welp

This is a mixed review.

I downloaded the demo of the new Alien VS Predator game from the steam storefront a few days ago.

There were some issues with an earlier release of the demo which made it almost impossible to join a game within a human lifespan. If through necromancy you managed to join a game, it would promptly disconnect.

The developers (Rebellion) apparently did some updating to the demo, and after a hiccup with the update process, telling me that I had an install problem with 100% integrity files (I wonder what was wrong then), it installed fine.
The update is clearly an improvement over the previous version, joining a game is a two minute process.

Now while that is no longer a problem, the volume settings in this game are atrocious. If I set the master volume to 1 bar and the voice volume to 0 bars, I get voices which shake my entire house. If I put something at zero bars, I expect 0 fucking bars. No excuse.
Jesus christ 0 bars are you fucking serious. Also, allow push to talk HOLY FUCK. Detecting noise is a good idea with LOUD DRONING NOISES ON AND ON AND ON AND ON BURROWING INTO YOUR SKULL. I would like to let John Dies At The End share one of my favorite quotes with you:

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from perfectly-cooked steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at 50,000 watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. It was madness and desperation and deprivation and torment gone supernova, screeches and howls and images and I heard, sprinkled in here and there, my own name.

This is what you bring to the table with your voice chat AVP, I am disappointed.

Thankfully, the developers realized that they could not make you tolerate that bullshit for more than 2 minutes, and it cuts off in game, where all you hear is the screams of people’s heads getting exploded by alien metal tails and predator claws.

The fighting is basic but can get complicated in group fights. M1 jab, M2 charge attack, M1+M2 block, Q to sprint, E for a finishing move grab, each species has its own abilities, aliens crawl on walls, predators become invisible, humans have guns. There are various other things like vision and ranged weapons for the predators if they get “plasma”, but the mechanic essentially boils down to who has the jump on whom, who can get either 3-4 light blows, 1 heavy, or possibly grab for an insta-kill. The pred’s cloaking ability is meh, you see it every time. The human’s range really works to their advantage a lot, but the predators and aliens can run half the map in 3 seconds, so they usually just disappear around a corner before they can shoot them.

Overall I enjoy AVP even though I have to go limit its volume in my OS settings so I can not be overpowered by the droning of ten thousand wasps.

7/10

Update:

Some people requested in game screenshots, so I provide.

Fuck you Hulu.

You started off well, you even changed some of your advertising policies( Hulu user’s support etc) but this new double ad policy is crap.

I did not become a frequent patron of your service to get the same shitty experience everyone else gets on television.  Internet TV is about getting a minimum of advertisement and a maximum of content, don’t double dip motherfuckers.

Note: this also applies to commercials over 30 seconds, unless we are talking a commercial free show; you set the rules motherfuckers, I am just enforcing them.

I swear to god I will go back to torrents in a new york minute.

Have you used subsonic? If you are using something like gnump3d or the like, you have to try it.
Caveats: It’s java. (bleh)

So a friend of mine was working on getting gnump3d working on his home network, and I helped him troubleshoot it, just some misconfiguration stuff. During the process I discovered this really cool looking streaming server called Subsonic. My methodology for finding internet software if Google is being shit for brains; is to do a site specific lifehacker search for the type of software I am looking for, they have good advice on everything.

Anyway, some of the features of Subsonic that I have been using so far: in-browser streaming of music, transcoding of video and audio to formats streamable (flv for video), android integration with my droid, always on authentication, blazing fast indexing of material, really nice album art support, overall just a great product.

Worst part is, it’s free.

To be fair, a lot of what I enabled was through a little googling and applying of minor patching to the code base, but I will let you in on my secrets.

This link was by far the most useful, even if it is a little terse. It took me a minute to figure out the “notepad” section meant to edit the file with the following.
http://www.informationproductsinc.com/b/blog/page/Building-a-streaming-video-server.aspx

And the original from lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5198016/roll-your-own-streaming-media-server-with-subsonic

If ever there is a rogue Jesus on the loose.

So I use this really nice site instapaper (I highly recommend it) and I wanted to write my own instapaer rip off, so here it is.

This program was written with Sinatra, all other code by me.

Just posting from wptogo, a lil android app that allows you to post/edit stuff from your mobile, pretty sweet. I like the options available, especially on the droid.

We are interviewing for a new hire, and this is the suggested requirements:

The ability to react quickly, take in new info and immediately sound like they know what they’re talking about, integrity, a borderline masochistic work ethic, humor, and an outgoing personality are all REQUIRED…

All you need to know about dwarf fortress

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Funktionide Part II from eltopo on Vimeo.

http://www.commandlinefu.com is a great website with a wealth of information about bash and related fields, I found four or five snippets that instantly added some damn useful commands to my repertoire, and a couple more that floored me, I couldn’t believe I didn’t know them already!

For example:

cat *.c | { printf “se te du\nplot ‘-’ t ” w dots\n”; tr ‘[[:upper:]]’ ‘[[:lower:]]’ | tr -s [[:punct:][:space:]] ‘\n’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 100 | awk ‘{print $1}END{print “e”}’; } | gnuplot

Uses the dumb terminal option in gnuplot to plot a graph of frequencies. In this case, we are looking at a frequency analysis of words in all of the .c files.

–From http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4099/plot-frequency-distribution-of-words-from-files-on-a-terminal.

This site is damn useful.