( Cut for width. )

• 21:55 5 minutes to start of New Moon. #

• 12:30 Robert Pattinson may unlock clues to secret of dark energy bit.ly/pX4Dc (secretly a physicist?) #
• 18:16 Having dinner with my dad. Great food. Great convo. #

My current life is perfectly represented by the bottom example. (Literally -- we just got a bunch of iPhones at work for the sales people.)

There is no way to describe this video except as: EPIC.

“Pigeon: Impossible”, a marvelous CG animated short by Lucas Martell. This was Lucas’ first attempt at animation, taking him 5 years to create the film.

Whenever I next need to put together a resume, I should include a section for testimonials. I could include this email I got this afternoon:

Hi Martin;
Thank you for your thorough response and tutoring on this importance marketing aspect in today's modern consumer world. I'll move forward with far more confidence now that I have your input. Your work is very much appreciated, Legend dealers have a real team player in you.
-- Super important dealer

• 19:22 The 4 New Moon tickets we just bought for Thursday represent 80% of their remaining stock. #

• 16:49 RT @BadAstronomer: NASA finds reservoir of water ice on the Moon! is.gd/4UlSS #

Things are so incredibly stupidly busy right now at work, and when I get home I'm too burned out to think enough to even make a one-paragraph post here. I hate that the only thing I can write these days are the occasional tweet. That being said, I still think I'm going to look back at this time in my life in a positive way. My home life is...strange to say the least, but it's good. I feel like the work I do at the office is important to people (and the raise I got today seems to confirm that).

So this is me forcing myself to take 5 minutes during my lunch break to actually try to put a few sentences together. (Clearly, there was zero hope of my participation in NaNoWriMo this year.)

Meg, Mona, and myself have all gone through a flu. Whether it was the porcine variant is unknown, but it was an altogether miserable affair. I managed to only miss a couple of days of work, though the workday before and after was pretty tortuous. Meg and Mona each missed a week of school. Even a week later I still have an annoying cough.

Matt and I rented Borderlands for the PS3 and play through. I am NOT a fan of first-person-shooters on the console (you'll take my mouse when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands) -- however, since you can't rent computer games it was the only frugal alternative. And while split-screen gaming is a little sucky, it does mean that we didn't need to get two copies, so again this was pretty cheap. Borderlands is very entertaining. It offers a nice "sandbox" environment with a TON of missions. The gameplay is just straight-up combat, but the RPG elements (inventory, equipment, leveling, and talent points) really added considerable depth. Anyone who has played WoW with me could guess that I was very excited to find an easy way to reset my talent points so I could try different builds.

Matt's sniper character was the far deadliest of the team, with my soldier being more suited to support. I mostly focused on the talents that buffed the auto-turret that I could drop down, giving it aoe-team-healing and ammo-resupply capabilities, as well as better firepower and a shorter cooldown. So mostly our team was Matt + Turret, and I was only there to lug the turret around.

Anyway, the ending of the game was somewhat of a letdown, but overall it was a ton of fun.

---

Some time ago I'd also pre-ordered Dragon Age: Origins. There was probably a discount and some special content. Anyway, so despite being swamped with other games I've been wanting to play, I suddenly get an email saying that Dragon Age is ready to be downloaded (via Impulse)...and how could I resist diving in?

It's hard to tell, but I think I may me about one-third of the way through the game. It's very nice to look at and the voice acting during the conversations with NPCs are great. The various party members you can collect throughout the game are very well done and have vibrant personalities. The gameplay is similar to other Bioware RPGs and this has a feeling very similar to Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights despite not having a D&D license. It seems to have a pretty wacky difficulty curve though. "Easy" is ridiculously easy. Normal, Hard, and Very Hard are not that different from each other, but Normal is a huge jump from Easy. I think it says something very weird about the game when a relative veteran of the genre, like myself, finds Normal difficulty to be extremely challenging. Maybe it has something to do with my choice of partymembers...I don't know.

I also find it quite frustrating in games like this to play as a low "charisma" character, because there are so many conversation options and quest branches that you simply don't have the opportunity to explore. It seems virtually impossible to succeed at any of the "Persuade" or "Intimidate" options unless you've maximized your character for it. It's also disturbingly difficult to unlock a great majority of the chests in the game, even though I've specialized one of my partymembers to do it. I'm very strongly thinking that I'll have to make a second run through of the game with my main character being a charismatic, thievery-oriented rogue. I hope that won't make an already challenging combat segment harder...

Those nitpicks aside, however, the game features an absolutely epic story. I definitely get a Lord of the Rings feel to the campaign. There's a great horrendous blight of monsters getting ready to ravage the land, lead by an archdemon (or several). In addition to fighting them directly where you can, you are also trying to unite elven, dwarven, and human kingdoms into a massive alliance to fight them off. The situation is made more complicated by the fact that the human king was effectively assassinated and that the usurper of the throne has blamed the Grey Wardens (which right now is pretty much just you and one other guy) for the king's death. Very excellent.

One of the other things I really like in the game is the "Tactics" mechanic, by which you program you party members with what to do in combat. Now, you can always fully control them if you like (you can pause whenever you want and issue orders), but I find this tedious and would rather just focus on my own character. (Arguably, this is one of the reasons I'm finding the combat difficult, but frankly I don't think NORMAL should be so demanding that I need to micromanage my party in every single encounter.) You characters only start of with 3 or 4 spots for instructions, which can look like:

- Activate a special combat mode at the start of any combat
- If there's an enemy ranked "Elite" or higher, hit him with your armor-shattering attack
- If there's an enemy hitting you in melee, use your stun attack
- Attack the nearest enemy

With the top-most actions having priority. Since all special abilities have cooldowns, you'll eventually see all the actions occur. The problem is that as you level up, you will quickly have more abilities than can be assigned in the 3-4 slots available and also the scarcity of slots also prevents more sophisticated tactics. Luckily, when a character levels up you can spend their skill points to unlock more tactics slots, which I have done whenever possible. One of my characters has 8 slots right now (I think) and can use all her abilities effectively while also being smart enough to prioritize enemies based on a variety of criteria and can even use healing potions and come to the aid of party members. There are SO many ways this appeals to me, not the least of which is as an avid fan of strategy games and as a programmer. I find a lot more pleasure taking 30 minutes setting up tactics than taking 3 seconds to assign the party member a target in combat.

Anyway, this tactics thing is a very minor part of the game and you can ignore it completely if you wish...but I love it.

I'm also a big fan of the way the game handles "toggle-able" abilities. My mage doesn't have to re-cast his "stone armor" spell every X minutes. You just turn it on and it basically just reduces your maximum mana and you forget about it. Titan Quest had a similar mechanic, and it ruled. There is a clear cost to having the ability activated, but it requires no micromanagement to keep it up. Contrast this with Torchlight, the indy Diablo-like game, which requires you to re-cast your buffs whenever they expire...some of which only last 20 seconds. Activating my Frost Armor in Torchlight costs a trivial amount of mana. I never DON'T want it on. But every 20 seconds I need to push the button like I'm some kind of rat in a behavioral research experiment. I detest it.

But again I spend too much attention on the technical aspect of Dragon Age. Even if the gameplay mechanics weren't brilliant, I would still highly recommend the game to everyone for the story (and graphics/sounds) alone. It's fantastic.

(If Dragon Age had a way to respec your talent points, it would be perfect.)

EDIT: Oh, one thing to note is that both Dragon Age and Torchlight offer editing tools to make your own campaigns and modify the gameplay. This is extremely exciting and promises to add tremendous replay-value to both games.

EDIT 2: Dragon Age features an integrated online player profile. You can see my page here:

http://social.bioware.com/playerprofile.php?sku=dragonage1_pc&nid=2263364586

You can see my character's stats, gear, talents, achievements, and a variety of screenshots the game automatically takes for me. The updating is a bit slow (especially right after release like this?) so you won't see the absolute latest info, but it's still nifty.

• 10:50 Just read a live blog of the first day of the final table of the 2009 World Series of Poker. I think I'm going to be sick. #loldonkaments #
• 21:51 How did I lose a night playing "freak" poker like 2-7 triple-draw lowball? #

• 09:25 I currently have my hands on a Mac Mini server, and it's an f-ing beautiful thing. I may have to get one for the house. #
• 22:34 The hyper-turbo tourneys on Full Tilt #Poker are incredibly fun, and are also remarkably profitable despite the apparent luck factor. #
• 22:36 After 82 tournaments, my return on investment is +42%. Suck it, Wall Street. #poker #

• 14:07 Too many amazing games coming out right now! I just got an email telling me my Dragon Age pre-order is ready. I pre-ordered? #

• 08:17 Anyone going to give NaNoWriMo a try? #
• 20:55 I've got the flu and am running a 101.1 fever. :( #

• 18:11 It's 6:15....where are all the kids?? #swineflugotthem? #
• 18:11 Also: Damn you Champions Online servers for being down. #

• 23:14 Got the XKCD book today. Not sure what is more awesome: That the pages numbers are in base-3 or that it only took me 5 pages to recognize. #
• 23:18 1 2 10 11 12 20 21 22 100 101 102 110 111 112 120. Actually, the book skips from 20 to 100. 120 to 200 to 1000. I'm missing something yet. #

I'm going to throw a few words and phrases at you. Ready? K.

Diablo-style action-RPG.
Crew features ex-Blizzard designers. *
$20.

I have just described Torchlight, which was released yesterday.

Torchlight is a single-player-only action-RPG with an impressive pedigree (an MMO version is promised in 18 months). It's 3D and runs very crisply -- it can even run on netbooks. It plays fast and fun and features the same hack-slash-loot gameplay that made Diablo so addictive. It features random levels that fit together so well you'll think they were individually hand crafted.

You can buy it directly from the website and I downloaded the game from their mirror in 5 minutes. It's hard to go wrong for $20.

(Wow, what a crazy good year for cheap indy games!)

* It also has music by Matt Uelman. Uelman's the guy behind Diablo, as well Diablo 2, StarCraft, and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Diablo's soundtrack was great. Torchlight's is even better.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds was glimpsed briefly on ABC's "Castle," with Nathan Fillion dressing as his "Firefly" character on Monday's episode (context: it's a Halloween costume).

"Didn't you wear that 5 years ago? ... Don't you think you should move on?"





UPDATE: From Nathan Fillion's twitter feed: Anyone catch the obscure Firefly reference in Castle just now? 6 min in?

Starring: Felicia Day

Incredibly funny. Must watch, even if not a science geek.

• 08:11 R.I.P. Geocities. While it is true that we early Internet users hated your terrible websites, it is a sad thing to see you close your doors. #
• 08:13 XKCD has a *perfect* Geocities homage today. I think it's the animated construction workers that really does it for me xkcd.com/654/ #

• 12:35 I'm in ur church, baptizin ur babyz. #