Nothing here is explicitly NSFW but exercise caution. Reminds me of that old school Apple IIe Pr0n that came on unlabeled floppies with my first computer….. What did underage people do without the internet?
I’ve learned exciting things at PHENO.
So I ended up buying a Wii (+3 games, 2 controllers) yesterday so I too could have Kart and Smash action nearby but Kart isn’t everything you want it to be and makes me question what the fuck Nintendo was doing. Really, all they really had to do was make Kart 64 + new characters + new levels + motorcycles, done, it would be awesome.
What it does well:
1. Multiplayer racing and Single player racing, these are both good, pretty much standard kart but with some cool levels and some new items, it’s fun. There’s lots to unlock, not sure this is a good thing or not yet.
2. Motorcycles are a nice change of play from the Karts. They’re different in that you can go faster (but turn really poorly) by doing a wheelie. You slow down when power sliding (like Karts in the DS version) which isn’t too bad as you can corner better. You only get blue sparks (or orange Z’s) instead blue and gold sparks (or red Z’s) when powersliding but you can speed boost by doing tricks off jumps which sort of compansates.
3. Classic controller’s controls are everything you want them to be (nunchuk + mote isn’t bad either).
What it sucks at:
1. The motion controls are horrible, I tried the wheel and it sucks… bad. It has no sensitivity and very little fine control. For example, you’d be going in a straight line, want to turn, turn the wheel 90 degrees maybe even 180, guess what you’re still going in a straight line or better yet turn a little but not much and slide off the edge into the oblivion.
2. There’s no coop mode for unlocking stuff in races. This totally blows, it means that you have to play, by yourself, to get gold trophies in all of the cups (8 cups x 3 cc + mirror = 320 races minimum), plus beat all of the set times (beat 25 expert ghost times which will take awhile), plus get all the level stars (whatever those are but I think you only need to get 8). Really Nintendo, for a game known for it’s multiplayer you gimp the unlockables to being done by a single person, this really goes against what you were trying for with the Wii.
3. The only battle modes are with Teams, and only 2 Teams (Red/Blue). I really, really hate this, even more than the no Coop mode. What was wrong with everyone for themselves or find Asshat and kill him mode? Why not at least the option to have MORE than 2 teams or something other than 6 ‘players’ on each team? One ‘feature’ of the teams is that all items are color coded, which really fucks team BLUE since now their fake boxes have a blue tint (quite distiguishable) while the RED boxes are barely distinguishable from the real (but shinier) boxes. It ruins the battle mode of the game (which comes with 12 levels I may never play) enough that I want to return game. They better ‘fix’ this ‘feature’ with some sort of downloadable update. They’ve had a year to play test this game, how did this not come up?
Update: I was wrong, you can do tricks with both types of vehicles, it’s great especially since many levels incorporate quarter pipe like sides where you can, ramp up do a trick, then boost on the way down allowing you to skip tight turns are no penalty. Also, the new Bowser’s Castle (the old one from 64 is also there in a different cup) and the new Rainbow Road are great. The Rainbow Road is what you want it to be, a balanced combination of Super Mario (no walls at all) and 64 (crazy steep drops and tight turns) + speed jumps and boosts (which can be deadly). DK’s Jungle level from 64 is there (my favorite 64 level) but several frustrating changes have been made in that you can’t do the sideways jump (only can go straight) and you can’t power slide up the hill in the cave right before the finish line (there’s a path now and everything outside of it is like sand or ‘rough’).
Update: The game reviews are wildly different. Some people think the Wheel is great (Ars) while others find it to suck like I did (Wii Fanboy). Almost everyone hates the battle mode being teams (Wii fanboy, IGN), but some just ignored it (Ars and others). Some people really like the online feature (Wii Fanboy) others hated it (Ars), I haven’t tried it yet. Everyone agrees that the AI is a horrible cheating machine, and I totally agree with that. I’ll be 7 maybe 15 s ahead of everyone else say 1/3 the map. Then it’ll be blue shell (which also explodes for splash damage) and then either red shell tracking from across the map (bullshit) or lightning bolt, or pow hit. Since being hit by any of these items causes you to lose the both the item your dragging and the one your carrying, you can’t avoid the double, triple, or quadrouple rape. For instance on Delfino Square (DS race level) I was almost 30s ahead, more than 1/2 the map, in Lap 3 when I got blue shell, red shell, lightning bolt, pow, green shell, putting me into 7th place. However since I’m awesome at that level (all that DS pays off) I still got 1st but had it been 150cc or Mirror instead of 50cc, I probably would have had to restart the cup get Gold Trophy through no fault of my own. It’s even worse on Rainbow road or the levels without edges as the blue shell + red shell + getting rammed or spin into a boost will throw you off the edge and then you just lose. This + lack of Coop is going to make the unlocking a bitch, thankfully unlocking more tracks is easy and all I really care about. It would also be nice to have 4 of each light, middle, and heavy class racers for multiplayer but I’m not going to kill myself for that (plus the bonus karts aren’t that great).
This post is from Sherry Towers, the author of the D0 article on gender bias in D0. She refers to the offhand comment I made in my earlier post (that I now realize is one of the few comments I posted). She points out that you cannot play the system as I suggested. However, you can do things that may put you in a better position. For example, you can simply refuse to do service tasks (it is your life), instead aligning yourself with people who only want you for analysis. I can see a young cabal getting together and just deciding to do this. Of course, I am not on that experiment, so it is easy for me to make such statements without really understanding how I would feel. But, I think it is not unreasonable to imagine circumstances where you use this type of knowledge to your advantage (for men especially).
If she has time (and energy), she should do a study of CDF. I think the results would be enlightening. This article has brought more focus on America’s continued need to move forward with respect to cultural issues. Certainly, the physics faculty here at OSU (outside of high energy) are discussing the results and implications. I believe that the impact is positive.
Even though things have been totally crazy at work etc, I’ve managed to waste some time playing Disgaea 2. It hasn’t lost any of it’s appeal. Read on to hear more about the differences from the first game and the second.
I love Penny Arcade.
I’ve been trying to avoid reading/blogging about the election. But this isn’t really about what is actually happening. It’s more of an idealized “What if?” senario. The basic idea is that Obama is young, and can win a real coup-de-etat with some patience. The article explains all the details:
The summary is that Obama drops out now in a noble sacrifice to spare the democratic party the toils of a long campaign. His base revolts, and votes against Clinton in the general election. McCain wins, the democratic party leaders look silly, and there is a rebellion within the party. Obama replaces old leadership with new leadership, crushes all oposition to his nomination in 2012, and beats McCain in the next round.
I love this post of a detailed outline for a undergraduate cirriculum designed to train ninjas. The post is written by a dean at a small college, so it’s got all the right buzzwords. Funny snipets include:
Capstone design project: “Ninjas: The Deadliest Mimes”
This article is a study of gender bias at the postdoctoral level in particle physics at the D0 experiment. A few points of interests:
Even if you do not care about women’s rights, you can actually learn how to play the system by reading the article.
The article ends
Some readers of this article may be wondering if the administration of Fermilab has been made aware of this study; they have. In late summer 2006 the author presented the preliminary results of this study in a formal complaint to the Fermilab Equity Office on behalf of all the female postdoctoral researchers collaborating on the Run I I Dzero experiment. The laboratory disdained to investigate the complaint despite the fact that many women were affected, and the fact that it was likely the most thoroughly statistically well-founded complaint that office had ever received.
The author has since complained to the Department of Energy Office of Civil Rights (DoE OCR) regarding Title IX non-compliance at Fermilab (which receives federal grant funding through the DoE). It is the responsibility of the DoE OCR to enforce Title IX compliance in their federally funded research activities. In the complaint, the author pointed out that not only did Fermilab disdain to investigate the complaint, but also did not meet even the minimum standards of Title IX compliance (by, for instance, failing to publicly post the name of the Title IX complaint co-ordinator on site, along with information about Title IX and instructions on how to complain about discrimination or harassment under that law). The DoE OCR is currently investigating the complaint.
I found a link to a relatively readable description of how someone managed to break flash in a way that lets them run arbitrary code. The blog post is about a white paper from the guy who managed to pull off the exploit. It gives a little bit of info on how exploits work in general. It’s informative and gives you a feel for how glamorized movie hacking is.
Update: Here’s a fun wikipedia entry for a more classic trick, the buffer overflow: Wikipedia entry
