So yeah, while I was in Anchorage last weekend, I caved into the hype and picked up Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim...a bit odd considering I have barely ever even heard of the Elder Scrolls series before. *shrug*

In any case, the maniacal laughter that used to grace the subject line came in the form of inadvertently finding out about and abusing an glitch early in the game.

Long story short: First room of Hegen Keep, the first area in the gaem...Level 12, Sneaking/1-Handed Weapon/Destruction Magic all fairly high level. Only reason I'm not continuing with it at the moment is because level grinding can get a bit tedious. :/


EDIT: Long story shorter: Apparently the game auto-corrects for level grinders to keep things challenging...and by challenging I mean completely imfrikkinpossible. I'm at the end of the Golden Claw mission, where you get your first Voice power...and it triggers a ramped up boss fight that is completely one-sided. My absolute strongest move, a double-dagger sneak attack, is unusable due to this guy pegging my exact location instantly. My next strongest, a double-cast flame, gets him down to maybe 85% HP before my magic runs out...

Oh, and did I mention THE SUNUVABITCH KILLS ME IN TWO HITS!?

So yeah, looks like I'll be restarting the game all over again...assuming I ever allow my PS3 to see the light of day again for a reason other than "target practice."

And for the record, no, I'm not going to give fair play a shot. Not after this bullshit.

As you've all probably been made painfully aware of by now, the SOPA/PIPA protests across the 'net had a hell of an effect; the two "anti-piracy" bills have been tabled indefinitely by both sides of the Capitol.

What you might not be aware of, however, is what the Department of Justice did soon afterwards: came down on file-sharing site MegaUpload with a vengeance, taking it down completely and arresting associated persons as far away as New Zealand. No due process or anything like that, just wham, bam, jail-door slam.

There's been a lot of outrage about this, and I can certainly see why...even so, however, I see this as something that, wrong as it is, needed to happen for 2 reasons.

First off, it shows that SOPA and PIPA are completely unnecessary. The government already has all the authority that the MPAA and RIAA wanted to give them (and, likely, themselves...*coughcough*) to take down websites like that, taking out one of the industries' main excuses for both bills.

Secondly, it shows just how dangerous and overreaching such authority as granted by those bills would be, since the Constitution seemingly got completely sidestepped here. With any luck, this will put those thirsty for power in DC under a very uncomfortable spotlight and start to bring some sense and accountability back to those we elect to run the show.


On a more personal note, I think the takedown of MegaUpload is complete BS. Sure, there was undeniably some media theft going on there, but it was also (and, to my knowledge, primarily) a means of people sharing their own creations with the world in a free, easy manner.

Some would argue that taking it down was justified because of the illegal stuff...well, let me paint a scenario to shoot that mentality down nice and quick for you by giving you a real-life example: the automobile.

We use it to get to work, to take loved ones to school and the hospital, to go get groceries, to deliver mail...it's a very key part of our lives, much like how the Internet has become.

It is also, however, used for drunk driving, hit-and-runs, drive-by shootings, human trafficking, and, as Timothy McVeigh and Al-Qaeda have shown us, terrorism.

While the evils committed with cars are vastly, vastly outweighed by the good and normal things we do with them every day, by the logic of these people, we should outlaw vehicles completely.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the Defense rests.

While it's a bit gargantuan (about 4 pages), the character creation sheet for Blade Clash appears to be rather well balanced, allowing for enough variety of character stats/abilities to keep things interesting...

Right up until I brought Minions into play, anyway. Finding a way to make them cost-prohibitive enough that the character is in a bad spot without them, yet powerful enough that they're a significant threat with them (which is the whole idea with them) is proving tricky...my first set-up failed miserably, leaving my test dummy, on his own, about as powerful as its Minion-less opponent..and with a cluster of Minions that made him outright devastating. "Lopsided" barely covers it.

For now I think I've got a pretty fair mix...whether I decide to include the character template for folks to make their own characters or not, right now I think it's good enough for me to use for pre-designed characters in order to keep them balanced.


One thing I'll say about all this, though...it's kept me from making any YouTube videos for a while. I dunno if I should see this as a problem or not....hm. *shrug* Oh well, whatever keeps my free time occupied. :b

For about the past hour now I've been pounding out a system for creating your own character cards for Blade Clash. After a while I decided that it was pretty good as it was...then I looked at it in Print Preview.

My Navy RP friends may be the only ones to get this reference, but the current product looks a lot more like a character sheet for GURPS. (It's 2.5 pages long, for one thing.)

On the plus side, though, even if I ultimately decide to drop the custom characters idea, I can use this template to help make any official characters more balanced. Still....sheesh! O_o;

Son of ALOHA made it to Equestria Daily.



I have to admit, it is a nicely pleasing feeling making it on there again...the amusement people seem to get from them make them all worthwhile.



Oh, and davidn? Nothing as spooky as last time. No Emergency Relax-O-Vision, no brutalized wildlife, none of that...it's safe to watch. :b

Had a massive amount of downtime at work today and couldn't find much to do, so I decided to see if I could recall any of my notes about my Trading Card Game project, Blade Clash, and jot them down on Suzaku.

Long story short: Not only do I apparently have the rules for it burned into my head, but I came up with some new ideas to further improve it, including the start of a template by which people could actually create their own character cards for it. (Personally, I think being able to, within reasonable limits, make your own character for this game would be so much cooler than just playing something stale and boring.)

Concepts I'm working with right now:
-A new, more usable resource system, MP, which would factor in a number of ways.
-New rules regarding Minions.
-Clearing up problems that could be caused by conflicting pieces of Equipment.
-Adjusting the rules on how a Blade Clash occurs to make them happen more often...mostly because I like the concept. (Hell, it's the name of the game for crying out loud!)


Of course, now I'll have to redo the Character & Minion Card templates -again-...then again, I think I was gonna have to all along for all of them, making them into layered PNG files. Oh well, c'est la guerre.

An M1A2 Abrams tank and a crew of friends to help run it. For zombies at a distance, you've got the 120mm main cannon. For zombies at medium range, you've got the 50-cal and 308 machine guns. For zombies at close range....well, I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept of roadkill. Rising from the grave is one thing, but you are not recovering from becoming street pizza.

( Something I've come to realize about SOPA that got a little longer winded than expected. )

While I still find this thing to be a terrible idea overall, the more I study it, the more I find that all of our reactions to it might be a bit of overkill as well...still, I'm rather hoping this doesn't pass.


INFORMATION SOURCE: here.

The Firewire cable I needed to transfer her from the old Macbook to her new Macbook Pro shell came in today, and as of 10 minutes ago the move was complete. I gotta say, the difference between the two is absolutely dumbfounding.

The old shell's not getting chucked or anything, though; mom's been in desperate need of a new computer ever since her desktop realized it had *cringe* Vista installed and acted accordingly.

There was one minor disappointment with the transfer, however; my Genesis emulator was a PowerPC-based program, and those aren't supported on here.

Darn. :b

...your bluff has been called this night via the Iowa caucus. Mitt Romney edged out a defeat against runner-up Rick Santorum by a margin of 8 votes. Not 800, not 8,000, eight. More appropriate, however, is the fact that, at one point in the reporting, he was ahead by literally a single vote.

If this is not evidence of how much each and every vote matters, I don't know what is.


Kinda weird having all this be said by someone who, during the Dubya/Kerry race, voted for the late film critic Gene Siskel, but my point stands regardless.

For a better chunk of the month I've been working on a sequel to "ALOHA - A Load of Horse Apples."

It is with great pleasure that now, on the fringe of the 2011/2012 New Years celebrations, I end one and kick of the next with the results of Project HAL (Horse Apples Lite)...

Son Of ALOHA - Another Load of Horse Apples!

"Rogue web sites that steal America's innovative and creative products attract more than 53 visits a year."

This was written by the US Chamber of Commerce to the New York Times as justification for the Stop Online Piracy Act.


Let's do some guesstimations here, assuming that all 53 of these visits are from different people:
Average number of movies a person buys in a year: Let's say 20 for good measure.
Average cost of a movie: $30.

That's $600 a year, roughly, per person, which means that, by what the Chamber of Commerce has stated, movie piracy is costing the motion picture industry, a multi-billion dolloar financial powerhouse, $31,800 a year.

To put things in perspective, they raked in 31.8 billion in theatre revenues in 2010, making the estimated revenue they lost...

.0000001%. That's a percent of a percent of a percent, a penny of every ten thousand dollars earned.


Long story short: The revenue lost from the backlash of this thing becoming law would be infinitely worse.

As a Christmas present to myself, I ordered a new MacBook Pro to transfer Miyuki over into, as well as a Firewire cable to accommodate said transfer.

Cable shipped first, with the laptop going a day later.

Laptop showed up today, cable didn't.



what

Only have 1 scene left to do, when suddenly YT Movie Maker, the program I use to make these videos, just out of nowhere decides it doesn't like to work with .mpg format videos anymore, recognizing them as audio files.

Fortunately the video formatting software I'm using has plenty more options, but they're proving a bit dodgy as well. Biggest problem is audio sync. Kinda hard for a Sonic Rainboom to have the same comedic impact when the Road Runner "meep meep ZOOM" meant to accompany it* comes in 3 seconds later.

Oh well, I'll get this sorted at some point...I hope.



*Not an actual example of anything in the video.

The other day, Dad and I were watching an episode of either "Sons of Guns" or "American Guns," one of the two...in it there was a bit where the shop owner bet an NFL punter that he could shoot a bunch of his field goal attempts out of the air with a shotgun. The last one was rigged up to explode in mid-air.

This gave us an idea for making the game of football (for my English friends' clarification, this is what Americans call football, not what the rest of the world does) a lot more exciting and action-packed:

Extend the play clock by 10 seconds, and ease up any play-ending stuff like dropping the ball and fumbling and whatnot to allow a second or two for someone to pick it back up. The play goes on for as long as someone's got the ball...or until the play clock runs out, at which point...

He's at the forty...the thirty...the twe**BOOOOM!!**Oooh, and #43 is down at the 22-yard line for a first down!

For added fun, cut the clock time for a field goal/extra point attempt down to 5 seconds. If it detonates before going through, too bad.

The kick is up, aaaand--OHHH, fell JUST short of the uprights!

After the 2-minute warning, the ball gets swapped out for one that won't detonate until the half/game is over...with, of course, a somewhat bigger payload inside.



Admit it, if they could do that without it being too dangerous, you'd watch. :b

before millions of doomsday sayers are proven wrong* when nothing happens**.




*again
**again

As we all have heard by now, one of the fears people have about this bill, which the MPAA and RIAA have been pushing for, is that, if it becomes law, simply accusing a website of using or linking to copyrighted material is enough to have them effectively erased from the Internet.

That got me to thinking: Would it not be a bit of karmic justice if, assuming all this "worst case scenario" stuff came true, the MPAA & RIAA's websites were the first to fall?

That line of thought, admittedly, spiraled way out of control; false advertising lawsuits against the MPAA since the "go to our website for details on movie ratings" blurb in all the movie posters now being wrong, RIAA lawyers and execs getting fired left and right for such a colossal backfire, things like that.


It is definitely a comforting and amusing train of thought, even if it has gone completely derailed. ^_^

2:30ish this afternoon, I took Miyuki downstairs so as to websurf while watching the World Series of Poker Europe on our big-screen.

About half an hour ago, I noticed that the battery was down to about 10%, so I brought her back upstairs to plug her back in.

The instant I reach for the power cord, she shuts off. Couldn't wait 2 freakin' seconds. XP

Was checking my Yahoo mail one last time for the night before hitting the sack, and I get greeted with this news headline:

Kim Jong Il is dead.

...Huh. o_o

One thing it states is that his youngest son, about whom not much is known, is slated to succeed him. Hopefully one of the first things we find out about him is that he's nothing like his father; if so, this could be the best thing to happen to the Korean peninsula in decades. If not...well, business as usual, I suppose.

Anyway, g'night.

As you might recall, a few weeks ago I heard about a bill going through Congress called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA for short. Proponents said it was needed to stop the online theft of intellectual property such as movies and music, amongst other things. Opponents said it basically amounted to the Great Firewall of China.

After reading through it, I found myself strongly against it for one simple reason: as written it violates the most fundamental and basic premise of the US legal system, the presumption of innocence and proof of guilt. To me, it appears that under SOPA a website would only have to be accused of piracy, and all internet and monetary traffic to it could be cut off..for an online business, that's a death sentence.

Swap "piracy" with "witchcraft" in that summation, and it's Salem Witch Trials 2.0.


In any case, the House was set to vote on it today (or yesterday, one of the two), but it seems that, due to the rather sizable harangue it's been causing, they weren't able to get around to it before the holiday break. As such, voting on it has been tabled for an indefinite period of time.




...Oh, and since I bring ponies up, finished another scene on HAL earlier. Trying to come up with a replacement for another one, though, due to the video footage I wanted to use not lasting nearly long enough.

Sorry Tank.

Project HAL (now with official title; project name stood for "Horse Apples Lite" if anyone was curious) is officially underway.

Title screen (I'm starting to enjoy splicing these things together a little too much) and 2 scenes of a planned 11 are done.

Hopefully this'll turn out as good as, if not better than, ALOHA did, even if it is going to be substantially shorter.

Oh, and don't worry David, there won't be anything to terrify you like last time. In my defense, though, I -did- warn about references to grimdark stuff right at the start of the video. :b

Although, it still needs to be a bit louder to be the ROYAL CANTERLOT VOICE.



Bring her back to the show soon, Hasbro. :[

Project HAL's on pause again; minor oversight on my part. Namely, the fact that I had the entirety of Season 1 ready to use...but some of the video uses footage from Season 2. Which I did NOT have ready to go....so yeah, that's working itself out right now.2 glitched videos and one more power outage (seriously, WTF?!) later, that's all done. Giving Sczer the rest of the evening off; I'll start on HAL sometime this week.

In the meantime, after coming downstairs this morning, I noticed my folks had decided to spend the morning wrapping Christmas gifts. Makes the house look VERY festive and primed for the holidays...but it does give that feeling of wanting to peek inside rather badly.

It's even worse when I take 3 factors into consideration:
1) I leave for work after they do.
2) I return home from work before them.
3) One of my job skills is being able to determine what is inside something via X-ray.


To say it's not tempting would be a complete load of BS.

On the 5th day of Christmas, my family gave to me....OOOOONE BIIG DILEMMAAAAAAAAA....

Planned on spending today working on my next video project, but the weather's decided to get in the way of those plans. The power's already gone out twice today (once before I got up apparently, then again right when I got up), and I'm not gonna risk anything bad happening to Sczer from a 3rd outage.


Note to self: Invest in an UPS for her. :/


EDIT: How the hell did I not see this coming? Weather calmed down earlier today, so I figured it'd be safe to start on things after all....not 20 minutes after firing her up? BZEWWWW, power's out again. *facepalm* Dammit...