she’s come undone

July?!

I honest to god don’t mean to update only once a month. The months just go by so fast.

I haven’t been working on my Civilization mod for awhile, mostly because I’m trying to become better at the Warlords difficulty setting. Not that I have been playing all too much either recently.

I have begun my WOT reread. It’s not going too fast, or as fast as usual, but that might be because a) I’m not reading every day and b) when I do read I’m doing a more close-reading a là college cramming. The other problem might be out of the whole series New Spring and Eye of the World are books I’ve read more than the others.

Changed hosts. My new host uses DirectAdmin instead of cPanel, which might take some getting used to, but so far it is fine. One thing I really like is that each domain gets its own folder. With cPanel you needed WHM to do that, which usually cost more than regular cPanel. Even so, I still need to have a moiraine.meandraine.net subdomain for now, otherwise my redirect rule via .htaccess won’t work: it’ll just show an error page.

For some reason my vBulletin database is larger on this host than the last one. Don’t know why. Also, my disk usage meter has close to 40mb of data I can’t account for. I’ve waited a couple of days before sending in a ticket to ask about that. My other tickets (one for sales, others for transfer) have gotten answered nice and fast, so hopefully the same will be true here. So far, I am very happy with new host.

Also, MW forums aren’t down every 30 minutes. This is a nice change.

I’m kind of rambling here….

I need to find boxers for Elnore for two reasons: 1) It’s a part of her character, and 2) They’ll help keep her pants up. Caraline needs a new wig, and there is one girl who makes fur wigs that I like, but of course she is closed!

I want to go to Europe.

It’s Getting Hot Again

You know you’ve been in Arizona too long when you consider 90 degrees warm. Not hot: warm. Maybe a little too warm, but still. I always roll my eyes at the east coasters going to school down here who throw a fit over 85. Like seriously?! Enjoy it while it lasts, bitches! Wait until it’s 110.

I am so behind the times. vBulletin has raised its prices across the board. Renewals for owned licenses (the renewals are for support/downloads of latest releases) is now $60. Unless you do it two months before it expires then it is $40. It used to be $30 no matter when you renewed. I liked the old way better, because vBulletin seems to have taken a page out of phpBB’s book on updates. That is, 4.0 is really no where in sight. Hopefully there is some information soon.

I have no desire to update to 3.7, since that release seems geared more towards those who want their communities to be more like MySpace. I don’t want more bloat, I want a more streamlined vBulletin forum. I don’t regret moving away from phpBB to vBulletin, especially considering how long it took them to come out with 3.0. But my reasons for moving to the other guys was for forum features (merging,splitting,better spam protection) not SEO.

I’m still enjoying Civilization IV. I’m not sure whether I have found a little bug with my Westlands mod or not: in the Civilopedia it shows that one of Tar Valon’s unique units upgrades to one of Andor’s unique units. Obviously that is not how it is suppose to go. I will look into further once my current game is over. The goal is to clean up what I have now, refine the leaders, and then add new leaders to the current custom civs. After that, I will add new civs/leaders.

And because I feel like adding pictures (as always click for bigger):

Civilization IV

For the past few weeks I’ve been sucked into the world of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. I must thank Niklas for this latest love affair. Although I’m sure by now he wishes he hadn’t mentioned the game at all.

At any rate, it didn’t take long for me to want to create a custom civilization; and thus was Moiraine and the nation of Cairhien born.

Learning how to make Cairhien wasn’t easy: a lot of the tutiorals about custom civs were based on the vanilla install, not any of the expansion packs. And then some of the more clear ones were never finished. Basically the best way was to simply find a custom civ that worked, and see what they did.

I eventually got confident enough to go ahead and make another civ to counterbalance Moiraine and her empire.

Upon completing my second civ I realized I needed to breakdown and learn how to add civs the modular way, because the XML files were becoming a bit long and ridiculous. The modular method would allow me to keep adding more civs as I saw fit, with less hassle.

So far I have Cairhien, Amadicia, and Andor. I’m thinking of adding a Borderlands civ and maybe Seanchan. (why yes Niklas, I am a WOT nerd!) I haven’t delved to the level of creating custom meshes for units and all that jazz, but maybe one day. Maybe.

Dear EA and Maxis

You suck.

BB: When you play The Sims 3, you play as one household. However, you can choose to change the household that you are playing. What’s different about The Sims 3 is that when you are playing one household, the other households in your town will develop intelligently: other Sims will age, get married, have children, go to work, et cetera. This means that the world is changing around you and no game will ever feel the same. If one of the Sims in your household moves out, you can choose to follow them and control a different household, or you can continue to play the same household.

Um, hell no! I do not want to be stuck with an either/or situation. I especially don’t want Sims reproducing on their own (and with ugly townies to boot!).

BB: There will still be plenty of ways for devious fans to play in The Sims 3 — including removing the pool ladder! Anything can happen in this new open neighborhood environment; we can’t wait to see what players come up with. [Editor's Note: During GFW's visit to see the game earlier this year, design director Matt Brown dropped this detail: "Though if you do try to drown your Sim in a pool, he can realize what you're trying to do, because it's pretty clear that you've put him in a pool and then taken away the ladder... And now he can just crawl out of the pool, which he couldn't do before."]

So now I can’t drown my Sims. That was the fastest way of killing, and yes Sims were rather stupid to fall for it, but still! It’s a classic Sim-killing technique and you’ve done away with it?! This is why I like my Sims to be semi-stupid!

Don’t get me started on the aging neighborhood thing.

Honestly, I’m afraid Sims 3 will end up another SimCity Societies. I’d probably enjoy it just until the kids move out, at which point my fun factor will drop. Unless I keep everyone in the same house, which, uh, yeah no. Yeah, there are good improvements to the system and the A.I. but that doesn’t change the fact that they seem to be determined to take away a lot of the micromanagement features. On the flip side, Sims 2 EPs and Stuff Packs will be going for cheap!

Speaking of which, they have decided to release an eighth expansion pack, instead of sticking to their guns about only seven. It’s pretty obvious this is for money purposes, because an EP about apartments? Are you kidding me?! They better have something major planned, otherwise it will feel just like it is: a quick chance to make money this fall.

Bon Voyage caused huge amount of issues with players’ computers and CD drives thanks to SecuROM, the Free Time patch was pulled off the site after it made issues worse, not better, and now they are adding another pack onto what is clearly a too buggy game?

On the official BBS there are thread after thread of people debating the future of the Sims. When someone referred to The Sims as an RPG I had to step in, but that right there tells you how far Maxis/EA have changed the gameplay and marketing.

Fixing Wrong Album Art on iPod

Well. In hindsight I should have taken the appearance of random artwork on my Animatrix songs as a sign of bad things to come. It is only recently I had decided to google the album name of the cover and discovered it had no relation to any song on the Animatrix soundtrack. At all. So clearly something was going wrong months ago, I was just too stupid to catch it.

Now, the basic way to fix such issues is to disable artwork on your iPod, wait for the iPod to update, then re-enable. However, it was during this re-enabling process that I would get a (-50) error. Now only some of the albums were showing any art, but most of them were blank. Basically the only solutions I found were “use a different cable” and “do a restore”. Since I couldn’t find my old cable, I was basically left with the latter. This did not make me happy, since Apple in all its glory took out the ability to take songs off your iPod and onto your hard drive easily.

Backing up the music wasn’t hard for me, just annoying, and the restore is just a one click process. Reimporting all that music (I had about 5.36GB) was the long part; not so much getting the files into the library, as deleting all the duplicates-because again, Apple didn’t see fit to have such a feature built in.

But yay, the iPod is working properly again. Today, I spent a good portion actually going through the albums that never had any artwork to begin with and tried to fix that. In some cases I had to actually make my own (like for mixes, or what-have-you). I really wish you could do the Find Album Art thing on your iPod.

And yes I am anal about the cover art, because it’s silly to have a fancy iPod with coverflow, if you don’t have covers!