tempest in a teacup

Most people, when explaining a long gap in posting on their blogs, cite the problem of not having anything to write about. I have the opposite problem, in that there’s too much going on and I can’t decide what I want to write about.

Here’s a list of stuff that happened this week that piqued my interest:

1. The high-profile failure of Congress to approve the Wall Street bailout deal + my general anxiety at the economic climate
2. Cliff Bleszinski continuing to sound like a tool by saying stupid things like this and this
3. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood’s release (and subsequent evaluation by me)
4. My purchase of the original Fallout (1997) from GOG.com
5. Gintama being awesome
6. My falling sick and being kept sane by Qi clips and my DS
7. Sarah Palin proving herself to be a colossal idiot

In the end, I don’t even know if my next post will be about any of those things, because stuff that catches my attention just keeps on happening. Maybe I need to be more decisive…

1 comment

A scoreboard shot after my most recent round as Heavy in Team Fortress 2. I think that’s the most dominations I’ve ever had in a game :D

Also, Natascha is now in my possession! I hear it’s not particularly useful, though…

No comments

Been a while since I last wrote anything…I’ve been spending a lot of time playing Team Fortress 2. For some reason, since the Heavy update hit I’ve been playing the game a lot more. I’ve also been reading the official TF2 forums from time to time to gauge what the state of the game is, and figured I would record my thoughts here.

Arena Mode

I must say, I rather like this mode - since every player only has a single life and health pickups are limited, having Medics on your team becomes a lot more important, and Spies become incredibly lethal when played correctly. It’s a mode that rewards skill. On the other hand, I could do without the random shuffling of teams - it makes it hard to plan strategy when all you have are 5 seconds at the start of the round to decide on class makeup.

Badwater Basin

This is probably my new favourite map. It’s a payload map much in the vein of Goldrush, but much more open - there are tons of alternate routes making it great for ambushing while both attacking and defending. There aren’t too many chokepoints, so BLU tends to have an easier time than it does on other maps like Dustbowl and Goldrush.

Class-specific stuff

The Pyro is still my most-played class (although how much of that is because of achievement farming, I’m not sure), but these days I’ve been trying to avoid picking it, if only because it’s starting to seem to me that Pyros have a fairly low skill ceiling. Adding the air blast to the regular Pyro has added some new capabilities (in particular the ability to blow attackers or defenders off a control point, and reflect projectiles), but his combat strategy is still entirely limited to ambushing - head-on encounters rarely seem to go well. So I’ve been trying some other classes.

I’m having a lot of success playing Heavy, which is a lot harder than trailers would have one believe - you need to be completely aware of your surroundings at all times, pick targets carefully and know when to pull back (before you take too much damage or before your ammo runs out). I’ve only earned one of the unlocks so far (the Sandvich) and it can be useful if the team’s Medic is busy somewhere else and I need to heal up after retreating from an attack. However, the shotgun is arguably the more useful weapon in most circumstances.

I’ve also been playing Soldier a lot more. This class gets a reputation as one based on spam and luck (lol critrawkets, etc) but if you ask me the distance between an expert Soldier and a novice Soldier is greater than that between an expert Pyro and a novice Pyro. Good Soldiers know to aim ahead of their opponents and take advantage of juggles, use the mobility afforded by their rocket jumping to attack from unexpected angles and retreat from battles, and most importantly to make their shots count (given that their reload time is so long compared to most other classes). I can’t say I’ve mastered any of these skills, but I have been trying.

On a final note, the Spy. Playing Spy is amazingly fun when you get it right (like in Arena matches like I mentioned earlier) but when you get it wrong it can be amazingly discouraging. I’m alright with getting discovered by a nosy Pyro who suddenly appeared around the corner, but when your primary weapon - the instant-kill backstab - fails to register half the time there’s clearly a problem. Sometimes it’s because the stab doesn’t register as a backstab, but most often it’s because of the laggy backstab animation you get if you’re too close to the enemy. I know the Spy is arguably the class with the highest skill ceiling, but this stuff even bites players who have far more Spy experience than I do.

The other thing I’ve been doing recently is keeping track of King of Fighters XII news - but that’s a topic for another post.

4 comments

Things seem to have gotten considerably worse since the last time I wrote about the economy. In just a few short weeks, we’ve seen the following events:

1. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government mortgage institutions) get taken over by the government
2. Lehman Brothers collapses and its assets are bought up by Barclays bank
3. Merrill Lynch sells itself to Bank of America
4. AIG Insurance gets bailed out by the US government

In response to this raft of bad news, stock markets all over the world predictably took a dive. The latest headline on the BBC news website is that the Bank of Japan has just pumped $14bn into the markets in order to improve stability. In Singapore, where my family still lives, people are apparently rushing to cancel their insurance policies with AIG - this crisis has had far-reaching effects.

If you want to know more about these issues there are far more authoritative sources than my blog to visit. Still, I felt like I had to say something about this, if only to leave a record of my own stand on the issue.

It occurs to me that we’ve seen this before. It bears a striking resemblance to what happened in the 1930s. Then, the recession was caused by the bursting of a bubble and the subsequent freezing up of the financial system (although in that case they were dealing with a stock bubble rather than a housing bubble). And the root causes are arguably very similar - the lack of regulations on banks (then) and non-bank financial institutions (now).

So yes, I’m in favour of extending existing financial regulations to cover these institutions, something which the people in charge (i.e. Republicans) seem very much opposed to doing - and this includes John McCain. Neither McCain nor his running mate/soccer mom seem to know anything about economics, and the people they rely on to know these things appear to think that everything is peachy and what we really need is even more deregulation. Remember Phil Gramm calling Americans a ‘nation of whiners?’

Barack Obama has a far more sensible and rational policy for addressing the root cause of the problem - why he isn’t leading significantly in the polls because of this one issue is a total mystery to me.

(Actually, it isn’t, really, given the kinds of ridiculous issues that people in this country tend to regard as important)

No comments

So here’s a random screencap from Gintama:

2 comments

One of the big headlines in the news right now is the launch of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The facility is meant to accelerate and collide subatomic particles in order to recreate conditions that were present at the start of the universe so that the interactions of these particles can be studied.

One of the (somewhat ridiculous) concerns coming out of this experiment is that the collision could cause the end of the world (by creating a black hole, or god knows what else). While this concern has been thoroughly refuted several times by people more qualified than me, the folks at Reddit and Fark have taken a different approach to addressing them.

Click here to see what I mean.

Sound advice, all things considered.

5 comments

Just saw this piece on the BBC website:
Eat less meat to combat the effects of human activities on the global climate, says the UN’s top climate scientist.

Disclaimer: I’m a vegetarian.

The scientist’s position focuses mainly on greenhouse gas emissions without pontificating about the superiority of a vegetarian diet, which is good, I think. If anything I know that ideas tend to be more favourably received when argued logically, not when preached by someone on a high horse. I’m actually quite interested in seeing the text of the speech Dr Pachauri will give on Monday, if only to see how he tries to sell this idea.

---

In other news, I’ve been taking advantage of the 50% discount offer on all id software games on Steam to try out some old FPSes that I missed out on - Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom 3. RTCW is pretty good so far, but I played partway through the Doom 3 demo before going ‘fuck this shit’ and deleting it. The people complaining about the light levels in this game aren’t kidding in the slightest. I couldn’t see what the hell I was shooting at half the time, and the fact that I needed to drop my existing weapon to use the flashlight only aggravated this. Yes, you play a marine a century in the future when we’ve colonized Mars and created teleportation technology, but you don’t have access to a flashlight that doesn’t tie up one of your hands.

Long story short, I probably won’t be buying that one.

No comments

It happens to be the 25th anniversary of GNU this month, and Stephen Fry, of all people, has put out a video explaining the promise of free software to commemorate the occasion. Mr Fry, contrary to what most might believe, is quite a techie, and an avid proponent of the concept of free and open-source software (as anyone who reads his blog would know).

In any case, if you’re curious about what this free software business is all about, Mr Fry puts it in rather simple terms that anyone can understand.

Click here to watch the video.

(The server handling the streaming seems to be hammered right now, so you may want to just download the video and watch it on your computer. You’ll need the Ogg Theora codec - a free codec - for it to work)

No comments

I spent most of the day at PAX today, since I’d never been to a gaming convention and there were a few games I wanted to check out. I actually didn’t get to play too many of them (the lines were way too long for me to be standing around) but I did get a reasonable idea of how some of the games I’m looking forward to are shaping up.

Click here to read more >>

2 comments

…of why I play the airblast Pyro in Team Fortress 2.

The backburner can be great fun in pure ambush play, but the ability to just run up to a control point and BLOW PEOPLE OFF IT is just too awesome. Bonus points if said point is suspended over an instant death pit :D

No comments