more xbox gaming

December 13, 2008  🎲 👾

I’ve been playing GTA IV. It’s got a lot of good things, but for the most part I’d say it’s a big step backwards from GTA: San Andreas. It’s clearly benefitting from being on newer hardware, but there’s less game. I seem to have fewer missions available, and nearly no random pickup tasks. In San Andreas, I could steal a cop car and do “Vigilante” missions. I could steal a fire truck and fight fires. I could steal an ambulance and pick up the wounded. I could do cab rides. There are probably other random missions that I can’t think of, too. In GTA IV, vigilante missions are much more of a pain in the butt, and are unlocked quite a ways into the game.

dice frequencies in dnd4 (not scientific)

December 11, 2008  ⚔️

I thought I’d look into how often I’d need various kinds of dice in D&D 4th Edition. I did this entirely unscientifically by grepping the PHB.

chessex pound-o-dice

December 10, 2008  🎲 ⚔️

We need new dice for our D&D game. I ordered a Chessex Pound-o-Dice from an Amazon vendor, Rookie’s HQ Games and Cards. Here’s what we got:

at long last, email sender is released

December 10, 2008  📧 🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

When I started at Pobox, we had a few different ways we sent or delivered mail. Chief among them were IO::Persistent::SMTP, smtpsend, ICG::TestTools::Mail, and Email::LocalDelivery. These all had their own purposes, which was fine, but they also had their own APIs, which was not.

the rpg is dead; long live the rpg

December 10, 2008  🎲 ⚔️

I don’t mean “the RPG” in general is dead. I mean that the game I’ve been running, the ABE RPG, has come to an end. We first met on October 15, 2005, meaning that the game ran for over three years. Wow!

sixapart cheers and jeers

December 10, 2008

A few months ago I took a look at where to publish this journal. For a long time (years?) I’ve been posting simultaneously to rjbs.manxome.org and use.perl.org. I control rjbs.manxome.org and it does more of what I want, but it didn’t support comments. use.perl.org supported comments and had more readers, but little things about it kept bugging me.

the problem with console rpgs

November 28, 2008  🎲 👾

I’m playing Mass Effect now. It’s pretty good, although I’m starting to find it a bit tedious, mostly because I keep having to repeat the same bits. This is especially frustrating when I have several dialog options that look very similar but end up coming out of my mouth with very different tones of voice.

awful itunes hack for album listening

November 26, 2008  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

It’s bugged me that iTunes makes it hard to listen to things as albums. Sure, it has shuffle-by-album, but smart playlists are all per-track.

first few xbox games

November 24, 2008  🎲 👾

My Xbox 360 came with LEGO Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda. I haven’t tried Kung Fu Panda, but I finished the story mode of Indiana Jones. It was pretty good, although nearly the entire Last Crusade scenario was incredibly annoying. The LEGO games from Tt have a lot going for them, but they also have a lot of flaws that just don’t seem to be getting fixed. They have awful cameras, terrible jumping predictability, horrible partner AI, and the vehicle chapters tend to kind of suck. Despite all that, I’d probably give it a B-. Like I said, the LEGO games have a lot going for them.

in which rjbs apologizes for being a dick

November 17, 2008  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

A while ago, I did a bit of work applying patches to MIME::Lite. It’s the most widely depended upon of the dists I maintain, and one of the oldest, with the most RT tickets. I also don’t really like it very much, so it doesn’t get as much work as I’d like to give it.