Posts Tagged ‘current music’

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The Daily Lynx 11/28/2010

Monday, November 29th, 2010

[Insert drawing of a lynx with a monocle here]

I don’t want to admit how many RSS feeds I watch on Google Reader, but suffice to say it’s more than two and less than aleph-null.  Given how many interesting things I run across, I have decided to start a semi-regular link aggregation here.  Pay no attention to the purported daily nature of this lynx: he’s got delusions of grandeur.

SMBC has a message for science journalists. Yes.  Please.  That.

Here is a fairly awesome music video, made even more awesome by the apparent fact that it was filmed in one take. (via Shamus Young)

(Warning: Contains some NSFW language.) Blag Hag weighs in on the relationship between feminism and sexiness. These are very important points, given how frequently they seem to be forgotten.  TL;DR: Feminism is (or should be) about letting women choose what they want, not forcing them to avoid traditional roles.

(Warning: Probably not for the snake-phobic.) Something about the Pentagon and snakes, but I’m mostly interested in the video of a flying snake.  I’ve heard of those fellas, but never seen one in action.  Very nifty.

(Warning: Not for those trying to avoid Minecraft addiction.) Mojang has a bug tracker now!  Crazy.  It even tracks solved problems!

In other news, I might be doing some blog maintenance soon.  Getting a non-default WordPress theme, cleaning up my schizophrenic tag usage, that sort of thing.  Please imagine an emphasis on “might.”

Today’s writing progress (Derelict): -1 words.  Today was almost pure revision: some scenes were moved around, an outline was updated, and several scenes in Part 1 were partially rewritten to accommodate some major changes to the plot there.  (Outlines are not reflected in word count.)

Today’s writing progress (secret project):  What secret project?  I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Current music: Rogue by Incubus.  I’ve got Light Grenades on a playlist with Within Temptation, Muse, and Flyleaf albums, set to randomize.

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Oh. Oh, no.

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

I thought I’d kicked the habit.  But now there’s a new release.

Well, I guess I’ll see everyone in a few months.

Current music: The default DF music.

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Laptop phail!one

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Well.

My laptop’s hard drive has been threatening to fail for a while, and I think it’s finally gotten there.  Upon unlocking the screen, the machine froze for about three minutes, and then everything GNOME pretty much went blank.  It’ll boot about as far as the part where it’s supposed to mount stuff prior to loading the login, and then it goes to a lovely shell.  So, y’know, the drive’s not completely shot, because it loads Grub and stuff pretty well.  I’m running fsck now.  Expect more updates when I figure out what the hell I’m doing.

Current music: You Belong With Me by Taylor Swift, courtesy of Kix 104.

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Why yes, I am posting more frequently.

Friday, December 11th, 2009

I’d say I intend to keep doing so, but I’m already treading on thin ice by mentioning it.

On another note, I mostly posted this because I like my current playlist and wanted to mention it.

Also, I’ll probably do a post with some more baby pictures soon.  Most of them will be under the cut.

Current music: On loop — Unwell (Matchbox Twenty), Jumper (Third Eye Blind), Runaway Train (Soul Asylum), Inside Out (Eve 6).  I love these songs, particularly in combination.

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Ninite

Friday, December 11th, 2009

I ran across a lovely little app today called Ninite.  It made me cry a little.

How often have you found yourself on a new, new-ish, or refurbished computer with none of your must-have software on it?  It’s happened enough to me in the past several years to become something of a running annoyance.  I don’t know how many computers I’ve built, but I know I’ve gone through at least three main computers in as many years.  (I plan to stick with this one for a while, though.  It likes me.)

Ninite lets you pick from a fairly comprehensive list of open-source software, freeware, and shareware, and then it gives you a custom installer which will fetch the latest versions for your computer (in x64 if need be) and install them to the default locations — no babysitting, and absolutely no bundled crapware.  (I’ve mis-clicked or autopiloted myself into a couple of annoying toolbars in the past, despite a deep-seated and lasting loathing for most of them.  I’m not the only one, right?)  It’s pretty darned nifty.

Ninite doesn’t have all of the stuff I install — there’s no MediaMonkey, for instance, though Songbird has gotten good enough recently that I’ve considered switching.  Firefox will need to be immediately upgraded with your favorite addons.  And of course no computer of mine is complete without a version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.  But really, it’s very pleasingly complete.

So which of these, I cannot hear you asking, do I use?  Well, seeing as how you’re so obviously interested, I will tell you in great detail.  Because I feel like it.  (For those of you who don’t care, this post is pretty much over for you unless you care what music I’m listening to.)

Starting from the top — browser of choice.  I use Chrome quite a bit, but for now Firefox is on top.  Chrome has a special place in my heart — it’s fast as blazes, for one thing — but it’s just not as customizeable as the Fox yet.  That’s going to change in a hurry now that Chrome has opened it’s extensions gallery, and I’m enormously pleased to have Chrome on my laptop now that it’s been released for Linux.  When running Portable Apps, Chrome is usually my go-to browser; its much faster and much more stable when running off my poor flash drive.

Pidgin is my messenger of choice.  I do sorely miss the cute little Gmail chat emoticons, but Pidgin’s everything else makes up for it.  I’ve poked Thunderbird a couple of times, but never seriously.

Current Music: Counting Crows, Accidentally In Love.  I thought this was a Dixie Chicks song for the longest time.  Also, I’m putting this in the middle just to annoy anyone who does care about what I’m listening to but not what apps I use.  No reason.  Just feeling contrary.

Media: Oh yes, VLC Media Player.  This is like the second or third thing I install on a computer, right after Firefox and maybe some antivirus software.  As awesome as VLC is for movies, though, I never use it for music — for that I prefer desperately need MediaMonkey or, failing that, Songbird.  Songbird has great potential, but I don’t really feel it’s quite gotten there yet.

Imaging: The Gimp.  I also mess with Inkscape enough that I’ll probably include it in any Ninite install, even though I do so little graphical work that I could probably make do with MS Paint indefinitely.

Documents: OpenOffice, Adobe, and maybe Foxit.  I actually prefer not to use Adobe for PDFs — not only is it bloatware, but it’s been known to have some pretty impressive security holes.  Sumatra PDF is usually my app of choice, but Foxit is a perfectly good alternative.

Security: Avast and Spybot.  I love both of those.  I’ve also started to mess with Malwarebytes, but I’m not yet very familiar with it.

Runtimes: Flash 10 (for other browsers, I will never need the IE version), JAVA, and .NET.  This falls under the “yay for annoyances I’ll never have to deal with now” category, because I never notice these missing until I need them.

File Sharing: uTorrent.  For Linux images, dontchaknow.

Other: I started using Dropbox about two days ago for backup purposes, and it’s pretty awesome.  Steam annoys me a great deal, but I do love me some TF2, so I’ll install it on any machine I expect to do gaming on.

Utilities: Launchy and Revo.  Revo is indispensible. (Do you know how many registry keys some programs leave behind?  Upwards of four thousand, in the case of some HP printer software I took off a laptop the other day.)  I just started using Launchy the other day. (I had a “hey let’s try out some software I’ve been eyeing forever” day)  But you know what?  Launchy’s pretty freakin’ cool.

Compression: 7-zip.  I used to use Winrar, but it’s shareware and 7-zip is open source.  And faster.  And supports more formats.  And doesn’t bloat my right-click menu as much.

Developer tools: I like Python, and I love Notepad++.  And . . . what’s this?  You mean I never have to dig through Sun’s website for the (right) JAVA SDK again?  That alone makes Ninite worth it.

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All things considered, it’s been a pretty awesome day.

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

For starters:

Reader ZeroInbox Zero-ish

At long last, I have home internet again.  And I had scarcely had it ten minutes when I received a very awesome invitation.

So far, it's one heck of a fun toy. Check back with me when the rest of the Zosias dev-peeps get invitations.I do love me some Google Wave.

Plus it just so happens to be WoW’s anniversary.  If I’d gotten internet a day later, I would have missed out on a vanity pet, and I really like vanity pets.

And that’s not even all yet.

CRAV stands for Cops, Robbers, and Velociraptors. There's a story there.Remember the other day, when I found a backup of the roguelike I’m working on now?  Well, as it turns out I found a backup of a roguelike I was working on years ago while digging through my inbox.  The great thing is that the two totally complement each other.  Most of my work on the above was on the front-end, the graphical pretty stuff.  Most of my work on the current one has been on the back end — character creation and the like.

I make no apologies for making 'neko' a race option.And since I was, even then, a great big fan of object-orientation and plentiful comments, methinks the two will get along quite nicely.  I like how each of them solves a bunch of problems I was avoiding in the other.

This isn’t even getting into the massive inspiration attack I’m suffering from regarding writing right now.  I think I’m gonna get on that.

Current music: The Truth, by The Spill Canvas, via Pandora.  Never heard of them.  I think I like them.

Ah, Pandora.  I’ve missed you so.

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Programming a roguelike

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The other day I decided to sit down and do some programming on a roguelike I’ve been meaning to make forever.  A roguelike, it should be noted, is generally not a small project; it is usually a multi-year thankless task in which you produce an indy game which, for free, will delight a relatively small audience.  But I enjoy programming, and so program a roguelike I might.  I also might decide, a week from now, not to work on it for a year or two.  My hobbies are funny like that.

It should be noted that time spent programming does not necessarily translate to time spent not writing.  If anything, my inspiration for Derelict is the highest it’s been in months since I started on this roguelike.  I think it helps to have another creative task to switch to from time to time.

So about the roguelike.  I’m aiming a little to the side of what roguelikes normally do.  In a typical roguelike, you descend into a random dungeon, fight monsters, and take their stuff, and that’s certainly planned for this one.  But I’m also planning on implementing a more social side of things.  You can have characters that never go into the dungeon at all, spending all their time building relationships and social skills on the surface.

The town, randomly generated when you roll your first character, remains persistent between characters — and your characters can improve it.  Found a mage’s guild, and wizard characters you create will have higher starting skills.  Spawn a heir and leave an inheritance, and you can play them as your next character.  Tick off the neighboring hobgoblin civilization, and they will do their level best to knock your town back to the stone age, destroying your hard-earned improvements unless you can stop them.

I’m aiming high, but that’s the point.  One of the advantages of roguelikes is that, without the need to create and maintain pretty graphics, you can create a game with incredible depth of play.  The best example of this is Dwarf Fortress, the one example (to my knowledge) of a roguelike that’s also a full-time paying job for its creator.  It’s also probably the closest thing to what I’m attempting here.

Don’t get your hopes up about this game.  Just because I’m starting it doesn’t mean I’ll finish it — it’s a lot of work, and I’ll keep doing it as long as I keep having fun.  That’s the beauty of doing it as a hobby as opposed to professionally.  (Derelict, for instance, necessitates my attention whether or not I’m having fun on a particular day, since I hope to someday go pro as a novelist.)

Current music: Mozart, various

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Transportation upgrades

Monday, October 5th, 2009

We’ve had a car for a couple of months now, having upgraded from a scooter literally the day before we moved north.  There’s a story there, but it’s long, and I’ve told it so often in person that I don’t feel like retelling it here.  Sorry, Internet.  Suffice it to say that we are extremely grateful to a couple of our friends.

Not that we got rid of the scooter.  I mentioned a while back (a long while back, actually) that I didn’t think I’d ever get rid of my scooter.  Unfortunately the things aren’t highway legal at 49cc.  I think the magnitude of this fact really hit me when I was driving to see my parents and realized that the distance between the town I grew up in and the next town over was actually less than my daily in-city commute to work had been in Little Rock.

Besides, a couple of friends of ours up here needed transportation, being at the time completely without.  We’ve been there before a couple of times, and with it becoming increasingly obvious that we weren’t going to get a lot of use out of our scooter up here the choice to sell it off seemed obvious.  And as much as I like scooters, I have to admit there’s a certain thrill in just tossing the groceries on the back seat.

Lately though, the car’s been riding pretty rough.  Turns out that can happen when one of the tires is literally tearing itself apart.  We took it in to one of the local shops (to anyone in the Springdale, AR area — I really recommend Latino Tires) and got three of the tires replaced and the whole batch balanced.  Not only am I now confident in the car’s traction (especially important with winter coming on), but it’s riding smoother than it ever has while I’ve had it.  Very nice feeling.  It’s like my transportation is on some sort of rolling upgrade system.

Current Music: Cat’s in the Cradle by Harry Chapin, via Pandora.  I really love this song.

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Genre Supercolliding

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

I’m a big fan of science fiction, fantasy, and everything between or tangentially related to the above.  (I also rather like Dickens, and enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, lest anyone think I only read completely fantastical stuff.  Though now that I think about it, the sheer amount of coincidence in Great Expectations could almost qualify it as fantasy.  That’s not my point, though.)

One of my favorite things is genre busters.  I said the other day that I enjoy reading things that break out of the normal molds.  Well, not just reading.  One of the reasons I like anime (and manga) so much is because there’s a marked tendency to stray farther from the norm than we usually see in Western media.  A lot of this, I think, has to do with the fact that drawing a really cool vampire-demon-thing and drawing a regular person are much more similar, budgetarily speaking, than filming the same things.  And to be fair, it’s often not that they don’t conform, but that they conform to a different set of stereotypes and genres.

But where else can you enjoy a slice-of-life story on a terraformed Mars?  (Seriously, if you know, tell me.  There’s gotta be others, right?)  I read a lot of YA for the same reason — YA is a market in which genre-bending and outright genre-busting are generally well received.  I love the Pern books (though technically sci-fi, they have their share of fantasy tropes).  I love King’s Dark Tower series.

For the period of time that Dragon magazine ran with Polyhedron on the flipside, I had a subscription.  Every two months I would get Dragon in the mail and immediately ignore every single adventure in it, flipping it over to get to the Polyhedron mini-game.  The cancellation thereof was one of the great tragedies of my youth.  (Can I say that yet, or do I need to wait a few more years?)  The mini-games were great.  There were about a dozen of them in all, and they took the D20 rules I knew and loved and converted them into some wild, and fascinating, things.  A D20 update for Spelljammer.  Thunderball Rally, a 70s race-across-the-US (and blow up everything in your path) game.  Mecha Crusade.  Omega World, a Gamma World-inspired post-apocalypse game of doom.  I loved, and love, these, each and every one; to this day I occasionally pull these old troopers out when I want to run a one-shot.

And not just the one-shots that they’re designed for.  I prided myself on the ability to, on the spur of the moment, throw together a wildly disparate setting for a session or minicampaign from the various elements at my disposal.  I once ran a Spelljammer campaign using the vehicle modification rules from Thunderball Rally.  (Don’t ask me how.)  I ran post-apocalyptic D&D with mecha.  Call of Cthulhu racing games.  (The Thunderball Rally rules were a perennial favorite of mine because of the vehicle customization.  I’ve not before or since seen a better system in an RPG for tricking out your ride.  I know they’re out there, but humor me.)  Give me an hour, a spark of an idea, and my bookshelf, and I would pull rulesets from a half-dozen different sources to create a wildly experimental campaign of doom.  I loved that.  (Still do.  Shhh, it’s a secret.)

This is actually a lot of why I don’t like 4th edition D&D as much as 3rd — it’s not nearly as adaptable.  The sole fact that monsters use different rules than PCs again just breaks my heart.  In my Zosias games, the monster manual is really the Great Big Book o’ Races.  I almost wish I was joking.  Want to play a blink dog paladin?  Sure, it worked pretty well last time.  Awakened horse fighter?  That guy had great potential, pity the campaign never carried on.  The saving grace of my ability to run the game is that I do the same thing for NPCs.  Amnesic green dragon dreamwalker?  Great.

I’ve got more and more coherent things to say on the subject, but I’ll save that for another day.  For now, over and out.

Current Music: Avril Lavigne, Sk8tr Boi, and Alice in Chains, Them Bones, on loop.

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Things found on the Internet

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

I spend more time on the Internet than is probably healthy.  I used to have a “daily checks” webcomic folder that I middle-clicked at least once a day before I discovered the magic of RSS.  There were something like forty webcomics on it at the time.  Since switching to RSS, the list has only grown.  (Also, switching to RSS was one of the best things I have ever done.)

I’ve idly considered the possibility of starting to post webcomic reviews once a week or so.  If I did one a week, I’d be in business for about a year on my daily list alone.

Today, because I feel like it, let me share a few things I’ve found on the web that I find nifty.  First off we have this extremely cute set of photos, in which a mouse decides that a leopard’s dinner looks really tasty.

National Geographic has, on their site, a photo of the day feature.  I’ve gotten more than a few awesome wallpapers from this feed, such as today’s and a few others.

Cool Tools has become one of my favorite feeds by far.  It is what it says, though some things are more tool-like than others.

Food in Real Life is a really nifty concept.  It takes (usually) boxed or similarly prepackaged food, prepares it according to instructions, and often arranges it like the picture on the packaging.  Then it compares the result with what the packaging would have you expect.

Finally, have I mentioned my love of webcomics?  I’m pretty sure I have, at one point or another.  When finding a new webcomic, particularly one that’s been around for a while, there’s often an initial startup time during which I do not eat, sleep, drink, or play WoW until I have finished reading through the entire archives.  For those who say that’s not healthy, there’s Archive Binge.  It’s a really, really nifty idea.  First, you pick one of the supported webcomics.  (Well, first you create your account for it, but I don’t mind for something this useful.)  Then you pick which strip to start with, how many comics to read per day, and which days to receive comics, and it creates a custom RSS feed to get you through the archives in a healthy manner.  I’ve got something like five or six feeds going, not just on comics I haven’t read before, but on old favorites (namely XKCD and Schlock Mercenary) that I wanted to read again.

Current music: On loop — Mr. Roboto by Styx, Dream On by Aerosmith, and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.  But I’m about to switch to The Who.  Or maybe Pandora.

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