Month: November 2008

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is a very intense game.

Adam picked it up, and we played 2-player co-operative split-screen on my projector. It plays out like a standard zombie movie. The scenario we played was “No Mercy” – we had to get to Mercy Hospital, and get to the roof to be rescued by a helicopter.

It’s very much a team game, there are tons of zombies constantly coming from all sides, so you have to cover each other’s backs, and sides, and don’t forget to look up now and then too! It’s 4-player, so the other two characters were bots. They did a good job of keeping up and not being too stupid. Mostly.

The zombies in the game are not the slow, shambling kind, no, they are the running-straight-at-you-at-full-speed kind, like in “28 Days Later”. There are also a few special types: hunters, fast leaping zombies who pin you down; smokers, with a rope-like tongue that can grab you at a distance, called a smoker because when it’s killed, it leaves a noxious cloud of smoke; tanks, giant hulking zombies; boomers, bloated fat zombies who puke noxious goo on you that blinds you and attracts zombies, and if you shoot a boomer it explodes; and witches, strong zombies who just sit there crying until disturbed.

The scenario plays out with chapters, at the end of each chapter the group gets to a safe room and can rest for a bit and resupply. Overall, I think the scenario was about movie-length when we played it, around an hour and a half or two hours.

It ended a lot like a zombie movie, too – the helicopter came to pick us up, and the roof was swarming with zombies. Adam got to the helicopter first, then I got there. One of the bots went down, and the other bot went to help. Then out of nowhere, a smoker’s tongue whipped out and pulled Adam out of the helicopter and back onto the roof, into the horde of zombies. Then I guess the helicopter had been waiting long enough, because before I could free Adam from the smoker, and before the two bots made it back to the helicopter, it took off with only me on board.

Adam and the others were, as the title states “Left 4 Dead”. =)

The game is not so much creepy as it is intense. When zombies attack, they come from all sides, fast, in huge numbers. By the end of the scenario, we had killed around 2500 zombies.

Sticky words

I find certain words to be more “sticky” than others… they catch in my brain, perhaps due to interesting rhythms or structures. Sometimes they get stuck in my head the way a tune can.

Here’s a poem-like construct built from some sticky words:

seven tetrachromatic macrophages
installed subdermally
palpate genomic matrices

Last day at Points South

I went up to Points South on Saturday, to get one last look before it went away for good, and hang out with Snooj and Marla et al. Also to check out what was up for sale. I didn’t really need anything, but that didn’t stop me from picking up a server rack and a cast-iron saucepan. =)


Points South goes dark.

I took a bunch of pictures, check em out.

iPhone gripe

So I really like my iPhone. Yes, it has flaws, both hardware and software, but there is one hardware limitation above all others that I run into every day: the pathetic 16GB of storage.

It might seem like a fair amount, but coming from an 80GB iPod, it’s not nearly enough. I can only put a fraction of my music library on the iPhone, and every time I want to add a new album, I have to remove one, a dark sacrifice to appease the Apple gods.

This morning, I thought I had enough space to add a new album without removing one – no luck, only half the new album would fit.

16GB is just *too small*! 32GB would be great, 64GB would be fantastic.

Ok, rant done.

Tattoo two

This is the other design I mentioned, the circle quartered by a cross:

Again, not planning on getting any tattoos, just, y’know, if I did, these are some ideas.

Looking at it, this came out pretty clean considering I was drawing a freehand circle with my left hand.

Tattoo

Not that I’m planning on it or anything, just entertaining the thought, but I think if I did ever get a tattoo, it might be something like this:

It represents two things to me: Pascal’s Triangle aka the SierpiÅ„ski Gasket, and the Triforce from the Zelda games. Both of which I’ve always loved.

Another design I’ve always liked is the circle quartered by a cross, an ancient symbol representing, among other things, Earth.

First prop 8 in California, now this…

Wow, first seemingly tolerant CA passes proposition 8 banning gay marriage, now Arkansas passes a proposition banning gay adoption. Not only that, but it also bans single people of any sexual orientation from adopting – what’s next, take away the kids of all single parents?

It sounds like even adoptions that have already gone through would be reversed by this – tearing apart already established families.

That such a mean and absurd proposition passed is terribly depressing. Of course, this is the backwards state that brought us Huckabee.

Sigh. Hopefully the UCLA will overturn it as they overturned a similar ban in the past.