Is an admirable bakery product considered a roll model?
OH GOD I DOWNLOADED THE SIMS 3.
I haven’t played it since 2012, I’m pretty sure. But I got the urge to play it again the other day and magically remembered my old Origin username and password so that I didn’t have to buy a new copy.
(Like that would have deterred me.)
TIME TO MAKE A FAMILY!
Update: I made a dude named Dominic. He’s got a crap job and no money ($14 as of my writing this) and a house that contains the bare minimum furniture to keep him alive and somewhat happy.
Update 2: HE GOT FREAKING ROBBED. The robber stole his fridge. Seriously? The dude was so desperate for a fridge that he broke into the crappiest house in the neighborhood and made off with the crappiest fridge that had no food in stock? Why didn’t the robber steal Dominic’s last $14 to go on a McDonald’s binge or something?
Update 3: Oh good, the cops recovered the fridge. THANK GOD, THAT WAS ALMOST TRAGIC.
Update 4: Dominic was super lonely (he’s a social Sim), so I made him a roommate named Leon The Lion to keep him company.
Update 5: Aww, they’re in love now!
Update 6: Leon proposed! Time to plan a wedding. Unfortunately, Dominic wants a lot of people at the wedding, and as of right now him and Mr. The Lion are the only two Sims in the neighborhood. Time to build friends!
(Further updates to follow, most likely.)
War of the Words: Nate and Claudia Play Scrabble
Hello, people! So I did all of this stuff over the weekend/in the airport, but because of craziness with the flight and everything yesterday, I’m just posting it now.
Okay? Okay.
Nate and I have been playing Scrabble approximately once a week since the beginning of the year.* We have been recording our scores since we first started playing (for a total of 26 games), and I have been taking pictures of our completed Scrabble boards for the past 17 games.
NOW IT IS TIME FOR OUR SCRABBLE GAME-RELATED STATS.
Before we look at our performances, I want to preface this by saying that Nate has the incredible talent of pulling all the vowels all the time, which is the only reason his average is lower than mine. I’m sure if he didn’t have the Scrabble Curse of Vowels and was able to pull the Q, J, and X as often as I do, our scores would be much more equal.
Just sayin’.
Here are our point stats.
Holy crap, my standard deviation is huge. Nate’s super consistent; I’m all over the place.
Here are box plots!
I should do a test of equal means (paired t-test) and a test of equal variance, but I’m pretty sure they’d both come up as significantly different.**
Here are our score trends across the 26 games.
I also made a heat map of the Scrabble board! Here is a heat map of our most frequently used tile spaces based on the 17 pictures of our completed boards. Yellower squares indicate more frequent use; bluer squares indicate less frequent use. Obviously the center square is the yellowest because the first word in every game has to touch it. This center square had the maximum number of uses (17), but all tile spaces were used at least once.
There was another heat map I made which highlighted which squares had the highest number of points placed on them across the 17 games (calculated by just summing the point totals of all the tiles placed on each given square over all the games), but that wasn’t as interesting.
Now we have SUPER SCRABBLE, so that’s going to start happening soon. New data!
*Not every week, though, and we played a few games in 2014, but that’s all irrelevant anyway.
**They did.
So this is awesome
Dudes. This is so cool.
From what I’ve read about it, all the player has to do is press “forward” and the track does the rest with the power of PHYSICS.
Also, that music rocks. It’s The Pink Fields by Doxx & Feint, just fyi.
FALLOUT 4!
FALLOUT4FALLOUT4FALLOUT4!!
The good: Fallout 4.
The bad: There’s no official release date yet, but once it’s announced, it’ll mean that I’ll have to get a new PC (desktop, not laptop). Which is good in and of itself, but it’s also expensive.
But…
FALLOUT 4!
CELESTIAL GOAT
It’s 4 in the morning and I’m like negative amounts of tired, so rather than sleeping I decided I wanted to play some sort of video game. I was originally going to play some Half Life, but as I was going to click on the desktop icon, I caught a glimpse of The Neverhood icon and decided to play that instead.
I’d forgotten how fun this game is!
Since I seriously doubt any of my readers ever played this late ‘90s claymation game, have a 10 minute review and then a play-through if you’re interested.
It is a super hard game to find (and it’s not cheap when you do find it), but I still have my original CD!
(Also, Hoborg rules.)
Free Man
HOLY CRAP, I hate tests. This one wasn’t bad—meaning that it wasn’t hard—but it was super long and I wasn’t able to finish in the allotted 50 minutes. But most other students weren’t able to finish either, so hopefully our professor will have some mercy on us.
Now to play HALF LIFE, bitches. I love me some Half Life.
Edit: listen to/watch an interesting discussion about why the game was pretty groundbreaking for its time.
Typists, Get Ready!
I just found a SUPER ADDICTIVE typing game!
It’s a little like Space Invaders. If you play the normal mode, it doesn’t really start getting rough until, say, the 23rd level. I think expert mode starts you at level 20, or at least something similar. And shooting the ships doesn’t retard their falling.
The highest I’ve gotten on normal is level 32; the highest on expert is level 12.
Minecraft!
For those of you who play Minecraft on the PC: “mark nutt” is one of the best seeds I’ve found as far as super-diverse and dramatic worlds go. Check it:
I built my house around a lavafall.
Also, now I have to go watch the Mark Nutt compilation again.
The New Science
WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARD OF THIS GAME BEFORE??
From the site:
“In The New Science, you play the role of one of the great scientists from the scientific revolution in 17th century Europe. You are attempting to publish your remarkable scientific discoveries in order to gain prestige, be seen as the finest mind of your era, and consequently be appointed the first President of the Royal Society.”
And which great scientists can you play as?
LEIBNIZ!
ALSKFJASLDFJALGSLA
This looks really, really interesting. I need this game, yo.
(And a dorkfest of friends to play it with.)
PEGGLE!
Oops, I’m addicted to Peggle.
Thanks a lot, Achievement Hunter.
For those of you who don’t know what Peggle is, here’s the AH crew playing Peggle 2, which just came out. Peggle is quite similar, so if this looks fun, I recommend Peggle! You can get it from Steam.
KibbieCraft
So I just spent my evening recreating the back of the old Kibbie Dome in Minecraft.
Yeah.
I know it looks a little narrower than the actual Kibbie Dome…that’s because even though I copied the tiles exactly (there may be a few mistakes ‘cause I suck), tiles in the actual Kibbie dome are rectangular but the Minecraft blocks are square.
(I didn’t do the actual building ‘cause that would have taken forever. Plus it’s just a big dome of white, so it would also be pretty boring to construct.)
(Sorry these are all so short, I’m buuuuuuuuuusy)
So remember that zeppelin game I played like in 2009? That was from Abandonia.
Unfortunately, I can’t play the zeppelin game anymore ‘cause it was just for Vista and lower, but I forgot how many weird-ass games are on Abandonia. Miiiight have to start playing more of them.
WOO!
Ode to GMod
Woah, this is beautiful.
The Cosmic Osmo Appreciation Post
So today I’m going to talk about this game:
This is the opening screen from Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. It’s almost as old as I am (published in 1989) and is pretty much the only non-shooter game I grew up with (unless you count Spin Doctor as well).
Says Wiki: “There is no goal, no system of scoring points, and nothing that the player can keep in an inventory. A player can be said to have “finished” the game if they’ve explored every area and found every secret, but the game gives no feedback to indicate whether this has happened. Although this is unconventional, it allows finding new secrets to be a genuine surprise, while avoiding the frustration of endlessly searching the game for the last secret to achieve 100% completion.”
And it’s a big game, especially for 1989. And look at these awesome black and white screenshots:
You can buy Cosmic Osmo on Steam (for pretty cheap, I think). I totally recommend it.
And happy birthday, Matt!
Pokemon!
I miss my Pokemon cards. I should have kept them. Foolish Claudia!
I’m a psychic-psychic, which is awesome, ‘cause I love the psychic Pokemon. Can I be Alakazam? I always thought Alakazam was awesome.
Or Drowzee.
“Puts enemies to sleep then eats their dreams.”
I totally do that.
Also, look at this dude and tell me there’s not a resemblance:
Also, this is relevant to today.
Much Ado About Bacon (or, Claudia Plays Oregon Trail III)
I can’t remember the last time I played The Oregon Trail. But I do remember that for whatever reason, I had made it my goal with each play-through to accumulate as much bacon as possible while still surviving* the trip.
Oregon Trail III (I think) had a journal feature in which you could write about your harrowing transcontinental journey. This is a saved excerpt from one of my bacon-driven travels way back when I used to have Oregon Trail on one of our computers. So who knows how old this is. Enjoy.
I now have 500 and some odd lbs. of bacon. I NEED MORE!
——
I NEED BACON!!!! BACONBACONBACON!!!
——
I cannot write the date today because I am severely weakened from lack of bacon…
——
Bacon!
——
I traded a pair of boots for 5 lbs. of bacon. If you ask me, these people have a severe bacon shortage–this must be investigated! (P.S. Who would trade their bacon for a measly pair of boots?!)
——
I traded yet another pair of boots for 10 lbs. of bacon. These people don’t seem to understand the importance of bacon and are easily coaxed into trading some sort of clothing or aloe for their precious pig meat.
——
Much success today!! I went into fort Kearny and got 22 LBS OF BACON!! Talk about a deal. Then we circled the wagons and I traded one of my chickens for 14 lbs. of bacon. But I did have a problem: there’s this one lady in our “wagon circles” who seems to be some sort of vegetarian–she never has any bacon! Actually, she could be some sort of bacon activist, and is hoarding her bacon in a secret bag wrapped in tin foil to soil the smell in her wagon. Hmm…
——
A snake bit Jeff Goldsmith. I was generous and gave him a piece of my precious bacon to rub on the wound. Of course, he got better instantly. BACON CONQUERS ALL!
——
Anna Tillman should have never agreed to come on this trip. She’s a wuss! First, while I’m hunting, she gets in my way and I shoot her! Then she discovers a truly brilliant plan of catching Cholera so’s we can pay extra special attention to her. Real dang smart. Then she gets shot again and is visited by the angel of infection. And if that wasn’t enough, she ATE SOME OF MY BACON!! ARRRRRRRRRGH!
——
What’s-her-face from yesterday’s entry’s got a cold.
——
You know, I don’t think Oregon’s so great anyway. If these guys we’re traveling with aren’t bringing bacon west, then what’s the point of settling the west?
——
You know what this trail needs? A Jack-in-the-Box.
——
ANOTHER shooting? Seriously? I thought by this date in history they’d invented aiming.
——
I am so sick of this!!!! I WANNA GO HOME!!!!
——
Let’s do the cholera dance! I have EIGHTY pounds of bacon.
——
Wait. FIFTY pounds of bacon?? Something somewhere went horribly wrong. Anna Tillman, explain yourself!
——
You know, if these people hoarded bacon like any smart individual would, we wouldn’t HAVE cholera issues, now would we? But nooooooooooo….
——
What’s-her-face from 2 entries above died. Too bad; she was a fisherwoman. Dang, the gal could catch fish.
——
Even though we suffered a death, the rest of us are all in excellent health! Even her husband! I asked him if he would like me to sit him down for some one-on-one counseling, so I could make sure he was okay, but he just said, “Naw. If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go snatch Anna darlin’s anvil. Since she won’t be needin’ it!” He seems emotionally fine.
——
I gave him bacon. I think he’s even BETTER now.
——
Okay. This lady we keep circling the wagons with, the bacon lady, still hasn’t got any bacon!!!!!! I’ve tried and tried but I haven’t got any out of her. Why do we keep circling our wagons with this family?!?! Wait….maybe they’re stalking us!!!! Oh great. Now I’m REALLY worried…
——
Bacon Lady’s got no bacon!
——
Okay. Seriously. Why don’t these people we camp with have bacon. It’s like a food group, and they’re lacking it. No WONDER people are dying like flies!
——
Dysentry: the other white meat.
——
What’s wrong with this stinkin’ trip?!? First, there’s this bear that gets in the way of a deer I was gonna shoot. So I shot the bear. I was sure there was going to be a mauling, since every other natural disaster that’s possible had happened to us up to that point. But no, no mauling. Instead we got a prairie fire. WHAT NEXT????
——
(like 20 game days later)
Oh cool, Oregon.
*survival optional for other group members.
The Original Half-Life is Fantastic
I started a new game of Half Life a week or so ago and have been playing my way through it. I’d totally forgotten how long it takes to get to the damn surface that it is the most fantastic game on the planet.
10 reasons why this game is awesome:
10. It’s Black Mesa! I’d totally want to work there if it actually existed. I have a mug (available from the Valve store).
9. “Start the rotors” is a running joke with me (mostly just in my head). Anytime I do something that I know is going to cause catastrophe later, I say to myself “I just started the rotors, didn’t I?”
8. Watching Stephen King’s “The Mist” with my dad like a decade ago (old Claudia is old) I thought, “holy crap, this is a total rip-off of Half Life!” Turns out Half-Life itself is based partially on “The Mist.” Oops.
7. Gordon’s 27 years old and all the other scientists are geezermobiles. I just find that hilarious.
6. This game is my late childhood-early adolescence. I think my mom’s old friend got some sort of bootleg copy for me to play (‘cause that’s what he did with everything) and then we went out and got a legit copy ‘cause we thought it was so awesome.
5. I really like the fact that two expansion games to the original, Opposing Force and Blue Shift, allowed you to play the game from two perspectives other than Gordon’s—as a soldier (Opposing Force) and as one of the security guards (Blue Shift).
4. I know it’s not directly related to Half Life gameplay itself, but when I found the Half Life references while playing Portal, I had a little squee. Okay, a major squee. Good video of the “Competing with Black Mesa” slideshow.
3. Cheating. Is. Hilarious. Activate god mode, noclip, and impulse 101 when you’re going through the tram system during the opening credits and you can go screw with all the scientists in the scenes you pass. I like to throw snarks at the security guards then sprint in the opposite direction.
2. Speaking of snarks…
1. CROWBAR!!
You can have your overly-fancy graphics, intelligent enemies, experience points, and dynamic environments. Just give me Gordon Freeman.
Swiss Cheese Robinson
Play this. It’s super fun.
That is all.
Addiction: It’s What I Do
I used to avoid crossword puzzles in every puzzle book I ever bought.
Now all of a sudden I love them like none other and must acquire as many crossword puzzle books as possible.
Obsession, thy name is Claudia.
Teeny Tiny Blog
Good lord, Fallout 3 is the epitome of awesome. Those of you with an Xbox (or a Steam account or a PC copy of the game) need to play this game. Seriously.
Uh…there was something else I was planning on saying today, but who knows what it was.
Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system
The original Half-Life is, in my opinion, entirely underrated. I’m of the purist camp that says that the original is vastly superior to Half-Life 2 or even the earlier iterations of Blue Shift, Opposing Force, and Team Fortress Classic.
I mean hell—you get to be GORDON FREEMAN. I love Gordon Freeman. And the crowbar.
Fun fact: obviously, Half-Life is named after, well, the half-life of something. But the two other early iterations of the game are also named after scientific things. Opposing Force is named after Newton’s third law of motion; Blue Shift is named after the blueshift, a decrease in wavelength, opposite of a redshift. Snazzy, eh?
And for those poor souls who have yet to see this:
Apologies for the relatively crappy blog posts. My life has been a nightmare for the past few months and I’m basically just waiting for this phase of things to be over in a month and a half or so. Things will get better, I promise.
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.
8-Bit Green Light
Few books are simultaneously more deserving of and more inappropriate for NES game format than The Great Gatsby. This image alone captures the greatness:
It’s short, easy, and freaking fantastic. Nick Carraway’s weapon is his hat (or hats, rather), but they look like pitas in the extremely pixilated format which makes things even more hilarious.
More classic novels need to be made into retro NES format (except To Kill a Mockingbird, that just needs to stay away from me for the rest of my life). Lolita would be rated AO and would attract creepy but surprisingly articulate men who like pixilated preteens.
Why I Like Shooters
I’m unsure as to whether or not I classify myself as a gamer. Sure, I obsess over the five or so games I adore, but apart from them I’m certainly not a hardcore Xbox-hugging control-gripping game freak.
I do, however, love a good shooter.
Give me an FPS and I can go for hours (Unreal, anyone?). I’ve caught a lot of flak for this when I happen to mention it to people who are gamers but generally stay away from this violent genre. I usually get the “I hate shooters, they’re so mindless and boring,” or something along those lines, usually followed up by a defense for fantasy, RPG, or pretty much any other genre. In a sense, I agree. Take Quake, for example. There’s a “plot,” but it is grossly overshadowed by levels and levels of straight killing for killing’s sake.
Boring? Yeah, okay, maybe, but only if you take it at that value. Back in my “I’m seven years old and my fingers can barely reach the arrow keys on the keyboard” days, I didn’t really see Quake above that level because I really couldn’t. Physically, it was a challenge to finish the game. Once I got older, though, I continued to obsessively play Quake. Why? Two words: speed runs.
I’ve posted The Rabbit Run on here before, and I think it’s an excellent example of how shooters can be fun past the “MUST DESTROY EVERYTHING LIVING” mode of gameplay. Basically, if you can find another element to tweak while you’re playing, there’s far less focus on the mere shooting aspect and more focus on whatever other element you’re trying to maximize/minimize/perfect.
Another example of this for me is Gears of War 2 (thanks mainly to Aaron). Apart from the incessant stream of possible Cole Train jokes arising from the campaign mode, the main pull of this game for me is the Horde. In Horde (both single- and multiplayer) there are 50 levels, each with an increasing number and/or difficulty level of enemies that you must kill without being killed yourself. It’s not so difficult when you’re going through it with a partner, but by yourself it’s freaking tedious as hell. And that’s what’s so great about it, at least for me. Between rounds of freaking out about Multivariate Analysis and Linear Algebra back in spring semester 2009, I spent my time trying to work my way through all 50 levels of Horde in easy mode. It literally took me months to complete.
Of course, anyone who knows me in the slightest knows I love tedious, and that’s exactly what this game provided. Shooters, in my opinion, when played correctly, are horribly tedious. And that’s the fun part (it’s another reason I adore Fallout 3 as much as I do, too, now that I think about it). It’s why I get a bit upset when people bash shooters as these mindless violence trips. Sure they are, most likely, for some people. But for some of the gaming population like myself, we approach them and work through them like ten pages of matrix algebra.
And that rocks the socks off of a fox.
Gift of the Magikarp
I suddenly have an insatiable urge to acquire Pokemon cards. I had quite an impressive collection way back when. I also remember being the only girl in elementary school who was into Pokemon.
I miss my Gameboy Color, too. It was sexy.
Anyway, here is a list of my 10 favorite Pokemon. Just ‘cause.
Snorlax
I adore Snorlax. He’s such a fat dude. Any creature whose abilities include “thick fat” has to be awesome. I always tried to play him in my deck as often as possible, haha.
Psyduck
This is the creepiest Pokemon ever. Its powers stem from something akin to chronic migraines, which makes me wonder, in its picture, whether its staring into the water to concentrate or contemplating suicide.
“Psyduck are usually unable to think very clearly due to having a chronic headache. Because of the headache, a Psyduck will always hold its head. When these headaches worsen, Psyduck may use psychic powers.”
What if that principle held for humans? “Uh oh, migraine coming on…guess I’ll have to USE AMNESIA!”
Sudowoodo
Apparently this is a rock-type Pokemon. I was unaware of this. I wonder why a rock Pokemon would desire to disguise itself as a tree rather than anything else. Now I am even more intrigued by this club-branched weirdo.
Porygon
These should always be named Tron.
Ditto
Silly Putty Pokemon! I thought this was always one of the coolest Pokemon in terms of moves.
“When two Ditto meet in the wild, they will attempt to transform into each other.”
And this is how black holes are formed.
Diglett
Diglett is cuter than hell. He’s also the first Pokemon I was ever introduced to, so I think I have a soft spot in my heart for him.
Metapod
Yes, I’m aware that my liking Metapod basically makes me the most boring person on the planet. But I always thought it was one of the cooler-looking dudes. It also lends itself to jokes like this:
Voltorb
Every time I see one of these I have to think of how often they would be mistaken for pokeballs. What kind of weird evolutionary tactic is that? “Hey, I’m actually a Pokemon sitting here in the grass and HEY STOP TRYING TO SHOVE ANOTHER POKEMON INTO ME WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ASH YOU DILETTANTE POKEMASTER!
Magneton
It’s a molecule! That’s why I always liked it, it looked like H3 or something.
“Magneton is most commonly seen as one Magnemite on top, and two Magnemite linked via body on the bottom, forming a triangle.”
Bow-chicka-wow-wow.
They can also get hungry and have emotions, apparently.
Machamp
Machamp was the first holographic card I ever got; thus I have a soft spot in my heart for it. That’s about all I’ve got for Machamp, haha.
Today’s song: Horchata by Vampire Weekend
Eigenblogger 