she’s come undone

Writing Workshop

Bleh, so Niklas and I have agreed to try and write at least 2-3k words per a week, because he doesn’t like to write alone and I work best with deadlines. I didn’t really want to edit Nik’s first submission-being that it was a freakin’ mini-novel-but I figured I might as well use my degree for something.

I’ll give Niklas some links he can read over if he wants.
Punctuating Dialogue
Writing Dialogue
Writing Dialogue..Again
Writing Good Dialogue
And More Writing Dialogue
Dialogue Tips…ooh fancy
Incomplete sentences (he makes mention of dialogue here too)
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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):

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!

I <3 Music

I always get excited when I find an artist I like. I had heard of We Are Scientists in passing before, but never actually heard anything of theirs. Last night I ended up hearing two tracks of theirs from their 2005 album, so yeah, decided to check them out and now I’m in geeky heaven. I need to see into their other albums, but I am mildly afraid they might not live up to my expectations.

In other news, last night I had a dream with a talking horse that lived in a closet and bossed me around. And then the horse was sent away and replaced with a chimp which scared me shitless. I also had a dream with Hanson, fainting fangirls, my dead grandmother, and a savage cat. Seriously. No more late night snacks before bed.