I love being on a starbase, watching as two brilliant diplomats try to outsmart the other. I love hanging out with people who save the world again and again, not because they want to, but because it’s the right thing to do. I love the excitement of traveling to other worlds in a starship or through time and space in a blue police box. I love seeing two souls share a perfect moment in a stream of people flowing through the largest city in the world. I love the joy when people find each other and the pain when it’s all over. I love seeing the world through the eyes of a serial killer, as he forces us to look at ourselves and what makes us tick. I love the hate, the bravery, the sacrifices. I love when people rise to the challenge, or are crushed by the flood. I love to be surprised. And most of all, I love to see people evolve.

Watching movies and TV-shows are one of my favourite leisure activities. If they are well done, I become completely engrossed in them. I’m a sucker for moving pictures. Books don’t have the same effect on me; neither does animated movies, 3D or otherwise. It’s probably the faces, I love the details and nuance that you get from watching an actor.

Despite my childlike fascination for this medium, I often have a hard time communicating my excitement. Whenever I try, it seems inadequate or insignificant somehow. For many, watching movies are just a way to pass the time. I suppose this and differing tastes are part of the problem, but it doesn’t fully explain it.

In a way, watching a movie is a solitary process. When you watch a movie, it mixes with your thoughts, opinions, emotions and experiences. It forms a synergy which makes the movie unique for each observer. It’s (at least for me) very difficult to share a complex emotional experience with someone.

For instance, think back to when you last had a problem. Then recall the moment when all the puzzle pieces were in place, when everything finally “clicked”.

I’m currently learning Scheme, an old programmering language which differs quite a lot from the big languages in use today. There have been a few “Aha!”-moments. Every time, I am filled with joy, pride and fascination, and I just want to take to the rooftops and shout out my excitement to the world. But I can’t do that. The experience of understanding can’t be shared, besides, climbing around on the roof should be left to trained professionals.

Is this universal? I have no idea. I hope it isn’t. But if it is, there are always movies and TV-shows that can act as a proxy as we try to connect to each other. They can let us share similar experiences. They can make us ask questions. And of course, they can entertain.

About two weeks ago, my main and only harddrive began making a noise I didn’t like. This resulted in a shiny new harddrive and it gave me the opportunity to try out a different linux distro. I have run gentoo for two years, and now I have installed archlinux. It was either archlinux or SourceMage, but since I’ve never run a binary distro, I thought I’d give it a try.

When I was still running gentoo, I slowly drifted over to using Firefox with the Vimperator extension (I’m a keyboard junkie), having previously always been a devoted Opera user. The reason for this was the unstable support for Flash in Opera. I was never quite satisfied with Firefox, since it was slow and, now and then got my profile data corrupted.

When I installed archlinux, I got the lastest versions of both Opera (9.25) and Flash (9.0.115), and this version does not work with Opera at all.

So, now I had a situation where I had to start up Firefox whenever I wanted to see something Flash(y — I just can’t resist a good cliché), which really got on my nerves. Most of my Flash use is for youtube-links people give me. Thus, I decided to solve this until Opera 9.50 comes out. (Opera 9.50 runs both a Qt-event loop and Gtk-event loop, which means it’ll be able to work with Flash without a hitch… hopefully)

YouTube uses FLV-files, which are really h264 videos. I did some googling and found out how to download these files from YouTube and wrote a little script which takes a youtube-link, extracts the url and pipes it into mplayer.

This is the script:

#!/bin/bash

WGET=/usr/bin/wget
GETFILE="http://www.youtube.com/get_video.php"
MPLAYER=/usr/bin/mplayer
SED=/bin/sed

if [ $# != 1 ]; then
    echo "$0 <url>"
    exit 1;
fi;

PARMS=$($WGET -O - "$1" | grep "fullscreen" |\
    $SED -e 's/.*\/watch_fullscreen//')

$WGET -O - "$GETFILE$PARMS" | $MPLAYER -noconsolecontrols -

It’s quite simple but it fills my needs. If you want to use this script, copy and paste it into a file, chmod a+x and call it with the parameter set to a youtube-link.

I’ll be your host this year, and I hope it will be an eventful one. Please do not touch the exhibits and try not to wander off too far from the group — nasty things are hiding in the dark.

During the holiday I had all kinds of things planned. I was planning to work on the M2 Importer for Blender; I was planning to write a small puzzle game prototype, and I wanted to finish a 3D model I’ve been working on and off on now for some time. Looking at that list, I might come off as amazingly efficient when I’m anything but :).

Then life struck. I haven’t done any of those things due to illness in the family. John Lennon really got it right when he said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans

And you can spice that one up a little by giving it a slasher movie workout:

Life is what stabs you in the back with a chainsaw when you’re busy skinny-dipping late at night — Richard

I’ve done some work on the M2 Importer, or rather I’m extending it. First of all, no, I haven’t added animation support yet. I’ve written a bunch of scripts to search and extract files from MPQ-archives. I didn’t like using an MPQ-extractor through WINE (I’m a linux user) so I solved that. I’m currently writing a BLP-converter and I have a half-functioning model viewer in the works.

The plan is to make a bunch of small programs and wrap them in a GUI which lets the user select what equipment and clothes the model should have, generate a file which then tells the M2 Importer script which files to extract and apply to the model. I might later be able to integrate that into the Blender UI, but that depends on how much tweaking it needs. The advantage of using all those small programs is that you don’t have to use the GUI if you don’t want to, and you can do batch processing and all kinds of neat stuff.

Also, almost all of it is written in Python (a language I’m not particularly fond of) in hope of people learning from it and adding stuff themselves. The only thing not written in Python are a decryption routine (was too slow in Python) and one of the decompressing methods MPQ-archives uses (didn’t want to reimplement it in Python).

But now is a new year with new challenges, new hope, new… stuff, I guess? Best of all, it’s a year of Getting Things Done. (I bet that stuff works for some people, I lack the discipline to implement it.) Most of all I wanna get my 3D model done, so I can do cool stuff with it. So many ideas, so much ambition, so little motivation :)

Have a nice 2008, I hope you enjoyed this tour. You can find the gift shop by the exit next to the talking potted plants. Should you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me or my deities. And remember: nasty things are hiding in the dark.

But I have finished the two previous games. Based on that I have come to the conclusion that I aim as well with those tiny little Tac-2 redux thumb joysticks as I do deep ocean diving without a scuba gear and with a grizzly bear hugging my spine with it’s teeth while singing “Heal the world” by Michael Jackson. If you’re wondering what a grizzly bear is doing in the ocean you should go watch National Geographic or ask Google. If that’s too hard for you, then watch Ocean’s 12 and in your head replace all the characters with rainbow colored grizzly bears with goatees which won’t make the movie any better, but at least unshaved rainbow colored grizzly bears are fun to look at.

This would be a problem if I had played the two games alone, but fortunately for me and unfortunately for my friend, the game has a well-functioning co-op mode — something I miss in most games. When I play together with a friend I can pretend to hit stuff when I’m not busy looking at the sky or admiring the ground where my feet should be. I also get to see the story, or rather the parts of the story not told by Cortana (Master Chief’s secretary AI) because Bungie (Developer of Marathon for that Apple company, a game in which you kill by clicking. Myth 1 and 2 where you kill by clicking on your stuff and then clicking on the other’s stuff. And of course Halo 1 and 2, where they revolutionized the gaming industry by killing with the push of a number of multicolored buttons) decided Cortana’s constant babbling might confuse the average console gamer’s already overloaded brain by making them push multicolored buttons AND listen to a mumbling female voice. Therefor they lowered the volume of her voice, making it slightly more difficult to make out what she says. Afraid that wasn’t enough, they alternate between playing loud music or blow stuff up whenever she’s talking, making dead sure that people like me don’t hear anything of what she says and at the same avoiding lawsuits by angry relatives of average gamers for having to repaint the average gamers’ bedrooms post brain-explosion.

Taking cover behind my friends excellent gaming skills wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the vehicles. The game contains a buggy which one can drive and the other can control the mounted turret. This is where my lack of thumb precision becomes apparent. I can’t hit for shit, especially because the vehicle is moving while I’m supposed to be aiming at something which also moves. Taking the driver’s seat is equally fun for me, and confusing for my friend since suddenly the whole game turns into a big obstacle course where the fun lies in driving into and onto stuff at high speeds, most often flipping the buggy upside down or possibly jamming it between a hard place and a hard place, making it a nice static part of the level for the Covenant (bad guys) to admire while making sure our heads are removed from our spines by rainbow colored grizzly bears with chic goatees.

What does all this have to do with Halo 3? I want to see where the hell they go from bringing in a silly, omnipotent vegetable, which I don’t think fit in at all into the story they were telling. But since I do not have an Xbox360 and have “Heal the world” on repeat, I have decided to settle for this excellent review, which at least in part mirrors my opinion on Halo 1 and 2.

I grew tired of the old design for this site, so I changed to this theme. Now it’s a little cleaner, a little clearer and a little better.

Two more web issues of Sugershock are up. Number 02 and number 03

Go read!