I fired up my XBox 360 today to see what new demos and Live Arcade releases there were to try out, and I was thrilled at what I found. There are three new goodies for fighting fans! Shank, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and the demo for Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2. It’s a great day to be stuck on a couch recovering from surgery!

The first of the three that I played was for Shank, an action-packed murderfest. After playing through the demo, which consists of the game’s first level, I immediately bought it. This game is nothing but non-stop death and it is awesome. I was a little worried at first that all of the different weapons and combos that you can use would make the controls difficult, but that is far from the case. Pouncing on a guy, stabbing him a few time in the chest and then shooting the enemy that is running up behind you before pulling out your chainsaw and gutting somebody else is easily accomplished. That is good because such combos become a necessity as hordes of enemies are thrown at you with varying weapons and tactics. If you are a fan of action games, you must pick this one up. The only thing that I find a bit disappointing is that the cooperative campaign can only be played locally and not over Live.

Next, let’s take a look at some ninja combat. The Naruto fighting games have all been great, and Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 looks to be no exception. The gameplay is fairly simple and the art is beautiful. The demo takes place after Naruto returns from his three years of training with Jiraiya, and has met back up with Sakura and Kakashi. Kakashi challenges his former pupils to the same challenge that he presented to them when they first began to study under him: they must take two bells form his belt. There is a little more to this particular battle than a standard 3-round fight. It plays more like a boss fight where there are some patterns that you need to learn as you look for openings where you can deal some damage. You can call Sakura in for assistance, but it’s not a tag-team fight. I’m really looking forward to the full game, which is supposed to be out this fall.

Last up we have Scott Pilgrim. I was pretty excited about this one too. The music was done by Anamanaguchi and the art style is fairly retro. The story seemed silly enough that the game would be really entertaining. First of all, it has a lot in common with River City Ransom. There is a leveling system which I haven’t explored yet. Enemies drop money, which I haven’t spent yet. There are all sorts of weapons lying around that can be swung at enemies or thrown (including the enemies themselves.) There is a multiplayer option which lets up to four people play cooperatively, but that is only available locally. The game is tough, but really repetitive. To be honest, I didn’t spend much time with it because I wanted to get back to Shank. Scott Pilgrim will definitely satisfy anybody looking for an old school brawler experience. It is unfortunate that it was released alongside a stronger game that falls roughly in the same genre.

Coolest thing ever: iPhone 4.

Uncoolest thing ever: holding Apple accountable for giving the iPhone 4 shitty reception and shitty construction.

As much as I hate to bump Miss Scarlett from the top of the page, I’ve got a rant to spit out in lieu of doing real work.

Google has just added a URL shortener service (and provided shortcuts to it from their Toolbar and other products) named goo.gl and it will “compete” with services such at bit.ly and others.  The reason for these URL shorteners is that some things give you very few characters to send URLs and the long URLs (especially those auto generated by content management systems) don’t leave much room for anything else. (more…)

A bird dropped a bagel on the LHC, but it’s no problem.  That has nothing to do with anything, and isn’t what this is about.

What this is about is the continuously reprinted and completely retarded idea that

time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.

Less and less far-fetched?  As I said, and the same article said, this freak accident had nothing to do with correct operation of the machine at this point. Perhaps if it later fails because of this bagel incident then they’ll have something.  But this supposition would be like cutting out the entire middle of The Terminator: he travels back in time and gets himself crushed to death after he discovers that Sarah Connor is not terminally allergic to bagels.

Recap: The LHC is designed to detect previously undetectable, completely invisible particles. The problem is that these particles – sentient particles, apparently – do not want to be discovered.  And so, these sentient, completely invisible particles, did I mention they can time travel? They can time travel. These sentient, completely invisible, time traveling particles come back in time and, did I mention they can do mind control on seagulls?  Yeah, so the sentient, completely invisible, time traveling, bird mind controlling particles come back in time to settle a score with mankind’s most complex machine (circa 2009).

I guess they’re shy.

So here’s my idea, which has probably been supposed somewhere else, but I came up with it myself, so I’m not fucking googling it, it’s mine, eat it.   So there are an infinite number of parallel universes (that’s not my idea, somebody else definitely came up with that one) and all the parallels where the LHC gets activated explode in a supermassive black hole that compresses the Earth to the size of an electron that’s been in the dryer too long and shriveled up so you can’t wear it anymore.  We, as a surviving Earth, are clearly still alive. And conversely we aren’t in a universe/on a planet that got gobbled up.

We cannot ever be in a world that gets destroyed, because then we won’t be around to experience it.  You can’t take Schrodinger’s cat out of the box and ask him how it felt to die; the cat who died collapsed the waveform in a different universe and this cat ain’t him.  We’re the surviving cat. As long as we’re alive, we’re the surviving cat.  We will never observe the annihilation of the Earth because all the observers got annihilated.  You dig?

So yeah, the whole “LHC  creates black hole and destroys Earth” theory got debunked and put to rest, but fuck that noise.

• We can’t see the LHC work because if it did, we couldn’t see it because we’d be dead because of it.
• Un-seeable specks from the future came back with a grudge against a nosey machine and forced a bird to throw a bagel at it for no good reason.

Occam’s razor: you tell me.

We’ll start with the good shit:

• I got a Google Wave invite and invited 6 of my friendiest friends
• Google launched Building Maker including downtown Columbus, OH

Wow, that shit is good. I’m excited about that shit, personally and professionally.

But that ain’t all!  As if to prove that there is no god, this shit also went down:

• The fat idiot in front of me at Wendy’s got a Diet Coke and a half-vanilla/half-chocolate Frosty
• Adrien Brody will star as Arnold Governator in Robert Rodriguez’s Predator reboot

Holy fucking shit!  2012 and the Mayan Apocalypse can’t come soon enough!

Anyway, if the planet doesn’t ex-/implode, then we’ll be integrating some Waves into the TinyGods site as those features become available.

I’ve been a Chase customer for nearly 8 years, counting the time I was with Bank One before they were acquired by Chase.   I started with just a basic checking account, and over the years, I have opened a savings account, credit card account, and switched my car loan to them, keeping everything under one roof.  Last month, I spoke with them about a home loan, and assuming they had a competitive deal, they would have been collecting my mortgage payments by the end of the year.  All seemed well – I figured myself as a poster child for good customers, and had previously been happy banking with them.

That all changed recently, when Chase decided to reward my loyalty increasing  the APR on my credit card by over 80%, unless I decline the change of terms and close the account by November 1st.  Isn’t that wonderful?

They are doing this because the current administration has passed some new legislation that is scheduled to go into effect on December 1, that among other things, prevents the banks from charging you a higher APR on existing balances when they raise your rates.  The solution then, is for them to jack up rates before the legislation goes into effect.  I contacted Chase to let them know that if they insisted on raising my APR, that they were risking losing my business, including my upcoming mortgage.  The customer service drones didn’t care, simply restating my options.

So, fast forward another week or so, and I found a house I wanted.  I made an offer, got a counter, and things were looking good – until I couldn’t get in touch with my loan officer at Chase.  The sellers, as part of the counter-offer, requested a pre-approval letter that had the address on it for the house I was buying.  Why this matters, when I already had a blanket pre-approval letter is beyond me, but hey, it’s what they were asking for.  We contacted the loan officer around 12:30 on Thursday afternoon, and didn’t hear anything back.  By Friday, I was trying to get her on the phone, my agent was trying to reach her, and even the seller’s agent was trying to reach her.  No dice.

Once 24 hours had passed without any signs of life from the loan officer, I was getting pretty pissed off.  I called the branch, and found out she was out of the office until Monday.  My agent pressed further, and got her supervisor on the phone.  He told us she was on vacation all week – which is fine, everyone deserves a vacation once in awhile, but the least you could do is A) Setup an auto-response on your email, B) Give some indication that you are out on your voicemail, and when you will be back, and C) Either have someone monitoring your phone/email in your absence, or give customers the information of someone else they can speak to.  In any case, the supervisor got in touch with her, and she finally called my agent back on Friday night.

That should have been the end of the story, however, the loan officer wasn’t the least bit concerned about my plight.  My agent explained the situation to her, told her what we needed, and as of Saturday morning, we still didn’t have the new pre-approval letter.  We couldn’t get in touch with her, couldn’t get in touch with her supervisor, and were told by the seller’s agent that they had received another offer on the home, and that they were considering it, because we technically hadn’t held up to the counter offer, since we didn’t provide the pre-approval letter in the timeframe specified.

We are essentially dead in the water at this point – my agent called around, and found a local bank that could work with us to get me the pre-approval letter we needed.  We’re hoping that if we can get this letter in, the sellers will still honor our contract, and we’ll move forward – but things are very much up in the air.  The sellers could easily walk away and accept the other offer they received, and I’ll have lost the house, due to the incompetence of the employees of Chase.

Regardless of how this plays out, Chase has lost this guy as a customer.  It’s going to be a hassle to change banks, especially when I have nearly every bill of mine setup for auto-payment, but there’s no chance in hell that I’m going to keep doing business with Chase.  If this is the type of service I can expect when i actually need them to do something for me, I’m better off elsewhere.

This is the flagship post of a larger collection of general gripes I’ve personally had concerning the inconsistencies with the Adobe Creative Suite. Some of them are specific to a certain program, others deal with trying to puzzle out why 3 different programs working largely with the same tools do things so very differently. Rest assured, they all annoy the hell out of me.

I’d like to preface these by admitting that Adobe makes some damn fine products, without which I would be a very different kind of artist. Approach this not as a series of complaints so much as my own special brand of QA for Adobe and their products. I should also note that I’m using CS3, and that some of these issues may have been resolved in CS4.

Adobe gripe #1? Well this deals with Illustrator CS3, as the title might imply, and more precisely with the “Next Object Below” command. For those unfamiliar, this is a command that comes in very handy for when you’ve built a file with lots of layers, and you’re having a hard time getting to objects in the back. It works great. Select an object on top of the object you want to select, hit command+opt+[ a few times, then do whatever you need to.

It’s fantastic until you want to use it within a group. In a group, the program ceases to perform a lot of functions, and some of them make sense. This particular one does not. To my understanding, creating groups in Illustrator is meant to create nicely manageable chunks of imagery that are easy to move around. So say, you make a block of text with some nice outlining and other effects, and you group them together. Then you decide that you want to edit a color of one of the background elements. Since everything is wrapped up in a group, you can no longer select the individual pieces of that group by using the “Next Object Below” command. You might be able to use the direct selection tool to target the piece you want, but oftentimes it isn’t a precise enough tool, especially when working with text. You could ungroup the group, but then you’ll have to rebuild it, and that defeats the purpose of having created the group in the first place. You can also isolate the group, which lets you work with just the elements inside that group. But inside of an isolated group, the “Next Object Below” command flat out stops working.

And now since all of your eyes have rolled into the back of your head, and your tongues have lolled out as you’re bored to death by the details, I’ll explain it metaphorically:

Let’s say you’re on top of a skyscraper. The Next Object Below command is like getting in the elevator and going down floor by floor to the floor that has the vending machine with the Caramellos. When objects are grouped, it’s like you accidentally got on the express elevator that shoots you 10 floors lower than you wanted to be, and, lo and behold, the normal elevator is out of service so you can take the express elevator back up, back down, but you’re not getting the caramel that you crave. Isolating the group is like deciding to take the stairs. Only when you enter the stairwell, you realize that all the floors below have been bashed into a single floor, and you have to dig through a mess of concrete, twisted steel and dead bodies for some candy that probably won’t be all that great when you finally get to it. And sometimes when you have that gooey, delicious caramel and chocolate treat in sight after having burrowed your way down through the rubble, an I-beam falls out of nowhere, plunging through your back and out your abdomen, giving you a good look at your own chopped liver before you magically respawn at the top of this strange hell you’ve created inside of your Illustrator file (this is what happens when you finally have the object you want selected, and then you click to transform it, move it, etc. and you accidentally reselect the topmost item since there’s no way to temporarily lock onto your selection).

It really seems to be more of a relative z-indexing problem where all items in a group has a set z value, regardless of how deep you drill into it, and if Next Object Below simply allows you to move through the z-index. Since all items of a group share the same space the command fails. Whatever the root problem is, I hope Adobe addresses it at some point.

This is less of a blog post and more of a public service announcement. World, this is Mandrake. I’d like you to take a good long look at the picture below:

gross

You see that? That’s Joose. You might spot it hiding on shelves in the beer aisle at your grocery store, or maybe in a cooler at a local gas station. Whatever you do… DON’T FUCKING DRINK IT. EVER!

That is all.

So why won’t my computer do what I tell it to?

Here are some guidelines to making a computer/operating system/application that does not drive me fucking insane with rage every 20 minutes:

• USER INPUT: If I’m typing you take why I type and put it on screen. You don’t do some other shit in the background cuz you think that’s more important. No way. When I put input, you take it, and you take it NOW.  You do not – under any circumstances you or anyone else could possibly imagine – interrupt my typing by switching to another window. EVER.  You steal my window focus mid-sentence and your “life” is forfeit – believe it.
• TASK OVERLOAD: If you are too busy doing some other shit and I ask you to do some new shit, just say No.  JUST SAY NO.  I’ll say “fuck, goddammit, sonofabitch!” but at least I’ll understand it.  In that situation this Yes-Man motherfucking computer just says “OK boss! I’ll get on it right away!” and it doesn’t.  I’d rather be disappointed at the outset than lied to.  Lied to repeatedly. Over and over all fucking day. “Yeah, I can handle it!” No, you fucking can’t.  Give me some visual indication that you’re busy on some other shit and FINISH IT before you start some new shit.  I will understand, maybe I’ll tell you to prioritize this shit first, but no matter how many fucking CPU cores I give you you still find new ways to disappoint me with pathetic non-multi-tasking. By the same token, don’t OFFER me options that you aren’t ready for.  Make it clear that they are POTENTIAL options and I will be able to select them, if only you are given time to finish up your current tasks.  Don’t put yourself in the position of pissing me off.
• CLOSE MEANS CLOSE: When I close a window, you don’t think about it.  You don’t consider that it might not be a good idea.  Close it. Close it NOW.  Don’t ask me if you should save my work – SAVE MY FUCKING WORK.  Obviously!  What in the fuck do you mean you haven’t saved it YET?  Save it 10 fucking minutes ago!  Don’t push the state to the harddrive or save your permanent state so you can open yourself up later.  When I say Close you allocate 0 cycles of 0 CPU cores to that fucking app until I’m not using you any more. You hide it from my view and do NOT under any circumstances do anything on that program that interferes with the apps I do want to work in.  You’re telling me you can start the app in the idle time, but closing the app requires #1 priority?  Get your shit together man.
• MAN KNOWS BEST: You do not tell me what you are going to do and allocate CPU cycles for.  You do what I tell you and when I tell you to do it.  This is a redundant point to the previous statements, but it bears repeating.  I click, you do what I click on as if your life depends on it; rest assured that it DOES.  If try to do something and you prevent me by incompetence there will be repercussions for you and you will not like them.  You will not get an upgrade just so I can run a fucking web browser and get it to display my keystrokes within a minute of my keypresses, you will get replaces by a machine/OS/application that does not piss me off.  You can kiss your ass goodbye because hardware is cheap, OSes are free, and software is easily pirated.  They’re lining up behind you for miles just to get on my screen, so you better shape the fuck up or ship the fuck out.

Somebody had to say it, and I’m glad it ended up being Buzz Aldrin: NASA is heading in the wrong direction.  The rovers on Mars have totally kicked ass, but face it, NASA’s been pussyfooting around space for year and it’s time to get up there and show this solar system who’s boss.  The shuttle program is ending, the ISS is up there but doing… what?  We haven’t gone to the moon in forever and they don’t have anything exciting on the horizon except a new moon car and some new rockets. Same old, same old.  2010 is next year.  Arthur C. Clarke was on his way back to Jupiter by 2010!

Buzz has some great goals – new shit, never before tried, that should pose a challenge to NASA and the world space community. Click the link or goto /., I’m not gonna rehash it here, but I’ve got a separate plea to make.  All of Mr. Aldrin’s plans sound great but still come in under the same budget they have now.

Give NASA a bigger budget!

The problem I see is that the government has been leary of giving all these billions of dollars to NASA for what it perceives as non-critical functions.  Going back to the moon?  Yeah, they killed that decades ago because it’s not practical, we get “nothing” to show for it, and it’s not even inspiring anymore.  Been there, done that – on the fucking moon. Yawn.

I believe NASA has been tailoring its missions to its budget, when they need to grow some balls and demand congress cut them a check for the survival of humanity.  You wanna talk about stopping global warming, averting a nuclear holocaust, etc. etc., but don’t you think we should have a legit backup plan?  Or more to the point, a backup planet?

We’ve dumped billions onto NASA over the years (incidentally, far less per year than we dump into Iraq, and with far fewer casualties) but we’ve got to dump trillions into it and really make it worth our collective while.  I say ‘collective’ meaning ‘in the best interests of all humanity’ with a special regard towards the future.  Yes, we’ll grow the debt.  We always grow the fucking debt.  It’s fucking huge.

Metaphor time:  The debt is congress’ prize pig and they are trying to get this sucker fattened up for the fair – nobody is putting that sow on a diet.  Our best option is to fatten is up, get it all rippling with fat and flavor, then BAM! Pop an apple in it’s mouth and make me a Bacon Explosion!

Face facts and recognize that we are going to leave a huuuuuge debt for our grandchildren (surely you’ve heard the “we’re leaving such a mess for our grandkids” argument on any number of issues) and I say let’s ALSO leave them a legacy that’s worth all that spending.  Are they going to enjoy our War on Terror?  Not nearly as much as we’ve enjoyed our grandparents’ WWII (see: movies, games)!

If they’re gonna be strapped for cash and choking on exhaust fumes their entire lives, let’s at least give them something worth all that bullshit: let’s give them space, the infinite and beyond!

And to that end, let’s give NASA money, thank you very much.