/spit

On social networking…

Posted on July 1st, 2009 by damos

To twit, or not to twit?

[8:08:53 PM] myrmician says: social networking my DICK
[8:10:09 PM] myrmician says: [7:00am] Woke up with an erection - I want to kill myself.
[8:10:17 PM] myrmician says: that would be my one and only twitter entry
[8:10:26 PM] myrmician says: leave ppl guessing

Ahaha, i haven’t laughed or had this much fun since the last time i was unemployed!

…Ok, ok - i suppose I can’t just leave it at that. Besides, i noticed that the last time i posted here was Feb 22nd, so i guess a more comprehensive update is in order.

Yes, i am now unemployed. Last Friday I was told that my position had been made redundant and, as such, my services were no longer required. I was given fair severance terms. I’m neither here nor there on it to tell you the truth. I can’t say it wasn’t expected. I’m quite lucky in that this doesn’t really affect my plans for the next 12 months, however I do know that some of my colleagues who were also retrenched are not so fortunate and so i wish them all the best for the times ahead. As for me and my immediate future, i’ve got a few options open to me so i’m taking this week off to weigh everything up. Sidenote: sleeping in on weekdays is fucking awesome!

My parents, who have been back in the Philippines for a little over 6 months now, arrive back in Perth this Saturday. I’m really looking forward to seeing them both. The brothairs and I are weighing up the merits of traveling over CNY in Feb. I’m… actually, i’m not going to tell you what i’ve got coming up

Urgh… i…. uh… hmmm… ah, WHOA - LOOK AT THAT!!! /runs

…

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#209

Posted on June 29th, 2009 by Giiviak

Captains log, star date 29.06.09…

The days are short now that winter has arrived. The weather has been wet, windy and wild even, over the past five or so days. Indeed, a severe weather warning has been issued out over the metropolitan area, that is - Perth, Western Australia, Australia.

I dont know what is, or what will be - all i know is that I must, be like water.

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#208

Posted on June 21st, 2009 by Giiviak

What the fuck.

Today was pleasant. it started off with some riding followed by some bike worship - a full bike clean up. The ride today was pretty good. Just pretty cold that’s all. My legs were pretty tired but its good to be back on the road again. Hmm.

I then cooked a lovely salmon lunch with myrmician. See pic below:

The salmon was pan fried and flavoured with fresh garlic, ginger, and special ingredients. Moreover, it was served with blanched arrara who gives a fuck. The point is that it tasted good, which is more than I can say for last nights meal.

Pad Thai, that’s what I cooked last night. Boy was it shit. It had too much fish sauce in it plus it was way too sour. No amount of palm sugar could combat the level of sourness. Worse than those warhead lollies I tell you. I ate about 3/4 of it, and that’s only because I was really quite hungry. The remaining 1/4 was disposed of. Anyway, I ate that salmon lunch about 6 hours ago now, and i’m only just starting to get hungry. In other words, I ate way too much of it.

After that I lounged about and then took this girl out for an evening coffee. F for FAIL. What a shit way to end my weekend, I should have just opted to stay at home instead.

Bah, its 10pm, time to go to bed. And you know what else? Terminator Salvation sucks like a fucking black hole. What a fucking shit movie.

Ah I shouldn’t complain so much. As I’ve recently been reminded, life can be far more shit than mine.

Posted in /say | 2 Comments »

Ghosts of gaming past and the scourge of the ‘casuals’

Posted on May 19th, 2009 by myrmician

I say ghosts, because it always comes back to haunt me. The word ‘past’ however, isn’t that fitting though, as I am only talking about last year here. Anyway, the game about which I speak is Spore.

I was browsing /v/ today and came across a thread that had me on the verge of gavomiting. You see, Spore was one of the few games I actually followed the development of and looked forward to playing. It aspired to combine a number of popular gaming genres (FPS, RTS, civ., space civ.) under the guise of ‘evolution’ - taking your own player made ’species’ from a single-celled organism, to a full-fledged creature, then eventually to a sentient being with its own civilization, and even into space. Now, take a look at this Youtube video the OP posted of a demo of the game from 2005 - this is what the game was supposed to be and what had millions highly anticipating its release. I won’t bore you with a video of the actual gameplay. Those of you who have played it will know what I mean. Watching that video cannot help but leave a bitter taste in your mouth. Sadly, the game was a highly watered down version of the demo, both lacking in gameplay and depth, and suffered from being ridiculously simple and easy to play and finish. Why?

One word: casuals. You see, these days there is a battle raging in the gaming world, something that has been prevalent for a long time in music and film; appealing to the masses. Gaming is still considered a niche market, even though it generates more revenue than Hollywood. However, what has been happening now is that you are seeing games being released (and even whole consoles such as the Wii) that cater to people who are not ‘hardcore gamers’ - that is, games that are friendly to new and occasional users, with low learning curves, easy controls and that don’t require a large amount of time to play and finish. What this means is that you see games that should have been magnificent, such as Spore, end up being full of dumbed down, soulless content.

This isn’t something new of course, but as developers push casual games to appeal to a wider audience, lower their production costs to make more money, we will inevitably see (just as in cinema) titles that should have been great be nothing more than the pathetic, empty shells of what could have been. Anyway, I just came here to rage a little because it still pisses me off. If you actually want to read an intelligent post on the subject, go here. I will however, leave you with some quotes that made me rage just that little bit more…

[…]there’s a challenge with granularity - we originally had a formula for speed which was basically a curve that said that getting more legs made you faster until you had more than four legs, after which is it made you slower, but never made you as slow as someone with one leg, all of which was modified by the level and type of feet that you had and the mass of the entire creature. What we found however was that even people who thought they wanted that sort of calculation both didn’t understand it and didn’t like it when they were actually playing - the problem switched to ‘my guy looks like he should run real fast but he doesn’t, why?’ and we’d say, well, you put five legs on him and that bulbous tail is actually really heavy, and people were both disappointed by the result and didn’t understand it and they thought their creativity had been crushed.

Chris Hecker was having strong misgivings about how appealing all this hard science would be to the wider world. “I was the founding member of the ‘cute’ team,” he says with pride. “Ocean [Quigley, Spore’s art director] and Will were really the founding members of the ’science’ team. Ocean would make the cell game look exactly like a petri dish with all these to-scale animals and Will would say, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen!’ and some of us were thinking, ‘I’m not sure about that.’”

Soon rival camps had formed. New recruits were taken out to lunch and covertly probed to discover where their natural leanings were. Quigley’s microscopically accurate concept drawings were vandalized with stuck-on googly eyes; there were suggestions that it might be cool if the creatures wore sneakers.

/facepalm.

I guess, then, that my real gripe is with the so-called ‘masses’ for which mass consumption is targeted, and the fact that these ‘masses’ are in the majority. It can’t be that hard to produce a film or game of a high quality - but then why is it that whenever a big title comes along that should promise to be something special, it is forgotten in a vast sea of mediocrity? If you have a majority that is satisfied with the sub-par there is no incentive to produce anything otherwise, right? Will there always be a society in which the tastes of the majority seem so woefully inadequate? Why does it always feel like there was better to be had in the past? Ugh…