Here I was trying to figure out whether to publish videos to Google or to YouTube and then recommend something to the TEP class… Well, now it looks like I won’t have to decide. 🙂
All posts by markdangerchen
My sis Frances got married!
Just got back from a trip down to CA. My sister Frances got married on Sat! Grats Frances!
Anyway, I’ll post some photos later. 😛
Google PIM
Well, I made the switch yesterday to gmail and google calendar.
All my email is being forwarded to my google account, and when I hit reply my messages appear to others to be coming from whichever account they sent the email to. That’s handy. Also, I found an app called Companion Link which lets me sync my PDA with google calendar.
Now that my email (and contacts) and calendar are online I am ready for the Opera browser for the Nintendo DS which is slated to hit the US in January. The only question is if I will miss the pdf viewer and, of course, the ability to see my calendar, etc. without a wireless connection.
Runaway and Broken Sword 4 more…
Six more things I remember about Runaway which turned me off:
1. At the very beginning of the game, Brian/the player has no idea if he should believe Gina. Well, if that is so, why does he bother stealing medical supplies from a hospital storeroom which he gets to by climbing out the window and scaling the outside wall rather than using the freakin doors?? Sheesh. That doesn’t seem quite normal to me. “I am not sure I believe this person; I think she is delusional. But, what the hell, I’ll climb out the window. Who cares if I fall to my death? When I find a storeroom, hey, morals be damned, I’m stealing from this hospital!” Later on, when it seems she is telling the truth, rather than maybe calling the cops, Brian/player decides it would be better to set off the hospital fire alarm. Uh… doesn’t that seem completely lacking in common sense to anyone? How many patients just died from that act?
2. In the museum you/Brian discover that the janitor is stealing lab equipment to sell. There is no option in the game to report this illegal activity. I guess the main character really has no morals or something… and later defaces priceless artifacts.
3. I love how in Chicago, the car the main characters use is instantly recognized by an acquaintance of the bad guys in New York where the story began. Get this: the acquaintance is a midget. Why? Who knows? The midget must have crazy memory, visualization skills, and eyesight, though, to be able to recognize from a description a totally nondescript brown sedan. Or maybe there’s only one brown sedan in all of New York and Chicago?
4. Funny how over the top a video montage of Gina plays through Brian’s head after he thinks she just fell to her death is, especially given that he spent absolutely no effort to actually see if she died. “Oh she just fell through a hole. Guess she’s dead. Oh god, no! How can life be so cruel??”
5. At one point, you/Brian discover that some local ants in a desert in Arizona love peanut butter. How do you make peanut butter? Why, by mixing peanuts with butter, of course! Wow, do they really think that’s what peanut butter is? To top it all off, the mixture has to be cooked?? And to do that, you have to put the bowl of mixture in the sunlight coming in through a window of a shack. Uh… why couldn’t you just put the bowl on the ground outside?
6. I found it annoying in general that you have to search things like bags over and over again at different parts of the story since you only realize the importance of things in the bag later on. The reason why it is annoying is that the game doesn’t tell the player what is in the bag, only that “there’s nothing I can use in there” so that there is no idea in the player that the bag might have something useful later.
After finishing Broken Sword 4, I’m extremely disappointed. I did not play the third game, so am not sure if something happened, but why are George and Nico so cold to each other? When they first meet up in this fourth game, how is it that George doesn’t recognize her at first? And there is no explanation of why Nico even shows up. Some of the puzzles were very difficult and I had to look at hint boards to solve them. I still don’t know the underlying logic behind those solutions, though. Also, the end of the game was… well.. rather abrupt. In fact, in the whole history of me as a gamer, I might have to say it was the worst ending ever.
The Color of Fear
Anyone who has not seen this movie… I dunno how available it is from rental places or Netflix, but it is worth watching (so is last year’s Crash, btw).
It’s basically the conversation a bunch of ethnically diverse men have during a weekend retreat over racism. It is emotional at times and rational at times. All of the Teacher Education Program TAs watched it today, but we didn’t have much time to discuss what we saw.
One thing I wanted to say was that I completely understand how one of the men felt when he said that he is tired of having to explain things all the time to white folk. It makes me think about how guarded I am all the time in an unconscious way and how when I go and visit my family down in California and we go to a Chinese restaurant and everyone is Chinese, I can almost literally exhale and just relax. Not that I feel much discrimination up here in the Northwest.. not explicitly so, but it is always there, like a shadow from a moving cloud which sometimes becomes very oppressive and other times is hardly noticeable.
I also remember talking to an African-American friend of mine once about how we just know. We were able to communicate a feeling that we had without even saying anything somehow… The conversation went something like:
Him: You know that feeling when… and it is always there… but in the background, sort of?
Me: Yes, I do.
And I’m sorry, but that is about as best as I can explain it to white folk.
But I do still have to wonder how much of the feeling is something I’m bringing to the table? In high school when I was rebuked by white girls, was it because of me or my race? That nagging thing… race is always a factor. I’d like to believe that it was me… or maybe not.. I don’t really know which is worse.
Games, Summer ‘06
Well, the summer is over. What do I have to show for it? Other than some Teacher Education Program work, I played a lot of games. Heh.
I got into two main genres of games. One is my continual love of adventure games. This summer, I played 6 Nancy Drew games (haha yeah… some of them were pretty good, some not so much). Right now I’m playing Runaway: A Road Adventure with Robin and Broken Sword 4 on my own. Unfortunately, I really wanted to play Broken Sword 3 but could never get it to work on my computer.
Runaway is an odd game, but I think it ultimately fails in a lot of ways, most notably the sheer lack of research done by the developers about the settings they were portraying and crazy non-sensical physics displayed in the game. When I saw that we were going to go to Chicago and visit the natural history museum… well for some reason, I guess I’m crazy for thinking this, I thought we were going to check out the awesome Field Museum of Natural History which is basically a HUGE deal in Chicago and the museum world. It has amazing architecture and is located in a nice park area dedicated to civic improvements. Instead, we were funneled into some generic building. It was obvious the artists had never been to Chicago or at least that they just didn’t care.. or something. The same was true for their depiction of UC Berkeley at the end of the game. Ah well… It was also crazy of me to think, maybe, that their depiction of a catapult would be true to life in that heavier objects wouldn’t be shot as far as lighter objects… but nooooo… Newton’s Laws be damned. This was especially offensive since the main character was going to grad school in physics. Also, no fault of the developers, two of the characters were voiced by the same person who voices Nancy Drew. That was just coincidental weird.
Broken Sword 4, so far, has been excellent. Revolution has always made great games.
The other big genre I got into was space flight sims. I love this genre. But meh. See one of my previous post on some of my disappointments.
Also, some guildmates came up to visit (see the photos from that visit over on the right of this page) and we played a bunch of board games and a card game named Bang! Great game.
Limits to friendship
Over the past few weeks the Horde faction on my server in World of Warcraft has suffered a couple of major blows. [This is a weird sentence for me to say… I’m basically using the language that some of the people I used to raid with used when describing these occurrences. I mean, I don’t really think of the Horde faction as a unified body which can take blows… but I think they really do feel at opposition with the Alliance and that raiding and end-game PvP really is about competition.]
The first is that one raiding guild imploded. About 9 or 10 of my guildmates went with them to Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, so it changed very dramatically the availability of several level 60 guildies during certain times of the week. What happened was that the guild leaders and officers decided to ditch their guild (with like 12 hour notice) and migrate to a different server where they felt that they could advance their characters at a faster pace and basically get more opportunities to get farther in the higher-end instances, probably including tackling Naxx and AQ40, currently the two highest-end instances. [I find this very sad in that it is another blow to the image of uber guild and how there really is no allegiance or loyalty beyond what can be generated from a hierarchical, loot-oriented organization. Something here acts as a counterpoint to TL Taylor’s portrait of power gamers in her recent book Play Between Worlds, where power gamers are very socially oriented and loyal to their guilds…
The other thing that happened was that the guild which ran the raid group (composed of many allied guilds) that I ran with (the one in my paper on camaraderie), ironically, also imploded. This was something in the works through the whole summer, I believe. It started with some key healers leaving due to how loot was handled, which is completely contrary to the behavior one would expect from players who confess to value friendship and hanging out over loot. Then other people started leaving for various reasons. Communication started failing. I think it was because our group wasn’t stable, with a lot of new members to fill in the void of those who left over the loot drama or simply due to having a different summer schedule. Whatever the case, a heated discussion started happening on the lead guild’s forums, and it was pretty clear that some people from non-lead guilds were feeling underappreciated and that some people from the lead guild were also feeling underappreciated in the wake of being abandoned by the people who had left for more serious raiding guilds. One person in particular expressed the feeling that he was tanking for us and that it was our privilege to have him perform this service for us. He then went on to basically insult everyone not in his guild. Later he explained that his tirade was misunderstood due to a typo and that his anger wasn’t directed at all OOGers (out of guilders) but just to the original person who started the thread. But it was too late. By then all of my guildmates who were part of their raid decided to leave. I left for solidarity, but I was going to leave due to a different Fall school schedule anyway. The funny thing is, even if we had known he had made a typo… well, our main beef wasn’t actually against his insult but more his attitude that he had that the world revolves around him. That part wasn’t a typo and is consistent with how some of us felt about him for some time now. I am not sure how this raid is doing anymore as I no longer go, but I assume it is still going and that they are still working on Rags and Vael.
Anyway, these few weeks obviously have been pretty emotional for me in terms of game life and Ushki and school about to start, etc. But what worries me the most, I think, is that I am not exactly sure what this says about my paper that I wrote in June. I mean, do I have to retract what I wrote? Is it that the raid doesn’t value friendship and camaraderie as much as I had thought?
My thought is this:
People joined my ex-raid group to hang out with friends, primarily, but loot and character advancement should not be glossed over so readily. Different people value loot differently, with great variability, and different people view fairness and loot distribution differently. When the loot rules did not accomodate their expectations they bailed. Months before, perhaps they wouldn’t have bailed, but they did over the summer.
I think that, as with pretty much anything, tolerance is not a binary. People’s tolerance of things vary over time. I know that with “real-life” friends, I can only hang out with them for an afternoon, maybe half a day, or maybe three days, before I start to tire of them. I think it depends heavily on our personalities and what we are doing, but at some point I need some downtime. Well, think about this… This raid group has been going to Molten Core and Onyxia for almost a whole year now, three days a week for about 5 or 6 hours a day. That. is. a. lot. of. time.
At different times, different people had to come and go, and I bet some of them left because they got tired of the rest of us. It’s not that they hated us or couldn’t get along… It’s just tiring, you know? The core group emerged as the people who basically stayed the longest, I guess. We somehow maintained our friendship through the tough times (and the often really good times). When we started getting tired of each other… well, what kept us there if not the camaraderie? For me, it was a sense of loyalty and also the chance of winning loot. Once drama started happening, loyalty died due to the type of drama, and well… loot ain’t enough. By the time the drama started happening, the “fun” factor was already gone or so diminished that it just wasn’t enough to hold us together.
Anyway, that’s my take on things. People get tired of each other. All raid groups are destined to break apart. Some last longer than others because of the friendships. Ours was still an awesome group and I still believe the best 40-man raid group on the server. But we needed a break. Or at least some of us did.
What I think the space flight sim genre (and MMOGs) needs
Lots of space flight sims out there such as Freespace 2, Independence War 2, Freelancer, Elite, and, more recently, X3 and Darkstar One. There’s even a MMOG, Eve Online (and Earth and Beyond before it)…
Why are there so many competing franchises? Well, none of them get it right, IMHO.
They pretty much all feature the player as a ship captain sitting in a cockpit of a space ship shooting pirates or playing pirate, transporting goods between planets or space stations, completing missions or contracts, and following a main storyline of some sort. Some of them are very freeform, letting players choose how to earn money and upgrade their ships and letting them choose whether to follow the main storyline. Others are relatively linear where the trading, pirating, etc. is just a backdrop to the main story.
But none of them do all of those things right. X3 is pretty good and very ambitious, but it is totally riddled with bugs. At one point, I pretty much had to quit trying to follow the story (the story for me is extremely important (take *that* Raph Koster!)) due to a bug. Darkstar One is the opposite in that the story is pretty much ALL there is to the game such that I didn’t actually care and felt too restricted into following a specfic path. That’s too bad.
What I’d like to see is some game that gets it all right… but actually, I want more than that. I’ve been spoiled by really good RPGs such as Oblivion and Gothic 2 and Knights of the Old Republic. Now, I’d like to see a space flight sim rpg.
Take everything that a good space flight sim should be. Now on top of upgrading ships and equipment and a huge galaxy to explore, add character skills which improve over time. Most importantly, throw in some side-quests and make all the quests “solvable” using different methods. Let players decide whether to help one faction over another. Have quests that conflict with each other. Tempt players with greed vs. honor. Throw in some moral and ethical choices.
Am I asking too much? Nah… might as well also make it so that all the NPCs don’t all look and sound alike, and make it so all the space stations are different. Throw in derelicts and alien artifacts and anomalies and other unique things to explore.
I also ask this of World of Warcraft. Reputation grind sucks. How about faction quests which conflict with other factions? How about end-game characters who aren’t all alike? WoW-nnui indeed.
PS. Doing web searches for some of these games has made me realize something interesting. Games like Freespace 2 and Independence War 2 still have active websites YEARS after they were on store shelves since people can still get ahold of them through ebay or download (when they become either abandonware or officially released to the public) and fans can still make mods that other players can check out. Doing a search on Earth and Beyond, however, was rather sad. The news sections of fansites devoted to E and B featured messages from 3 years ago, basically announcing that the sites would no longer be maintained since the game no longer exists. Will most MMOGs (minus those with fans who hack them and run pirate servers) exist only in our memories?
Ushki’s alive!
We got Ushki back on Tuesday… I didn’t post immediately since, though we were happy about it and it ended up costing a couple hundred dollars less than the estimate, I was still in a foul mood.
I ended up letting my mood get the better of me when a couple of my jokes were misunderstood in guild chat and on the forums and instead of correcting the issue, I became defensive.
I will try my best to be more tolerant and understanding… though I have no guarantee the people who were reactionary to my initial statements will do the same.
The thing is that jokes and nuance just doesn’t work very well in text. It depends even more on context and additional indicators like 🙂 have to be added.
But it also sucks that I can’t joke with friends who I’ve known for YEARS without them taking it literally. Which is why I think I need to try to change myself and not be so quick to defense. The least I can do is meet them halfway.
Ushki update
On my birthday, two days ago, we went to the vet again to see if the antibiotics and new diet we received last Monday was helping with Ushki’s bladder infection and high pH level. The answer to both questions is yes. Yet, she was still peeing blood which isn’t so great. So we had an x-ray taken and it turns out that she had a little stone in her bladder which had been building up over quite a while. The vet, a really nice woman, Dr. Johnson, with 4 kitties of her own, highly recommended she undergo relatively easy surgery to get it out.
Happy birthday to me! $1570 surgery… not including the previous vet visits… we had to card it and now are in debt again. Fun!
Also, they had to keep her in the hospital for observation afterward. We’ll get to see her again after the holiday. We have not been notified how the surgery went but assume that if it went poorly someone would have called. So, hopefully, Ushki will be her old self again in a couple of days.
Robin has a way of saying things precisely sometimes, and yesterday she said that Ushki may be small but her presence is huge, and her absence leaves a palpable difference in the way our home feels.
The thought crossed my mind that maybe it didn’t work out. What would we do then? Would we sue the vet for not notifying us? What difference does it make if we had found out sooner? We probably can’t sue regarding the outcome since we signed some documents and such…
Anyway, this event has sort of put us in a funk.