timesink get?

I accepted a friend's invite to Starfleet Commander on Facebook and I've been playing it.  It's a massive waste of time.  It's kind of neat because it's playing even when you aren't at your computer, and you can start stuff that takes a long time and then leave, log out, close your browser, or even turn off your computer and it'll still finish.

The game has a tutorial to get you through the early stages, which basically walks you up to being able to build ships.  Towards the end of it I was gleefully ignoring it for a reason I'll explain below.

I have some issues with the game.  First off the prices.  They start out reasonable, but then you hit a brick wall approximately 54% of the way to your first ship when the prices suddenly skyrocket.

The next issue: To get certain things in-game you have to invite friends to play it (and they have to accept your invite).  Any time someone accepts your invite you get three Crew Points and one Crew Member.  Crew Points are required for certain things, and Crew Members can be used to speed up production of nearly everything.

Further, to get resources you have to micro-manage.  You can't just say "okay, go get me some crystal" and have your crystal value go up periodically.  You can build mines to get resources automatically, and upgrade them so they give you resources more often, but the amount you get is very small compared to the prices you have to pay for everything.  So to get resources, every two or so minutes you have to click a button.  This makes it very hard to do anything else, such as typing a blog post.

There is an exception to the "you have to invite people" rule to get crew points and members.  You can build droids that do the same things.  You'd think a droid would be more effective at any given task than a human would, but this isn't the case.  In fact, humans are twice as effective as droids for increasing production and three times as effective at increasing your crew points (and a hell of a lot cheaper).  I was just going to eschew social interaction on a social network entirely and simply build droids to do my shit for me, but they're basically not worth the money and time it takes to make them.

I found an ultimate solution to the crew issue, though perhaps unwieldy.  Simply log out of Facebook and make a dummy account, set it up with the bare minimum stuff, and then invite it and accept the invite.

There's a partial solution to the micromanagement issue.  Once you get multiple cargo ships and the ability to fly them all separately, you can tell it "hey, send this number of ships to get crystal".  You still have to click once every couple of minutes, but you get more resources per click.

The last issue with the whole friend invite thing is that to be able to send a cargo ship to get the resource you need the most of, hydrogen, you need one crew point.  Either build a crew droid, which serves no other purpose except to get you crew points but takes forever to unlock and build, or make a fake account to invite.

It sucks that this game is designed to be a time waster, because if the costs and build times were more reasonable it would actually be kind of fun.  In fact, this game reminds me of a much better shareware-turned-freeware game for Windows (it runs nearly perfectly in Wine in case you're on Linux) called Warpath 97.  The galaxy was a bit smaller (divided into eight octants with 16 planets each), and it isn't massively multiplayer, but its gameplay is much faster and more better.  Also 90% of the people in Starfleet Commander are inactive.

plastic guitar committing plastic suicide

I've done a lot to extend the life of this guitar controller that I got with Guitar Hero 3.

• The neck is hardwired because frets were randomly dropping.
• I have a piece of paper folded up and jammed between the neck and the body so the neck won't wobble.
• The whammy bar has a rubber band on it because the one essential piece of plastic (plastic...) that causes the spring to do its stuff broke off.

Well, really only three things.  But it feels like more since the first one involved disassembling the guitar, cutting out the faulty neck connection hardware, and splicing wires together and wrapping them in electrical tape.

Recently I noticed that the fret buttons don't all stick out of the controller the same distance.  As one might expect, this has an effect on the feel of the buttons.

• Green and Orange have the best feedback and stick out the farthest, though Orange feels better.
• Red and Yellow don't feel too bad and stick out about the same distance, but less far than Green/Orange.
• Blue is very close to the surface of the controller and I can barely feel it move when I press it.

Strangely enough this isn't affecting gameplay one bit.  The game doesn't errantly register blue or anything.  I'm thinking of disassembling it again to look at the fret button hardware to see if it's any issue I can fix.

localization

Having a program able to display its messages in multiple languages is a good thing, right?

Well, how about this: Once I've selected a language (i.e. English), DON'T FUCKING INSTALL LOCALIZATIONS FOR OTHER FUCKING LANGUAGES.  I DON'T KNOW THOSE LANGUAGES AND THEY'RE JUST EATING UP VALUABLE HARD DRIVE SPACE.

Pidgin does this, a number of Firefox extensions do this (and get disabled if you remove the localizations you'll never use), and probably many more applications as well.

It's fucking retarded.

lol real guitar

I think I just played a proper F chord on guitar.  I still find it hard to bar two strings, let alone six.  lol calluses

This would be helped greatly if I could find the pick.  I'm using some bullshit "Ultimate Paper Football" thing, which works but is much thicker (and made of paper).  I could have sworn I put the pick back in the case after last time I played but it doesn't seem to be in there (nor is it floating around inside the guitar...)

The tips of my fingers are too fucking fat and keep hitting other strings, which messes up (in particular) my Ds and As.

And it doesn't help that my left index finger is shorter than it should be, due to an accident I had as a kid.

lol nevermind

Eclipse re-released episode 46 using the clean raw.

tsunami bullshit

Eclipse's raw for Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood has the bullshit 90cm tsunami warning map plastered all over it.

But I was browsing Tokyo Toshokan and found a .mp4 release from another group using Eclipse's subs that doesn't have the map, but has that group's credit in the upper left corner of the screen for the entire episode.

I'm wondering if I can't use aegisub to somehow remove that credit.  Or if I can find a 720p h264/Vorbis .mkv raw without the map, could I just pull Eclipse's subs out of their release (they're just softsubs) and stick them on that.

I wish I understood better how this shit worked.

omfg

Seriously Azureus.  Stop bugging me for a donation.  I'm not going to fucking donate.  I've already told you this more times than I can remember.

I really need to get another torrent client that has an RSS feed scanner that uses regular expressions for its filters (this restriction eliminates uTorrent from contention).  I'd use Deluge but the one RSS feed plugin I've found that looks like it should work doesn't work because it has external dependencies it doesn't tell you about and are impossible to install on Windows.

fuck I'm stupid

Everything with my server has been absolutely awesome after switching to Arch Linux.  Except recently I noticed that I couldn't use the eject command to eject its DVD drive.  Every time I tried it would say it couldn't read from the device.  The temporary workaround was to chmod o+r /dev/sr0 before ejecting, but this would revert seemingly randomly.

I stumbled upon the incredibly stupidly simple solution while browsing Arch Linux's forums looking for something else entirely that I forget at this point.

/dev/sr0 has rw-rw---- for its permissions bits, owned by user root and group optical.  Somehow I had neglected to note the group permissions.  The fix was exactly that, stick my user into the optical group and then log out and back in for the change to take effect.

I feel so stupid.

holy fuck it's march already

Finally.  Hopefully this means that the winter that refused to end will finally end.

Seriously, over four feet of snow across the season in a region that's used to maybe 6 inches to a foot, tops.

I think I need to make a rum and coke and then play Invasion + UT2k4 RPG now.

Also sakura matsuri is coming up.

dvd navigation fixed

Apparently having my MPC set to EVR Custom was preventing me from navigating DVDs with the mouse.

Switched to VMR9 and I can navigate DVDs again without MPC's keyboard controls that only work when they decide they want to.

Also now it seems I can take screencaps with subtitles once again.

UT2k4 RPG

I saw this mutator running on some random servers in the server list way back when, and forgot about it until recently.  Then I googled it up and installed it.

It's pretty neat.  For each kill you get while you have it loaded, you gain experience.  When you get enough you level up and get points that you can use to make your stats better.  Stats include things like weapon damage, damage reduction, health capacity, adrenaline capacity, and ammo capacity.  You can also save up the points to purchase various passive skills that do things like increase the distance you can fall before taking fall damage or periodically giving you adrenaline.

Beyond the stats, it also adds random modifiers to the weapons you pick up.  There are prefixes and suffixes as well as plus bonuses that increase the damage you deal with that specific weapon.  One of the best suffixes is "of Infinity", which gives the weapon infinite ammo.  Get a Minigun of Infinity and you're good to go, though my personal favorite is the Flak Cannon of Infinity.  The Redeemer or Ion Painter would be interesting to have "of Infinity" on as well.

There are also artifacts, which are similar to relics but are only active when you enable them and consume adrenaline when used.  My favorite of these is the Summoning Charm, which takes a random amount of adrenaline and then according to the amount it took summons a friendly Invasion monster of appropriate strength (i.e. the more adrenaline it takes, the stronger the monster it summons).

Funny I should mention Invasion, because UT2k4 RPG and Invasion seem to be a match made in heaven.  I guess it's just the whole "killing monsters" aspect of it, but it just feels right.

Segueing into Invasion, DM-KillbillyBarn is an awesome level for it.  It's not very big but it's very open and if you grab the Ion Painter off of the top of the silo you can pwn things from the roof of the barn.  It also has some extra sound effects, so when you pick up the damage amplifier it goes "YEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAW!", when you walk up to the front of the truck it honks a Dixie horn at you, and there's a radio in the barn that if you stand near it you can hear a radio broadcast.  Oh and there's a barking dog tied to a tree.