The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I was working at my job. You know, the one that I have to earn money? Yeah, that one. So I was working there, changing all the jewelry signs because I promised Krista I would, so I’m doing that, and then I feel kind of squirmy-itchy around my stomach region. And I’m like “hey, okay, no big deal, I shall scratch a little, not like anyone is around.” So I give my stomach a scratch. Doesn’t do much. I look down, and there seems to be something on my shirt, so I brush it off… but it isn’t on my shirt… it’s in my shirt… so I lift it up and

HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BUG IN MY SHIRT.

To my credit, I did not kill the creature. I could not really tell what it was as it crawled away. It wasn’t big, but it didn’t have wings. I don’t think it was a tick or anything, as it didn’t look like that. I have no idea what it was, and even moreso, I have no fucking idea how it got in my shirt. Did it climb all the way up my body? When did it do that? Why did I not notice it until then?

There are so many unanswered questions.

But most importantly, it has made me insanely itchy the whole rest of the night. So many phantom bugs, coming out of nowhere, crawling under my clothes… makes me shudder just thinking about it…

…stupid bug…

Okay, so I’m going to attempt to make a point about vidjeo gamez. Stand back.

Difficulty in video games. On one paw, you have things like this. Horrible, awful things that only exist to be hard and, potentially, drain your will to live. On the other, you have things, perhaps, like this, where perhaps the complains of “OMG for n00bs too easy” are warranted.

Still, I’m so far in the second camp, it’s silly.

I’ve never been into video games for the challenge. I can’t remember a time when I thought a game was too easy or too simple. I don’t doubt it happened once or twice. But no strong examples spring to mind.
Like most gamers my age, I grew up playing games. I played all of the hard games, of course. At the same time, I sure as hell used my Game Genie a lot. So I guess I had more fun when I was jumping over the levels in Super Mario Brothers 2 than when I was trying it for reals and failing. As games matured I found RPGs, and latched onto them. Here was a genre where, much like in the design of the original Dragon Quest, if you couldn’t defeat something, you could overcome it with sheer perseverance and level-grinding. The fact that I didn’t have skills didn’t matter so much. I could still enjoy the game, and I got a little story in there, too. Then came music games into my consciousness, a genre where it’s just all about fun. There’s a challenge element, but you can set it to easier modes and still feel like a rock star, or, more appropriately for my first excursion, enjoy the humorous and catchy rap tunes.

And now, difficulty need not be an element at all in games. It’s so far away from what’s actually popular. I couldn’t be happier. Sure, once I’ve mastered a difficulty in Rock Band, I do kick it up to make it more challenging, but that’s not the real reason I’m playing. I want to feel like I’m rocking out to my favorite songs. Sure, I do enjoy a roguelike now and again, and those are the hardest games out there. But the idea isn’t to beat those games. It’s about seeing the progression of your own skills. I know that that’s probably what everyone does in every hard game. “Yes, I made it X amount farther than last time!” But I don’t know. Most games have the end as a goal. Roguelikes don’t. It, like golf, is simply all about bettering yourself. If a roguelike is worth its salt, you will probably never be able to beat every single run you do. But that is okay.
The point is, games without challenge can be just as fun. I love the crap out of all of Telltale’s adventure games, and they are essentially interactive stories than games. Same with Phoenix Wright, or Hotel Dusk. These are very, very entertaining games! I love the crap out of them. Difficulty isn’t necessary.

In fact, more and more I’ve been doing away with difficulty entirely, and enjoying games more for it. I play too much shit to get stuck on one level and play it over and over. The last thing I want in a game is to die more than once or twice in an area, and even if I do die, I want it to have auto-saved close enough to keep the frustration down. So I pick easy in games, sure. All the time. Games I know I’m good at, I go normal. But there’s no shame in Easy mode. I’m sure I got just as much enjoyment out of Persona 4 playing it on Easy than anyone else did on normal, and it stopped me from getting stuck on the harder bosses.

There was a while where I bought into the hype. That I was getting soft spending my time playing Crossword DS and shit. But just like there are a wide variety of types of things in any media, there is a place for easy, casual, and completely non-challenging games. I love them more and more as I have less and less time to consume things that take awhile to get to the fun, or frustrate me during what is supposed to be my leisure time.

Bring on the tiny, fun, easy games, I say. I will be there to buy them.

(And if this blog post didn’t turn out as imagined, I blame PaRappa the Rapper, who completely distracted me for like an hour as I was looking up a youtube video for that link up there. Damn you for being so catchy! But again, I had fun reliving those games. So who cares. WHO CARE
Also, this is probably why I don’t try to write more detailed blog posts. Yep.)

You may recall me saying, way, way back when, that I was thinking about putting together a physical archive of all the content on the old site. I might have said it, oh, here.

Of all things, I started trying to put that together the other day.

I was motivated into trying it again, sort of, by how much success Parish is having with building books and magazines in the Blurb editor. Apparently it’s working pretty damn well for him! Surely it couldn’t be too hard for my silly project: I just had to cut and paste a lot of blog posts, maybe write an introduction. Nothing difficult. If the editor was as easy to use as he said, hey, I could probably do it!

So I download the thing from the Blurb site, and I get to work. The thing has some quirks. It really wanted me to use Georgia as a font, for instance, and it was doing some really weird things about splitting the www off of www.getmetoufothis.net. Still, I persevered. I put together a simple color, in the weird shade of pink the old site was, with some cover blurbs and promotional text, like someone would actually buy the thing. I skipped the table of contents and introduction for the time being, and started pasting in blog entries, shaking my head at how silly and not at all like the blog is today that it was in its youth.

Then the program crashed.

To its credit, it was saved EXACTLY where the crash happened. I lost no data. Still, that wasn’t a good sign. And it continued until it got to the point where it would crash every time I tried to bold something. That’s where I gave up.
I needed to be able to bold the titles to the blog posts to set them apart from the rest of the text, you know? This is not some hard thing for the program to be able to do! But it’s pretty completely unusable because of it.

I guess this new version just came out, and that Parish used an old version before. Maybe they’ll patch it quick. I don’t know. But for now, I suppose that’s another little project tabled. And like, 40 bucks I won’t have to pay. Heh, it was going to be an expensive little book… but it would look nice. All hardcover and shit. Seeing all 400 or whatever pages of my stupid blogging for so many years… yeah.
I’ll get back to it sometime, I’m sure.

So there’s a new Clan Dungeon about, The Slime Tube. And hey, we haven’t even finished our Hobopolis runs yet! (Although I do have my Hamster now, and damn, it’s pretty powerful, even with just the Hobo Power from Hodgman’s Bow Tie.) But I’ve been checking it out. It’s simple, but it is indeed quite fun, and it’s got some rather interesting items for high-level farming, with huge drop bonuses for certain types of things. It also has some weird skills that are ascension-relevant and buff up bigger each time you use them.

Needless to say, it’s looking like there is a need to speed run this dungeon too, in order to get lots of goodies. The way to make the Slime Tube go faster seems to be to buff Monster Level up incredibly high. This makes you have to do less fights, which can quickly change the Slime Tube from a 1000 turn affair to a 400-something turn affair. The crazy thing is, though, that buffing your monster level that high is extremely difficulty. The fights themselves, once you get it up there, are not, really, but to get buffed up to that point… well, Val was planning out loud and bouncing ideas off of me on how to do this, and it was quickly apparent that it would take at least 6 days of not using any turns in order to get the buffs from food and booze needed to get it up to appropriate levels, not to mention the cost of most of the other +ML buffs, and the annoyance of getting enough turns of, say, Unpopular. It’s a huge undertaking.

Of course, the reward for going that fast? A drop that lets you make gear that slowly, as you get more of it, makes speed-running the thing trivially easy. What?

The concept of difficulty in Kingdom of Loathing is just so weird like that. No fight is ever difficult, besides fights that game the system, such as Uber-Hodge. Any challenge put forth seems to require just gobs and gobs of resources, and it’s not so much difficulty as just perseverance to farm all the money you need, and wait around to get everything set up. That is just kind of fucked up.
At the same time, I realize their problem. You have a game where those who first created characters have characters in the insanely, mind-blowingly high levels. There’s no level cap, so they just keep grinding away, more and more. Creating an encounter that could challenge these characters is no easy task. I mean, I’ve been not ascending for awhile, and I’m over level 30, and there is nothing besides Hobopolis Bosses and a couple encounters in the Sea, really, that are anything more than one click on the attack button. I understand the design issues that make these sorts of problems come about.
I also see a potential benefit to the economy of the game. The economy of KoL is actually pretty damn important to its continued success. People enjoy being able to speculate, invest, and turn money in to more money. Having goods that everyone needs in bulk is always going to be a good angle for people to farm and make a lot of money. Once Hodgman required Pufferfish Spines and Spectral Jelly to defeat, you can bet people jumped on farming them, and created a whole economy out of them. I mean, hell, I bet that if I now started to go out of my way to farm Great Tit Feathers, I bet I could make a pretty decent profit, as I’m sure they’re in much greater demand than they ever were before. These sorts of things do make the economy more interesting and do make for an interesting game.

At the same time, though, isn’t KoL supposed to be a casual experience? I understand that there is an extremely hardcore fanbase that they need to tie into. I also understand that it is completely possible to enjoy The Slime Tube without speedrunning it, because I am right now. But still, it just kind of bothers me that there are such things that are so locked off this way that a causal player without a group of knowledgable friends and a bunch of resources will never be able to experience them.
On the third paw, I suppose the same can be said of World of Warcraft. It’s taken as a very casual game by a lot of players, but you still have to be very hardcore and very prepared to run the high-level raid dungeons. And that’s what Clan dungeons are: KoL’s raid dungeons.

I guess I don’t have a solution to this problem. And Jick and Company are obviously doing a decent job with the game, as it continues to keep going and make money and whatnot. But sometimes I feel like I’m losing what originally drew me to this game when I dive into all this hardcore content. I’m losing the joy I first had about having a short, daily play RPG with funny writing that made me smile. I guess I’d like if they focused on making the game work like that a little too.

Are you feeling down? Uninterested? Thinking that the world perhaps just isn’t awesome enough? Just a little?

Then may I present Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar.

It’s so short, and it’s so silly, but dammit, it just makes me smile. The idea is awesome, the execution is awesome, the game mechanic of the beam deserves more exploration, the music is pretty intense… this is pretty well the definition of a good flash game, you know? I mean, I might have a few things to say about the guy who made it. He deserves a high-five. Definitely.

So there. There’s a little smile for you on your Sunday, hm? Have an awesome day.

…Roar.

So all of my parts and shit came in.

It was time to upgrade my Eee PC.

First things first, I had to flash the BIOS in order to recognize the new parts. I had ordered a new USB thumbdrive, so I went to format it as FAT, which it required in order to find the new ROM for the BIOS… but I couldn’t format it FAT. It was 8 Gigs and thus too big.
I raged for a bit. The walkthroughs I had read had told me to use a stick at least a gig big! But dammit, this was frustrating. The ROM was less than a megabyte. I decided to fuck it, and formatted my old 256 meg stick, and tried flashing it with that. That worked. Score.

So I unscrewed the little hatch on the bottom of the lappy. Inside was the SSD and the RAM. It was a little cramped, with barely enough opening to see them both completely, but eh, I could handle it. I pried the clips on the RAM apart to pop it out. It caught and pinched my fingers. Then I slid the 2 gig stick on in there and clicked it in place.

I turned the thing on. Blank screen! I turned it on again. Blank screen! Lovely.
Oh, wait, I’m stupid, the RAM didn’t click in the right way.
Fixed that, and it booted, and recognized the RAM. Score.

I then started to unscrew the two screws holding in the SSD. I tried and tried, but my screwdriver couldn’t get ahold of the tiny screws. I searched the house for more screwdrivers, trying them. Nothing could find purchase. Once again, in a bit of a rage, I decided to go buy a set of tiny screwdrivers. I did, and came back. Having the right tool for the job made it work easily. I slide the new 16 gig SSD into the slot and screwed it back in. It’s recognized in the BIOS. Victory.

Of course, then I had to get an operating system on there. I had gotten it into my head to install Windows 7 RC1 on there, but try as I might, I couldn’t get the installer to boot from a thumb drive. So I said fuck it, and went with my original plan, and installed Easy Peasy. The little program got it on the thumb drive easily, and it installed. Score! Then it updated! Score! And then I was almost late for work.

So, uh, I got all the work done… but I haven’t even gotten to try it yet.

Go… me…?
I’ll tell you how I like Easy Peasy’s modification of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface, and if the upgrades helped the computer, soon.

So last Sunday, Woot twittered a message.

Moments later, I bought a Netbook.

Saturday, I get an e-mail saying that it’s been shipped, and here’s my shipping information. Huzzah, I say! I click on the shipping thing to see when the estimated delivery for the machine is.

It says it was dropped outside my door not 10 minutes ago. I run downstairs, and sure enough, there it is.

Now, I had done a bad thing after I ordered the Eee PC. I had gone and read messages from the last time Woot sold these things, and as such, I read the horror stories. This was a bad plan. Most people weren’t going to have horror stories! But still, I had got myself all worked up about it. Good for me.
There was nothing to worry about, though. My white EEE PC 900 booted up fine, and is running just great. I mean, sure, it could use more RAM, perhaps some more storage… but I may or may not have already ordered all those upgrades because I am like that. So that’ll fix itself sometime next week. The Xandros Linux that comes on the machine is servicable, but not optimal as well, since it does stuff like not automatically connect to Wifi networks. (It’s a netbook, for fuck’s sake. It’s pretty useless without an internet connection!) But again, once I get those upgrades in, I plan in sticking Eeebuntu Netbook Remix on there, so that should help. Hopefully!

One thing I was worried about, though, was internet video issues. I had vaguely remembered reports of earlier netbooks not being able to process youtube videos without skipping, due to weaker processors, so Youtube was the first place I went, followed by Yugioh Abridged. Both worked just fine, thank goodness.

But yeah, I’m now the owner of a Lappy of sorts. We’ll see if it all goes to waste, or if I get a lot of use out of it. If nothing else, I’m sure it’ll get use with me, say, playing browser games in bed. But who knows.

Rapid Fire Ramblings returns! For some reason!

This is the essence of Justin Spaeth: Right here, in this tweet. That just sums the man up so perfectly, I think.

I really wish I could figure out why Steam’s voice chat works so weird. I love it: it works like Xbox Live when it’s working, and bringing that kind of functionality to the PC is so sweet. But every time I plug in my headset it’s a crapshoot whether or not I’m going to have to restart Steam in order for it to recognize it and let me talk in a call. It’s actually probably some sort of issue with the audio drivers of my headset, but oh well.

So awhile back, I noticed they had apparently translated the Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei manga. As someone who had enjoyed the show, I picked it up. The show did so many weird things, I was expecting the manga to be different, but not so! It’s almost shot for shot the same thing. This means it’s still quite entertaining, but I have issues reading it, as I’ve watched all the episodes covered in the first volume at least twice. Oh well, at least the creator got a little money from me for making something I enjoy.

I cashed in my bucket of pennies over the weekend. I had 2400 pennies! I also cashed in 121 quarters, 242 dimes, and 130 nickels at the CoinStar machine to end up with an $84.95 Amazon Gift Certificate, which is basically paying for the next couple games I’m being mailed. So that’s cool. Time to fill the bucket up again!

I’ve had two packs of Maui Melon Mint gum on my desk, and every day I think about taking them to work and then every day I don’t take them to work. It’s not a bad gum. I should take it to work tonight. I won’t, though.

Yep.

This is a boring post. Sorry. But here are some things to look at and watch that are NOT boring. Yay!

This is a video showing why Star Ocean 4 apparently has the worst voice acting and animation in any video game ever.

This is a BBC video about monkeys and how much they enjoy the booze, which was shown to me via Shawn Elliott.

And this is something that Talking Time showed me. A “Let’s Play” of sorts. I don’t know if I should be ashamed that that’s so funny.

This is, of course, Meet the Spy, which you should have already seen, but damn, watch it again because it’s still awesome.

I have been much too obsessed with listening to Rap Chop and the follow up, Jam Wow. Yeah. They’re on my iPod.

And, of course, if you combine TF2 with Vince, you get this. Yep.

Also, I know it’s not a video, but dammit, there’s new Azumanga Daioh that someone was nice enough to translate. It’s wonderful.

And okay, since this is apparently not a set of video links anymore, go play this nice art game, hm? It’ll only take a few minutes.

So yeah. Go forth and be entertained. It’s a huge internet. There’s lot of entertainment out there, and most of it is better than this blog, probably! I’ll write something better some other time. Maybe!

Whelp, I ended my college career with a 4.0 year.

That’s… definitely something! I’m kind of proud of myself for sticking to it and making that happen. I was stressed out, but I worked hard, and I suppose this is my reward.

Was it worth it? Eh, not really, but whatever. It basically just highlights how fucked up my college path was. I could have, easily, been getting 4.0s the entire time. But I let depression fuck me over, and I ran from things that stressed me out to help me recover, and all kinds of stupid shit happened. Yay for me.
It is kind of a shame, though. There was a twinge of guilt when I saw everyone at the commencement who graduated with honors, and I was not among them, due to said fuck-ups. Still, the guilt was more for my parents. I was worried they would be pissed at me for not getting it. But I think they were just happy that I finally got to that point. Hell, I know I was.

In the end, I know the grade doesn’t really matter. Hell, it’s not like what I got wasn’t decent. I ALMOST graduated Cum Laude. It’s the diploma that counts. And hell, I got that. Or, you know… I will when they send them out in a few weeks in the mail. Heh.

But yeah, everything has past. Does my life feel different, now that I graduated? Nope. Not in the least. I’m still playing the same video games, talking to the same people… it’s going to hit me when people start moving away, which will happen. That’ll be sad times. But life moves on, and I have to move on if I want to be happy.
Have to move on and make things happen.
Have to.

Yeah.