emphatically static
I don’t usually get bored out of my skull when I’m at places where intellectual discussions are going on, but this has been a bit much. On the plus side, I’ve gotten to see a lot of interesting things around town. For instance, I saw a statue of General Hooker, a guy who specialised in getting “women of the night” for his men. I know you were always curious as to the etymology of the word ‘hooker’. Now you know.
Here is a sample picture at the docks.
– The ‘theatre districts’ of most parts of the country shut down on Monday. Why?, because they can. What they don’t tell you, is support businesses like restaurants around the area close too. I thought it might be useful for you to know, so you pack a snack.
– I got to experience Shear Madness last evening, and it was super fun(ny). If you’re around, this is not something to be missed. I’d been told something of the sort a while ago, and the woman wasn’t lying. It isn’t everyday the audience gets involved in theatre performances.
– There was also a related incident involving sweet talking a woman at the concierge desk into scalping extra tickets she had for the show, and getting in for, let’s say… less.
– Remember the winds in the movie Unfaithful? The kinds that can knock you off your feet, force you to fall and scrape your knees, and get seduced by French book sellers? Today I got to experience a similar situation. Except there was no French book seller, definitely no seduction, and was extremely scary. Now I am definitely not a petite little thing. In fact, I am large and heavy. Anyway, the winds on the streets were extremely forceful, and as I was waiting for a cross-the-street signal I (yes, large and heavy I) got blown into a busy intersection (nearly killed by fast moving traffic of course), pushed to cross the road, and had to hold on to the traffic light pole on the OTHER SIDE to prevent being blown any further down the street. I was shaking, and held on for a while until the winds slowed a tad, and I regained composure. But that was quite a rush. Not something I’d ever want to go through again, but a rush nonetheless.
– I, one who never tips unless I’m insanely satisfied, have been tipping over 25% wherever I’ve eaten at so far. No, it’s not a change of heart, things have been so good.
There haven’t been (and probably won’t be) any real updates to delineate or actuality as I am not around to update either.
I’m at a place I’ve been to like 4 times, and yet feel more at home than anywhere else. Strange, but awesome.
I have absolutely no self control, and that sucks for a variety of reasons. But hey, at least I got to get through Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for the GameCube (PoP:SoT) in a couple of nights, when I probably should have been preparing some stuff for the upcoming talk.
And I’m not kidding, I really did finish it in two sessions of under 5 hours each. It’s that short. Here are some thoughts. Firstly, the one game that kept coming to my mind as I was playing this was (Raven’s Quake II engine based) Heretic II. They looked vaguely similar, but that’s not why. This and Heretic II are the only third person action games (you can’t really call them third person shooters since they don’t really have guns) in which I’ve actually cared about the characters as the story progressed.
While I am starting to relate it to other games, I might as well compare it with the other games I’ve played in the PoP series and get it over with. Funwise, it is definitely better than PoP I, arguably comparable to PoP II and light years ahead of PoP 3D.
Now, returning to the star of the show, PoP:SoT. It has a well thought of story that ends with a pleasant twist. It doesn’t follow the formulaic “the evil vizier kidnapped the princess and you must rescue her” scheme, which is nice. You sort of have a sense for what is going on during the game, but it all makes sense and falls into place during the last sequences – like The Sixth Sense. PoP:SoT is also extremely funny at points, realized by some brilliant voice acting. And the music fits the mood nicely. Except, the music sounds more Indian than Persian, but I’m not complaining.
The game is what I call “super linear”. There is absolutely just one path from the time you start the game to finish. If you see something and can reach it (jump across across to a ledge at a 6000 m elevation, say), that is the way you must go. As long as you can move in a given direction, you are progressing along the intended path. Which is actually nice, as it involved very little intelligence, some things most games these days force you to expend waaay more than necessary making the experience less fun. Because of this strict linear path and a not-so-subtle hint system (premonitions warning you of all possible traps and how to get by them), the game is short, and simple, and I loved it.
True to its PoP lineage, a bulk of the gameplay deals with avoiding and circumventing all sorts of devious traps and things that hinder your progress. Now, just as in the rest of the series, one false jump, one spiked ram knocking you off a ledge or just about any other wrong move can kill you in an instant. But since it will be no fun to allow saving after every step, the creative story writers worked in this (sand powered) dagger that controls time (don’t ask). Occasional screw ups are now acceptable because all you need to do is “rewind time” to a point before you made a mistake and get on with it. It sure beats restarting at the beginning of a level and having to go through all sorts of devious jumps and things again. You realize the true glory and brilliance of this simple addition only much later in the game, when it gets taken from you. You then have to perform a bunch of things without screwing up once. It can get irritating when you make a simple slip up 90% of the way through a sequence and have to redo it all over again.
All in all, it’s a super fun game with a carefully crafted story you want to believe, with interesting characters you’ll get attached to, with some very witty dialogue worked in. It’s a pity it was so short, but it still deserves a 5/5.
I’ve not been able to write too much recently. I have at least 4 unfinished posts which ended up stranded cause they were insanely boring (and pointless) even though they seemed like great ideas when I started. So I’ll stick to life news, since boring as it may be, the primary objective of this place is to chronicle my existence.
I’m heading to Boston Monday for the week, for another talk. And I think I might be there this summer too – it’s like my life is not complete and will not move on if I don’t spend a week a year in this place. But it’s awesome, so all’s well.
I am not taking the EOS 20D because I don’t trust myself yet to not screw up when something pretty worth taking comes along. Plus, it’s heavy and after half a day of walking around town with it, my arms hurt like as I’ve stressed myself working out. I mean, how I think they might hurt if I stressed myself working out, if I ever tried.
For the first couple of days, I’d been keeping myself busy with other things and didn’t make time to try out the new camera. I didn’t make the time to, or … I didn’t want to? I don’t know, I’d been overly ambivalent about the whole denting my life savings exercise, but all that changed late last evening. After 83 test shots at home and familiarizing myself with some settings, I stepped out into the darkness and biting cold to take a bunch of pictures. I am pleased to report I am very impressed.
Here’s one of them. There was no noise, no blur, no struggling to auto-focus, no chromatic aberration, no spherical aberration, no dead pixels, no nonsense. Just a clear capture of exactly what I saw. All I had to do before uploading it to delineate was scaling. There was no need for the usual subtle tweaking of any sort.
Here’s a crop of the unscaled image for those curious. And for those who aren’t as well.
Sometime early afternoon, yesterday.
arbitrary person: Dude, it is going to snow soon.
me: Quiet down foo, it is over 50 degrees (in the devil’s own unit) outside. It isn’t going to snow.
ap: But dude, tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. You’ve gotta have “first snow” by Thanksgiving.
me: STFU.
Sometime late afternoon, when me steps out and into a shiny white powdery coat of snow.
me: Ayee! God damn it.
*YACE — Yet Another Conversation Excerpt
This is probably the funniest thing I’ve seen on slashdot in ages. It’s a picture of how a rock might be rendered in three modern game engines, along with the real rock, for comparison.
