So hey... Remember when I showed you that there are actually scientists who are studying the effects of cow burps on the environment? As in cow burps causing global warming? Yeah, well... I just stumbled across the most amazing news article! It's old... Really old. August 2003-old. Can you guess what it is? Well... I guess I kind of gave it away by bringing up cow burps, but it's actually something completely different, yet completely the same. Are you ready?
Since this was way back in 2003, wouldn't it be a safe assumption to say that a possible increase in whale flatulence is responsible for the oceans getting warmer? (Even though... You know... NASA says they're not.) This is the perfect explanation! Cows are heating up the atmosphere with their farts and whales (the proverbial cow of the ocean) are heating up the oceans with THEIR farts! It's absolutely stunning. I think I've just solved the problem of global warming. Who could have known that hunting whales to extinction could actually be a good thing? Next, in the spirit of giving up our primary energy source in favor of an alternative nobody's given us, I say that we need to exterminate cows and give up our primary meat source in favor of an alternative food source! Hey... I'm just the guy who realizes how much danger we're in. It's up to you to find another source for beef! It's my job to take it away from you... It's your job to scramble around for an alternative. I can afford to wait, even if you can't.
Why yes... This post is satirical. I'm glad you caught on. Well, the article about the whales isn't... It's just that I find it so hilarious that scientists are actually studying the effect of cow farts on global warming. Surely they understand that there are thousands of other species that pass gas, right? There are some things that you just can't do anything about... Stop wasting money. In fact, stop wasting money on global warming as a whole, okay? Please? For the sake of everyone's sanity? (And sometimes their sides... You make us laugh too much sometimes.)
Two things I've discovered that you can do while you're bored...
One, read your blog. I have almost three years of posts in my database. (Will be three in November.) There's nothing quite like scrolling through the past and reading how witty or stupid your ideas, aspirations and insights were back then. I was having a grand old time reading about my take on the Windows Automatic Update fiasco that happened so long ago. Anyone remember that? Yeah... Probably not. It's fun! It really only works if you've got a lot of old content still online, though. I can still remember a lot of what I've posted this year, for instance. I should go back to the very beginning of my blog and work forward from there. Should be quite an adventure.
Second, Google your site's address. Keep it simple... I Google for rivenwolf.net, plain and simple. You get to see where people have linked to your site, and you get to see what other sites you've signed up for are publically accessible. DeviantArt and Technorati and such. At least anywhere that publishes your provided website address. The REALLY interesting sights come from seeing places where people link to you... Like this post I found on a forum at The Great Tree. Oh yes, I'm so going there. The initial poster kind of proves my overlying point that people these days don't know half of what Uru was supposed to be like... Which is fine, but they don't understand what it's like to know and then be denied. That was the point of that post, by the way. I was trying to explain my stance when it comes to my feelings about Uru. I was trying my best to explain why there were people who didn't like Uru to people who couldn't understand why people didn't like Uru. I thought I did fairly well... Looks like that wasn't how people saw it. (Oh, surprise-surprise!)
I'm going to treat BladeLakem's post as a general response to the situation in general, even though he does kind of come across as those grumpy old men in his own example... But a few other people were talking about me specifically, and saying things like what I was saying was "apalling" or that they felt sorry for me, and Marten railed about my disabling comments. Funny that he jumped to all kinds of conclusions and that I didn't hear anything from him specifically... Not like he couldn't contact me back then. Anyway! There's a general aura of complete and utter misunderstanding and misconceptions. There's an overpowering idea that I was complaining about Uru even when I specifically said my post was to explain WHY it might seem like it. Even my explanation was seen as a complaint! Everyone feigned pity for me and some even said I was desperate and hopeless. Desperate and hopeless, heheh... Interesting choice of words. Not sure what they meant by that.
But it drives home the point I was trying to make to begin with... I said they couldn't understand then, and it's painfully obvious that I was right. I just want to reiterate the fact that I left the community because nobody could stand to know that I didn't like Uru... It's not like I went out of my way to say I didn't like it, but of course when someone pressed the matter, I would respond accordingly and then I'd get pummeled with the rediculous accusation that it's "my kind" who are destroying Uru... Amazing. Simply amazing.
This may seem to be in the past for all those posters, but as far as I'm concerned, I just learned about these responses last night, so it's still very new for me. As I once heard from a very wise man, you may not know of something that's happened when it does, but you should make an effort to discuss it the moment you DO hear about it. It will show that you aren't just intentionally bringing up old events for the heck of it and that you honestly didn't know what was happening. But, I abstain... I also do enjoy bringing up controversial subjects. It's part of my political nature, I guess. It's something that hasn't been resolved yet, and people are trying to sweep it under the rug, but it's not going to happen.
ANYWAY! Yes, the entire point of this post was to point at The Great Tree and laugh at their poor attempts to understand what I was trying to say... Not that it was even meant for them. It was meant for Whilyam at the time. He understood what I was trying to say because it addresses points he'd made in his own blog. But this is what I do when I'm bored... I start poking around and I find stuff like this and become thoroughly overjoyed at the fact that I'm known as a poor, apalling, irritating, desperate, hopeless, pessimistic grumpy old man on a porch... At least to The Great Tree. Probably everywhere in the Myst community. I hope they all realize that this only fuels me. I thrive on personal attacks! It means I'm making people angry... Not that I do it intentionally. Far from it... But when people get angry simply because I'm speaking my mind, that makes me happy. It's a far cry from the wolfdog from years of old who was upset when a certain someone raked him over the coals for declaring a collection of churches as heretics for embracing the fallacy of macro evolution.
I will say that I sometimes have bouts with people insisting on continuing subjects that I wish would end and I'll exercise my power to close comments, but that's something I try not to let happen. In fact, when I was working with my blog a few months ago, I manually opened all comments on all posts... If those people are still around (which I have no doubt that they are*), they can feel free to comment and I'll discuss things. Just because a post is a year old doesn't necessarily mean the topic is closed.
*Isn't it interesting that even when people clearly and openly hate your guts, they have the uncontrollable urge to lurk around your site and read and, when you least expect it, swoop in to strike? There you are, minding your own business and they, unprovoked, drop by to unleash a fresh barrage. Goes far to speak of their characters, wouldn't you agree?
But how's that for a post written solely out of boredom? It's just asking for trouble, isn't it?
So... I've been interested in getting a game that takes advantage of music. You know, like Dance Dance Revolution, only something less brutal on the body. I have to admit, Guitar Hero looks pretty cool, and when I saw videos of Still Alive (you know, the now immortalized end credits music to Portal), I really wanted to have something like it to play... I didn't really feel like dropping 60 bucks on Guitar Hero for a bunch of music tracks that split your skull (I'm really not a fan of loud rock), so I decided to look for alternatives. I remembered a PC game that was similar to DDR and Guitar Hero, except that you used the arrow keys... Enter Stepmania!
Stepmania is free, which is a bonus, and more like DDR than Guitar Hero in the sense that there's only four buttons to press in time with the music. People can make their own tracks, too, but you have to program the corresponding keys in time with the music... It doesn't analyze the beat to produce a tempo and keys to press on the fly. That was a little disappointing. These things seem to be designed for fast, heavy music, and I recognized almost none of the music available for the thing. I saw a video of an odd Japanese song created from Wily's Stage music from Megaman 2 (warning: it is VERY funky), but I wasn't able to actually locate the thing so I could play it myself. Not that I actually want to... I think the music would give me a heart attack before I actually finished the stage.
So I had shelved the idea and moved on with my life... Until yesterday. I was poking around on Steam when I noticed an advertisement for Audiosurf. To my great delight, there was a free demo I could download! I had absolutely no idea how the thing worked, so I decided to give it a chance... I mean, I'd seen the videos before, so I knew that you could drive a sort of car on a racetrack and hit specifically colored blocks in order to score points, but I had assumed it was just another DDR clone where pre-made tracks were distributed to you or you could make your own by programming the steps. But! I decided to check it out... Unlike Stepmania, this thing was actually easy to get running... Just download it from Steam! (Hah!) Imagine my shock and awe when I realized the unimaginable. This game didn't have prebuilt tracks. In fact, it would analyze, in real time, ANY music track you give it (and by that, I mean almost ANY track... CD, MP3, FLAC, OGG, WMA and iTunes, according to the site) and present to you a complete track.
It presents you a graph to tell you how difficult the song will be based on beats and tempo. When the graph climbs higher, that means the track will run slower and you'll get less points... When the graphs drops lower, that means the track will run much faster and you'll get far more points! It'll even show you a glimpse of where all the colored blocks will be in an effort to give you some ouce of preparedness. There are several different "characters" you can choose from to play the game, and each one changes the difficulty level and has the option of providing more bonus points, and then there's what's called Ironmode, which takes whatever you choose and then throws in an extra dose of difficult and gives you even more points.
Now... It's really hard to explain, so here are a couple of videos. Below is one video where someone plays the theme music from Team Fortress 2. I think this is a great example of the complexity of some music. TF2's theme has several slow parts which suddenly gives way to really fast parts that take you off guard. (In case you're wondering, the particular mode this fellow is playing, which seems to be the most popular, is one where you try to avoid the grey bricks and hit only the colored ones.) Short and sweet, but incredibly difficult:
Of course, everyone who checks into these music games HAS to know if you can play Still Alive on it and, yes... You can. For anyone curious, if you purchase Audiosurf from Steam, it will come with the ability to pick through the Half Life game files and extract the music for you. If you have the Orange Box, for example, and you buy this, then TF2 and Still Alive are within reach without having to hunt them down online.
As if those weren't good enough, if you log in to the Audiosurf servers, your scores get compared with everyone else who's ever played that song. But, I must warn you that Audiosurf determines what music you're playing based on the tags of the file... If you play Still Alive, for example, but you've tagged it as, say, Still Alive (Portal End Credits), then it won't compare to the file that's tagged simply "Still Alive". This isn't a problem for me, since I spent days converting my tags to iTunes for iPod sync purposes, but I see lots of people with incorrect tags and that WILL interfere with your score comparison.
So what do I play? Well... You know my taste in music. I've done Star Trek: Voyager Main Theme, Rising Sun from Okami, various Mario tracks... A couple of ES Posthumus and Epicon tracks. I am currently working my way through the Myst soundtrack, too. It's really neat, actually... You'd think that Myst would be slow and boring, and some, I grant you, are. The Myst Theme is really slow and short and doesn't allow for much points, but some songs will surprise you with some sudden complexities... Planetarium, for example, managed to pull itself off as a really fast song. ANY Mechanical Age music has that background beat that throws race tracks for a loop... Riven's "Fissure" is also one of those that starts out slow but then takes a dive and leaves you scrambling not to run into those dastardly grey blocks. I don't have any videos, but I can show you a couple of screenshots after the jump.
My advice? You should buy it... The fact that you can use, literally, any song makes this something far worth the mere 10 dollars that they ask you. (And there's no programming involved... Pick a song and BAM! You have a race track that the game provides you.) I'm not sure about cross-platform compatibility for the non-Steam version, but for Windows, I would very much suggest buying it through Steam, since it allows you to interface with the Valve game files and pull songs from their games. (Complete with accurate tags.) Unfortunately, there's no multiplayer, which would have been neat to see, but you can always play over Skype and compare scores after the song... You can add friends to the game, too, and compare scores directly. Sort of like how Xbox Live Arcade does it. You've got the global scores and then scores amongst your friends. (Audiosurf also sports a "Nearby Scores" that takes your provided region and looks for scores in your own state, for example.) Also, the game itself is rather stunning. Of course, on my wimpy laptop, I have to run it in a really small window without extra graphics options so I don't lag at a critical moment, but it can take advantage of some pretty awesome graphics capabilities. But if you're not convinced, then at least check out the demo? It allows you five songs to play with, and that was all I needed before I was hooked.
EDIT: I thought I should mention that the videos look difficult only because they CHOSE the difficult modes. There are three modes... Casual, Professional and Elite. (Each being susceptible to the Ironmode option.) Plain ol' Casual mode is just that. Casual. It's easy... It's slow. It's FUN. You probably won't get on the high score sheet of a popular song, but it's fun. What's even more fun, of course, is having your entire library of music ready to become a game. This was the sell point for me... It looks like every other music game out there, sure, but this is the only one (that I'm aware of) that will take your favorite music and let you play it without you doing more than just picking it. "I feel like playing Halo Theme today." It's as simple as that. No packages you have to search for... No toiling to make your own configuration file so it can tell you what to push at what time. It's just pick-and-go... For ANY music. I think I'm going to try some Super Mario World stuff now... See ya!