#26 – Quake (PC)
I can't remember the last time I played all the way through Quake, so this totally counts. Hey! Quake is 13 years old and it's still balls out insane! The level design kind of suffers towards the end (episode 4 outright sucks) but it's still totally fun to play through, if a little short! I may take a break to keep slogging through Max Payne or I may hop into the first Quake expansion. I haven't decided yet.
#25 – Borderlands DLC: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned (X360)
DLC counts, right? Sure! Especially when it's in such a neat little package as Dr. Ned.
I blasted through this today. Do you like Borderlands? Do you like shooting the undead in the face with your shotgun? Do you enjoy a setting that mixes classic horror with humor? If you answered yes to any of these, you'll love The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned!
One word of advice though; as soon as you can get to Hollow's End, go straight to the shack in the most southwestern end of the map. There you will get a quest to collect zombie brains, of which you'll have probably already seen many of. Get started on this right now! And when you fill up on brains, go back and turn them in, because you'll be collecting more. You'll be making five brain runs in increasing numbers. I neglected to turn in my brains as soon as I was full of them and ended up having to chase down 100 more after I'd finished all the rest of the section's quests and I was quite aware of the necessity of completing these brain runs. If you don't start early you'll either be grinding for brains in areas you've already been through at least twice or you'll have to skip on getting that achievement.
I started on Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot and it's hard. It's all arena fighting with enemies tailored to your level. Going at it solo will probably be a lot harder than it has to be. I may hold out until a friend or two has it and we can grind through the arenas together.
The annual holiday Steam sales are killing me. I'm now the proud owner of Max Payne and Max Payne 2. I've never played the first and I barely started the second. So far the first is good if a little difficult!
Bad News
I'm tired of bad news. I'm deleting two links from my bookmarks, for at least a month, and doing my best to not visit these sites.
I'm done with Digg and Reddit.
Digg has slowly devolved into strictly stupid pictures and top 10 lists. Reddit gets huffs and tisks at every wrong doing while rarely doing anything about them and is a general wellspring of negativity.
Now I am batshit insane about getting new news but only when it's stuff I care about. I could not care less about top 10's, dumb pictures, and I can wait for good tech news if it means I don't have to wade through a sea of bitterness. So I'm back to relying on old favorites, Slashdot and Ars Technica, and Google News.
PPK Bonus Features v. 0.2345678
So I did some thinking and the ignore function isn't worth keeping if it means I can't share what I've made with other people. In this version, I've taken it out. I'm splitting off the ignore feature back into it's own script, which is coming later.
Without the ignore function, this version is a little lean. In fact, it's only a moderator flag. BUT that moderator flag is now bigger and in color! Behold!
Get PPK Bonus Features here: http://dreamofwaking.com/ppkscript/ppkbonus.user.js
Get Greasemonkey here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
As always, post bugs and suggestions here!
The best part of Bionic Commando
I'm playing Bionic Commando on xbox. This theme is probably the best part of the game and entirely deceptive. I mean the game itself is okay but when it starts like this, with an elegant theme, I wanted to hope that there was more to it than shooting dudes and swinging. I know that's all there was to the original and I'm not asking for the Citizen Kane of videogames but it starts with the foundational theme of a government that cast aside it's soldiers as ugly reminders of their past and, thus far, it's done nothing with it. The storytelling just devovled into a bunch of snarky assholes yelling at each other. Oh well.
Here's a megaupload link for an MP3 download of the theme.
#24 – 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (X360)
Yep, that 50 Cent. This game was far better than it probably had to be. It's an inappropriately competent Gears of War clone. Compared to the last 50 Cent game, Bulletproof, Blood on the Sand is nearly a masterpiece. It's fun, looks good, and plays well. It's basically everything Bulletproof wasn't.
Now I'll either go back to playing Bionic Commando (which is decidedly less fun than Blood on the Sand) or I'll go back to Condemned 2.
Addressing some PPK Bonus Features concerns
I've been asked a couple times why I made a script for ignoring people. The short answer is that it is a starting point for better things to come. Here's the long answer.
The PPK forums run on a forum software called PunBB. PunBB does a lot of things well and some things crap. As soon as I started visiting the PPK forums I saw that there was room for improvement. Obviously, I, being a typical user, cannot change the forum software. So I'd have to implement improvements and fixes from an outsider's perspective. Inspired by the Something Awful Last Read extension, I immediately went straight for a full blown Firefox extension. I quickly realized that that sort of thing is way over my head, especially without a basis of knowledge in javascript and DOM and nothing to base my work off of. So it got shelved. That was a long time ago.
Recently I decided to give it another go, with a more realistic perspective of my own abilities. Greasemonkey is well known for implementing small changes on the user side that can build up to sweeping changes. I still don't have much of a handle on javascript or DOM but I have google.
So I searched userscripts.org for "punbb". Lo, and behold, a couple of scripts but they were all of the same function: ignore users. That's not the kind of improvement I was looking for, but it's a start. It gives me something to work with. Something I can tinker with and change and observe the results without the painful process of starting the whole thing from scratch and tossing it after an hour's worth of effort.
Now that I had something to work with I started to implement one of the features that I actually did want, moderator flags. Nowhere on the PPK is there a list of moderators. You can stumble upon them by pulling up the user list and sorting by "Administrators" and you'll get most of them. Looking at the index you'd only see VeganMegan as a moderator and that's because she moderates ONE subforum. I'm sure she gets all kinds of insane non-Playground questions because she appears as the first visible authority figure around!
So to me, as someone who frequents other internet forums but has never been a part of the in crowd, knowing who the moderators are is rather important! They're the people who can fix things when they get out of hand and answer questions! It also gives common folk more confidence in the words of people who speak with an air of authority to know that they are actually a person of authority. People are more likely to post when they know who it is that they shouldn't actually piss off.
So let's get to more about the ignore function. Ignored users are ignored locally. The list of ignored users is stored on that person's login cookie. The ignore function is not phoning home and I am not compiling a list of ignored users. I'm not interested in knowing who is being ignored by whom. When you ignore someone, it is a personal decision. No one else knows or needs to know who is being ignored by whom. Personally I won't ignore anyone for any reason. I would even remove the ignore function but that's removing functionality that someone may find useful and I'm not in the business of removing functionality. I will probably even improve upon the ignore function so that it when a post is hidden or a user ignored, the "Show Post" link has a username attached so you at least know who's post is being ignored.
Also, no one is paying me and no one asked for this. I didn't do this to appease anyone but myself. If no one else uses it, I'll be the only one then. I'll keep working on it until I get bored or stuck or run out of things to implement. I've been told by one person, who is a moderator, who happens to be my wife, that I'm personally not allowed to make a post on the PPK about this, no matter how useful it is. If you use this and like it now or in the future, please post about it! I'd love to get more feedback! If you're a moderator and you like this and you're willing to tell Katie to piss off, let me know! I'll be glad to post about this myself.
If you've gotten this far, you deserve a gold star. And a wrap up.
I'm trying to improve things, not cause drama. Help me help you.
OH! And I've put PPK Bonus Features on GitHub! If you're willing to help out, please clone and have at it! Right now the master branch is also the newer-than-new build but once I release a new version, master will freeze and development will continue on a new branch.
PPK Bonus Features (previously known as PPK Ignore Script) version 0.2222222
Here it is, the new version of the PPK Bonus Features, previously known by the most short-sighted name ever, PPK Ignore Script. This one does more than ignore people! Here's the shortlist of features!
- Allows you to selectively ignore users or specific posts
- Forbids your ignoring moderators
- Flags moderators as such
Get the script here: http://dreamofwaking.com/ppkscript/ppkbonus.user.js
Get Greasemonkey here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
NOTE: You need to uninstall the old PPK Ignore Script if you're going to use PPK Bonus Features! If you don't, you'll end up ignoring moderators and with two sets of ignore options! You only need to do this once though. Once you're on PPK Bonus Features, when a new version is released you can just install over it.
As always, post bugs or improvement suggestions below! I'm not happy with how the moderator flag looks so I plan on doing something about making it more obvious. I'm primarily pushing out this new release to establish the new name before too many people are hung up on the PPK Ignore Script.
PPK Ignore Script (version 0.1111111) for Greasemonkey.
There's a lot of things PunBB (the software that runs the PPK forums) does right and there are some thing it can improve on. In an effort to improve things by plagiarism, I searched userscripts.org for PunBB scripts. Unfortunately there's not much else than an ignore script. Oh well, it's a start.
Once you install this script it will add two links under people's identity block in posts; Hide Post and Ignore. Hide Post does just that, it makes that post disappear under a link to show it again. Ignore hides every post that user makes. You will still see the threads they've started in the index but when you view the thread, their posts will be hidden. To un-ignore someone, just click the Show Post link and click on ***IGNORED*** and they will be un-ignored. I guess this can be a struggle if you've ignored a lot of users as you'd be unhiding post after post to find one by the user you're trying to un-ignore. Hey, now I have something I can improve on it with!
I haven't done a lot of testing beyond making sure that it works as advertised. It does work. You probably shouldn't use this to ignore moderators. I guess making that impossible would be another improvement.
Get Greasemonkey here first (if you don't already have it): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
Get the script here: http://dreamofwaking.com/ppkscript/ppkignore.user.js
Katie won't let me make a thread in the PPK for this. She's afraid it'll make people sad because they'll think everyone has them on ignore. I guess what I'm saying is most PPKers are adults and if one adult wants to selectively ignore other adults and those adults are incapable of coping with the possibility that they're being ignored, maybe they don't need to know that it's possible they can be ignored to begin with. Or maybe they should grow the fuck up.
Post bugs here. Post improvements here. Think small, I'm not a genius at javascript or DOM, I barely know how this script works to begin with.
Things I'm looking into:
- Adding username to the Show Post link
- Blocking moderators from being ignored
- Making moderators more noticeable
- User notes? (maybe too much for me)