Punctuation

Some people might've noticed that my punctuation is all over the place.

I actually pay a lot of attention to my punctuation.

I just don't care much for the rules.

The trick is, I think...

When it comes to games, I don't really apply the same weighting factors as average people. For instance, I put a disproportionate amount of weighting into originality and UI. And by "originality" I don't actually mean the pioneering game of some mechanic set but rather the first decent game of the same set that happens to fall into my lap. Sorry, first come first serve.

An example.

I played Disgaea 2. This should be fairly obvious to any readers. I peddle the series to anyone who would listen, because it's a great set of games. But it's actually hard for me to actually be motivated to play any other game in the series or in fact any other tactical RPGs. You know, it's all flavours of fruit punch; once you've tried one you've tried them all.

Maniac shooters are different. That's because I've convinced myself that I have to conquer them all. Crazy, I know.

Anyways,

Let's talk about Ar Tonelico.

I will first discuss the UI.

Look at all these gauges! It is comforting that they are there. That is all.

People complain about its difficulty curve being too easy. I've never ran into that problem. The trick is, I think, to be too lazy to upgrade your equips. Some games are made for min/max-ing. Melding this, crystal that, who cares. This isn't one of those games; this is a game made for diving into Reyvateils.

Oh, and the story turns out to be pretty good.

Still the best Eva trailer

What's Google got on you?

http://www.google.com/ads/preferences...

Arts & Entertainment
Arts & Entertainment - Comics & Animation - Anime & Manga
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio - ... - Song Lyrics & Tabs
Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio - Urban & Hip-Hop - Rap & Hip-Hop
Arts & Entertainment - TV & Video - Online Video
Arts & Entertainment - Visual Art & Design - Painting
Arts & Entertainment - ... - Photographic & Digital Arts
Business & Industrial - Advertising & Marketing
Business & Industrial - Aerospace & Defense - Defense Industry
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Finance - Credit & Lending - Auto Financing
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Games - Computer & Video Games - Fighting Games
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Reference - General Reference - Dictionaries & Encyclopedias
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Demographics - Age - 18-24
Demographics - Gender - Male

Canada

Given deep introspection, I have come to the conclusion that Canada is the least exotic country in the world.

No, seriously, there is literally no other country that is as boring.

We are pretty much America, but without the gungho "go big or go home" attitude. And in the case of hispanics, it's pretty much just "go home". Where home is apparently Mexico regardless of origin of birth or place of childhood. Also our own "Manifest Destiny" was kind of half-assed. Like we sort of wanted to screw over the natives but didn't really put in the effort.

Commonwealth but without koalas, frivolous hats or a hatred of the British for pillaging the land and taking all the diamonds.

Well run like Germany, but more like a contraption made of rusty nails and softwood lumber that just happens to work rather than an engine of precision milled aluminum designed by engineers in fluorescent white cleanrooms. We also don't have a history of half-baked world domination ploys and make terrible movie villains.

Cold, like Scandinavia, but with less Satan.

I'd take kangaroos over Canadian geese. At least you can eat them.

ROFL

Nanoha has softkill ACM now:

Need for Speed is stupid, as if the police would chase you in Lamborghinis!

Well...turns out I was dead wrong.



And apparently some of them do actually get used for policing duty...so...

Oh well, not like regular police cars are cheap either. The Italians also got a pair of Evoras on duty.

Did you think A380s were big?

Some suggest that Luna Lovegood is the most attractive witch

I respectfully disagree:

So much for the spirit of learning

I just made a P-x-y diagram.

It certainly looks like a P-x-y diagram, but I'm not really sure what the curves mean.

I'll just leave it unlabelled and assume that the marker will assume I know what things are.

Often in engineering, we are told to do something to solve a problem because it works and not to think too deeply about it.

It gets really ingrained and sometimes we take it to too much of an extreme.

Last week I was working on a Transport assignment.

"Does this graph look right to you?"
"Yes, I mean wait, what are those lines?"
"Uh, let me read the problem statement and get back to you"

Like in Jeopardy, when you ring in the answer before the question gets read.

One more thing: I hope the med students run their training patients with better care than we run our training distillation columns. Otherwise I'd stay away from the hospital at Mac.

Oh fuck this

Brb, quitting Minecraft forever.

Upon reflection

I think that Gundam 00 has actually become my favourite Gundam series (i.e. excluding OVAs, movies) ever.

When I watched first season by itself, I thought it was a trainwreck modeled after Code Geass, but after finishing the entirety, I totally understand what the writers were going for [1].

The thing about Gundams is that as a real robot show, it never actually was that plausible.

Like what, you didn't notice that the Titans/Zeon come out with a new mobile suit every week?

That the Jetstream Attack was retarded?

That Amuro Ray pushed an asteroid away from Earth by the power of his mind?

Various shows have tried to put forward serious explanations for why things are the way they are. Like all of those new models are just prototypes for field testing by elite forces and all of those wildcard pilots are elite members allowed to exercise their individual judgment on the battlefield. 00 takes all of these explanations, and then immediately highlights how ridiculous they really are:

"Another new model? How much money does the Federation have?"

or

"What about you Mr. Bushido, are you going to follow my orders?"
"No"
"No?"
"I have a license; I'm a one man army"

All of those kids who step into a Gundam and just naturally good at piloting? "Okay!" says 00, "we'll recruit this guy whose sole credentials are that he looks like our previous pilot who died!"

And they don't just take from the UC. You thought Wing was gay? We will make sure our show is the gayest! You thought Strike Freedom was broken? We will break all our Gundams in half and then escalate the enemies' weapons to match!

It's like it was made by a bunch of guys who really like Gundam sitting in a room. They're aware of every 3 times faster, you punched me twice joke on the internet and they want to make sure to include it. They didn't just sit there and trash talk Destiny, they laughed about it and then threw in a few gratuitous transformation sequences as a tribute.

In this sense, 00 really succeeded at what Turn A tried to do, that is unify the Gundam multiverse, but while Turn A was concerned with the physicality of it all, 00 took the spirit of every series, mixed it up, and boldly turned it all to 11.

They do make a serious attempt at characters and theme, and while it's not outstanding, it is an entirely respectable performance and stands well against their contemporaries. They could've gone the serious route, but it's been done over a million times already and Zeta is pretty hard to top in this respect. So they gave you a roller-coaster ride instead.

For everyone else, you still have Unicorn. No more complaining.

So then, between 00 and Force, most of my great ideas has already been put to paper. What now...

1) The movie was weak on substance, but I consider it acceptable if only for closure. That and the Solbraves are amazing [2].

2) Trans-Graham.

Kadokawa, you make me laugh

So everyone knows about Newtype magazine.

You know, for Gundam fans that aren't hardcore enough for Gundam Ace.

Now the thing about Gundam is that, ever since Gundam W revealed the untapped potential of yaoi fangirls, Sunrise has gotten progressively gayer and gayer until the logical conclusion of a trap piloting a reverse trap.

So of course, a spinoff of Newtype only makes financial sense. Newtype Romance.

At the same time while this is happening, someone somewhere else discovered that there is also an untapped potential for people that like mechas, and also like bishoujos.

Naturally Kadokawa is getting on this bandwagon. Time for another spinoff!

Enter the newest magazine to enter their publishing family: Nyantype.

The only place where you would get this and this at the same time.

Ha!

Setting the gold standard

Are you ready, Main Cannons?


Force is a lot better than ViVid.

Just as planned!

Maybe some of you have heard of the presidential helicopter program that spun out of control and got cancelled after some 3 billion dollars.

There was some (half-serious) speculation that the semi-complete birds would end up being sold to Canada for dirt cheap.

As it turns out, they have been sold to us for dirt cheap, and these helicopters are really tricked out. The government intends to use them for SAR.

Yes! Finally, some actually useful equipment!

Don't get too excited, the second part of the speculation was that we'll end up spending large amounts of money downgrading its capabilities for whatever reason.

Oh yeah, and we only need them in the first place because for some reason we can't get spare parts for the old perfectly capable helicopters. As in it's apparently not possible or something.

I don't know what's worse, a defense department that consistently has massive cost spiral issues or a defense department that consistently collects great bargains and then spends large amounts of money to break what they just bought.

Studying is going well, thanks for asking

I made a Dominion tracker for myself, but anyone can use it if they want.

It's hosted here, courtesy Will.

It may very well turn out like that time in Settlers where I calculated my expected values for all the resources and then watched helplessly as I was unable to do anything about it despite the game unfolding exactly as predicted.

But you have more control in Dominion, so who knows.

As with anything open-source, I'm giving no documentation, what, are you an idiot or something?

Naturally it doesn't take into account a lot of things, in particular the expected handsize algorithm makes me very unhappy.

So if any CO majors would like to formulate some better equations for me *cough*Dani*cough* I would be happy to make the changes.

Pimp my code

I guess this works:

---

function combination(n,k){
return factorial(n)/(factorial(k) + factorial(n-k);
}

function factorial(n){
nf = 1;
for (i=1;i<=n;i++){
nf = nf*i;
}
return nf;
}

---

I'm looking for something more like:

---

def combination (n,k)
f = lambda {|x|(1..x).inject(1){|x,y|x*y}}
result f(n)/(f(k)*f(n-k))
end

---

If anyone can use array.reduce in Javascript without it turning into a mess, I would like to know. <_<

It's cheaper anyhow

As people may know, I often quit hobbies when my friends get too good at them.

Ever since Phi introduced Dominion to me last Christmas break, I've been in love with the game. But only recently have I found out that an online client exists, and that's been what's really helpful in actually convincing people to play.

Net money spent: $0

Score!

I enjoy Dominion because it's kind of like Magic on ADD.

There are many problems with casual Magic. There's always been the disparity in how much money people are willing to spend on the game with the accordingly disparate deck power levels. The bigger problem for me is that after awhile, all the match ups between people's main decks have been played out and that's boring. At that point there's the option of spending more money to build new decks, or making terrible secondary decks with super volatile power levels. Not cool. Drafting is an option, but at that point you've committed $15 - $25 and an entire afternoon to playing Magic.

Dominion solves all of those problems: everyone shares the same card pool, you build a new deck every game, and you play. If you end up with something you hate, it's scrapped at the end of the game anyways and you're free to make something new. And having played with Desire builds before, let me assure you that building a stormy engine that cycles your deck twice over in Dominion is every bit as satisfying as resolving a lethal Brainfreeze.

Magic multiplayer has the problem of single player decks being totally unsuited for the format. Control decks with one-use spells for instance. Actually, control decks in general make people mad. Combo decks work once before people get wise and start to gang up on you. EDH is a good start, but also gets stale without fresh card infusions every so often. Emperor is one of my favourites, but having a requirement of exactly 6 people is hard. Dominion on the other hand is less confrontational, so while multiplayer changes the game dynamics, it is difficult to for people to team-up. In this sense it's more "tactically pure". People might see it as a downside, but really you still have fun interacting with friends; if I wanted to play diplomat I'd play Diplomacy. Incidentally, I can never convince people to play Diplomacy...funny that. The flexible player requirements are also a nice bonus.

Magic has terrible mana issues. You can have the right curve and land count and still run into mana screw frequently (probably 20-30% of the time). One deck primer I read specifically mentioned how to decide if you want to mulligan to 2 when you have Chalice of the Void in hand, which means that scenario can be expected to occur repeatedly within a reasonably finite amount of time. Yes, it hits everyone and, averaged out, good players will rise to the top, but it is never fun hitting your 4th land on the 8th turn. In Dominion you cycle your deck so many times and draw so often that if you have terrible economy throughout a game, it's almost certainly your own fault for building a crappy base.

Finally, it's super easy to pick up. Most everyone will fully understand the rules before the second game. So people who would never play something like Magic [1] can get right into it. Naturally, the fact that there is no capital cost for new joiners is also helpful.

That said, can I convince anyone want to buy some poker chips?

1) Not that it affects my decks at all, but post-2010 combat rules are bullshit. Everything uses the stack except combat? Stupid. Extra rules baggage.

y u no liek?

This is the very lovely Panamera that everyone else seems to hate:

This is the CTS-V wagon that everyone gushes over:



WHY??

No way!

This is what the Batmobile should look like!







Soo~ sweet!