Gaming this Fall: Features and Distractions

After much consideration I've decided not to endorse your park. No wait. That's not right. After much consideration, I've picked my fall gaming line-up. It was tough. Skyrim. Rage. Arkum City. Gears. Saints. The Old Republic. I can't play them all at once.

With plenty of backlog to go, I had a hard decision ahead of me. But I have a system; not a schedule, a system of features and diversions. The feature or features are the games that occupy most of my screen time; I let go and get sucked into these gaming worlds.

My features for this fall are Skyrim and Disgaea 4. I didn't put D4 in the opening list, because it was a given. I'm kinda hoping Skyrim will be my next Fallout 3. Bethesda, I'm throwing you a bone here. You surprised me with your take on the Fallout universe. Having never touched an Elder Scrolls game before in my life, all I can say is I hope your dragons do it for me. But seriously, I want the world and its story. However, if the dragons disappoint, I will let you know.

The real measuring stick for Skyrim's success will be how much it pulls me away from Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten; this game drops on September 6. There's an event in my google calendar and a bookmark in my graph paper notebook where the map designs start. Skyrim will only stand a chance because it lands sometime in November. That'll give me plenty of time to break my controller playing D4. And (hopefully) enough time to find another PS3 controller.

This time around, the diversion was the most difficult to pick. In my system, the diversions are games that I turn to when I need a break from the feature. Rage and Gears of War 3 were the two biggest contenders this year, as shooters usually fall into the diversion role for me. Stirrings of madness often require me to blow hordes of enemies into steaming piles of fresh and bone for my sanity's sake. Aka, I like diversions that help me blow off steam.

After seeing more videos then necessary, I decided to pass on Gears and Rage for Saints Row: The Third and I must shamefully admit that the man-a-pult car had something to do with my choice. It's like the cannons in Mario 64, but rated M. Like Elder Scrolls, I have never touched a Saints game and I don't give two shits about its gangland story; I just want to reek havoc and be goofy. Goofy. That's what I want in this fall's diversion title.

On a closing note, I'm just choosing to wait on The Old Republic and Batman: Arkum City. I cracked open Arkum Asylum about a year after it dropped and loved it. Hopefully waiting (again) will make the bat and the cat that much sweeter.

Fun With WiFi

There is an unsecured wireless network in our apartment complex; it's the free internet that everyone uses. Having recently killed our internet, my roommate and I use the unsescured "linksys" for all of our internetting needs.

Lifehacker discussed some scary wireless network names via this story. The two posts got me thinking of funny/scary names for wireless networks. Here is the list...

c:\virus.exe

rapeU@midnight

WeCanHearUHavingSex

ICanWatchUFroMyPC

c:\d_firewall.exe

w32/kilonce.b.worm

Warbiest_Terminator_v.2.0.exe

unmarked surveillance van

Trojan.Downloader-647

Win32/Nuwar.N@MM!CME-711

botnethasu

IdRathrbphishing

W32.MyDoom@mm

virtualvahjj

These wireless network names are meant to deter others from sapping your wireless bandwidth. Of course, the other option would be to secure your wireless network. Duh. And remember kids: just because you secure your wireless network, doesn't mean you have to settle with the default "linksys" SSID. Be creepy creative.

Organizing A Digital Life

I have a netbook that I consider to be my primary computer. If my apartment were burning to the ground, this netbook is one of the few things that I would grab and shove into my backpack as I scramble away from the searing flames. The netbook contains most (if not all) of the silly little writing projects I'm currently juggling. Devoid of music and pictures, I use this mobile writing machine for note-taking, free-writing, and brain-storming. It's also my primary e-reader. Not in the same vein as a nook or a kindle, but if I'm going to read something electronically, I'll probably read it on this little guy. It's great for blogging and surfing; plus, it has Doom and a GBA emulator installed. All the fun I need right there.

Just as dust builds up on forgotten bookshelves, so does crap collect on this computer; it's time to clean it up and clean it out. Messy.

The same could probably be said for my other computers, but right now I'm just worried about this netbook. The horror stories circulate of crashes and data loss; they've finally scared me into backing up my stuff. Now I need to figure out the best way to do the backing. My instincts tell me external harddrive. And if it's just a matter of copy-pasting every month, I'm cool with that. However, in this day and age of "There's an app for that," I feel like I could hunt down, well...an app for that.

For a small amount of back-up and syncing, I already use Dropbox. This little application killed my use of and dependence upon USB flash drives. I still have one floating around here somewhere, but it's contents are just as messy as my netbook's.

Some interesting options that I've found are SugarSync, Amazon CloudDrive, and Crashplan. Now, to be completely honest, I'm a flickr nut. That network is my home for photographs. The problem is that I take way more pictures than the ones that I post to my free flickr account. What do I do with those "B" images? That's where SugarSync comes in. Dropbox has some of the photo sharing functionality that SugarSync features, but it can't beat SugarSync. The five gigs of space that SugarSync provides (for free) are dedicated to all the crazy, weird, crappy shots that don't make the cut for my flickr page. Occationally, I dig into those gigs for photoshop inspirations of the crazy and weird category.

I'm still very much an iTunes dude; my iPod touch still gets around. Amazon's CloudDrive with it's five free gigs was a bit outside my comfort zone. Then I realized I could buy one album and bump those five free gigs to twenty gigs (for a year). So I jumped, signed up, but still haven't purchases the el cheapo album to qualify for the extra free gigs. I'm hoping for something that I like that's also under three dollars. It hasn't happened yet.

Last is Crashplan. I first read about this guy on Lifehacker; they covered the app in detail, but I had to play with it first. The free features sold me initially, but when I grow up and get a job, I'll shell out the jeffersons for the cloud back-up features. I've no momentary shortage of external media; imagine a nifty mosaic made out of SD and pro duo memory cards. Don't tempt me. Seriously though, I have a big external harddrive that I'm using for now.

Because of the no internet thing, I've been spending much more time with my little netbook (as I carry it to coffee shops, the library, and occasionally campus) and I want to make it a more efficient and safe machine. Being outside or sharing a table with a fellow laptoper has been a nice change to my dark, dank bedroom that serves as the center of my computer prowess.

Hurricane Mary

Death has never been an unsettling thing for me. It's a part of life. A part of living. Sure, it's jarring when it's unexpected, especially when it's a child or a young person shuffling off this mortal coil. But old people? I know and I know they know that their clock is ticking. So when somebody old dies in my family, my grieving process is incredibly short.

Given the spiritual state of my family, I believe that when a loved one has passed on, she has gone to an infinitely better place compared to the broken world in which we live.

The body, the leftover flesh, goes in an expensive box that goes in the ground. The living bury the same decaying organic matter as everything else on this planet. What goes in the ground is not who we are. We are immortal beings; our spirit or our soul or our light leaves a physical body behind that was nothing more than an earth suit.

I don't grieve the loss of a ripped shirt, torn pants, or worn-out socks. Why grieve the loss of an earth suit?

In every death there is a radiant birth as our soul transcends the boundaries of this physical world. Free of its shackles, our light returns to the light.

My Computer Wants More Attention

Oh shit, it's that time again. I can feel the primordial urges swelling up inside me, tearing away at my civil, organized, and laid-back nature. No, it's not a full moon and I'm not transforming into a werewolf or some other shape-shifting beast. It's time to dive back into PC gaming.

It's a vicious cycle; my PC gaming history dates all the way back to Myst and Doom 95. If you were to plot my PC gaming with a fancy graphing calculator or just scribbles on a white board, it would look like your average sinusoidal wave. Complete with crests and troughs; large, wide troughs representing valleys of console gaming and sharp, peak-like crests representing my periodic ascension to WASD greatness.

So, maybe it's not as sequential as I'm imagining it, but there is a clear pattern here: new computer. Our first family computer, my first personal computer, my first laptop (for college). Those are the three peaks, right there. The odd thing about each peak is that I carry games from new machine to new machine. Myst kind of died with Windows 95, but I've installed Doom on every PC of mine that I can. I picked up Diablo 2 and The Sims with my first personal computer. That machine was also where I first played Fallout (such a special place in my heart). The Dell XPS that traveled with me to college was my first high-end gaming machine. Unreal Tournament 2004, Far Cry, Dungeon Siege 1 and 2, and Paraworld spawned from that dorm room desk.



Yes, I said Paraworld. I like my RTS games with dinosaurs. Hell, everything is better with dinosaurs. Take Jurassic Park, for example, if not for the dinosaurs that movie would have sucked. I've added an iMac to that computer collection, but it's not for gaming. That's for all the multimedia editing that I do for work and freelance. I also picked up an Acer netbook sometime in graduate school. Guess what the first program I installed on that baby was? The Doom Collector's Edition. All the Doom you can handle in one neat little package. Then I installed all the crap I needed for class.

So far, there are five PC games to which I'm constantly returning: Doom, Diablo 2, The Sims, Dungeon Siege, and Paraworld. Being able to play these again will be a plus, but it's games like The Old Republic and Diablo 3 that are spurring me to contemplate a new gaming machine. Maybe I'll even build my own PC this time.