All Blogs

Most of the blogs I've seen on Tumblr are weird and low-content, with lots of noisy, loud images and pointlessness. Especially the ones who ended up following me when I started posting a bunch of things over from my Livejournal.

The most recent blog that followed me is of a very different sort. It's shockingly content heavy with at least a dozen posts in one day, but I think it counts as more sociopathic and insane rather than weird. First I thought it was an Atheist attacking Christians, but looking at it further it seems to be some sort of proto-theism that tries to absorb the god of Judaism then say that everyone else currently following him is wrong, then decides to toss in nonsense about communism and anarchy. There's even some bizarre references to transhumanist anti-homosexuality rhetoric to top it off. It's the most ridiculously over the top thing I've ever seen.

I don't even think I'm going to post a link unless someone really wants it. I'm not sure if I want that person to get any more publicity...

Books:

Someday... SOMEDAY I'll finish Books of Skyrim.

Games:

10. Hotshots Golf: International. Quite fun. I'm stuck at about 460th in the world so far...

Videos:

25. Twelve Kingdoms. Quite an interesting series. A bit libertarian by the end, even though it can be a slog towards the beginning.

26. True Tears. Good, but annoying at the same time.

27. Doctor Who: Black Orchid. Cricket, and old time british explorers.

28. Doctor Who: Earthshock. They were trying to be all edgy and dramatic by killing off a character in this, but it was kind of flat.

29. The Black Cauldron. Interesting. Went really fast, about like watching the Dragons Lair 2 game.

30. Doctor Who: The Visitation. I don't remember much about it...

31. Sherlock Series 1. Pretty good, up until the end of the last episode. That was terr-i-ble.

32. Strike Witches. Urgh. I hate shows that lean on lack of clothes like this one.

33. This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. Meh. Pseudoscientific nonsense.

34. Witchblade. Really interesting actually.

35. A place promised in our early days. Interesting. Alternate worlds.

Books:

I still haven't worked my way through the Skyrim book, but I'm about 7/10ths of the way through.

Games:

8. Journey. Worth getting. Really. Go buy it now.

9. Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack. Excellent game, a side scroller like Rayman Origins, mashed up with Katamari Damacy.

Videos:

14. Stargate SG1 Season 2. Pretty good.

15. Vexille. Quite interesting. Like Ghost in the Shell, but less optimistic...

16. Gunslinger Girl Season 2. Still as creepy a concept as ever. Focuses even more on the villians.

17. Doctor Who: The Visitation. Aliens attacking humans. Interesting twist ending. Just like the later one where Doctor Who visits right before vesuvius.

18. Sherlock Season 1. Very good, aside from the ending of the 3rd episode.

19. Gunbuster. Another one of those ever expanding scale mecha shows, very rapid and short, but not really that great.

20. The Road to El Dorado. Pretty good. Plot holes you can drive a semi through.

21. Doctor Who: Four to Doomsday. I think I mentioned this one before.

22. Dragons Lair 2. I watched this instead of playing it. After watching it, I don't know how anyone could finish the darn thing. too fast and chaotic.

23. Blackjack. I went in expecting medical puzzles, and instead got mysticism, radical environmentalism, and lots of supporting the small country dictator.

24. Doctor Who: Kinda. Meh.

I've had Telekill on my PSN friends list since the early days of Gamesey.com (Now Gameslurp.com.) I apparently never looked closely at his profile though...

Today I was looking through my Near charts and clicked on one of the people with the little orange friend circle, and noticed it said Telekill... Odd, I only knew him through Gamesey, and he hadn't posted there since 2007.

I was about to accuse Near of being inaccurate, then I went and looked up Telekill's profile here... And it said that he lived in the same area of the world that I did.

The Doctor Who episode is rather amusing. They talk about these tiny chips about the size of an arm cell phone chip that "has more connections than the synapses in the brain"

Then they claim the junctions are 100nm in size...

And here we're starting to make 22nm chips and they aren't anywhere near as powerful as the ones described in the show.

I've been using a Zacate board for several months now. Zacate Asus

For a $120 system where I borrowed ram from another system to get it running, it's been solid as a linux system. I mostly just used nfs to mount my /home drive and ran the system off a small partition on the hard drive. It's decent, but it wasn't great.

I recently installed Windows 8 preview on it using up more of the huge hard drive I had in the system. What a difference solid drivers make. Youtube stuttered and dragged under linux. It ran solid full screen under win8. Most web pages work better under chrome on windows than linux.

Maybe it's also because linux does poorly with CPU scaling and was sitting at 800mhz the whole time, but it's actually a solid system that could be used as someone's main system as long as you don't want to play really intensive 3d games.

These motherboards are as cheap as $75 now with processor...

I recently bought a new Wii to replace a broken one...

I have 11 Wii games, several of which I really want to finish.

So why is it that I've not played it since I bought it, and I'm just playing Vita Golf, Assassin's Creed 1, and Mass Effect 2 instead?

I really didn't get much done this month... Other than work. Maybe the Vita is partially to blame. ;)

Books:

None, not quite done with "Books of Skyrim"

Games:

6. Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. Pretty standard layton game, but the twist at the end was really good.

7. Final Fantasy 13-2. Great game, but I hate cliffhanger endings... Still a bit to do on this one.

Videos:

9. We are the Strange. Terrible. 3 minutes of coherent story jam packed in a 60+ minute film with liberal use of surreality and Sinistar audio tracks.

10. Doctor Who: Logopolis. Oh look, the doctor visits a place that is theoretically holding the universe together, and the master ends up popping in and nearly destroys the universe...

11. Doctor Who: Castrovalva. Against my better judgement, I started on the 5th doctor's stuff. The master again. Meh.

12. Futurama, 6th series. Pretty good for themost part.

13. Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Schitzophrenic. A different art style and a parody of a new type of fiction every episode. Somewhat entertaining.

While looking at the intellectual property notices of my Vita, I saw some interesting tidbits.

Netfront from Access Co in japan is apparently still the web browser for this thing, Access Co is the company that owns the PalmOS operating system and the Graffiti text entry method.

It uses Skyhook for location services.

Open source components it uses? Blist, CyrusSASL, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Freetype, Giflib, libEtPan!, libjpeg, liftiff, MD5, squish, strlcpy.

For the web browser, it uses cairo, dtoa, expat, Freetype2, hash.c, ICU, libjpeg, libpixman, libxml2, list.c, PCRE, trio, Webkit.

Other software? FLANN, OpenCV.

It's interesting that the Vita has such a WebOS style interface, when PalmOS's developers apparently did some of the development on the system...

Also, the blog may be up and down here, it seems to have run out of memory, and I'm noticing that there was a rootkit on it at one point. I'm going to be replacing this VM with something new as soon as I can.

Books:

Just one,

1. Kaspar's Box. Yet another Chalker book I'm highly disappointed in. At first it felt like I was reading a very interesting book in the vein of The Wizard of Karres. By the end though, the whole thing just fizzles out and crashes into a complete and dull non-ending.

Games.

Ridiculous numbers of them.

1. Rage. Took a break from Skyrim to plow through this one, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

2. Solatorobo. I've been working on this one for months, it really works well as a bite-sized game where you can do 15-20 minutes here and there.

3. Skyrim. Terrible, but so broad and tapping into those MMO-esque addictive quest acquisition urge.

4. FF3. Knocked this out in a few days after I finished half of it years ago.

5. Mecho Wars. Almost doesn't count as it's a PSN Mini title... but it's really quite good.

Videos:

1. Bubblegum Crisis. I hate going back to old anime like this, it seems so lousy even if it was good at the time.

2. Kimagure Orange Road. Cheesy old japanese sitcom anime. Nice to see the rest of a series I watched a decade and a half ago. Or most of the rest, netflix doesn't have the first 3 dvds...

3. Doctor Who: The E-Space Trilogy. Not terrible.

4. Doctor Who: Keeper of Traken. Eh? It's ok.

5. Futurama series 5/6: mostly OK.

6. Doctor Who: The Leisure Hive. Another forgettable old Doctor Who episode.

7. Stargate SG1 Season 1: Pretty good...

8. Kick-ass. A decent movie, better than expected.

It's already been an incredibly productive month for games.

Rage was the first game I finished a few weeks ago. I was frustrated at Skyrim for being so buggy, so I took a break and plowed through this one. Just about 17 hours from start to finish.

The second was Solatorobo. I've been working on it for several months. It's an ideal game for bite sized gaming sessions, usually just a half hour or so before I go to sleep. Ultimately took just over 20 hours to finish both chapters, and another 2 hours for some additional content. There's actually another 2 missions and lots of optional stuff left undone though.

Finally, after 130 hours Skyrim is done. At least the main quest line. I probably put another 10-15 hours in that were lost because of crashes though... Of course, I still have quests to do... 3 of the guild quests are either unstarted, or unfinished. Still have a civil war to finish.

That puts me at 3 games for January already, more than I finished January last year...

If I'm lucky, I'll get FF3 finished before the end of the month as well.

Not going to be much of a post for december of 2011... But the year end total? 22 books, 22 games, and 96 video series/movies/etc.

Books: Nada. Half-way through Kaspar's Box though.

Games: None. Played a lot of Skyrim, solatorobo, and Bastion, but didn't finish any of them.

Videos:

90. Lost in Space. Interesting update of the original...

91. Outlaw Star. I'm not really happy with this series. I probably would have been if I watched it back when it was on TV though... I've gotten tired of some of the anime tropes it uses.

92. 12:01. A time loop like Groundhog's day. 18 hours over and over. They didn't even try for an optimal ending though, they broke the loop on quite a sub-optimal one...

93. Doctor Who: Creature from the Pit. It was OK.

94. Doctor Who: Horns of Nimon. Another OK one.

95. Doctor Who: Season 6. Quite good, interesting ending. Unexpected.

96: Doctor who: The City of Death. Multiple Mona lisa and Leonardo Dvinci...

Mostly gift cards this year, but happily $70 of the gift cards were PSN. Picked up Corpse Party for $20, Trine 2 for $15, Assassin's Creed 2 bundle for $13, and Red Dead Redemption bundle for $25. Also received a copy of Rage, which I'm sure I'll find entertaining. I ended up passing on the Assassin's Creed Brotherhood $25 bundle, and the Borderlands $15 bundle. I need to see if AC is good first, and I have Borderlands already on Steam.

The downside to getting PSN downloadable games though is how long they take to download and install. I started the process last night, and 24 hours later it still hasn't downloaded all 4 of my bits of software. RDR is 8.3 gigs and I just started installing it around 15 minutes ago, it's at 45%. Sony really needs to beef up their server network somehow. Maybe setup some CDNs.

Lastly, $75 in Best Buy cards, and a string of USB LED lights. That puts me half-way to replacing my wireless headphones that broke this year.

KEXO ran some old radio shows this year. We found them entertaining enough that I went and bought a collection of Abbot and Costello shows. $5 for 50 shows. 10 cents each for a half hour of audio. Pretty good bargain, really. Fun listening to the quaint Cigarette commercials in the middle of the shows.

I shuffled through everything I've finished this year and picked out the ones that were the most fun for me. Not counting December of course... but I'm not sure what could change this list at this point.

Books:

1. One Day on Mars
2. The Rolling Stones
3. Storm from the Shadows
4. Quantum Connection
5. Mogworld

Games:

1. Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
2. Tales of Monkey Island
3. Disgaea 4
4. Stacking
5. Portal 2

Videos:

1. Porco Rosso
2. Darker than Black
3. Eden of the East
4. Moribito
5. Farscape

Wow, I didn't have much time for entertainment this month...

Books:

22: The Wizard of Karres: a sequel to an old Schmitz book. Written by the Shadow of the Lion folks (Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint, Dave Freer)

Games:

22: Uncharted 3. Finished this on Hard. Oddly, it's almost more fun than Uncharted 2. UC2 I quit after finishing once, UC3 I immediately started replaying on Crushing.

Videos:

87: Pixar Short Films Collection Vol1. Some pretty interesting ones in here.

88: Doctor Who: Destiny of the Daleks. What if you get two super-intelligent computer races set to destroy each other? A logic deadlock, neither can find a hole to attack the other because they can predict each other's every move...

89: Aeon Flux: Animated Collection. So disjointed and odd.

I just had a thought while I was fiddling with Emusic and looking to download my monthly allotment of music...

There's a ton of bands I listen to where I lose track of them and find myself 1-2 discs behind. Bowling for Soup I missed their 2009 release entirely and only picked it up in 2011. I don't have time to check up on all of the bands I listen to and see if they've released new stuff.

I wonder if there's some sort of tool where I could get notice of any artist in my top 50 list on Last.FM that they've released a new cd...

Google Reader recently was stripped of much of its useful functionality. This makes it a bit hard to get the word out on new locations for some of the information I used to share there.

Hopefully some of the people who I knew on google reader will have this blog marked, and the rest probably have Google+.

There are two new RSS feeds that you can add. One should be added to a "Comments" folder to replicate the old recent comments functionality, the other should go into a "Shared" folder that would replace the shared items from the old system.

• Shared Items: http://kazriko.tumblr.com/rss
• Comments on Shared Items: http://kazriko1.disqus.com/latest.rss

Adding things to shares is only marginally harder than the old google plus, and a fair bit easier than sharing to Google+. If you need help setting up your own Tumblr/Disqus solution, just let me know and I'll try and write something up on it.

Books

21. Slanted Jack. Sequel to the book I finished last month. I really should pick it up and try to get more than 24 books in this year.

Games

21. Disgaea 4. Spent all month working on this one. It's addictive.

Videos

75-80. Doctor Who: The Ribos Operation, The Pirate Planet, The Stones of Blood, The Androids of Tara, The Power of Kroll, The Armageddon Factor. This is really one very, very long series of all interconnected stories. Fairly enjoyable, though not consistently so.

81. Birdy the Mighty. Watched because it was about to fall off the netflix list. Avoids most of the typical nonsense that comes with such shows, yet it's still the sort of story you'd usually see only out of Japan.

82. The Princess and the Frog. Yes, I watched a Disney thing. Same as Birdy, about to go off the netflix list. Decent.

83. Moribito. Excellent, go watch it.

84. Solty Rei. Interesting story, about humans and almost humans...

85. Blue Man Group: The Complex Rock Tour Live. I added this way back when we missed seeing them in Vegas over 2 years ago, and it finally reached the top of the DVD queue.

86. Shaun the Sheep Season 1. I thought the kid would enjoy this because it has no words, but he lost interest. I kind of went ahead and watched the rest of the first season anyway.

I keep checking PSN video and comparing it to other ways that I could rent/buy movies and tv shows, and I must say, it's horribly overpriced.

Take House. I missed some episodes in the middle of season 5, but I'm not 100% certain where I stopped watching. It'd be $48 to buy all of season 5 on PSN or another one of these video streaming sites at $2 an episode.

I could buy the whole thing for $20 though on DVD.

I've pretty much missed season 4 and 5 of Venture Bros as well. The price to watch this in SD on PSN? $32. To buy a Bluray disc in HD? $30. What's the point in digital download if you can't be competitive on price? Is it just that some people have an instant gratification thing on that exact show at that exact moment?

The only thing where I'm preferring digital so far to physical copies is the PSP. Mainly because the downloaded copies are faster than the physical ones, have minimal lag, etc.

Books.

20. One Jump Ahead. Mark L Van Name. Quite interesting, showing a mercenary sort of character's thought processes as he works through a way to swindle a government and two mega corporations to get what he wants and rescue a girl...

Games:

19. Resistance 3. Pretty good, better than 2. I think I like the pseudo-regeneration in 1 better than the pure medkit style of 3. Story is derivative, but fits with the universe.

20. Microbot. Not the best game, but a good diversion. I still have 3 silver trophies to go in it though.

Videos:

67. Clannad After Story. Every time I watch one of these shows with a VN attached, I want to play the VN. Too bad they just aren't released here at all...

68. Farscape Season 3. Always an interesting series.

69. Farscape Season 4. Quite a season to end the series on.

70. The Black Cat. Exactly what you'd expect from a Shonen Jump anime.

71. Doctor Who: Underworld. Really, really cheesy.

72. The Book of Eli. Fun post-apoc thing. The ending was an amusing twist.

73. Doctor Who: The Invasion of Time. The sequel to the one where the doctor ends up becoming president. It's better than that one though.

74. Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. Ties up most loose ends. Pretty good. Fakes you out though the way it skips around. Lots of main characters perish, just like Serenity.