Opposites attract.

Tonight Jenny came home from school all wound up, for some reason, like a Jack Russell on speed. I'm trying to wind down. As she was (rapidly) talking, I leaned back in my chair and started this song:

She paused, and said, "We're like complete opposites right now."

Can't really argue with that, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

What was I talking about?

Look, I'm going to pretend it hasn't been four months since my last post. Are we all okay with that? Yes? Good, moving on.

Today we had some hellfire and brimstone-style storms blow through the city, and because of reports of widespread flooding in Raleigh, I drove Jenny to work in my truck for her three hour shift. I decided to spend the time shopping at Poplar Plaza rather than driving back home, and that was not a great idea. Walked into Spin Street and immediately found $20 special editions of Serenity and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which I really, really wanted. I didn't need them, but it was close. I settled for a couple of used CD's. First, Live's Throwing Copper, one of those seminal Gen-X albums that I always meant to own but never got around to picking up. Sure, I could download it, but that's not the point.

Second is Lewis Black's classic live CD, The White Album. Ten years ago, when I was living in Germantown with a couple guys I worked with, we Napster'd this record, and spent night after night laughing at it while we Quake III'd the night away. I've tried to find it a number of times recently, both in record stores and with things like Soulseek. Never came close, but today there it was, for $7.99. Money well spent, my friend. I'm going to rip this fucker and put it on my cell phone so I can inappropriately laugh my way though a few days of boring, grinding work on industrial battery chargers.

So after spending a few bucks at Spin Street I spent a few more at McAlister's, where I got to meet Jenny's new manager and get a very good lunch. Then I went to Bookstar and forced myself not to buy at least a dozen books I really wanted. I've become so used to randomly finding cool books for next to nothing at places like Goodwill and Salvation Army and that used bookstore in Millington (latest buys: Band of Brothers, Life on Earth, and Harry Potter 5), that I forgot what it was like to find exactly what I want for full price. I won't list all the stuff I had to make myself put down, but the last one, Hell Hound on his Trail, was a real struggle. I stood there and read the entire first chapter. I'm not kidding.

What else. Oh, I'm loving this Netflix thing. Jenny talked me into it a couple months ago, and damn if it isn't worth the nine bucks a month. Even setting aside the fucking awesome instant, unlimited streaming of all kinds of movies and TV shows whenever we want, I'm just hooked back into renting movies again. I'd slipped into a mode of selectively buying cheap DVD's that I really wanted, which severely limited what I got to see. Now we're throwing whatever seems interesting into the queue, and with a 2 to 3-day turnaround, even getting just one disc at a time is plenty. Right now I'm watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Two days ago we watched Where the Wild Things Are. Next up will be Kindergarten Cop and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. It just makes having esoteric tastes for movies so simple to satisfy, and it comes wrapped in the convenience of never having to go out in public to rent something. Okay, that was a joke, since there's nowhere within 20 miles of here you can actually go to rent something in person. Seriously, every Blockbuster, Cinemagic, and Hollywood I was aware of is shuttered now, excluding the Blockbuster outlet store on Summer. That would really suck if I didn't have a Netflix subscription, which is why they're all closed in the first place. Is that good or bad?

Anyway I'm off to my new obsession, The Lord of the Rings Online. Wait. Fuck. It's three in the morning. Okay I'll play all day tomorrow. Wait. I have to go to Aldi, the awesome low-price grocery store for 70% of the stuff you need from a regular grocery store. Right, so I'll spend an hour doing that, then it's LOTRO for the rest of the day. If you need me I'll be on the Meneldor server. Don't look for me. I'll find you (creepy, but true).

Life should have a fast-forward button.

Seriously, someone get on that.

Not a huge amount to report right now. Things are changing for me, but slowly. I'm in the opening stages of writing a new, much better chapter of my life, but it's taking time. I'm looking for work, getting ready for a move, and cutting back on school to accommodate. Reconnecting with the love of my life has changed everything; I have a new purpose now, and something phenomenal to look forward to. Even now while things are still in flux I'm happier than I can ever remember being.

For now I'm just plugging along in my client-side JavaScript and basic networking courses and trying to find a job. Filling the gaps by spending every possible minute with Jen and practicing bass when I can't be with her. She's tuned me into some amazing bands I might not have found otherwise, like The Radio Dept, The Libertines, Damien Rice, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. My secondary hard drive is rapidly filling up with new music and videos.

I'm also still trying to help with FABA! in the limited ways I'm able. I'll be designing a flier for the resurrected FABA! Bash soon, and have finally gotten hold of a copy of Photoshop 7 to help with that. I realized not long ago that there's only so much I can do with Paint.NET and GIMP, and I think I've hit that ceiling. Simple things like the transform tools I took for granted just don't seem to exist in those apps, and I'm tired of jumping through hoops to do shit that Photoshop makes easy. Now I just need Illustrator and Dreamweaver...

Killing time.

Best post ever.

I'm in wait mode lately. Waiting for the semester to start Monday, waiting for some personal things to resolve themselves (which has been a lot harder). Waiting for xmas to finally end. All the decorations are back in storage, but there's still a big damn tree in the living room and pine needles everywhere. I'd been distracting myself by going out every day, but lately I've just been holed up with my computer and my bass. Ran out Friday to get some things done, relaxed for a while over a latte at MO's Edge. After hitting up the last three, I finally missed an open-mic at Newby's this week. I'll probably go next Tuesday after my late networking class, just for the distraction.

I'm loving this Deftones B-Sides record I bought the other day. Favorite track by far is "The Chauffeur," a Duran Duran cover, of all things. The DVD is little more than a collection of their videos through the self-titled album, but the brief interstitial material is interesting and well done. It could probably have been released on its own.

Picked out the basslines to a few more Radiohead and Weezer songs. Again: bored. Hell, I'm bored out of my mind just writing this, don't tell me you're still reading. Go do something more productive, like emptying the lint trap on the dryer, or, I dunno, staring at your phone until it rings. Just pretend this post wasn't written. That's what I'm doing.

Pointless post.

Bored? So am I. Here's something to read.

Spent some xmas gift-card goodness on, among other things, a giant, decent-if-not-great pair of over-ear headphones. They have a switch that lowers the bass; I don't know who that's for. Half the point of buying a good set of cans is to get some appreciable bass, no?

Couple days later I went by Cat's expressly to blow some cash, and found myself holding two records called B-Sides & Rarities, one by Cake and one by Deftones. Although I do have a man-crush on Cake's music, and despite the fact that the Deftones record cost twice as much, that's the one I bought. I'll get the Cake LP eventually, until then I'm satisfied. Deftones is just a brilliant fucking band, and this is a great set (CD, DVD, booklet/mini-photo album). Almost picked up a Damien Rice album while I was there, but I think Jen may already have it. Need to check her library.

Quick Steam update. Valve's landed another major developer in Rockstar Games. The entire Rockstar catalog is live, check it out if you're a PC snob like me. GTA San Andreas is one of my all-time favorite PC games, console-origins be damned. When and if some more disposable cash comes my way I'd like to finally get around to checking out the Max Payne series.

Oh, I thought this was funny. So there's a drug store in Raleigh I go to sometimes. There's an older black lady who works the register in the evenings, and she used to bust my ass about my ID before I got my new license. I get it, I look way younger than my 31 years, and my old ID was nine years old, beat up, and the picture didn't really look like me anymore. But she would go all out, looking for a second opinion on it, asking for secondary ID, the whole deal. Just for a damn pack of smokes. This happened at least a half-dozen times. At a certain point you'd think she would fucking remember me, but no.

Anyway I went in there tonight. I'm really not a douchebag, but I was definitely wearing a douchebag's uniform: baggy jeans, a black knit cap with a big skull printed on it, and a bright orange t-shirt that says 'Show me your Titties' (don't ask). Guess who was working the register. I walked up dressed like a dick, and she was clearly already unhappy with me, and proceeded to buy nothing but beer, cigarettes, and condoms. I don't know why, but there was something liberating about being, superficially, a complete and utter asshole for once. That's so not who I am, but I think I could grow to like at least pretending to be one every now and then.

Where am I?

Oh, right, I still have stuff to do.
by AC - permalink

Sometimes it's nice to just sleep all damn day. I topped several consecutive late, late nights working on stuff for finals week and getting almost no sleep with a badly-timed late night out. Sort of sleepwalking right now, but I'm wrapping up my XHTML final project; after tomorrow I'll be done for the semester. Anyway, I went out to see Annie in the karaoke finals at what I'll politely not call a redneck bar. It was worth it though, both for her "giant parrot singing Tracy Chapman" act and for some girl named Michelle's bluesy take on Purple Rain.

Afterwards I headed home because I was exhausted, but then I caught myself copping out on some potential fun, said "Fuck it" out loud in the general direction of my windshield, and headed to Newby's for open-mic night, where my friends in Falling for Grey were playing. They were fantastic, btw. By 2am it had started to rain and I was nearly unconscious after basically not sleeping for 48 hours, so I decided to book and came on home, and promptly passed out for too many hours to count.

Just before heading out though, I watched the Griz get their brains beat out by Detroit. It was relatively close at the end, but it just felt like the Pistons were toying with them. I don't know what's going on with this team's defense. I mean how can it be getting worse? This is one of the most nauseating box scores I've ever seen. Two steals? Fourteen fewer assists on just four fewer made baskets? And why did Mike Miller take four shots in 39 minutes? I watched the game, and I still have no idea.

At one point Warrick was isolated and actually passed the ball to Lowry, who gave it right back! No! Okay, it was the right play, as Hak's man shifted to help on Kyle. The problem is, Hak made the shot. Positive reinforcement of bad habits is not good. But whatever. I'm still finding it worth the pain to watch Rudy Gay. I love the fact that you can see him flip a switch in his head every night when he decides to just take over, and then he actually does it. Jacob Riis agrees with me:

The rap on Gay coming out of college and on into his rookie season was that he wasn’t assertive. Well, that’s not the player we’re seeing on the floor right now. We’re seeing someone who really wants to try to take over games and take the big shots and someone who’s ability to create good shots all over the floor continues to develop and impress.

I'm not so crazy about the fact that Rudy has to keep flipping that switch back on again during a game. Why is it going off in the first place? But overall the signs are all positive with this kid.

Watch this.

Lazy post Vol. I
by AC - permalink

Let's hear it for hot bass-playing, lead-singing former stars of The Wizard.

It's crunch time, whatever that means.

That was quick...
by AC - permalink

The end of the semester is suddenly here. I managed to get caught up in all but one of my classes, somehow. I still have labs due next week in PERL and HTML, as well as a test each, and my final HTML project, but at least I'm not behind anymore after last night's marathon coding session (thanks, Mountain Dew and cheap beer). I'm done, for all intents and purposes, with my 1001 Office class. The only thing left to turn in is PowerPoint tutorials 1 and 2, and I did them this afternoon. I won't even mention that geo class. I may be kinda screwed there, but it's my own fault. I got too behind while working on my short film.

Annie did manage to submit our tapes on Monday, and I owe her for that as she and CMB were evidently editing her short until 4am that morning. It's a good thing I got in, as I've been handing out copies of a flier to my friends at school that Monica threw together in class yesterday. I have a revised version I'm going to get approved for posting around campus tomorrow. We want as many people as possible to come out to the fest on the 15th.

My mobile playlist in the car and at school lately has condensed to Deftones, Flyleaf, Portishead, and Violent Femmes. At home I'm still looping my .flv library of cool bass songs. More school work has meant less TV and more music as I'm spending hour after hour in front of my PC. All I've really made time for is Heroes (which is over now) and Grizzlies games, which are bittersweet most of the time. I've been breaking from work to play bass and write email, and occasionally to eat. Haven't had time for much else. I guess this is what the next three semesters will be like.

Finally managed to speak in person to my new advisor today, he seems like a nice enough guy. He's actually involved in planning courses for the Web tech major, so he should be exactly the guy I need. Have a meeting with him Thursday at 4, so by the end of the week I should know what kind of course load I'll have in the Spring. Trying to balance it with what I'd like to do in the local film scene will be the tricky part. Turns out a local director/musician, who I randomly bumped into twice in the last week, lives like three blocks from me. Hopefully some opportunities will open up for me there. We'll see.

School, music, and Halloween.

Whoops.
by AC - permalink

Funny thing about my last post: I did actually have a lab due after the break in my logical programming/PERL class, but I somehow misread the due date. I explained this to my professor after miraculously getting two-thirds of it done in the half-hour of lab time she gave us during class, and she said I could just finish it and turn it in next class, only losing the standard 5 points (out of 100) for being one day late. Oh well, I thought, but after lunch I was feeling productive, and wrote the final, unexpectedly complex program in about an hour. I printed out the source and console and brought the final lab to her in her office. And surprisingly, I got full credit. Let's have a round of applause for her flexible grading, and for my procrastination skills. I never had a wasted, beer-and-football-filled weekend be so productive in my first go-round at college ten years ago.

School has taken up so much of my idle time that I've been neglecting most of the things that used to make existence bearable, including gaming and music. I'm spending so much of my time in front of my monitor, both at school and at home, that I haven't played much of anything lately, only spending an hour or so every now and then on a new play-through of Far Cry, which just never gets old. But tonight I devoted a couple of hours to my sadly neglected bass guitar, digging up some old songs via YouTube that I used to play religiously years ago. Amazingly, not only could I still play bass lines like Radiohead's "Paranoid Android," Clutch's "The Yeti," and Flea's immortal line in "Soul to Squeeze," they actually came pretty naturally and easily. I can't begin to fathom how going from playing almost every day to playing three or four times a month can have made me better, but that's how it feels.

Anyway. Halloween is here, and like every other holiday, I was sick of it weeks ago. The other day I was in a Rite-Aid and they were stocking an entire aisle with Christmas items. What the fuck is that? The orange-and-black-labeled Skittles aren't even in the discount bin yet, and you're trying to sell me wrapping paper and garland? In another week I'll have had enough of Christmas, and it won't even be winter. Bah.

Time well wasted.

Mini-vacations rule.
by AC - permalink

Fall break, aka five-day weekend, ended today. I had no assignments from any of my classes, other than to read two pages of the PERL intro and to start on a tutorial on tables in my HTML class -- both of which I finished last Thursday. So the break was pretty much just football, beer, and catching up on my gaming. I finally got around to playing the Prey demo, which I downloaded to my backup drive way back before my system restore, and I was really impressed. It's a solid, polished demo of what looks to be a much deeper game than I expected. While the art direction is very reminiscent of Doom 3 and Quake 4 -- not a great idea for only the third game, after those two, to use the Doom 3 engine -- it does have its own style of gameplay, with its much heralded (at the time) portals. They go way beyond just level-hopping, on one occasion delivering a truly fantastic, "What the hell just happened?" moment. I even like the Duke Nukem-ish way your avatar, Tommy, frequently speaks. Usually, it's just something like, "What the fuck is going on here?" but hey, whatever. The demo took me well over an hour to complete, which was a nice surprise.

On the other hand, we have the single-player demo of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which is more like 20 minutes long, but which left me so floored that I've decided to put off buying the Orange Box and save my money for this game. It's just spectacular. Even at fairly high in-game settings, it runs shockingly well on my rig. It appears to run on a modified version of the same engine powering CoD 2; i.e. a heavily modified Quake III engine. Even without the shader model 3 goodies, it looks amazing, and I love Infinity Ward for recognizing that backwards-compatibility is very important in PC games. That damned MoH: Airborne Assault demo turned out to be a wasted download, as it requires an SM3-compatible card to even install. Just when I start to forget why I hate EA, they give me another reason.

Anyway. I'm working slowly but surely towards 100% completion in GTA San Andreas. I'm at around 94% now, and all that worries me is beating multiple levels of Bloodring Banger, which I hate, those air races at the Venturas airport, and the NRG challenge, which I've never beaten before. We'll see. I'm also replaying Far Cry after installing the 1.4 patch for the first time. I've been wary about this patch for a while now, as the others have done more harm than good, but it seems to be working out well. Load times are significantly lower, those instant-reboot bugs are a no-show, and I haven't seen any rainbow shadows yet.

Speaking of which, I just finished downloading Radiohead's In Rainbows free and legally, though I feel a little guilty about entering a price of $0. In my defense, I don't have any money, and though I did pay for OK Computer once upon a time, I lost it a long while ago. I really like In Rainbows so far, "Bodysnatchers," "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "All I Need," and "Videotape" especially. I was disappointed by Kid A and Amnesiac, and while I did like parts of Hail to the Theif, I never got around to buying it. In Rainbows, though, hooked me immediately. I'm looking forward to burning it so I can listen to it on the long drive to and from school.

Quake, '96 style.

Old school is the new school.
by AC - permalink

Quake was an important game for me. Even more than Doom, Quake is what converted me from a console gamer to a full-on PC shooter fan. The first game I ever played on my first new PC, a smokin' Pentium 133 rig with 32MB of RAM and a huge 1.6GB hard drive, was the shareware episode of Quake. I learned to play it online, with a 33.6K modem, which meant I was lucky to find a server that gave me a ping lower than 350.

What's more, Quake was my introduction to Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor composed Quake's soundtrack, which is still one of the all-time creepiest original scores for any shooter. He actually went further than that, recording sound effects for what would become the Quake alpha test demo, most of which were replaced by the time the game went gold. But my point is, if I hadn't become so enamored with that eerie, haunting Quake soundtrack, I never would have picked up Broken from my local record store (because it was the cheapest NIN album there), which led me to buy Pretty Hate Machine, which led to The Downward Spiral, and so on to today.

Not so much for musical reasons but for nostalgic gaming reasons I finally ordered Quake, in a download-only form, from id Software's online store yesterday. It took some work to get it to run properly in WinXP. It came with the WinQuake and GL Quake ports, but WinQuake runs software-only, and the version of GL Quake shipped barely worked. I tried an older GL Quake I downloaded years ago, and it works fine. It even works with my old Quake Mission Pack CDs I bought a decade ago, which means I've finally (nearly) completed my Quake collection. I have Quake and its two official mission packs, Quake II and its mission packs, Quake III Arena, and Quake IV. What I'm missing is Team Arena, the only official Quake III expansion.

And there's one other thing I don't have: Quake's soundtrack. The downloadable Quake I bought was only 24MB zipped, which obviously didn't include the ten-track Reznor score. I have no idea why, but it sucks all kinds of ass. Fortunately, a Google search ponied up the tracks immediately, but I still have to go through the bother of burning them and manually starting the tracks while playing the game. What the fuck, id? Twenty bucks is a lot to ask for an eleven-year-old game in the first place, but stripping out the soundtrack, that's just fucking cold. I suppose I owe you for including Quake II and both mission packs with the DVD edition of Quake IV, but when are we going to get a similar package for Quake 1?

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be out soon, but honestly I have no plans to buy it. It looks to be a sort of Battlefield 2042 in the Quake IV universe game, which doesn't interest me at all, unfortunately. I know id is working on a new IP, and assuming my hardware can run it, I'll be first in line. But ripping a historically great soundtrack from a monumentally important game does not set a great precedent, especially for hardcore id Software fans. And I know I must be a harcore id guy, because Doom 3, which most people seem to consider a huge let-down after all the hype it generated a few years ago, is one of my all-time favorite PC shooters.

I'd ramble on some more, but I'm halfway through Scourge of Armagon, and I haven't even started on Dissolution of Eternity...

Living with a working PC.

Shouldn't something be going horribly wrong?
by AC - permalink

A week after installing my new CPU, its cooler, and my new power supply, I'm adjusting to life with a PC I don't have to constantly monitor and mollycoddle. I've been watching my CPU, GPU, and ambient temps closely, and finally felt comfortable enough to run closed-boxed for several hours this morning. I'm still popping the case open and employing the desk fan when running games, as it still lowers the GPU temp by a good 10 to 20C under load, and my vidcard, running solely of the PCI-e slot's power, doesn't have much of a fan. The good news, though, is that the new AMD 4000+ CPU has made for some noticable improvements in some of my games over the old 3500+ chip.

I've seen the most gains with GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2. They both hover right around 60fps at high resolutions now with all the bells 'n whistles on, which means annoying drops to 45 and 30fps with v-sync on. My cheap monitor can only handle 60Hz at 1280x1024, but a sudden brainwave led me to try running them at 1152x864 with a forced 75Hz with no v-sync, and they look fantastic. This doesn't work for slower-paced games, like Doom 3, when the tearing is much more pronounced, but with my new CPU it's even more rock-solid over 60fps, so it still looks badass.


Going back to GTA, though, I did a little more research into the LOD issue I was having with Vice City, and eventually I came across this thread at PlanetGTA, which pointed to this thread at the DriverHeaven.net forums. And as unlikely as it seems, altering the shortcut to run in Win98 compatibility mode worked perfectly. Unfortunately, while I'm in love with Vice City for its ambiance and music, San Andreas makes the control scheme and mission layout feel frustrating and limited. But whatever, I only paid ten bucks for it.

Not to digress completely, but I want to mention the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, which I bought last week. It's fucking awesome. If you've heard With Teeth, it's sort of like that, only much more awesome. And it... well, it's hard to say this about a NIN disc, but it's got a groove to it. Not a groove on par with something like Definitive Swim, but it's definitely the most accessible NIN album since Broken. I still think The Fragile is the best NIN LP ever, but Year Zero is now easily third behind The Downward Spiral.

Steam gets steamier.

For better or worse, Steam rolls on.
by AC - permalink

Valve picked up another high-profile partner today as Eidos Interactive is hocking their games via Steam now. There's some good news here, as this opens up classic games like Tomb Raider, a Saturn favorite of mine, to easy PC distribution. Just Cause is also in the Eidos library, and I'm downloading the demo by way of Steam right now. By all accounts Just Cause is basically Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry-style, which sounds pretty damned good to me, but I've been hesitant about how it will run on my rig.

I'm even more excited about the original Tomb Raider. I have the Saturn version of this game, and I'm completely in love with it. This started out as a Saturn exclusive, and was ported to the much more popular PlayStation and held for a simultaneous release. It plays great on the old console, but it would be great to play it with the resolution and framerate cranked up. I don't know how it will be priced, but for ten or even fifteen bucks, it'd be worth a download.

In other me-related news, I finally got around to ripping my last couple Nine Inch Nails CDs and integrating them into my library. The two domestic Closer CDs and the Head Like a Hole maxi-single are fairly repetitive, but worth listening to, especially with the inclusion of Memorabilia on Closer disc 2. Also I'm supposed to be taking one of my dogs, Lucy, to the vet this week for her yearly round of innoculations, but I can't seem to get around to it. She's sick for days afterwards, and she's always so pissed at me for doing it. I shit you not, yesterday she overheard me say "I guess I'll take Lucy to the vet tomorrow," and she went straight under the bed and wouldn't come out. That dog is so smart it creeps me out sometimes.

Theme post: Rock out, bitches.

When did buying CDs become outdated?
by AC - permalink

I went to my (sort of) local Cat's not too long ago to look around and talk to the Record Store Guys. There aren't a lot of places in north Memphis where you can find some Record Store Guys, so you have to take advantage of the situation. These ones were plucking badly at an acoustic guitar and were way, way too into Tool. I love Tool, but at some point you have to realize that you're not actually in the band. Anyway, I ended up buying a couple of eponymous debut albums spanning 25 years: Violent Femmes (1982) and Flyleaf (2007).

The Flyleaf record isn't bad. If you like their singles, I'm So Sick and Fully Alive (tracks one and two, interestingly), you'll probably like the rest of the CD. It's short, though, only a little over 34 minutes. Personal favorite is currently track 4, Cassie. It'll probably be the next single, coming to a college rock station near you.

The Violent Femmes album is, well, Violent Femmes. Almost half the record can be found on the radio now if you count the cookie-cutter Gnarls Barkley cover of Gone Daddy Gone. I never really knew that much about the band and was surprised this record was so old. It's a timeless LP, you should go get it.

What else. Oh, DirecTV is showing the concert footage from the new Nine Inch Nails DVD Beside You in Time on channel 101. It's OK, I guess. Reznor is awesome as always, but these new musicians... I dunno. I don't want to say they suck, but they kinda suck. As far as I'm concerned, the real live NIN is T.R., Danny Lohner, Robin Finck, and Chris Vrenna.

One last vaguely music-related note, you should point your interweb browsing devices to Adult Swim's download page to grab a handful of genuine Dethklok mp3s. Metalocalypse has officially supplanted Aqua Teen as the funniest, most kickass animated show on television, and you get free death metal songs to boot. Beat that, South Park.

More demo impressions.

Try before you buy.
by AC - permalink

Painkiller Gold has just been made available via Steam, and comes complete with a playable demo. It's not bad. Painkiller was released in 2004, and although the promo material brags about the incredible proprietary 3D PAIN engine, it's a pretty underwhelming game visually, especially when you consider that 2004 also saw the debuts of CryEngine, Source, and the Doom 3 engine. Painkiller runs really fast and has nice physics, but it's all very flat and reminds me a lot of the Quake III engine. It doesn't help that there are only a few weapons in the demo, and you get a bonus for beating it using only the stake launcher. Way to add variety there. Three bad guys and optimally just one gun. But it's still kinda fun in a Serious Sam, mow-em-all-down kinda way.

First impressions of the Prey demo are positive. It looks as good as Quake IV and runs as smoothly. Good atmosphere, although it really is strongly reminiscent of Quake IV and Doom 3. Hopefully Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will finally do something original with that brilliant Doom 3 engine. Anyway, the portal effects in Prey are seriously cool, which makes it suck even more that we have to keep waiting and waiting for Valve to get around to shipping Portal only when Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 are done. I could go on a nice, satisfying rant about how Valve's episodic content plan has gone completely to hell (over a year between Episode 1 and Episode 2, and the value-pricing idea is out the window), but I won't.

I've been playing around with Screamer Radio, a nice little freeware internet radio client. It's a tiny app and comes with a decent preset list. So far I haven't heard a single stutter or skip. On the downside, at least a fourth of the presets are dead, and it gives you only a limited amount of customization. I'd have liked a sortable station list, for one thing. But you can't beat the price. So far, Sky FM is the only station I've liked enough to add it to the favorites list. First track was Bjork, second was Soul Coughing, third was Temple of the Dog. Sweet.

Is there really nothing on TV?

Channel surfing keeps getting harder.
by AC - permalink

I'd heard that MTV was going to ignore its 25th anniversary today, but it really didn't strike me how weird that was until I saw VH1 Classic's six-hour tribute to MTV's "Day One" this afternoon. I realize that both channels are owned by the same massive conglomerate, but it's still off-putting that MTV is so afraid of alienating its pre-teen audience by acknowledging that it's older than they are that they actually shifted the anniversary programming not only to VH1, but to the upper-tier VH1 Classic that not many people even get, or watch. In my mind, this is MTV officially abandoning any of their original fans. Sorry, old man, we were going to have John Norris intro some Blondie videos, but it would have cut into Next and Made and Room Raiders and a lot of other bullshit we've dedicated 22 hours of the day to in place of, you know, music.

VH1 Classic is really a better channel anyway. Classic/Current is pretty cool. They play a band's first ever video and then their most recent one. And I just watched the Elvis Costello edition of Classic in Concert twice. He played an extended concert with Death Cab for Cutie, Fiona Apple, and Billy Armstrong, and it was just amazing. No, "Wake Me Up When September Ends" didn't really need the Elvis Costello touch, but his collaboration with Fiona on "I Want You" was fucking magic. I want a DVD of that concert.

It seems like all the good shit on TV is on the channels you can't get with a basic cable or satellite package. The Discovery Times Channel is at least as good as Discovery now, probably better. Times has Thomas L. Friedman Reporting, and these days that might be the most significant show on TV. It's also still the only channel where you can see Off to War.

There's also BBC America, one of the first places I check when I turn on the tube. Monty Python has disappeared, which is disapointing, but there's still a lot of guilty pleasures like Keeping Up Appearances (which, like Monty Python, you can find on PBS), Cash in the Attic, and Bargain Hunter. Bravo is still a high-tier channel, and you need Bravo if only for Celebrity Poker Showdown and six hours of Kathy Griffin every day. Actually, you might not need Bravo. But there's still IFC for uncut, often widescreen movies that average at least a thumb and a half up, and you won't get your weekend fix of Samurai movies anywhere else.

It concerns me that it keeps getting harder to find quality TV on non-premium channels, but it concerns me more that the premium channels are becoming more ubiquitous and are getting correspondigly blander as a result. TechTV, for example, has devolved into MTV2 for gamers, aka G4, and Fuse, which started out as "MTV as it used to be," is quickly morphing into "MTV as it already is."

But there's still hope. IFC has shown few signs of commercializing, and channels like Link and Current and even NASA TV prove that there's a future in TV for people with brains that still work reasonably well. And we can always downshift a gear or two and enjoy the train wreck that is Fox Reality. Watching idiots compete with other idiots for small cash prizes amid endless humiliation? Priceless. And you thought you were wasting your money on that premium package.

iTunes vs. musikCube.

The Battle of Unconventional Capitalization.
by AC - permalink

Bad news for musikCube. I found iTunes's "browser," which duplicates musikCube's killer user interface function of giving you subwindows listing artists and albums above the master track list. This was the big UI feature that immediately showed me how much better musikCube was over older media players like Winamp and CoolPlayer.

The good news for musikCube is that it's still better at highlighting the currently playing track when switching playlists. But iTunes has an answer for that: the "now playing" window at the top of the app has a little button that will highlight the current track. It's an extra click, but that's not a dealbreaker or anything. And if desktop space is at a premium, you'll find musikCube much easier to work with, although iTunes has a mini-mode, and musikCube has a popular plugin called miniPlayer that equals it.

See my last post for more on iTunes vs. musikCube, but I have one more thing to add. musikCube eats up a little less RAM. iTunes pays for its slick interface and instant iTMS connectivity by using more memory. Both players average around 10MB, though I've seen iTunes spike at nearly 30MB. It's rare, but I've seen it happen.

But I have tons of RAM, and you probably do, too. It's hard for me to write off musikCube, because it's so small and simple and, above all, open-source and extensible. But iTunes is a very competent music player. Again, I'm not taking into account iTunes's interface with iTMS here, but even from a purely offline standpoint, it's hard to find a reason not to ditch musikCube unless there are plugins for it you just can't live without.

So there, I've said it. I'm endorsing Goliath over the David I've enjoyed for years. And I hate myself for it. I hope you're happy.

Shocked by AOL.

They've actually done something of value.
by AC - permalink

I was so bored yesterday that I actually decided to pop in one of those AOL CDs I get in the mail every few weeks, instead of chucking it under a passing car on the way back from the mailbox like I usually do. I'd gotten one months ago that had some "War of the Worlds" crap on it, so I decided to have a look at a vanilla AOL CD. I didn't autorun it or launch the setup app, but buried in a subfolder I found an installer for iTunes. I've never wanted to sit through an iTunes download because I don't really have any use for the iTunes Music Store, but I decided to go ahead and install it.

It ain't bad. I have a decent amount of music on my hard drives, considering it all came from my CD collection. It's between 500 and 600 tracks, more than thirty, maybe forty hours. With mostly complete albums and only a handful of individual tracks, mostly from compilation CDs I burned years and years ago, I've been a devout believer in musikCube. It has a really robust interface and fantastic virtual playlist generation. Plus it's open-source and extensible.

iTunes also indexes music to create virtual playlists, but you have to do more of the work yourself than you do with musikCube. But it's generally less buggy, and the equalizer is a lot easier to work with. Visualization is average. As you would expect from an Apple product, the interface is much, much better than Microsoft's competing Windows Media Player. I have Windows Media Center edition, and I still like the Media Center music player, but it's so limited from a power-user perspective that I have pretty much no use for it. If my PC were hooked up to my TV, it would be a different story.

So from a purely offline, non-iTMS perspective, I like iTunes. In fact, I killed a couple hours this afternoon digging up nearly 70 album covers online (cheers, Amazon) and attaching them to my music collection. Just because. But is iTunes good enough to give up on musikCube? I don't think so, but I'll keep tinkering with it.

Doom and Metallica, Heller and Vonnegut.

Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!
by AC - permalink

I've switched to a different old monitor while I work up the guts to throw down a few hundred dollars for a new one. This one has much better color and brightness than that last piece of shit, but even at 15 inches, its max resolution is just 1024x768 at a depressing 60Hz. But that's not so bad, really. I've discovered that just about every game I own runs so well at 1024 that I can jack up the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering as high as my vidcard can go without dropping the framerate below the refresh rate (I always enable v-sync). 6x AA with temporal enabled does a very good job of eliminating those 1024 jaggies in games like Half-Life 2 and GTA San Andreas.

So anyway, I started playing Doom 3 again, and I think I really do like this game, overall. It's still just a lot of, "walk into that room, shoot those teleporting baddies, walk into the next room, shoot some more," but it's so fucking pretty I still like to play it. I started over from the beginning with a duct tape mod, but I ditched it early on. I really think it works better in the dark. And with a radio playing in the background; this weekend 93X decided to go back to an old gimmick they had years and years ago. They're playing every Metallica song ever recorded in alphabetical order. They call it Metallica A to Z, and it's really cheesy, but it's still awesome. How often do you hear "Disposable Heroes" or "Of Wolf and Man" or "Trapped Under Ice" on the radio? The last time I heard "Trapped Under Ice" it was on a cassette I used to have, and I'd taped it from a Metallica A to Z weekend in like 1996, when we were still playing Doom 1.

I managed to download the Rag Doll Kung Fu demo via Steam this week, and it's weird. Definitely unique, but I don't know about the fun. I'll keep toying with it anyway. I don't think I'm going to try to buy Half-Life Episode 1 over Steam. I'll just look for a retail copy. I'm working on downloading the Shadowgrounds demo now, but God knows when that will finish.

Which reminds me, I'm reading God Knows by Joseph Heller now. It's fucked up, but that's what we love about Heller, isn't it? You only have to read Catch-22 once to love him. He invented a character called Major Major Major Major and we bought it. After God Knows, I think I'll finally get around to tackling this whole Kurt Vonnegut shelf I have but have never gotten around to reading: Jailbird, Galapagos, Deadeye Dick, and Bluebeard. Vonnegut is tough for me to get into. I always liked Slaughterhouse-Five, but then a good friend of mine found out about that and told me it was bullshit. And I suddenly realized that she might be right. You either totally buy into what he's saying or you can't fucking stand it. But then that's the mark of great fiction, isn't it? It's why I love Chuck Palahniuk's books. Because I get it. But Vonnegut? I'm still working on it.

Rock radio is still alive in Memphis.

We gave you Rock 'n Roll. You're welcome.

by AC - permalink

There's a radio station in Memphis broadcasting at 92.9 FM called 93X. Right around when they lost Howard Stern they were playing a pretty stereotypical mainstream rock playlist. Any current top-40 rock or alternative track was given six or seven rotations a day. At any given moment you could find the song currently playing on 93X running simultaneously on two or three other crappy Memphis stations. It had been the only station I could tolerate in this town for years, the station that introduced me to Deftones, and it was finally letting me down. The whole thing was just really depressing. And the fact that it was so hard to find good rock in the town that first broadcast Elvis Presley's "That's All Right, Mama" in 1954 and basically gave birth to rock 'n roll was absurd to me.

But 93X turned it around. Their playlist now is as good as any I've ever heard. Just now, as I type, they're following up "Punk Rock Girl" by Dead Milkmen with Metallica's "Master of Puppets." This weekend I've heard them play the new Tool single from 10,000 Days, but they also ran track 10 (I forget what it's called) just for the hell of it. To put that in perspective, the last Tool single, "Parabola," from Lateralus, was played on 93X so rarely that I heard it only once. Under this new format, they've already played a deep track from the new album, and by the way, they just played "Sex Type Thing" by Stone Temple Pilots. I think that was on Core.

They're still playing too much Saliva, I guess because they're from Memphis. The only Saliva track I actually like is that acoustic version of "Your Disease." Which they do still play sometimes. And do I want to hear "Lump" by the President of the United States of America, which it playing now? Yes. Yes I do. Thank you, 93X. You don't suck anymore, and I salute you for that.

Update, five minutes later: "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" by Pearl Jam. You see? That's good shit.