jmoiron.net

Went to the/a doctor today. From what she told me, my lower abdominal pain and other symptoms can be one of 4 possibilities:

read the rest of "Jaystorm"

Just "finished" hacking together some code that started out as a small desire and has ended up an obsession of sorts. Initially, it was just going to be a smart, specialized file renamer. It has ballooned into a poorly written (but fairly solid) beast of a program with crc checking and unrar/zipfile support. When I say it's poorly written, I mean it's not beautiful like my xdccq module is, for instance. It isn't elegant in the least, does things in a way that is acknowledged as poor design decisions, and the main dispatch is a giant ugly conditional mess. But it works pretty well!

read the rest of "ninrename"

There was a lot of talk in the channel about RPGs of various types and countries of origin. This might have been spurred on ultimately by a thread at insertcredit which was not too kind to the Japanese subgenre. There has been a lot written on the subject, but I'm going to start with a little story.

read the rest of "Anatomy of an RPG"

I am virtually surrounded by this chuck klosterman article. People who know me well know that I am never really interested in one thing for very long, and that my interests almost always run deep. Such is the case with virtually all of the things I write about, and it just so happens that video games.

read the rest of "Arrogant Linux Nerd"

When I got back to my apartment tonight, half of the ceiling in the common area was gone and my room was about 90 degrees. I'll explain the hole on the ceiling; but rest easy knowing that the upcoming soul searching is cyclical in nature. The heat kind of gave me a nostalgic feeling about first moving in; building my furniture at night in the heat, getting eaten alive by bugs on my trips to and fro, and my first few nights here trying to sleep to forget about how uncomfortable I was. Last summer, looking for a place to move to, was completely surreal; it seems like it was all a dream now.

read the rest of "Summer already?"

I read the whole archive of Elf Only Inn the other day, mostly at the impersonal behest of Tycho, who's on comic has left me somewhat empty these days. This archive reading of course reminded me that I haven't read the Thin H Line/Sexy Losers in a while, so maybe I'll eventually get to doing that.

read the rest of "Elf only inn"

After carefully reading my own writing, namely RPGd which takes up so much vertical space as to make me somewhat embarrassed, I realized it was rife with errors. It's not the grammatical or spelling errors, since those don't phase me; its the stylistic errors that bother me. Repetition. Repetition. Ugh.

read the rest of "Shirtless o' clock deux"

Today's title is brought to you by an old favorite, RPGd, and is brought to you as such because of the events at the end of Fall Semester '03 at Stevens Institute of Technology as well as Christmas '03 back at the Moiron household. In many ways, the last 3 or 4 weeks of my life have been heavily centered around video games and the pursuite thereof. So, I bring to you my thoughts on these matters.

read the rest of "RPGd"

The past week or so has been simultaneously entertaining and ironic. After the most dissapointing week of my life as far as attendence at work is concerned, I make up for it with the busiest weekend since classes ended. Fitting that my vacation from work was easily broken this weekend, 1 week before classes are slated to start.

read the rest of "Making of a cyborg"

Its been quite a few days since I set out to rewrite this site in python, and so far, I have only constructed a minimal scaffolding where I want my great statue to stand. How the brilliant fire of fervor can die down to the smoking head of a recently lit match, blown out by the wind or put out of its misery by a single rain drop, is beyond me. How my mind that seemingly lives only in pursuit of its own destruction due to overactivity manages to latch on to something so completely only to let it go is also not yet within my understanding.

read the rest of "Somebody's Heine is crowding my icebox"

It has been brought to my attention by a certain someone that I have not updated in a while. Being one of the few and proud users of propper capitalization, I suppose I should fight the good fight and struggle through this time of the not altogether barren wordscape that grows in the plains of my brain. Its a rich field in there.

read the rest of "cem entradas, sem gas"

As the title would suggest, and as its double meaning would infer, my luck runs in a uniquely bad pattern spiraling ever downwards towards depths incomprehensible by the nature of down itself. Let us examine the evidence, as examining evidence seems to be what I do here now.

read the rest of "Acyclic crap luck"

Today was a day of video games; starting off with a little Marvel vs. SNK2, then moving on to some crazy cart game, then Tokyo Street Racing, which was a pretty cool rice boy sim, and then after an incident of a football game which I will go into later, there was more MvSNK2 followed by Guilty Gear X. That was cool. Now, to the uncool.

read the rest of "Guilty Gear X"

I'm not quite sure how to initiate this discussion. I know that it was initiated for me by the recent release of the [Forza 3] racing sim, but it's something that has been on my mind for years. As someone who used to prefer the cheap thrills and pure raw adrenaline of arcade racers, I know what it's like to bemoan a game filled with cars that "won't turn."

read the rest of "The joys of racing"