..we’re fucked. Seriously, seriously fucked. If you haven’t been paying attention, the dollar is in collapse versus foreign currencies, and all signs point to further collapse this Wednesday when it is widely expected that the fed will again lower interest rates. My favorite quote that sums this up quite nicely, from a recent thread on metafilter.com:

The fundamental problem is that we owe, in every level of the economy, far more than we can pay, and that debt is denominated in dollars. We can either have a deflationary debt collapse, or, eventually, a hyperinflationary collapse. The second approach causes much more total damage over a much longer period, but in any given month, it looks less painful, so that’s what we’ll opt for.

And that’s what we have opted for. Apparently the only remaining variable is when hyperinflation kicks in, and I’ve seen charts that suggest nothing will stop it from coming in the next 12 months, roughly, though I have zero idea how accurate they are. What the consequences are beyond that I cannot say. Collapse in housing prices? Check. Collapse in the credit markets? Check. Apocalyptic collapse of the US economy not seen since the great depression? I have no idea. Some credible folks think it likely, like the head of the IMF and Alan Greenspan, the former head of the fed.

Who was it that said they’d rather not live in interesting times? Lately I’m feeling like I agree with that guy .

I finished the latest episode of Halflife 2 this weekend. Overall I’d give it a B. It’s got the same solid Halflife 2 production values and the engine still looks great, and there’s one significant gameplay element added, a gravity gun launched sticky bomb that has to be set off with a pistol to deal with a certain situation. Honestly though beyond that HalfLife 2 is beginning to feel a bit stale. The story is still engaging, and ends in such a way that leaves me wanting to know/play more, but for the most part this pak feels like a rehash, with the same sort of situations we’ve seen in Halflife 2 before, differentiated by being set in new level geometry or featuring a different character or a new weapon. Also I’m starting to get aggravated with a couple of longstanding Source engine bugs - the sound stuttering bug (I mean  come ON now - 3 retail releases, a number of incremental updates, and STILL this is not resolved? It causes me at least one death a night in multiplayer) especially being the one that bothers me, but also you have always sort of ’stuck’ to things in Halflife 2. Backing away from something ferocious can often lead to an untimely death when you get stuck on the corner of something - a door frame, a desk, a crate - and instead of sort of sliding around it like you do in many other games, you just stick. They’ve solved this in other Source engine games (Team Fortress 2 for example) so I’m not clear on why they haven’t in their main product.

Anyway to sum up - Orange box is worth the purchase just to get Team Fortress 2, which I am playing obsessively, but I don’t know this time around if I would have found Episode 2 on its own a good deal, even at ~$20 like the last episode was. I’d prefer Valve get back into a more normal development pattern and release a new, significantly upgraded game with 20 or more hours of content every 2-3 years, rather than this ‘we’ll release a 4-6 hour long episode every 6 months…wait, no, we meant um, 18 months?’ that they’ve been doing for 3 years or more now.

As someone who hasn’t made their bed since, oh, maybe grade school when my mom could still force me to, I really enjoyed this article over on the BBC website, which covers scientific research demonstrating that not making one’s bed is actually healthy for you. Really! Go read for the details, meanwhile I’ll happily continue on with my (healthy!) slovenliness.

As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I love a good shmup, and today’s friday fun link is a great example of the form. Varia has beautiful, stylized graphics, a pulsing techno soundtrack, and challenging gameplay. It’s a vertical scroller, with 4 axis movement for your ship and the typical boss battles to conclude levels. The most unusual aspect of Varia is the fact that it comes with a comprehensive tutorial. Check it out, oh, and here’s a youtube clip so you can check it out before downloading:

Team Fortress 2 is the finest multiplayer FPS to be released in years, a triumph of design and art direction. I’ve been playing it constantly. Here’s a handy archive of scripts you can use to enhance the playing experience. Perma-duck ftw!

I had my second MRI a couple of days ago. Surgery is about 99% likely at this point. The MRI itself was fine, better than the last one in fact, because they gave me headphones so I had something to focus on besides the incredibly loud sounds emanating from the MRI machine. Prior to the MRI though I had to have a substance injected into my shoulder blade to provide contrast for the MRI, which involved getting a 4″ long needle jammed into my shoulder joint. It was surprisingly painless but it was still super unpleasant - all my instincts were screaming at me to yank that thing out of my shoulder and run away and it took a lot of effort to force myself to just lay still on the table. Anyway glad it’s over - next up is a return to the orthopedic specialist to review my surgical options now that he has better MRI data to figure out what the best procedure will be.

Sure, you can edit csv files using excel or a text editor, but depending on what you’re trying to do the former may be overkill and the latter is generally inadequate to the task. If you’re on windows, check out CSVed, a freeware csv editor that saved me some time this week when I was trying to diagnose the output from a form script.

In the 80’s, there was the arcade game Wizards of Wor, and the teenagers did say ‘it was very good.’ But in the 90’s the arcades did die off, and the arcade gamers from the 80’s did say unto the lord ‘woe is us, for the youngins do play games of great complexity and less fun!’ And the lord of arcade fun did hear their prayers, and in the 2000’s he caused to be a resurgence of fan made classic arcade game remixes and remakes, and the arcade gamers of the 80’s rejoiced, and did play many, and fun was had. But still, there was no longer a Wizards of Wor, and the arcade fans of the 80’s did wish there would be one. And lo, Dave discovered that there WAS one, and he linked to it in his blog. And there was much rejoicing and blasting of demons with laser blasters by all.

[link courtesy of indygamer, quixotic tone courtesy of my mood. Game for windows only, tiny download, great meticulously crafted pixelicious graphics, difficult to master controls. Check it out]

Admit it - doesn’t this look like fun?

(~3 minutes, footage of various carnage in Crackdown, an Xbox 360 game)

It was. Crackdown was excellent. It’s a 3rd person action game set in a dystopian future city where you’re a genetically altered supercop out to put the smackdown on the gangs that have run amok in the city. The city itself is fantastic - it’s huge, diverse, detailed, populated with tons of people wandering and driving about, and graphically it looks great. The game is free form - aside from some hand holding in the beginning you’re basically free to do as you please, exploring, fighting wandering thugs, and seeking out gangleader hideouts as you see fit. Your skills increase as you use them, so for example in the beginning you can only jump about 10 feet, and by the end you can leap about like a bionic jackrabbit superhero. The core mechanics of running, fighting, shooting, jumping and climbing are really solid and really fun, so much so that even though I’ve solved the game I’ve still been playing it a bit, continuing to explore the nooks and crannies of the huge city. It’s not all perfect - enemy AI is poor, which is especially obvious when you fight the bosses, and the driving is ok but much less compelling than the other gameplay mechanics. Still, the game is a solid, engaging A level game and well worth a look, especially since you can get it dirt cheap - my copy was only $13 shipped from an ebay seller.

It’s also got coop which I haven’t tried yet but which I intend to if I can only manage to convince my buddy Trevor to pick up a copy.

Ingredients:

• 1 or more gamers raised on old school 80’s twitch arcade games
• 1 Playstation 3
• 1 2 stick/8 way shooter incorporating awesome guitar rock soundtrack cleverly integrated into the gameplay, 8 bit generation inspired but modern sensibility informed graphics, and novel scoring mechanic.

Download game from psn store, and play, play, play. Details:

(translation: Everyday Shooter is absolutely fantastic. I’ve gotten more mileage out of 8 way shooters on my PS3 than any other form of entertainment on the thing. $9.99, and no one who has a PS3 should pass this up. Even if you don’t have a ps3, watch the video. Road trips to my house will follow.)

Halflife 2 is a classic first person shooter - witness the reviews on metacritic and gamerankings.com by way of example. Valve’s recent release of episode 2 for halflife 2 was only available as part of a bundle that also included the original halflife 2 and episode 1 expansion pak for it. This was kind of stupid for a lot of folks including me, since we already owned these, but Valve’s made it possible to ‘gift’ these licenses to someone else. So. If you want a free copy of halflife 2 and the first expansion pak, speak up in the comments. This is PC only. The hardware requirements are relatively modest since Halflife 2 is several years old now, though if you’ve got a recent machine it still looks great because they’ve been continually improving the engine.

Back in July of 2003 I turned on my media box, and it’s served me well since then, happily running the excellent Snapstream, recording shows for me, and playing back stuff I grabbed off the web. But recently I subscribed to Directv, and I got an HD DVR as part of the subscription. I decided to go that route rather than invest in the hardware I would need to record HD video, and besides, I’d rather get windows out of my living room. I’m planning on getting a dedicated video playback device to handle downloaded videos, something like this or this.

The end result is I’m going to part out this box, selling off what I can on ebay. This is the model I have, which got great reviews at the time. It’s been running 24×7 for years now and I’ve been nervous about the fans and power supply for a while now, but all has continued to work fine. If anyone’s interested, speak up. It’s got a gig of ram in it, whatever the last Athlon XP I had, a Hauppauge mpeg hardware video encoder card, an old Nvidia 5200 class video card, and that’s about it. I’m keeping the DVD burner and hard drive. I’ll let all this go for cheap, make me an offer in the comments if you want it. Speak quick because by this weekend I’ll probably have parts of it up on ebay - I want to take the money from the parts and buy one of the media boxes listed above.

Yeah, so Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition was announced this spring, which is interesting in and of itself, I suppose, if you’re still playing pen and paper RPGs, but what’s more interesting is the whispers of online functionality, gaming portals, subscriptions services and more that have been swirling about since the spring. I hadn’t been paying much attention, but today I noticed this video showing some of the functionality of their new services (~5 minute youtube video below - fast forward about a minute and a half to see the online stuff):

Color me intrigued. Details are still scanty, but a toolset that takes care of modeling the mechanics of combat, in 3d? Awesome! I don’t know who I’d actually be able to play with, but my love of tactical combat knows no bounds. There are other toolsets out there for the pen and paper rpg crowd, but nothing I’m aware of comes close to this in terms of presentation, and presumably it will be populated with the complete catalog of DnD material, something no other toolset has or can come close to. Supposedly this stuff is going to be available in spring of ‘08. I’ll be watching to see how it plays out.[via]

So you’re a little girl in a dress.. no, don’t bail, stay with me here. You’re a little girl in a dress flying through an undefined space, assaulted on all sides by geometric shapes. The good news is you can fend off the assault by drawing lines through things with the stick of chalk you’re armed with, using your mouse to draw.

If that premise doesn’t grab you (and honestly, who could resist it?) I’ll also note that Chalk is fun, cute, and clever both in premise and gameplay mechanic implementation. This is windows only,  a tiny download, and worth checking out for the novel gameplay.

Please make it stop!

That’s your laugh of the day, courtesy of an email sent to me at work where I monitor the webmaster@ email address. It was from a former student who’s just about to finish grad school, is hunting for a job, and discovered that the number 1 result in a certain famous search engine when searching for his name was an article published by a student run publication as part of an April fools issue that satirized steroid munching student athletes and the effects on their testicle size. While I feel for the guy, I also couldn’t help getting a laugh out of it.

So one downside to the hike to Mount Colden - Soolin ended up with some injuries. Basically the harness she was wearing, which I used to haul her up and down all sorts of impediments - steep grades, ladders, boulders, etc - caused chafing under her arms and on one of her shoulders. Most of these are healing up nicely, but the one on her shoulder flared up into a hotspot by late last week and I ended up having to shave her shoulder. It didn’t help that I didn’t notice it at first - initially I thought she had pine sap or something stuck in her fur, and it was a couple of days after I first noticed it that I realized it was actually her wound seeping into her fur that was causing the sticky patch. Doh! Anyway, she’s healing up now. Here’s a pic to illustrate, and there’s a closeup at the end of the Colden Gallery linked in the post previous to this one if you’re a dog owner and curious about these things.

Last weekend I hiked Mount Colden, in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, just south of Lake Placid. I finally got a chance to post all the photos online, which you can checkout here:

http://www.metamusing.net/gallery/v/other-adirondak-hikes/mount_colden/

A few samples of my favorite images from the trip to encourage folks to click the link:

Soolin and I at Marcy Dam:

A view from the summit of Mount Colden

Hiking mountains can wear a dog out

I’d planned to buy an Xbox 360 since the day they were announced - in fact I planned to buy all three of the new consoles, just as I did last generation, but the 360’s continued hardware troubles delayed my purchase well past when I initially thought I would get one. They recently applied at least a partial fix to their issues, so I decided to buy one to coincide with the Halo 3 launch.

Although I thought the original Halo was only average, I had a fantastic time playing through it coop with my buddy Nick on the original Xbox, and we made our way about halfway through Halo 2 playing coop a couple of years later which was also fun.

I never solved Halo 2 because of the premature death of my original Xbox (you can see where my hesitations about buying another MS box comes from), and I had sold off Halo 2, so I bought the 360, a new copy of Halo 2, and pre-ordered Halo 3. I played my way through both games over the last couple of weeks, finishing up Halo 3 last night.

Overall my opinion remains largely the same - Halo is an average FPS with well above average music and audio, well crafted combat mechanics, and level design that ranges from good to awful across the three games. The overarching plot is great in a comic book sort of way, and the guy from Marathon….err, I mean Master Chief, is a great protagonist. Oh, and Halo does do a great job of giving things an epic feel. Riding up a giant space elevator inside a space station that feels like it’s the size of the moon while your buddies follow along after you in a spaceship bigger than a 747 is some cool, cool stuff. Sure, the ‘elevator’ may only be made up of 17 polygons and textured with what could generously be called ‘engraved concrete with glowies,’ and the bad guys may be popping out onto the elevator out of monster closets, but it’s still some cool shit.

I haven’t played much multiplayer yet, but what I have played has reinforced my tendency towards playing online on PC. I can routinely come in the top 5 across a spectrum of FPS on PC, from the Battlefield series of games to the recently released Team Fortress 2, yet in Halo online I rarely come in better than dead last. It’s humiliating and reinforces my tendencies (which I’m trying to overcome) to not play console FPS.

In terms of Halo 3 specifically: it’s been criticized for being too short and for not being true HD graphically. I don’t agree with either criticism. Maybe it’s because I played 2 and 3 back to back, but I thought 3 was just the right length, I thought it brought a satisfactory conclusion to the plot, and I thought the graphics were great, especially the lighting. I don’t care much what the nerds who bothered to count the pixels say, at the end of the day it looks great.

I’ll write more about the 360 as time permits. A short comparison to the PS3 would look something like ‘360 hardware feels cheap compared to PS3, and the PS3 interface is world’s better (I mean really - 360 interface reminds me of a gaudy flea market - ads all over the place and garish oranges and greens, plus things scattered all over the place in a non intuitive way - where did that game just go that I downloaded?), but in the end it’s about the games, and the 360 wins in a major way at that - Halo 3, Dead Rising, Project Gotham 3, and Crackdown, all besides Halo purchased for under $20, and all great fun.

(one last technical note - 360 emulation which allows you to run old xbox games on it is weak. I had constant frame rate problems playing Halo 2 on it, and a terrible graphical glitch which would cause background imagery to superimpose itself on the screen and stay stuck there. I managed to finish the game but there were times I got sick of restarting the thing to get rid of the gameplay obscuring graphical glitches. It was a near thing, whether I finished it or not).

Still too busy to get to posting the pictures, but I did work a bit on the software running this site and want to test it out, so here’s a sample of the photos we took this weekend. These were taken by Andrew, and show off how stunning some of the areas we hiked through were. This is Avalanche Pass, looking roughly northwards down Avalanche Lake and then southwards back the way we had come. We’re about 4-5 miles from the trailhead here.

Current Album: Mount Colden
Images:

Current Album: Mount Colden
Images:

I went on a glorious hike this weekend in the high peaks region of the Adirondacks. I’m completely wiped out today so I probably won’t get around to posting pictures and the story of the trip until later this week or this weekend, but meanwhile, here’s where we were. Soolin and I climbed our first 46′er on this trip. It was great but exhausting. More to come….