Bigass writeup on why DVD+R is great, and a nice writeup and reasoning on the best media to buy, regardless of format.

After a weekend hassling with a pair of DVD-R burners - both write Memorex media just fine, one writes TDK just fine, the other has hissyfits and general attitude problems with same - I think it's noteworthy just for the media recommendation.

But then, I have around 220 gigs of my own material, and I'm itchy about keeping it all organized and backed up. Redundancy only goes so far when the media has an optimum five year lifespan.

From MSNBC :

The latest Newsweek poll shows that 91 percent of American adults surveyed believe in God [...] Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact.

That indirectly explains the contents of the "newspaper" rack at the grocery store checkout, among other things. Makes me wonder what the Saudi Arabian equivalent of The National Enquirer or People is.

[Insert rewritten Huey Lewis and the News lyrics here.] March through November of 2006 were pretty great - I felt good about taking it slow with ATC (oppose the overwhelming drive to get it done this year and the overwhelming low-level desperation regarding the quality of ATC, DCR, and everything else I've created), I was fine with Life In General (see previous perenthesis, replace creative bits with life bits), I was fine with people (absolute proof I was on drugs!). 99% of PPAC was created "under the influence." Life didn't get under my skin as much.

I let the prescription run out because I couldn't afford the stuff - 30$ every six weeks or so was a pain in the ass at the time, as was the Agony of sitting around Giant Eagle for forty minutes. Now the 30$ being burned on video games - something I wouldn't feel like sinking into if I didn't, yanno, need a diversion. What with sleeping, eating and paying bills leaving me with just enough money for laundry and nothing for going out more than, say, once a pay period. Nevermind new clothes, furniture, hardware, etc.

Lack of funds would be why I'm taking commissions now, which has turned out to be its own kind of hell. For the time being, anyway. If I get a few of those done, get caught up on bills and so forth, get The Glacier that is my inertia pointed in a "get another doctor's appointment" direction, then I ought to be able to afford to get back on the stuff. At which point I'll feel better about life being nothing but work and liver destruction.

From Breitbart.com:

At least four Palestinians drowned in a tsunami of raw sewage on Tuesday when a water treatment reservoir burst, flooding a village in the northern Gaza Strip.

The deluge, triggered by the collapse of a septic system aid organisations had long warned was dangerously overburdened, submerged dozens of homes in the Bedouin farming village of Umm al-Nasr beneath a cesspool of foul-smelling effluent.

See also the BBC followup.

• Look is handled with either the stylus (which I found to be mind-alteringly unuseable but very accurate), or the crosskey. As with any FPS, the analogue input is accurate and the digital isn't. Trying to use the stylus with this game made my hand explode in under a minute, so I got the non-accurate shooting experience. It's a lot like playing Quake with just the keyboard.
  • Large parts of this game will suck ass with digital input. Unfortunately, the only way to switch between digital and analogue is to go all the way back to your ship and toggle buttons. I consider this to be a horrible oversight in the QA department.
• You fight two bosses - a giant column thing and a giant ball-and-tentacles thing- four times. Each time they're supposedly tougher than the last. You will not survive without learning how to circle-strafe.
• Dropping into ball mode and dropping bombs like a motherfucker is the best way to defeat most of the hunters.
  • Except the yellow guy - the Impact Hammer kills him dead.
  • This works very, very well with the silver guys and the Epyon wannabe.
• Like all FPSsen that have a final boss, all previous battles do nothing to prepare you. The game drops copious hints regarding strategy, but it basically boils down to "you die."
• The "Metroid" parts (puzzle solving, item-hunting, etc) are fun. The scanner thing is neat. Getting the everloving shit kicked out of you while trying to scan and puzzle-solve is neither fun nor neat.
  • Running back to your ship in the time allotted can be a pain in the ass. Not the running and jumping part (it's expected) so much as the "clock keeps running down while the door takes its sweetass time opening" part (BUG! BUG! BUG!!!!).
• I haven't bothered with multiplayer. Mainly because I have no interest in getting my ass handed to me by people who can actually control the game with the touchscreen.
• Gameplay/aesthetics-
  • The graphics are fine.
  • The music ranges from unobtrusive to out-of-place. Space Yanni doesn't really fit with the whole Metroid thing.
  • The doors are very, very glitchy. This is tolerable until you're running for your ship after beating a boss.
  • Like most DS games, it's Short. Nitpicking aside, after I got into the groove of MPH, I wanted more - more levels, more boss variety, more items, etc. It's quite fun once you get the hang of the controls, learn the quirks of the door glitches, and accept the lack of boss variety.

Unfortunately (for you) I can't talk about FF6 without talking about FF7. The neurosis is deep and complex and boils down to this: FF6 lived up to the hype. FF7 did not. FF7 : Advent Children did and was AWESUM!* but that's neither here nor there.

To this day, I still stifle the urge to punch the shit out of all the assholes who claim FF7 is THE BEST!. It usually turns out that it's the first Final Fantasy they played - more often than not, it's the first one they'd ever even heard of. My hate-turned-to-grudging-acceptance relationship with FF7 is borne out of the hype surrounding that game - the promise that it would be bigger, badder, prettier, and awesomer than FF6. Which, in many ways, it isn't. Ultimately, it's apples and oranges - FF6 is a Role Playing Game, whereas FF7 is much more of an Interactive Story. While 7 is a decent experience, it isn't the same kind of game as 6. It isn't even close to 6: it's the first of the Interactive Novels - a "game" where you're expected to be sucked into the story and ride out the levelgrinding while gunning for the next cut scene and grimacing through "..." after "...". Which kind of blows if you're the kind of person who'd like to punch Cloud in the face with a shovel. Gameplay isn't one of 7's Great Achievements, in my opinion - and gameplay is one of the reasons why I continue to consider 6 to be the superior title.

Much like the Iowa class battleships, Final Fantasy 6 is the culmination of years of evolution. There's little to no "..." in FF6. There is, instead, dialogue. The plot spins around a broad cast of characters - you can, within reason, pick your favorites and root for them instead of being stuck in the orbit of a single unlikeable (Cloud or Squall, take your pick) protagonist. The bad guy is a fucking lunatic, and is far more crazed and vicious than any FF villian before or since.** The Espers (which would be "summons" in any other FF) do their thing and get out of your way - you're not stuck watching a thirty second to five minute in-battle cut-scene for 500 damage. It's dark. It's depressing. It's the Empire Strikes Back of the series. Elements of it inspired the early formation of ATC. It's got ninjas, moogles, power tools and mecha. It's one of my favorite games ever. Even if you're one of those new-school cut scene kiddies who cried when Aeris died or Rinoa went comatose (I didn't), FF6 is still worth your time. It's an important piece of RPG history, man.

The only downside is that Cid looks like a banana.

See?

That said.

I could go into great detail about all of the differences, but I'll spare you.

The biggest issue in the GBA version is slowdown - there's a lot of it in sprite-heavy combat. Cure3 and Meteor are the most noticeable, as is The Esper Formerly Known As Pallidor- bring a sammich when you cast him, as he takes longer than some of the FF7 summons. The starting floor of Kefka's tower is another slug spot. Other than that, the only issue is that the encounter rate seems to be a hell of a lot higher than it was for the US SNES version- a fact that is sure to get under your skin if you've played the game before and still remember where everything is, as you'll now be running into monsters every five steps instead of every eight. The new translation is generally superior to the old one, though the "new" (read: Japanese) names for the monsters and espers ranges from humorous to confusing to unpronounceable. The new espers and spells integrate seamlessly, as do the bonus dungeons (unlike GBA Final Fantasies 1, 4, and 5) - though you'll probably need to consult a FAQ to actually find them. The Vanish|{Doom|X-Zone} trick has been sorta "fixed" in that X-Zone never seems to work on anything you'd really want it to - much like the Odin and Raiden espers, or Cyan's final Bushido attack.

Of all the GBAed Final Fantasies I've played, FF6 ranks Best Overall. It's the most seamlessly tuned of the lot - there's quite a bit of new stuff, but in many ways it's the least altered, the least "improved, and - as it was ten years ago - the most enjoyable.

Oh, and Kefka's theme still rocks.

* How can I like Advent Children but not FF7? Easy. AC is everything I love about FF7 with none of the stuff I didn't like.

** While you could make a case for Sephiroth, Kefka wins on the grounds that he's 100% pure undiluted-by-backstory psychotic. No Freudian fixations going on here, no sir.

So, mercury's header graphic wound up on a russian server, which somebody is in turn re-using as a partially-cropped blog header. Makes me wonder what other bits of mine have been appropriated.

gg, internet.

At least he links to ATC.

10:19 <@bda> wtf is MegaTokyo doing?
10:19 < solios> sucking cock?
10:19 <@bda> Maybe.
10:19 < solios> it's been sucking cock for the last four years.
10:19 <@bda> Bunch of pervy otaku buying sex robots. One of them caps a guy that touches her wings.
10:19 < solios> how it could do anything else is beyond me.
10:20 <@bda> It's like... I'm used to random weird stupid shit, but... wtf?
10:20 < solios> maybe if I crossed Love Hina with my computers I'd be all kinds of internet famous too.
10:21 <@bda> Probably.
10:21 * solios silently thanks gid that those parts of his heart/mind are made out of steel girders and acid, as opposed to fluffy gay.
10:21 <@bda> I don't think homosexuality has a lot to do with it.
10:21 <@bda> Like, not actual buggery.
10:22 < solios> it's a different kind of gay.
10:22 < solios> more the [lilith fare] / creepy old guys in pink shorts variety.

The "other stuff" I mentioned previously happens to include vomiting.

Felt slightly odd Monday night - the "I'm coming down with something" sensation. Out for a few drinks regardless, go home. Start vomiting somewhere between 0130 and 0330 hours - no nausea, just a general indication that It's Time To Get To A {Bucket|Garbage Can}. Pass out on floor near garbage can with face in garbage bag. Wake up around 0800-0900, clean up mess, go to the bathroom for ventral vomiting with simultaneous dorsal vomiting - upgrade from garbage bag to bathroom garbage can. Retreat upstairs, consume and expell approx. 3 oz. gatorade. Consume .5 oz. gatorade and pass out until 1600.

At this point I'm seriously starved and dehydrated, feeling nothing. Refuel out of necessity, nap some more. Surprised it's staying down. Wake up again around 1900, meal and liquid staying down. Fortunately.

On the upside, the temperature broke 70 today, so the windows are open and the room is "freshening up." Possibility the disgusting over-heated sensation was just the Fortress Of Solitude taking in the sun, as opposed to a fever.

Impact is finished. 47 pages total, 23 of which were done over the last six weeks. Which is why I haven't been blogging, making noise about PPAC or DCR, etceteras. Cranking out a page every two days takes a lot more effort now than it did back in the halcyon days of Reentry.

I still need to finalize the script for Subversion (Chapter 8 Actual), but before I do that, I need a breather. Time to catch up on other stuff, etc.

21:08 * ejp watches 2001
21:13 <@solios> :o
21:15 <@ejp> I dunno. I still feel starting your story with "$Thing was there at The Beginning, and OH NOES IT IS TEH BACK!!" is cheating.
21:15 <@ejp> this is a fairly common idea/cop out/thingy
21:21 <@ejp> Don't use the tool little monkey! it's what they WANT you to do!
21:21 <@ejp> noooooo, put it down!
21:21 <@ejp> stupid monkey. :|
21:22 <@ejp> damn monkey just condemed mankind of thousands of years of warfare and dildos.