Emptyeye

Yep. It’s my new obsession, again.

Anyway, as fun as it is, I’m of the opinion that the Campaign Mode of StarCraft really doesn’t do a very good job of preparing you for online play (Whether or not it should is another subject, I guess). Most of the missions that are the traditional “eliminate your opponent” variety can usually be won by amassing huge amounts of one given unit and going nuts all over the map, which will generally get you steamrolled in online play.

Oh well.

This past week here on the site, not much happened, though if you pay close attention you’ll note I updated the about pages to make them more current (The About the Site page had a reference to the long-gone donation button). And other than that, I’ve really been pretty lazy.

Neil Peart once wrote “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, and I suppose that’s what I’m doing at the moment with The Six Day Exile–rather than decide to forge ahead without my Echo Indigo, or see if I can fix the problem (Outlined here), I’m just sort of letting it sit in limbo and playing lots of StarCraft, which I continue to be terrible at. I’ll have to eventually find a style and stick to it; I actually found a neat little map that trains your multi-tasking abilities, which I’ll have to practice a bit until I can improve those skills.

Until next week…

-EE

There are enough blogs out there about companies giving awful customer service–Verizon Math, which spawned from Verizon’s inability to tell the difference between “cents” and “dollars”, is probably my favorite–that I wanted to share one customer service call that was actually as pleasant as could be, given why I was making it (Which was to make sure I actually got my electric bill. Yeah, I could’ve played dumb for awhile, but fear of ultimately having some collection agency at my doorstep told me this was probably not the wisest course.).

So yesterday I called the customer service line of Connecticut Light & Power, to have the billing address changed to something that the post office will actually deliver to. After wading through the various automated menus, and attempting to pick the option closest to “get billing address changed”, within literally seconds, a very nice young woman named Hannah is on the line helping me with my problem. As a bonus, she spoke very clear, unaccented English (I don’t want to sound racist/ethnicist/whatever here, but to heavily paraphrase Daniel Day-Lewis, if your accent prevents me from understanding you, and my completely different accent prevents you from understanding me, and we have no other method of communication….this…screws…my…customer service experience! IT SCREWS IT UP!)..hooray! After I sheepishly admit that I don’t know my account number (An effect of having not yet received an electric bill), I proceed to give her my service address, and in about two minutes, I’m no longer a dirty energy thief (As it happens, they hadn’t sent out my first bill yet anyway, but better safe than sorry when it comes to something like this.). One of the easiest service calls I’ve ever made.

So hooray to Connecticut Light & Power for actually employing competent customer service people whom I can understand without effort!

While The Six Day Exile work is stalled–first by my laziness, then by some equipment compatibilities as outlined here–I figured I’d throw this idea out and see what anyone thinks of it.

I don’t have a lot for it yet, but what is here is Copyright ©2008 by me, Marc J. “Emptyeye” Dziezynski. Everything is in a very early stage, so a lot of the proper names and things will most definitely change before the concept is totally finished.

Essentially, when I first got into StarCraft, I had the idea for a StarCraft trading card game. I refined that idea today so that it actually doesn’t have anything to do with StarCraft anymore, but is closer to Magic: The Gathering meets the now-defunct WWE Raw Deal (Yes, there was a wrestling trading card game. Not only that, but it was pretty fun too..I still have some cards kicking around here, I’m pretty sure.). For the overarching concept, there are basically three factions–your Knights (Chivalry, saving the world, etc.), your Villains (Trying to take over said world), and for lack of a better phrase yet, your Damsels (Who are sick of always being imprisoned/tied up/forced to await rescue and have decieded to show that they can kick some butt too). It’s a paper/rock/scissors system, with Knights being strong against Villains, who are strong against Damsels, who are strong against Knights. Knights prefer direct combat and attacking their opponents. Villains like to summon creatures to do their bidding for them. Damsels generally prefer to stay out of combat and use magic to attack the enemy (I’m not sure how practical the difference between Knights and Damsels will be in this respect, yet.).

You can play as one of several characters, each with their own unique ability (Hey there, Raw Deal influence!)–one of the Knights can deal damage directly to his opponent once a turn, one of the villains can summon creatures at a reduced cost, one of the Damsels can heal herself if her health falls below a certain point and she has…magic (We’ll call it Mana for now, though I’ll need a different name for it eventually) to spare.

Beyond that, it’s very similar to Magic in execution. You start with 100 life points (Somewhat arbitrarily chosen and subject to change), and the object is to reduce your opponent to zero, using creatures/attacks/etc. The basic currency of the game as it were is Mana (See above), which you automatically generate one of for each turn. You can save it up to cast bigger spells/creatures/etc, or use it each turn. Some cards will allow you to generate more mana per turn.

The “vision” as it were is for about 200 cards, 50 or so for each faction (With the balance within each faction being tailored to their strength–Villains would have predominantly, though not exclusively, creature cards), and another 50 or so that anyone could use.

Yeah. Like the title says…but what do you think?

Well, no I don’t. But I’m not particularly happy right now.

This week was pretty much an idle one in terms of the site. I do have ideas for writings which I should really get up and running sometime soon, because I certainly haven’t been doing much lately as far as music goes, instead opting to laze around and play video games when I’m not working. Some would argue there isn’t anything wrong with this, but The Six Day Exile isn’t going to finish itself.

So today I finally tried to get up and running to resume work on said album. I say “tried” because I think I hit a major setback, and it wasn’t even the one I was expecting (Namely, Windows Vista not playing nicely with my extremely outdated version of Cakewalk SONAR…I still haven’t installed that on this machine yet, by the by). No, I went to install my Echo Indigo on it…and found out that the cardbus slot is apparently not the right size for it. Or, more precisely, there is a “notch” inside the slot that prevents the card from going in fully. Hopefully I can somehow remove it, but if not…without the Indigo, I have no idea how any recording/mixing/etc. I do on this comp will actually sound. And it really annoys me.

Anyway, yesterday I saw one of my friends from college that I hadn’t seen in close to three years. She graduated about a month ago (She was a sophomore in college during the one semester I finished up in Fall of 2005), and she’ll be moving out to Texas soon, so I went to her graduation party seeing as she lives around here for the moment. It was fun, and hopefully she’ll come by to see the apartment before she moves halfway across the country.

Until next week…

-EE

That’s right, in the singular. Similar to this post, it comes from an observation about work (Speaking of which, I should be grateful I even still have a job that I can make amusing observations about, thanks to the job climate, the state of the banking industry, and the cost-cutting measures in place at my place of employment). I’m not going to try to read too much into it, but suffice to say it involved copying a table in which “Women” was capitalized as “WoMen” several times. It brought to mind a Beavis and Butthead episode where for some reason, B&B stumble onto a feminist organization that called themselves “Womyn” (Because they weren’t just a subset of “Men” or somesuch), and the guys, having not heard of this, promptly inform the organization that they’re spelling “women” wrong. Don’t ask me why this came into my head at that point, but oh well.

This past week, a lot of the issues I had with the apartment got fixed, specifically the toilet and cable (The latter of which involved a simple reboot of the system on Cox’s end). As a result, the place actually feels something like a home now, and to celebrate, we had a housewarming (Apartmentwarming, I guess) party earlier today. It pretty cool, as some of my friends from Massachusetts showed up, as did my parents and a bunch of Jess’s family. So that was neat.

In about a week, work on The Six Day Exile will resume, for real this time. It’s a good thing I had everything backed up onto two external drives, because on of them has just about died. Luckily, the second is still up and running; late next week sometime I’ll probably get another one to keep that redundancy (A good thing when it comes to backing stuff up) intact.

Speaking of things being on the fritz, my Cobalt Flux continues to not work right even after a cleaning. I’m not entirely surprised, mind you–what it did isn’t really consistent with it being dirty, but rather some type of wire problem–but it is a bit disappointing. Well, more than a bit–DDR was about my only form of exercise nowadays.

Finally, I’m back into playing StarCraft. I’m not exactly sure why, to be honest. But I’m going through all the missions again to get some semblance of skill in the game back.

Until next week…

-EE

This week, I’ve been mainly busy settling into the new apartment. The main issue thus far is a broken toilet and an unresponsive son-of-landlord (If you’re curious, it’s one sort of family-owned business that my landlord is a part of, and the son actually lives in the same complex. It’s not like I randomly called the landlord’s son with my problems for no reason). The surface-level problem is that the flushing mechanism is a bit loose, so when water gets that high, it leaks out. Those plumbers among you are naturally wondering “But why is the water level getting that high in the first place?”, which is really the deeper problem, I guess. Anyway, tomorrow will come a call to the landlord proper if I don’t hear anything by the end of work.

Other than that, though, it’s actually been pretty interesting living without cable. The lack of programming means I’ve been catching up on Seinfeld DVDs that I got for Christmas years ago and never actually watched (You’ll also note that as of this writing, Amazon is advertising for people who need a last-minute Father’s Day gift. Wow, that really IS last-minute), plus one of the 87 bazillion editions of the original Star Wars Trilogy (By the way, while I’ve never seen it, to paraphrase Wrestlecrap’s R.D.Reynolds, “The fact that George Lucas, he of the Super-Ultra-Deluxe-Special-Editions of the Star Wars movies, refuses to officially release the Christmas Special, should be enough to convince you how bad it really is.”) and a documentary on their making. For some reason, George Lucas really likes shooting in Tunisia.

And that’s really it for now. Until next week…

-EE

One of the more interesting things I’ve seen in my trek to work from my apartment (Which I’m probably only going to walk a couple days a week, at least at first–apparently my ankles didn’t really like going from almost no walking to suddenly walking two miles a day two days in a row) is actually a piece of graffiti. If indeed it can be called that. The reason it’s interesting is mainly because I’m trying to visualize in my head the sort of conversation that took place for the object of the graffiti to actually see it. The piece reads “I LUV RAY MAC”, but what’s truly fascinating about it is its location–it’s on the ground, by a place where a u-turn can be made (But only by authorized vehicles–this is Connecticut, after all) on I-691 West, right by Exit 2. Really, it’s only visible from the overpass that I walk on on my way to work. So in order for this proclamation of love (Or “luv” more accurately) to be seen, the perpetrator first had to actually spray paint the ground with the letters, then somehow lure Ray Mac to the overpass where it could be seen, and finally essentially admit to committing..I don’t know what the technical name is. Vandalism of an Interstate maybe? I dunno.

I just found it sort of amusing, and tried (And failed, thanks to the sun plus the fence constructed to prevent people like me from falling off the overpass to severe injury or worse) to get a picture of the street art in question. I wonder if whoever took the time to craft it still luvs Ray Mac or not…

Just a quick post to say that I’m alive and moved in. We won’t have official Internet until next Tuesday, but I’m currently, um, borrowing someone’s wireless connection, and I’ll try to sporadically update between now and then when said connection is available.

Also, check out Rich Wilson’s comment on my review of Lifting Shadows. I apologize for not acknowledging it sooner, but I’ve been a bit busy with this whole moving in thing.