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Archive for July, 2005
Chip
Sunday, July 31st, 2005Who Would Win in a Fight?
Saturday, July 30th, 2005
VS. 
Who would win in a fight, The Incredibles or the Fantastic Four? Let’s make a list of powers.
Does the team have a member who can turn invisible?
The Incredibles: Violet
The Fantastic Four: Invisible Woman
Does the team have a member who can set his body on fire?
The Incredibles: Jack Jack
The Fantastic Four: Human Torch
Does the team have a member who can stretch out their limbs?
The Incredibles: Mrs. Incredible
The Fantastic Four: Mr. Fantastic
Does the team have a member who has super strength?
The Incredibles: Mr. Incredible
The Fantastic Four: The Thing
Does the team have a member who has super speed?
The Incredibles: Dash
The Fantastic Four: NO
Looks like The Incredibles would win in a fight. And although I haven’t seen the Fantastic Four movie — and I do not plan to — I think it’s safe to say The Incredibles win in that arena as well. As an aside, did I just accidentally prove that The Incredibles ripped off the Fantastic Four? I think I did!
Down in Front
Thursday, July 28th, 2005Last night I rediscovered a fact about life which shaped my childhood. Video games are way more fun when you sit up right in front of the TV. It seems like when we were kids, we all somehow knew this. I remember everyone’s parents (my own included) constantly telling us to sit further back from the TV, and yet when they left the room, we’d sneak right back up towards it. This couldn’t have been just to spite them, because every single kid sat too close to the TV. No, the only explanation is that we knew, instinctively, that closer was better.
At any rate, I rediscovered this fact last night playing Dr. Mario with Lydia, and she sat up in front of the TV because she was having trouble seeing the screen. It was at this point that she started savagely beating me at Dr. Mario, so I had to escalate the arms race and go sit up close, too. In the end, she was just better than me, but I did realize that it was more fun that way. Thanks Lydia!
Batman Begins: A D&D perspective
Saturday, July 23rd, 2005So, I saw Batman Begins with Mikix tonight. Verdict? It was pretty damn good. But that’s not the point of this post. All throughout the movie I found myself analyzing the alignments of some of the main characters. When I say alignment, I refer to D&D alignment, a two word description of a person’s morals. I will warn you that there are movie SPOILERS ahead and so now you know. Honestly, if you haven’t seen the movie, this post is probably going to be meaningless to you anyway. Also if you don’t play D&D this is probably going to be pretty stupid. Yay ridiculously niche audience!
I was faced with a tricky decision when analyzing some of the characters’ alignments. The concept of Lawful versus Chaotic gets kind of blurry when the law is corrupt. Since “justice” is a major theme in the movie, and the movie’s definition of justice seems to refer to ideology and not written law, I went with that definition for Lawful.
Bruce Wayne / Batman: This was the hardest character to figure out. He’s always at odds with the police, has a secret personality, and fights for his own beliefs no matter what the price. This leans toward Chaotic. However, he is primarily motivated by revenge against criminals and a desire for justice, which are fairly Lawful. Since I’m using the ideological definition of Lawful, I decided that’s where he fits. On the Good/Evil scale, he is clearly Neutral. He’s a decent guy, and he genuinely wants to clean up Gotham, but he’s not above busting a few heads while doing so. Verdict? Lawful Neutral
Rachel, the District Attorney: Clearly Lawful Good. She has strong ideals and will not be threatened or bribed. She and Batman want the same thing, justice, but work for them in different ways.
Carmine Falcone, the mob boss: Clearly Chaotic Evil. He loves power and will do anything to keep it, including drug trafficking, extortion, and bribing the local government. He also has no qualms with killing those that stand in his way.
Ra’s Al Ghul, leader of the League of Shadows: He has the same ultimate goal as Bruce and Rachel, to rid the world of criminals. His strong devotion to justice made him see eye to eye with Bruce for a while, as both are devoutly Lawful. However, planning to wipe out an entire city is rather Evil. Ra’s Al Ghul and his minions are all Lawful Evil.
Jonathan Crane / The Scarecrow: Preying on the fears of your opponents is a rather Evil act. Crane is just as corrupt as anyone in Gotham, and works directly with the League of Shadows in their plan to destroy the city. However, he doesn’t give a damn one way or the other about the criminal underworld or about the League’s ideals. The Scarecrow just loves being Evil, plain and simple, and he deserves the Neutral Evil award.
Several remaining characters in the movie are Neutral Good, including Bruce’s butler Alfred, Lucius played by Morgan Freeman, and Bruce’s cop friend whose name I think is Jim. They are generally good guys who want to help, but don’t mind winding up on the wrong side of the law to do so.
This concludes my ultra-geeky analysis of Batman Begins.
Jedi RPS
Monday, July 18th, 2005I was driving back from dropping Mikix off at his workplace and I got to thinking.
1.) Jedi can see a few seconds into the future. This is documented in Episode I as an explanation for their apparent incredible reflexes.
2.) RPS is awesome. In case you’re out of the RPS-loop, RPS stands for Rock-Paper-Scissors. It might be worth visiting worldrps.com for more information.
In case you don’t see where I’m going with this, I posit that a game of RPS played between two Jedi would be totally awesome. Jedi #1 is going to throw paper, so Jedi #2 sees this coming and smartly decides to throw scissors, but now Jedi #1 sees that coming and decides to throw rock, etc, until finally time gets to be too short to start changing your mind anymore and the throws would finally come down, revealing the wiser Jedi as the winner. Oh man, it would be so intense.
A deeper analysis follows.
Mind Tricks: The Jedi are seen frequently waving their hands around and convincing other people to believe whatever the Jedi want them to believe. This is shown not to work on people with “strong minds”, but I don’t think a situation where a Jedi tries to mind trick another Jedi has ever come up. Assuming it could work, possibly if the opponent Jedi were caught off-guard, then a mind trick could be used to convince the opponent to throw paper, allowing you to counter with scissors in a classic move called Paper Clipping.
Cloaking: In Episodes I through III, Senator Palpatine managed to frequently deal with the Jedi council and they never suspected he was a Sith. Clearly, the Sith have some sort of cloaking ability that lets them mask their intentions from other Jedi. This would be a powerful tool in RPS, allowing you to prevent your opponent from seeing your next move, or possibly letting him think he has predicted your throw while secretly plotting a different one.
The light side and the dark side of the Force grant access to different strategies, making the prospect of Jedi RPS even cooler. Deception and prediction are key tools in the game, and Jedi and Sith have plenty of both. I look forward to seeing an RPS match in Episode VII.
Time Attack
Sunday, July 17th, 2005I am a fan of time attack movies. For those not familiar with time attacks, they are videos of speed runs through various video games. An important thing to note is that an actual human is not playing these games. They are carefully executed frame-by-frame to (hopefully) complete the game as fast as is technically possible. If this interests you, check out this site.
You can grab AVIs of the time attacks, but the way time attacks are distributed in the purest form is with an emulator movie file. This file contains all the information about which buttons were pressed at which moments for the entire run through the game. Then, if you wanted to watch it you could plug it in to an emulator with the game ROM and watch it played via those button presses.
Now, I am building up to talking about a very specific time attack video I watched last night. Somebody managed to create an emulator movie file (series of button presses) that works for two different games, Mega Man X and Mega Man X2. In case that didn’t sink in, that means that the exact same controller input will complete two different games from start to finish. In fact, when you watch the AVI of it, you see both games played through side-by-side. You see both Mega Men jump and shoot at the same time, but in two completely different situations. How the author (DeHackEd) did this I may never understand.
I suggest you download and watch the greatest time attack ever conceived (as of July 17, 2005).
Jigsaw Puzzle
Sunday, July 17th, 2005So, Mikix and I decided we wanted to play a game of Go and do a jigsaw puzzle today (simultaneously). The idea behind this is that Go is a good game, but it is slow. When it is not your turn, it’s good to have something else to do. Also we really like jigsaw puzzles.
We headed to Target to buy a puzzle. Now, Mikix and I are both strangely hardcore about our jigsaw puzzles despite the fact that I don’t think either of us has touched one for quite some time. Anyway, we decided that we wanted to do the puzzle without knowing what the picture looked like, for added challenge. Unfortunately, we had to buy the damn thing and you can’t very well pick out a puzzle from the shelf without looking at the cover.
This is when we got creative.
We picked out a bunch of acceptable puzzles with the same box size and shuffled them around on the shelf with our eyes closed. Then Mikix picked one out, eyes still closed, and held it behind his back. In this way we made it all the way to the cashier without seeing the box. It was rather awkward trying to purchase an item without ever looking at it, especially when the cashier for whatever reason decided to make small talk about the picture on the puzzle box. She mentioned something about the box saying “Big Ben” but there appeared to be no Big Ben in sight in the picture and wasn’t that weird! “I wouldn’t know,” replied Mikix. I felt awkward so I explained to her that we were trying not to look at the box, which I think just made everything more awkward.
We still needed a way to open the box when we got back to our parking lot, and unfortunately the thing was rather well-sealed and the picture of the puzzle was on every side of the box except the bottom. In yet another wacky solution, I blindfolded myself with my shirt and proceeded to knife the box until it came open. I handed the top of the box (with all the pictures on it) to Mikix who was in his position: outside of the car, facing away from me, hands behind his back. He delivered the box cover safely to the dumpster and then we were finally in the clear.
As of now, about 12 hours after we bought the puzzle, it’s about 10% finished and I still have no idea what the picture is supposed to be except that it involves trees and some houses or something. I have a slightly out-of-date picture here.
