Shenanigans

There aren’t many games I’ve played that I want to replay immediately after completing them. Most I’m not all that interested in replaying at all. Playing Saint’s Row the Third was by far the most fun I’ve ever had gaming, and when now the main storyline is done, I’m going to start from the beginning. It’s that good.

I kind of knew it was going to be over-the-top zany fun. I didn’t realize just how much. The game breaks away from common sense, then plausibility, then from the bounds of reality itself. And it is awesome, and throughout continually becomes more and more awesome. I’d like to mention some of the awesome things that happen, but I don’t want to spoil anything.

If you only listen to one of my recommendations ever, listen to this one : Buy Saint’s Row the Third. Now. Get the fastest shipping option you can. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’ll change your life. It’s not flawless, but whatever flaws it may have you won’t give a shit about because you’ll be having too much fucking fun.

31 days, 29 posts, more use of the words “so” and “eh” than I frankly expected.

What do I think about the whole experience? Honestly : “Meh”. I’ve written some stuff with the idea that I was doing it to out-post other people. I’m fairly sure no-one else actually has read any of this shit, and that’s probably for the best, since it’s pointless and trite. I’m not sure what I expected; some new found clarity in delivering ideas to screen perhaps. But nope, it was mostly just hassle in order to beat other people. And I can beat other people with ease and comfort - I have a stick and everything.

So I won’t keep on doing it? Maybe I might occasionally post an odd thing if I have something super important to say, I guess. But I’ve never had a problem with expressing myself before, and I don’t exactly envisage developing one.

All-in-all: Blogging. I’ve tried it, and I still don’t get it. What’s it all about then, eh?

Once, so long ago that it may have well been another lifetime entirely, I had the superpower of avoiding hangovers entirely. I’d drink an entire skin full,  and be up and about next morning full of vim and enthusiasm for the day ahead. I think that power only had a limited number of uses, and they’re all gone. Or perhaps, I’m simple old and falling apart. Maybe I’m just drinking more but it’s just not affecting me as much st the time. Whatever has changed, I miss those days.

I woke up yesterday feeling pretty awful. Due to the lack of everything, I had no way of coping with the problem. My usual way is to take painkillers, shut my eyes and cry the hangover away. That usually works for the basic level.

But, I do have a plan. This plan involves fixing this problem in my life the same way I solve every other problem I have : WITH SCIENCE. My first thought was to find a scientific special hangover cure. But the only thing an extensive (3 minute) Internet scouring (typed it into Google) revealed was a product called Alchohol-X. I was tempted, just for science. It sounds like the sort of secret-project that makes super-heroes, like ENERGY-X, or Weapon-X. But then I snapped to my senses and realized it was just a shitty scam product from the Internet.

So what’s next? Find all the cures (FIND ALL THE CURES!). Try them all. Rank them in terms of effectiveness vs Planning required. Somehow profit. I have free time. I have a need to drink. I like making plans that I’ll invariably give up on half-way through. What can go wrong?

OK, first of all: They totally dropped the ball on the name of this program. “Hey dudes, I’m making a program to rename stuff! What shall I call it?”. They came up with “TheRenamer”. Worst. Name. Ever.

So what does it do exactly? Apart from renaming. Well, it extracts the name and episode from a TV show file, and renames and moves it based on your specifications, resulting in a well-sorted folder system without having to get all manual up in that bitch. I can also be run as a command line tool, letting you get your files sorteas soon as they’re ready. Which is nice.

If you have a lot of TV shows and need a better sort-them-out thing, this is pretty much the best. You can find it here : http://www.therenamer.com/

So it seems my recent wave of computer manipulations has fixed the Crashy McBluescreen problem. Fucking sweet. Now I can actually use it for stuff, without returning to find a smoking crater where a task used to be.

What it has not done, however, is affected the noise. It’s fine, because I just put on heavy headphones to blanket out the angry hum of a thousand misanthropic bees caused by a tried out case fan. This is actually fine. Well, provided you don’t, for example, want to do anything without the headphones, in which case you’ll be hard-pressed to hear what’s going on.

It needs replacing. But it can wait.

For me, the best kind of fun is stupid fun. That probably says more about my maturity level than I’d normally let slip, but I’m pretty sure that’s what all this “blogging” thing is all about anyway.

The more restrictive something is, the less fun it’s going to be. That’s why games themselves can be described as being fun in a way that films can’t - even the most linear game places the freedom to succeed or fail into the players hands.

Realism is, at it’s core, a large collection of restrictions. It’s one that does help in other areas, like immersion, but it means that the game’s design has to stop a lot of awesome. It’s a balancing act between allowing the player to relate to the game and  providing a structure and framework to give consequence and reaction to the player,  while at the same time not letting that framework choke the player to death by boredom.

Enter Earth Defense Force. It’s approach to realism is to giggle at it behind realism’s back. It’s approach to story and characterization is to copy Space Invaders - “Here are some aliens attacking Earth” it says “You should probably stop that using shooting”. Sophisticated? Not in the least. Clever? Heck no! But it is mindlessly unapologetically fun.

It doesn’t even attempt to rationalize the aliens. “Why are they here?” you could ask - the game remains tight-lipped on the matter, and instead just begs you to be cool and go with it. “Why would aliens attacking Earth do so by giant-ifying ants, spiders, wasps and all other sorts of bugs?” Does it matter? Make with the shooting!

Nor are the weapons up for debate. You have unlimited ammo, naturally. The various shotguns and machine guns are fairly straight forward, but with insane fields of fire. The explosive weapons, on the other hand, are batshit insane. When you have a rocket launcher that fires three rockets at the same time you can’t really complain about firepower. Firing a homing missile that will destroy several buildings, but moves slower than walking place is par for EDF’s course. Grenade launchers that fire explosive charges out like confetti are present from the get-go.

Earth Defense Force 2017 was the go-to game for me and an old housemate after we’d had a lot to drink. We drank during it too - it enhances the game. Lacking a storyline to speak of means that it’s ideal for co-op. Being over-the-top wacky and yet fairly simple means that it’s ideal for inebriation.

The sequel, Insect Armageddon, has added some extra stuff, such as jetpacks and even more excessive weapons, while staying true to the core, but I’ve not really been able to play it enough. It’s probably my liver to blame.

This is about those flat, touchscreen computer thingies, not pills. In case you were wondering; getting them confused will stop this making sense.

So, last Christmas time, I got an iPad. It was a gift I’d never have got for myself - something of a rarity now that I have more money than willpower (Pretty easy, since I have no willpower at all). Before I got it, I was excessivly dismissive of this kind of computing, because on paper it’s kind of silly. It’s basically the same as a smartphone, only you can’t make calls, and the screen is larger. You could probably achieve the same effect as an iPad with an iPhone and a magnifying glass. On the other hand, compare it to a regular computer, and you’ve got something that’s far less powerful, more locked down, and costs more money.

So what changed? Well, owning one kind of changes my viewpoint bias. But in short what happened was laziness: one of the most powerful forces in the universe. I use my iPad because my actual computer is just too darn far away. Want to watch your videos but don’t want to get out of bed? That’s what it’s for. It’s pretty awesome like that.

What’s that all about then? Carrot. In Cake. Whaaaaaaaa?

This is a tale of hardship and sacrifice, of destruction and rebirth, of sorrow and anguish. This is the tale of the longest day of my week.

Those of you paying close attention will remember my post last week on a poor choice of motherboard. The rest of you HEY! PAY ATTENTION!. Well, today I went about replacing it. And also the CPU fan. Replacing those has pretty much killed me.

Nowadays, replacing and upgrading computer parts is very easy. Most things you don’t even need to unscrew anything, just pop out the old, and clip in the new. Changing the fan mounts on a motherboard is very old fashioned. You need to be a master juggler to deal with all the screws floating around, you need to be a Hindu god to hold everything in place, and you need to be a physics-defying wizard to actually follow the instructions (which require you to screw things together INSIDE OF OTHER THINGS). So that wasn’t ideal to say the least.

Stage two was removing the processor from the old motherboard. This went monumentally badly. There’s a latch to hold the CPU in place, but that only works when you put it in at the start. After a fucking great big heatsink goes on top, it no longer works as it should. As a result, in removing the CPU, some of it’s pins got bent. The core processor in a PC has about a billion legs sticking out the bottom, which fit into the rest of the board, and feed the processor with electric and computer data and probably cheese. These need to fit into matching holes. If these no not match, what you’ve got is a very expensive ornament. I of course, hadn’t realized that at this stage. More on this story later.

The next obstacle was separating the old fan from the processor. Sounds easy, one just sits on top of the other, right? WRONG! There’s a layer of goops between them called Thermal Paste (or Thermal Compound … or Thermal Goopy Shit What the Fuck). At an atomic level, the top of the processor and the bottom of the heatsink are super bumpy. Considering what we want is for the processor’s heat to go into the heatsink, that’s bad, since the air gaps don’t pass heat very well at all. Enter Thermal Paste. A goopy silver stuff for gaps. It allows heat to pass between the two surfaces. Cools, I’m down with that. Downside? After it’s been used for a while, it’s basically filled the whole gap, and also solidified into an unbreakable barrier. Some googling told me I should have thought ahead to this situation (I didn’t), and got me some special goop cleaner. But, methylated spirits would just about do the trick if desperate (I was). It worked pretty damn well, freeing the processor from the iron bonds of it’s thermal oppressor.

When I tried mounting the processor onto the new board though, I found the pin-issue. There was a lot of swearing at this point. See, the thing about the pins, is that while they’re super eager to move, what they’re really love to do is break off, but can only do that if they’ve practiced at moving enough. Putting them back where they belong is, therefore, very fail-prone. With a few tricks I read about on the interwebs, a lot of luck, and a little precision poking, it actually friggin worked, the processor once again lived. I almost did a jig, before realizing that there was plenty more that could go wrong.

But it didn’t. Everything else fitted into place perfectly. Good job too; it’d been 7 painful hours of pain, and I probably couldn’t have taken any more problems.

So: Is it any quieter? Not really - most of the noise is being made by a different fan, which needs replacing. Is it any faster? Nope.  Will it stop the computer shitting itself and dying? We’ll find out. Why the fuck do you subject yourself to this? I have no idea. Buying something pre-made doesn’t appeal to me. I like the tortured process of putting it all together, no matter how bad it feels at the time. It’s … well, I’m not sure I’d call it “fun”, but satisfying.

I have stepped over the threshold. That line from “I’m pretty full now, oh I guess I might be able to have another tiny morsel” to “… why did I finish that? I am so full I might just die of mortal fullness”.

There’s not many foods that can cause this. Pancakes can do it without breaking a sweat. Domino’s pizza can too. I have no idea why. I think it’s just so full of unhealthiness that it bypasses something primal within the brain. That it fulfills a base need in exactly the right way as to switch off the body’s ability to discern when it really shouldn’t carry on.

It’s not a problem exactly, but I do want a nap now …