Things I Should Do, and Things I'd Like To Do

Today's post is a diary post, because I have a lot of things I want to say about myself today. If you read this more for the stories and reviews, you can just skip this post. I promise my next one will be one of the other two.

Tonight we're going to make our second attempt at movie-going, but since we aren't interested in the local options, we're heading to the mall, which is about an hour's drive away. While up there, we'll be doing some Christmas gift card shopping.

Tonight is also the night I would usually go on AIM and participate in a Star Trek RPG, which is where the point of this post comes in. I missed the SIM (as we call it) last week because of a family visit that kept me longer than I had intended, so I was hoping to catch up this week. But it has been weeks since I've had a chance to get out of the house. On one hand, there's a storyline that I really want to advance in my Saturday Night SIM, but at the same time I want to use this gift card and get a chance to step out of the house for the night.

The thing is, I can't change the day that this RP happens. It's a group game, and it's the only time of the week that some people can even show up to play, yet it's a Saturday night, the one day of the week that is more likely than any other day to have "other plans" get in the way.

So while I don't want to disappoint my friend and miss the RP, I also don't want to miss my chance to get out of the house and see a movie. And that's the thing that always bothers me - knowing that I will disappoint someone either way, but having to choose between the two anyway.

Well, that's my rant. Like I said, I promise that tomorrow I'll have a more "creative" post. Maybe if I do wind up seeing a movie, I'll review it.

The Green Hornet! ...Was not seen tonight

I was going to dedicate tonight's post to reviewing The Green Hornet, but seeing how movie night has been pushed to a later date, that's not going to happen. So instead, for no real reason at all, I'm going to rant about climates.

Climate is one of the first things people consider when they make the choice to move. Usually the choice is balanced somewhere between a warmer and colder climate, with the benefit of one being less of the other. The problem with either extreme is that, in the dead of Winter the cold will be extremely frigid, and in the Summer the warm will be terribly hot. The natural inclination is to head for a temperate climate, but then you get winters that are morbidly cold and summers that are unfortunately hot, the worst of both worlds but only in moderation.

There doesn't really seem to be a solution to this problem, so I'm pretty much just spinning my wheels at this point. In fact that debate sounds so boring, I'm going to end it right now and call this whole post off.

*Kzhkt!*

Thesis, GO!

Today I shared this blog with my thesis class. Let's see if any of them come by to read it. Comment here if you do!

Other than that, not a very eventful day. I'm considering what I should get with a Barnes & Noble gift card that I still have, but I've already got a book to read, and this thesis to do, so I'm not sure.

I think I'll add a very short story to this post.

Our Sister Luna

As it rose over the earth, the Moon gazed down upon her sister, filled with sorrow and regret.

They had once been alike – two planets orbiting the sun in near-unison. Luna, the elder sister, had been born closer to the sun, and thus was more mature and full of life than her younger sister. Her sister was growing, and knew she would one day catch up with Luna, so she had no regrets and held no spite towards her sister.

Neither of them could have predicted what happened, and neither one would ask for it again.

The sisters drew close when speedy Luna passed by her sister, and each time it pulled her closer and closer, helping her to grow. One time, however, Luna drew too close, and a chance collision caused the two sisters to change drastically. Much of Luna’s beautiful body was lost, absorbed by her younger but larger sister, while her sister felt the massive impact ripple through her, and forced her to start anew with her growth.

Luna, ever worrying for her sister, refused to depart despite her injury, and hovered around her sister to watch over her growth. To this day, she is watching over her.

And so, that is why the moon looks down upon her sister. She is sad, and full of regret, but has a bittersweet happiness, knowing that her sister has matured into a beautiful woman.

Still Considering My Thesis Plans

Because I want to keep it fresh in my head, I'm going to talk about my thesis again.

If it is a research paper, which I plan on it being, it will have to be about 50 pages long. This is the biggest "problem" for me, as 50 pages is a huge daunting project. Hence, why I want to split the paper up into sections so that I can make gradual progress. Ideally, I want to compile my research and write an outline for it, then start on the first "Part", and work on it until I'm ready for the next "Part", each one making up 10 or so pages out of the 50 I have to do.

The first thing I'll have to do is gather my research. I'll pull up those old virtual worlds articles from my old classes, and dig out the textbooks that are relevant to my topic. I'm also going to have to do some seeking for proper "online game" research, which shouldn't be too hard to find, since I've seen it before in my attempts to write papers.

I wanted to do a few interviews too, so I'll have to write out a list of questions and schedule some time for me to conduct those interviews. Since it is largely a research paper, and the interviews are supplementary to that, I think five or so will do. That way I can augment my research with first-hand perspectives.

Once I've finished the "parts" of my paper, I'll have to go back through each part and revise. I think as I go along, I'll have to make notes on what needs to be revised. Otherwise I'm just going to keep going back to my other "parts" and be stuck going back and forth and not feeling like I'm getting anywhere.

I guess this is both a post about my thesis and a journal post today. But I'm glad I'm getting this out of my head, because it'll help remind me what my plans are for the near future.

Arbitrary Review - Commander Keen Series

Today, as part of my now-ongoing arbitrary review theme, I'm going to do a review of Commander Keen, the series, as a whole.

I wouldn't trust those trees

Commander Keen is a 2D Action/shooter/Platformer from the 1990s. You play as Billy Blaze, the ten-year old genius who dons his brother's Packers helmet and hops in his home made space ship to defend the galaxy as the titular character himself. You use your neural stun gun to zap monsters and aliens while rescuing innocents and thwarting the plots of evil bullies/supervillains from down the street.

The games are the first foray of id software. Old school computer gamers might remember id as

the company that popularized Shareware distribution. You can now remember them as the people who also made Doom and Wolfenstein, two of the most classic FPS games ever made, before any of them were made at all.

And you can't get much more old-school than that

id software was pretty revolutionary in their early days. When they weren't pioneering the most popular style of gameplay today, they were creating the first full-scrolling platforming game ever made on a PC. That's Commander Keen for those of you keeping score at home.

The story goes (from the Wiki page, at least) that during the turn of the century, one of the guys who would found id Software discovered a way to do full screen scrolling on a computer using the latest graphics card of the time.

Eat your heart out, Miner VGA

The original game that he made was humorously called "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement", and was basically a parody set of levels from Super Mario Bros. 3, showing that it could be done. John Carmack, the man who made this silly game, sent it to Nintendo to convince them that they could port Super Mario Bros 3 to the PC, but also sent it to one of his friends John Romero. They teamed up and made a full Super Mario Bros 3 port of the PC, but Nintendo declined their offer to license the game.

Oh what could have been...

The story would have ended there, but shortly after that, Apogee approached the programmers and offered to distribute a game for them using the software they had developed. Thus, Apogee and id teamed up to release Commander Keen.

The series ran up to episode 6, "Aliens Ate my Baby Sitter" (and had a non-canon game called "Keen Dreams"), but the series evaporated as id Software moved on to other, greener pastures.

Remember him?

But Commander Keen holds a special place in my heart. For one, I've always had a fondness for platformers, and for its time, it was the greatest platform game on the PC. On top of that, it appeals to everything a young boy dreams about. A genius ten-year old makes a rocket out of soup cans, listens in on alien signals, and goes off in his home-made rocket with a football helmet and what essentially is a toy gun to save the world. That's the sort of thing a kid would make up on his own and do in the back yard, and they present it here as an actual adventure. Silly yes, but they play that up so well that it's all the more fun for it.

Okay, so they probably wouldn't wear a pink shirt on purpose...

We will probably not see another Keen game in awhile though, unless the legal complications get cleared up somehow. But episodes 2-5 are available on Steam for download, so if you enjoy platforming games, I suggest you give it a try.

My personal favorite is the one we got with Shareware - number 5 - with the Dope Fish and deadly blue mushrooms.

And damn those mushrooms for all eternity.

I Should've Posted Sooner

I had a couple of good ideas for what I wanted to post tonight.

So naturally, when it comes time for me to post something, not a single thing is coming to my mind.

I partially blame reading the wiki page on "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream". I hate stories like that, and they always stick in my head and make me THINK about them anyway, so whatever I'd rather be thinking of is replaced with something grotesque that I don't care for at all.

Maybe I'll try posting earlier in the day tomorrow. Might have a better chance of feeling something kick.

Online Gaming as a Research Topic

I was talking with my aunt and uncle tonight, and I think a research paper on "Online Gaming" Or "Online Gaming Communities and Ethics" would be the best research topic I can pick.



While I don't play as many online games as some people I know (I purposefully avoid MMORPGs and Facebook games), I know about and have had a little experience in these types of games. On top of that, I have a number of interesting perspectives I could get for interviews - my aunt and uncle who play facebook games with people they have never met in real life, my friends who play MMORPGs, the group that I play AIM-based games with (By the way, sorry I missed last Saturday's game. :( ), and any number of people who have played just online-content games. Heck, I could even interview my brother and nephew who play X-Box games together online and see how their experience compares.

Selecting topics to divide it into might be a challenge. I could divide it into areas of different types of games, but that wouldn't really create a good progression, and I'd prefer to have the end point be emphasized by the data. I could do it by date of creation, though that would only help the emphasis go so far. OR I could ignore organizing it by different game types entirely and make the structure be based entirely around the issues being discussed, which might be the best choice.

The best thing about this is that most of my textbooks will be able to help me with this too. I've got a book on Cyber-Ethics, dated as it may be, and a few books on gaming theory that will help with the analysis. On top of that, the articles I saved from my Virtual Worlds class will come in handy for analysis of MMORPG-style games and internet social interactions. I'll have to sift through the rest of my articles to see if any of them will help, and check to see if I can find anything else that'll help, but not only do I already know about this topic, I'll be able to draw on my education to make a paper that is actually pretty interesting to me personally while also being relevant and informative.

Of course, the big problem I always have with papers like this is that they want a conclusion, but also want the data analyzed to be weighed evenly without bias. When you realize that much of the data is already balancing against itself and that interpretation of most texts, even research texts, is still subjective, you realize that drawing an unbiased conclusion is essentially an exercise in convincing other people that you ARE unbiased, then going out of your way to alter the way you present the evidence to prove how unbiased you are.

Regardless, I'll be presenting the information the way I feel it ought to be presented, and starting with the conclusion that I already have in my head so that I can at least work towards a point. If it turns out that it will be detrimental to me to continue to argue that point, I might just have to go back and revise my work, but I think the conclusion of "you really ought to be careful, but you can still enjoy yourself" is pretty unbiased. And, as long as I can make that sound important, I think I've got a pretty good thesis concept lined up.

Two more days until the class starts. Little bit nervous about this last one. Wish me luck.