Author: mdhughes

Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2

Sweet, a new SMT game (not a Persona game, which are OK but not really my thing)! You are literally using your mobile phone to run a game where you use a mobile phone to run a game which lets you fight real (in the game?) demons that can only be seen with a mobile phone. … Look, man, I just play it I don't do sanity.

Like the classic SMT games, you start with Pixie and go out and recruit more demons by talking to them before fighting. Then you merge them together in blasphemous rituals to make more powerful demons.

Sadly there's no grid-by-grid dungeon crawl, just the usual mobage missions with a series of fights, and some story visual-novel stuff.

[UPDATE]: There is a dungeon crawl, you just have to unlock it after the first chapter of the story missions! The first one is very small, but I presume they'll get bigger and more complex. So it's a real SMT game after all!

I mostly like the style of this, and there seems to be hundreds of demons to summon and create. The music varies from rather good JPop to some of the most boring elevator music loops ever invented to drive humans to Black Friday rampages.

The one negative is the "Megakin" tour guide/"Pro Youtube Personality"/most annoying NPC in a game since Navi and Tingle from Zelda games. Holy shit I hate this guy, and I hate being forced to tap on buttons to fulfil a "tutorial". Just let me play and make my own mistakes, SEGA. The gun-crazed chick NPC partner is insane but amusing; who or what do you get if you're a female avatar?

My friend ID is EG93SHUH (Home screen, ? icon, Search tab)

100 Days of Programmer Burnout

This is a fantastic way to make someone hate computers and programming, and take up a life of farming and/or sex work so they never have to see a computer again. (Which, sometimes doesn't seem such a bad idea, anyone want an aging gigolo in between potato plantings?)

When I was trying to do the Advent of Code, I couldn't do half the days because life got in the way. 100 days would be homicide-inducing, not habit-forming.

Here's my challenge: Program when you feel like it, when you have some problem amenable to computational solution. Take the weekend off; or if it's not your day job, only program on the weekends. Spend as many minutes or hours as it takes. For the love of fuck, do not commit to a Microsoft® Github® log, what is wrong with these people?!

Tromeo & Juliet

Written by James Gunn & Lloyd Kaufman. Narrated by Lemmy. More sex & violence than you really deserve, but Troma's there to give it to you.

Disney is shocked, SHOCKED I say, that James Gunn made dirty jokes; some Nazi motherfucker calls him out and Disney bends over for it? Fuck Disney right in the mousehole. Now the only theatre movies I have left are Deadpool.

What I'm Reading: MagicNet

MagicNet, by John DeChancie (1993): What if there's magic in the modern world, but it needs a computer "network" to make it real?

Everything below is SPOILER, because I want to talk about ideas not explained until the end.

Skye King (he references the TV show, but not the Kris Kristofferson song ) hears his friend Grant get murdered during a phone call, and then receives a box of 3.5" floppies (the fancy kind) containing programs OUIJA and RAGNAROK. OUIJA allows him to type and soon speak directly to Grant's "ghost". RAGNAROK is a tool for revenge against Merlin; no, not that Merlin, just some guy named Lloyd Merlin Jones.

This is where things get weird and/or stupid. Witches and wizards are all over, using computers but no longer really needing modems to reach the "Magic Net". They can project hallucinations and in some cases "demons" all over, but maybe can't do anything real? It's suggested that non-magical people wouldn't perceive anything, and maybe non-magical explanations would be "true" in base reality.

Nobody in this says "Internet", despite being written 5+ years after most universities got Internet access and just before AOL & the September That Never Ended. From 1989-1993 I was spending most of my time on USENET and playing CircleMUD or LambdaMOO, which were essentially the magical world already. Once, a witch describes the magical reality as "cyberspace", but this is just buzzword-speak, not a meaningful comparison.

Far, far too much of the book is first-person narration of mundane activities like cooking, or a plane flight, as if the author had never done that before or wanted to pad out the page count. Characters are introduced and forgotten almost every chapter.

This is almost like one of Rudy Rucker's Transrealism books, but nowhere near as weird, trippy, or fast-paced, and it makes far less sense. But they even name-drop and visit a famous SF writer.

The final section finally does go full drug-trip and has a semi-coherent explanation of how the magical reality is created, and if you paid attention to mythology (in particular Zoroastrian) you'll recognize all the spirits/demons names.

Certainly this is a poorly-written book, and the premise has been handled better by better writers; in particular Vernor Vinge's "True Names" handles the computer/fantasy interface, and Victor Koman's "The Jehovah Contract" covers the myth/reality/sexy witches interface. But it's an interesting work despite the mediocrity.

★★½☆☆

What I'm Watching: Burn Before Reading

Burn Before Reading: Oddly a Cohen Bros movie I've never seen. And no great loss. Stupid people do stupid things, with no motivation, no interest, and no consequences as their crimes are covered up by bored CIA functionaries. I had genuinely maybe two laughs in the entire film, and neither are "comical" moments. ★★☆☆☆ if that.

Why was this film made? Were the Cohens contractually obliged to deliver something and so they mad-libbed or cut-up to make a script, and then somehow filmed it, without anyone noticing it wasn't really anything?

I need something not as terrible & dark to watch, and I have no idea where to start. Something uplifting or at least where the body count is under 50%, and on Netflix or 'Zon Prime.

Kimmy Schmidt was briefly funny in S1, but no.

Icon Composer

In their ongoing efforts to break Mac development tools, Apple disabled and destroyed the rather nice Icon Composer.app because there's nobody left in-house who could figure out how to generate @2x images (protip: you use double size and rename it!), and now you have to use command-line iconutil with a set of magic filenames and no help.

So I wrote a little shell util, icontool.zsh:

#!/bin/zsh
if [[ $# -ne 2 ]]; then
    echo "Usage: icontool INIMAGE.png OUTFILE.icns"
    exit 1
fi
WORKDIR=$TMP/icontool.iconset
rm -rf "$WORKDIR"
mkdir "$WORKDIR"
sips "$1" --resampleHeightWidth 1024 1024 --out "$WORKDIR/icon_512x512@2x.png"
sips "$1" --resampleHeightWidth 512 512 --out "$WORKDIR/icon_512x512.png"
cp "$WORKDIR/icon_512x512.png" "$WORKDIR/icon_256x256@2x.png"
sips "$1" --resampleHeightWidth 256 256 --out "$WORKDIR/icon_256x256.png"
cp "$WORKDIR/icon_256x256.png" "$WORKDIR/icon_128x128@2x.png"
sips "$1" --resampleHeightWidth 128 128 --out "$WORKDIR/icon_128x128.png"
sips "$1" --resampleHeightWidth 64 64 --out "$WORKDIR/icon_32x32@2x.png"
sips "$1" --resampleHeightWidth 32 32 --out "$WORKDIR/icon_32x32.png"
cp "$WORKDIR/icon_32x32.png" "$WORKDIR/icon_16x16@2x.png"
sips "$1" --resampleHeightWidth 16 16 --out "$WORKDIR/icon_16x16.png"
iconutil --convert icns "$WORKDIR" --output "$2"

Preferably feed it a 1024x1024 input image, it'll resize all the others; the small sizes might be blurry but it's good enough for most uses, and you can edit the contents of WORKDIR and run the iconutil line again if you need to.

Minecraft Aquatic Update

I've been playing with the many betas and pre-releases, and Mojang's software quality is… job NaN as usual. Each version would break something that worked before, add new completely unrelated bugs, as if (and in fact we know this to be the case) they don't have any tests, they don't even have a "feature", they just hack on the source at random whim until they feel like dumping it, and people report bugs and sometimes those get fixed.

Anyway, this "official release" is somewhat stable, but today's new bug is: My chicken farm dies out. I use water flows from the corners of a 5x5 pit to put all the chickens and their egg drops into a hopper in the center, but in this version baby chickens drown in even a thin stream of water, probably due to Mojang "fixing" zombies not sinking & becoming aqua zombies.