All Kinda Classics

Seriously, save me from myself.

 Just in case you thought I was only good for old books.

 It's not a great contract, but it is a real one, where I make money. Yay!

 I think I've mentioned that I did the Goodreads reading challenge this year. Every quarter, they put out a half dozen or so catagories of books that (publishers have paid them to promote) you read from, you get an internet stamp, etc. I've read all kind of stuff. Some I had on my to read list for a while, one or two I read for the blog, some that wasn't on my TBR but was in my area, and some that was totally out. It's good to get out of my comfort zone. Most of it was absolute trash. The 90s Star Wars novels aren't high art, but most of them are at least reasonably free of obvious editing mistakes, blatant dicontinuity, etc. The amount of Big 5 books that look like first drafts is fucking embarrassing. I've heard there's a lot less editors/development going around these days, but we're talking stuff I'd hope a half decent amateur crit group would catch. I'm going back to grumpily reading the classics. Any probably trying the Malazan series. 

 After being in the middle of  Fruits  for so long, it's kind of weird to not be on something. I think I'm going to go back to the stuff I skipped in Volume 2. It was cool to finish Vol 1, I'll take another stab at it. Just jamming out to "Everytime We Touch" covers and folding laundry. BEHOLD THE OFFICIAL MILLENNIAL PROM THEME: Can we call exclamation marks BANGS? What are you BANGING so much in your emails, Jan‽

 https://www.npr.org/2026/08/24/nx-s1-5937919/move-over-beer-in-rwanda-a-bar-might-pour-you-a-glass-of-milk https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/g-s1-139914/milk-rwanda-milk-bar https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/09/world/africa/rwanda-milk-bars.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_bar

 The other day, I stumbled across  Atomic Robo . I'd read a couple of the print issues, but I was pleasantly surprised to see if still being published in the old school 2 page a week webcomic format online. Good stuff, working my way through the archive. Brian (the writer) also did the first web comic I ever followed:  8-Bit Theater .

 This was the weirdest thing we saw on our trip to Yale last month, a stained glass window of siege weapons in a common room. Even weirder, I can't even find anything about it online. I'll probably do some more digging, but I didn't expect this to be hard to find out more about.

   Got this month's  Rotary Magazine  and it had a liberal education essay in it that was decent. Just gonna pull a few quotes to talk about a little tonight since I can't find a digital version. A liberal arts education is sometimes misunderstood as a preparation for nothing in particular. In fact, it is a preparation for everything.  Its core purpose is not to load students with specialized information but to cultivate habits of mind: critical thinking, ethical reasoning, clear communication, and above all, adaptability. 90% of the classes I took in undergrad were, at best, about as informative as reading a Wikipedia article, despite spending 40 hours (plus homework) and thousands of dollars on each one. Most of them were a decade out of date on specifics before syllabus week, and wouldn't touch anything involving thinking with a ten foot pole. The idea of learning  anything  that'd be useful in real life, versus just paying a bunch of m...

 My wife and I are on a cruise. One of my favorite parts of cruising is getting to try a whole bunch of cocktails that I'm interested in, but don't necessarily know how to make (or want to answer 15 questions for the bartender at a regular bar). I've been going in pretty hard on martinis this trip. Last time, they had the Vesper (James Bond martini-- 4 gin, 2 vodka, 1 discontinued apatrif that you sub with a different apartif and a little tonic), which I enjoyed way more than I expected to. I've been going more traditional. I've decided the following (in order of preference): Gibson: THE BEST! The pickled onion really ties it all together, and I don't have to say dry. It's a shame more people don't have cocktail onions in stock. But at least one of the bars on our ship does, so I'm good. Gin: Dry and with a twist Vodka: Olives

Call of the Machine is MachineGames' expansion for the Remaster. It reuses a bunch of expansion content (monsters more than the guns, because fuck you), a little Quake 1 content (because every id universe needs to be forced into being a linear series now), and one or two original enemies. Also one from the Playstation port (but they still left one out?) A common critique of Quake 2  is that it's sort of stuck between two generations of shooters. Quake  is a clear evolution of Doom. Weird maps that exist to be levels, piles o' monsters, blast everything.  Half-Life  and  Unreal  at least sort of try to be realistic, and bring the crazy factor down considerably.  Quake 2  kind of splits the difference, in a way that doesn't satisfy most people. Call of the Machine gives a kind of "what if..." approach, with 6 mini-episodes (your guns reset, it counts) hitting at different places on that spectrum. You start out on a not-quite-as-cool-as- Quake-1 ...

 Those are clearly classics. I was dumb and didn't take any pictures. Here's a picture of an obvious classic: Apparently Azteks have been cool for the last 5 years or so. I always thought they were cool. The SAFETY YELLOW is the canonical color. I went out tonight and saw one!

 I was looking at a game last night, and they had done some of the art with AI. It wasn't very good, but at one point there was some brainwashing/flashback memory/spot-the-difference bullshit. I thought maybe they'd used the glitches in the AI images as the spot-the-difference points. They did not. 

  College of Ben Franklin Heraldry at Yale

I will be an insufferable Harvard fanboy, since that's what the blog is based on. (Not really it's gonna be really freaking cool.)

 Nightdive generally does a pretty nice job with their re-releases. You get the usual concept art, but they often grab stuff like deleted levels, demos, etc. and include them. Quake 2  comes with two such demos. Neither is worth a real post (they're levels from the game with less stuff, yay!) but a couple general observations: 1. The decision (or at least the work) to make every everything as dark as possible was apparently made pretty late in? A lot of these levels are actually visible, which is a cool change. It's fun to look at vintage screenshots and see how everyone yanked the brightness/contrast up (and made everything washed out) to compensate. And the visible levels were there all along. To be fair, a few are actually even darker than in release. 2. The levels work a lot better as a continuous set. There's some debate on pistol start vs full run in Doom , but Quake 2 's interconnectedness is critical. These just felt like weird speed runs (some were very skippa...

 Unlike  The Reckoning  we did have  Ground Zero  when I was a kid. Looking back, I think a fair number of my  Quake 2  annoyances were mostly from it. This is a very traditional expansions, bigger, harder, slightly more technically developed than the base game. Rogue software's stuff is kind of hit and miss, but I don't think they have anything actually bad. They worked closely with id (literally closely, same building), and I'll be looking at more of there stuff as this series of posts continues. Big picture, this is a decent expansion. They looked at Quake 2  found some areas that were lacking and polished them, moved the difficulty up in a mostly appropriate way, and put together a couple cute set pieces. The overall design doesn't quite align as nicely as  Quake 2  did, but it's better than  Reckoning, Evilution , etc. I will note that the remaster team made some substantial changes to this. I think they mostly got it right, an...

 I dunno, was gonna do some more DQ  today, but this felt more timely. I don't think I've ever actually sat and watched a whole futbol game before, so semi-live-blog here we go! I like the way they do the national anthems. They actually sing along, instead of just awkwardly standing there while someone hopefully doesn't butcher it like they do in most US sports. Watching it in the lounge at the campground we go to in the summers. As always, it's very important to get into a pissing match about how much you like soccer. I don't know why, I just feel like this is common when I'm at a watch party. We're 2 minutes in, and the commentators have already gotten awkward. Oop, don't talk about refs. Oop, don't talk about war. 3:30 and the begging the ref for a penalty. This is a real professional sport. Don't ask questions. ~4:00 Spain's first shot on foal, almost immediately followed by a turnover for a second. Argentina gets possession and runs down...

 I beat Ground Zero  and it was better than Reckoning,  but not by much. Will get it an entry later. Quake 2 64  is also included in the collection, and was pleasantly surprising. It's a bit easy, but I did have to scramble for ammo once or twice on hard. It's short. I beat it in one afternoon/evening, and I didn't  no-life it (cooked dinner, did some stuff with my wife, etc.) You get the full Q2 arsenal. It really goes to show how pointless most of the xpack guns are. About 3/4 of the bestiary is there. The Medic is probably the most noticably omission. They aren't afraid to throw what they have at you. I think the first Tank is on level 3. It's nice to see them again after the Gladiator-fest that was GZ . The levels are smaller/simpler, but the AI handles them better as a result. Flyers can get in close, Gladiators don't get hung up on ramps, etc. Lighting is, dare I say, better (aesthetically at least) than in the original, and even with the low poly textures...

 Got approved for TSA Precheck and Global Entry today. Go travel. It's a classic thing. Like Herodotus.