that would be...mean.

The Dark Knight Rises

Right, so I finally watched The Dark Knight Rises, as I watched The Dark Knight over a year prior.

I didn't like TDKR as much as TDK for a few reasons, mostly except for the reference to Batman leaving and Harvey Dent, everything with the Joker and the chaos he caused is swept under the rug. You know how for every movie, there's that "Darkest Moment" time when it seems that the villain seems to win, and the hero is dead/incapacitated? Yeah, well, for this movie, it goes on for way too long. After confronting Bane (the villain) in the sewers, Bane breaks Batman's back and sticks him a prison in the Middle East, which is mostly a huge pit with no plausible escape. Meanwhile, Bane, the criminals that Gotham City had put away, and his philosophy of "the people" ruling and taking from the rich destroys infrastructure, kills people, plunders and kills the rich through kangaroo courts featuring Dr. Jonathan "Scarecrow" Crane as the "judge", with a sadistic policy that involves killing people through slow strangulation, neck snapping, and a "lose hope until you pray for death" philosophy. And this goes on in-universe for five months. To make matters worse a clean energy source-turned-hydrogen bomb would blow in five months anyway.

When Batman finally returns to kill Bane, the attractive female board member Bruce Wayne entrusted with the energy source and one of Bane's hostages was evil all along, which means that even if Bane hadn't shown up, Gotham was doomed anyway. Even the ending isn't particularly upbeat, though there is a new origin story for Robin.

But more interesting is that even though some people have compared that Bane is a play on Romney's "Bain Investments", the character of Bane and his cohorts is the philosophy of Occupy taken the logical extreme. They even LOOK a bit like Occupy members. It's even more obvious if you know that Bane's character was created by political conservatives.

It's also a bit frustrating that while Bane is extremely skilled in hand to hand combat and wears a bulletproof vest, NO ONE thinks of shooting Bane in the head. But as a movie, it is very well done, both from a cinematographic and plot perspective, even if it is extremely violent.

Carbonizer says: YES, if you know what you're doing. This does not follow the "Marvel formula".

Video games 2012

Well, given what I said two years ago, how have I done in playing video games?

Right. So I did play and beat EarthBound that last summer, and Link to the Past in spring, but still not Ocarina of Time. I would pick it up every few months, play a bit, and quit, so a year later, I would be one dungeon ahead. But it's better now, and I'm now in Water Temple, after blazing through Forest Temple and Fire Temple. Chrono Trigger was done last summer IIRC, and I replayed it to the point to try to get the Developer's Ending (or at least a different one). Either way, I'll try to save Lara's legs each time (and don't forget to hit "A" to get rid of the dialog box). (It's also worth noting that in the prototype, you can't save her)

While I never played Mother III very far, partly because it didn't look very good played on a huge screen, and partly due to the fallout I had with Starmen.net), I haven't eliminated it from the list.

In the meantime (between 2010 and now), I beat other games, including (deep breath), Scribblenauts, Super Scribblenauts, Beneath a Steel Sky, Portal, Machinarium, Braid, Plants vs. Zombies, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (long time coming, had it since at least 12/10--too many fetch quests), Super Mario RPG, TeenAgent (yeah, it was a GOG freebie), Eversion (not 100%--but I got all the gems), and VVVVVV.

Final Fantasy III I finally picked up, but it's slow going--I never got into quite the way I did with CT. Evil Genius is going well enough, but I need to hold off on it, because I've played way too much of it.

Callin' it quits

I've officially given up my project to restore my Game Boy Advance SP in a new case. It would help if they came with the hinge parts instead of relying on you to pull them out (and potentially damage them). And that's not even counting the grief I went through trying to buy a tri-wing screwdriver...

Orange pork fat

I've noticed that pork fat that has been processed somehow (pepperoni, tamales, not bacon) has a distinct orange color, both in liquid and solid form (it is saturated). After trying unsuccessfully Googling a variety of terms related to it, I'm coming up blank, so I'm asking you this question.

Speaking of unhealthy foods, I'm thinking about some sort of McDonald's related blog (about restaurants, food, etc.) or website, which has been in planning for about two years, but I still can't decide if I want it to be a blog or website. I know I had written about the local ones, so I do have some ideas.

EDIT: It appears that the pepperoni fat is spicy in itself.

A Non-Human Death

I haven't dealt with a personal death in a long time, not since my grandfather died in summer 2008 (and my writing's gotten a lot better since then). While it wasn't the death of a person I knew closely--and I'm thankful for that--it did involve a friendly old tomcat who resided between Heldenfels (a common building at A&M which I visited many times) and the Evans Library (also one of my favorite haunts). He would be in his normal place in the garden, he was "officially" a "feral" cat even though he was neutered and got vaccinations, and he was extremely tame, better than my cat, even (maybe I shouldn't have teased her so). If you held out a treat, he would eat it out of your hand WITHOUT taking gnawing at your finger.

And now ol' Bisbee's gone. He won't be back next semester in the garden outside Biological Sciences Building East.

I resolve to no longer tease my cat, and also keep her well-fed.

In lighter news, I managed to get a controller working with Snes9x, as talked about yesterday. There's hope for bigger things!

A MESS O' Trouble

My affinity for obtuse puns can be found today. Kudos if you get both references.

Well, I'm playing through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which I started well over two years ago (Water Temple now. Gee, I'm in for some fun...)

But as I play, I'm getting increasingly dissatisfied. The constant pestering about a Rumble Pak (which the N64 version utilized) is getting to me: I can't use the Stone of Agony and fishing is a bit more difficult. And of course, I'm haunted by the mythical Ura Zelda (which, I can't reiterate enough, is NOT the same thing as Master Quest), which will never happen. After Ocarina of Time, I want to play The Wind Waker next for the "great Zelda experience", but also have a desire to play Majora's Mask, which isn't really the grandiose epic like OoT and TWW are, so it could be played at the same time (after all, both are in alternate timelines).

The thing is, I want a good emulation device. While the jailbroken "iPod as portable SNES" was a crushing disappointment, so much so that I ended up restoring it, with two lessons: jailbreaking isn't the Golden Ticket that will free your iPod from the invisible box Apple creates, nor is the iPod really a good game playing machine, with or without jailbreaking.

I realized then that while a portable device is cool and all: nothing like a device that you can play on the cozy environs of your bed, your couch, or any place where you can sit down and chill with headphones (school hallways, public transportation, etc. etc.) it's also to have a better emulation range. No doubt that the 16-bit generation was a great one (and yes, that includes you Genesis die-hards), but I'd kinda like something better: like the 5th generation of video game consoles (N64, PlayStation). Mupen64, which I have on my Mac, looks and runs great--that is, when the Rice video plug-in isn't giving the screen jitters (and yes, it's in a small windowed mode). The other major problem, which comes to a major problem when trying to play an N64 game: is the fact that my computer (Snow Leopard based) doesn't seem to recognize controllers very well. I suppose I could boot up into Windows, but the last time I tried that, it wouldn't even run sound--in an updated version of Snes9x, even--without some ActiveX upgrade. I stayed away from that. Frankly, I don't even boot up into Windows unless it's worth it: usually it was for SimCity 4, Portal, or Evil Genius, and I'd frankly like everything to stay on one OS (in an ideal environment). The reason I can't do that is...
- Games perform poorly in WINE or Cider wrappers, which is a major pain if it's a game that's not supposed to be some retro-style freeware game
- It takes up a ton of space per game.
- gmax, used for building SC4 "BAT"s, can't be used in WINE to my knowledge

I considered doing homebrew on my Wii again, as that would solve the "emulation but I can't use controllers" issue, but there were a few problems with that, and I wouldn't be able to use some of the cooler emulation features (such as a high-resolution texture pack).

I suppose my main problem is really the controllers--I can't get a joystick to work right on any software (even my beloved Apple IIGS emulator--I had a working joystick set-up on the iMac G3 for playing The Three Stooges in Bernie ][ the Rescue). And of course, I would need a bigger screen: my monitor size isn't going to cut it.

The Amazing Spider-Man

Well, to my surprise and relief, The Amazing Spider-Man plays off the solid tried-and-true Marvel superhero stories, and does it quite well. The real thing is how it compares to the Maguire-and-Sam Raimi Spider-Man series, first launched a decade ago. I admit I haven't seen Spider-Man 3, but I can tell you that I've read the novelization and heard enough about it, how it killed the franchise.

TASM is a definite improvement, although it does try to make it seem like the first movie, changing up things enough so it doesn't feel like the original with names changed. It swaps MJ for Gwen Stacy, changes the set-up in which Ben dies (alas, Uncle Ben is Doomed By Canon), makes Dr. Curt Connors the "new" Norman Osborn (complete with schizophrenia!), alters the focus of the character (more on vigilantism and finding out what happened to his parents), which arguably makes him less angsty. It avoids the common pitfalls and embarrassments of the first movie (the "upside-down kiss", the "throwing trash cans at the villain"), no long monologues while web-slinging, no over-the-top dorkiness in high school.

That being said, while it doesn't tear into its canon too much, it definitely feels like its treading on well-worn ground. Besides a few similarities to the 2002 Spider-Man, there's all sorts of things that remind viewers of any number of Marvel movies (including Iron Man) and the Dark Knight Saga. It has plot (unlike anything recent by Michael Bay), it has action, it has a story (superhero movies that don't tend to do this so well, such as the Green Lantern movie from last year, tend to not do so well financially or critically), and it doesn't deviate from its source material too much (Catwoman, anything from Uwe Boll are basically in name only). Following those four criteria (and plus an interesting side story, too) will result in something generally enjoyable, at least, spending money at the cinema.

Carbonizer says: YES

Windows IV

Re-installed Windows again, which was a pain. If you read my previous posts (click the "windows" tag at the bottom of the page), I give my trials and tribulations. After reformatting the BOOTCAMP drive created by Boot Camp to NTFS (reformat, not convert), Windows Update didn't work at all, so after connecting it to Ethernet (it can't use the wireless without SP3), I eventually tracked down this with a woefully out of date version of Internet Explorer. It was a pain, but I did it. You also have to run Boot Camp twice (before and after SP3) since there's some essential SP3-only stuff.

Happily, I was able to get Evil Genius running again with my files intact.

Railroads in a good city simulator

Alas, what we wish for but cannot have. The new SimCity does put thought into the way traffic sounds are done, for instance, but alas, there are absurdly placed graffiti and over-saturated flat textures in the actual game (and not that's not even counting the fundamentally broken things in there).

Over the last past few years, I've really thought about the way trains should behave in a city simulator, focusing on a new concept: like the military bases from SC2K, railroads are bought and run anywhere they please. In addition to saving costs, it creates an exciting new obstacle in which you must work around your railroads (which are greatly beneficial to your city), and bring new challenges, and trade-offs. Overpasses and underpasses can allow traffic to go through, as well as giving a quiet zone.

One benefit I realized since writing that post is how with multiple trackage and unbroken crossings, trains could park for hours, if not days (or weeks, or months, or years--though those only typically tend to happen on semi-abandoned tracks). That would be beneficial to your city: the longer unbroken sections of track you have, you could gain a small sum of money. While a bit unrealistic (the train company owns the track and does whatever they please), it would give a bit of incentive to you, the city builder (although train companies have been known to offer up cash to close off a railroad crossing, though this doesn't happen very often)

This is, of course, to compensate for the fact that you're not actually the one being held up by railroads. In the case of near me, there were two main crossings (Villa Maria Road and Harvey Mitchell Parkway) that were giving people grief, especially when trains came through right during rush hour. And when the 5 pm train comes rumbling through and you're not being stuck, it's a great feeling. Except, of course, that "pay off" doesn't happen in a game, in fact, it might be more fun to watch traffic jams reach legendary proportions.

Either way, there should be a way to help you realize that the train going over or under is the better way: compare major East Coast cities to cities elsewhere. There's hardly an at-grade crossing in site. The other thing about railroads is that railroads "coming through a town" is much less important than before: in fact, train companies and cities would rather route freight lines out of town if possible today (unless there were freight spurs), so it would be best to have some sort of 19th century simulation when railroads were truly all the rage, which would only add to the cost of the game. That's why they have expansion packs, I guess.

Esters give fruit flavors

From the July-August 2010 issue of Michigan Beer Guide. This is a pretty neat article about the esters that yeast produce when fermenting, which in turn, give the beer fruity flavors, as esters give fruit flavors (food science!). I especially enjoyed the part about isoamyl acetate which is both produced by bananas and bees (when they sting you). Since bees start losing internal organs as soon as it stings you, the main threat is the other bees that come after you, attracted by this phermone they left at you, at which point, you'd better start moving.

Viva la iPod

After a four month stint, the jailbreaking experiment is over due to the problems in that post and others (wrong clock time, problem loading Safari, shorter battery life, etc.). It was restored and is now back to normal.

But was it worth it? Well, yes. Remember, the original point was to convert the iPod into a lean, mean, games-playing machine, and in the process, I realized that the iPod just wasn't meant for games. I had installed Bugdom 2 after restoring it, a Pangea game that I had got for free a while back (it was released on the Mac in the early 2000s) and I realized that not only did have horrible controls, there was a bit of lag, just hammering home the point that the iPod really wasn't a games machine, no matter how many times analysts were saying this or that.

Even videos weren't all that great. I took off most of the videos, simply because I had either already seen them, they take up too much space, the iPod isn't an optimal viewing experience (the novelty wears off quickly), and I have YouTube (which now works again).

For a brief minute, my iPod felt NEW again, and it felt great. Sure, I'd like to get one of the newer ones (camera, iPhone capability, retina display, something that can run Ghost Trick), but for now, my late 2009 model will do fine.

Some run-down strip

A laundromat and a sign that says "25¢ pool tables".

(Baton Rouge, Louisiana, November 2006)