Author: mdhughes

Apple Watch

I bought a Gen-0 Apple Watch on launch, great device for fitness, weather, and notifications, don't really care about clocks, that's what I use calendar notifications for; but after 3.5 years it's down to under an hour battery charge, and the watch face acts weird, I think it's loose, so I don't wear it anymore.

So I just pre-ordered the Gen-4 Apple Watch, ships early next month. Same black aluminum, light and durable enough, original had the plastic "sports band" which got a little sweaty, so this time I got the cloth strap and a Nike "volt" black and green band (yes, my color theming is the same in RealLife™), see which of those I like better.

Does heart tracking make anyone else nervous, though? Like maybe I don't wanna know. The BPM measure and rings I don't obsess about completing on the original are more nagging than I want.

Nintendo Direct

Nintendo Direct 2018-09-13

  • Luigi's Mansion: Eh. I liked the original some, largely the gag being the Wiimote was like a vacuum cleaner or Ghostbusters particle projector, but no interest in more.
  • Katamari Damacy HD: Neat, but just a remaster. How's that Final Fantasy VII remaster going, Squenix?
  • Nintendo Switch Online: Actually saving your game data between consoles?! From anyone else, this is 20-year-old tech. Nintendo has just discovered "using the cloud to not be dicks"!
  • NES controller for Switch! Though there are good 3rd-party ones, but sweet.
  • Diablo III, some other ports. Eh.
  • Town: Boring generic name for boring generic RPG, but it's NEW content. So, good for you!
  • Daemon x Machina: Maybe the worst-looking mecha game I've ever seen, like a reject from N64 suddenly revived for Switch.
  • Yoshi's Crafted World: Branded LittleBigPlanet ripoff.
  • Asmodeee boardgame mobile adaptations. Yawn.
  • Starlink: Is this the terrible Starfox game they previously canned, or a new one? I dunno. I loved Starfox64, but all since is disappointment.
  • The World Ends With You: Fuck yeah. As previously noted, I resent the iOS port ripoff, but I loved the game.
  • Team Sonic Racing: Arcade racers are a thing I love, but they showed a few seconds of gameplay. Who knows.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: How to turn your friends into bitter enemies, the videogame.
  • Final Fantasy XII, and more ports: Nice, sure, but I've got every one I care about on iOS or Playstation. STILL NO VII HD, SQUENIX! WAY TO RIP MY HEART OUT A SECOND TIME LIKE YA DID WITH AERIS, YA FUCKS! I'm fine, it's fine.
  • Smash: Don't care. Even with Isabelle. Enjoy getting face-wrecked by a fuzzy dog-girl, nerds.
  • Animal Crossing: 2019. Fuck! I've been done with Pocket Camp for months. Minimum 3 more months, and "2019" in Nintendo Time probably means Q3 or Q4. My body is ready NOW.

Rules for the OSR (Old-School Renaissance)

Housekeeping note: I'm still too busy with programming on the new Perilar, and some other things, to get back to my tabletop and/or online chat games regularly, but I'll be moving all my RPG stuff over to this blog from Mark Rolls Dice, I'd like to have one site to maintain which I own.

So, start with basic principles. How do I run games.

I'm a caveman from the '70s and '80s, so my Old-School is literally old and from school, as noted in Five Games. The Old-School Renaissance is my frozen caveman ass being thawed out to do it again.

There's a bunch of guides to how to do this, but they're kind of bullshit. Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming is close to my view, and has gameplay dialogue examples which can be read in funny voices, but it goes on too long about irrelevant stuff. Principia Apocrypha and a bunch of other bloviating diatribes just go on forever, I started to nod off, make a little hand-puppet with my hand and flap its mouth up and down.

Here's my OSR principles:

  1. Let the dice fall where they may. ( Knights of the Dinner Table's Law )
  2. Be excellent to each other. ( Bill & Ted's Law, the inverse of Wheaton's Law )
  3. The Referee is always right, but the players can choose to stay or leave.
  4. Rules are just recordings of what we've previously done. We can change them at any time.

Like the Three Laws of Robotics, each principle is tempered by the ones previous: The Referee can override new rules. But, be excellent to each other. But, don't cheat and take away risk.

What I'm Watching: Game Night

I was hoping for another The Game (not Fincher's best, but a good tricky movie). Instead we get the insecure lead couple, saccharine black couple, idiot & random date, and annoying brother, in a painfully obvious scenario. Occasionally funny, but so dumb. I am sad I paid a couple bucks to Redbox to watch this.
★★☆☆☆

AI Just-So Stories

Couldn't remember a story reference, so collecting a few of these to make finding them again easier.

Bruce Schneier r/IAmA, and Five Eyes Backdoor Bullshit

This "just give us a secure backdoor!" bullshit is just infuriating to anyone who can think.

Any programmer can write a new crypto program without the officially mandated backdoor. Even if the Stasi5 banned all existing interpreters and compilers (and watch the economy burn when we can't write any programs), we could rewrite a crypto program in assembly, type character codes into a text editor, save it and run it with a buffer overflow, and now we could communicate securely, while everyone else was completely exposed. Banning all computers? You'd also have to ban all electronics that could be used to make a new computer. Starting a new Dark Age with a Butlerian Jihad burning all computers is literally the only way to stop people from having strong cryptography.

The only purpose of the "secure backdoor" is to let governments spy on law-abiding citizens. It can serve no other purpose. Time for us to end the "intelligence" agencies and set up something new.

That_one_Pizza: "Your opinion on pineapple on pizza?"
BruceSchneier: "The 1973 Council of Naples authorized fourteen pizza toppings, and pineapple was not one of them."

Hawaiian Pizza: The pizza of rebels. Never let the Man tell you what you can have on your 'za.

What I'm Watching: Bosch

I watched S1 when it came out in 2014, was somewhat annoyed by the Hieronymus Bosch name gag (but the actor is named Titus Welliver, so… ludicrous historical names all around), all the jazz (not even music), and some of the inappropriate workplace relationship bothered me, but it was a competent murder show. Little scattered in plot, personal drama, and side-plots that go nowhere.

Picked back up S2 and now working thru S3, and I'm more interested. The jazz is sometimes overbearing, especially when smug asshole Bosch preaches about how great vinyl is, or how every restaurant he goes to is "best X in L.A.", he's a super punchable prick. He's like House or Sherlock Holmes without the genius or charm. As a villain, he'd be fantastic. As a protagonist, he's much less charming than Dexter Morgan or Walter White.

But J. Edgar the partner (Jamie Hector, aka Marlo Stanfield on The Wire) and other competently-acted characters (several also Wire alumni), and better plots and writing, make up for a lot.

S1's a cold case murder. S2 is more of an LA Confidential thing with a murdered porno producer and hot blonde wife named Veronica (not Lake) as a film noir femme fatale. S3 has a couple parallel veteran murder stories going on; I assume in the books these are Vietnam, there's something about how they're written that doesn't fit the desert war that never ends.

★★★½☆ solid but rarely amazing.

RT @vishae

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