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When our oldest cat passed away, there was generally no doubt that we’d get a new one to accompany our other cat, Puffy (right here!). To be frank: Puffy the black cat is just not photogenic. Kitty (“Katherine”) was, Puffy not.

So, our new cat, Molly (“Millifred”) brought home a cold, flees and a bold new change of the guard as she, now over a month in, she’s bossy and tender. She’s obviously a young thing, but I don’t recall Puffy being as bad. Ever. They do get along so once and a while.

Which reminds me that I’ve slowly attributed human skills to these cats, which obviously my wife finds extremely unfair: Kitty was an extremely smart cat who could turn on and off light switches and who preferred human heat. Puffy, is the fuzzy sort of cat who at this age still does not cover up her, well, messages. And Molly? I fear she’s going to be a troll, who does not give any damn if you’re bigger than her.

On preview: I should go back to reading my books.

This is not going to be a review of sorts: However, I bought ‘Legend of Grimrock’ (producer) the other day, which is an old-style hack-and-slash dungeon crawler a la “Dungeon Master”, or, rather, more to my experience, “Eye of the Beholder”. I’ve only briefly mentioned “Eye of the Beholder” before on this site (here).

The game has been a resounding success, if I may say so: It looks like the Finnish developer has already recovered the cost of producing the game. This is surprising: Back when I played EOB (and EOB2) I always thought the introduction of games from Id Software (you know the 3D FPS) basically replaced the trusty dungeon crawlers: from one day to the other, these crawlers became ‘out of date’ technology. No matter how you turn it: Quake, was the turning point for PC-gaming.

While playing Grimrock, I run into frustrations as reported by many others on the Internets: however, most of them are actually neglectable if you think about the type of game Grimrock actually is: It’s a dungeon crawler. You’re supposed to take the time for it. For someone who finished both EOBs, like ages ago, the puzzles are what make these kind of games enjoyable.

While I’m at it: I haven’t had time to put any thoughts on games. Not that I spend my hours on playing games all the time: however, 2 or 3 months ago, I managed to finish ‘Skyrim’ (product page, wikipedia page).

I’ve played but never finished ‘Oblivion’ (review here) or its predecessor, ‘Morrowind’ (never reviewed): Actually the latter I actually played on an XBOX before but I can’t recall I actually finished it or not. Regardless, while I loved Oblivion, like anyone else, I despised the game’s ‘level scaling algorithm’. Good news first then: in Skyrim there appears to be no level scaling happening. I believe I was able to finish the game in 120+ hours and generally, it wasn’t too hard, combat-wise.

Right: Skyrim is an FPS-based open-world RPG. Technically you can do anything what you want to do in this game: while there are main quest lines (and the dozens of sidequests), you could venture out into a town, kill anybody and walk away from the onslaught. I think in one case, I refused to do a specific side-quest for people of a particular town and since I refused it, I decided just to kill all of them. The beauty of the game is that it detects people have died and (in my case) killed storeowners were replaced by unnamed assistant-shop keepers. Not bad, Bethesda.

Combat is still sort of clunky: Switching from magic to swords (and vice versa) is tedious. Bethesda provided keyboard short cuts, however the amount of available short cuts is not enough. If you’ve selected a combat-like character, there’s no point to try to get ‘magical points’: you might just as well find or create the very best armour/shielding there is. There are (and I won’t reveal too much) specific quests to find these items.

Technically and graphically, the game is not too far off from ‘Oblivion’: the engine is pretty and scales fairly well (I ran this on my 3-year old P7350 laptop). I don’t recall experiencing ‘slowdowns’ during hectic combat. I believe Skyrim auto-detects your graphical display capabilities: I would recommend to ‘notch it down’ a bit.

There’s so much more to tell about Skyrim: in my 120 hours, while I’ve discovered a lot, I can tell for sure that I’ve not seen 100% of the world. It feels humongous and the changing weather patterns (and northern lights!) make Skyrim feel truly a world of its own. Highly recommended.

See below for screenshots.

More…

When Imoved to Canada and married my wife almost 12 years ago, I automatically begot two pets, Katy the wonderdog and Peanut (nee Kitty). We lost Katy 2 years or so ago (previously). Last Wednesday we put down Peanut: for three of four days she had refused to eat solid food and she had lost so much weight that she could hardly stand up. During her illness, she was fairly fief tho: her last days she would never give up on purring her head off. Literally.

The death of Peanut feels like it marks the end of a an amazing set of years: Both dog Katy and cat Peanut were part of a 12 year adventure of fun, sadness, love and determination. Unsurprisingly, our cat never ceased to amaze and aggravate us and I guess, those are the stories of her that we will remember for, well, until we cease to exist ourselves.

As an atheist, I’ve never believed in a heaven or hell for humans. If there was a heaven or hell, I’m so hundred percent certain that this cat would have been a prime candidate for either place. If there was such a thing like ‘Feline History’, I’m sure her antics would have gloriously been part of that. For now, I’m glad that we were able to bury her next to her pal Katy.

I‘ve mentioned Yo La Tengo before on xsamplex (right here); as part of my ‘Past The Bridge’ series, I (slightly) proclaimed my likeness for the NJ based band.

If you’ve been on the Internet, you are probably aware of the band’s yearly “Yo La Tengo is murdering the classics”-gig, where the band takes requests for the illustrious radio station WFMU. I recorded one such session in 2008 (briefly discussed here), which was exactly right before I moved to work in SJ. Ever since then I missed the opportunity to listen, well, except for like 2 weeks ago, were a timely reminder (Metafilter, props) reminded me to get my recording gear in action.

Today’s ‘Past The Bridge’ sample is the full track of Yo La Tengo’s rendition of The Clean’s “Tally Ho” – the full track can be found in my media section. Compare that with the original, and judge for yourself (Single Youtube Link)

I have not yet sorted through the whole setlist: I recall that during a couple of songs I slightly lost connection here and there. Generally though, it was an excellent session. If only I had time to separate the tracks out for both 2008 and 2012 sessions.

A month or so, I decide to start reading all the books in Clancy’s “Ryan-verse” (Wikipedia). In short, the serie’s protagonist, Jack Ryan, is literally put in so many life dangering situations that at times made my toes curl. My theory on Clancy’s books is, that over time, the story line gets more and more preposterous.

Take for example, ‘Debt of Honor’: in this book Jack (now National Security Advisor) unravels a Japanese plot to take down the US financial world and on top of that, an attack on American military assets. The plot reeks of the typical 80s anti-Japanese sentiments (remember the days the Japanese took over all those American companies?) but if you think of it: Since WW2, the Japanese army and Navy was and has always been severely limited in power. Reading this book in the 21st century reminds me of the rant I wrote back in 2007 (rant ahead) about Japan, particularly about these anti-Japanese sentiments.

Mind you, I’m not pro-Japan. In fact, I love yelling at Japanese (that is, when I happen to encounter them). It’s just that I believe even at that time, Japan’s economic power was fairly overrated and (as we now know) temporarily. You know, cheap production thru robots and that.

Hey: it’s Roll up the Rim time again, you know, Canada’s favourite pastime besides eating donuts and shovelling snow. I got my first cup just a couple of days ago and I was allowed to “play again”! Amazing.

The low down tho, is that according to the Rules and Regulations the amount of contest cups went down to 285,854,400: this is almost 100,000 less cups than last year. This year, it looks like the US region is getting the most cups (+1,717,200) while the Atlantic provinces are losing out (-2,225,000). This seems to be the same pattern like last year’s and I assume that the idea is that Maritimers drink more coffee and hence why they can afford to lose contest cups because they keep buying them anyway. I made that last sentence up, obviously. Cool, eh!

Prize wise: this year Toyota provides the car, which is the Camry hybrid (it runs on tim hortons cup I heard..). The prize distribution for the Camry this year is exactly the same as last year’s. The 3D TV is also back and comes in the same distribution amounts as in 2011: however the secondary prizes (Coleman camping kit and the digital camera) show that the Maritime provinces are losing out on total distribution. Not by a lot, mind you but enough to recommend that if you want to win something more substantial than a donut, you should move to Ontario or the US.

Enjoy your pre-baked donuts and don’t Roll up the Rim and drive at the same time!

Previous entries: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 2002. Or click this tag for all posts tagged with ‘Roll Up The Rim’.

So this week, the first batch of music files in the traditional torrent file has appeared on the internets (here). There are currently 700+ files in there and I believe there’s another set coming up. Get your torrent app out and share.

This year I’ll be (once again) going through the whole collection: Last year I started late and it took me almost two weeks to get through it. The final result was fairly good: Thinking of it, the 5 songs that I selected are to this day still in my listening repertoire.

If you do want to follow my progress: I’ve shared my Google Doc with the outside world. Last year’s document is also online, but as far as I can tell, that sheet is the filtered music list (here). This year, I’ll stick to the adopted rule that ‘everything rated greater than 3 (not including 3) will be included on my listening device and will be properly rewarded on this blog. Ahem. Whatever.

On the personal side: This month the weather has been really wet and mild. The weather has been hovering around the -5 to +7 degrees. I recall we only had 2 or 3 days really cold weather (-19s). Additionally, we had a couple of snow days, but since the temperature still goes up during the day, most of the snow has melted and/or changed into ice. It definitely doesn’t make for good photo opportunities.

Continuing on that post I made earlier this month on Elite and X3 (here): I decided to get Evochron Mercenary. From the initial screens,the impression I got is that this game strongly resembles Elite. It looks like fun (you know, that is if you like these free-form games) but you can’t compare it to the X3 series. Evochron seems to focus on the Newtonian flight model: to be honest, the flight model is not all too different from X3. When I find time (time is precious), I’ll take a closer look at EM. Get it or not? Well: it’s not badly priced. If you’re into games with a steep learning curve, you should check it out.

Having spent almost 100 hours on X3:Albion Prelude, I find the game itself sort of boring: this is mostly because there are no real missions in this extension pack. Sadly, X3:AP does not include the X3:TC missions and as far as I can tell only contains one true mission. Egosoft promised to reintroduce the PHQ (Player Headquarters) in a V2 of X3:Albion Prelude, but the emptiness has quite some people upset. Lets hope I can run X Rebirth on my laptop.

So, the last couple of weeks, I’ve finally decided to push for a 1.0 release of Convendro (Google Code downloads, Github code): the reason being that I thought it was getting obnoxious that it was still in ‘beta-ish’ mode. After what, 2 years? Come on, pal.

That being said: I’ve mainly focused on clean-up and creating two separate installers for 32 and 64-bits architectures.The irony is that twhe development tool chain literally forced me to deliver two separate installers: First, VS (and the Express edition) has a funny bug (right-oh-here) that kicks in when ever you want to target a full project to 32-bits. My alternative choice, SharpDevelop, does not like targeting 64-bit as ‘there is no x64 debugger yet’. Tough luck and tough shit as a famous rapper once proclaimed: we just change the build to fit the 64-bit dlls and create new installers. Whatever.

So 1.0 out and what’s next? I have no idea, yet. I wrote Convendro because I got tired of WinFF and some other unspecified ‘ad-supported’ conversion tool. I’d love to be able to support more recent versions of ffmpeg. Clever-er parsing of output. Support for other encoders/decoders. How or what, I just don’t know yet.

It probably doesn’t surprise anybody that I’ve added “X3: Albion Prelude” (Egosoft) to my collection of playable games. This is supposed to be an expansion to “X3:Terran Conflict” (earlier on xsamplex), but to be honest, it doesn’t feel like that: from what I can tell is that some of the X3:TC features aren’t there. It feels more like a stand-alone game than an expansion, which makes the $9.99 price it sold at initially a very reasonable price. Alright: this is not supposed to be a review of sorts, so,

The reason I bring up X3 is that the joy playing this game stems from the initial skirmishes I had in the MSX version of Elite, like, way back in the late 80s (earlier). At one time I showed someone some X3 gameplay, and I was asked what ‘the point is of travelling for hours without doing anything at all’. Which is true: the game doesn’t have real goals (besides the missions). The only goal in the game is whatever the player wants to make out of it. On your own pace.

This is also what set Elite apart, 25 or so years ago, and it was indeed one of the most successful games ever made. I wish X3 would get the same attention as I believe Egosoft is doing something remarkable here.

The main event that marked 2011 was most likely the Japanese tsunami back in March, which triggered that nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant. I mentioned the disasters in a posting on March 20th (here), where I mainly focused on how the media presented the disaster to the public and how “hot” news events like that, slightly fall below the news radar because reporting the death of thousands of people sells.

On the Canadian side: the most important events circled around the Canadian general elections (May 2nd), where the CP managed to get the majority of seats in the House. Surprisingly, the NDP decimated the Liberals and ended up becoming the Official Opposition party. Not long after, the NDP’s leader Jack Layton retired from politics and died of cancer back in August. Layton’s funeral was most likely the number one story in Canada. I’ve not mentioned this year (I think) but I was eligible to vote. This was not as much as an emotional event as when I accepted the citizenship back in 2010. However, it was definitely a memorable ‘first’.

As usual, for a more detailed Canadian outlook of 2011, the CBC has put together a list of the most visited stories on their site, ordered by month.

Update: I’m totally aware of the Arab Spring, the death of Khadafi and even, the death of Kim Jong-il: too be honest, while interesting I have my doubts that things will be changing for the better any time soon in the affected countries. If so, I’ll surely bring it up.

I‘ve been mostly reading books these days: The Iconia I bought for my birthday (review) is the ideal reading device. Well, mind the glare then: I’m sure that future devices will have touchscreens sans gloss. What’s the point of having a tablet if you can’t use it outside?

Anyway: reading books. I was finally able to finish off a bunch of book series: I finished all of the Hunger Games books. I also finished off the ‘Sword of Truth’ set: while I liked it, I thought the writing quality had its ups and downs. I thought the Harry Potter books were pleasant: as with the movies, they did go from ‘light-hearted’ to mostly ‘dark’. Well, with the traditional happy end, because these are kids books, mostly. I have this feeling that JK Rowling will not produce anything of substance after finishing off HP.

I’ve kept track of most books on Twitter: sadly, Twitter is not the best media to store ‘historical’ data. Since I’m mostly using the Amazon Kindle reader, I was surprised to see that Amazon doesn’t really track which books I read. With envy I look at the Kobo reader, which has an excellent ‘social’ media ‘tie-in’ and ‘achievements’. I do find electronic books rather expensive. Oh well, back to reading my book