So I played a bit of Freelancer last night, and despite early warnings of its demise, I must say that this game is great. There is something about space-trading/dogfighting games that really grabs me — and I played Privateer quite a bit in my youth. Freelancer is more of the same, and BETTER. In Privateer you could pick your ship and outfit it will all sorts of firepower and such, and Freelancer does much the same. Your alignment with various groups in the game is affected by what you blow up, and who you screw over/do nice things for.

As far as the dogfighting goes — well, I will tell you that this game has NO JOYSTICK SUPPORT. No, at first glance, that’s fairly disappointing, right? Wrong. The mouse control for flying is really quite smooth and easy to do. You dogfight third-person from your ship and the handy targeting system (how far should I lead my firing to hit the enemy?) is challenging enough to stay interesting. The environment in which you play is quite open and large — you can explore all you want, or you can use the “space highway” system within the game to get where you want to go in a hurry. In relation to dogfighting — whereas in Privateer you couldn’t “abort”, that is to say, run away, from a fight — in Freelancer, if you are fast enough you can do damn well what you please!

There is a multiplayer side to this thing, replete with an in-game browser. The server for the game comes along with the install, and there are already a number of servers out there to play on. I can’t really say any further than that as I’ve only played single-player so far, but I’m assuming it’s a free-for-all out in cyberspace, yay!

Oh, I bet you are wondering what kind of monster system you’ll need to play this thing, right? Well, the specs call for a 16 meg video card on a 600 Mhz machine, and they are probably right — I’ve got a 1300 Mhz machine with an ATI RADEON 8500 card, and the game is smoooooth to me. The graphic in this game are not simple, but they are certainly CLEAN. The planets and spaceports are not extremely detailed, but the “fog” or “particle cloud” effects look quite good… altogether a nice, clean presentation.

Anyway, that’s my horribly written pseudo-review. I give it a thumbs-up so far.

From here:

good morning children, and goodnight meg and i are violently pushing forward for absolutely no reason, we see elephant rising soon and it’s uncomplicated presence forces us to wake up in the morning. i want to tell you about it some, but i don’t know where to start. i designed the artwork myself and with the help of headcoats drummer bruce brand was able to bring it to printing block. i’ve seperated the earth into three parts vertically ( lattitude or longitude?) there will be six covers, one for vinyl, and one for compact disc in each of the three sections of the globe, that way meg and i know where you got it from, such as the vinyl in australia will be the same as the vinyl in japan, but different from the cd in south america, which will be the same as the cd in north america. don’t you understand? lots of lightbulbs going off, getting our feet on solid ground, attempting to destroy and rebuild at a moments notice. i’m very sad at some of you for peeking at you christmas presents before christmas morning, can’t you wait? i can, well i do, we want you to have it when we want you to have it, it’s unfair that some get a taste and confuse others before they have the chance to have it for themselves, but the devil is at work here and you will pay for your impatience. this world of have it now, millisecond attention span and gross neglect for quality is getting old. i’m getting old too, watch me slowly die. meg coughed today. i looked at a puddle too. i told beck to get out of my bathtub, and i collected do not disturb signs with terry. mostly i had three minutes to myself today, and tomorrow too. some of the minutes are on loan. eating well though, and smiling politely to strangers, meg says to hug you mothers tightly and i say to let you lamplight shine and burn. see you soon kids on a stage near you, boomdagle rumblefuss charpenhurper fortusblend and cateldragon.
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Despite Jack’s claim of confusion, I don’t think there is too much confusion about Elephant. It ROCKS. Good god, does it rock.

now i know all too well… had to take Danielle to the aeropuerto this morning, as she is finally able to take leave of Louisville back to the icy winterland that is Baltimore. Then I got to take Kelly to work. I guess it’s OK, because I have to go to Cincinatti this AM on business. Thank goodness I’m not driving.

Despite “stringent” anti-piracy methods (releasing the previews on vinyl) The White Stripes‘ new LP, “Elephant”, has found its way onto the Internet. Yeah, I’ve got a copy of it. Yeah, I’ve burned it to a CD. Yeah, I’ve spread it around like peanut-butter. Wanna know why? IT COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, UTTERLY DESTROYS. I can’t make this more apparent!! This album ROCKS. HARD. The Mohs scale now goes to 11!

XL has decided to move the album’s release date up to March 31st (or April 1st, depending on your source) from April 14th because of this. AWESOME, I saw! I can’t wait to get my hands on this… I can’t explain the rock-tasticness that is Elephant.

Wanna see the promo shots for Elephant? sure you
do. also, a crap photo of the cover.

I think Meg looks like Bobbie Gentry in those shots, and Jack is toting dead cowboy like no man has seen before. So yeah, if you thought that Jack and Meg were creepy before, I’m sure you’ll be recoiling in fear from those shots. This whole undead look is due to the extreme strain that such rock would naturally impart upon the bodies of only two human beings. Behold a pale horse, and upon him a pale rider, and what followed was ROCK!!! \m/

I nabbed those shots from triple tremelo. the cover was via whitestripes.net.

1. get KYGeek in order.

2. get the “hey, that’s should be a URL” list going. Example: YeahThatsNotFunny.com, or CrackerJazz.com. When I get bored and want to throw darts at the internet, I enter the first word that comes to mind into Mozilla, and I see what happens. There are SO MANY good URLs out there waiting to be had.

3. finish up my patch for camE, which is coming along nicely, but considering my C skills a limited, its taking a little while.

That’s all for now…

I was listening to NPR this morning, and a story about the Negro League baseball leagues — specifically a pitcher by the name of “Peanut” Johnson. Johnson played three years, with a combined record of 33 wins and 8 losses, and also claims a .268 batting average! That’s pretty impressive! Most major league pitchers can’t claim 33-8 over the same number of games, and certainly can’t claim a .268 batting average! (Randy Johnson’s lifetime BA is .091!)

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that “Peanut” Johnson’s first name was Mamie. Yeah, she was a woman. Now, that’s pretty bad-ass! Read a passage about her in the book A Strong Right Arm, whydontcha?

Yarr! The ice-storm hath blown us over, it has. I don’t clearly remember a more odd winter storm than what we had here this weekend. It was raining, and turning to ice on the ground, and then eventually turned into snow. This formed a snow-looking sheet of ice over streets, houses, lawns, and cars. I had the pleasure of driving in it a couple of times (mainly to fetch my step-sister Kristin (whose name isn’t hyperlinked because, to my knowledge, she has no website. kids these days! In my day, we had websites!)), and it really wasn’t all that bad, if you didn’t drive like an ass.

Funniest weather-related moment for me, so far this weekend — having to trek across Showcase Stonybrook’s parking lot back to the car after the showing of Daredevil in a pair of Converse Chuck Taylor’s after the parking lot had COMPLETELY frozen into a sheet of ice. Shuffle-shuffle slip! Shuffle-shuffle slip! Grab stop sign! Hop from grassy median to median! I consider myself pretty sturdy, and I was slipping everywhichwaybutloose.

The winter isn’t over yet. February is always harsh around here. I cant’ wait for the The Black Keys/Sleater-Kinney show at the Southgate House on Friday! The Hump and The Hot Rock together….

My headphones NEED to be louder — if only for the four minutes and sixteen seconds of BLISSFUL AUDITORY DESTRUCTION that is The White Stripes‘ “Little Acorns”. Sadly, there is no-one on AIM at the moment who cares for my rawk-ranting, else I would say something.

ELEPHANT == ROCK. That evaluates as TRUE.

You may want to look lovingly over at the right bar and notice that not one (1) but two (2) webcam images now appear. One at home, and one at work. I have had the home-cam sitting around for quite some time, and finally got around to plugging her in! Clicky on the image to pop open a nicely formed auto-refresho window, or if you prefer the more terrestrial form, click here.

The images from home are brought to you by a nice little app called camE, which I hacked up a bit to upload a thumbnail along with the regular pic. It’s written in C, and I haven’t programmed in C++ since 1996(!). However, I managed to do alright by myself. I remember now why I enjoyed C++. It’s all very simple — the syntax is clean and not stupid. It’s nice in a simple-machine sorta way. I will be sending patches to the author soon, hopefully with some sort of added functionality to maintain a remote archive, which will allow me to do the same prev/next thing like to do with work-cam. More later.