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  • Dark Liquid 10:37 am on April 30, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Upgrading to Natty 

    I’m currently upgrading my desktop machine to Natty and once again it did the same thing that almost broke my last install – it trashed the gdk-pixbuf loaders.cache, making many gtk apps unusable. Considering the update program itself is a gtk app, this is not good.

    Luckily, I caught it doing it in the terminal of the update program, so I ran the following to fix it:

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    <code lang="bash">
    sudo bash
    /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders > /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache
    </code>

    Also, the update servers were so slow, I ended up downloading the dvd via torrent, mounting the iso and then using the cdromupgrade script on the image to do the update. getting the torrent was quick (600+kbps) but downloading packages manually was going at a max of 21kbps. Something to keep in mind.

     

  • Dark Liquid 9:24 am on April 30, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Random Linux Tip – Clearing out old kernels on Ubuntu 

    I get fed up occasionally of the million and one old kernels I have installed after multiple updates and upgrades of my Ubuntu install, so I have the following shell script snippet to sort it out for me:

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    <code lang="bash">
    sudo aptitude -F '%p' search linux-{image,headers,restricted}-2.6~i | grep -v `uname -r | sed -r 's/-[a-z0-9A-Z]+$//'`
    </code>

    That pumps out a list of all the installed kernels and associated images/modules/etc apart from the one you are currently using. It also keeps around suffixed kernels at the same version as your current one (so if you have the -pae, -rt, -smp, -generic and -preempt kernels installed, it will leave the ones that match the version number of your current kernel).

    Now, if you want to be dangerous and not check the output, you can bin them all with a single command, like so:

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    <code lang="bash">
    sudo aptitude -F '%p' search linux-{image,headers,restricted}-2.6~i | grep -v `uname -r | sed -r 's/-[a-z0-9A-Z]+$//'` | xargs sudo aptitude purge -y
    </code>

    Et voila! Goodbye superfluous kernels!

     

    • Ralph Corderoy 10:08 am on May 10, 2011 Permalink

      Don’t think the searching aptitude needs the sudo?

    • Dark Liquid 11:33 am on May 10, 2011 Permalink

      I think you’re probably right.

  • Dark Liquid 9:44 pm on April 2, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , characters, , writeup   

    A Penny For My Thoughts – Character Writeup 

    For some more information about A Penny For My Thoughts, refer to my previous post and the official game website.

    Sadly my wife threw away the memory triggers we came up with, so I only have the ones that were selected by each player. As I recall, each player wrote a total of 5 triggers, for a total at the start of 30 possible triggers. We didn’t really keep note of who did what when, or the guiding questions, so I’m just writing up the complete characters.

     

    Character 1
    Player: Me

    1. Recall a pleasant memory
      When I think of a championship tennis match I remember killing the #1 tennis player in England for al-Qaeda. We had chosen such an unconventional target for the simple reason that it would be broadcasted live internationally and give the world a clear message that we could get anyone, anywhere – even right up close to the Royal family itself. I’d trained for years in deep cover to get to Wimbledon and face off against the #1 player in the country and after beating him, we shook hands and I used a poison needle to inject a fast acting neuro-toxin into his palm. He died almost instantly.
      What was pleasant about it?
      I succeeded in my mission.
    2. Recall an unpleasant memory
      When I think of ring a ring of roses I remember my nephews birthday party. I remember he and my wife getting killed by counter-terrorists during a raid. I ran, stealing a taxi and driving to a safe house without trying to save them.
      What was unpleasant about it?
      My family died and I did nothing but ran away. I put the mission first and suffered crushing guilt from that moment on.
    3. Recall how you came to be here
      When I think of sea waves I remember being on a luxury cruise, looking for the reports of my exploits on television, murdering someone and starting my new life. I’d quickly left the country after the incident with my family. It was clear the authorities knew it had been me and I’d been laying low, but I’d slipped up, staying in the country for my nephews party and getting my family killed for my mistake. The cell put me on a luxury cruise where I would stop off in the Caribbean and leave ship to take on a new identity and life from a contact there. I was still charged with pride and excitement about the mission success and was being sloppy, looking for reports on the news, but surprisingly there was very little coverage which made me angry. Eventually, someone did recognise me so I had to kill them. Of course, it might just have because I was a famous tennis player, they might not have heard about the assassination, but I could take no more chances, especially after being so reckless.
      How did you lose your memory?
      I went to meet my contact at the docks, got my papers and new identity and left to meet up with the people that would smuggle me off the island we had docked at when during my run to the pick up point I slipped and hit my head.

    Do you want to remember your past? No.

     

    Character 2
    Player: Barry

    1. Recall a pleasant memory
      When I think of the sounds of screaming I remember when I went to the funfair with my best friend. We dared each other to go into the haunted house. I was planning to scare my friend whilst in the house, but something jumped out of a wardrobe in the haunted house and I ended up screaming.
      What was pleasant about it?
      I got to go to the fair with my best friend.
    2. Recall an unpleasant memory
      When I think of falling down the stairs I remember trying to escape a hospital. I was patient zero in a growing epidemic and whilst sick and delirious I fell down the stairs while trying to find my way out. As I fell I pulled over a medical cart with me and got a syringe full of an unknown substance embedded in my knee, which I accidentally injected into me whilst trying to pull it out. I managed to get out of the hospital but passed out before I could get very far.
      What was unpleasant about it?
      I was sick, delirious and in terrible pain and to make matters worse possibly injected with something dangerous.
    3. Recall how you came to be here
      When I think of scraping my knee I remember fleeing the custody of some paramedics that were taking me back to the hospital. I ran through an alley way, convinced I had to get to my best friend’s house in my feverish delirium to see her one last time before I died from either the illness or this mystery chemical I was injected with. I stole a car and drove to her house but on the way there I crashed.
      How did you lose your memory?
      As I lay in the crashed car, I realised that my friend was actually at the hospital all along and that I needed to try and get back to her because in my delirium I’d unwittingly abandoned her. The shame and pain of the accident was too much and I passed out.

    Do you want to remember your past? No.

     

    Character 3
    Player: Greg

    1. Recall a pleasant memory
      When I think of the smell of lavender I remember looking for my cat in my grandparents back garden. There were lavender bushes in their garden and as I searched for the cat, I came across a stranger stood over a shallow grave at the bottom of the garden.
      What was pleasant about it?
      I loved playing with my cat and hiding in all the various places in that garden.
    2. Recall an unpleasant memory
      When I think of the crunchy feeling of leaves underfoot I remember skinny dipping in the lake and the cat coming to get me. When I got out, I stepped barefoot onto the leaves covered the lake shore. I got dressed and went back to the house to find policemen there. They told me my grandmother was attacked and had been rushed to hospital.
      What was unpleasant about it?
      She later died in A&E. She lost a lot of blood.
    3. Recall how you came to be here
      When I think of a wasp sting I remember how my granddad died. We were at his shed when he got stung and he was allergic. I also got stung but didn’t have my injector with me so we only had the one shot from his injector between us. It was a choice between him or me and I chose to live. I had to call funeral services and the house didn’t feel like home any more.
      How did you lose your memory?
      The stress and guilt and grief was all too much and I just broke down under the pressure.

    Do you want to remember your past? Yes.

     

  • Dark Liquid 9:30 am on March 13, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: android, clanforge, plugins, slidescreen   

    Clanforge Slidescreen Plugin 

    I’ve finally done my first ever Android project, and by done, I mean got something working and usable, if not necessarily finished.

    To lay some groundwork, I use an alternate home screen on my HTC Desire called Slidescreen by Larva Labs. Slidescreen is absolutely amazing, it completely changed how I use my phone, bring all the information I’m interested in into one easy to access place. I highly recommend it. Larva Labs are currently developing the next release of Slidescreen and with it comes some exciting new features, the most interesting and valuable of which is the ability to write plugins for Slidescreen to integrate whatever data you want into it. I’m running the beta for Slidescreen 2 and I’m loving it.

    So, to get my feet wet with Android development, I thought I’d write a quick plugin for Slidescreen to pull information from Clanforge, Multiplay‘s customer interface for game server rentals. The plan was to load data over Clanforge’s API and display a list of your servers and their current status in Slidescreen so you can keep track of whether they are up or not, how many players are n them them, etc.

    Over the course of this weekend, it came together quite well and I now have a basic version up and running. I built the entire thing using a combination of Eclipse, Geany, Vi and the command line android tools until I finally got more comfortable with using Eclipse exclusively. I hit some annoying problems, the main one being that the SVG icon parser in Slidescreen seems to be very, very fragile and for the first few times I tried getting the plugin to work, my SVG file from Inkscape made the plugin memory leak and throw NullPointerExceptions around like it was going out of style. Eventually I crafted a ‘working’ SVG, but for some reason it’s showing up invisible, so I need to figure out why. UPDATE: Didn’t figure out what about my SVG icon was breaking, but did manage to get a rudimentary SVG icon working for it which I knocked up using an online editor.

    However, it’s up and running and here is the proof! Pics! Because it did happen!

    The code is available here: https://github.com/darkliquid/ClanforgeSlidescreenPlugin

     

  • Dark Liquid 8:04 am on March 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    A Penny For My Thoughts 

    So, we played a game of A Penny For My Thoughts last night and I enjoyed it immensely.

    APFMT is another story-centric game from Evil Hat with a twist – you don’t play any characters, but rather a group of amnesiacs going through an experimental drug/group therapy system to regain their memories. The game plays rather like an extended group character generation session, but with an emphasis on story-telling. There are no dice, no stats: it’s a complete departure from traditional D&D style games.

    I’ll admit from the start that running the game (so much that any one person can run it, giving there is no GM, per se) was a sort of test for my group. I’ve wanted to run a Dresden Files RPG game for a while which is also very story-centric with a large focus on group decisions, shared narrative control and collaborative story-telling. Dresden Files falls in between the traditional style and this more story-focused, collaborative one. I wanted to see how my group would react to this very different style of gameplay and so ran this quick one shot game to expose them to it.

    Overall, it was a success. One of the players made up their minds almost immediately that they didn’t like it and decided to make a bit of a nuisance of themselves so we eventually suggested they leave since they weren’t enjoying themselves to save themselves getting bored as us getting distracted.

    In hindsight, I think running the game slightly differently could have made it more fun for everyone – the player who left is very much an action-focusrd hack’n'slash type of guy and if I’d used the example facts and assurances in the book, which set the premise of us all being covert operatives, it might have been more enjoyable for him than the entirely mundane setting I established (which didn’t preclude being a covert operative, but didn’t encourage it either).

    Given the lack of familiarity with the system and the fact that many of the players weren’t well practiced at improv we didn’t finish everyone’s questionnaires. However on of the players did, so I’ll quickly summerise it now.

    The first memory was a pleasant one and the memory trigger he selected was one by our unruly player: “The sound of screaming”.

    Guiding questions turned the scene into a childhood visit to a fun fair with a long time friend and the memory started with the two entering a haunted house. The first decision was about actually entering it or not and who paid. He entered the house after making the friend pay for them both and they wandered through until they reached a corner, where another decision was made. The guides made some suggestions and he chose to shout Boo! behind the friend. They both ran out of the house and the memory ended on a kiss.

    The next memory was an unpleasant one and started with the trigger of “falling down the stairs”.

    The guiding questions established a large time gap, setting this memory in adult age. The setting became a busy, overcrowded hospital and he was feeble, patient zero in some kind of epidemic.

    The next decision points resulted in him spilling chemicals everywhere as he tried to sneak out of the hospital, getting a hypodermic of an unknown substance embedded in his knee when he fell, snapping the needle and accidentally injecting himself and feeling very sick and disorientated.

    The final memory was of how he came to be it the institute where this therapy session was taking place and started with the memory trigger of a grazed knee on concrete.

    This memory continued directly on from the last, following his escape from an ambulance whilst being returned to the hospital after his last attempt. He was gong to see the friend from the childhood memory.

    Each decision led him to wander through the streets in a confused state, until he began vomiting blood when he then became desperate to see his friend before he died and stole a car to drive there. However he crashed and as he lost consciousness he remembered he’d been confused and his friend had been at the hospital all along, ill like him and now he wouldn’t see her again before he died. Then he woke up with no memories at the institute.

    Some other memories were tragic or bizarre. One pleasant memory was of sinking into the oblivion of unconsciousness whilst drowning,  mine was of assassinating a tennis player at a championship match for al-Qaeda as a demonstration that they could get anywhere and reach anyone!

    We’re going to finish the session next week, and in a lucky coincidence both the person who finished their character and the player who didn’t enjoy it are absent next week, so no-one is going to cause any problems by being absent.

    On the whole, I really enjoyed playing this and look forwards to pjayibg at again as a sort of palate cleanser between longer games if not for a dedicated session. Fun stuff. Being designed as a one-shot game, it also works well for playing when key people are absent from another game or if people just want a quick break from a longer campaign of something else. Also, its a great way to create characters for stories and the writer in me definitely wants to try it on a future work.

    I’ll write up the whole game properly when its finished.

    On the whole though, highly recommended.

     

  • Dark Liquid 11:41 am on March 6, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Another belated update 

    I’ve been neglecting my poor blog again and I’m sure the hoard that is all of maybe 3 people are clamouring for an update (by which I mean, don’t care).

    So what’s been happening in darkliquid-land? Well, knowing my memory, more than I can recall, but the things that immediately come to mind are:

    • Failing my 1st driving test
    • Buying a car
    • Getting back in PHP, primarily WordPress development
    • Hacking on C++ code for a minecraft map renderer
    • Playing various indie games
    • Playing some main stream demos, and enjoying them immensely
    • Watching TV and a few films
    • Discovering new music, primarily Ugress and side-projects
    • Hacking up my laptop’s partitioning scheme

    So yeah, I failed my first driving test. It was almost a pass, but I made a really stupid mistake halfway through that killed it. I have my next one on Wednesday and I was looking forwards to it and feeling confident until yesterday, which was one of the crappiest days ever.

    Yesterday started off with a pre-test driving session to get some practice in. What was practice turned more into a demonstration to myself of everything I shouldn’t do. Simple manoeuvres took 5+ attempts, I almost got the car T-boned on a roundabout, all sorts of retarded stuff. I have no idea where my head was at, but it certainly wasn’t on driving. Even coming back and parking up, I crossed traffic without indicating, waiting or anything and I know that’s completely wrong. I felt so utterly terrible after that, there was absolutely no redeeming features of that session at all, other than surviving it, which is one step up from getting myself killed in an accident.

    Following that, I accidentally deleted about 135GB of data whilst doing something for work and needed to spend time fixing it in yet another example of epic failure.

    Since I was on a roll of self-destruction and failure I thought, hey, I already feel shit, I can’t feel any worse so rather than crawl into bed and calling the whole day off as a bad idea, lets see what else I can fuck up, lets go for the record, eh? With that in mind, I decided to resize the partitions on my laptop.

    When I’d first set it up, I’d accidentally only allocated 40GB to Win7 and 560GB to Linux. I was using maybe 8GB in my Linux partition so it seemed like a waste, considering Win7 alone without much installed except for all the C++ game development bits was already taking up 30GB. The plan was to shrink the Linux partition and then resize the windows partition to be larger and shuffle everything around. Alas, it is never quite that simple.

    Because I am an early adopter/technology masochist I’d formatted my Linux partition as btrfs, for which there is currently no partition resizing support. Also, my Linux and Win7 partitions were not next to each other, so expanding one into the other wasn’t going to happen.

    So, my plan changed to imaging my Linux partition, then deleting it, splitting it in half, with one half for Linux and another half for shared files between Linux and Win7. To image it, I used clonezilla, backing it up with partclone to an external USB harddrive. That all went well, so I was happy. I then used a gParted live CD to repartition the disk and then proceeded to go back into clonezilla to reimage the partition.

    Except it refused to do so. Clonezilla refused to allow me to image a partition backup of sda6 onto what was now sda7. Hacking around, I essentially renamed the to be called sda7 instead of sda6 and then hit another problem. Since sda6 was 560GB and sda7 was 280GB, it wouldn’t image the backup due to the size difference, even though the image was only 8GB, since it was a backup of only the used part of the partition.

    This was getting ridiculous.

    So, after looking up various issues and solutions on the internet, I discovered how to run partclone manually to force it restore the image anyway, since clonezilla didn’t offer any facility for doing so through it’s own interface. I had to cat together the 3 sections of the image backup (it had been split into 2GB chunks), pipe that through gzip and then pipe that to partclone.restore with a flag set to tell it to ignore size mismatches. It promptly, much to my shock, started imaging without asking for confirmation at all. Note to self: partclone is a dangerous tool that will trash your disk if make even the slightest mistake.

    So, now the image was on the partition, I could even mount it from the clonezilla live CD. Woohoo! But of course, I knew there would be issues. The drive layout was different which would make grub go doo-lally. The entries in the /etc/fstab wouldn’t match up, so the system wouldn’t boot even if grub would work. Before I did anything, I made sure to use the btrf tools to make sure the filesystem was aware of the new extents on the disk, by telling it to expand to the max for the partition (considering only 8GB had been imaged). That seemed happy enough and I saw no problems. I’m not even sure it was necessary, considering it seemed to get the free space calculations right even before I ran that command, but better to be sure I suppose.

    Now, on the more modern distros, your /dev is basically empty from start so it’s an arse if you want to chroot into another OS and run things like grub or anything else that needs the block device files for the disks. So, I had to bind mount the clonezilla Live CD /dev onto the mounted Linux install, then chroot, and then mount all the other filesystems, etc into that (/proc, /sys, /boot in my case). Once that was done, I edited the /etc/fstab to be correct – I would have used the drive UUIDs, but it was an arse copying stuff from the blkid command into the fstab file on the console, so I couldn’t be bothered – I can do it later from within the OS when I have a graphical environment. After that, I needed to reinstall and then update the grub config and then reboot.

    And finally, after hours and hours of messing around, it was all fixed, working and I had a nice chunk of extra space for sharing stuff between Win7 and Linux. I could boot into Linux or Win7 without any problem. That gave me a nice boost after the horribleness that had been Saturday.

    Now, in Win7, I wanted to shift some stuff to the new partition to make space. Namely Steam, especially since I’d succumbed to the special deal offer the other day and brought Red Alert 3 + Uprising for around £7 and 16GB of game data was not going to fit on the main Win7 partition. Annoyingly, Steam has no way of storing games on multiple partitions and while I could use NTFS’ native symbolic linking support to make it use the other drive, considering Win7 doesn’t expose that functionality at all and you have to use a command line tool, I didn’t trust it. Instead, I followed the instructions on the Steam site and moved the whole install to the new drive, which seemed to work perfectly.

    I also decided to tweak my Win7 install and theme it using the Maverick Ambience theme dpcdpc11 on deviant art created, so make it as little Windows-y as possible. Hit some issues with that due to the SP1 update breaking the stuff I did last time I enabled custom themes. Had to run sfc /scannow to regen the files and then go through the process again. Now it’s all looking nice. Hurray!

    Going back to the topic of games, I’ve been playing the Bulletstorm demo quite a lot. Its immensely fun, completely over-the-top and very tongue-in-cheek, satirising it’s own genre. I’m not normally an FPS fan, but Bulletstorm is everything that is right and fun about FPSes all put in one place. It’s a shame they did some stupid stuff on the PC port – it’s clear they targeted consoles first and the poor PC gamers got a little screwed by silly issues. I’ve been playing the PS3 demo mostly, but had the chance to play an echo on the PC version and it was very fun, even if I didn’t know half the controls.

    I’ve also been playing through the Dragon Age II demo on PS3 and likewise, it’s very fun and looks very pretty. The combat system feel a lot more punchier now and I found mages in particular feel a lot more powerful, in the first game they felt very weak.

    However, I doubt I’ll be buying either of them for a while, I still have several games on my list to go through and without any free time to play the games, I’m progressing through that list very slowly.

    I’ve also been playing Inside A Star-Filled Sky, a cool little indie game that revolves around the concept of infinite recursion and the act of becoming. Each level is the creature that you later become, but also, you can enter other creates, power ups, even yourself and by changing things inside them, change their abilities and attributes back on the outer level when you jump back up. It’s similar in concept to the movie Inception with it’s multiple layers. I’ve also been playing a lot of fake-scrabble on my phone via DroidWords, which seems the best of the lot in that genre and is a very polished little application, far better than the bug-laden monstrosity Words With Friends by the evil company known as Zynga.

    Since we’re on the concept of media, let me move onto music and film/tv. I recently discovered the artist Ugress, a Norwegian grungy-electronica one-man setup and I fell in love with his music. It’s absolutely divine. He has several side-projects including Nebular Spool, Ninja 9000 and Shadow of the Beat. What’s especially cool about Ugress is the way he communicates with his fans and really leverages the new digital age. He tries to get on all streaming media platforms, he offers his whole albums for free streamed listening directly on his site and offers some albums directly for download free of charge. The albums he does sell he uses a pay-what-you-want model with a minimum value (sometimes, that minimum is 0). His music and his attitude to the industry is inspiring.

    Speaking of which, when I listened to Ruins by Nebular Spool I was captivated. I was instantly catapulted into a state of intense creativity. The album seemed to be the perfect accompaniment to a story I am writing with Archi Teuthis on Protagonize called Neon Bible. I was consumed with the idea of creating a story-focused 2D platform game as a prequel to the story – filling in the blanks of the journey the Priest at the start takes to the city of Eden and covering the hard choices he has to make, telling the story of how the world the game is set in came to be the way it is and challenging the player emotionally and intellectually. I only wish I had the time and skill to create it.

    I still have yet to see most films this year. I just don’t go to the cinema. The cinema sucks, mostly because of stupid costs, other people and other things. At home I can pause the film or eat a pizza whilst watching it if I feel like it. Not so at a cinema. I also don’t have to worry about retards ruining it by talking, or if they do, I can at least tell them to shut the fuck up and rewind to hear what I missed. Also, most films haven’t really inspired me enough to go out and pay for. I still want to see Tron: Legacy even though I’m fully expecting to be disappointed but even that is still not worth seeing at the cinema.

    Two films I watched recently on the PSN were excellent though. The Other Guys, a Will Farrell film satirising typical buddy-cop action films. Hilarious, clever, deeply sarcastic. Just what I like. I highly recommend it. I also watched Red, the film about retired assassins/agents. Very funny and sweet, the action sequences were amusing in their audacity, but not over done. So many films try so hard to be cool that they don’t realising that trying so hard is what makes them decidedly uncool. Red got it all just right. A friend lent me Despicable Me and I have to say it was dull and uninspiring. I wasn’t really interested in it at all. However, maybe it’s the potential father in me, but I found Margo adorable and the film is worth watching just for her, she is awesome.

    I’ve been getting back into my C++ coding recently by working on extending mcmap, a renderer for minecraft worlds. I’ve been working on adding support for displaying signs on the map (as in the text) and struggling with the coordinate system transforms, but I’ve more or less cracked it now, so it’s on to the more taxing job of extending the renderer to blend text at various positions onto the image. I’m thinking of just not doing that at all and instead storing the text and coordinate data in a text file so you can apply the text later with your own process (which I’ll probably write a Ruby script for). I’ve also been playing with OpenZoom, an open source implementation of Microsoft’s DeepZoom system in Flash which in many ways is superior to Google’s Maps offerings, especially for the task of showing large images rather than actual maps, which suits the output of mcmap much better, since it isn’t really a map in the traditional sense.

    I’ve also been brushing up on my PHP again having been digging around in wordpress writing numerous plugins and changing some base functionality of wordpress itself to support various things and add new features for a site at work. I’m definitely not  fan of PHP or particularly of wordpress. they are both messy and ugly, but having worked with them for a while now, I’ve been fairly productive; so using wordpress as a CMS framework definitely has its advantages in terms of productivity.

    I’ve not been roleplaying much recently. The game our GM is running has ceased to hold any interest for me. I’m not interested in the other players characters, the story (or lack thereof), the settings or the seemingly meaningless jumps from one pointless job to another. Nothing in it seems gripping or interesting or has any meaning to the characters. I’m not even sure why the characters are doing what they are doing, there doesn’t seem to be any clear motivation to the game at all and that’s why I’ve bailed out of it. I think I’m becoming a bit of an Evil Hat fan boy. Their roleplaying games always seem very focused around characters stories, are strongly character-driven, thematic and designed specifically to create group stories. The Fate system as applied in their Dresden files game is fantastic in the way it does group setting and character generation and I hope to run a quick game of A Penny For My Thoughts to get the others to put their toes in the water in regards to that style of collaborative play. I’m bored with the traditional hack’n'slash GM/Player separation – maybe it’s the writer in me, but I want to tell a story, through the medium of a game, not play a game set to a story. The others all come from this more traditional roleplaying background, so it will be interesting to see how they react.

    Well, that’s it for now. Maybe it’ll be another 3 months before I update!

     

    • eric_the_girl 6:32 pm on March 6, 2011 Permalink

      To be honest, I’m on my third driving test and have resorted to taking a Kalms tablet before driving lessons to see if it helps… I had the Potts woman as my examiner last time and couldn’t hack it in the air of disapproval.

      Good luck, though! I have my next one on the 16th….

      (Plus, they say that you are a better driver if you pass second time than first…)

  • Dark Liquid 12:36 pm on January 2, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Post-2010 Update 

    So we’re now into 2011. Whoop-dee-do.

    I had a suitably geeky new year, seeing it in by killing my entire party of players on my Gamma World game. However, it does give them an excuse to regen using the expansion pack which I brought myself and me the opportunity to do made up adventure based of the consequences of failing the one that comes with the first box set.

    Speaking of box sets, I got the whole of Death Note, Wolf’s Rain and the first two seasons of Numb3rs, amongst other things.

    Annoyingly, the year came to a close without me getting my driving license due to the driving license inspectors being completely useless. I wasn’t informed my test was cancelled at all, even after I was sat 10 minutes are after EVERY OTHER PERSON IN THE DAMNED WAITING ROOM was assigned an inspector and left. Eventually, asking what was going on, they said sorry, it’s cancelled and we didn’t say anything because our bookings office is snowed in and hence closed – which is hardly an excuse since the person who said that knew I was cancelled and must have known the booking office was closed in order to tell me said fact. Dicks. Worse was that someone else didn’t turn up for their test but they wouldn’t take me for my test instead. What a bunch of lice-ridden cock-badgers!

    Bytey introduced me to Game Dev Story on my Android phone. It is dangerously addictive.

    So far the old IBS malarkey hasn’t really changed. After so many tests the doctors are basically saying – tough, it’s IBS and we’ve done so many tests we aren’t going to do any more as we are happy with our diagnosis. So now it playing around with my diet, lifestyle, etc to find some pattern of activity and food consumption that stops me from having lots of pain at random intervals. Or just hoping it goes away by itself. Fun times!

    DruidX and I are thinking of squeezing out some geeklings in the near future, which could be fun/scary.

    I’m becoming a Minecraft-widower.

    I really miss Asheyna, my favourite Canadian geek. Being able to hang out with her and just bounce ideas around and write together was awesome when Dru and I went to visit and I really miss it. With her new beau, Minecraft and other things, I barely even see her online any more. And that last sentence unintentionally sounds a tad passive-aggressive.

    I’ve come to an understanding that I’m not a writer, not really. I just don’t have that drive to finish any of the stories I’m telling. I’m a story teller, a roleplayer. I enjoy telling stories in the moment but actually writing a complete beginning-to-end story? I don’t think it’s for me and I don’t think I’ll ever be a published writer. Not to say I’m not going to try, but my definition of try in this case is very much a ‘keep writing as normal and eventually I’m bound to finish something enough to actual consider publishing it’. So, yeah, good luck with that…

    So, what’s in store for 2011?

    Hopefully some mini-geeks. New, exciting projects at work. Driving and all the freedom and flexibility that brings. More money, hopefully, as various things get paid off and I start earning more, etc. More roleplaying.

    I’d like to say more game development, or hell, any game development. Games and programmings are both things I enjoy and writing games is something I really want to do. Unfortunately, it’s also work and I have enough of that from my job at the moment, what with the commute too I’m basically in work mode from 5am-9pm so I need downtime away from programming to stay sharp at it and not just burn out, so it’s been slow going doing anything in that regard. I’m hoping the driving will help is it cuts down my commute from 5h/day to 2h/day and that 3 hours a day extra will make all the difference.

    Another thing I see happening this new year is playing more games. I’ve already succumbed to evil and have Windows7 on my laptop for the purposes of games I can’t get working under WINE in a satisfactory manner (such as Super Meat Boy, which is basically worth selling my soul over) and I expect I’ll find it increasingly more difficult to say no to games on the basis that they are only available to me under Windows.

    I also see myself obtaining the role of family tech-support, a mantle my brother-in-law is no doubt more than happy to pass on :)

     

  • Dark Liquid 8:19 am on December 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Pain is the Game 

    I’ve been terrible keeping this blog updated recently but it comes down to the fact that I’ve been incredibly busy, as per usual. Launching new, complicated things at work and trying to stay on-track with various other projects, it’s been a nightmare and so this blog has fallen by the wayside.

    However, it’s not all been doom and gloom.

    I recently discovered Super Meat Boy and the sub-genre of games often known as ‘masocore’. Incredibly, brutally hard and unforgiving games that seem to be designed to just cause you pain and frustration more than anything else. However, it’s a healthy pain, a healthy frustration. Yes, you might be tearing your own hair out, throwing your game pad at the wall, but you’re enjoying it even as the game gorges itself on your bitter tears. From that description you might guess that the ‘maso’ in ‘masocore’ comes from masochist.

    Given that I’ve been doing a fair amount of research into fetishism as part of a story I am writing (which turned out terribly during NaNo this year), I’ve developed an academic interest in that kind of thing. I enjoy psychology and understanding the mind, so not only am I getting a masochistic kick from playing these games, but I’m also getting the buzz of the introspection such feelings bring.

    Everyone's favourite boy without skin - it's Super Meat Boy!

    As stated earlier, what brought me to these games was Super Meat Boy. Super Meat Boy is a relatively simple platformer. You can run, jump and slide down walls. That’s pretty much it. The fun comes in from the fiendish level design and the general quality that all the separate elements come together. It’s an incredibly polished and silky smooth game which makes coming back to it again and again really quite easy. It also pays homage to several other indie computer games, such as Aquaria – one of my favourite all-time games, VVVVVV – which I shall be mentioning in a moment, Mighty Jill Off – which I shall be mentioning as well, and several others such as Tim from Braid and Gish – everyone’s favourite ball of tar. The story line and sense of humour is awesome throughout and appeals perfectly to me sense of humour. I mean, after all you play a boy with no skin whose girlfriend (who is made of bandages) is kidnapped by a fetus in a jar with a monocle. That sets the tone for pretty much the entire game. One of the awesome features in it is the end of level replays where the game replays every attempt you’ve made that session simultaneously on screen so you can revel in you success and failure all at once. Awesome!

    Another game I’ve enjoyed a lot recently is VVVVVV. It is an awesome retro-style game in true Commodore 64 style with an absolutely awesome chiptune soundtrack. The key mechanic in VVVVVV is that you can’t jump, you can only invert gravity and then only when you are stood on a flat surface (so no hovering in mid-air by hammering the gravity button). This leads to some really interesting challenges when navigating the levels, as well as some incredibly evil levels that revel in your suffering such as this one.

    After seeing it in Super Meat Boy I was intrigued by Mighty Jill Off which is essentially a sort of BDSM remake of Bomb Jack. A bit easier than the previous two, I felt, but a very fun and cute little game. Mighty Jill Off Title Screen The core mechanics here are jumping and gliding and you need to navigate your way up a tower, avoiding spikes and fire and monsters along the way. It incredibly simple, but often the best games are, though it surprisingly forgiving, I fully expected to have to start from the beginning when I died but you actually start from the last room of the tower you were in. It’s a quick pick up and play game though and is enjoyable pretty much whenever you fancy a quick challenge as it can be completed easily in 15 minutes. My first run netted me a time of 13 minutes or so.

    It’s good to get back into games and these things are just what I needed. I’ve been getting increasingly disillusioned with the mainstream games industry because for the most parts, games are all too samey, focusing too much on cinematics and graphics to actually make them fun or challenging. I want to watch movies, not play them. Indie games seem to understand that a lot better. They don’t have the budget for things like that so the gameplay is what they poor their hearts and souls into it and the games are ultimately better for it. I’m fed up with a game that doesn’t feel rewarding to play, that gives no satisfaction when you complete it because it presented no challenges. Not only that, but there is a difference between hard games and games that are awkward. In Super Meat Boy it is clear that if you ever die, it is your fault. You didn’t jump quite right, you got the timing wrong, you ran instead of walking. Super Meat Boy punishes you for your own mistakes, while many other games tend to essentially cheat, giving the enemies unfair advantages that make no sense, or just make the game more awkward to play (and by virtue of that more difficult) which results not in a more challenging game, but a less enjoyable one, as you feel like you are being punished just for trying, rather than for your own inability to succeed.

     

  • Dark Liquid 8:45 am on November 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: laments, ,   

    No More NaNo 

    Okay, NaNoWriMo just isn’t for me. I’ve tried, oh how I’ve tried, but it just isn’t happening. This is my 7th or 8th attempt now and like all but 1 its ending in failure. This November I was just too busy, the i-series event just took it out of me and I didn’t recover until I was almost 20000 words behind and even then still felt too mentally drained to be fully creative.

    Furthermore, my story sucked. I never got any of the research or organisation stuff I wanted done and so it was utterly, utterly terrible. While that didn’t bother me per se, it made starting writing again hard as the compromise I have with my inner editor is that I will at least try and maintain continuity which necessitates re-reading what I’ve written to remember where I am in the story. Reading you own writing and hating it is incredibly demoralising though and so that’s part of the reason I’m calling it a day.

    To be honest, I think I’m throwing in the towel permanently. Winning NaNoWriMo is definitely the excepting to the rules with me and being that I’m often so busy in November I just don’t have the time and this on-going illness of mine really doesn’t benefit from the stress of the challenge. Frankly, I’m not getting anything out of it any more, which is sad because I really did enjoy it and so sadly I have to bud BaNo adeiu until my life has room for it again. I’ll keep on writing of course, but at my own pace on my own terms.

    Farewell NaNo, it was fun.

     

    • jade 6:59 pm on December 13, 2010 Permalink

      i found with my psychical illness that everything just became effort, and then the psysical became psycological, depression and genral brain fog came with my diegnosis of fibromyalgia but also depression came with my later diegnosis of BPD, and concentration went with the later later DX of schizotypal disorder(like schizophrenia but with a mood disorder to boot) all that and the tim since then and now things in my life have just got fewer and fewer, you know like having to leave uni because i just coudnt concentrate anymore ect, which adds to depression and becomes a circle or a rut.

      all i can say is its good you still have stuff to do, because it helps, you dont want to oneday wake up and just want to stay in bed because quess what there is no point. i think your doing amazing with everything you have to do, plus want to do, all along with your illness, you carry on, and thats great, i wish i had the same.. motivation.
      ive been out of education for a year and abit now and well i havnt worked in forever, and mostly i feel guilty and just plane bored out of my mind, heh people who know me think it must be great not having responsablitys, but id trade any day, these days i pray i had a job where i was good at it and responsable.

      anyway, i think just as long as you kep doing somthing.. anything it will be good for you and your sleep, depression and even the psysical stuff.
      just dont get into the thought that if you stopp doing somthing you have always done that you must be ill and this is the point of no return, fuck that.. it isnt, you carry on writing and im sureoneday youll do nano again.

      i dont know why im rambling on at you about this, but i guess from my own experience i just wanted you to know that being ill dosnt make you some kind of crippled ghost.
      im sure even i will be doing somthing oneday, after therepy who knows… anyway sorry im rubbish at typing, sorry if this made no sence whatso ever.. my cognition is totally fucked because of my DX you know.. ranting and raving noncence :P

      anyway just wanted to say chin up really, but in a really long round about way.

      -jade, ps say i said hi to dru and hope shes ok too.

  • Dark Liquid 10:41 pm on October 20, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: collaborative, fiction, murder, , ,   

    Progress on Ten 

    I’ve been working on a project called Ten for a little while now and it’s getting exciting to see the characters involved coming together.

    For those of you that don’t know, Ten is a collaborative piece of fiction. Ten authors, ten characters, ten reasons for murder. Ten strangers spread across national and cultural boundaries are contacted with a mysterious offer. Would they like to play a game? Only, this isn’t a game. They each have a list of nine people to kill and if they succeed, they can have the one thing they wish for most. Fame, power, glory, a missing daughter returned, a dead wife resurrected. These are some of the things the mysterious benefactors can offer them but will these people kill for it?

    Ten is a kind of quasi-supernatural, international conspiracy-theory murder mystery and an experiment in properly writing a joint, collaborative novel including the full editing process, typography and cover design, all the way to print. It’s going to be a long undertaking, but eventually we plan to self-publish it and sell it at cost, licensed under a creative commons license.

    The first draft is being written on Protagonize, the other drafts will happen as they happen, where they need to. Nothing is very well organised as of yet and as the sort of chairman of the board, being the founder of the project, I’ve been keeping a loose grip on things but lately trying to take a more active management role.

    Anyway, as I said, it’s exciting to see things coming together. Over the course of the story we’ve had some authors drop out and need replacing. I’ve written chapters for 3 characters now when originally I had planned to be working in a purely advisory and editing role, rather than as a core author. I must say I’m glad to be joining in though, even if it’s under circumstances I’d rather not come up.

    As we are moving forward with the story I’ve been pushing for us all to work more closely together rather than just writing for ‘our’ characters like a glorified roleplay. We’ve been sharing notes on the wiki, slowly but surely, and now it’s time to start joint writing chapters together with the authors of characters the plot dictates we will meet soon. I want us to get down and dirty with all of the characters so we can attack the second draft and editing process fully armed with the knowledge of all ten characters and their plots, sub-plots and secondary characters in each of our heads. Mostly though, I want us to feel comfortable editing each others work. Writing strictly for one character will show up badly throughout the story, our own individual writer’s voices shining through. I want the story to be a truly collaborative piece, not just a combination of our voices, but a fusion, a sum greater than the whole of it’s parts. I think it will be awesome to read a book where we don’t even fully recognize our own chapters, because they wont be our own, they’ll be the sum of all the work every other author has put into them, a unique voice born from the combination of ten others.

    That’s the most exciting thing about this project, the test of creating a story written by a hive-mind author, with it’s own personality and voice that emerges from the combination of it’s constituent parts. That’s proper collaborative writing, right there and I am really looking forward to how it turns out.

    I’ve already found myself challenged and writing differently as I’ve picked up characters from authors that have dropped out and it’s a great experience. My latest chapter written for the character of Alexi, the failed and timid Russian magician, oddly become erotica without me intending it to, no doubt partly because of my practice and thoughts on Urges. However, if I had written Alexi from the beginning, I doubt that would have happened. Sharing characters adds new and interesting aspects to them and makes the journey all the more exciting, surprising and above all fun. I really hope the other authors can take even a fraction from Ten of what I’m getting by working together like this.

    As the story progresses, things are getting more and more interesting, the plots slowly weaving together, characters becoming more fully fleshed out, mysteries forming and answers beginning to lurk around corners. The first draft is going to be rough, really rough. The fun really begins when the editing starts.

    You can read the first draft of Ten so far on Protagonize.

    Stats

     

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