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| Saturday, July 30, 2005 04:02 PM |
| I'm It |
 by Fëanor |
- I done been tagged by babyraven with this "dorky things about me" meme. It's going to be hard to come up with good dorky stuff that isn't familiar to y'all already, and thus boring, but I'll do my best:
Five Dorky Things About Me:
- In the first and only computer class that I took in college (and really only the second one I ever took, the first being a typing class in high school), one of our projects was to make an animation of some kind using a graphic design language that this guy at MIT came up with called Design By Numbers. Most folks in the class made a program that showed the sun rising and setting, or a plane taking off, or something like that. I made a puzzle/adventure game in which you were a wizard and had to escape from this room that had a monster in it and an evil double of yourself who moved opposite to the way you moved. It was like a thousand lines of code or something.
- In that same computer class, we also had to make a project using this cool language called StarLogo. There was a really interesting book that we got to teach us that language, with all this fascinating theory about how really complex systems could arise from a collection of really simple entities. Anyway, for that project, I made this thing that was supposed to simulate vampires infiltrating a group of humans and vampire hunters, where you could vary the number of humans and vampires and vampire hunters, and then set them loose and see what happened. I called it something like, "The Introduction of Vampirism into a Human Community." (FYI, the humans almost never survived.)
- I keep a list of every movie I've ever seen, alphabetized and including ratings and other information, both as an Excel spreadsheet, and as a text file that's parsed by a Java Applet. The Applet allows you to filter the list and provides links to reviews I've written of the movies on my list.
- Rather than use any of the many perfectly good free blog templates that exist on the web, I built this one using Php and MySQL, just because I could.
- Okay, all of those things were pretty boastful, so now I'll tell you something dorky about me that's also really shameful. When the Care Bears Movie came out (which was, holy crap, 20 years ago, when I was six or seven), I really, really desperately wanted to see it, and my Mom said I could, but then she locked her keys in the car by mistake and we couldn't go, and I cried and cried.
I'm not going to tag anybody with this meme, because it's too hard to keep track of who's been tagged already and who hasn't, but feel free to do it if you want to.
- Now I'm not one of those people who hates Monopoly. I'm not particularly good at the game, but I enjoy playing it once in a while, on a rainy day, when there's not much else to do. But this habit of making a new version of the game whenever a new movie or book comes out has gotten completely out of hand. Case in point: poppy and I went to a Barnes and Noble today and came across the Fantastic Four version of Monopoly. Just think about that for a second. Fantastic Four...Monopoly.
So, let me get this straight. If I land on Dr. Doom (yes, all of the real estate holdings have inexplicably been replaced by super villains on this version of the board), and pay $350, then in the future whenever anybody stops there, I can charge them money for the pleasure of being on top of Dr. Doom?
Basically they've taken Monopoly and made into a game about Super Pimps and Super Hos.
- On video games: I recently finally beat Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. The ending was a little long and corny, but the game was a ton of fun, and it was cool finding out about what happened to all the characters I'd met and gotten to know. This is seriously one of my favorite RPGs ever. It's actually one of my favorite video games ever. Just difficult enough to remain challenging, but not so hard as to be frustrating, and full of great humor and fun. Plus, after it's over, they let you go back into the game and wander the world, doing whatever you want.
But I've already started my next 'Cube game: Killer7, which was lent to me by Peccable. Holy crap, this game is weird and creepy. You're an assassin killing these evil shambling zombie cult members who are strapped with explosives and who laugh maniacally all the time, but you can only see them after you've "scanned" an area for them, and you collect their blood to make you stronger, and you have seven different personalities that you can change into and out of using a television, and sometimes you meet ghosts of people you've killed, and you just might be totally insane and none of this may actually be happening at all. The game is totally fascinating and addictive. Since I started it, I just keep thinking about how I want to go play it again.
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