With Wonderlands in the mop-up phase, me and J need a new adventure. Gunfire Reborn will slot in to our short sessions pretty well, but we need a more campaigny co-op experience for the full sessions.
... Metacritic aggregates tons of data and provides crowdsourced ratings on video games, movies, and whatever else. Due to its generic charter, a lot of important details (for choosing a game) aren't represented on their site. "Up to 24 Players" doesn't describe the co-op experience very well. Enter Co-optimus, a web site dedicated to multiplayer gaming.
The plan for this month to rave about Horizon: Forbidden West and Elden Ring. The Ukraine crisis was an ominous but interesting situation three weeks ago. Sadly, now people are fighting for their country and seeking refuge and having their lives destroyed by a pointless invasion.
Jan 1's covid spike looked bad, but case rates have just kept going. As such, here's a long post that covers fractals, autoencoders, style transfer, and some vidya.
So other than progressing plot and content, I don't expect to have much to add to my initial take on Far Cry. Well, except a surprise visit from Danny-f'in-Trejo.
Another variant, another Far Cry, another Cowboy Bebop, another L4D, another Nioh, another Mass Effect. Oh yeah, and I mentioned all of them last month. (What I'm saying is my post title is totally on point.)
I was okay missing the first round of PS5s; launch day hardware isn't the best and there weren't a ton of games available. Now, a year on, I'd like for mine and J's next game (Back 4 Blood or Far Cry) to be on the new system.
Posting has been somewhat hamstrung. For one, I've upgraded my phone and camera hardware. The other blocker has been an overhaul of my photo preprocessor.
Let's start with the hardest-hitting item. Costco has a $200 handle of baijiu. I'm not sure if it's more shocking that someone decided bamboo liquor was worth importing or that there is a baijiu that costs more than 8 yuan.
I tried to think of a better title - I really did. It's bad now, but in a couple years I'm going to say, "A portmanteau *and* that word we no longer use, spluh". But, like, that's what it was. Memorial Day weekend and then the memening of GME, AMC, and BB. There's no other way to describe it. I'm sorry but I will not apologize.
The backyard terraces need fencing. Since there are two terraces, it almost made sense to connect the two and create a verdana/gazebo/pergola/palapa over the middle terrace.
Failing miserably is something that everyone does from time to time. They either obsess over it or pretend to grow from it while quietly obsessing over it. Sometimes the fails aren't of the "I did the right thing and didn't succeed" flavor but more of the "I know better but still did it" flavor. The beginning of February has been pretty faily in kilroysville, but I see it as an opportunity to grow.
It's 2021 now. Not too different from 2020 but people are more optimistic.
... It's mostly video games, coding, streaming, and house projects. Still. But there was some golf.
The covid surge that everyone expected after Thanksgiving has hit. Jes is busy at work. I can get by with games, streaming, jogging, and taking the dog out.
The first week of December almost always brings one of the biggest swells of the year. This one wasn't epic, but good enough to take a vacation Friday for some 0730 shooting and 0930 surfing. The lead image is a pretty good depiction of the difference between pre-sunrise shots and early-sunrise shots. The Black's cliffs make for a pretty tight window for good lighting.
Among Us memes are on the decline, but they got a little bump with the votingest election in US history. The lolbaters haven't played it in a couple of months, but we did have a few rousing sessions of griefing and dysfunction.
A little starfighter chat and then my next iteration in trading. I passed pilot level 15 after maybe a dozen dogfights and fleet battles, that doesn't intrinsically mean much except in the context of unlockables. I have most of the mods I want, leaving a few to acquire for tuning and experimentation. And I've acquired some fun cosmetics like the Twi'lek skin and some neat fighter paint jobs. I'm pretty happy with the rate of unlocks, though it'd be neat to have more variety in cosmetics.
Covid continues, but the surge appears to have tailed off some. I guess this is the new normal until one of the many "almost-there" vaccines works out.
Still waiting on the lens, I've made headway on the monopod. I won't cut the main pole until I know how high the lens sits, but I assembled the stem piece.
Saturday I put the remodeled media room to good use with some socially-responsible zombie killing. The Last of Us Pt II was released on Friday; the long-awaited follow up to a game that ranked third on J's all time list and fell just behind Metal Gear Solid on mine.
Having bigger fish to fry, I hadn't really touched the media room in about ten years, aside from swapping some electronics and furniture. It seemed like a modest house project was in order when we hit reopening stage 2.5. The plan centered around repainting a darker, more cinematic color and moving the audio wiring from being exposed to hidden behind moulding.
From Corona to SpaceX to the Floyd protests, there's a lot going on and I'm just sitting here isolating. If only I had a 5G bioshield I could go ride some flat waves, maybe next birthday. Still, I can't complain about a beer and cheese of the month club and some home office-friendly dinosaur slippers. Thanks, Jes!
Another week of quarantined programming, video games, and hitting f5 on economic news.
... I was going to dig into hyperparameters and retry with batchnorm, but diverted to a new model based on the idea that a seven convolutional layers is getting toward the feature recognition domain, and this isn't really what I want. I'm looking to characterize input based, perhaps, more on gradients than edges (maxpool bad?). I don't want the model to learn that human faces are generally photos and zombie faces are generally video games. I want it to see the grit of a photo, the depth of field of an SLR photo, the smooth rendering of a screenshot, or even its pixelation for older games.
Here's a little gallery/writeup on Shadow of the Colossus, the PS+ free update on the PS2 classic. In case anyone's considering a playthrough, I start with a short summary of the gameplay then - with callouts - progress to show each colossus (gameplay spoilers) and finally wrap up with the ending (plot spoilers).
Two weeks ago it was uncertain how this covid thing would play out. I don't think much has changed. I get the feeling we'll look back on this as either the biggest overreaction since terrorism or the epic disaster we absolutely could have avoided.
... The socially responsible thing to do, naturally, is self-sequester and play video games (ensuring one's character has proper PPE).
At last I finished playthrough 1, so here's some screencaps, stuff I learned, and ideas I'm taking into new game+. Gameplay and plot spoilers are at the end, so some things might look a bit out of sequence.
Here are screenshots from this decade that I like technically, aesthetically, or nostalgically. You may notice the post is at the beginning of the decade, I've chosen this as a convention so I can keep a running post for in-progress decades.
Cattle's xmas Steam gift this year was Pako - Car Chase Simulator. It had me pretty well captivated for my first two-hour session. I think I worked out a little bit of strategy:
Taking a few weeks off for the mcl tear, I did a photo session at volleyball. I started with a post-mounted off-camera speedlight triggered by the on-camera flash. It had the best lighting (side lighting woo), but was hard to keep the flash out of the frame. Probably would have been better to use the 20mm rather than the 50.
I'm on MCL tear number... err too many. Still, that just means no vball or sball, I can still game and do GBES events. For Brian's expedition, we started with Tiger Tiger donuts and finished at Street Car for some unbelievably hot chicken.
August meant it was time again for the annual Vegas trip. The Silverton was a pretty chill spot that was convenient for us, but there was good and bad. I killed it at craps, and Matt at the giant Wheel of Fortune machine. As usual, pai gow was a slow, losing battle. Corey and I posted up at a roulette table while we were waiting for the crowd to thin out elsewhere. Three times we caught the dealer (wheeler?) clearing his chips off a square Corey had won - pretty darn sketchy. For the rest of the weekend the name Roger was a synonymous with infamy.
Who doesn't love a good list? In this post:
... Good balance for the 2013 hits: brewing, surfing, bike work, renovations, video games, and E3.
... Good year for video games. Borderlands, Far Cry, and Fallout. I guess renovations and weimaraners weren't as exciting.
... Things moved away from video games in 2021 traffic and toward current events - namely the Boomerkrieg, the Ever Given incident, and the GME squeeze.
A couple small changes that are fairly evident below: I created an about page and a list of lists.
... The list of lists was inspired by publishing J's top ten video games. Part of the process led to another synergy for having some common code between my git toolkit and Java markup parser: automated text overlay. So Excel spreadsheet list + image set = list post, and not just buzzfeed-y top ten stuff. There's still some work to be done for rendering text in a way that pops, for now it's just drawing on a BufferedImage/Graphics2D canvas.
A long while back, J sent me his top ten video games of all time per an ongoing discussion about such matters. It took me some time to furnish my own, but I have at last.
... But really, it's just a list of video games. At the very least it's a brief trip down memory lane, at best there's coffee splashed in my face over slighting Diablo III (which sucked, btw). Without further ado code red:
Last month's journeys were followed by an early March trip out to the east coast, so suffice it to say I've been happy to spend some time in the man cave.
2019 has been all work and all play.
... Project needs dictated that I can take a quick trip out east, so I squeezed in a stop at J's place for some video games, brew tasting, and quality time with the fam.
The Brogue Squadron finished the Heroes of Eturi campaign, winning three victory points to one with one VP mission to spare. The final few scenarios included some cool variations like a space station and ground station.
The Gentleman's Beer Exploration Society took a short hike to Bitter Brothers brewing. It wasn't exactly the backcountry, but it was a great day to be outdoors.
The usual routine didn't work out so well. Between a broken down Metrolink on the way back and an unfortunate fatal incident on the tracks going north, I spent eight hours on the train to three hours at the expo.
J and I are pretty far along Monster Hunter, so for a change of pace we started another playthrough of The Division. We're hoping two years of fixes have solved some of the endgame/pvp stuff. There's also a bunch of dlc that might be worth checking out.
Jon, Dan, Derrick, and I took a trip to Park City. After considerable research, it appeared Snowbird would have been the preferred resort (acreage, conditions) but has a small and expensive inventory of on-site accommodations. To add to that, many of the ski areas have insane rental tax rates. Who would have thought Park City would be the more reasonably-priced option (for a ski-in/ski-out trip plan).
As avid historians of video games, J and I have a pretty good depth and breadth of experiences. This'll be my first attempt at a list feature [l], written in 2019 but backdated to 2017 when he actually authored the list. Also it's actually a top eleven due to a last-minute addition/re-think.
The Duc needs a new clutch, a valve adjustment, and maybe some troubleshooting of the cutch hydraulics. Between that, 50k+ miles, and having my eye on the ebike scene since I first saw them at Laguna, it seemed like a good time to go for it.
The Cooley Halloween party moved to the Tonkers' place due to special circumstances, but it still had costumes, pizzas, and beers. Jessica's Gamora costume won best of the night, (another) Chris's beekeeper won worst.
Jes and I took a trip up to Oakland to catch up with the hometown crowd and see some Raiders football. There was a bit of haze from the Santa Rosa fires, but not, like, SD in '03 or anything:
Of course more east coast trips. I can't be mad, I brought some Pot Belly peppers back this past time. And the one before that I got to ride the sweet Detroit airport tram that is overhead in the terminal.
Finished a few things this month, the first of which was a resurface job on the pool. It wasn't in bad shape, but since I'd drained it I figured I'd go ahead and apply a new layer of epoxy. The canopy made all of this considerably easier, although epoxy in an enclosed area has some disadvantages.
Mark brought Civ into the office and we've played through it twice. It's pretty amazing - it captures the spirit of the franchise while making it tabletop-able and adding a few elements that don't exist in the computer game.
After a morning paddle out with the bros, Jes and I went down to the cove to watch the fireworks. The bluffs above the caves were a great spot, although the people on kayaks might have had more fun.
Last year some League of Sporters undertook an incredible journey, one that proved too strenuous for a single weekend. But like any semi-casual athlete, giving up just isn't in our nature. To celebrate Dave finishing his master's, we completed the second leg of the Camp'n'crawl.
So J and I are letting The Division rest a bit and give the developers a chance to get their act together or move on and deal with the irate fans. I'll defer to his analysis:
I had a Utah ski trip on the books before the mcl thing happened. I decided to go anyway and made an eleventh hour decision to bring skis even if I wasn't fit to use them.
Since the futon is semi-permanently relocated to the guest bedroom, I decided to renovate the closets that used to just hang out behind it. Floor, walls, shelves. Now I have decent game storage and a surfboard check.
At long last we can crawl the postapocalyptic wasteland again, Fallout 4 is here. I haven't played all that much of it, and it's taken awhile to settle back into the gameplay style.
The Galaxy S3 finally died after it took a tumble off of my soccer bag not long ago. I was way out of contract so it was a good time to evaluate the options:
I just started with the Planetside 2 beta, on J's suggestion. Not for lack of desire, I haven't played Battlefield or CoD online so it's my first MMOFPS experience. It's pretty good, there are a lot of cool mechanics, although the gameplay isn't Bungie-slick.
A long time back blogspot removed the feature that enabled publishing to an external domain. Using a little perl-fu, I created a simple markup-to-html processor and went independent. Well, that code was shoestringy and so it's finally time to EOL it.
Somewhere along the way the Duc's voltage regulator decided to crack and leak. The problem manifested as a dead (new) battery and may well have been the reason my led tails blew. The prescribed voltage/resistance tests indicated that the alternator was fine, to my relief. When I pulled and inspected the regulator it seemed pretty certain.
I finally stepped into the new gen of consoles with Destiny for ps4. No xbone for me. Microsoft angered me far too much with crappy hardware and paid-for internet on 360 followed by the kinect snafu, subsequent lies, and a too-high price point. I'm no Sony fanboy, but a few leaked credit card numbers and prosecuting people who put Linux on their consoles started to pale in comparison to Redmond's transgressions. Sadly, Sony began charging for internet play with ps4, but at least they try to add value with free downloadables.
I stopped by the LA Convention Center to see what all the hubbub was about. The new consoles were heavily featured, with very little of the controveries featured in the pressers and internet. There was a lot of the usual stuff, more COD, MW, NFS, GT, Forza, Final Fantasy, etc. The Final Fantasy XV trailer looked pretty awesome though, annnd like they're maybe trying Assassin's Creed style gameplay(?).
My favorite englishman turned 40. We did a throwback lunch sess with Connie and afterward he and I tailgated with Cheese Shoppe sandwiches. Classy Guy had Perrier, I had Bawls.
Wednesday the sixth was e3 for me and the mforma guys. Hands down the most anticipated attraction for me was Borderlands 2. Thanks to Chris (aka zombiepancakes), we got a spot in the vip demo with no waiting. The sequel looks to have much better production quality without messing with series' excellent rpg/shooter formula.
Everyone made it out alive. No zombie flu, only a few stitches between the lot of us. The food rocked, there was a massive handegg match, dogs were all over the place.
I bought Starcraft on Friday, it's been awhile since I had any rts fun. The game's great, but I think I'm done with Blizzard, they pulled some serious Sony crap with this one. It all stems from the innocuous system requirement listed on the box, "Broadband Internet connection". Here's about how it went down:
Bpf 2.0 is on its way. Since blogger dropped ftp support I've had to write scripts to migrate everything to a custom setup. There's plenty left to do and some of the parsing needs perfecting, but it's decent progress considering the job hours I've worked this month.
Last month I posted my favorite photos from the 2010-2019 decade, here's its virtual cousin. Here are screenshots from this decade that I like technically, aesthetically, or nostalgically. You may notice the post is at the beginning of the decade, I've chosen this as a convention so I can keep a running post for in-progress decades.
So Bungie finished their contribution to the Halo series and did the dreaded franchise handoff. This has led to the titles Halo Wars and Halo ODST. After Dan came down again I had a jones for more shooter action so I picked up the recent release. As expected, it plays pretty much the same as the last three with minor visual tweaks and new features.
New lighting for the living room. You probably didn't notice, but I ms painted in a bookshelf to indicate what it'll look like sans line of sight to the light sources. Here's how it is now:
Smash Brothers Brawl is pretty good. At first the game appears to be little different from the previous installment. The controls and mechanics are the same, in fact you can play with a GameCube controller. The canon of characters, moves, and levels has been preserved but with quite a few additions.
I imagine the first thing people look for is motion control, as it is synonymous with the Wii. There is none. And that is as much a relief as it is a disappointment. I dreaded the possibility of a difficult control scheme (and I don't doubt the developers experimented with more than a few) simply to exploit the Wii's trademark feature. I expected something simplistic like shaking the controller to perform an attack, as in Mario Universe. But the controls are 100% old school and that adds some approachability to the game.
We finally got on the bandwagon. Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah. Apologies, sore tendons makes me giddy. Rock Band is basically Forza with instruments instead of a wheel. It takes practice, patience, and you really can't compete at a high level without knowing the track. Damn, pun counter is at two already. I'm on fire.
So Yahoo reported on a study by a German research group that concluded that racing video games are linked to reckless driving.
'Driving actions in these games often include competitive and reckless driving, speeding and crashing into other cars or pedestrians. Those who played the games most often were more likely to report engaging in aggressive and risky driving and getting in auto accidents.'
... So I assert the study's findings go both ways - and Yahoo decided to play the alarmist and report just on the ills of racing video games. Sure GTA will make you want to drive fast, sideswipe cops, and shoot up pedestrians because you're an idiot, conformist human being who wears G-Unit tees because that's what they do on television. But if the game is modeled on realistic competition (both the mechanics and consequences) you'll be better off.