Challenge!

Well, today I begin an epic challenge. My goal: to install linux on a decade-old laptop!

Now I wouldn't normally call this kind of thing a challenge. People put Linux on all kinds of thing. But the problem here is that I will be installing it on a laptop that can't boot from CD and has no floppy drive. So in theory, I can not install it. (There's this whole complicated thing with compiling the linux kernel - you have to be in a UNIXish environment to compile it or something...).

Wish me luck in doing the impossible!

Progress

It turns out that the only thing you really need to write a screenplay is inspiration and an idea. I've finally gotten the chance to brainstorm and write my idea for the basis of my movie, which should be finished in five months if all goes right.
The title of this article is a link to the script so far. I'm writing it in Plotbot for ease of use and it's collaboration features.
I'm just afraid that I won't be able to finish in time. I'm not too worried about the principle photography - it's the post-processing I'm worried about. Especially the editing. How am I even going to go about this?

Random old game stuff

Just because I took the time to look at NFG Games, I have a couple of goodies to share. First off is this translation of Nintendo's most awesome manual ever, for the Famicom Disk System, available here.

Second is this animated GIF, courtasy of NFGman himself. It's the opening animation to Zoom's Phalanx on the X68000

I'm psychic.

I was right. I messed up configuring the kernel. But I wasn't that far off, in my defence. As far as I know (which is admitedly very little, as I didn't check it out very well), All I forgot to check was the ethernet capabilities. If I had remembered to do that, then I would have been pretty OK. I've already installed some good net utilities like BSD-telnet and the indespencible tf (Alas, the MUD is dead in this world!), along with links and lynx. (Why does one person need two different text web browsers?)

So anyway, I ended up using genkernel, as I had guessed. This is terrible - I'm going to have kernel bloat for all eternity now. I'm going to have to wait longer at every boot for the kernel to probe the devices and install modules as necessary.

I should have used FreeBSD. It would be way easierish.

Anyway, I'm hoping that recompiling the kernel won't have any effect on the things that I had already configured, like networking and all that huzspa. I'm glad that Linux is so great at multitasking - if it weren't, I'd be having a terrible time trying to type this out now. I'm probibly going to have to sleep on this project anyway.

Oddly enough, I can't get XP to boot now, and if I try to reinstall it, I'll have to install another bootloader. Again. Oh poo.

Fear....

Well guys, it's the moment of truth. I just finished configureing the Kernel. I made a bunch of stupid mistakes with it though, like enabling SMP support, although it's only a single-core single-CPU machine, and enabling KVM, although I have no real reason for virtualization - especially at the Kernel level. I'm just hoping that I configured the processor part correctly.... If I failed in that, I will have to try configuring the kernel yet again. Oh lord.... If that happens, I'm just going to use genkernel's wise autoprobing abilities and just eat the used time.
I hope that someone out there understands that phrase.

And in case you didn't notice, I AM going to be giving updates every time I need to wait for compilation.

Akir Is a Stupid Little Brat

In an odd move, I have decided to install Gentoo once again. You know what this means - Long periods of me not being able to access my files. Longer periods of waiting for compilation or downloading sources.

Am I insane?

I think so....

So anyway, I'm in the middle of installing the base system. I've already unpacked the stage3 tarball, updated portage and it's snapshot, and got information pertaining to kernel configuration. After waiting for a near eternety waiting for the nearest mirror to give me the updated base files, I find myself waiting yet again for the Kernel (gentoo-sources, of course) to download. Of course, this is all after the 107MB stage3 tarball and 39MB portage snapshot.

Oddly enough, I think it's been worth it. It's been forever since I got to use a 'real' bash shell in a real linux environment. Syllable is gone now, of course, which may or may not be such a bad thing. I just hope that my linux-using guru friends are still alive.

Installing Gentoo has, for the first time in a long while, made me think. There are a number of choices to make when you're installing an operating system from near-scratch. The main question in my mind at the moment is which desktop environment I'm going to use. KDE? Gnome? xFCE? Enlightenment? BlackBox? Perhaps even (gasp!) GnuStep? Heck, I could just install them all and use whatever's best for the application.

Wow. I'm going to have lots of fun. Or sarcasm, depending on my mood.

Blank Minds

I think I'm going crazy. I just signed up for MySpace. Again! There's that confirmation Email in my inbox. I think I shall ignore it until it goes away....

Taking a Bite Out of Apple

Well, Someone pulled the wool over my eyes. Since I was a child, I was indoctrinated into the "Windows is good, all else must die" philosophy. I remember the wonder I experianced once I started using Linux. The fact that I compiled my own components brought me into a real high for the longest time.
Well, recently, I got myself a Power Macintosh G3 mini-tower. I don't mean that artsy blue-and-white unit, or anything like that. I'm talking about the first release in the beige case. It's actually a bit better then the first G3 - It's a G3 server, which means a 9GB SCSI HDD with a 300MHz processor, running Mac OS 9.2.2. I just upgraded it's RAM to 320MB.
You'd think that 300MHz would be slow, but that's not the case. IBM and Motorola (I think this was before their chip fab was separated to Freescale) really outdid themselves with the PowerPC 750.
This leads me to wondering.... If PowerPC chips outperformed intel chips at 300 MHz, why doesn't Apple use it now? It's easy to see that it's lightning fast - just watch how quickly Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator generates a three-dimensional image. Intel chips, on the other hand, have a history of being low-end. What's worse is that whenever they come out with new instructions, they still run slow. What's worse is that everyone knows how badly everyone programs on those chips - you can't find a single commercial program without insane bloat anymore.
This leads me to believe that Apple has betrayed their history. They used to be for making simple machines that can be used to do otherwise complicated tasks with ease. Now their operating system is based on UNIX, for crying out loud! While I'm glad that they've opened up their systems some more, I'm upset that they're no longer as simple to run as their 'classic' systems were.
I guess that I don't have a point with this rant. Well, perhaps I do. Don't upgrade to Mac OS X!

Sigh....

Today's song is "I Can't Stop Loving You" By Ray Charles.

I don't know what exactly my problem is. I've never been quite so attached to somebody before, not even my first love.
So I sent him a link to today's song. I don't know how he'll react to it, but it does express my feelings better then I could.

It's All Pointless, Anyway.

They say that the best poets are those whom are experiencing misery; their own personal hell. This is doubly true for me.
For no real reason (though to say so is a lie), I've decided to write about my past relationships. One just ended. But, just like the last one, it's not a real relationship of the standard kind. It's the kind where I'd give my love to the other, and he'd just give me appreciation of that love instead of his own love. It's enough to make me feel like I'm the 'chopped liver' of the world. Life-giving nutrition that people will avoid.
But I wonder... when I think to myself about the multitude of things that could make me desirable to others, am I just lying? What really is desirable right now? I realize that my body is less then desirable, but after years of trying, I know that nothing can change no matter what I do (I've actually been losing weight, but it's always extremely insignifigant).

Well, enough with my self-pity. I can't stand to listen to it myself, so I doubt if you're still alive after reading that alone.

The first person I gave my affections to would be David. He seemed nice enough. He had a weak heart (in more then one way, as later came to light) and circulatory problems resulting from it. Although this would probably scare away most people, he was on so many psychotropic drugs he couldn't take most over-the-counter medicines. He was a nice Englishman living in Warwick, where he went to university and, later, work. He was on the side of IT, which I know know never to trust nearly so deeply as I did him. Backstabbers, every one of them, and unreliable if you could even trust them to complete simple tasks. I hope that you understand that David was the worst example of the insane there is.
As I said before, he seemed nice enough. He had the queerest hair (and I say that in a good way), fluffy and too long to be called short. He was physically attractive, albeit a bit too skinny. His accent was interesting; It was actually more like a mixture of Canadian and Australian accents then a British accent. The best thing about him was that he was completely and utterly cuddleable. The type of person who you could hug if you were cold or lonely, or even just to say 'hi!'
But of course, he had his multitude of faults. I won't even mention his cornucopia of sexual fetishes. It goes without saying that he was never a virgin. He liked a multitude of things. At one time, he was a lizard with two 'legnths', both of which had to be coaxed out of a special pouch. That was just creepy....
Being natually faithful, I stood next to him through whatever he was going through at the moment. Trying to defend him in arguments and help him through his tough spots. All the while, he was threatening to break up the relationship for my benefit. Does that even make sense? I was happy the whole time I was with him. The only time I was not happy was when he upset me from threatening break-ups. Yet, all that time, he was the one who was given the most concern. I made sure to stay with him all the time I possibly could. I stood with him when he was drunk and near-suicidal. Somewhat ironic, because suicide is exactly what his last partner did. You'd think that it'd be much easier to escape a relationship with him by waiting for a couple of days and saying 'yes.'
Then one day, he actually did it - he broke up with me. He gave me the absolutely stupidest reason ever. He said that he couldn't go through long-distance relationships anymore. How ironic that his next four or five were the exact same way? Sadly, this was only about a year ago. God, he was a slut.

Fast-forward to something near the present. I can't even remember how long ago I started with him. He was Amilcar, the incredibly adorable Puerto Rican from Georgia. Calling him adorable is actually an incredible understatement. He has the sexiest chin I have ever seen, well defined to the end of his jaw, nearly.

Oh lord.
What can I say?
I'm still in love with him.
It just won't go away.

It's kind of odd, really. After he severed his ties with me (he says he so longs to remain friends with me, but it would be so painful for me...), I was OK. But then I decided to log back on to the MUCK I see him on, and when he came on, I started crying uncontrolably. It's terrible. I can't even feel what I want to feel about him. I'm such a terrible wreck now. I've been thinking how much Ray Charles' I Can't Stop Loving You mirrors how I'm feeling.
So I'm stuck in the present. There's one person I've been wanting to date, but I don't know if I can. And I keep feeling the sneaking suspicion that if I don't act soon, he'll slip out of my fingers as well. I don't know. The only thing I can do right now is fret over how my medication is working.

The Thinking Banana

 I had made a promise that I would make an effort to make an intelligent blog post sometime this month. Well, I failed. But I do have some odd oppinions that I feel that I need to voice.

 First of all, I just admitted that I was gay to the world. Why is nobody shocked! Was I that obvious! I mean ... seriously!



...

 Gah. Already lost track of what I was thinking about.

I'm gay

Yup.

I just thought it wasn't obvious enough.

Response: We Are Failing Our Geniuses.

 I recently read an article on Time Magazine about the United States' terrible ability in keeping up with intelligent students. Needless to say, I am angry beyond my ability to express in words. Above all else, it gave me a new mental complex; from now on, all of my writings will be written in this tone of voice (which is meant to sound as if it were written in technical jargon completely) with a more surly high-word-count vocabulary. This is a sad moment for me; I have to check my spelling constantly to compensate for my abhorred spelling.
 I suppose that the most major reason why the article was so terrifying was how well it described my educational history from my point of view. Since the earlier days of my youth, I remember being enthusiastic about going to the school campus. It was a chance for me that opened a doorway into the social delight of having occasional simplistic intercourse with peers when the time was previously scheduled for working on more academic ventures.
 I am not trying to suggest that receiving my education was unimportant to me. Not in the least; schoolwork was a joy, a recurring climax of my life. By the time I was in fourth grade, I did work just for the entertainment value. I have to admit, though, that my during my fifth grade year, I had a bit of a culture shock from moving into a classroom where no order could possibly prevail and the instructor would leave either because she was weeping tears of frustration or, as was the case with the first teacher, a pregnancy. Of course, the thirty (actually more, but I fail to recall by how much) out of control students (most of whom had shown signs of serious problems such as parental abuse, especially of the psychological classification; drug addiction, ADD/ADHD, clinical depression, and of course the torture of being 'perfect' where the average person was a demon under the thin guise of a child).
 Arguably, the pinnacle of my educational career built up so far was around my third or fourth grade year. At about that time, I was officially in GATE - Gifted and Talented Education. GATE was a once-weekly program that students would attend in stead of about one hour of standard grade-school time. The instructor for that class (if a class it can be called) was perhaps the most memorable instructor I have ever had. Her name was Mrs. Meyers, and she was one of the most supporting individuals I had ever made contact with in my entire life. In one of those hours of GATE time, you could expect to do math puzzles, learn about American history (and in a greater depth than in any high-school history class, I should say), broaden your acceptance of the art world, learn ancient roman numbering and Latin writing systems, and perhaps even make a robot. One of the most memorable activities that we ever did in the class a archaeological field-trip to Kyle Ranch; I was mentioned by name in three newspapers and had an appearance on television for that.
 I only went to GATE for one year after that, and there never thereafter. That was mainly because I switched to a different school when the year ended and I found all other GATE classes to be extremely boring. I mean boring in the sense that I did not feel inclusive in those sessions. Those classes were radically different then their predecessors. The previous year's program was designed to get the students' minds to perform more flexibly and effectively. The 'new' GATE was merely a slightly accelerated version of regular school. Next year, I did not attend that program, marking the very beginning of my decline into mediocrity.
 Middle school was the time when my mental recess began to show in more vivid detail. I found myself lacking in focus from boredom every single moment of my presence. I can honestly say to everyone I know that I had learned absolutely nothing in those three years of my life, excepting pre-algebra, perhaps. I found myself moaning from sores gained by staying in one spot for too long.
 As an interesting consequence of this time period, I became especially interested in socializing at this time (Although I was still ostracized from the years before.... It is a phenomenon that I still am unable to explain). As a result, my powers of empathy became extremely sensitive. As we all know, children at this age are all brutish and surly bastards (Harsh, you ask? My opinion is from experience, layman), and as a result, I was hurt emotionally by their cruel words. I ended up getting in a number of fights that conclusively had me transfered to two disciplinary schools, where the students ('convicts' would be a better term) were even more brutish and surly. To this day, I have an aversion to personal physical violence. I find it difficult to strike at anything, even inanimate objects.
 Perhaps the most frightening thing about this time in my life was how the teachers reacted to me. I was known to bring in books and read them during class when I could. What could be more to my argument then the fact that the teachers frowned upon my actions?
 This was also the time that I tried to expand my knowledge to the more ethereal sciences, such as philosophy and psychology (Ironically, I started therapy right after I started reading into the subject of psychology...). I picked up a book from the library, a condensation of the works of Carl Gustav Jung, the complete cannon of his ideas in his own words, taken out of his books.

 Then High School began, which gave further proof of the failure to tap into my potential. I was recommended into honors classes by my eighth-grade teachers in the three major courses; English, Science (Biology), and Math (Algebra). The habits I obtained through my torturious hours at the junior high school had transfered to that time, making me sleepy with laze about doing most work in the class, almost never doing any homework. I ended up passing time by memorizing the texture and color patterns of the objects around me. Comically, I ended up getting very dizzy after some of the teachers would reorganize the room.
 I failed a semester of Algebra and English that year. The only reason why I did not fail any of the other classes was because most of the teachers for those courses were actually attentive to my state of mind and tried to snap me out of it. Though two classes actually held my attention: Theatre I and AF JROTC. I owe that to genuinely interesting instructors who appeared to be more like human beings then teachers.
 My sophomore year was about as bad, but I denote a positive light to this time. That year, I was given a zone variance to go to Durango, obtained by a somewhat abusive letter that I sent to the superintendent of schools (It was harsh, true, but there were no lies contained in it. By the way, FIRE MRS. BRADFORD!). There I learned how to 日本語をします。(If you can't read it, your operating system is obsolete) At that time, I made a number of good friends (all of which I have lost track of...), none of whom I would expect of killing a man, nor even robbing them - a grand improvement over the previous series. I generally improved myself at that time. I didn't fail any classes, but with most of them, I was very close to the border.

 I would like all of my readers (all three of them, perhaps?) to take note of the part of my life in junior high school. This is a common occurance among youth across the country. I emplore you to please write your local representative to look into this important subject, as many are suffering with that issue as a cause of misery. I, personally, would be the first to vote for the bill to remove those terribly horrifying years from the public school system. Not even a reimbursement for the years of therapy I went through as a consequence of that time would suffice to me.

Amazing Revolutions

 Yesterday, Sun Microsystems made the most astounding announcement of the decade - if not the century. They have officially announced that they are going to license it's UltraSPARC T2 architecture to the public under the terms of the General Public License, as part of it's OpenSPARC project.
 Sun is known (as far as business practices) for it's internal investments. It constantly invests into it's self ($2Bn per year in R&D alone), making proprietary programs for their proprietary computers that run on their proprietary processors. This essentially means that when a business comes to Sun for their own solutions, and Sun would give them a complete package with no additional setup needed. But lately, they've been opening up their components. Solaris, their operating system, has already been made free to the general public. Above that, it's available for non-Sun systems like x86-64. UltraSPARC T1 itself has already been released under GPL as well, which has, in the words of Sun's representatives, caused a great amount of value to be added to the arch.
 Which brings us to the UltraSPARC T2.

 Sun's UltraSPARC T2 is the second in the "Niagara" series, and takes the firm foundation of the T1 to new heights. With the UltraSPARC T2, developers are given a single microprocessor chip with up to eight cores in it (double Intel's latest), each core supporting eight simultanious threads at 1.4GHz each. Doing the math, you have sixty-four threads and a net clock speed of 89.6GHz. Not too long ago, that would have been considered a supercomputer. The T2 also comes with some essentials already included right in the microchip, such as PCI Express (x8 1.0), two separate 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections (Not too shabby, considering that your average computer only has a single 10/10 megabit connection, and usually not built into the CPU), and four dual-channel FBDIMM controllers. It also has a couple of unbelievable hardware features built in, like one FPU and tow ALUs per core for extensive math requirements (Calculating the millionth digit of pi has never been so fun!) and eight encryption engines in every chip, each one capable of encoding and decoding DES, 3DES, AES, RC4, SHA1, SHA256, MD5, RSA-2048, ECC, and CRC32. It's internal memory is a bit low, but 4MB isn't too shabby for an L2 cache.
 Possibly the greatest thing about this chip, though, is that it's licensed under the GPL. Because of this, it is possible for any capable organization or individual to create one, which means that it's highly possible that you'll see some branded by AMD, NEC, LG, and other high-density semiconductor companies. It can also be changed so long as the derivative is also licensed under the terms of the GPL. It's likely that it will be ubiquitous within a few years of use, meaning that some version of Windows will likely be ported for it.
 At such a level of advanced multilevel processing, The UltraSPARC T2 is a great leap in terms of bringing massively-parallel computing to the masses. I'm only sad to see that BeOS doesn't run on it. Oh well, there's hope for Haiku.

Oh, and FYI, T2 PWNz the PS3's Cell.

Eyestrain is teh funz!

 For no real reason other then to do anything, I actually took the time to update my website. I finally took away all traces of all CMS utilities. Now I have nothing left but a minimalist template and stupid text content. On the other hand, I finally took the time to actually double-space after all punctuation. And it loads super-fast - a product of having absolutely no images whatsoever. It took me forever to come up with the color scheme, which is pitiful for only having two colours.
 Now all that's left to do is to update the title page.
 You can take a look. I plan on having some downloadable content available sometime soon. Maybe a techdemo for my game?

...

HA HA HA!

Le Tresor Interdit

For no real reason, I decided to put another video on this blog. Well, it actually did have a purpose. Mostly, I wanted to test out ZSNES's movie dumping abilities. After that, I decided that I also wanted to test Blogger in Draft's new video upload ability. Appearently, it converts the movies to MP4.

I'm sorry, but for some reason the first few seconds of audio don't work. I have no clue as to why.

Look, The Final Frontier is Finally Finished!

 I'm not a Trekkie, per se, but I found that Star Trek has once more become Awesome. Strange, I know.
 What I'm talking about is, of course, Star Trek: New Voyages. It came upon the media for it's infamous episode, with it's principal shooting just completed, "Blood and Fire", which was introduced to me by a lesbian friend of mine (The only reason why I have any dislike for lesbians is that they only tell me after I start to make my moves, seriously). Why the infamy? Because Captain Kirk's nephew starts a new relationship. With a male.
 Normally, I'd just turn my back from this kind of media. Gay romances never seem to make good movies, no matter how heartbreaking Brokeback Mountain was. But there is some interesting points in history that makes that particular episode interesting. First, the script is heavily based off a rejected Star Trek: The Next Generation script. Gene Roddenberry himself, the creator of the franchise, endorsed the idea, saying that it was something that they should do. After all, the original idea was to have the show confront modern-day issues (Ever notice how the early Klingons reminded you of a mixture of Russians and Japanese?). Paramount was being bitchy after Gene died though - "The bastard's dead, we don't have to do as he said."
 I was rather surprised to see how well New Voyage was produced. They managed to modernize the original Star Trek while retaining the ghetto-fabulous effects and sounds. Some of the actors actually do a very good job of incorporating some of the cannon cast's acting quirks into their performance while somehow managing to make that character their own. And while the updated visual effects (like the ships and more fantastical settings) are a bit 'generic', they ended up looking very good.
 The storywriting deserves some good note as well. The episodes are amazingly well written with incredible plot convolutions. Some things are totally unexpected. The last episode released, "To Serve All my Days", explores the character of Commander Checkov better then any of the episodes produced by Desilu. And even though there are warnings throughout the episode, you never really expect what happens to him at the end. Want to know what happens to him? Go download it. It's free.
 I'm a bit annoyed at how long it takes to produce these shows, though. Luckally, the next episode is almost complete. That would be "World Enough and Time", as pictured above. It actually has a cannon cast member, George Takai, return to his role as Mr. Sulu. To make up for his old age, he's been thrown across time. The new Sulu actually battles the old Sulu! Needless to say, I am waiting with anticipation for this next episode to premier. Heck, it's momentum gave it the priority to have a live stream for it's initial release, along with an after-party in Hollywood.

 Now I leave you to click on the title to be teleported to the Star Trek: New Voyages website to download and watch the first episodes, along with these final words:

I have too many lesbian friends.

P.S. To Stephen, Surkit: Yes, I am making fun of you. Seeing you question my sexuality is just too funny.

Zzzzz....

 I'm sorry for my long absense. I've been writing about a million personal issues in this blog, but like any nearly-sane individual, I didn't publish it.

 So in repentance, I show you this video:

BASTARDS!!!

Heck. I was just angry. I thought I'd prove my existance by writing in here for now.


Yeah. I was REALLY angry.

But I'm OK. There's someone who did the kind miricle of being loving to me. Needless to say, it wasn't my parents.

So... little... inspiration....

Give me something bloggable, oh ye muses of life!

You Jerks!

At least one of you could have consoled me!

I feel so hurt, emotionally!

Living As a Dead Man

 I never knew what loneliness was like before. I simply never cared if anyone would be with me or not. I even scoffed at those who were lonely themselves.
 But what a fool I am now.
 Living in that odd state of unknown emotion. Perhaps it's not emotion, but the complete lack of emotion. The lack of proof of love. I see the lack of the person who I had loved so much. The person whom I thought that I could have spent the rest of my life with; this is a thought that I maintain, thinking I could somehow start again. I can't find anything to fill the burning void left behind. I can only listen to songs. They open the wounds, but I feel that they still heal that pittiful wound.

 Now, as silly as this sounds, I'll date the first person who asks me. No matter what sex that person is. I only care if you can love me.

OS Battle for Werkzeug - Finale.

 Most losers with computers haven't tried any other operating system than Windows. The learned are those who have looked at Linux, without even learning how to use it. I, on the other hand, have tried about every different OS that there is to try. Windows, Linux, AmigaOS, MacOS, BeOS, BSD, VMS, Haiku, AROS, AtheOS, and even Plan9.


Now, some of you may remember that I was trying to figure out what OS I would use to replace Ubuntu on my desktop. (The archiving features of the blog are great, aren't they?)
Well, That never happened. It stayed on my desktop untill the day it died and was replaced by MegaLupis, currently active as my server.
Now, thanks to the wondrous charity of my sister, I now have a new desktop computer, now named Werkzeug. It's much nicer now, with double the memory and clockspeed, with extra CPU features and a faster FSB to boot! The only probem is, what operating system do I put on it?
 As I've said before, I've fallen out of love with Ubuntu. It's dropping support rapidly, and worse, Firefox hasn't been updated in ages! So I had a choice of different operating systems to choose from. The main choices I had were AROS, Haiku, Linux of some other distrobution, and the winner, which I'll tell you about later.

 I'll make this easy on you, and shorten the story. AROS is too unstable, has no applications, and no support; Haiku doesn't even have an installer (although through virtual machines, it looked hella awesome!), and I really didn't want another Linux distrobution — I have too many Ubuntu CDs in my desk as it is.
 So I found Syllable. It's a fork of AtheOS. I figured if someone wanted to use a completely Open-sourced original operating system in the feild of desktop environment as well as Kernel(!(!!!)), there must be something special about it!

 Syllable's installation starts off by starting a stripped-down graphical user environment with a window running Aterm, the (surprise!) terminal emulator, which automatically runs the install script. It asked for the usual junk: Partitioning, formatting, and bootloader setup. The only interesting things notable about the install was that editing the partitions and the bootloader menu gave graphical applications.
 Although the installation process was insanely easy, I still have no idea how I got it to work. The bootloader is a specialized version of GRUB, so why was I having such a hard time installing it? Eventually, I somehow made it work.

 I'm absorbed in Naruto and pizza at the moment, so I'll just say "To be continued..." and write a sequel later.

X68000 Goodness: Wolfteam

 Not many people know this, but most of the best Wolfteam games for the Genesis were the crap versions.
 It's true. Let's take a look at three of the epitomes of Wolfteam's goodness; Arcus Odyssey, Sol-Feace, and Granada.
 What do they have in common? Yes, they do all have that one wonderful and much-loved composer, Motoi Sakuraba, but that's not all. They all started out on the Sharp X68000. Sakuraba even said that his works on Sol-Feace were designed specifically for the X68000!
 Now I realise that you may not all have the luck to own one of these marvelous machines (nor do you have the brains to run an emulator - numbskulls!), but in a single phrase describing it. It PWNS the PCEngine, Megadrive, and SNES (Even with acceleration chips embedded, most of the time). Can you connect your SNES to the internet? I think not!
 Although I could alert you to the differences in each and every Wolfteam game (which would talk a long time, as they made quite a lot of X68k games - It's a good development system), I'll simply focus on Granada, my personal favorite.
 When you push in disk one (there's three floppies, but you only need to use two of them. Luckally, Sharp decided to build-in two floppy drives, eh?), you will be presented with one of the most exciting openings being played right before your eyes. The excellent OP song (Which I have recorded here) - gotta love Copyright loopholes!) provided by the superb artist Motoi Sakuraba gives one of the most exciting synergistic effects you'll ever see. I'm not kidding - you'll be awed.

  The Genesis version, in comparason, has a hevily butchered OP song and a text intro.

 After you finish watching the intro and popped in the third disk into FDD0, You will see a technically amazing line effect where the Granada logo phases onto the screen. There are many details in the logo; You can see some bronze tarnishing, and the shiny parts glistening in accordance with it's "manufacture."
 In the Genesis version, the line effects are maintained, but there is no tarnishing effect in the logo due to palate size limitations. There is also no shining effect. So what if it's just simple palate-swapping, it still look good, damnit!

 Now, to the gameplay. Granada (the game's namesake is the tank you pilot) is capable of 360 degrees of movement. Although digital gamepads only have eight directions, the limitation is surpassed by allowing the player to make partial turns, and then hold the direction of the turret. The turret is a fully-rotating object: no missing angles to be seen on this game. The treads are even visible underneath it. Pressing A makes the turret rapid-fire, Pushing B holds the turret direction, and hitting both makes you fire a cannon shot - taking out many enemies with one blow, sometimes. All of the enemies are also fully rotatible, giving the feeling that for some reason, they must have a smarter AI (It's hard to explain it - you have to see it). Everything that moves, explodes, adding hellish adrenalin bonus to the player. And, of course, Motoi Sakuraba's soundtrack will excite you to the point of either a heart attack or a coma.
 The Genesis port has most of the same things, mainly rotating objects. What is missing is basically the little details that make the game directed, and not feeling like they were manufactured. For instance, Granada's treads are totally missing, and targets blend in with their surroundings, making that radar ever-so-loved. Sound quality is reduced, although not too much - excepting the opening theme... Grr....
 The main qualms I have with the Genesis version is the difference in game play mechanics. instead of programming a good AI like the X68k version, they decided to just throw lots more enemies at you! It's simply stupid, especially because that many rotation calculations really bog down the processor - making this one of the few Genesis games with dropped frames. Also, they did as much to make this version easier, although that may just be because I played the US version. The Genesis version gives you the maximum amount of shields available - with no options to change them whatsoever. This is opposed to the X68k version's options to give you no shield or no spare tanks. The Genesis version is even missing obstacles, like the rollers from the first stage.

 So you see, the Genesis was not as good as we remembered it to be. Although Wolfteam was still able to show off the wonderful things you can accomplish with the system (the Motorola 68000 is quite a nice chip, after all), it couldn't compare to a superiorly-built system like the Sharp X68000 - even though it was produced quite a few years before the Genesis.

Time....

 I won't deny it; I've been ignoring this blog for a while. And I won't deny that it's been for mostly sexual reasons, either. I haven't written in over a month. In that time, I've gained and lost a loved one.
 What can I say, really? I can't say anything meaningful; I've gotten people to impress an image on who read this blog. I definitely won't tell anyone who I've fallen for, but I'll do everyone a favor by telling them how they might find out. (Although the directions will definitely make no sense)

 To find this person's identity, log into Sociopolitical Ramifications as a guest (you can use your own character, if you have one) and ask the persons there if they know who I've been with. You can even search to talk to me live if you can page and locate me. But as a rule, you can only get an answer from me if you tell me your real name.

 This post today does have a purpose, however. And that is to declare something. It is a declairation of sexuality! Don't worry; I'm not going to say that I like it a certain way or something, but I'm going to make a simple statement that should be obvious.

 Here we go:

   In order to be sexually engaged with somebody, only an intimate relationship reaching beneath the skin will suffice.
 Yes, I know that it should be insanely obvious, but I find that there are way too many idiots who don't know this! And it's so insanely obvious! INSANELY OBVIOUS! I can't emphasize this enough! I'm sick of seeing these cheesy women just waiting to be 'picked up' by some even more stupid jerk-ass guy! Gyaaaggghhhhh.....

Meh.

 Yeah, I'm just pissed off and depressed. Plus I just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye. That's what happens when you watch the entire season of 'I Love New York' on VH1. All I can say is that New York is an idiot for not picking Mr. Boston. Jews are so awesome.

Some stupid fun.

My Mormon name is Arland Bracken!
What's yours?

I'm appreciated!

 Well, everyone likes to be loved, and likewise, I like to know that a project I've completed is appreciated.
 I was recently contacted via AIM (he was actually using ICQ - there's a crossover) by FurryFox, AKA Red_Fox. I assume that he's Czech, because his alias was @something.cz. He was contacting me in regards to my vocalization of the Furry Personal Assistant hypnosis files. He had claimed that he had gotten somewhere with them.


 Here they are, for all those who are curious. Please take note that I am not a licensed hypnotherapist; I am an amature, and that there is no promise that these will work as desired.
File 1
File 2

Because Jesus is Fun!

Because I practice my shading religiously.

Shading is fun!

 I just figured out the perfect method for shading. It never (before I thought of this shading technique) occured to me that the layering capabilities of the GIMP were so useful!

 This is a demo shading and colorization that I made. It's an alien and a severed foot.

Woo Hoo!

 OK, I'm officially having too much fun this weekend. I Havn't even left my room today (except to get some trash cans - But there's only so much trash I can handle). I just found out some of the values of the vintage books I bought about a year ago and never got to. "A Heritige of European Literature" is copyrighted 1948. Herzog is only from 1961 (actual publication 1964), but it's extremely good reading. The first line is "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."
 I didn't think that anyone would name their child Moses anymore.

 Who cares, I finally got Dragostea Din Tei from O-Zone! Nu ma, nu ma!

I've Got More Kudos to Hand Out - Wesnoth

 It seems like that's all I've been doing lately, just giving out kudos like they were some kind of granola bar! But I suppose it can't be helped. Battle for Wesnoth has been under my nose for far too long — especially for a good game.

 Battle for Wesnoth is an odd duck, to say the least. It's not that there's any weird happenings in the game, per se; it's how it came to be.

 Let me put it this way: It's an open source game that has actual content.

(the crowd goes wild. On the East shores, there are screams of terror, whlist on the West shores there are thousands standing with their mouths agape.)

 Open-source games (with the exception of games that started out commercial before releasing the source) have the tendency to be bad. Very very bad. Wesnoth is nothing of the sort. In fact, it somehow manages to be extremely well designed without using any proprietary software libraries. This is an awesome accomplishment, and has been taken full advantage of, with ports made for virtually every imaginable system. It is available on Windows, Mac (Surprised me to!), Linux, BSD (the Open and Free varieties), BeOS, AmigaOS4(!), OS/2 and eComStation. There's a gossiped unofficial port to MorphOS - which will put me in heaven if I ever do get the chance to get my hands on a PegasosPPC (I'm hoping to save up and get the new Pegasos 3!)

 It's not easy to describe what amazes me so. Perhaps it's the amount of people playing the game. Open Source games tend to be somewhat of a niche, with not many people playing. But Wesnoth is such a good game, it's actually able to attract people to it! One of the cool features of the game is the ability to make your own campaigns. This is a bit of a large task, however, as you need to understand WML (Wesnoth Markup Language, not the WAP hypertext junk).

 There are a number of things that I can say makes this game great (which I generally won't mention), but I think that the #1 thing is the Music. It's so good (not so much as well composed, but well produced), that Many would call it better then commercial game music (other than, of course, any music produced by Procyon Studios — Mitsuda is just too great). Some of it does sound as if it came from Blizzard's Diablo.

 Of course, there are negative points to all things, but there are a plesent few in Battle for Wesnoth. I've narrowed it down to two very minor faults. The first problem is that there is no loading screen — which can make you believe that your computer has crashed. It is, however, still bearable, and is never a problem during gameplay. The second (and last) is just an annoyance. There's no hardware acceleration (Such as OpenGL, which is available for virtually any video graphics setup), so things can get slow if you have a slow processor. There could have really been some nice effects if there was hardware acceleration (smooth scrolling comes to mind).

Sleep Deprivation - Iis Goodt!

Not sleeping is a good thing. You get to do all kinds of things that you would have been missing out on if you were sleeping. Like ranting. BlackBox is such a cool Window Manager. I should make a gooder Xwindows for Windows. Then I could have the real BlackBox instead of a clone. Although the clone is good....

But how about that GNU Solfege? It's nice, huh. Eartraining is a good thing.

I had an opportunity to chat at 4AM today. Wheeee!


Voltron is so cool. sugoii desu yo~~~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MEGA SPEED!!!!!

 It's highly unlike me to post two articles in the same week (a habit that I've been trying to shake), but there's two posts today.
 I have just discovered the joy of BBLean.

 In the last post, I casually mentioned the Replacement for window's evil shell (explore.exe) called LightStep. It was nice - full featured, to say the least! It was far too bloated - there were far too many times that I had used over 100% of my CPU cycles. It did have a number of nice features, though, like an uber-quicklaunch popup bar - one that could parse !bang commands.
 In light of the terrible slowness of LightStep, and in incredible hatred of explorer (with it's never-ending memory consumption!), I looked for a simple window manager. One that would take care of all my window management needs without ANY kind of bloat (Having a Zip Archive extraction and compression tool in a window manager is NOT neccessary!). I looked for the MS Windows equivalent of Blackbox for the X Windowing System.
 Luckally for all of us, the nice fellows at bb4win had the courtesy to make BBLean (AKA BlackboxLean).

 Blackbox (and thus BBLean) has the wondrously simple interface that many early linux pioneers had gotten used to using. And why not? Blackbox is smaller, simpler, and faster then any window manager out there, then or now. And for those of you who can't stand minimalism, there's even a plug-in system.
 When Blackbox is first started, the only thing you will see is the (somewhat badly named) Slit - BB's equivalent of the taskbar, but much better. The Slit gives you access to your running programs, a different way to access the other desktops, your system trey, the date, and the time. All of this fits in a bar that doesn't even reach to either side of the screen. (Technically, the Slit is nothing, just a rectangular container. The functions are provided by special 'docklets.' That's not the official tern, but it's a good descriptive.)
 Blachbox has many of the features one would expect from a popular modern window manager - Features like Virtual Desktops (which are invaluable for people who 'multitask in bulk'), a CLI (BBLean just uses windows' "Run" command), a centralized list of major user programs (Such as solitaire and minesweeper), and a way to get help (Which, in the case of BB, is a guy online screaming "RTFM!" at you - it is, after all, an extremely simple system).

 It's really difficult to describe just how impossibly simple and easy it is to operate BBWM (The WM part of that means "Window Manager"). It's something that you can tell people, but they won't see why that's so great. Let's start at the menus.
 Pop-up Menus are the great helper/launcher/System tree explorer of Blackbox. Right-clicking anywhere on the root window (That's fancy XWS talk for background) will lead you to menus that will allow you to do virtually anything - Launch Programs, view your filesystem tree, change system settings, and change the style. The only things it can't do is switch desktops or find iconified windows. You use the middle mouse button for that.

 Another thing that's totally unexplainable is the unbridled speed. For some reason, it's totally faster then any other window manager out there (with the possible exceptions being UWM and XWM, and of course running in a pure terminal environment, but that means no graphics!) Perhaps it has something to do with the time-warping effect of really good gradient backgrounds... or not. Checking with the Windows Task Manager with BBLean, blackbox.exe takes about 2,077Kb of memory - somewhere between one third and one tenth of explore.exe's memory usage - and that doesn't even count any of it's usage of the Page File... (Removing most of Microsoft's junk would probibly free enough memory to be able to remove the pagefile - at least until I start a program).

 Well, that was my long-winded rant about Blackbox and BBLean. Thank you for not going insane.

Ut Re Mi

 Out of pure insanity, I have installed GNU Solfege.

 Well, Not out of pure insanity — I was researching the penny whistle (An English instrument used in early American anthems and modern Celtic music; it's more commonly called the tin whistle), which, in Wikipedia, linked to the Solfege (FYI, The names of the notes are really Ut, Re, Mi, So, Fa, Ti, and Do — notes and syllables from a catholic hymn). On the Solfege page, there was a link to GNU Solfege, So I downloaded and installed it.
 GNU Solfege is quite an impressive program. It does a number of things, like teaching you basic music theory, training you to recognise harmonies and intervals, among other things. From the site, this is it's features:

• Recognise melodic and harmonic intervals
• Compare interval sizes
• Sing the intervals the computer asks for
• Identify chords
• Sing chords
• Scales
• Dictation
• Remembering rhythmic patterns

GNU Solfege is an amazing program, definitely a must-have for those who have problems recognizing tones or has rhythmic problems.

 I'd write more, but I am too busy messing with the genius LightStep WM.

Yasonori News

 Yasunori Mitsuda is slowly but surely making Procyon Studios and Sleigh Bells highly competitive businesses. Although none of the records they've released have reached "gold" or "platinum" (I don't think that Japan actually has those awards), every single disc has been a Killer. I just got Moonlit Shadow, a collaboration between Mitsuda Yasunori-sama and Higashino Miki-san, and it contains some of the most brilliant tracks I've ever heard in the genre of jazz. Some of the tracks have Pitched Poetry (AKA rap) in them, and it's just unbelievable what you're hearing. It shows how much Mitsuda's changed since 2197.

 Sleigh Bells offers a pretty large collection of music, even if only in account of their small size (they probibly don't even have ten employees). Currently offered is:

• An Cinnuint
• Sailing to the World
• Xenosaga Episode I
• 箱の庭 (Hako no Niwa, which means backyard... something)
• Moonlit Shadow
• Kirite (with book by Kato Masato-Sama)

 Procyon Studios is going even better then Sleigh Bells. First off, Procyon is the company that produced all of those albums. Second off, Procyon is being Contracted for major Moolah by game companies — only two of the Sleigh Bells releases aren't soundtracks (Moonlit Shadow and Kirite — both of which tend to be better then the rest). Procyon is also being benefited by the fact that Suzuki Hidenori-sama, one of the world's best sound programmers and loyal Procyon employee, has released under Procyon's sails Digital Sound Elements, A tool that develops code for music (Currently working with the DS, Wii, And PS2). I have no doubt in my mind that Digital Sound Elements will be a good professional sound development SDK, and will be popular among other sound dev. studios.


UPDATE:
Dude! I just found out that Procyon worked on Katamari Damashi! I always wondered why it was that I loved that soundtrack so much...!

Written next to their section on "Published works" was 効果音 ： 伊藤美紀、金子昌晃

It's January 22

... And the final day of FURther CONfusion.

 It's strange — I've never wanted to go to a confurance so much before - with the obvious exception of Anthrocon (Uncle Kage is just too much fun).

The Real Cable Innovators

 Ok, so I admit that hours of midterm testing and a couple of throat lozenges have made me somewhat giddy (I was laughing like crazy when I saw that sunsilk commercial. OMGWTF! Stuffed hair)! But seriously, there's some major amazing history I just discovered!

 Let me introduce you all to the Cable Consortium. The CC is a group (they're really made up of the major cable providers, with a big chair reserved for AOL Time Warner) dedicated to standardizing Cable communication protocols and other standards, such as digital cable (Including HDTV broadcasts) and cable modem (Still no clue to it's real name...). But let me tell you something; CC is not the innovator of the Cable Communications business. CC is just a spinoff of the springboard provided by Sega.
 The innovation provided by Sega is - in fact - Sega Channel. In the 90s, Sega introduced a service through a deal with the Time Warner Cable company (who provided the actual service) and a side deal with Scientific Atlanta (the provider of the hardware) to provide about 50 games per month to the subscriber's Sega Genesis system, as well as some original content and sneak peaks of upcoming and in-progress translation games and some original music. Sega Channel's influence was so great, that it encouraged Japanese companies to translate their games to cater to an American audience, and gave free advertisement to boot. Unfortunately, it's cancelation stopped in-production games from being completed, including Pulseman, one of the greatest linear simple-system platformers ever.
 Sega Channel's demise was only the beginning of cable innovation. After Sega pulled off the licensing for the games, the cable company utilized their advantage of the cleaned up signal to add the ability of ordering Pay-Per-View through the cable lines, as opposed to the traditional manner of telephoning. Later came the infamous cable modem, digital television, and digital voice lines. None of this actually needed any new broadcast equipment, but rather piggybacked on the new broadband data line.

 Wow, that whole Sega innovation was almost as surprising as the improvement of OpenGL2 over a windows Software renderer! Then again, maybe not....

And the New Linux Distro is....

None.

 Heck, I really don't know what I'm going to do. Building applications is the only way I can get good speed on the games I play (Especially emulators), and that's just plain too difficult. So I decided to test out Solaris 10. I figured, "Heck, why not. If Sun, a major technology company, thinks that their OS is better then the rest, then why shouldn't I at least know why?"
 So I ordered the Solaris 10 media kit (for no charge - It's similar to Ubuntu's ShipIt service. Oh, and does anyone want some free Ubuntu CDs?).

 Heck, If this doesn't work out, then I'm going to just wait for Haiku.

Wanna see?

The title to this post is a link to a zip archive with my audition for the part of Konstantin Koptev in the audio dramatization of Experimental Comic Kotone. I just thought that the world deserves to hear my sexy voice.

I've fallen in love!

 Of course, that would be the purpose of Ren'ai games.

 Due to a certain new relation to the Ren'Py engine, I have been introduced to Ren'ai games. that's right — "Romantic Love."

 This particular article is a note to Senior Year, the best of the bunch (unless you're a princess-maker kinda guy). It's so good, I decided to make the title the link.

 I have to say, Senior Year is quite a shining example of the genre (I say 'shining' because it's not quite like the rest — it's shinier). It's the first Ren'ai game to have complete English voiced dialog (except, of course, when it's you talking. That comes complementary with a birth). And it's perverted without being adult, hoorah!

 The first person that my persona (who was, oddly enough, named "Akir Ikasu") was Becky. It infuriated me quite a lot, because it only happened because I accidentally flirted with the stupid book girl! She's the one who you'll want to talk to if you're especially perverted. If you're not like that, then you will simply be laughing your head off. She's the type of girl who isn't really one to fall in love with (I previewed the marriage path, and she said "Why'd you have to ruin all the fun?"), but would really use as a so-called 'plaything.'
 And she was a friggin' waitress!

 The person who I seriously wanted to pursue was the splendidly angelic Linda. Her exquisite voice is none other then the marvelous Mirielle. If it's possible to say that I somehow got hooked on ren'ai games, it's Linda that did it.

 Linda's love is the hardest to pursue, but it's her love that is so beautiful and pure, that you can't help but try to grasp for it at every occasion. Stay and talk to Becky? No way! Flirt with the book girl? Why do that when there's someone who's actually interesting?! Get together with Carla the Cafeteria worker? No way in hell! (Although, she is kind of cute....)

 Linda is just so cute, and she's so shy, but that's alright, because you're willing to help her, anything to get her to marry you!

 Of course, sly man I am, I married her in 12 minutes.



And I'm not kidding when I say that Linda's Voice Actor has inspired me to join the VAA (Voice Actor Alliance) and help her with her production.