So.
I was about to have lunch in this nice little cafe with my friend yesterday. The place was a bit off from the busiest parts of the city, peaceful, seemingly mostly occupied by people so ancient that I can only assume it is indeed possible to simply get demended enough to forget to die.
Got myself a panini and sat down at a table.
Two seconds later there was a kind of sharp clickety-clickety-click and something zipped into existence right next to us.
Old lady: "You know, you two look just like my parents."
Me(outraged): "Well, I never!"
OL: "Where you from, young man?"
Me: "Finland?"
OL: "Oh, that be in northern Europe, innit? You all Russian there, aren't ya?"
Me: "Well..."
OL: "And where you from, little lady?"
My friend: "I come from Japan!^^"
OL: "Aa, you know Pearl Harbor, then?"
Then she started her monologue.
Fifteen minutes later she was still going strong, endlessly swinging back and forth on her two crutches, like some kind of post-polio orangutan.
OL: "--Now, back in the 60s I met this man in Auckland, who really got me started with my writing career. Let's see now. Ahmed. Ahmed he was called. A fierce, fierce man, he was! You see, back in those days we were quite poor, and of course I had already a long history of different ailments that had really put my body down the bad way, let me tell you! And for a girl like me, who got her education in German, it wasn't too easy to find proper employment as a teacher, but luckily there was the time, when I was learning to use them early word pro-cess-ing machines and ended up writing this poem about mice that people back then really liked... where was I now? Ah right, counterfeit passports. You see--"
I think we could still be sitting there, listening to her, had we not finished our food and excused ourselves (repeatedly, maybe up to 15 times, and even then she tried giving us her address so that we could visit her for more delightful conversationing).
In a way it was a pity to end the "conversation", because towards the end she really started gaining momentum. I especially remember this snippet paraphrased below.
OL: "Do you reckon that Obama in the you-night-ed States will live very long? I really don't think so. It's such a shame, after Bush. Both the senior and the junior. Horrible people... You know, he is half from Kenya, black father, was it now.. He also did drugs when he was younger. I'm really into politics, see? People are always saying that I has a very keen eye, can see what it's all about, see? Did you know that there are some presidents in States who were jews? Like Roosevelt! Imagine that! With their huge noses and moneygrubbing! Of course they always change their name so that people will accept them, but it doesn't really change it, does it? Always be on guard for'em!"
Me: "Sorry, but... did you say before, that you are working for Amnesty International?"
OL: "Oh, yes! Such an interesting work! I also do gardening, since after retiring I always have so much time--"
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Let's Movie Review! ^_________^
I've spent many an hour in the local cinema during the past weeks, allow me to share some of my thoughts with you.
Bolt3D ***½
Saw this right after coming to New Zealand, and incidentally, it was the first movie I've seen through a pair of polarizing glasses, which might explain perhaps ½ a star in the rating. I was surprised by it. It is actually a very nice movie, even if the storyline doesn't step away from the well-tread path set by a million stories told before it. It's really not that simple to make humor that is funny for both kids and the adults, but I think Bolt succeeded in it. I even liked the hamster-in-a-ball that some have complained about. (Yay for being in an English-speaking country and the chronic lack of the ever-so-high-quality Finnish dubbing.)
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans **
I give it two stars instead of one, because the guy playing the vampire elder really did a fantastic job in portraying his role. The werewolf dude (it's been a few weeks, forgot all names already) wasn't bad either, but the overall blandness of the movie makes his role quite forgettable. The vampire girl, on the other hand, holy fuck! Talk about a mess.. She was like Gollum, her moods swinging wildly between super-angsty and a princess-shaped paperweight every time the camera cut angles. And there were a lot of cuts. (And weird camera angles. Half the time you don't know if you are looking at the ceiling or the floor of the particular cave the scene is taking place in.) Was it the first Jason Bourne movie, the Bourne Identity, that started it all? That was a good movie, but the assholes who made it, should be skinned alive for killing off the whole fucking action genre and replacing it with the strobo shows that we are being fed these days. Fuck me, even the latest Bond movie would have been tolerable, had the action scenes been properly made! (I'm also heretic enough to call the reboot of the Batman series only a partial success because of this very thing.) Shaky camera and MTV-editing are to the action movies, what all the flicks ending with the word "Movie" are for comedies.
Well, there is some gore in it, and vampires can never be a total waste of time.
Watchmen ****½
(admit it, you clicked that hoping for something big and blue to pop out. Instead, I give you something even better!)
Yea, it's a good movie, a very good movie. Of course it's not exactly like the comic with all the philosophical nyances and whatnot jammed in there, but anyone who thinks that it fails because of that, can cry themselves to sleep until old age and dementia wash away the scars for all I care. Few things that bothered me -- that I can think of off the top of my head -- were that Nite Owl and Silk Spectre (II) were displayed as such brutal little sonuvabitches in a fight that it really took a lot of the impact off of Rorschach's and Comedian's roles. And Nite Owl was supposed to be a middle-aged everyday normal guy, not the kind of semi-beefcake the actor was (the whole manhood-in-costume angle was very well displayed, though, I thought). Oh yes, and the ending... I actually liked this new one over the comic's squid one. It has a different weight to it, but the wrath of an angry god works just the same as an unknown alien thread for me -- it's just that after all the violence in the movie the whole destruction of the city scene was a huge cop-out. It really would have added some much-needed effect to it to show the bloody corpses piled up on top of each other everywhere instead of yet another CGI explosion. :(
Anyway, this movie has been talked to death, and most people have probably seen it already, and for those who haven't, you can come over to my house later and we can watch it together after I buy the bluray, if you bring the beer.
--Intermission--
I was in a cafeteria today, sipping on a vanilla cappuccino the size of an olympic swimming pool, and writing some stuff on my laptop, when all of sudden two girls sit to the table next to me.
And proceed to speak in Finnish.
I got a rare opportunity right there to find out, what it is that women speak, when they think that there is no one listening/understanding them.
It's like guys usually assume it is, they speak of dicks.
And apparently not necessarily of dicks that are attached to a member of the human species.
Oh, weaker sex, you never cease to amaze and mildy disgust me. :)
--And now for the latter part of our reviews--
Transporter 3 *½
For the sake of everything that is still good in this world:
Jason Statham.
Start paying more attention to the movies you are making than you do to level-upping your chest muscles. You are already quite large enough. Every time you take your shirt off on screen, I can hear the women in the theater going cuu-ee and slipping off their seats on their own juices.
Statham has been the leading mug of many a fine picture already, including one of the last year's shiniest cinematic gems: Death Race. The previous two Transporter movies were also pretty good, or at least damn fine entertainment, but this time around I felt like leaving half-way through. Transporter 3 is just a lazy movie. The shoddy camera and editing work is there, like can be expected, but the story, as trivial as it can be in movies like these, just felt too poor even for an excuse to drive cars around really fast.
Luc Besson is credited as having written the script... I really don't want to diss the creative mind behind Léon and The Fifth Element, but this guy is sinking rapidly towards the bottom of the George Lucas Trench in the Ocean of Shit, like some perverse cosplay of Le Grand bleu. Has he really done anything worthwhile since Danny the Dog/Unleashed? I'd rather see him retire, while I can still muster some warm feelings towards his long career...
As for Statham, I really hope this won't become a norm for him. He has the right stuff to become Bruce Willis of the 21st century.
(Incidentally, the NZ guys in the theater needed a change of underwear after every time a shiny German car came rrrrroaring to the screen with its hard-as-steel engine trembling and pulsating with barely-contained power that...oh hell, you get the picture...)
Monsters vs. Aliens ***
I just saw this one tonight, again in 3D, and again, just like with Bolt, I have to say I was really surprised at how much I liked it, since the trailers I had seen before were more cringe-inducing than anything else. Again, the main parts of the storyline aren't going anywhere unheard of, it's just another try on the friends-with-special-powers-take-on-a-super-villain-and-win-because-they-are-not-the-bad-guys. It is acceptable as a one-shot, but if Dreamworks will start churning out sequels like they did with Shrek, I'm going to hire a hobo to urinate into the gas tank of their CEO's SUV.
The humor in the movie is reminiscent of the said Shrek flicks, which is entirely a good thing. It's nice to have two large animation studios with slightly different ideas on what makes a funny. I saw Pixar's Wall-E before leaving Finland, and it was a great movie as well, but in a thoroughly nice way, whereas Dreamworks executives seem to think that it is okay to blow a million or two on a fart joke every now and then. I agree with them wholeheartedly.
The thing that I found most impressive in Monsters vs. Aliens was the quality of the animation itself at parts. Most backgrounds and many of the (even main) characters were overly cartoony and simple, but when something was well done, it was like the pixels were fellating my eyeballs. The destruction and mayhem of the action scenes, water, cloth simulation, particle effects, all very much top notch. It's almost depressing, really, as I like toying with 3D-modelling myself, and these days the professional-level CGI is more than just a bit ahead of what a twerp like me can accomplish with a copy of Blender. In short: effects and overall animation - a slight improvement on what they've done before; characters - a loo-ong step backwards from the vivid personas we saw in the Shrek movies; story - it will be the first thing I'll forget about the movie, maybe as soon as tomorrow; humor - I laughed several times.
-----------------
Alright, let's leave it at that for now. Later this week I will witness the live action horror that is Dragonball Evolution. Really looking forward to it, I have a gut feeling it will be like the unholy union of Karate Kid and Mortal Kombat 2(the movie). :)
Coming up later on:
The new Star Trek movie with Sylar as Spock.
The new Fast and Furious movie, because I hate cars, pointless drama in action movies and I really hate cars.
The new X-Men movie, because Wolverine is like the only interesting character so far in the motion picture versions of the comics, though I have hopes for Gambit in this one.
Terminator Salvation, because I can't come up with a reason to not see it.
Transformers 2, because you can only go up from the atrocious first one.
Heh, maybe even Night at the Museum 2, because ... well, I might be bored enough to see it someday.
Did you notice that all of those movies are sequels? Fuck you Hollywood.
Did you also notice that I'm not seeing movies like Slumdog Millionare, Che, The Wrestler or Gran Torino? Fuck you art fags, I'm seeing movies for entertainment, not to become depressed.
Bolt3D ***½
Saw this right after coming to New Zealand, and incidentally, it was the first movie I've seen through a pair of polarizing glasses, which might explain perhaps ½ a star in the rating. I was surprised by it. It is actually a very nice movie, even if the storyline doesn't step away from the well-tread path set by a million stories told before it. It's really not that simple to make humor that is funny for both kids and the adults, but I think Bolt succeeded in it. I even liked the hamster-in-a-ball that some have complained about. (Yay for being in an English-speaking country and the chronic lack of the ever-so-high-quality Finnish dubbing.)
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans **
I give it two stars instead of one, because the guy playing the vampire elder really did a fantastic job in portraying his role. The werewolf dude (it's been a few weeks, forgot all names already) wasn't bad either, but the overall blandness of the movie makes his role quite forgettable. The vampire girl, on the other hand, holy fuck! Talk about a mess.. She was like Gollum, her moods swinging wildly between super-angsty and a princess-shaped paperweight every time the camera cut angles. And there were a lot of cuts. (And weird camera angles. Half the time you don't know if you are looking at the ceiling or the floor of the particular cave the scene is taking place in.) Was it the first Jason Bourne movie, the Bourne Identity, that started it all? That was a good movie, but the assholes who made it, should be skinned alive for killing off the whole fucking action genre and replacing it with the strobo shows that we are being fed these days. Fuck me, even the latest Bond movie would have been tolerable, had the action scenes been properly made! (I'm also heretic enough to call the reboot of the Batman series only a partial success because of this very thing.) Shaky camera and MTV-editing are to the action movies, what all the flicks ending with the word "Movie" are for comedies.
Well, there is some gore in it, and vampires can never be a total waste of time.
Watchmen ****½
(admit it, you clicked that hoping for something big and blue to pop out. Instead, I give you something even better!)
Yea, it's a good movie, a very good movie. Of course it's not exactly like the comic with all the philosophical nyances and whatnot jammed in there, but anyone who thinks that it fails because of that, can cry themselves to sleep until old age and dementia wash away the scars for all I care. Few things that bothered me -- that I can think of off the top of my head -- were that Nite Owl and Silk Spectre (II) were displayed as such brutal little sonuvabitches in a fight that it really took a lot of the impact off of Rorschach's and Comedian's roles. And Nite Owl was supposed to be a middle-aged everyday normal guy, not the kind of semi-beefcake the actor was (the whole manhood-in-costume angle was very well displayed, though, I thought). Oh yes, and the ending... I actually liked this new one over the comic's squid one. It has a different weight to it, but the wrath of an angry god works just the same as an unknown alien thread for me -- it's just that after all the violence in the movie the whole destruction of the city scene was a huge cop-out. It really would have added some much-needed effect to it to show the bloody corpses piled up on top of each other everywhere instead of yet another CGI explosion. :(
Anyway, this movie has been talked to death, and most people have probably seen it already, and for those who haven't, you can come over to my house later and we can watch it together after I buy the bluray, if you bring the beer.
--Intermission--
I was in a cafeteria today, sipping on a vanilla cappuccino the size of an olympic swimming pool, and writing some stuff on my laptop, when all of sudden two girls sit to the table next to me.
And proceed to speak in Finnish.
I got a rare opportunity right there to find out, what it is that women speak, when they think that there is no one listening/understanding them.
It's like guys usually assume it is, they speak of dicks.
And apparently not necessarily of dicks that are attached to a member of the human species.
Oh, weaker sex, you never cease to amaze and mildy disgust me. :)
--And now for the latter part of our reviews--
Transporter 3 *½
For the sake of everything that is still good in this world:
Jason Statham.
Start paying more attention to the movies you are making than you do to level-upping your chest muscles. You are already quite large enough. Every time you take your shirt off on screen, I can hear the women in the theater going cuu-ee and slipping off their seats on their own juices.
Statham has been the leading mug of many a fine picture already, including one of the last year's shiniest cinematic gems: Death Race. The previous two Transporter movies were also pretty good, or at least damn fine entertainment, but this time around I felt like leaving half-way through. Transporter 3 is just a lazy movie. The shoddy camera and editing work is there, like can be expected, but the story, as trivial as it can be in movies like these, just felt too poor even for an excuse to drive cars around really fast.
Luc Besson is credited as having written the script... I really don't want to diss the creative mind behind Léon and The Fifth Element, but this guy is sinking rapidly towards the bottom of the George Lucas Trench in the Ocean of Shit, like some perverse cosplay of Le Grand bleu. Has he really done anything worthwhile since Danny the Dog/Unleashed? I'd rather see him retire, while I can still muster some warm feelings towards his long career...
As for Statham, I really hope this won't become a norm for him. He has the right stuff to become Bruce Willis of the 21st century.
(Incidentally, the NZ guys in the theater needed a change of underwear after every time a shiny German car came rrrrroaring to the screen with its hard-as-steel engine trembling and pulsating with barely-contained power that...oh hell, you get the picture...)
Monsters vs. Aliens ***
I just saw this one tonight, again in 3D, and again, just like with Bolt, I have to say I was really surprised at how much I liked it, since the trailers I had seen before were more cringe-inducing than anything else. Again, the main parts of the storyline aren't going anywhere unheard of, it's just another try on the friends-with-special-powers-take-on-a-super-villain-and-win-because-they-are-not-the-bad-guys. It is acceptable as a one-shot, but if Dreamworks will start churning out sequels like they did with Shrek, I'm going to hire a hobo to urinate into the gas tank of their CEO's SUV.
The humor in the movie is reminiscent of the said Shrek flicks, which is entirely a good thing. It's nice to have two large animation studios with slightly different ideas on what makes a funny. I saw Pixar's Wall-E before leaving Finland, and it was a great movie as well, but in a thoroughly nice way, whereas Dreamworks executives seem to think that it is okay to blow a million or two on a fart joke every now and then. I agree with them wholeheartedly.
The thing that I found most impressive in Monsters vs. Aliens was the quality of the animation itself at parts. Most backgrounds and many of the (even main) characters were overly cartoony and simple, but when something was well done, it was like the pixels were fellating my eyeballs. The destruction and mayhem of the action scenes, water, cloth simulation, particle effects, all very much top notch. It's almost depressing, really, as I like toying with 3D-modelling myself, and these days the professional-level CGI is more than just a bit ahead of what a twerp like me can accomplish with a copy of Blender. In short: effects and overall animation - a slight improvement on what they've done before; characters - a loo-ong step backwards from the vivid personas we saw in the Shrek movies; story - it will be the first thing I'll forget about the movie, maybe as soon as tomorrow; humor - I laughed several times.
-----------------
Alright, let's leave it at that for now. Later this week I will witness the live action horror that is Dragonball Evolution. Really looking forward to it, I have a gut feeling it will be like the unholy union of Karate Kid and Mortal Kombat 2(the movie). :)
Coming up later on:
The new Star Trek movie with Sylar as Spock.
The new Fast and Furious movie, because I hate cars, pointless drama in action movies and I really hate cars.
The new X-Men movie, because Wolverine is like the only interesting character so far in the motion picture versions of the comics, though I have hopes for Gambit in this one.
Terminator Salvation, because I can't come up with a reason to not see it.
Transformers 2, because you can only go up from the atrocious first one.
Heh, maybe even Night at the Museum 2, because ... well, I might be bored enough to see it someday.
Did you notice that all of those movies are sequels? Fuck you Hollywood.
Did you also notice that I'm not seeing movies like Slumdog Millionare, Che, The Wrestler or Gran Torino? Fuck you art fags, I'm seeing movies for entertainment, not to become depressed.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Virtuality
For a anti-social reject like me trying to enjoy a sunny Saturday afternoon, which is more annoying? Is it the table on my left with four Korean teenage girls going on and on about whatever it is that airheads like that talk about in their silly-sounding language? Or could it be the middle-aged Kiwi redneck beauty at the table to my right, filling up two chairs with her enormous carcass, mouth-breathing like she just held her breath for 5 minutes and talking about equally pointless bullshit in between slices of chocolate cake.
Whatever. It's a pretty day outside.
I've been quite busy these past weeks, mostly working on my next programming task, which has required me to re-teach myself most of the mathematics that I already learned once in university back in the day. In fact, I've been working on it pretty much day and night, office and home, come hell or high water. My beard has already grown past the point where it would tickle my own face and girls have stopped complaining about it scratching their thighs, whenever they manage to pull me away from my computer.
It's good to be a geek. :)
Over the weeks, I've also attended to a lovely set of lectures on virtual reality back at the lab, given by Tom Furness, one of the Great Old Ones in this field of research. According to him, he is the only one of the three guys left alive, who studied the field already in 1960s.
It really shows: this guy is literally a gold mine of information. I consider myself very lucky to have been able to tap into his head like this.
Interesting thing he told us a couple of days ago:
He was working on a data glass tech that, instead of having miniature see-through displays on the lenses, utilize lasers to directly draw the images on the user's retina. The technology is maturing up quickly, and they can already produce very vivid, high-contrast VGA-resolution images that just seem to hover there, in front of your eyes.
The funny part: they were testing their prototype on some guy who just happened to be visiting their lab. The dude put on the glasses and looked at the images shot into his eyes, nodding his head in appreciation. Then he told them: “Impressive, especially considering that I'm blind in my left eye, and I can still see the images perfectly clear with it.”
It's a feature, not a bug!
Apparently the retina in the guy's left eye was still alive and kicking, it was just the rest of the eye that was messed up with large amounts of scar tissue, a result from some accident years back. Prosthetic eyes based on this are already being researched. :)
Onward.
An observation that I have made here.
Skateboards. Holy shit, half the people in the campus seem to use them as their primary means of transportation. They are actually considered cool. Every time I see someone skating, I start hearing the song, The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News (Back to the Future movies, come on...), play in my head.
It's driving me crazy. I swear, I can go to a toilet, and then, in the booth, start hearing the damn song approaching from the distance. The bathroom door opens and as the guy rolls past me, I'm exposed to the full blare of the music so that I automatically try to wipe aside the long curly locks of 80s hair from my face that I know never even were there.
The campus security zooming around on their Segways are cool, though.
And now for something completely different.
Towards the end of April and in the beginning of May, expect a change of scenery, as I travel north towards Auckland, and from there fly to Japan for a couple of weeks of historical sightseeing, beer gardens and hopefully not too many geishas (I really don't see the point in them). I haven't thought about it too much yet, but on the menu so far are Osaka (where my friends live), Kyoto and Nara (which are pretty), and perhaps Iga-Ueno (which is the home town of the legendary ninja, Hattori Hanzo, and the birth place of the entire culture of wearing your pyjamas around your head and totally flipping out for no reason, killing everybody in town.)
Cheers, eh.
Whatever. It's a pretty day outside.
I've been quite busy these past weeks, mostly working on my next programming task, which has required me to re-teach myself most of the mathematics that I already learned once in university back in the day. In fact, I've been working on it pretty much day and night, office and home, come hell or high water. My beard has already grown past the point where it would tickle my own face and girls have stopped complaining about it scratching their thighs, whenever they manage to pull me away from my computer.
It's good to be a geek. :)
Over the weeks, I've also attended to a lovely set of lectures on virtual reality back at the lab, given by Tom Furness, one of the Great Old Ones in this field of research. According to him, he is the only one of the three guys left alive, who studied the field already in 1960s.
It really shows: this guy is literally a gold mine of information. I consider myself very lucky to have been able to tap into his head like this.
Interesting thing he told us a couple of days ago:
He was working on a data glass tech that, instead of having miniature see-through displays on the lenses, utilize lasers to directly draw the images on the user's retina. The technology is maturing up quickly, and they can already produce very vivid, high-contrast VGA-resolution images that just seem to hover there, in front of your eyes.
The funny part: they were testing their prototype on some guy who just happened to be visiting their lab. The dude put on the glasses and looked at the images shot into his eyes, nodding his head in appreciation. Then he told them: “Impressive, especially considering that I'm blind in my left eye, and I can still see the images perfectly clear with it.”
It's a feature, not a bug!
Apparently the retina in the guy's left eye was still alive and kicking, it was just the rest of the eye that was messed up with large amounts of scar tissue, a result from some accident years back. Prosthetic eyes based on this are already being researched. :)
Onward.
An observation that I have made here.
Skateboards. Holy shit, half the people in the campus seem to use them as their primary means of transportation. They are actually considered cool. Every time I see someone skating, I start hearing the song, The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News (Back to the Future movies, come on...), play in my head.
It's driving me crazy. I swear, I can go to a toilet, and then, in the booth, start hearing the damn song approaching from the distance. The bathroom door opens and as the guy rolls past me, I'm exposed to the full blare of the music so that I automatically try to wipe aside the long curly locks of 80s hair from my face that I know never even were there.
The campus security zooming around on their Segways are cool, though.
And now for something completely different.
Towards the end of April and in the beginning of May, expect a change of scenery, as I travel north towards Auckland, and from there fly to Japan for a couple of weeks of historical sightseeing, beer gardens and hopefully not too many geishas (I really don't see the point in them). I haven't thought about it too much yet, but on the menu so far are Osaka (where my friends live), Kyoto and Nara (which are pretty), and perhaps Iga-Ueno (which is the home town of the legendary ninja, Hattori Hanzo, and the birth place of the entire culture of wearing your pyjamas around your head and totally flipping out for no reason, killing everybody in town.)
Cheers, eh.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
No Skool Like Old Skool
Don't think that my life in NZ is all booze, girls and bungee jumping. No, no, no.
Most of my time is actually spent at the lab, surrounded by a bunch of computers, studying things related to 3D-graphics, graphics programming and especially augmented reality. In fact, I'm often so absorbed into my work that I end up missing the last bus home, which passes the university at 11pm. A lazy bastard like me, there's no way I would do something like that unless I found my work very interesting indeed.
Video games.
I always wanted to make my own, but for some reason never got around to seriously attempting to put one together.
So, a couple of weeks ago I decided to give it a shot!
I've been an avid gamer since 1980s, and I firmly believe that modern game makers have forgotten, what makes a good game good. It is not downloadable extra content, or a fuck-ton of shaders to make virtual boobies look so real you want to lick your monitor, nor is it real-time ray tracing or character models with million+ polygons.
It's nothing more complex than the core idea of the game. It's the game mechanics. It's the way it's been realized. IT'S THE FUN. I have two of the current generation consoles at home and I enjoy playing on them a lot, and will probably continue playing the latest games all the way to my grave, but it is my opinion that most of the games today simply can't hold a candle to the classics of days gone by.
I can accept someone calling games like X-Com ancient. They are getting there, but are still heaps more enjoyable than 99% of the offerings today. Then I hear someone saying that they have never played games like Thief, "because it's too old" and all I can think of is "Holy shit I'm getting old." If I talk about old games, I usually mean the very early 1990s offerings, like the first Monkey Islands or Scorched Earth, or if we talk about console gaming, the late 1980s NES games, such as Megaman or Metal Gear. (Kids who think that Metal Gear Solid 1 on PS1 is the original game in the series, make me die inside a bit).
Now, before someone gets it into their head to slap me in the face with their big fat nerd penis and show off their Commodore 64 or Intellivision -- I did play on them, a lot. But for me, true gaming began with post 1985-games pouring out from Japan, when the technology really started playing leap-frog with the developers.
Okay, okay. The reality is that we are now living in the new golden era of gaming, because Internet and things like Flash allow people to develop their own games with extremely limited resources and still get them to where thousands can play them, be it for free or for tuppence.
It really warms my black heart.
Can we please get to the point of this post already?
Here it is.
I've never coded anything graphical before, and I feel this little project was a great way to start looking into OpenGL. It took me about two weeks worth of long nights to put it together. My homage to games like Scorched Earth and Worms, the wonderful genre of artillery games.
I give you: Dudes!
You start off by drawing an outline:
After which the game generates a level from it, and you can place a bunch of Dudes in it...
...and then proceed to try and destroy every last mother-loving pixel, whether it belongs to other Dudes or the terrain itself.
A nice little physics simulation for explosions, dirt and blood particles.
And a bunch of weapons that make sure that there is no such thing as a safe place for your opponents.
Good times, I'm very happy with the outcome. :)
On to the next project, Robin!
Most of my time is actually spent at the lab, surrounded by a bunch of computers, studying things related to 3D-graphics, graphics programming and especially augmented reality. In fact, I'm often so absorbed into my work that I end up missing the last bus home, which passes the university at 11pm. A lazy bastard like me, there's no way I would do something like that unless I found my work very interesting indeed.
Video games.
I always wanted to make my own, but for some reason never got around to seriously attempting to put one together.
So, a couple of weeks ago I decided to give it a shot!
I've been an avid gamer since 1980s, and I firmly believe that modern game makers have forgotten, what makes a good game good. It is not downloadable extra content, or a fuck-ton of shaders to make virtual boobies look so real you want to lick your monitor, nor is it real-time ray tracing or character models with million+ polygons.
It's nothing more complex than the core idea of the game. It's the game mechanics. It's the way it's been realized. IT'S THE FUN. I have two of the current generation consoles at home and I enjoy playing on them a lot, and will probably continue playing the latest games all the way to my grave, but it is my opinion that most of the games today simply can't hold a candle to the classics of days gone by.
I can accept someone calling games like X-Com ancient. They are getting there, but are still heaps more enjoyable than 99% of the offerings today. Then I hear someone saying that they have never played games like Thief, "because it's too old" and all I can think of is "Holy shit I'm getting old." If I talk about old games, I usually mean the very early 1990s offerings, like the first Monkey Islands or Scorched Earth, or if we talk about console gaming, the late 1980s NES games, such as Megaman or Metal Gear. (Kids who think that Metal Gear Solid 1 on PS1 is the original game in the series, make me die inside a bit).
Now, before someone gets it into their head to slap me in the face with their big fat nerd penis and show off their Commodore 64 or Intellivision -- I did play on them, a lot. But for me, true gaming began with post 1985-games pouring out from Japan, when the technology really started playing leap-frog with the developers.
Okay, okay. The reality is that we are now living in the new golden era of gaming, because Internet and things like Flash allow people to develop their own games with extremely limited resources and still get them to where thousands can play them, be it for free or for tuppence.
It really warms my black heart.
Can we please get to the point of this post already?
Here it is.
I've never coded anything graphical before, and I feel this little project was a great way to start looking into OpenGL. It took me about two weeks worth of long nights to put it together. My homage to games like Scorched Earth and Worms, the wonderful genre of artillery games.
I give you: Dudes!
You start off by drawing an outline:
After which the game generates a level from it, and you can place a bunch of Dudes in it...
...and then proceed to try and destroy every last mother-loving pixel, whether it belongs to other Dudes or the terrain itself.
A nice little physics simulation for explosions, dirt and blood particles.
And a bunch of weapons that make sure that there is no such thing as a safe place for your opponents.
Good times, I'm very happy with the outcome. :)On to the next project, Robin!
Monday, March 16, 2009
9000 words in pictures! And some more in writing!
Went to New Brighton beach on Sunday. Lovely, lovely place. See for yourself. :)
The sunlight here is very bright. It was a warm day, but not too warm for my dear jacket.
Playing with... food? Well, the sea gulls like them.
Yea, right.
A gull, a surfer dude and hills.
The only purpose of this 300-meter pier, as far as I can tell, is to provide a better view of the ocean. As if you might miss it otherwise. It's construction was funded by private people and some companies. They all have name plaques planted on the top along the pier's entire length. Once the people die, the original plaques are replaced with "In loving memory of XXX" ones.
Back from the beach, in the park near my apartment.
Say what you will, I feel there is something magical about this picture. :)
Downtown Christchurch, seen from the top of the university library. My apartment is towards the left edge, 6km away, near the tall buildings.
The sunlight here is very bright. It was a warm day, but not too warm for my dear jacket.
Playing with... food? Well, the sea gulls like them.
Yea, right.
A gull, a surfer dude and hills.
The only purpose of this 300-meter pier, as far as I can tell, is to provide a better view of the ocean. As if you might miss it otherwise. It's construction was funded by private people and some companies. They all have name plaques planted on the top along the pier's entire length. Once the people die, the original plaques are replaced with "In loving memory of XXX" ones.
Back from the beach, in the park near my apartment.
Say what you will, I feel there is something magical about this picture. :)
Downtown Christchurch, seen from the top of the university library. My apartment is towards the left edge, 6km away, near the tall buildings.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Echoes of Steve Fossett
After my trip to Queenstown I've more or less kept my word to myself and lived peacefully (and perfectly happily) ever after.
Unloaded some photos off my phone, here are some of them.
A snapshot from the Iron Maiden concert.
At the Iron Maiden concert, the counter to buy soft drinks and snacks:
And right next to it, the counter for beer:
I found a great bar a few blocks from my apartment. Right next to the river with a nice view. Specializes in Belgian beers, of which they have an impressively large selection. Love the place. :)
This might be the only time in my life that I have actually voluntarily considered going to a service.
A nice Saturday afternoon. 25 degrees, sunshine, a large maple tree to sit under, a somewhat quiet cafe/restaurant. Later a family with 2 screaming kids came along and ruined it all. The mother was accidentally served some milk that had apparently gone bad, which had her toss her baby violently to her hubby's lap and leap to vomit even more violently against the trunk of my maple tree. The waiter was full of apologies, but I wanted to give him an extra 10-dollar tip for a job well done. ^^Alas, he disappeared after the incident.
Ah, I hear you asking yourself, "What is this about Steve Fossett, then?" Well, you know of the guy, right? Millionaire adventurer, who disappeared in US with his plane. They found the wreckage and fragments of his body months afterwards.
Today I was supposed to listen to a seminar by a Cambridge professor. I went to the lecture hall and sat there with maybe 50 other people, when at the time of the lecture a somewhat flushed guy appeared in front of the room, explaining that the professor in question has disappeared and the seminar was canceled until further notice. Apparently the man is an avid pilot and had flown his private single-engine plane to NZ all the way from UK, and two weeks before had departed to explore some islands far south from the mainland.
No one had heard of him since.
I hope the guy is okay. Would be a huge shame to lose such amount of expertise and experience in an accident, and I want to listen to that seminar, damn it!
Unloaded some photos off my phone, here are some of them.
A snapshot from the Iron Maiden concert.
At the Iron Maiden concert, the counter to buy soft drinks and snacks:
And right next to it, the counter for beer:
I found a great bar a few blocks from my apartment. Right next to the river with a nice view. Specializes in Belgian beers, of which they have an impressively large selection. Love the place. :)
This might be the only time in my life that I have actually voluntarily considered going to a service.
A nice Saturday afternoon. 25 degrees, sunshine, a large maple tree to sit under, a somewhat quiet cafe/restaurant. Later a family with 2 screaming kids came along and ruined it all. The mother was accidentally served some milk that had apparently gone bad, which had her toss her baby violently to her hubby's lap and leap to vomit even more violently against the trunk of my maple tree. The waiter was full of apologies, but I wanted to give him an extra 10-dollar tip for a job well done. ^^Alas, he disappeared after the incident.
Ah, I hear you asking yourself, "What is this about Steve Fossett, then?" Well, you know of the guy, right? Millionaire adventurer, who disappeared in US with his plane. They found the wreckage and fragments of his body months afterwards.
Today I was supposed to listen to a seminar by a Cambridge professor. I went to the lecture hall and sat there with maybe 50 other people, when at the time of the lecture a somewhat flushed guy appeared in front of the room, explaining that the professor in question has disappeared and the seminar was canceled until further notice. Apparently the man is an avid pilot and had flown his private single-engine plane to NZ all the way from UK, and two weeks before had departed to explore some islands far south from the mainland.
No one had heard of him since.
I hope the guy is okay. Would be a huge shame to lose such amount of expertise and experience in an accident, and I want to listen to that seminar, damn it!
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Most radical, this one is
So sorry for the late update, was on a road trip until 2 hours ago.
The Iron Maiden concert last Sunday was really awesome, as you can probably expect from a group that has had 30 years to get their act together. Bruce did escape to backstage between songs "to change into a new outfit" -- extra oxygen and/or other stimulants may or may not have been involved. Fantastic gig, nonetheless, I can only hope that I'm half as active at their age myself.
Fine, got that off my shoulders.
And now we can proceed to the burst of righteous anger that some people have come to expect from me for some reason.
So, I was on a road trip to Queenstown for a few nights. The drive from Christchurch to Otago region takes about 6 hours and is filled with increasingly majestic mountains and the ever-humble and ever-numerous sheep. A drive from, say, Oulu to Helsinki is a long and dreadfully boring one, but on this little trip you won't really notice the time passing in nearly the same way, as you *will* keep your face pasted at the window beside you, sucking in the sights, for most of the time.
Around 11pm on Friday, about an hour and a half from Queenstown, we stopped the car to the side of the road for a moment and I saw the most incredible thing: The Milky Way. Whenever I visit my parents during the winter, I take it into me to always go outside during the night time to see the stars, as the light pollution in the city reduces my star gazing to a glance at a moon -- whenever it happens to be full. But I am willing to bet my eternal beauty on the hunch that even the street lights down in Brussels pitch in on obscuring my view up in Finland.
Not in New Zealand, not down in the southern parts of the South Island, not on that stretch of mountain road. No. There weren't many buildings around us for tens of kilometers to any direction, to the west lied mountains and thousands of kilometers of sea before Australia; to the east lied mountains and tens of thousands of kilometers of sea before the American continents. That, and we were at least 1km up in the mountains, with less air to get in the way.
It was magnificent. Truly magnificent. I know, just how large our galaxy is, but this was the first time that I could actually count stars by the thousands, millions, it felt like!
I wanted to stay there all night.
I wish I can gaze upon it again as soon as possible.
Right.
It took us 1.5 hours to reach Queenstown from that magical moment, and during that time we almost ran over a rabbit, a cat and two possums. (the rural roads in this country are literally paved by roadkill, sometimes you can't go 10 meters without coming up on a fresh(ish) street pizza. These people like to drive fast.)
Queenstown is a small, charming little town tucked away in between a swarm of ~2km peaks and a lake. Very pretty.
Think of the girl-next-door, the pretty one.
A nice lass, smart, good-natured, well-behaved. Does well in school, everyone expects worlds of her, when they notice her at all.
A lot of suppressed anger and frustration in her, from the society-inflicted illusion that she is missing out on... something. The stuff of idiotic teenage years that she on one weak moment decides to vent and ends up in bad company (yea).
A month later she has to get into porno industry to support her drug habit.
As she naturally has huge ... tracks of land ... she doesn't need to bother with too many upgrades to please her chosen audience, and as her reputation grows, so do the crowds, the piles of money, her greed and her arrogance.
Queenstown is the bleached anus of that girl, torn flaccid by the continuos triple penetrations.
It's a town of little more than 10.000 people, annually visited by more than 1.2 million tourists! It's a beautiful little town-turned-adventure-themed-amusement-park, and no matter how much money there is involved, it's bloody ridiculous! There's almost no one actually living in the core of the town, they've all escaped the suddenly-orbital real estate prices and rent levels. And the hordes and hordes of adrenalin-seeking party animals, whom no legion of Uruk-Hai could ever hope to match in disturbance they cause. The center of the town is just a collection of hostels, bars, clubs and expensive shops (the general price level is much higher than elsewhere in the country, and most of the tourist activities start their pricing from around 80 euros a shot and scale quite high indeed towards the more hardcore end of the spectrum), and the locals live higher up in the mountains, almost like trying to escape from a stampeding mass of demon-sheep, or way out in neighboring villages.
Oh well, it's their mess, not mine. Here's some more pics from the road:
Lake somethingsomething, half-way between Christchurch and Queenstown. If the air was a bit clearer, you might catch a climpse of the tallest mountain in NZ, Mount Cook(3754m) behind the lake. (very strange color, the water, by the way)
Off-roading in the surroundings of Queenstown.
Statue of the founder of Queenstown. The ever-present sheep are starting to creep me out.
10am on Saturday morning. As everyone is still sleeping off their hangovers, it's a perfect time for a quiet walk about the town.
Oh yea, almost forgot. Guess what I did? ;)
A bungy jump from 134 meters, from a pod suspended between two mountains, with a river raging through the canyon in between, way, way down. I've done it now!
And I'm never, ever doing it again! O_O
The Iron Maiden concert last Sunday was really awesome, as you can probably expect from a group that has had 30 years to get their act together. Bruce did escape to backstage between songs "to change into a new outfit" -- extra oxygen and/or other stimulants may or may not have been involved. Fantastic gig, nonetheless, I can only hope that I'm half as active at their age myself.
Fine, got that off my shoulders.
And now we can proceed to the burst of righteous anger that some people have come to expect from me for some reason.
So, I was on a road trip to Queenstown for a few nights. The drive from Christchurch to Otago region takes about 6 hours and is filled with increasingly majestic mountains and the ever-humble and ever-numerous sheep. A drive from, say, Oulu to Helsinki is a long and dreadfully boring one, but on this little trip you won't really notice the time passing in nearly the same way, as you *will* keep your face pasted at the window beside you, sucking in the sights, for most of the time.
Around 11pm on Friday, about an hour and a half from Queenstown, we stopped the car to the side of the road for a moment and I saw the most incredible thing: The Milky Way. Whenever I visit my parents during the winter, I take it into me to always go outside during the night time to see the stars, as the light pollution in the city reduces my star gazing to a glance at a moon -- whenever it happens to be full. But I am willing to bet my eternal beauty on the hunch that even the street lights down in Brussels pitch in on obscuring my view up in Finland.
Not in New Zealand, not down in the southern parts of the South Island, not on that stretch of mountain road. No. There weren't many buildings around us for tens of kilometers to any direction, to the west lied mountains and thousands of kilometers of sea before Australia; to the east lied mountains and tens of thousands of kilometers of sea before the American continents. That, and we were at least 1km up in the mountains, with less air to get in the way.
It was magnificent. Truly magnificent. I know, just how large our galaxy is, but this was the first time that I could actually count stars by the thousands, millions, it felt like!
I wanted to stay there all night.
I wish I can gaze upon it again as soon as possible.
Right.
It took us 1.5 hours to reach Queenstown from that magical moment, and during that time we almost ran over a rabbit, a cat and two possums. (the rural roads in this country are literally paved by roadkill, sometimes you can't go 10 meters without coming up on a fresh(ish) street pizza. These people like to drive fast.)
Queenstown is a small, charming little town tucked away in between a swarm of ~2km peaks and a lake. Very pretty.
Think of the girl-next-door, the pretty one.
A nice lass, smart, good-natured, well-behaved. Does well in school, everyone expects worlds of her, when they notice her at all.
A lot of suppressed anger and frustration in her, from the society-inflicted illusion that she is missing out on... something. The stuff of idiotic teenage years that she on one weak moment decides to vent and ends up in bad company (yea).
A month later she has to get into porno industry to support her drug habit.
As she naturally has huge ... tracks of land ... she doesn't need to bother with too many upgrades to please her chosen audience, and as her reputation grows, so do the crowds, the piles of money, her greed and her arrogance.
Queenstown is the bleached anus of that girl, torn flaccid by the continuos triple penetrations.
It's a town of little more than 10.000 people, annually visited by more than 1.2 million tourists! It's a beautiful little town-turned-adventure-themed-amusement-park, and no matter how much money there is involved, it's bloody ridiculous! There's almost no one actually living in the core of the town, they've all escaped the suddenly-orbital real estate prices and rent levels. And the hordes and hordes of adrenalin-seeking party animals, whom no legion of Uruk-Hai could ever hope to match in disturbance they cause. The center of the town is just a collection of hostels, bars, clubs and expensive shops (the general price level is much higher than elsewhere in the country, and most of the tourist activities start their pricing from around 80 euros a shot and scale quite high indeed towards the more hardcore end of the spectrum), and the locals live higher up in the mountains, almost like trying to escape from a stampeding mass of demon-sheep, or way out in neighboring villages.
Oh well, it's their mess, not mine. Here's some more pics from the road:
Lake somethingsomething, half-way between Christchurch and Queenstown. If the air was a bit clearer, you might catch a climpse of the tallest mountain in NZ, Mount Cook(3754m) behind the lake. (very strange color, the water, by the way)
Off-roading in the surroundings of Queenstown.
Statue of the founder of Queenstown. The ever-present sheep are starting to creep me out.
10am on Saturday morning. As everyone is still sleeping off their hangovers, it's a perfect time for a quiet walk about the town.
Oh yea, almost forgot. Guess what I did? ;)
A bungy jump from 134 meters, from a pod suspended between two mountains, with a river raging through the canyon in between, way, way down. I've done it now!
And I'm never, ever doing it again! O_O
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
