Excitements

I know, I know. I copped out again after having taken a four-day break of some sorts and reverted to using six-word stories. It's not as though I had deliberately planned for that---I was trying to deal with a silly tension headache while simultaneously trying to contain all manners of excitement and trying to keep a level head in this ever increasingly hot weather, the kind where one immediately feels muggy just from stepping out of a cold shower.

So, all manners of excitement huh. I'll bet some of you who are reading this are wondering just what kind of excitement are there. Well, allow me to enumerate briefly. Over Friday and Saturday, I was half-expecting a text message from a friend who was to inform me of the details for a planned blind date that she thought would be an interesting fit; such a date was planned to occur on Sundays, hence the wait with half-expectations. There were some... complications with respect to the original plans that she had made with her boyfriend over this girl, but we'll just leave it as such for now and not talk about it. Over Sunday I was excited for the arrival of Edythe-II as well as the watching of the new X-Men movie with Moo, Paul and his wife. Those were the main excitements that were keeping me up and making me feel too tired to give a damn about writing.

Of course there are more interesting things that have occurred in between. After nearly a month of running computations and ahem hosting, I finally could reboot Elysie-II back into Windows to play a bunch of games over the weekend. One of the games that I had wanted to start on was Unepic. I had heard of interesting responses from KK about this a long time ago, and had gotten the game from GoG some time back, and I was finally going to give it a go. Man, it was totally worth it. It had a rogue-like sort of feel, very similar to Rogue Legacy for example, except that there isn't any perma-death. So the pressure was actually off the game play and learning-by-dying, which actually gave a little more time towards the small puzzles and the hilarious dialogue. I won't spoil it any further, but considering that I had only played a quarter of the game by this point, there really isn't much else that I can say about it. The platforming felt a little stilted though, the manoeuvrability of the protagonist is surprisingly mediocre---it was impossible to say move in a direction and change weapons at the same time. This also meant that cool platforming tricks like side jumping up a platform immediately above the one that the protagonist was standing on was basically impossible.

I had also started on Bioshock, and suffice to say, the horror ambience was starting to get to me. I'm starting to wonder if I'm not really a fan of the horror/survival genre. Most of the FPSes that I play and particularly enjoy are those that involved relatively fast action, with lots of heroic moments, like Borderlands 2 or even Serious Sam. Deus Ex: Human Revolution actually took me a while to get to to complete it, and till date I still haven't completed Doom 3 and Quake II despite restarting on them every few months. Hell, I don't even play Left 4 Dead 2 anymore. But that's probably a slightly different story.

Oh right, Edythe-II. She's a Fujitsu S904, Intel Core i7, 8GiB RAM (4GiB slotted and 4GiB soldered, going to get an 8GiB RAM stick to up to the maximum of 12GiB) with Intel HD Graphics 4400 and a 1TB hard drive. And those aren't the real reason for me getting her. The answer lies in the form factor---13.3'' screen with a resolution of 2560×1440. Well, screw the fact that she is running Windows 8.1 Pro and therefore has a useless Metro UI and the whole App marketplace concept as well as the touch-screen mechanism. That the screen has so many pixels at such a density meant that I could literally use GNU Unifont as the default coding font for all my terminals without having to sacrifice the total character cell count, as opposed to using the Proggy fonts series. This doesn't sound like much, but really, GNU Unifont is more useful than the Proggy series in that it is pan-unicode in nature, which makes things much more coherent when mixing multiple languages. GNU Unifont has the added advantage of actually being taller than its width, something that is false for the Proggy series (they were all 8×8 compared with 16×8 and 16×16).

More pixel space also means that using tools like Scrivener and FL Studio become more viable, something that I will be doing a lot from this point onwarrds. I have two novels that I want to write (more like three based on NaNoWriMo standards, but no one is counting). I had heard of Scrivener and was contemplating its use in organising more complex novels as compared to the slice-of-life stuff that I had been beating out time after time, and bswolf gave what I would consider a glowing recommendation for the tool since he was using it to organise his own novels. But on a small screen, Scrivener doesn't show off its prowess that well, and so Edythe-II was obtained.

Anyway, this week is a short one. Soon YT will be back in town for a meet up, which is good because I have someone more sane to talk to that isn't related to work, and Brian is actually in town right now, but I will only be dragging him all over the bloody place come Friday where I had taken leave just for that. And with my proposed architecture for an access control service approved in principle, things are just getting peachy.

Now, if only that blind date were to occur, and I have some luck and meet someone who is compatible...