Month: March 2009

binaural beats

Got a binaural beats app for my iPhone. Not sure if it works, exactly, but after listening to it for 3 or 4 hours, I definitely felt… something.

The theory behind binaural beats, in a nutshell, is that by using phased frequencies in your left and right ears, your brain’s frequency can be influenced.

I went to lunch after coding for the morning with binaural beats playing behind some new-age-y music, and going through the lunch line, things seemed a little… off. Hard to put my finger on, just that reality was a little disconnected feeling. After an hour or so the feeling faded. Who knows, maybe my head was just stuffed up from the cold I’ve had the last few days.

Warrants further investigation, anyway.

Mass Effect

Got back into playing Mass Effect on the Xbox360 last night. I was playing it a while back but got distracted by something shiny, now I’m coming back to it.

It’s well-written, and very cinematic. And features some moral choices that are actual decisions… some games give you choices like “do you become an assassin or a bounty hunter?” but Mass Effect does it better, with some more subtle, or lose-lose choices. Like last night I was playing a level where two of my teammates are in different areas fighting off a lot of enemy forces. I could go provide help to one or the other, but the one I didn’t help would die.

Inventory management is Mass Effect, as in Fallout 3, is annoying. I guess Fallout 3 was more annoying since it had encumbrance rules, but in Mass Effect I’m constantly running out of room to hold things and have to melt them down for scrap. It wouldn’t be so bad if the interface wasn’t so clunky for it.

But overall, really fun. I’m about 24 hours in and feels like about halfway through.