Emptyeye

Download | Story | Lyrics

“I can tell you are lookin’ for a way to live
where truth is determined by consensus
full of codified arbitrary directives
come join us” -Bad Religion, “Come Join Us”

I’m a big fan of The Urban Legend Reference Pages–I go there whenever I get some implausible-sounding e-mail to see whether said e-mail is really being truthful, or if it’s just scaremongering from one party or another. I actually posted on their message boards for awhile before drifting away from there, as I tend to do with pretty much everything (Witness my complete lack of work on The Six Day Exile, although that isn’t totally self-imposed). In contrast, I am not a big fan of Wikipedia, though I’ll admit it’s useful if you don’t plan on seriously using any of its information, to the point where I’ll try to avoid linking to it whenever possible. Part of my problem with it can be summed up in the lyrics above (Which, interestingly, predate Wikipedia itself by about six years), but I have another, related problem with it.

One of Wikipedia’s guidelines–indeed, one of the pillars upon which Wikipedia is constructed–is the concept of “Verifiability, not truth”. Put another way, Wikipedia doesn’t care if something is correct–they just care if it’s been repeated before. This probably reached the peak of absurdity in early October, when some prankster wrote a silly, untrue fact about a guy named Ronnie Hazlehurst, who soon after happened to die. Lazy obituary writers then essentially copied his Wikipedia entry, complete with untrue fact, in their papers. You can read the absurd part of this here, or even check the discussion page on Hazelhurst’s Wikipedia entry. To summarize: Some Wikipedians actually argued that because the incorrect fact (Which originated on Wikipedia) was now in verifiable sources (Hazelhurst’s obituaries), it passed the aforementioned Wikipedia pillar and should thus stay in the article. Cooler heads ultimately prevailed, yes, but really, that isn’t the point. Coller heads shouldn’t have to prevail–the system essentially encourages the behavior mentioned in the lyrics at the top of this entry. And that’s a system I can do without.

This past week as far as the site goes mainly consisted of me finding out why my soundcard doesn’t fit my new computer. Apparently I have the next step up in card technology in the computer…which renders the soundcard obsolete, at least temporarily. My options now are either getting an adapter for the port, which is expensive in and of itself, or trying to find another sound solution–the current hardware is not going to cut it, if my brief experiences with trying to record Astyanax speedrun commentary are any indication.

Other than that, the main thing that’s been happening with me is work. Without going too into the details, we have a big project we’re trying to roll out, and a rather severe lack of resources to add some of the features that are basically needed. Not a lot of fun.

And I continue to be awful at StarCraft, if you’re curious.

-EE

I went to visit my parents today, mainly to celebrate my mom’s birthday which is roughly around this time of the year. While there, I used her computer to look up my port problem. I’m ashamed to admit that I used The Font-of-All-Knowledge-Some-of-it-Even-Accurate to do so, but credit where it’s due, it did help me out. Apparently the entire Cardbus standard is outdated, and there’s a new sheriff in town called ExpressCard. Furthermore, there apparently exist adapters to go both ways–old-to-new and new-to-old. The problem for me is that these are expensive, in the neighborhood of about $120 (I paid about $160 for the soundcard). So I’m waffling on that at the moment.

The long story short is that I played around with Audacity earlier tonight to try to learn it in preparation for recording commentary for my Astyanax speedrun–and as I recorded some vocals, I immediately noticed the hiss upon playback that I couldn’t immediately make go away. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t all that much on my Rygar commentary, so I scrapped it for the time being and will retreat back to my lair to plot my next move.

*Mutter mutter mutter*

Yep. I had planned this post to coincide with (At least within a day or two) the opening of the site…then checked my archives and realized I made the first official post on the site on October 7th, 2007. So I was late by nearly a week. Whoops.

Anyway, the most interesting thing is that my prediction as to the usefulness of a review of the Dream Theater book was apparently completely off–it’s the most popular post on the site in terms of views, and even the author himself (Hi Rich, if you happen to read this) stopped by to share his thoughts, which was pretty cool. Filewise, the most popular thing appears to be the commentary for my speedrun of Rygar, which makes some amount of sense.

And that’s about it as far as that goes, for now anyway.

Yeah. This past week, I did a lot of playing StarCraft and very little of anything else. I continue to enjoy the game, despite the fact that I continue to be terrible at it. Hooray for that, I guess. Mainly, I just need to get faster at performing actions. It won’t magically fix everything, but it’ll be a good start.

Other than that, I did take steps toward creating commentary for my Astyanax speedrun. I just basically have to learn the very basics of Audacity and then record the commentary itself. I even made sure to re-watch the run again, to be ready for anything particularly interesting that occurs in it.

That’s pretty much it for the moment, really. Until next week…
-EE

Those of you who aren’t familiar with your old school video games are no doubt wondering if I’ve come down with some terrible disease. Those of you who are familiar with them know that “Rash” refers to the first player’s character in the original Battletoads, and may actually know me (Especially if you were at MAGFest VI and got to see Pianotoads live..click here for my assessment of how it went) as “That Battletoads Guy”.

I am happy to relinquish that title after seeing the new Battletoads speedruns currently on SDA. I actually knew this was coming for awhle–Pablo and I exchanged some e-mails awhile back, and I had the feeling he had been the one to perform the runs when I saw them on SDA’s “To be verified” list. To be honest, both of my runs needed improving anyway (To the point where I don’t think they would have gotten on the site had I submitted them now, as opposed to back in 2005 when SDA was just coming into its own), so this essentially frees me from having to accomplish that task. Either way, congrats to Pablo on two high-quality runs.

Speaking of speedruns, I’m going to attempt to record a commentary track for my Astyanax speedrun over the weekend, now that SDA officially supports external commentary tracks.

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 video will be of no interest to you whatsoever if you don’t play StarCraft. It’ll be twelve minutes of overenthusiastic Koreans shouting things as someone gets destroyed in the game. Nonetheless, I’m going to attempt to give it context anyway.

Imagine if, in Super Bowl XLII, rather than merely defeating the mighty juggernaut that was the New England Patriots in the last minute or so of the game, the New York Giants (Whom you may remember had “no chance in hell whatsoever” of winning that game according to the blantantly pro-Pats media) instead humiliated them from start-to-finish, running up the score on them to ridiculous levels and continually going for two just to humiliate them. Now imagine you got to see this carnage from the view of one of the Patriots players. That’s essentially what this video is in StarCraft form; it’s from the point of view of a player called “sAviOr[gm]”, then considered the best StarCraft player in the world, and it’s game 3 of a 5-game final in one of Korea’s major StarCraft leagues. In this particular series, his opponent, a then-unheralded “Bisu[Shield]” (Who would himself ascend to the title of “Best StarCrafter in the World” for a time), has already won the first two games by essentially showing sAviOr a gameplan he has never seen before, and that sAviOr either can’t, or stubbornly refuses to, adjust to. The third game plays out pretty much the same way, as you get to watch Bisu make sAviOr look like a complete chump through sAviOr’s eyes.

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, skip ahead to about 11 minutes in when you hear shrieking that seemingly rivals that of a Beatles concert. Completely insane. Also note the final insult to injury as the game for some reason refuses to allow sAviOr to save the replay.

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