Kef's Mirror of Darkness

Another reason why YouTube sucks

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:59:56 GMT

I accidentally deleted a comment from my channel profile on YouTube. It didn't ask "Do you really want to delete this comment?" nor provide any means of undoing it; it was just gone. One slip of the mouse, and poof.

You'd think that a website of YouTube's magnitude would be able to do something right, but I've yet to see it happen.

- Kef

ActRaiser & Earthworm Jim

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:26:02 GMT

Yesterday I started playing ActRaiser, and today I beat it. It was pretty much as lame as I expected, but it was a decent way to pass the time regardless. In fact, it's amazing that they committed so many blunders and still ended up with a decent game. (The game's main problem is that it tries to be an action game and a sim game at the same time, and isn't terribly good at either. The poor translation puts the icing on the cake...)

So, basically, for the last couple of years I thought ActRaiser would suck, and now that I've sat down and played it, I somehow enjoyed it. By contrast, there was another game that for the last couple of years I thought would rock, but I never got around to actually playing it. So I finally got to playing it the other day and...

Earthworm Jim sucks.

Yep. That's right: I can't stand Earthworm Jim. It's not terrible, just terribly overrated, and terribly frustrating. I'm sure it was a totally awesome game in 1994, but there just isn't enough substance to the gameplay. I got to the middle of the second level (note to game designers: do not design a level that's all orange and yellow, and especially do not put such a level near the beginning of the game) until I decided to just call it quits. Earthworm Jim 2 is even worse: it takes away everything that's good about the original and leaves all the crap. Ah well...

- Kef

Best Tetris player in the world

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:57:54 GMT

I know I've been overdoing it with YouTube videos lately, but damn.

- Kef

Hahahahaha

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:01:05 GMT

A captcha on Facebook just gave me "Nicolae Joder".

"Joder" is Spanish for "fuck".

- Kef

The best (and worst) game of Puyo Puyo ever

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:44:47 GMT

VB.net never looked so awesome

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:46:02 GMT

YouTube comments

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:56:48 GMT

Am I the only one who wonders why the fuck YouTube videos don't put the comments in a consistent order? Sometimes the oldest comments on a page come first, sometimes newer comments on a page come first... why?!?!? Is there any reason for that other than to confuse people??

- Kef

Impossibly cool

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:22:55 GMT

You might remember that years and years ago, I made a Lemmings tune in Mario Paint. Then a while back I put it on YouTube.

Two days ago I got a comment from Tim Wright.

The guy who wrote the damn thing.

Wow. I never expected that to happen...

- Kef

The Mojave Cross

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:58:06 GMT

It irks me when the ACLU picks the wrong battles.

Now, I'm a very strong believer in separation of church and state. I don't think our coins should say "In God We Trust". I don't think the pledge of allegiance should have the words "under God" in them. (Keep in mind that neither is an old tradition; they both started in the mid-20th century.) Neither of these bother me so much that I'm inclined to make much noise about it, though. Courts putting the Ten Commandments on their walls? Well, that one doesn't bother me so much, though if I were to run a court I would also post counterexamples such as Hammurabi's Code, which is much more of a foundation of modern law than the Ten Commandments. (If somebody objects that Hammurabi's Code isn't a good model for an American court to follow, well, neither are the Ten Commandments.) And nativity scenes on public property don't bother me either, 'cause it's more of a depiction of a religious event than an endorsement.

Prayer in public schools does bother me. It's not really so much that it's there (well, would be there if it weren't already banned), so much that it's biased in favor of one particular religion. The same people who would smile upon learning that their kid is praying to God in school would throw a shit fit if they learned that their kid was instead praying to Allah. (OK, God and Allah are actually the same guy, since "Allah" is simply Arabic for "God", but never mind that.) So how would that not be a state endorsement of Christianity?

Though of course people who think there's no prayer in schools today has never had to take a big test while nearly failing the class.

Anyway, the issue of the day is the Mojave Cross, a tribute to fallen soldiers in, well, the shape of a cross. (For more information, check the link at the start of this post.) And, of course, a cross is a Christian symbol. But come on! It's just a cross. How many Jewish, Muslim, atheist, etc. soldiers would really be offended by it? Oh, I'm sure a few would be, but I think there are probably bigger issues for them to worry about.

I do think the ACLU has a point, that a good war memorial should honor all its soldiers and not just its Christian ones (and they made the point that not even all Christians identify by the cross, either). They're right. But the ACLU needs to learn to pick its battles. This one's not worth it.

- Kef

Final Fantasy IV

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:06:15 GMT

I just beat FF2us, a.k.a. Final Fantasy IV. The one with the bad translation and all that. The game is cheesier than I remember it (although part of the reason that FF is cheesy is that it helped create a lot of the cliches in the first place).

But I'd have to say that the most absurd thing in the game (spoilers ahoy) is Cid's sacrifice to seal up the underground in order to protect the Enterprise (and perhaps the upper world in general), with a bomb. It seems like a silly idea in the first place, probably one that had an absurdly low chance of working, yet he was willing to sacrifice his life for it. Then he jumps off the Enterprise way up in the air and detonates the bomb. And we find that, not only does the plan miraculously work, he survives, with pretty much no explanation. WTF.

BTW, I'd also found out late in the game that one of my characters had her bow equipped in the wrong hand for a long time. Why doesn't the damn game just automatically put it in the correct hand? There's no advantage to putting the bow in the wrong hand, and it's hard to notice when you do it, so the game shouldn't even give you the option.

But oh well. On the whole, the experience was alright. It's not a fantastic game (I'm sure it was much more of one back in the day), but I don't really regret playing through it. Though I do regret having quit back when I got very close to the end of the game a few years ago; if I'd just gone ahead and finished the game, I wouldn't have had to spend 22 or so hours playing it again. :P

- Kef

From the Twilight Zone

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:09:10 GMT

Some weird coincidences lately:

AVGN's latest episode mentioned Billy Mitchell, using his hot sauce as sort of a plot point. Billy Mitchell holds the world record in Donkey Kong, a game that I've been playing a lot lately (and have become pretty good at, compared to an average gamer). Earler in the month, there was Steve Wiebe's attempt to break said record, which just happened to come along when I regained interest in the game in the first place.
There was a discussion on Comics I Don't Understand about licky stamps/envelopes versus the automatically sealing kind, and how the licky kind are becoming rare. The day after (I think it was), my mother handed me such a licky envelope.

I had the song U Can't Touch This stuck in my head for days. I even made a miniature NES version. Then a movie was on TV that featured U Can't Touch This.
Yesterday I plugged my NES for the first time in ages, so I turned on the TV. It happened to be on The Dark Knight, which I had been thinking about only minutes before (although that was just 'cause it's been on a lot lately), so that's one coincidence right there. So I got the NES plugged in and turned it on, forgetting to replace the game I'd left in there from last time with the one I wanted to play. The game that happened to be left in there? Batman.

- Kef

Super Conan Bros.

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:26:53 GMT

(You must watch, or else you will lose your geek license.)

(EDIT: Replaced YouTube link with Hulu link, since this one won't be pulled for copyright.)

Steve Wiebe beats Donkey Kong, but not the world record

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:54:57 GMT

He attempted the game three times (technically five). His final game was his best, with a score of 989,400.

Why was it "technically five"? Well, his second attempt started off really badly: he died at the beginning of Level 2! On the one hand, somehow it's comforting that even the very best players can mess up in the beginning levels. On the other hand, if even they can mess up that badly, what chance do we mere mortals have?

Then his third (technically fourth) attempt ended prematurely somewhere between 150,000 points and 200,000 points when the power went out. The cameras went blank, although you could still hear the audio for a while... which was a damn good thing, 'cause without it we'd have missed the funniest moment: Wiebe asking, "Is Billy Mitchell around? Where is he?"

On his last attempt he got to the infamous kill screen. By that point he was more interested in reaching the kill screen than points, since he still had an extra life left over (you're "supposed" to ditch your extra lives before then to rack up more points, since there are barely any to be made on the kill screen). I'm glad he made it there, though... not just 'cause it makes for a satisfying conclusion, but it also put one idiot who kept insisting that the version he was playing didn't have the kill screen in his place. God, I hate morons.

- Kef

The problem with all-powerful superheroes

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 04:36:56 GMT

Hey, I just realized. In Watchmen... if everybody wanted world peace so much, couldn't they just have gotten Dr. Manhattan to do it? True, he couldn't just wave his hand and magically solve all the world's problems (he controls atoms, not attitudes), but he had the power to overthrow anybody who disagreed with him. For instance, he could have made Russia fall all by himself. All he'd have to do is teleport over there and exert control over all the key people. It'd be a one-man coup. Afterwards, he could simply install trustworthy people to ensure that Russia remains a friendly country.

Now, there's a counterargument that maybe Dr. Manhattan wouldn't have wanted to be used in this way, but they did use him as a superweapon in Vietnam, so I don't see why not. (Hell, why didn't he do that to the Viet Cong, for that matter?)

- Kef

Dethroning the king of Kong

Sun, 31 May 2009 07:44:49 GMT

You may be familiar with the (slightly fictionalized) documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. In it, Steve Wiebe (the "good guy") tries to take the world record in Donkey Kong from Billy Mitchell (the "bad guy"). [Note: This was itself fictionalized: Wiebe was actually trying to beat his own previous record, which had already displaced Mitchell's.] He did so... but almost immediately before the movie came out, Billy Mitchell broke Wiebe's new record.

The reason for this post is... at E3, Wiebe's gonna try to take it back. And you can watch, too, at g4tv.com. Dunno if any of you all are geeky enough to watch, but I know I will. Dunno what time it's gonna be on, though... G4 lists it as "all day", so I'm guessing starting at 10-11 AM Eastern or thereabouts.

Also, the King of Kong is going to be shown on G4 on July 1st and 2nd if you haven't seen it. I haven't, so I guess I'll watch it first.

- Kef

Who Watches The Watchm-- / Pac-Man hackin'

Fri, 29 May 2009 05:09:44 GMT

I finished reading Watchmen yesterday morning or so. It was another one of those books that makes you go "What the hell did I just read?" at the end. I suppose I can respect it for apparently having changed the industry (I dunno, I wasn't there), but as a work on its own, I think it's kinda... blah. Rorschach was interesting as hell, but the rest was kinda meh. Especially Dr. Manhattan. I guess what happens when you become the world's most powerful man is you become the world's most boring man. Well, if it were real life, it'd be different, of course, but I think this book proves that what's interesting in real life isn't necessarily interesting on the page (or the screen or whatever).

In entirely unrelated news, I've been hacking ports of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to see if they have endings or kill screens. Here are the ones I hacked:

Pac-Man for NES
Ms. Pac-Man for NES, Namco version (the Tengen version is completely different and has an ending)
Pac-Man as a minigame in Pac-Man 2 for SNES

All three were found to have no ending and no kill screen or other interesting behavior. The game simply continues forever. Ah well. It was funny when I flooded the screen with Pac-Men in the Pac-Man 2 version in an attempt to give myself infinite lives, though. :P

I developed a mildly clever way of testing it. At first I tried making a direct "level skip" code, but I realized that this might not be a reliable way of replicating the game's actual behavior, so I needed a way to get through a lot of levels very quickly. I tried ideas like infinite lives and infinite blue ghost time, which worked pretty well, but I needed to get through the game more quickly. Then finally I hit upon the idea of making the game to go the next level when you eat the first dot (by tricking the game into thinking it's the last dot). Worked like a charm. As a nice bonus, it was also easy to keep track of the level number, since I got 10 points per level (due to eating one dot each time), so when I had 2550 points, that'd be the 256th level.

I tried coming up with a similar trick for the NES version of Mario Bros., but it didn't work. Apparently the game doesn't have a variable containing the number of enemies left to be killed in the level; it figures out when the level is over by some other means. That means I can't hack it to go to the next level merely by killing the first enemy -- at least, not easily. Ah well...

- Kef

My favorite facial expression

Thu, 21 May 2009 11:51:42 GMT

It recently occurred to me what my favorite facial expression is. But upon further reflection I also realized something odd about it: humans don't actually do it. Well, not the same way cartoon characters do.

The expression in question: when a character lowers his or her eyelids as if to say, "Wow, you're being a fucking idiot." (Example here, at 0:48 -- not an ideal example, but it gets the idea across.) Of course the expression isn't entirely in the eyelids... it's necessary for the eyebrows to be lowered, the mouth to be "flat" rather than smiley or frowny, etc., but the eyelids are the most prominent feature, particularly if your character has large eyes.

But humans just don't do that with their eyelids. They do assume a blank face in such situations, but lowering the eyelids just isn't part of it. In fact, the eyelids play very little role in facial expressions (except when they're closed, of course). Yet if you tried to do that in a cartoon without lowering the eyelids, it just wouldn't convey the same idea at all. Weird, huh?

Another odd thing about it is that it's actually something of a cross between an expression and a gesture. It's not the expression itself that conveys the idea... by itself it just looks bored. It's the act of putting on the face -- the transition -- that sends the message. One moment you're bright and smiley, and then the smile fades and the eyelids come down.

I know this is a bit of a silly thing to make a post about, I guess, but it's kind of funny how we see this expression all the time and don't really think about it. Makes me wonder what else we don't think about.

- Kef

Star Trekkin' across the universe...

Fri, 15 May 2009 02:57:47 GMT

I just saw Star Trek. Not much to say about it... pretty good movie, didn't knock my socks off, but certainly don't regret watching it. I'd give it about an 8/10 -- certainly not less, though.

BTW, isn't it funny that the name of the guy they got to play Kirk, Christopher Pine, just happens to be one letter off Christopher Pike?

- Kef

Flash

Mon, 11 May 2009 20:07:23 GMT

Holy cow, I like Flash animation, now that I understand how to do it. A bit time-consuming, sure, but somehow it doesn't seem as boring as general drawing or inking. Maybe my cartoon project has a chance after all.

- Kef

gah

Thu, 07 May 2009 12:54:25 GMT

There was a copy of Flash MX 2004 Professional on eBay going for $15.15 (or something like that). I figured it'd be a bargain even at $100, so I bid on it, eventually bumping my maximum bid to $100.00 as I kept getting outbid. Then I hopped in bed. When I woke up, I found the thing ended up going to another bidder for $102.50... I'd have bid more, but I'm a bit low on cash right now and I didn't want to empty my wallet on a piece of software I might never even use.

I'm trying to get into Flash animation and I'd like to have a legal copy for once. :P But I don't really want to pay out the ear for it. College students are lucky... they get to buy the Pro version of Flash CS4 for much cheaper than what a non-student has to pay for even the home version!

Oh well, I guess maybe I should teach myself how to actually animate first before I really worry about paying for Flash... I don't think there's much sense in paying for something that I'm really going to have a rough time committing to.

- Kef

Super C

Tue, 05 May 2009 22:00:56 GMT

I just beat Super C, the sequel to Contra. Weakest final boss ever. The game as a whole is a bit tougher than Contra, though. But not nearly as cool.

Yep, Contra is, in fact, easy

Fri, 01 May 2009 22:27:16 GMT

I beat Contra. Less than 24 hours after I started taking the game seriously. This game is hard? I've beaten much harder games than this one.

Shoot, I even had a continue or two left over. :P

- Kef

魂斗羅は難しいと思った

Fri, 01 May 2009 19:17:07 GMT

So, starting from yesterday, I'm trying to play through Contra now, with no cheats. A little while ago I made it to level 6 without dying even once. I thought this game was supposed to be hard. :P This supposed king of difficulty has got nothing on Jurassic Park II: The Chaos Continues.

I did lose all my continues on level 7, though, but that's just 'cause I haven't had a chance to practice that level yet. Since the game has only 8 levels, I can't really imagine that I'll have that tough a time beating it.

- Kef

Pandemic?

Fri, 01 May 2009 04:48:20 GMT

Q: What do SARS, bird flu, and swine flu have in common?
A: People keep going on and on about them, even though nothing ever fucking happens.

OK, so technically we don't yet know if nothing's going to come of swine flu, but it follows rather logically from the pattern, doesn't it? Seriously, you'd think everybody would realize by now that these mass panics are pretty fucking stupid.

- Kef

Sewer Surfin'

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:01:56 GMT

I keep neglecting to post about this. A while back tansunn was taking cheap video game music commissions (maybe he still is, I dunno), provided that he got to choose what style it was remixed in, so I commissioned Sewer Surfin' from TMNT4. This was the result. Very nice work, Tansunn :3

- Kef