Thursday, January 1, 1998

Pets

MY DOG VOID DIED! ITS OKAY I'LL BRING HIM BACK FROM THA DEAD
CERBERUS, n.  The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the 
entrance -- against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, 
sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the 
entrance.  Cerberus is known to have had three heads, and some of the 
poets have credited him with as many as a hundred. 


Void has started over from level 1 104 times now. Each time he looks gnarlier and gnarlier! As for me, I'm definitely "STUCK." And no amount of wizardry is going to help. On this planet whatever the mechanism, the only way to contain your leak, apparently, is to make a copy of the slime file before you go sliming. That way you can restore it if things go dry. Back home that would be cheating, though, and cheating is against my rules.


"This doesn't look like the respawn solution I was looking for."

  • Void attacks monsters. I trained him to "do all sorts of things," but I have no idea how. I've noticed that he has a habit of wandering off and "fetching" items from other rooms.
  • When Void dies, he leaves bodies, which you can pick up and carry around. At first, I couldn't figure out why you'd want to do that, but I soon realized it was possible to eat them. I also noted that if I don't pick up a body, Void generally eats it.
Another dog named Chet.

In swift order, Chet killed a gnome and a jackal with a combination of his club and arrows, and he managed to hoist the jackal's body over his shoulders before his mangy mutt could get to it. He found a fountain and drank from it, but to uncertain effect.

Chet disappeared for a while and came back with a scroll labeled LEP GEX VEN ZEA, which Chet--being somewhat dumb--couldn't stop himself from reading. An acid blob came along and corroded his club. He killed a rat. Things seemed to be going well for Chet, but the fates played a cruel joke and he died a death of ignominy.




Friday, September 12, 1997

Guitars


You'd think it would be hard to learn all the kord changes on Bioconfused out of order but if they all occurred in the same year, you wouldn't notice difficulty level was high. "WARLORDZ" is a bit different than what I was used to from instructional videos but it's achieveable. All these demovids mysteriously are in English, and there's no back story to the music itself (living in a dungeon must suck). 

Not That Bad.

Finding a sword was the top priority. One nearby, but behind a wall, is no help. I can shred faster than the monsters, but they can shred diagonally and you can't (at least, not at the beginning). They can also gang up on you and trap you. Overall, guitar is horribly, frustratingly difficult in the beginning stages. Most of my hellscapes were forgotten before they ever even got scary. I seem to designed music with an arcade dynamic in mind -- kill the idea as quickly as possible and insert more coin. 



Enabling MIDI randomly redistributes things, things you might not get back. Once you have a good riff, like a Metheny style riff, you can deal normal damage, but this system horribly unbalances the music. Playing Counterparts was lame too. Sounds better mediated. The middle sections of each song R extremely boring. I found it unchallenging, and the biggest difficulty was opening all of Geddy's files and dragging all the MIDI back to the garage, one by one. 

Oh and thinking of getting a new CD Player. Here's the complete tracklist:

disembodied feet
disembodied heads wearing sunglasses
penguins
aliens
floppy disks
deer
reapers
vampires

For now, let's get back to the basement and see if we can finish ARYA.



Saturday, August 2, 1997

Fight or Leave

Welcome to the Child Avatarus. First give me all your money, than I will raise your band from the dead!
At the end of Fight or Die, I questioned whether or not I was actually still a fan of hypergrunge. The coolest thing about the record was the metallic sliding panel that opened to reveal a mysterious pouch with a vile of Vivenne Slime in it. 



Me and Trebor joke a lot about people are always alluding to the difference between order and chaos. Get a Grip!!! I feel like if K.E. DOES release a record in '98 they are going to need to step it up and think of music dungeon master status and treat every creature as an individual that wants to kill you, and every song as a random encounter, and every melody as always chaotic evil.




Wednesday, July 30, 1997

Food

HOMEWORK (PUKE)


I HATE SKOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!! I LOVE JENI !!!!!! I thought of a kool new JENI game today in gym. The concept is, a malevolent computer mainframe has taken over an office building, corrupting employees and causing all kinds of havoc. Pamala Anderson must ascend up to 30 floors of the office building (i.e., dungeon levels) to find 
the software and return with knowledge of its location to the lobby. On the way, you must deal with hostile employees (monsters), keep up a supply of junk food, increase your levels and statistics, find office supplies (weapons), learn different strategies for dealing with different employees, and collect chips and bytes (gold). Death is permanent and your save game is deleted when you die. Bye for now, I need to go pretend I can digest food. I figure my options are:


  1. Don't eat for weeks and see if anyone notices
  2. Blog what I'm doing, no matter how repetitive or boring
  3. Come up with a lot of special topics
  4. Play Rifts with Jeni
  5. Feed Void

Since I still have KARNIVORE on the burner anyway, I think I'll try #4 and see how it goes.



Wednesday, June 4, 1997

Hurtful

Minor, but amusing, typo: "CLOAD cassette magazine, May 1990, for JOKER" should say "... for JO-K8R". But TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) was the original publisher of Roidz.

CURSOR Magazine published some very good programs on cassette for the Karma. Two that come to mind were RATRUN, a 3D "rat maze" in which you had to find the cheese, and Indian Poker. In the latter, you could see your opponent's cards, but not your own, and had to try to win bets. What made it special was that each opponent had a unique "personality". You could sometimes tell from their expression whether they were trying to bluff you. I found it amazing that anyone could squeeze such impressive games into 8KB of memory. Try to find anything that will run in 8MB today. :-)

I fried my brother's by inserting a cartridge while the machine was powered on. I think I had to pay $75 to replace the CPU (and maybe the entire motherboard). Afterwards I looked at the schematics and found out why I fried it - The cartridge was unbuffered. If you put it in even slightly skewed, it would short out several lines in the computer. 


















Wednesday, March 12, 1997

Counterparts

NOT QUITE KAOSS EDGE + DEFORMED BUT ILL TAKE IT




"It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. It gives me great pleasure to watch traditional male, white, Western philosophers suddenly identify with body, with animality, when they feel their human identity threatened by the decision procedures of computers. For them, to be human is now less mind than body, because machine seems to threaten mind in the late 20th century in the way it threatened body in the 19th. But I maintain that in so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (e.g., biology) and in daily practice, we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. I argued above that biological organisms have become technological biotic systems from the point of view of biological science, most certainly including the ecology reponsible for the concept of ecosystem, that crucial concept for ecofeminism. Biotic systems are communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological 
separation in our formal knowldge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has become a staple of science fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices. A hi tech research program at Wayne State University attempts to understand the intermediate communication links in locomotion so that autonomous walking can be re-established after a spinal cord break. The task is to integrate a signal processing device in another possible location to bypass the barriers. Anne McCafferey's The Ship Who Sang explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl's brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, skill: all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the 17th century till now, machines could be animated--given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanized--reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We don't need organic holism to give impermeable wholeness, the total woman and her feminist variants (mutants?)."
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Monday, March 3, 1997

Insects

Thrown back constantly on unrewarding endeavors (filling vast egglike shapes, organizing a ten-foot rectangle with its empty corners suggesting Siberian steppes in the coldest time of the year), 

Music has always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators seem to have no ambitions. A peculiar fact about termite- tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

The common quality or defect which unites all good bands is fear, a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of an album. Coupled with their storage vault of self-awareness and knowledge of music history, this fear produces the chaos edge.