The Dark Prince

Unfortunately for anyone reading this though, it may not make a lot of sense. See, I’ve just started writing for this site. A good site, and I’m more than a little dwarfed by the guy who runs it all. To put it bluntly, he’s a brilliant writer with his finger on the pulse and about 48 more hours in his day than everyone else seems to get. So, in other words, he’s far better than me.

Now I know this comes as a shock, my hallucinated readerbase. How can anyone possibly be better than me? I know, it’s something that defies the very nature of the physical world. But it’s also true. Presumably he exists in some sort of magical parallel dimension where women don’t insist on putting the toilet lid down and don’t always have headaches at extremely specific times. They may or may not also enjoy wearing school girl outfits but I cannot say at this point.

School…girl…err.. What was I saying? oh yeah. So, that’s the guy who I’m essentially working for, and the problem is, that he’s too fucking fast. He writes about 20 articles in a week, at least, and they’re all usually of a very high standard. Plus the forum related to this site usually contains a large number of links about material that could be used in an actual piece. So this brings me to my first problem, actually finding something to write about.

Because you see, the wonderful thing about the internet, is that everyone likes finding things wrong with everyone else. The moment you write something that has already been said, some wonderful specimen of humanity points out that it was in fact done before on sub obscure site that no-one else reads, not even the person who writes said site. It’s impossible to find something that doesn’t already exist somewhere else, because people are fucking inconsiderate.

Despite all this, due to my amazingly cool amazingness, I did actually find things that weren’t covered on this site or others and wrote about them. They were vaguely related. WHAM FUCKING BAM, the internet provides it’s finest thinker and instantly my only abilities are writing on a field which practically covers an entire scene anyway, according to Confucious reborn. It may also have been because I criticised an old movie, and presumably said intellectual liked this old movie. To top this off, another figment of the internets imagination who had otherwised seemed nice suggested I should do more research when I practically screamed out that I didn’t want to see some festering old try hard movie about things that I don’t care about. That was part of the joke. Maybe I should have written it in bold and capitals, but I assumed that was a bit unsubtle.

It’s these sort of things that make you feel like throwing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures at random people. And if you’ve never been hit by one of these plastic menaces, you won’t realise how damn sharp and pointy they are. And that is as good a sentence as any to end this on.

I’m so terribly sorry for not updating. Really I am. I’m sure there is at least someone out there who is mortally wounded by me not writing a new totally pointless post about something that has no point.

Right then. So what’s been happenng then? Well, I’ve gotten a sort of job thingy writing for somewhere else, so the scope writing here is going to be limited somewhat. This is probably a good thing because well, it might give this place a bit of an actual context rather than a random collection of passable and not-so-passable writing. I’d say most of it will now be about programming and such.

Aside from that I’m actually getting some programming done, some of which I may be able to actually talk about. I’m sure that will thrill everyone.

Coming soon! More logo adventure!

It’s nice when people can make light fun of stupid things in this world. There’s nothing quite like having a good chuckle at goths claiming that they are somehow superior and interesting and intelligunt and such, (yes that spelling mistake was intentional, it was a joke. Bugger off already). More than ever due to the internet and such, very specific groups bringing out extremely strong stereotypes make themselves extremely easy targets, lets examine these closer shall we children?

1. Goths - The fashion style can look tremendous on the right kind of person, but like most fashions, 90% of the people who adopt it look shit. Oh, and they’re usually stupid and pathetic, and for some reason have a massive ego about how wonderful they all are.
2. Teenage Girls/weblog types - Animated GIFs? Hideous clashing colour schemes? Unreadable text due to said colour schemes? Pictures of famous people or anime or Final Fantasy Characters? All you need now is thousands of words about precisely nothing that is in no way enjoyable to read due to the lack of spelling, punctuation, grammar or content and you’ve got yourself an award winning shitbox.
3. Feminists - Not the real deal, I have no problem with those who fight for sensible things like equal pay and such, but the screaming females who want more women in gaming (or female friendly games) and such I have trouble understanding. Most females I’ve met don’t like gaming. They think it’s pointless and they don’t care. Why force it on them?
4. Protesters - Not those who have a genuine reason and carefully research a cause but those who blindly follow on the parade of protesting about something. VSU (Voluntary Student Unionism) is a really fantastic one. I guess they’re worried they won’t get thousands of dollars to staple poorly written propoganda all over everything.
5. Believers - Particularly in the religious context, these type can just be really stupid. There are plenty of others who read that Make Money Quick malarky and believe that the right “formula” can make you a millionaire. Either way, they’re all the same sort of gullible idiots and they deserve what they get.

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It goes on and on. Simply put, they are generalisations and cruel ones, but there are so many people who fit this generalisation down to the last dotted ‘i’, people you’ve almost certainly met in some context that you can really understand the observations made. I’d like to point one out that will probably shock you. The screaming queen.

Got your breath back yet? I must be homophobic just saying it mustn’t I? I must be. But I’m not. I have no problem with homosexuality, I have that many people close to me who are that it just isn’t a concern. What does bother me is the type that shove it in my face. A while ago, my best friend, who I spent far more time with than anyone else before or since turned out to be gay. He had some unsureness at first, but he dealt with it. I was impressed, but then it started. Before, he had always argued vehemently that gays shouldn’t be allowed to adopt kids, now, unsurprisingly he was for it. Everything had to have a gay subtext. I was practically forced to read all sorts of books expressly written for gays, on and on and on. I’ve seen this behaviour everywhere, but recently a fantastic spoof site called idiot toys (look in the links if you must) suddenly attracted the short attention span of this tool.

For months Idiot Toys (geddit? look at the initials and stop making me explain good jokes..) has generally made a lot of very good observations about the marketing of electronic gizmos, one of the common ones being that marketing is more and more pushing towards the female/gay market. It’s not an insult on the writers part to lump these two groups together, it’s very clear that this is how the manufacturers are lumping them together. Anyway, this is what started Mr Tom Gay Coates on his bike. Note how first he laughs and appreciates the humour and then goes on to say that it’s all rude and prejudiced. Note how the author actually explains that this is not the case and is ignored. Note the endless ranting.

Thing is, it’s not nasty humour. It’s clearly meant in a light hearted atmosphere, it’s not in any way proclaiming that all gays should be shot or such. But Mr. Coates knows, and by god is he going to tell us about it.

If I was nasty, I’d say that Tom Coates is very likely just recently out or extremely immature, not yet at the stage where he’s dealt with it and isn’t so sensitive. But instead I’ll just say he’s a dumb fuck and should go and seek commiserations on one of his rambling and shitty blogs.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to go and see a movie that I had neither heard about (because I don’t spend my entire time waiting for the next movie fix), nor particularly cared about once I knew what it was. I went, because it sounded like a fun idea and the rest of the night was good anyway. The movie was a pathetic and boring Sci-Fi Film called “Serenity”.

For those of you that haven’t seen the film and want to see the film at some point in the future, please stop reading now, because what I’m about to say will spoil the non-existant pleasure to be gained from watching this crud. It’s shit. There are some good lines in there and some amusing moments but the premise of the film, the plot, the characters etc are typical Joss Whedon generic bullshit and I’m fucking sick of it.

Every forum I frequent says something about how this film is so much better than Star Wars. Well done universe on producing the dumbest generation of idiots yet. It’s a shit film that slightly better than an extremely shitty film, lets praise it all because watered down lameness is the new cool. Perhaps the fans of this pap like to eat paper mache testicles for breakfast every day, because after all, they taste Sooo much better than smoked dog shit? What a fucking stupid comparison to base the claim of this thing being good on.

Next up you see blatant fanboyism in halfbaked poorly attempted jobs like this:

From sensible people who know better. WHY?? Name me one thing that Joss Whedon has done that hasn’t been generic, soft and pale imitations of much better things. I’ll get onto that in a second, let’s first go over the ridiculous statement that this movie is somehow cool and good.

First off, The brilliant Whedon has to include at least one dream sequence. He always includes a dream sequence, he just can’t help himself - he has a strict formula to follow and a very specific order to follow it in. Needless to say it doesn’t work. Moving on, there are these creatures who are stated, with certainty to be extremely aggressive and nasty things. Pure aggression in fact. Yet these creatures who spend every waking second on screen growling and making scary noises have time to carefully paint their ships, burn the flesh of skeletons and neatly tie them around their ships and of course, sit in a massive fleet in orbit around a planet for, ohh…no reason at all. Let’s not get into the trivial detail of an animalistically aggressive thing being able to smoothly pilot a ship, or the fact that they’d attack each other due to their own aggression. This is the genius of Whedon, he’s obviously really carefully thought this out.

Okay, so that’s only one plot hole right? Surely that’s just a minor oversight, it can’t be that bad. Ohhh..but it is. You see, one of the characters has a deep dark secret. That secret turns out to be that the big bad empire is in fact big and bad. Who would have guessed it? It was made out to be some amazing thing and in the end it was quite boring, but get this. The team of bumbling idiots we are forced to follow finds a video of a woman explaining that the big bad empire is bad and big. This video could have been made anywhere, and has nothing that places it in context of any planet or indeed actually proves any of the womans claim. Ignoring all this, we are led to believe that by showing this video to the entire planetary system, everyone will now understand that the big bad empire is big and perhaps even bad.

Let’s ignore the fact that different planets will have different nights, some people won’t happen to be actually listening or watching some media (a concept completely alien to americans of course) and of course the huge technical impossibility of actually broadcasting such a video on all forms of media to an entire solar system, these can all be poorly explained away by the sort of warped logic that claims this is a great film. Let’s instead look at a very very disturbing idea that is marketed as completely possible that broadcasting this video is somehow going to not only convince everyone in this system that the big bad empire is in fact quite large and not very nice, (again, Whedon-arse-licking-logic can rule out the idea that people might have been savvy to this idea before seeing a video of someone talking with no context to what they are talking about or where they are talking from), including a zealot of the strongest order. If only the Americans had realised this and broadcasted propoganda to the people of the middle east. Or vice versa, depending on your current dietary habits.

It’s shit. Pure shit. And as well as these hideous plot flaws and continual standardised form, Whedon manages to make a fight scene that should have been vaguely impressive boring, as well as making a straight forward battle scene impossible to follow. Need any more evidence that Joss Whedon is a complete arsepastry? Go and look at this hideous mess of a script for Alien Resurrection. Certainly not the finest work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but by no means a particularly bad film. In fact, in later interviews he describes how he couldn’t create the film in his own vision, but was forced to make severe compromises. Read that script. The work of the Master Script Writer Joss Fucking Whedon. Personally, I think it’s amazing Jeunet even managed to get a good movie out of it at all, it’s a pile of cliched shit with all the usual Whedon trimmings.

So, if you watch this stupid Serenity film thingy (or any other muck involving this child protege), be sure to look for the following generic elements of the most boring scriptwriter/director around:

• Dream Sequences - It doesn’t work. It never worked. Please stop.
• Angsty ‘Cello Solo - Because it just shows how mature and clever you are for watching this and how highbrow your musical tastes should be
• Generic cast of characters each with very obvious and very exploitable character flaws - All of these characters have to look cool in some failed way as well.
• Female “super fighter” - again with deep personal problems, because only the best fighters have such anguish
• Attempts at horror that seem pale or watered down - In particular making someone being eaten boring and somehow presentable at a nice christian dinner
• Extremely unconvincing fight scenes - How can you make an armlock seem weak and tacky? Who can honestly believe that trained fighters move so goddamn slowly? Why do the kicks look like they’re being performed by a five year old?
• Theme plagiarised directly from some other source - The entire first season of Buffy, that was complete originality there.
• Sledgehammer Symbolism - Naming the ship and the movie Serenity just in case you didn’t get the clever reference. Jesus fucking christ.
• Admittedly half decent humour - To hide the complete lack of plot coherency or interesting storyline.

The most tragic thing of all is that the amount of money wasted on all this bullshit would be enough to fix an entire third world country, rather sobering that.

Yes, this is old. It’s a fair few months old, but every now and then you see something that just makes you feel ill. Really really ill. I can hear you anticipating the reason for this nausea, and here is the start of it:

MAME over

Now, I have never been a big fan of Stuart Campbell, he always sounds like he’s got a big bloody chip on his shoulder. No matter what I think of him though, I’ve yet to see an argument he’s made that doesn’t have extremely good backing or merit. Even when he’s criticised something that I truly love, I cannot do anything but agree with his points, because he obviously thinks pretty carefully about them. In either case, I agree with him wholly on this article, although I wasn’t sure how true it was. So I did some hunting.

I found things that really really shocked me. To start with, on the softer front, here is a poorly constructed and utterly shit rebuttal from one of the self-righteous developers. Here’s the real give-away:

…our target audience is not primarily gamers.

Who then? What is the fucking purpose of documenting games if not for playing them? Not wanting to get into an “Are Games Art” debate, but you don’t see art collectors closing their collection into safe sealed up completely dark boxes because their target audience is not primarily viewers. It gets worse though. Far far worse.

The famous justification of removal of high-score saving

Now, I can side with a small part of reasoning that high-score saving may make bughunting difficult, but removing an entire and wonderful feature for everyone because of it? There are far better ways of handling this, allow it to be disabled, even leave it disabled by default, but for christs sake, forcibly removing it? I think Stuart far more elegantly sums up the arguments against this, so read that first article again.

Okay, I thought, the developers are a bunch of fucks. The selfish self-centred types who turn up everywhere more and more. The free-style jazz players (an ugly sound that is utterly unenjoyable for the audience but the musicians enjoy playing), the podcasting losers who just want their opinion to be heard, the “I know more about Japan than you” bullshit artists that seem to frequent the internet everywhere, the list goes on. So, I tried to see what the rest of the scene was like and found this:

The most sickening read I’ve had in a long time

I can understand the development team being stuck up fucks, because, well, most coders in the world seem to be. But the fact that they have a bum-groping bunch of wankers happy to shove a nose up the ever more cavernesque rectum of said team is just scary. I could only read about half the wild justifications and attacks made by people using the word “gamer” as an insult, (rather like calling someone a “drinker” because they think wine should be enjoyed and so on..) before I gave up. Apart from the obvious fact that a large portion of their audience is going to try and actually play games on this shitbox of an emulator and they have all been ignored by a statement clearly meant to protect the project from litigation, it’s very obvious that many of the defensive types on there are completely useless as programmers and are just trying to gain kudos for agreeing with the development team.

Now, the MAMEDev team will never read this, none of the whacked out fucks on their forum will ever read this and there’s a very good chance that no-one else apart from me will ever read this. But, if so much as one other person apart from myself reads this and thinks “I’m never going to let that happen on a project” as I am now, then this has been worth writing.

Here’s to all the programs that worked so well until some fucker went and improved them:

• Winamp - Fast lightweight media player that is now bloated with a shitty video player and even shittier browser plugin
• Trillian - Straightforward chat client filled with bile and just plain ugly now
• Nero - The best burning software around until someone decided to hide all the useful options (or simply remove them, to make the whole thing “user friendly”), and of course add tonnes of useless shit.
• MAME - Which at the current rate will probably be usurped by a new package, perhaps Final Burn
• Many many more - I just can’t be fucked thinking of them

May their hard-learnt lessons be remembered. May no-one ever fuck things sideways like this again.

Well, my progress in the land of programming has gone so well recently that the secret goal I set out for myself just over a week ago was achieved and a fair bit more. So what next for me? Well, firstly I have to sound all self important on a page that nobody reads. Then I plan on making claims about being the best programmer in the world. Finally, I plan on making a retraction of all things written here with some poor attempt at wisdom such as, “I have grown as a person and learnt that perhaps my private life does not belong in a blog”, or perhaps “Writing a blog is like totally uncool now because everyone does it and like, it’s totally stupid and so ghey”.

Anyway, this entry wasn’t about mocking those that write pointless, badly structured and uninteresting posts about their stupid and pointless lives in internet lingo, it is about launching this very new and very exciting section of this very cool and exciting place. In a bit of an effort to get things a little less…plain…here I vow here and now to try and build up a decent professional logo for this and other endeavors. This will ideally include a 2 dimensional outline of the logo and a full 3D render, which unfortunately means learning how to use 3D Studio Max, which really isn’t that hard but I still put it off anyway.

So, hopefully this will be interesting reading, or at least force me to do something about the rather poor presentation of this site. Enjoy, (err…the newer entries on what I’m actually doing that is..)

Today, whilst retrieving food from the bowels of the city I was accosted by a fairly drunken lout asking me whether I barracked for West Coast or Sydney. I replied that I didn’t give a flying fuck about watching musclebound men in tight shorts running around after balls and acting like spoilt children when things don’t go their way (in slightly politer terms). Naturally of course this was taken as some sort of insult and was in general not fun. Thankfully, the grand final is over, wonderful news that because now I can finally stop being asked about it all. This entry is going to be the link that I send everyone to when they ask me if I watch AFL or try to engage me in a conversation that in some way involves AFL.

So, here it is here and now, my definitive statement about it all. I don’t care about AFL. I’m not interested in Football. Lots of people aren’t. Please go away and stop fucking asking me. If I have to make a website called idontgiveafuckaboutafl.com just to
prove that I don’t give a fuck about AFL and plenty of other people don’t either, then I will.

Somewhat of a gloat this post. Since being a bit annoyed at not being very organised I actually have managed to get somewhat organised. With the help of the rather pretty version control system called SubVersioN and an extremely well made client called TortoiseSVN I have done a fair bit on that 8-bit remake as I promised. I’ve read up on heaps and heaps of material related to the many facets of programming, which has been interesting but rather like the Red Queens Race. As well as this, I also got two reviews done for the lovely Old School Gaming site, which is really looking very nice now, so really things are going well. Someday I may even get around to making this site look less bland and having some useful content on it.

Hello again all you very very bored people who actually read this. Today I thought I’d just quickly point out one of the stupidest reports ever in the history of something or other. Here it is:

Have a good laugh at this

Among the most stupid comments, is this one: excluding murder, Scots were almost three times as likely to be assaulted as Americans.

That’s a bit like saying, “if we exclude all accidents involving cars, then there are no road accidents in Australia”, well done UN on proving yourself a valuable asset to the world. I know next time that I’d far rather be in America, because it’s much less violent, oh..except for the violence that ends in death I guess. Maybe that should be called something else then.

After accidentally purchasing the hideous special edition of Chronicles of Riddick, I saw the original, unmutilated version for far too high a price at Target yesterday. But, for whatever strange reason, I just haven’t seen it cheaper anywhere than about $34. Anyway, being the type to waste money on things impulsively, I bought it.

The good news is the movie is just as good as it was when I saw it in the cinema, I am now much happier, since the special edition really really spoiled the movie for me. The strange thing is that the menus are all identical to that of the special edition. It’s like they’ve just poorly cut in the extra scenes (and boy have they ever cut it in poorly…), probably not even changed the chapter menus and added another disk full of content that no-one would ever watch. Still, I’m happier now, because I can watch it the way it should be.

Again, I encourage people to have a look at this film, since it really has some spark in it. I don’t know why, but it reminds me an awful lot of Dune, except that it didn’t put me to sleep, (although it did have anaesthetic effects on other people who shall remain nameless).

Oh, and for some stupid reason Game Boy Advances still haven’t come down in price, so despite the fact that the PSP is out, (for a pretty hefty price, but worth it in my opinion), the DS costs a mere $50 more than the GBA SP (and has two screens and complete backwards compatibility), it’s still ridiculously overpriced at $150. Stupid world.