No proper post today since I’m doing radio shnizzle at i43. I’ll probably update next week sometime.

☮&♥

About baby stuff? No. Turns out I wasn’t preggers, just skipped a period (only to then have a ‘double’ one >.<) I am panicking about insomnia43.

It should not come as a suprise to any of you that when faced with a massive task and a looming deadline the first thing I want to do is run around in ever decreasing circules while screaming and wavinmg my hands in the air.

So far however all the planning is going well enough but I keep having those horrible ‘ohno’ sensation that I’ve forgotten or missed something out. Getting people to commit and stop being so wishy-washy about their plans is insanely difficult, as is getting delegated tasked picked up and accomplished. Now I know why the phrase is not ‘organiser’ but ‘cat herder’ >.<

In other news I’ve been asked to be a keyholder at work again. I’ve been assured it will only be for rota’d days and I’ll get paid extra, but I’m not sure. I can’t really afford to frack up again. I might just do it anyway and sod the consequences.

So that about it really. Been a pretty quiet week, nothing terribly exciting going on, so not a lot of news.

☮&♥

I’m getting quite bad at my regular Monday post aren’t I? This time, however, I have a very good excuse. It was my Birthday on Saturday, with Dan R and Barry’s on Friday. So I had a whole weekend packed with fun stuff. Unfortunately those things weren’t Sushi, Horse Riding or a Spa day, but that doesn’t really bother me.

Instead Dan treated me to breakfast after our bank meeting on Friday. Later I looked at the pretty sports cars on the quay with my parents and I had a very tasty Sea Bass stuffed with Spiced Crab Meat at Barry’s meal on Friday, A. Elaine and U. Bryan’s treat. Sat I went to a craft fair with my parents and then we had a nice meal in the evening. Sunday was chill-out day and Monday I went to another Arts and Crafts thing with Barry, A. Elaine and U. Bryan, and my parents.

Barry got me the cutest stuffed ferret, a ’404: shirt not found’ t-shirt and books, Andy bought me a frack-tonne of books and a dvd, A. Elaine and U. Bryan bought me yet another book and my parent’s paid for me to join the Dorset Wildlife Trust.

See how cute it is?

I’ve had the rest of this week off as well, and I’ve spent it mostly in my pyjamas playing Minecraft and reading. Oh and I got my hair cut as well. I shall probably re-dye it before i43. No news on the baby front, everything’s the same as it was, and I’ve book a docs app for next Friday.

A quick mash-up of what I've been up to on our MC Server

So that’s my round up. It’ll be back to business as usual on Sunday though

☮&♥

Egads, almost two weeks with out a blog post? I’m surprised no one came hammering on my virtual door

So it’s my birthday tomorrow. I’ll be 27. Uh, yay? But I have had a lot of presents from Andy already which are most definitely yay

Aside from that there’s still not much going on in regard to the post title. I’ve not menstruated for over 4 weeks since I should have, and yet every time I take a pregnancy test it comes back negative. The doctor said to give it until 5 weeks had passed, and if things still looked the same, then to go back and they’d do blood tests. A lot of people seem worried, but I’m not. I’m frustrated and annoyed, but not worried. It’s like the battery of tests I had done trying to work out why I had that stupid little cough and felt bloated and sick all the time. I was annoyed because I didn’t know what was going on inside me, but I wasn’t overly worried because I felt mostly okay and I (unlike most people, it seems) trust the NHS. Plus I’m aware that some of the medication I’m on might be making things a little skewed.

There isn’t much else going on in my life right now. Radio is rumbling on, we’re getting a healthy level of donations and more people wanting to present. i43 is set to be our best yet and I’m pensive and excited for it all at the same time

So yeah, life is chugging on. I’m happy and content

☮&♥

Have a meme.

Found at Men Seldom Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses:

Reblog if you want to know who people think you should cosplay as.

So, any suggestions? For a visual refresher, see my most recent (decent) photo:

☮&♥

I was sat here, about to put my shoes on in order to head over to Dan R’s place for tonight’s radio show. I had one sock on already, and was thinking about the walk over, and how it would involve effort. And then I stopped. If I felt ‘meh’ about it, why was I even bothering? It seems to me that there are few things in my life right now that I do because I actively enjoy them, rather than doing them because that’s just what I do.

I’ll be honest, this thought kinda scares me; I don’t want to be one of those people who just sleep-walks through life, doing things because they think they should. Sleep-walking through an Alternate Lifestyle is still sleep-walking. But it did make me realize I should probably take some time and think about what I do with my life.

So instead of presenting the Monday Night Show, I’m sat here contemplating my life, textually, in front of a world of strangers. I sort of wish it was like that BT ad where everyone connected to the internet can stand in front of the world’s population and get the answers they seek. But no matter, it will have to do.

Except, where do I even start?

By asking for help. If there is one thing that I’ve learnt, is that this feeling I’m experiencing is not unique to me. There are so many self-help books, internet articles and so forth dealing with these issues that it’s easy to get lost in them. So I need to ask the people who know me, and who I know have faced similar issues, how they overcame these feelings and got their life where they wanted it to be.

Reading up. A quick google serch lead me to this very interesting Wikipedia article, based on needs. As I scanned down the explanations I happened upon this:

Self-actualization: This … need pertains to what a person’s full potential is and realizing that potential. … In order to reach a clear understanding of this level of need one must first not only achieve the previous needs, physiological, safety, love, and esteem, but master [them].

In order to get to this state, the article says, you must be able to accept yourself for what you are. Aaand this is the part where I fall down.

So maybe that is where I should start? By fulfilling my need for esteem, particularly self-esteem and ” the need for self-respect, the need for strength, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence and freedom”?

I shall read up more, and I shall ask for help from my friends, but I think for now my journey for self-acceptance would be best left for another post, another time.

☮&♥

Sadly holidays are over. Until I can be bothered to write a proper post about it, have some photos (in no particular order):

Arty Chocolate Cake

The Cairn Andy and I made on Tintagel beach

Owen eating Chocolate Cake

My Mum, standing on the mound in Bude

Our mate Dan, building his own cairn

Arty coffee cup, mit milk and sugar

My Parents, Andy, Helen, Owen and part of A.Elaine at Tintagel Castle.

Looking out a door at Tintagel

Strange Winged Beastie

Amusing Seagulls on a roof at Bude

Owen and Helen

☮&♥

Today is my blog posting day, but I am on holiday at the moment so this will be short n sweet. We’re staying on the devon cornwall border at a place called Bude. It’s very pretty here, all green rolling hills and suchlike. So far we’ve been to a couple of craft shows and eaten lots of good food, played a few games but not a lot else. I’m intending to get some reading and maybe some writing done. Internet is intermittent, so I’ll update with more when I get back.

☮&♥

My gods, I am so sick of the above comment.

I know it’s usually meant in jest, but when it’s followed up with ‘tits of gtfo’ (verbatim quote) that just makes it worse. This is my community, the one I helped build. G3 Radio is supposed to be about equality and fairness, so how come the girls are still treated like they’re mystical fictional beings? No one is saying to the gay couple: ‘buttsex pics or gtfo’. That would be horribly rude and offensive, so what makes the above any more acceptable?

I shouldn’t have to prove I’m a girl and neither should anyone else, just because we happen to enjoy video games, or coding or fantasy fiction or pen&paper roleplay games. It should just be taken as a given that I am a person who enjoys these things, what’s between my legs has no bearing on my hobbies. We aren’t even that rare, so why even have the distinction? I am a DJ, not a ‘girl’ DJ. I am a gamer not a ‘girl’ gamer.

Sure. my brain works slightly differently to yours, but that just makes me better at certain things. I can hand you your ass over organization any day, even if you can hand me mine with lifting that bag of cables and mic stands. Those are the differences that make us a better team than if you have a penis and I do not.

So you know what? Manners or GTFO.

☮&♥

Now, it should be no surprise I’m a creature of odd habits but since my lovely wife is calling me out on this particular one, I feel it should be brought to your attention.

The Law is pretty simple. Whenever you say “pew pew” it must be immediately followed by the phrase “green laser”. It only applies when spoken (though doing it when writing is encouraged and I only don’t here, though it pains me, for illustration purposes) and you can’t make up for it by saying “green laser” at any point other than immediately following the saying of “pew pew”. Obviously you have to have meant to have said it as part of the sentence “pew pew green laser” but if you forget and catch yourself quickly enough and haven’t said anything since saying “pew pew” saying “green laser” then is tolerated, but frowned upon as lazy and negligent. If the delay is too long though (more than 2 seconds max, and that’s pushing it) then it’s too late.

The colour of laser is not optional; it is always green.

So what happens if you break “The Law”?

You lose respect, of yourself and your peers and furthermore you make the entire world a little bit sadder. If you spot someone breaking “The Law”, you can say “green laser” for them, but it isn’t the same, they’ve still broken “The Law” though your valiant effort reduces the amount of sadness by some small measure. The only real defence against lawbreakers is education.

Thus is “The Law”.

It seems I am due to write another post. Since my Two Things post went down so well I’m going to do a similar one. 

Listening to: EdGuy. These guys are pretty old, but I recently discovered them while my music player was set to random play through our whole music collection. They’re a German Power Metal band, and I was orginally caught by their song Catch of The Century, about how how a record company turned them down and how EdGuy felt the Company was missing out. Some of their songs are serious and some of them are just for fun, but I’m loving the whole 80′s feel to the music.

Watching: Stoppit and Tidy-Up. This is a cute kids cartoon made by CMTB Animation and narrated by Terry Wogan. Each episode is only like 5 mins long and one of those is taken up by the intro. The cartoon is about Stoppit and Tidy-Up, two characters that live in the land of Do As You’re Told, with such friends as Comb Your Hair, Don’t Do That and the Big, Bad I Said NO. I’m really enjoying watching it again after all these years, and I think it’s actually better now, since I’m older and can appreciate some of the slight sarcasm in the narrating. My kids will definitely be watching this. I’ve also been lent Trap Door to watch )a claymation by the same people), and I’m trying to get hold of Bucky O’Hare and the Righteous Indignation, but those will be covered in seperate posts.

Reading: Art of Community by Jono Bacon. This is pretty much what it says on the tin. Jono Bacon, formerly of LUG Radio now Cananonical Community Manager, has written a book about how to make sure the community you founded or helped found doesn’t run out of steam or interest, as well as other interesting skils needed, things to look out for and ways to deal with issues, all told in his classic amusing anecdotal fasion. I’m only a couple of chapters in but so far I’m liking it and finding it very useful. 

Playing: Planet in a bottle (on my phone)
Planet in a bottle is a pet survival style game, but instead of a pet you have a whole planet. You have to make it rain and turn the sun on and off to keep your planet heathy and happy. To much or to little the population doesn’t grow and the people get unhappy. as the population grows you can see houses and factories appear in the planet’s surface. There are also achivments to gain such as Survior novice (keeping the planet alive for a day)  all the way to bottle god (get a population of 19000 within a month). It’s silly and fun and doesn’t require a great deal of effort to play. It’s a good distraction when you’re bored, so I like it.

☮&♥

Anger has always been a problem for me. It’s not the anger itself that’s a problem, but the great that comes with it, the helplessness I feel as I lose control, the knowledge that my rationality is slowly slipping away. I feel like I’m drowning.

I hate being angry. Even talking about it makes me feel sick but I refuse to let it beat me, I refuse to be controlled.

The worst part of being angry is the aftermath. I can’t make it just go away and nothing I do really serves as an outlet. I know exactly how I could resolve it, which is usually by directly addressing the cause, but I know in every case that if I allow myself to do so it will only grant myself a temporary reprieve and inevitably make things worse in the long term.

I end up stuck in a sort of analysis paralysis where I run through different scenarios over and over in my head. I can’t help myself even when I know that every scenario results in failure to resolve the issue, including doing nothing, I just keep reliving the cause and aftermath of my anger again and again inside my head in infinite permutations trying to find a solution that will never come.

Everything becomes a variable and a cause for doubt. Even this blog post – could it be construed as a form of passive-aggressive bitching or since kind of attempt at inspiring guilt or sympathy? If it can what are the ripple effects? Will the other parties in the incident talk to other people about out from their own one sided view points and will those that listen change their behaviour in a easy that effects me negatively? All those questions and doubts buzz around my head like flies and often I come to the conclusion I should just stop caring and do nothing. I know my ability to deal with the situation rationally is compromised and even if it wasn’t the same couldn’t be said for the other parties involved. I’m a problem solver, I font like leaving things to just sort themselves out so I just feel trapped between inaction and the darker temptation to just let my anger consume me and damn the consequences.

When I think about my anger I can sympathise with addicts of various mind altering substances. I can understand the appeal of just letting go of any responsibility, of just giving in to oblivion, to not have to be part of the world any more but to be completely free from everything, if just for a moment. But it doesn’t just effect me and when oblivion hands me back to the world I know their will be far worse things waiting for me than when I left.

At the moment inaction seems the best course of action. It’s highly unpleasant but I’d rather be drowning than burning and for now any other scenario seems like it will let the world alight.

This post seems weak and pathetic as does this admission of the fact. Everything seems transparent in this anger induced paranoia of mine, every action questionable and sneered at under the harshest light but I need this act of catharsis, I need to give something up to the anger so rationality be damned, this post shall be it’s sacrifice and I’ll deal with the consequences whatever they may be. At least this way I can stop caring for a little while, stop drowning and start swimming.

I’m currently upgrading my desktop machine to Natty and once again it did the same thing that almost broke my last install – it trashed the gdk-pixbuf loaders.cache, making many gtk apps unusable. Considering the update program itself is a gtk app, this is not good.

Luckily, I caught it doing it in the terminal of the update program, so I ran the following to fix it:

sudo bash
/usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders > /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache

Also, the update servers were so slow, I ended up downloading the dvd via torrent, mounting the iso and then using the cdromupgrade script on the image to do the update. getting the torrent was quick (600+kbps) but downloading packages manually was going at a max of 21kbps. Something to keep in mind.

I get fed up occasionally of the million and one old kernels I have installed after multiple updates and upgrades of my Ubuntu install, so I have the following shell script snippet to sort it out for me:

sudo aptitude -F '%p' search linux-{image,headers,restricted}-2.6~i | grep -v `uname -r | sed -r 's/-[a-z0-9A-Z]+$//'`

That pumps out a list of all the installed kernels and associated images/modules/etc apart from the one you are currently using. It also keeps around suffixed kernels at the same version as your current one (so if you have the -pae, -rt, -smp, -generic and -preempt kernels installed, it will leave the ones that match the version number of your current kernel).

Now, if you want to be dangerous and not check the output, you can bin them all with a single command, like so:

sudo aptitude -F '%p' search linux-{image,headers,restricted}-2.6~i | grep -v `uname -r | sed -r 's/-[a-z0-9A-Z]+$//'` | xargs sudo aptitude purge -y

Et voila! Goodbye superfluous kernels!

For some more information about A Penny For My Thoughts, refer to my previous post and the official game website.

Sadly my wife threw away the memory triggers we came up with, so I only have the ones that were selected by each player. As I recall, each player wrote a total of 5 triggers, for a total at the start of 30 possible triggers. We didn’t really keep note of who did what when, or the guiding questions, so I’m just writing up the complete characters.

Character 1
Player: Me

1. Recall a pleasant memory
   When I think of a championship tennis match I remember killing the #1 tennis player in England for al-Qaeda. We had chosen such an unconventional target for the simple reason that it would be broadcasted live internationally and give the world a clear message that we could get anyone, anywhere – even right up close to the Royal family itself. I’d trained for years in deep cover to get to Wimbledon and face off against the #1 player in the country and after beating him, we shook hands and I used a poison needle to inject a fast acting neuro-toxin into his palm. He died almost instantly.
   What was pleasant about it?
   I succeeded in my mission.
2. Recall an unpleasant memory
   When I think of ring a ring of roses I remember my nephews birthday party. I remember he and my wife getting killed by counter-terrorists during a raid. I ran, stealing a taxi and driving to a safe house without trying to save them.
   What was unpleasant about it?
   My family died and I did nothing but ran away. I put the mission first and suffered crushing guilt from that moment on.
3. Recall how you came to be here
   When I think of sea waves I remember being on a luxury cruise, looking for the reports of my exploits on television, murdering someone and starting my new life. I’d quickly left the country after the incident with my family. It was clear the authorities knew it had been me and I’d been laying low, but I’d slipped up, staying in the country for my nephews party and getting my family killed for my mistake. The cell put me on a luxury cruise where I would stop off in the Caribbean and leave ship to take on a new identity and life from a contact there. I was still charged with pride and excitement about the mission success and was being sloppy, looking for reports on the news, but surprisingly there was very little coverage which made me angry. Eventually, someone did recognise me so I had to kill them. Of course, it might just have because I was a famous tennis player, they might not have heard about the assassination, but I could take no more chances, especially after being so reckless.
   How did you lose your memory?
   I went to meet my contact at the docks, got my papers and new identity and left to meet up with the people that would smuggle me off the island we had docked at when during my run to the pick up point I slipped and hit my head.

Do you want to remember your past? No.

Character 2
Player: Barry

1. Recall a pleasant memory
   When I think of the sounds of screaming I remember when I went to the funfair with my best friend. We dared each other to go into the haunted house. I was planning to scare my friend whilst in the house, but something jumped out of a wardrobe in the haunted house and I ended up screaming.
   What was pleasant about it?
   I got to go to the fair with my best friend.
2. Recall an unpleasant memory
   When I think of falling down the stairs I remember trying to escape a hospital. I was patient zero in a growing epidemic and whilst sick and delirious I fell down the stairs while trying to find my way out. As I fell I pulled over a medical cart with me and got a syringe full of an unknown substance embedded in my knee, which I accidentally injected into me whilst trying to pull it out. I managed to get out of the hospital but passed out before I could get very far.
   What was unpleasant about it?
   I was sick, delirious and in terrible pain and to make matters worse possibly injected with something dangerous.
3. Recall how you came to be here
   When I think of scraping my knee I remember fleeing the custody of some paramedics that were taking me back to the hospital. I ran through an alley way, convinced I had to get to my best friend’s house in my feverish delirium to see her one last time before I died from either the illness or this mystery chemical I was injected with. I stole a car and drove to her house but on the way there I crashed.
   How did you lose your memory?
   As I lay in the crashed car, I realised that my friend was actually at the hospital all along and that I needed to try and get back to her because in my delirium I’d unwittingly abandoned her. The shame and pain of the accident was too much and I passed out.

Do you want to remember your past? No.

Character 3
Player: Greg

1. Recall a pleasant memory
   When I think of the smell of lavender I remember looking for my cat in my grandparents back garden. There were lavender bushes in their garden and as I searched for the cat, I came across a stranger stood over a shallow grave at the bottom of the garden.
   What was pleasant about it?
   I loved playing with my cat and hiding in all the various places in that garden.
2. Recall an unpleasant memory
   When I think of the crunchy feeling of leaves underfoot I remember skinny dipping in the lake and the cat coming to get me. When I got out, I stepped barefoot onto the leaves covered the lake shore. I got dressed and went back to the house to find policemen there. They told me my grandmother was attacked and had been rushed to hospital.
   What was unpleasant about it?
   She later died in A&E. She lost a lot of blood.
3. Recall how you came to be here
   When I think of a wasp sting I remember how my granddad died. We were at his shed when he got stung and he was allergic. I also got stung but didn’t have my injector with me so we only had the one shot from his injector between us. It was a choice between him or me and I chose to live. I had to call funeral services and the house didn’t feel like home any more.
   How did you lose your memory?
   The stress and guilt and grief was all too much and I just broke down under the pressure.

Do you want to remember your past? Yes.

I’ve finally done my first ever Android project, and by done, I mean got something working and usable, if not necessarily finished.

To lay some groundwork, I use an alternate home screen on my HTC Desire called Slidescreen by Larva Labs. Slidescreen is absolutely amazing, it completely changed how I use my phone, bring all the information I’m interested in into one easy to access place. I highly recommend it. Larva Labs are currently developing the next release of Slidescreen and with it comes some exciting new features, the most interesting and valuable of which is the ability to write plugins for Slidescreen to integrate whatever data you want into it. I’m running the beta for Slidescreen 2 and I’m loving it.

So, to get my feet wet with Android development, I thought I’d write a quick plugin for Slidescreen to pull information from Clanforge, Multiplay‘s customer interface for game server rentals. The plan was to load data over Clanforge’s API and display a list of your servers and their current status in Slidescreen so you can keep track of whether they are up or not, how many players are n them them, etc.

Over the course of this weekend, it came together quite well and I now have a basic version up and running. I built the entire thing using a combination of Eclipse, Geany, Vi and the command line android tools until I finally got more comfortable with using Eclipse exclusively. I hit some annoying problems, the main one being that the SVG icon parser in Slidescreen seems to be very, very fragile and for the first few times I tried getting the plugin to work, my SVG file from Inkscape made the plugin memory leak and throw NullPointerExceptions around like it was going out of style. Eventually I crafted a ‘working’ SVG, but for some reason it’s showing up invisible, so I need to figure out why. UPDATE: Didn’t figure out what about my SVG icon was breaking, but did manage to get a rudimentary SVG icon working for it which I knocked up using an online editor.

However, it’s up and running and here is the proof! Pics! Because it did happen!

The code is available here: https://github.com/darkliquid/ClanforgeSlidescreenPlugin

So, we played a game of A Penny For My Thoughts last night and I enjoyed it immensely.

APFMT is another story-centric game from Evil Hat with a twist – you don’t play any characters, but rather a group of amnesiacs going through an experimental drug/group therapy system to regain their memories. The game plays rather like an extended group character generation session, but with an emphasis on story-telling. There are no dice, no stats: it’s a complete departure from traditional D&D style games.

I’ll admit from the start that running the game (so much that any one person can run it, giving there is no GM, per se) was a sort of test for my group. I’ve wanted to run a Dresden Files RPG game for a while which is also very story-centric with a large focus on group decisions, shared narrative control and collaborative story-telling. Dresden Files falls in between the traditional style and this more story-focused, collaborative one. I wanted to see how my group would react to this very different style of gameplay and so ran this quick one shot game to expose them to it.

Overall, it was a success. One of the players made up their minds almost immediately that they didn’t like it and decided to make a bit of a nuisance of themselves so we eventually suggested they leave since they weren’t enjoying themselves to save themselves getting bored as us getting distracted.

In hindsight, I think running the game slightly differently could have made it more fun for everyone – the player who left is very much an action-focusrd hack’n'slash type of guy and if I’d used the example facts and assurances in the book, which set the premise of us all being covert operatives, it might have been more enjoyable for him than the entirely mundane setting I established (which didn’t preclude being a covert operative, but didn’t encourage it either).

Given the lack of familiarity with the system and the fact that many of the players weren’t well practiced at improv we didn’t finish everyone’s questionnaires. However on of the players did, so I’ll quickly summerise it now.

The first memory was a pleasant one and the memory trigger he selected was one by our unruly player: “The sound of screaming”.

Guiding questions turned the scene into a childhood visit to a fun fair with a long time friend and the memory started with the two entering a haunted house. The first decision was about actually entering it or not and who paid. He entered the house after making the friend pay for them both and they wandered through until they reached a corner, where another decision was made. The guides made some suggestions and he chose to shout Boo! behind the friend. They both ran out of the house and the memory ended on a kiss.

The next memory was an unpleasant one and started with the trigger of “falling down the stairs”.

The guiding questions established a large time gap, setting this memory in adult age. The setting became a busy, overcrowded hospital and he was feeble, patient zero in some kind of epidemic.

The next decision points resulted in him spilling chemicals everywhere as he tried to sneak out of the hospital, getting a hypodermic of an unknown substance embedded in his knee when he fell, snapping the needle and accidentally injecting himself and feeling very sick and disorientated.

The final memory was of how he came to be it the institute where this therapy session was taking place and started with the memory trigger of a grazed knee on concrete.

This memory continued directly on from the last, following his escape from an ambulance whilst being returned to the hospital after his last attempt. He was gong to see the friend from the childhood memory.

Each decision led him to wander through the streets in a confused state, until he began vomiting blood when he then became desperate to see his friend before he died and stole a car to drive there. However he crashed and as he lost consciousness he remembered he’d been confused and his friend had been at the hospital all along, ill like him and now he wouldn’t see her again before he died. Then he woke up with no memories at the institute.

Some other memories were tragic or bizarre. One pleasant memory was of sinking into the oblivion of unconsciousness whilst drowning,  mine was of assassinating a tennis player at a championship match for al-Qaeda as a demonstration that they could get anywhere and reach anyone!

We’re going to finish the session next week, and in a lucky coincidence both the person who finished their character and the player who didn’t enjoy it are absent next week, so no-one is going to cause any problems by being absent.

On the whole, I really enjoyed playing this and look forwards to pjayibg at again as a sort of palate cleanser between longer games if not for a dedicated session. Fun stuff. Being designed as a one-shot game, it also works well for playing when key people are absent from another game or if people just want a quick break from a longer campaign of something else. Also, its a great way to create characters for stories and the writer in me definitely wants to try it on a future work.

I’ll write up the whole game properly when its finished.

On the whole though, highly recommended.

I’ve been neglecting my poor blog again and I’m sure the hoard that is all of maybe 3 people are clamouring for an update (by which I mean, don’t care).

So what’s been happening in darkliquid-land? Well, knowing my memory, more than I can recall, but the things that immediately come to mind are:

• Failing my 1st driving test
• Buying a car
• Getting back in PHP, primarily WordPress development
• Hacking on C++ code for a minecraft map renderer
• Playing various indie games
• Playing some main stream demos, and enjoying them immensely
• Watching TV and a few films
• Discovering new music, primarily Ugress and side-projects
• Hacking up my laptop’s partitioning scheme

So yeah, I failed my first driving test. It was almost a pass, but I made a really stupid mistake halfway through that killed it. I have my next one on Wednesday and I was looking forwards to it and feeling confident until yesterday, which was one of the crappiest days ever.

Yesterday started off with a pre-test driving session to get some practice in. What was practice turned more into a demonstration to myself of everything I shouldn’t do. Simple manoeuvres took 5+ attempts, I almost got the car T-boned on a roundabout, all sorts of retarded stuff. I have no idea where my head was at, but it certainly wasn’t on driving. Even coming back and parking up, I crossed traffic without indicating, waiting or anything and I know that’s completely wrong. I felt so utterly terrible after that, there was absolutely no redeeming features of that session at all, other than surviving it, which is one step up from getting myself killed in an accident.

Following that, I accidentally deleted about 135GB of data whilst doing something for work and needed to spend time fixing it in yet another example of epic failure.

Since I was on a roll of self-destruction and failure I thought, hey, I already feel shit, I can’t feel any worse so rather than crawl into bed and calling the whole day off as a bad idea, lets see what else I can fuck up, lets go for the record, eh? With that in mind, I decided to resize the partitions on my laptop.

When I’d first set it up, I’d accidentally only allocated 40GB to Win7 and 560GB to Linux. I was using maybe 8GB in my Linux partition so it seemed like a waste, considering Win7 alone without much installed except for all the C++ game development bits was already taking up 30GB. The plan was to shrink the Linux partition and then resize the windows partition to be larger and shuffle everything around. Alas, it is never quite that simple.

Because I am an early adopter/technology masochist I’d formatted my Linux partition as btrfs, for which there is currently no partition resizing support. Also, my Linux and Win7 partitions were not next to each other, so expanding one into the other wasn’t going to happen.

So, my plan changed to imaging my Linux partition, then deleting it, splitting it in half, with one half for Linux and another half for shared files between Linux and Win7. To image it, I used clonezilla, backing it up with partclone to an external USB harddrive. That all went well, so I was happy. I then used a gParted live CD to repartition the disk and then proceeded to go back into clonezilla to reimage the partition.

Except it refused to do so. Clonezilla refused to allow me to image a partition backup of sda6 onto what was now sda7. Hacking around, I essentially renamed the to be called sda7 instead of sda6 and then hit another problem. Since sda6 was 560GB and sda7 was 280GB, it wouldn’t image the backup due to the size difference, even though the image was only 8GB, since it was a backup of only the used part of the partition.

This was getting ridiculous.

So, after looking up various issues and solutions on the internet, I discovered how to run partclone manually to force it restore the image anyway, since clonezilla didn’t offer any facility for doing so through it’s own interface. I had to cat together the 3 sections of the image backup (it had been split into 2GB chunks), pipe that through gzip and then pipe that to partclone.restore with a flag set to tell it to ignore size mismatches. It promptly, much to my shock, started imaging without asking for confirmation at all. Note to self: partclone is a dangerous tool that will trash your disk if make even the slightest mistake.

So, now the image was on the partition, I could even mount it from the clonezilla live CD. Woohoo! But of course, I knew there would be issues. The drive layout was different which would make grub go doo-lally. The entries in the /etc/fstab wouldn’t match up, so the system wouldn’t boot even if grub would work. Before I did anything, I made sure to use the btrf tools to make sure the filesystem was aware of the new extents on the disk, by telling it to expand to the max for the partition (considering only 8GB had been imaged). That seemed happy enough and I saw no problems. I’m not even sure it was necessary, considering it seemed to get the free space calculations right even before I ran that command, but better to be sure I suppose.

Now, on the more modern distros, your /dev is basically empty from start so it’s an arse if you want to chroot into another OS and run things like grub or anything else that needs the block device files for the disks. So, I had to bind mount the clonezilla Live CD /dev onto the mounted Linux install, then chroot, and then mount all the other filesystems, etc into that (/proc, /sys, /boot in my case). Once that was done, I edited the /etc/fstab to be correct – I would have used the drive UUIDs, but it was an arse copying stuff from the blkid command into the fstab file on the console, so I couldn’t be bothered – I can do it later from within the OS when I have a graphical environment. After that, I needed to reinstall and then update the grub config and then reboot.

And finally, after hours and hours of messing around, it was all fixed, working and I had a nice chunk of extra space for sharing stuff between Win7 and Linux. I could boot into Linux or Win7 without any problem. That gave me a nice boost after the horribleness that had been Saturday.

Now, in Win7, I wanted to shift some stuff to the new partition to make space. Namely Steam, especially since I’d succumbed to the special deal offer the other day and brought Red Alert 3 + Uprising for around £7 and 16GB of game data was not going to fit on the main Win7 partition. Annoyingly, Steam has no way of storing games on multiple partitions and while I could use NTFS’ native symbolic linking support to make it use the other drive, considering Win7 doesn’t expose that functionality at all and you have to use a command line tool, I didn’t trust it. Instead, I followed the instructions on the Steam site and moved the whole install to the new drive, which seemed to work perfectly.

I also decided to tweak my Win7 install and theme it using the Maverick Ambience theme dpcdpc11 on deviant art created, so make it as little Windows-y as possible. Hit some issues with that due to the SP1 update breaking the stuff I did last time I enabled custom themes. Had to run sfc /scannow to regen the files and then go through the process again. Now it’s all looking nice. Hurray!

Going back to the topic of games, I’ve been playing the Bulletstorm demo quite a lot. Its immensely fun, completely over-the-top and very tongue-in-cheek, satirising it’s own genre. I’m not normally an FPS fan, but Bulletstorm is everything that is right and fun about FPSes all put in one place. It’s a shame they did some stupid stuff on the PC port – it’s clear they targeted consoles first and the poor PC gamers got a little screwed by silly issues. I’ve been playing the PS3 demo mostly, but had the chance to play an echo on the PC version and it was very fun, even if I didn’t know half the controls.

I’ve also been playing through the Dragon Age II demo on PS3 and likewise, it’s very fun and looks very pretty. The combat system feel a lot more punchier now and I found mages in particular feel a lot more powerful, in the first game they felt very weak.

However, I doubt I’ll be buying either of them for a while, I still have several games on my list to go through and without any free time to play the games, I’m progressing through that list very slowly.

I’ve also been playing Inside A Star-Filled Sky, a cool little indie game that revolves around the concept of infinite recursion and the act of becoming. Each level is the creature that you later become, but also, you can enter other creates, power ups, even yourself and by changing things inside them, change their abilities and attributes back on the outer level when you jump back up. It’s similar in concept to the movie Inception with it’s multiple layers. I’ve also been playing a lot of fake-scrabble on my phone via DroidWords, which seems the best of the lot in that genre and is a very polished little application, far better than the bug-laden monstrosity Words With Friends by the evil company known as Zynga.

Since we’re on the concept of media, let me move onto music and film/tv. I recently discovered the artist Ugress, a Norwegian grungy-electronica one-man setup and I fell in love with his music. It’s absolutely divine. He has several side-projects including Nebular Spool, Ninja 9000 and Shadow of the Beat. What’s especially cool about Ugress is the way he communicates with his fans and really leverages the new digital age. He tries to get on all streaming media platforms, he offers his whole albums for free streamed listening directly on his site and offers some albums directly for download free of charge. The albums he does sell he uses a pay-what-you-want model with a minimum value (sometimes, that minimum is 0). His music and his attitude to the industry is inspiring.

Speaking of which, when I listened to Ruins by Nebular Spool I was captivated. I was instantly catapulted into a state of intense creativity. The album seemed to be the perfect accompaniment to a story I am writing with Archi Teuthis on Protagonize called Neon Bible. I was consumed with the idea of creating a story-focused 2D platform game as a prequel to the story – filling in the blanks of the journey the Priest at the start takes to the city of Eden and covering the hard choices he has to make, telling the story of how the world the game is set in came to be the way it is and challenging the player emotionally and intellectually. I only wish I had the time and skill to create it.

I still have yet to see most films this year. I just don’t go to the cinema. The cinema sucks, mostly because of stupid costs, other people and other things. At home I can pause the film or eat a pizza whilst watching it if I feel like it. Not so at a cinema. I also don’t have to worry about retards ruining it by talking, or if they do, I can at least tell them to shut the fuck up and rewind to hear what I missed. Also, most films haven’t really inspired me enough to go out and pay for. I still want to see Tron: Legacy even though I’m fully expecting to be disappointed but even that is still not worth seeing at the cinema.

Two films I watched recently on the PSN were excellent though. The Other Guys, a Will Farrell film satirising typical buddy-cop action films. Hilarious, clever, deeply sarcastic. Just what I like. I highly recommend it. I also watched Red, the film about retired assassins/agents. Very funny and sweet, the action sequences were amusing in their audacity, but not over done. So many films try so hard to be cool that they don’t realising that trying so hard is what makes them decidedly uncool. Red got it all just right. A friend lent me Despicable Me and I have to say it was dull and uninspiring. I wasn’t really interested in it at all. However, maybe it’s the potential father in me, but I found Margo adorable and the film is worth watching just for her, she is awesome.

I’ve been getting back into my C++ coding recently by working on extending mcmap, a renderer for minecraft worlds. I’ve been working on adding support for displaying signs on the map (as in the text) and struggling with the coordinate system transforms, but I’ve more or less cracked it now, so it’s on to the more taxing job of extending the renderer to blend text at various positions onto the image. I’m thinking of just not doing that at all and instead storing the text and coordinate data in a text file so you can apply the text later with your own process (which I’ll probably write a Ruby script for). I’ve also been playing with OpenZoom, an open source implementation of Microsoft’s DeepZoom system in Flash which in many ways is superior to Google’s Maps offerings, especially for the task of showing large images rather than actual maps, which suits the output of mcmap much better, since it isn’t really a map in the traditional sense.

I’ve also been brushing up on my PHP again having been digging around in wordpress writing numerous plugins and changing some base functionality of wordpress itself to support various things and add new features for a site at work. I’m definitely not  fan of PHP or particularly of wordpress. they are both messy and ugly, but having worked with them for a while now, I’ve been fairly productive; so using wordpress as a CMS framework definitely has its advantages in terms of productivity.

I’ve not been roleplaying much recently. The game our GM is running has ceased to hold any interest for me. I’m not interested in the other players characters, the story (or lack thereof), the settings or the seemingly meaningless jumps from one pointless job to another. Nothing in it seems gripping or interesting or has any meaning to the characters. I’m not even sure why the characters are doing what they are doing, there doesn’t seem to be any clear motivation to the game at all and that’s why I’ve bailed out of it. I think I’m becoming a bit of an Evil Hat fan boy. Their roleplaying games always seem very focused around characters stories, are strongly character-driven, thematic and designed specifically to create group stories. The Fate system as applied in their Dresden files game is fantastic in the way it does group setting and character generation and I hope to run a quick game of A Penny For My Thoughts to get the others to put their toes in the water in regards to that style of collaborative play. I’m bored with the traditional hack’n'slash GM/Player separation – maybe it’s the writer in me, but I want to tell a story, through the medium of a game, not play a game set to a story. The others all come from this more traditional roleplaying background, so it will be interesting to see how they react.

Well, that’s it for now. Maybe it’ll be another 3 months before I update!

So we’re now into 2011. Whoop-dee-do.

I had a suitably geeky new year, seeing it in by killing my entire party of players on my Gamma World game. However, it does give them an excuse to regen using the expansion pack which I brought myself and me the opportunity to do made up adventure based of the consequences of failing the one that comes with the first box set.

Speaking of box sets, I got the whole of Death Note, Wolf’s Rain and the first two seasons of Numb3rs, amongst other things.

Annoyingly, the year came to a close without me getting my driving license due to the driving license inspectors being completely useless. I wasn’t informed my test was cancelled at all, even after I was sat 10 minutes are after EVERY OTHER PERSON IN THE DAMNED WAITING ROOM was assigned an inspector and left. Eventually, asking what was going on, they said sorry, it’s cancelled and we didn’t say anything because our bookings office is snowed in and hence closed – which is hardly an excuse since the person who said that knew I was cancelled and must have known the booking office was closed in order to tell me said fact. Dicks. Worse was that someone else didn’t turn up for their test but they wouldn’t take me for my test instead. What a bunch of lice-ridden cock-badgers!

Bytey introduced me to Game Dev Story on my Android phone. It is dangerously addictive.

So far the old IBS malarkey hasn’t really changed. After so many tests the doctors are basically saying – tough, it’s IBS and we’ve done so many tests we aren’t going to do any more as we are happy with our diagnosis. So now it playing around with my diet, lifestyle, etc to find some pattern of activity and food consumption that stops me from having lots of pain at random intervals. Or just hoping it goes away by itself. Fun times!

DruidX and I are thinking of squeezing out some geeklings in the near future, which could be fun/scary.

I’m becoming a Minecraft-widower.

I really miss Asheyna, my favourite Canadian geek. Being able to hang out with her and just bounce ideas around and write together was awesome when Dru and I went to visit and I really miss it. With her new beau, Minecraft and other things, I barely even see her online any more. And that last sentence unintentionally sounds a tad passive-aggressive.

I’ve come to an understanding that I’m not a writer, not really. I just don’t have that drive to finish any of the stories I’m telling. I’m a story teller, a roleplayer. I enjoy telling stories in the moment but actually writing a complete beginning-to-end story? I don’t think it’s for me and I don’t think I’ll ever be a published writer. Not to say I’m not going to try, but my definition of try in this case is very much a ‘keep writing as normal and eventually I’m bound to finish something enough to actual consider publishing it’. So, yeah, good luck with that…

So, what’s in store for 2011?

Hopefully some mini-geeks. New, exciting projects at work. Driving and all the freedom and flexibility that brings. More money, hopefully, as various things get paid off and I start earning more, etc. More roleplaying.

I’d like to say more game development, or hell, any game development. Games and programmings are both things I enjoy and writing games is something I really want to do. Unfortunately, it’s also work and I have enough of that from my job at the moment, what with the commute too I’m basically in work mode from 5am-9pm so I need downtime away from programming to stay sharp at it and not just burn out, so it’s been slow going doing anything in that regard. I’m hoping the driving will help is it cuts down my commute from 5h/day to 2h/day and that 3 hours a day extra will make all the difference.

Another thing I see happening this new year is playing more games. I’ve already succumbed to evil and have Windows7 on my laptop for the purposes of games I can’t get working under WINE in a satisfactory manner (such as Super Meat Boy, which is basically worth selling my soul over) and I expect I’ll find it increasingly more difficult to say no to games on the basis that they are only available to me under Windows.

I also see myself obtaining the role of family tech-support, a mantle my brother-in-law is no doubt more than happy to pass on

I’ve been terrible keeping this blog updated recently but it comes down to the fact that I’ve been incredibly busy, as per usual. Launching new, complicated things at work and trying to stay on-track with various other projects, it’s been a nightmare and so this blog has fallen by the wayside.

However, it’s not all been doom and gloom.

I recently discovered Super Meat Boy and the sub-genre of games often known as ‘masocore’. Incredibly, brutally hard and unforgiving games that seem to be designed to just cause you pain and frustration more than anything else. However, it’s a healthy pain, a healthy frustration. Yes, you might be tearing your own hair out, throwing your game pad at the wall, but you’re enjoying it even as the game gorges itself on your bitter tears. From that description you might guess that the ‘maso’ in ‘masocore’ comes from masochist.

Given that I’ve been doing a fair amount of research into fetishism as part of a story I am writing (which turned out terribly during NaNo this year), I’ve developed an academic interest in that kind of thing. I enjoy psychology and understanding the mind, so not only am I getting a masochistic kick from playing these games, but I’m also getting the buzz of the introspection such feelings bring.

As stated earlier, what brought me to these games was Super Meat Boy. Super Meat Boy is a relatively simple platformer. You can run, jump and slide down walls. That’s pretty much it. The fun comes in from the fiendish level design and the general quality that all the separate elements come together. It’s an incredibly polished and silky smooth game which makes coming back to it again and again really quite easy. It also pays homage to several other indie computer games, such as Aquaria – one of my favourite all-time games, VVVVVV – which I shall be mentioning in a moment, Mighty Jill Off – which I shall be mentioning as well, and several others such as Tim from Braid and Gish – everyone’s favourite ball of tar. The story line and sense of humour is awesome throughout and appeals perfectly to me sense of humour. I mean, after all you play a boy with no skin whose girlfriend (who is made of bandages) is kidnapped by a fetus in a jar with a monocle. That sets the tone for pretty much the entire game. One of the awesome features in it is the end of level replays where the game replays every attempt you’ve made that session simultaneously on screen so you can revel in you success and failure all at once. Awesome!

Another game I’ve enjoyed a lot recently is VVVVVV. It is an awesome retro-style game in true Commodore 64 style with an absolutely awesome chiptune soundtrack. The key mechanic in VVVVVV is that you can’t jump, you can only invert gravity and then only when you are stood on a flat surface (so no hovering in mid-air by hammering the gravity button). This leads to some really interesting challenges when navigating the levels, as well as some incredibly evil levels that revel in your suffering such as this one.

After seeing it in Super Meat Boy I was intrigued by Mighty Jill Off which is essentially a sort of BDSM remake of Bomb Jack. A bit easier than the previous two, I felt, but a very fun and cute little game. The core mechanics here are jumping and gliding and you need to navigate your way up a tower, avoiding spikes and fire and monsters along the way. It incredibly simple, but often the best games are, though it surprisingly forgiving, I fully expected to have to start from the beginning when I died but you actually start from the last room of the tower you were in. It’s a quick pick up and play game though and is enjoyable pretty much whenever you fancy a quick challenge as it can be completed easily in 15 minutes. My first run netted me a time of 13 minutes or so.

It’s good to get back into games and these things are just what I needed. I’ve been getting increasingly disillusioned with the mainstream games industry because for the most parts, games are all too samey, focusing too much on cinematics and graphics to actually make them fun or challenging. I want to watch movies, not play them. Indie games seem to understand that a lot better. They don’t have the budget for things like that so the gameplay is what they poor their hearts and souls into it and the games are ultimately better for it. I’m fed up with a game that doesn’t feel rewarding to play, that gives no satisfaction when you complete it because it presented no challenges. Not only that, but there is a difference between hard games and games that are awkward. In Super Meat Boy it is clear that if you ever die, it is your fault. You didn’t jump quite right, you got the timing wrong, you ran instead of walking. Super Meat Boy punishes you for your own mistakes, while many other games tend to essentially cheat, giving the enemies unfair advantages that make no sense, or just make the game more awkward to play (and by virtue of that more difficult) which results not in a more challenging game, but a less enjoyable one, as you feel like you are being punished just for trying, rather than for your own inability to succeed.