Monday, May 09, 2005
I feel... defeated.
Today has been nigh-unbearably shitty. It's as though Monday woke me up with a boot to the ribs, and for the next 7 hours just kept on kicking. All that's left for me now is to wiggle around a bit and feel for the crunching scrape of broken bone shard against broken bone shard. First, I overslept by 40 minutes or so, and then thanks to the bussing schedule had this further extended to being about an hour late for work. Next, I find that Visual Studio .NET is a royal irritant of the first degree if you decide to integrate features into your software. Provided you do everything right from the get-go, it isn't so bad as an IDE, and works not too badly. The massive amount of infrastructure and interconnected components and properties and settings however, lead to all kinds of problems if you were not fortunate enough to have done everything perfectly the first time. Just adding a help feature is like pulling teeth. I feel like I have to punch the program in the face a few times just to get it to listen, and then spend further negotiations on trying to convey what it is I want to do. Maybe I'm an idealist, but this shouldn't be difficult--isn't the goal of any program to allow the user to do what they want? Bah.
Perhaps today has not been of the best of days because my weekend was not horrible. I got to play the new Freedom Force game, and lo, it is good. Has a general "B-movie" feel to it, but in some ways, that's not a bad thing. It nicely conveys the general feel of Silver Age comic books, with a nice nod to the Golden Age WWII pulps as well. Most importantly, it plays nicely. There are a few interface issues that have caused me some annoyances, but they're never a big deal (ie. they don't format your hard drive) and on the whole it makes for some fun superhero strategizing. Hero balance seems improved as well, but that may be simply because Man-Bot isn't in this game.* To be brief, Irrational has done it again, further banishing the superhero curse, resurrecting all the fun of the last game while introducing new fun and refining the fun from the first game. A very worthy sequel.
On the less-than-worthy front, we have Coffee and Cigarettes. Now when I saw the trailer for this, I expected a film filled with witty, engaging dialogue between an eclectic mix of celebrities while sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, as the title suggests. Unfortunately, this is not what I got. What I got, was a set of 11 well-made, nicely done shorts that seem to focus exclusively on awkwardness between celebrities. Some of the shorts aren't bad, such as the one with Jack and Meg White, the Rza/Gza/Bill Murray one, or the one with Steve Buscemi. The rest are for the most part utter dreck, leaving me with the desire to never combine caffeine and tobacco ever, although a few, like the Iggy Pop one, merely instilled the urge to shut off the movie at once and burn the DVD. In short, I want my hour and 37 minutes back.
So maybe it was the weekend that caused my supremely lousy Monday today. All's I know is that today of all days, I decide to cop out on my afternoon tea and use the IN-SINK-ERATOR! (I swear it's really called that) insta-boiling water faucet, and it's barely hot. More like the temperature of a half-drunk, sat-for-half-an-hour cup o' tea. Also, because of said less-than-boiling, IN-SINK-ERATED water, I'm pretty sure there's residue from my hot chocolate in my mug. Yeah, this is pretty swell to the extreme right here. Kill me now.
To quote both Tim of the Scientific Democrats and Howard Dean: NYEEEEAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!!!
--------------------------
* In the first Freedom Force, Man-Bot was the big, slow tanker character that was supposed to be nigh-invulnerable. Trouble was, he wasn't, in fact, that invulnerable. This put a big dent in the team role he was supposed to fill. The result? A slow character with bad dialogue that was mandatory for many missions and caused much irritation. ¶ 4:47 p.m.
Today has been nigh-unbearably shitty. It's as though Monday woke me up with a boot to the ribs, and for the next 7 hours just kept on kicking. All that's left for me now is to wiggle around a bit and feel for the crunching scrape of broken bone shard against broken bone shard. First, I overslept by 40 minutes or so, and then thanks to the bussing schedule had this further extended to being about an hour late for work. Next, I find that Visual Studio .NET is a royal irritant of the first degree if you decide to integrate features into your software. Provided you do everything right from the get-go, it isn't so bad as an IDE, and works not too badly. The massive amount of infrastructure and interconnected components and properties and settings however, lead to all kinds of problems if you were not fortunate enough to have done everything perfectly the first time. Just adding a help feature is like pulling teeth. I feel like I have to punch the program in the face a few times just to get it to listen, and then spend further negotiations on trying to convey what it is I want to do. Maybe I'm an idealist, but this shouldn't be difficult--isn't the goal of any program to allow the user to do what they want? Bah.
Perhaps today has not been of the best of days because my weekend was not horrible. I got to play the new Freedom Force game, and lo, it is good. Has a general "B-movie" feel to it, but in some ways, that's not a bad thing. It nicely conveys the general feel of Silver Age comic books, with a nice nod to the Golden Age WWII pulps as well. Most importantly, it plays nicely. There are a few interface issues that have caused me some annoyances, but they're never a big deal (ie. they don't format your hard drive) and on the whole it makes for some fun superhero strategizing. Hero balance seems improved as well, but that may be simply because Man-Bot isn't in this game.* To be brief, Irrational has done it again, further banishing the superhero curse, resurrecting all the fun of the last game while introducing new fun and refining the fun from the first game. A very worthy sequel.
On the less-than-worthy front, we have Coffee and Cigarettes. Now when I saw the trailer for this, I expected a film filled with witty, engaging dialogue between an eclectic mix of celebrities while sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, as the title suggests. Unfortunately, this is not what I got. What I got, was a set of 11 well-made, nicely done shorts that seem to focus exclusively on awkwardness between celebrities. Some of the shorts aren't bad, such as the one with Jack and Meg White, the Rza/Gza/Bill Murray one, or the one with Steve Buscemi. The rest are for the most part utter dreck, leaving me with the desire to never combine caffeine and tobacco ever, although a few, like the Iggy Pop one, merely instilled the urge to shut off the movie at once and burn the DVD. In short, I want my hour and 37 minutes back.
So maybe it was the weekend that caused my supremely lousy Monday today. All's I know is that today of all days, I decide to cop out on my afternoon tea and use the IN-SINK-ERATOR! (I swear it's really called that) insta-boiling water faucet, and it's barely hot. More like the temperature of a half-drunk, sat-for-half-an-hour cup o' tea. Also, because of said less-than-boiling, IN-SINK-ERATED water, I'm pretty sure there's residue from my hot chocolate in my mug. Yeah, this is pretty swell to the extreme right here. Kill me now.
To quote both Tim of the Scientific Democrats and Howard Dean: NYEEEEAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!!!
--------------------------
* In the first Freedom Force, Man-Bot was the big, slow tanker character that was supposed to be nigh-invulnerable. Trouble was, he wasn't, in fact, that invulnerable. This put a big dent in the team role he was supposed to fill. The result? A slow character with bad dialogue that was mandatory for many missions and caused much irritation. ¶ 4:47 p.m.
