October 2010
2 posts
Flash Player Manual Installer (thank god) →
Lessons Learned (Volume 1)
Or, rather: Lessons Learned in the least convenient way possible, in the most painful manner possible, with the maximum amount of stress, time pressure, and personal agony.
Chapter 1: January
This January, in the middle of composing my Division III (essentially my final project of college), my biggest hard drive, upon which all my archives and stored data resided, blew its servo. I had the...
September 2010
1 post
April 2010
4 posts
An Interesting Observation
Activision’s Infinity Ward debacle has, to date, cost them:
The integrity of the Modern Warfare 2 team: IW is going to need major rebuilding if it’s going to put out a game any time soon.
The confidence of the gaming public.
Two proven high-level developers who command a high amount of personal loyalty, further proving their skill.
40% of the developers who actually worked on...
I Still Hate Roger Ebert
“Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren’t gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.”
...
Rules?
Humans play games. Games, in the sense I’m referring to them, are activities with lists of actions that are acceptable and unacceptable (rules). We play two types of games, and I divide them by their manner of mediation. One is mediated by humans, aided or unaided by technology. This covers sports, tag, etc. The other category is that mediated by technology, with humans as a secondary. This...
“EA director of corporate communications Jeff Brown would not confirm whether the...”
– Activision Countersues ‘Scheming’ Ex-Infinity Ward Heads
February 2010
2 posts
“… the idea that paid artistic output is obsolete because true artists...”
– Will Wiles’ blog, Spillway
http://willwiles.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-have-always-relied-on-strangeness-of.html
January 2010
2 posts
Your Regularly Expected Programming
Kane and Lynch: Dead Men
The original reviews for this game panned it, pretty much. I didn’t read them too carefully, so when I saw this game for 18$, I decided “Ah, what the hell.”
This game is bad. No, scratch that- It’s Bad with a capital B. The studio that made K+L is where game design goes to die. The number of monumental errors in this game is… well, about...
November 2009
3 posts
Every time I sit down here, at the computer, my first thought is “Fuck this chair.” Seriously.
It takes a lot of effort to design something this unappealing. At least, I think it does. The color… it’s beyond purple. It’s like this horrid blue-ish purple that reminds me of the literary device so often used to describe clouds of foul engine or cigar smoke. The wheels jam on...
Excitement!
Currently loving Coma Baby’s “Body Weekend”, along with the usual “Love Me Hate Me Kiss Me Kill Me”.
I’m successfully writing for my Div III, with a review meeting on Tuesday. Thinking of blocking out some quiet time Monday, maybe skipping work, just sitting with my bottle of Jack Daniel’s and staring off into space, in the vein of what Warren Ellis is...
October 2009
4 posts
rachelsoma:
15:46 Dear interwebs, it is your fault that when I hear the word ‘bifurcated’ I immediately think ‘penis’ #
Sadly, this is true for me, as well.
Something I do not care for:
When I am told to take responsibility for something that is in no way my fault or responsibility.
August 2009
8 posts
In the finest tradition of MENTLEGEN, I give you- BEETSHITTLES. Now I need to make an image macro for it.
Marvellous Modernity
You want modern marvels? Screw construction vehicles, weaponry, the internet, and computing. Think medicine. I have developed a condition that, a mere two generations ago, would have probably killed me. It’s pretty innocuous, as far as medical problems go: basically I have trench foot in my mouth, a perfect storm of bacteria eating away at my gums and necrotizing them. Kinda distractingly...
Both sex icons in their own right.
Both speak a...
For the first time in my life, I’m suffering gadget overload.
When I was young, it was 1993, and Doom was released with great fanfare. Somehow, the shareware edition arrived in my household and I watched my father play through E1M1, blasting demons and barrels, swapping lead with zombies, and generally make the computer into something that I could fall in love with.
Later, the internet...
Howto: Fix Mozilla Firefox
Firefox, while it is an awesome, fast, secure, extensible browser that I love and use every day on many different platforms… can sometimes fail. In fact, when it does, it fails spectacularly, becoming completely un-runnable by crashing silently just after starting, like an overachieving suicidal ninja.
When this happens, it’s understandably kind of hard to debug. So most people try...
Informational!
delicious feed no longer being imported, it is the clutter. Pleased to be visiting delicious.com/bhakarnow if you wish to stay up to date (who would, though?).
Warning, hopeless romantic alert.
I should refrain from making personal posts here, but this is just too cute.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/alt/1205953161.html
Possibly NSFW?
Ocean Travel Without a Boat
…Because otherwise there’s no challenge.
I’ve known my OS drive was dying for some time now, which was one of the reasons I transferred my user directory to my 1TB drive when I bought it. However, I had not anticipated the possible effects of a slowly-failing hard drive on trying to burn a DVD- namely, that it is impossible. This led me to (erroneously) believe that perhaps my...
July 2009
30 posts
Identity WTF
I’ve been on the internet a damm long time, so I can remember the hoary days when GameSpy was a trusted name and brand. Stop screaming and drinking bleach, it was a LONG time ago. They got bought by IGN, and then a lot of other things happened in the meantime… I should research that history, it’s a tangled web of crap and lies, I assume. Not too important, though.
What IS...
Best. Comment. Ever. →
(On the recent debacle with the iPhone and its Google Voice app being recalled)
AT&T: You want answers?
TechCrunch: We think we’re entitled to them.
AT&T: You want answers?!
TechCrunch: We want Google Voice on our iPhones.
AT&T: You can’t handle the iPhone with Google Voice!
Son, we operate on network that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by carriers with...
So I got an iPod Touch...
Originally I was thinking…
But then gradually I became…
and then I got persuaded to TA a game development course involving it, so I kinda had to be…
…the guy on the right, obviously.
So here are my semi-coherent ramblings about it, so far.
Man, Warren Ellis got me so excited for this. In an oblique way, he referred to Clay Shirky’s famous statement...
Pimp My Gun →
“Transnistria is a long and skinny scrap of land along the Dniestr river, wedged...”
– Maciej Cegłowski, Transnistria
Package Mismanagers
There is something truly perverse about *nix package managers. Ideally, when installing a program, the installer either assumes all dependencies are covered (braindead, but acceptable in certain circumstances), or includes all dependent packages and installs them along with itself. In the case of dependents being present but of the wrong version, the installer should always defer to a higher or...
HowToUse - winchain - A quick walkthrough on... →
CK's IT blog: Personal Installation Guide for... →
Very off topic: Why I won't be at my high school... →
http://suigintou.desudesudesu.org/4scrape/ →
статьи →
The case of the 500-mile email →
Radiowave Propagation Center: forecast and current... →
Yeah I know it's been out forever
RE5 Thoughts / Mini-review:
Classic example of good game design gone horribly wrong. Take the inventory of the older RE games, cut down on the variety of weapons, but keep the focus on combat. Be slightly more sparing with ammunition, and introduce co-op. In addition, streamline the saving system to only allow for one save, and introduce checkpoints and suchlike to make it more modern. Sounds...
Just Hungry | Japanese recipes, healthy and fun... →
bookofjoe: Steampunk Mechanical Cheetah →
Killzone 2 Review
I’m not even a third of the way through this game at 3 2/3 hours playtime, which is good, but there is something that bugs the crap out of me. Why did they have to make the Helghast British? I understand the need to make the voices clearly delineated, but this is just lazy and stupid. The accent doesn’t fit at all with the racial character of the Helghast- these are hard-bitten...
Shomben Yokocho on Vimeo →
Using Kon-Boot from a USB Flash Drive: Bypass... →
live-android - Google Code →
Hacker News →
Gizmodo - Navy Rail Gun Test DESTROYS Everything... →
Вне зоны комфорта - Fallout 2009 «Ничто... →