Friday 28 December 2007 at 7:25 pm
RIP. Thanks for the internet and my first experience with porn! Netscape is dead. Long live Netscape!
Get Firefox!
Wednesday 26 December 2007 at 01:33 am
We concluded a delightful Christmas by watching Michael Moore's recent documentary SiCKO. Michael Moore is, well, many things. Not the most objective person in the world is one title that comes to mind. While I am not an expert in healthcare (I am far better suited to evaluate movies on, say climate change), this was probably the most accurate and calm movie Michael directed to date.
Near the end I was almost in tears. THE SYSTEM IS FUCKING BROKEN PEOPLE. I am frustrated because things can be so much better and yet I am almost powerless to do anything. Hell, I've been denied healthcare coverage and I am a young, healthy 23 year old. This country is no longer great and, if an opportunity presented itself and certain specific significant others were willing, I have no issues leaving this country. Hell, then maybe I could actually get married to the person I love as well.
Wednesday 26 December 2007 at 12:11 am
Christmas! My morning got off to a delightful start at 6am when an East Coast friend of mine decided to do a mass SMS. Timezones people! Seriously!
Now that I got that off my chest, my morning was spectacular. One again my Grandparents from Mom's side came to our morning tradition of gifts between my immediate family and from Santa. One sign of growing up is no longer getting excited about recieving gifts but giving them. I got my family a 530 Roomba. The look on Mom and Dad's faces when they opened it made my Christmas. I don't think they ever expected anything like it in their lifetime.
The late morning and afternoon was spent at my Dad's parents up 100 miles north in Centrilia, Washington. Regrettably I didn't get as many pictures up there as I would have liked.
So what did I get over these past two days?
Vacuum cleaner
Wooden cooking spoons
Chefmate cooking utensils
Two Terry Pratchett books
Mario Galaxy
Wooden cooking spoons
Some inexpensive Tupperware
Scarf
PaJammie bottoms
Gloves
Crockpot
Cookbook for crockpot
7 piece cooking set
Heroes Season 1
Candles, from Boyfriend (to be initiated with a bubble bath)
Pictures
Tuesday 25 December 2007 at 01:03 am
Tonight was Christmas Eve at home. This is a much celebrated tradition as it happened my entire life. It consists of my Mom's side of the family showing up for dinner and gifts. A very traditional dinner I might add which must have my Mom's BBQ pineapple chicken wings and her blue berry salad. One year she attempted to make something normal, like ham or something, and everyone threw a fit.
Christmas Eves are much larger now than when I remember. For many years it involved just ten people, but due to the insistence of my Uncle's branch on having children that number has now ballooned up to 15. I can not fathom how we would have managed in our old house (as you can see above in version 3.0.5). I do miss that place but I digress. This new generation of youngens were surprisingly well behaved compared to years past. The two young boys adore me for some odd reason, although with their oversized t-shirts and their sideways expansion in size they remind me of the wannabe gangster types from the 1990's.
The gifts tonight were fun. I can tell I am getting old when I get excited for receiving cookware. Yes beloved boyfriend, we have some nice new cooking utensils, a covered pot and pan set, and a crock pot. I thought I was being all original by asking for a crock pot and there were two others given tonight, all bigger and fancier than the one I got. Damn family stole my ideas!
Grandma also deserves a special note. My Uncle's family gave them a nice looking phone/answering machine set. She nearly fell out of her chair as if it was the most extravagant gift they ever received. But I am worried. For forever Christmas Day was celebrated at my Grandparents house, but this hasn't happened the past couple years at the instance of Mom and my Uncle due to her health. My Grandparents are giving away increasing sums of money to the family every year and their health continues to decline. Granddad has a constantly sore back and Grandma has a arm which no longer functions in any useful sense. There are few things that terrify me about the future and this is one of them.
Why sixty times and of what you may ask? My Granddad celebrated Christmas Eve in this very property for almost sixty one consecutive years, all but the last 8ish of which were held in that charming little house I mentioned. The ONLY exception was when Mom became very ill with pneumonia one year and it was held at my grandparents house across the field. I will not hold that against his record. Tonight was his 60th Christmas Eve here. How much and how little changes...
Monday 24 December 2007 at 03:48 am
I am addicted to the internet, especially when I am bored. This was most evident today when 50-70% of packets were dropped rendering the internet as usable as dial up over a 9880 baud modem. Finally it seems to be running fine with only 4% packet loss. Much of my day consisted of helping my mom with preparing for our annual hosting of Christmas Eve, more sessions of Supreme Commander in one day than I have played the rest of the month, and finally graduating myself from the university in The Sims 2. Tomorrow I will document the hilarity of 15 people of ages 3 to 80 crammed into my home. My family seriously needs to stop making babies.
In other news, I've updated the blog software to PivotX Alpha 2 which was released today. My geek project for tomorrow is to look into finding a way to have one layer mask modify some layers but not others in GIMP. I need some way for the images to fall off on the sides and fade away. I also need to spice up other areas of the page as well to improve readability. Suggestions are, as always, welcome.
Saturday 22 December 2007 at 02:43 am
In one day my parents and I moved almost all my worldly possessions 15 blocks down the road to my boyfriend's and my new apartment. Two and a half vanfulls and two carfulls of it. The whole process took from one in the afternoon to six at night. If I was a smart man I would have enlisted the help of any friends I had in the area, and sadly at this point there were only two. Forethought was not my strong point this time around. In fact if I were a smart man I would have been in bed long ago.
To my boyfriend's horror I uploaded the current status of our apartment startinghere. It made me appreciate that what little big stuff I have isn't that heavy. I do not look forward to moving his couch up two flights of stairs.
Matter of fact I will treat all my faithful readers, and not so faithful ones, to the floor plan and layout provided by my beloved lover. While the area of the place is a bit smaller than my previous occupancy, my living area will be greatly enlarged. Once we finished moving the last box in I couldn't help but smile, thinking of what this place will be.
Thursday 20 December 2007 at 01:53 am
My roommate mentioned to me the other day how my boyfriend missed the German language and feared his was eroding away. My roommate had similar feelings when he returned from his year long study in the country last year. For the longest time I thought this to be somewhat silly; it is just a language. Just now while I was in the bathroom I realized the parallelism to the symbolism of my own experiences.
After nine years in the marching arts the lower half of my body was, to take a moment to gloat, fairly damn impressive. In high school there were a set of young women who loved it when their drill placed them behind me. Especially when we were in uniform. The relatively thin fabric of our pants really showed off my ass, or so they say.
Recently as I sat doing some leg stretches I noticed that the muscles in my legs were not as large as they use to be. My quads are about half the size they were, my calves are a bit narrower, my skin is more lose then it was before. It made me surprisingly depressed.
In reality it is just muscle after all and can be rebuilt through exercise, but I became saddened because my legs represented a very important part of my life and experiences and adventures that I will probably never experience anything like it again in this life time. While German is just a language it symbolizes something to my boyfriend. It wouldn't surprise me if the abstract emotional chain is identical even though the experiences and the symbols are drasticly different. I just hope he learns how to cope with it better than I have.
Wednesday 19 December 2007 at 04:06 am
The year lease is signed. Derek and I are now going to spend a year together and, like I've said, I am excited and terrified all at the same time. We signed the lease first thing this morning and did the walk though. While I was trying to sign us up for Verizon Fios Internet and TV (which costs less than Comcast and offers more) he kept attempting to do naughty things to me while I was on the phone. After setting up the installation on January 2nd (no internet until then!) we proceeded to check off the Dining Room off our places to do. Five more rooms remain unless he wants to add the hallway and the closets. I may need to draw the line there.
Let us not forget pictures!
Friday 14 December 2007 at 7:09 pm
Yesterday Derek and I submitted our applications for our apartment we are going to share. I am nervous and excited and terrified.
That and I needed a post to get that bloody auto-play video off the front page.
Thursday 13 December 2007 at 3:56 pm
Those of you who suffered the atrocity that my website has become these past few days, my deepest apologies. I am aiming to create a new theme that is anti "Web 2.0." Now, I am aware that Web 2.0 is actually how a site functions (user contributed content), not how it looks (glossy mirrored logos, rounded corners, aka iMac/Pod). I am taking the a more earthly colour scheme inspired by the general direction the next version of Ubuntu is taking and adding a bit of flair to it that isn't a shiny newness.
Now, should I make an brownish theme, a greenish theme, or try to make a good mix of the two?
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 04:09 am
I've upgraded the blogging software to
PivotX, the next generation of the Pivot blogging software. Individual entry pages are broken as my old theme is based in the old way of doing things. I have retheming plans however which will make this current minimalist theme look more plane than... than.... ok my creative side fails at 2 in the morning.
Tuesday 11 December 2007 at 02:03 am
That is all I have to say. He is home. The greatest adventure of my life is about to begin.
Wednesday 05 December 2007 at 2:18 pm
From my homework assignment for my Xenobiology class:
Living
Online Worlds
Massive multiplayer
video game universes are interesting beasts to analyze from a
xeonobiological perspective .
They are a fusion of both artificial life, for obvious reasons, and
human societies as there are often enough people in an online world
that could populate a small city.
Because these universes are quite diverse in terms of mechanics and
structure only one of these will be studied. The game Eve Online
was selected for analysis for several reasons: it is a mature game so
the system is stable, it has a reasonable population of 300,000
subscribers that exist in one universe, a dynamic economy, and the
author's previous experience with the game. In this paper this
system will be described and analyzed to determine which aspects it
shares with
living systems and what would happen to the system if it
were placed into a virtual environment in competition with other
systems.
Eve Online is an
online only game that is composed of a single persistent universe.
Players log in with their client which only provides
a medium for the player to interact with the server. The universe is
drawn in a science fiction setting where the player's avatar, a
virtual representation of themselves,
is represented by futuristic spacecraft. Game mechanics are inspired
by an old computer game called Elite where the player is again an
avatar in a futuristic spacecraft and takes on the role of both
merchant and mercenary in a vibrant and living economy. In Eve
players are organized into cooperative groups called, based on the
game back story, corporations. These corporations
can then be organized into larger groupings called alliances. The
terminology and representation of the universe is of course
arbitrary. The same system could just as well involve unicorns and
candy mountains.
What makes Eve
Online similar to other artificial life experiments is that there is
no boundary as the entity encompasses its environment. Being
a digital environment entropy does not have to be simulated
resulting
in the possibility that the system can be completely self contained
if its genesis was seeded with sufficient resources for a player base
of a given size. CCP,
the company responsible for producing and publishing the game, is
interested in making a profit and expanding their real world market.
Limiting the player base is against their capital interests. As a
result the energy flow of the environment is simulated though
economic faucets and sinks that magically pumps and removes resources
from the system that scales with the player base.
One of the first
criteria in evaluate living systems is its barrier with its
environment. Like other artificial life and computer simulations,
there is no environment and, as a result, no need for a boundary.
This does not mean a boundary does not
exist. On the contrary, the universe is finite in physical size and
will not expand unless the developers code in extra room.
Once players consume the internal resources of this finite
environment the system will stagnate and die. To compensate the
environment is simulated. A source of energy is simulated by
regenerating resources for the players to consume. Despite internal
local competition, the system as a whole is continuously well fed.
The energy flow is
also an interesting description as it can be difficult to determine
what parts do what.
One advanced feature Eve Online has is specialized energy inputs.
There are two sources of regenerating input: ore in asteroids for the
player to mine and pirate ships that are controlled by the AI which,
when destroyed, drop goodies for the player to collect. The raw ore
is then processed into materials which are then used to construct new
products or to maintain some of the larger craft and space stations
which would otherwise become inoperable.
One pillar of game
design is to trick the player into thinking that some fancy
simulation or game mechanics is going on instead of fully simulating
it, especially if the end results are the same.
There are additional inputs whos identity and function are suspect
for this reason.
The first item is insurance players may take out that, for a given
investment, they receive and even larger sum upon the destruction of
the ship. There also exists computer controlled buyer and sellers of
goods which will always buy and sell whatever wares they need or
carry. In both these situations they have unlimited resources, but
are intended to be part of the system, while their actual function is
a faucet and sink of resources.
Other deviations
from conventional models of life include various entities of the
system taking on different roles in whole or in part. One such
example is that the players, or more appropriately their character
avatars, take on multiple responsibilities for different aspects of
the system. Unlike other games of the economic genera there is no
computer controlled systems that provide any of the functions
delivered by the player. If no one is logged into the game the
system is frozen in its current state. Players take on the roll of
catalysts and energy currency for this reason. They also can group
together in organized entities and these entities are organized again
into larger structures with their own properties.
These individual entities could also be studied at a system level
but, due to the diversity of their internal workings, would be
difficult to study at a general level.
There are various
options to create a more living system. For example, the creation
of a virtual environment, a metauniverse of sorts, where various
other virtual realities would compete for limited energy sources and
abundant metabolic waste. This would be very interesting from a game
design standpoint as well; players could not interact with these
other systems directly but indirectly through their manipulation of
the state of their own system. Such a situation could drastically
change the game to a more cooperative paradigm within a given
universe.
Limiting input,
either by competing systems or just limiting the spontaneous
generation of raw resources, would
affect the system greatly. Growth would be limited, a downfall for a
company seeking profit. Internally players would take fewer risks,
be more efficient at resource collecting and recycling, and be more
likely to store resources. As the system builds up stored resources
there may be some growth as the more charitable players and
organizations supply their members with resources. Eventually the
players and groups who stored the most will attack those who did not.
The opposite is just as possible where smaller groups would band
together to take on the largest and most powerful. The system took
up too much energy from the environmental flux and, as a result, will
inflict damage unto itself accelerating the entropy.
Metabolic waste
would be an entirely new concept for the game but would not be
difficult to implement. It could be something as simple as a
byproduct from the manufacturing process that, unless relocated or
removed, would induce slower and less efficient reactions or even
damage to structures. Just like a metabolism, the
more active the economy the more waste is produced. Specialized
systems would have to be developed to transport these wastes into
less populated regions of the Eve universe. Due to the finite
boundary (and assuming it would not expand) this solution will only
suffice for so long. There would have to be means to transport the
excess waste outside of the system, such as by a black hole or some
other futuristic plot device. How the system reacts to buildup of
local waste and ways to seek better energy sources in the
metauniverse is
beyond the scope of this paper.
Eve Online exhibits
many life like properties.
Some are done by trickery instead of actual simulation. Others are
modeled fairly well such as the general economic system as it relates
to metabolism. One change, such as the creation of a competitive
meta universe, can alter existing mechanics and provide avenues for
new gameplay mechanics. There are some upcoming games, such as SPORE
by EA Games,
which will attempt to explore the concept of a meta universe on a
limited scale. As internet availability is becoming more and more
common we should see more examples of almost living virtual spaces.
