King Critter’s World

Some­where in between Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead, George Romero was bit­ten by a zom­bie. It’s the only way to explain it.

Here’s some issues, big and small, that I had with the movie. There are spoil­ers, but that doesn’t really mat­ter since you should avoid this movie like the plague — watch­ing it will lower your IQ.

• Skate­boards. A few dif­fer­ent peo­ple skate­board in this film. Prob­lem: at the start of the movie, some­one is skate­board­ing in a zom­bie infested town. Have you ever skate­boarded? If you have, you know that you can’t skate gravel. Or dirt. Or mud. Or on a mass of leaves. In other words, all the things you’d except to find in a town that’s been aban­doned for ten frig­ging years! (Or how­ever long it’s been — it’s never actu­ally stated in the movie.) But nope, I guess they’ve got func­tion­ing robot street sweepers!

  And let’s not for­get when there’s a guy wait­ing in a shack. After he hears a noise, he gets up, jumps on his skate­board, raises his gun (does he not know about Newton’s third law?) and skates the five feet toward the door. He gets what he deserves.

• Auto­matic weapons. It’s com­mon knowl­edge that the only way to kill a zom­bie is to shoot it in the head, so what does every­body do? They fire on full auto toward’s the zom­bies’ tor­sos, and act shocked when noth­ing happens.
• So this dude steals a APC-like vehi­cle that’s armed with mid­dle launch­ers, and says he’ll blow up the city unless… he gets two mil­lion dol­lars in cash. The only thing I can say to that is: WHAT! THE! FUCK!

  What the FUCK are you going to do with money in the mid­dle of zom­bie infested Amer­ica, huh? Even IF there still was a func­tion­ing econ­omy in the city itself (a pretty big if — more on that in a bit) he can’t exactly go back to the place he just threat­ened to destroy. Com­pletely illogical.

• Econ­omy. Oh man, I’m not sure where to begin… In fact, I don’t think I can write any­thing on this sub­ject other then “what the fuck!?” because it is just 100% the oppo­site of any­thing remotely plausible.
• Lead­er­ship. The city was manged by a board of direc­tors that did… absoult­ley noth­ing? Along with an upper-class group of cit­i­zens that like­wise did noth­ing except sit around and drink fine wine? Another WTF is called for.

And then there are count­less inci­dents where char­ac­ters act like utter morons for no good rea­son… and by “inci­dents” I mean “the whole damn movie.”

I’ve heard many peo­ple say that the “…of the Dead” movies are a metaphor­i­cal, satir­i­cal take on life and society.

If they mean that life really, really SUCKS, then I guess they’re right.

Should of posted this a long time ago, but what­ever: Death Troop­ers is the worst Star Wars book ever. Well, maybe a close sec­ond to the Tales of the Empire (or was it New Repub­lic?) short story col­lec­tion, which was SO FREAKING BAD I puked all over it. Then qui­etly put it back on the book­shelf and slipped out of the book­store. (Slight exaggeration.)

Death Troop­ers had a lot going for it. Well, ok, just the cover… but the cover alone was enough to make me go blind from the sheer awe­some­ness of the thing. If I could get that thing as a poster, I would.

And the book even starts alright — the first chap­ter is pretty creepy. Then the char­ac­ters open their mouths and it all comes crash­ing down. On top of bad dia­log is the fact that every­one seems to be hold­ing the idiot ball and not notic­ing when corpses start dis­ap­pear­ing and shit. (The whole thing was a ter­ri­bly con­trived way to add sus­pense. I’m sup­posed to believe that these zom­bies are going to sneak around, care­fully remain­ing hid­den and avoid­ing the sur­vivors just in order to… what, inflict psy­cho­log­i­cal harm? Yeah.)

And so then some stuff hap­pens, some peo­ple die (not as awe­some as it sounds — I think the Lucas­film peo­ple might have edited it down, or the author just sucks) some more stuff hap­pens, and the escape, and every­one lives hap­pily ever after. Mhm. Dawn of the dead this is not.

In sum­ma­tion: could have been so frigg’n awe­some. Later on in my life I would not mind fund­ing a low bud­get indie adap­tion of this, in the vein of Alien. With the script com­pletely reworked my yours truly, of course.

After my last post about how much Spirit Tracks sucks, I decided to replay Phan­tom Hour­glass. And yep, it’s awe­some. I think it’s bet­ter then Oca­rina of Time. Fur­ther­more, Linebeck is the great­est sup­port­ing char­ac­ter of any Zelda game ever made.

Trains? THEY SUCK ASS! It’s the most lit­eral def­i­n­i­tion of “on rails” as pos­si­ble, and it is mega un-fun. Phan­tom Hour­glass was way bet­ter — and, of course, the Game Boy’s Link’s Awak­en­ing was the pin­na­cle of hand­held Zelda games. It so deserves a remake.

Man, Christ­mas is just not fun as a 19 year old when you com­pare it to when you were younger. The magic is gone.

And now they’re telling me Santa Claus doesn’t exist? Fuck this, I’m build­ing a time machine.

After read­ing for about 20 straight hours, I fin­ished the novel Unin­tended Con­se­quences. It’s a pretty long book.

Basic plot is… well, the basic plot actu­ally has noth­ing to do with most of the book, and doesn’t start until page 500 or so.

The main theme, how­ever, is firearms and related laws. Hon­estly, that’s all the book is about.

Good book, any­way. It’s a must read if you can man­age an almost 900 page, small print novel. Read the Wikipedia page for more info.

EDIT: after read­ing some of the reviews on the Ama­zon page, my mind was opened a bit, and I real­ized that this book should have been split in two: one non-fiction dis­ser­ta­tion on the his­tory and effects of gun con­trol; and one (rea­son­ably sized) work of fic­tion that cov­ers the main plot of the cur­rent Unin­tended Con­se­quences novel.

Fr the first time EVER, I’ve con­tributed to an open source project. Yes indeed. I added Sub­lime Text to Wine’s AppDB.

Not much, no, but what­ever. Still makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. ^_^

syn­client ran­domly seems to reset itself to the wrong val­ues, and syn­dae­mon –t is pretty much use­less, as the touch­pad turn back on if you hold down a key for more then a sec­ond, or if you hit another key within that time. So if you want your touch pad to auto-turn off while typ­ing, you’re lim­ited to < 60 char­ac­ters per min­utes. Fuck that.

Shin Megami Ten­sei: Devil Sur­vivor — for Nin­tendo DS

This game is, in some ways, very rem­i­nis­cent of The World Ends With You. They’re both set in Tokyo, they both involve a 7-day count­down, they both have time lim­its for each mis­sion, and they both have to do with the afterlife/underworld.

Devil Sur­vivor, how­ever, plays com­pletely dif­fer­ently. It’s a tac­ti­cal RPG with many lay­ers of depth. You con­trol a party of up to four humans. Each human is accom­pa­nied by two demons. There are no “action points” like some tac­ti­cal games. Instead, you can take every action once per turn, in any order.

For exam­ple, you can cast a defense-boosting spell with one demon, and offence boost­ing spell with the other, then move towards an enemy, then attack the enemy, then cast a heal­ing spell with the human.

Yes, all on one turn.

Demons are are like Poke­mon, only cooler. But these crea­tures don’t come in poke balls — they’re bought and sold in a mar­ket. Any demons you defeat in bat­tle are sent to the mar­ket. You then can buy them — bid on them, actu­ally. Com­puter play­ers bid against you, and can win if you’re stingy with your cash.

But not all demons can be bought — the really awe­some ones have to be cre­ated. You can fuse demons together to form new type. This requires some strat­egy in order to get the best carry-over of stats and spells from you old demons to the new one.

Speak­ing of spells, it’s rather inter­est­ing how you learn new ones. Your demons learn them auto­mat­i­cally, but your human party mem­bers have to fight for them. At the begin­ning of every bat­tle, you can set the “skill cracks,” where you assign a party mem­ber to a par­tic­u­lar demon’s skill. If you defeat that demon with that party mem­ber, you “steal” the selected spell. You can only assign three spells at once, per char­ac­ter, so your extra spells go in your skill folder. You can reas­sign them to your hearts con­tent out­side of battle.

Bat­tles are inter­est­ing. You first choose what each of your fight­ers (your two demons and the human) are going to do. Then every body springs into motion and blasts the hell out of each other with crazy-awesome (and very pretty) spells. There’s six ele­men­tal types, to which every demon can be weak or strong against (or absorb, block, or reflect). Like­wise, every spell is aligned to one of those elements.

After ever­body fin­ishes their move, each com­bat­ant gets a chance at an extra turn. These are awarded for doing cer­tain things, such as scor­ing a crit­i­cal hit, absorb­ing or reflect­ing a spell, or just being lucky. After the extra turn (if there is any) com­bat ends.

tl;dr: This game is awe­some. If you like RPGs and/or tac­ti­cal games, I sug­gest you rent/buy/pirate the game right now.

“Fire­fox is bloated.“
“Fire­fox sucks!“
“Fire­fox runs faster in Wine, ZOMG!“
“WTF, FX?”

Com­plaints like these are quite com­mon. A num­ber of peo­ple are con­vinced that Fire­fox runs like crap on Linux — so slow that even the Win­dows ver­sion run­ning via Wine goes faster.

I, too, was one of those peo­ple. When I ran Ubuntu on my lap­top, Fire­fox would take ~5 sec­onds to switch tabs. It would hang while scrolling. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire took about as long as Fire­fox did start­ing up.

It sucked.

I thought Chromium was a gift from the gods when I found it.

But then I switched to Sidux, and last night I gave Fire­fox another try. And guess what? It’s fast! Not quite as snappy as chromium, but pretty darn close!

The only con­clu­sion I can come to is that Ubuntu is doing some­thing ter­ri­bly wrong. What, I haven’t a clue.