Quick background for the non-Halflife players: the game Half-Life 2 is distributed by the company Valve, and they have a whole game delivery system called Steam. Steam’s generally kinda handy, in that you can buy and download their supported games fairly easily, and if these games need updates, Steam automatically downloads them for you.

Steam also sends some general info back to Valve, and a while back Valve released some statistics on how people were doing in their most recent (and most unfortunately named) game, Half-Life 2: Episode One. This includes things like how long people took to finish the game, where most of the player deaths occur, etc.

But apparently, a lot of people were dying in a certain place in Ep1, so Valve’s decided to modify that part to make it easier. The next time players connect via Steam, their game will be updated to add more ammo and remove some bad guys from a certain point.

I get how this sounds good from a marketing perspective and all–the player base is much bigger than the playtest base, and if the players are having and extra-hard time with a certain spot, then let’s modify it. It’s like thousands of playtesters saying ‘this part is too hard”, so who are we to ignore them?

But it kinda pisses me off. There’s a part in the previous Half-Life 2 game that is hard as holy hell (the multiple gunships getting into Nova Prospekt), and it kicks my ass a predictably large number of times, but it is far and away one of my favorite parts of the game. Sometimes I’ll go back into the game just to replay that part. If they collected the same stats for Half-Life 2 and saw people were dying a lot and decided to make it easier, I’d be pretty ticked about it.

Saw Superman Returns over the weekend. I don’t think I’ll have real spoilers here, but if you’re ultratouchy about spoilers as I am, you might not want to read this. But then, nobody’s as ultratouchy about spoilers as I am, so.

Read the rest of this entry »

My mom just sent me this…it’s something I drew many, many years ago.

I can’t even imagine how old it is. I got a preference for college-ruled paper pretty early on, and given the subject matter of the original text, it sounds kinda grade-schoolish. (I have a vague recollection that it was existing text that I carefully erased to put the image in, and it wasn’t just filler for the background.)

Man. I don’t remember when I did it or anything, but I remember not being happy with parts of it…the right arm being straight out seemed wrong to me, and an obvious ploy not to draw another hand; the leg in front felt weird, too. But now I’m thinking that’s not too bad for whatever age I was. The backlighting effect’s pretty good, too.

I have a “Blogs you should see” list over there, and I don’t link lightly, so let me tell you why you should…

Suspect Device, by Greg Peters: Great insight on politics, especially in Louisiana…wish I understood half of the Louisiana stuff, but the rest more than makes up for my occasional lack of context. He’s also a published political cartoonist, with archives on the site.

Zompist’s Rant Page, by Mark Rosenfelder: insists it’s not a blog, but eh, we kids know better. Insightful and well-researched views on a number of topics that make you realize there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know. I fear the day the link to the current page changes (great linking strategy you have there, Mark, geez).

Slumbering Lungfish, by Lore Sjöberg: has great bits in itself, but also provides updates on much of the sprawling Sjöberg entertainment empire. I asked him to count his domains, once. I think he said he owns 31, at last count. And here I felt obnoxious for my…um, 8 or so.

The Daily WTF: the only blog currently in that list by someone I don’t know personally. I love tech screwup stories by horrified geeks. Depending on your tech level, some percentage of them will go over your head, but they have a thriving community and there’s always someone who says “I don’t get it”…if you’re interested enough to work it out, there’s probably an explanation.

Geekbloggings, by Joe: a surprising amount of text and insight on various events of to-day. I talk to Joe frequently during the day in IRC, and he rarely ever mentions his blog, which is just surprising because God knows I do. Joe also apparently holds out on some good links, because I am surprised to find stuff in his blog that he doesn’t mention in channel. What the hell, Joe, your blog’s too good for us?

Eau de SeanQ, by SeanQ: I dunno, something about sports and coin collecting and some other stuff. He’s a friend, I felt obligated.

Craig just showed me this:

YAOUNDE, Cameroon (Reuters) — Worried that her daughters’ budding breasts would expose them to the risk of sexual harassment and even rape, their mother Philomene Moungang started ‘ironing’ the girls’ bosoms with a heated stone.

I said, is Cameroon in Africa? That must be Africa. And yes, it is. What’s with the entirely wacky stuff going on in Africa? I’d fully believe this is I saw it:

YAOUNDE, Cameroon (Reuters) — In an attempt to appease “the Elder Gods of Toilet Anger”, Yusana Pholamone followed the traditional remedy of shoving live chickens up his son’s rectums until everyone involved was dead.

I guess it’s lack of health care, and any kind of traditional remedy looks better than no remedy at all, I guess. But still?

YAOUNDE, Cameroon (Reuters) — Thirteen are dead as an attempted C-section went awry in a local village. “My wife could not produce the child,” said Motumbo Yuthasa, the alleged killer. “So I attempted to find the baby in the bellies of the men and women in the village, as my father told me, and his father told him.”

Most of the time when I want to come to my blog, I go to the URL field and type the first “tr” of “trapezoidalinclination.com” before I realize it’s wrong.

I refuse to buy another domain. I refuse. 

<Lore> Also, have we seen the latest eeriest fucking thing ever?
<Lore> http://www.maskon.com/kerry/masks/index.htm
<spinn> oh geez. why?
<Craig> oh, those masks give me nightmares
<Lore> For some reason this is even creepier than the anime version of this.
<spinn> oh god.
<spinn> COMICS.
<spinn> oh man oh man
<Lore> Oh, I missed those!
<spinn> okay. the masks are disturbing but
<spinn> READ THE COMICS
<spinn> I got through four. then I closed the browser, turned off the monitor, and moved it to someone else’s desk
<Lore> NOW YOU ARE A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN! KISS ME!
<Craig> oh dear
<Craig> oh d-d-d-dear dear
<Craig> “this lock will seal you in until I let you go”
<Craig> I never want to hear those words
* Leth puts his house on the market, looks for flights to Guyana
<Leth> must…escape…horror

Order of the Stick (OotS), by Rich Burlew, is a comic that I used to be kinda into, but no longer. It’s pretty funny, and it has the geek factor of being based on Dungeons & Dragons in a self-aware way.

But I finally lost interest due to the lack of regular updates. A while back, I was part of a discussion with Lore when he was getting Bad Gods together, and he was trying to decide whether to update three times a week, or once a week with three items at a time. I said, people like frequent updates more. Others disagreed, saying that people like predictable updates more, and once a week was fine, as long as it’s there when you think it’s going to be there.

I’ve since changed my opinion to agree with them, not in small part because I realized how frustrated I got with the lack of OotS updates. Originally the note at the top of the pages said “updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday”, but that would kinda slide to Monday at 11pm, then maybe Tuesday, then maybe a double-comic on Wednesday, etc., etc. I got involved with the OotS forums for the sole reason of debating this point…and, oy, well, I’ll get to the heart of that in a minute, but for now I’ll say someone pointed out that he had only missed a few updates, and we were still getting nearly the same number of comics we would if he were on the schedule. That’s true, but…something just feels wrong about not getting them when we’re told we will.

Read the rest of this entry »