hey all,
I put in a little more time on Dark Souls, but the current area I'm trying to clear out is pretty vile. It is called Sen's Fortress. The guards are these big snake-headed dudes with giant scimitars and shields, and then there are these cobra-headed multi-armed guys that shoot lightning at you, and then there are the traps and narrow walkways with swinging axes. I've easily lost 10,000-20,000 xp trying to clear this place out, so I think I'm going to grind my character in the Darkroot Garden for a little bit. I was finally able to kill those troublesome black cats, so with them gone I can prey on some of the easier enemies and level up my stats and weapons and maybe my armor.
My B-day present from my mom arrived: Skyrim. And my does it look big! For the previous game in the series (Oblivion), I happily put in over 120 hours and still didn't manage to finish it. There were just so many quests to do, so many areas to explore, etc. Reports are that Skyrim is easily over 300 hours long. And so far it plays really well. The graphics are a huge upgrade over Oblivion, the level up system is really awesome, the quests are well-written and the voice acting is good so far. The geography and level design is also a lot more interesting than either Oblivion or Fallout 3 (both games designed by the same company which made Skyrim.). The combat is a lot more fun than in Oblivion, but it is no match for Dark Souls in that department. But then, there is a lot more to do in Skyrim: you can mine metals, smith your weapons and armor, enchant your weapons and armor, gather ingredients and make potions, cook meals, pick locks, steal, buy and decorate houses, join different groups and complete quests for them, fight huge dragons and many other activities.
I also just watched a video about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and boy does that look fun too! Unfortunately, that game is also an RPG, which means that 40-100 hours of game play would not be out of the question. As I still haven't finished Batman, Battlefield 3, Dark Souls, and I've just started the gigantic Skyrim, I'm not sure if I'll have enough time to pick up the game when it comes out in February. I'll just have to see.
Michi and I went climbing with one of my teachers from work, and that was pretty fun too. Overall, its been a great weekend. I'm still climbing somewhere in the 5.10a-b range, so maybe a little more practice and I'll be able to pull off a few 5.10c's or d's.
I realized yesterday that what I was posting about earlier with Pascal's triangle and the binomial theorem was actually a power set: the set of sets you can make from a set, not strictly speaking a combinations problem. Anyway...
Cheers,
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Manspace
hey all,
I saw this on TED quite a few months ago, but I find it more interesting now that I have my own.
You see, when Michi gets home from work and we've done our catching up and chatting, and planning, we usually retreat to our own private spots. Hers is the kitchen/living room coffee/dining table, and mine is my bed room gamer's den. I've got my HD computer monitor hooked up to my PS3, my laptop for surfing the internet (ie, watching game reviews, finding walkthroughs, and advice for getting through tricky spots), and a nice place to set my snacks/dinner.
Cheers,
I saw this on TED quite a few months ago, but I find it more interesting now that I have my own.
You see, when Michi gets home from work and we've done our catching up and chatting, and planning, we usually retreat to our own private spots. Hers is the kitchen/living room coffee/dining table, and mine is my bed room gamer's den. I've got my HD computer monitor hooked up to my PS3, my laptop for surfing the internet (ie, watching game reviews, finding walkthroughs, and advice for getting through tricky spots), and a nice place to set my snacks/dinner.
Cheers,
Well, Well
hey all,
I was able to solve that problem I had with my character being cursed. Like most problems in Dark Souls, it is solved by slightly changing your tactics, taking your time, and being careful. I successfully fought my way through all those pesky ghosts and made it to the healer. After that, I was able to clear out several bosses and some mini-bosses too.
But Dark Souls giveth, and it taketh away. Tonight I was trying to fight off the mini bosses of the Darkroot Garden area, some feral black cats the size of horses, and I died. At the time I had 30,000 xp on my character, so I had to fight my way back there in order to retrieve them. But I died on my way there, and so lost that 30,000 xp. I've put about 25 hours into the game now, so I'm maybe a quarter of the way through. That is, as long as I can keep from losing 30,000 hard earned souls every night.
And I'm still putting in time for Batman and Battlefield 3. It looks like I am most of the way complete with the main story of Batman, but I still have something like 3/4 of the optional quests and collector's items to pick up. Why try to get them? Because collecting them unlocks the "battle arena" maps where you can kill hour after hour trying to best your previous score or a friend's best score. I've ranked up my Battlefield 3 character a few more times by playing the multiplayer missions, and I have even suffered through more of the campaign.
Work has been work. Not great, not terrible. For the most part, even the new class has been kinda mundane. Not an eye opener, but not depressing either.
Cheers,
I was able to solve that problem I had with my character being cursed. Like most problems in Dark Souls, it is solved by slightly changing your tactics, taking your time, and being careful. I successfully fought my way through all those pesky ghosts and made it to the healer. After that, I was able to clear out several bosses and some mini-bosses too.
But Dark Souls giveth, and it taketh away. Tonight I was trying to fight off the mini bosses of the Darkroot Garden area, some feral black cats the size of horses, and I died. At the time I had 30,000 xp on my character, so I had to fight my way back there in order to retrieve them. But I died on my way there, and so lost that 30,000 xp. I've put about 25 hours into the game now, so I'm maybe a quarter of the way through. That is, as long as I can keep from losing 30,000 hard earned souls every night.
And I'm still putting in time for Batman and Battlefield 3. It looks like I am most of the way complete with the main story of Batman, but I still have something like 3/4 of the optional quests and collector's items to pick up. Why try to get them? Because collecting them unlocks the "battle arena" maps where you can kill hour after hour trying to best your previous score or a friend's best score. I've ranked up my Battlefield 3 character a few more times by playing the multiplayer missions, and I have even suffered through more of the campaign.
Work has been work. Not great, not terrible. For the most part, even the new class has been kinda mundane. Not an eye opener, but not depressing either.
Cheers,
Thursday, November 10, 2011
10,585
hey all,
See if you can figure out the post title before the end of this post.
Been busy posting on the new course's website. For this course, you are required to post on a certain number of other people's posts each week, in addition to answering the questions the prof. assigns. It is actually part of your grade of the class.
Work has been busy. My private lessons seem to be dropping like flies, but the ones that stay are doing well on the Eiken tests. The Eiken is a well-known Japanese English test. My morning class and my PM class are both improving little by little, and in general I can't complain about it too much.
I took a break from Dark Souls to enjoy Batman and Battlefield, but now I am dying too many times and too easily when I try to progress further. It seems like my playing has deteriorated and/or I'm trying to get into areas that are designed for characters that have higher stats than I do. The main thing that has got me frustrated is that my character has been cursed, which reduces his health by half. The only way to cure this is by buying an item from a particular merchant, or by visiting a healer in a particular area. By accident, before I was cursed I attacked the merchant, and now she won't sell me anything because she's angry. The only way to fix that is by collecting about 66,000 experience points (for comparison, most enemies drop around 50-200 xp, which means farming about 330 enemies at minimum, and at my current level, it takes about 6,000xp to level-up). And I spent a good hour or so trying to get to the healer, but I needed to fight through these ghosts which can take away a lot of your health easily, and which can hide in floors, walls, and ceilings. I can't remember how many times I died. The other thing is that these ghosts don't give you any xp.
If anyone is allergic to math, you have been warned to turn your eyes away. As part of my work on the biome packet, I thought it might be interesting to have graphs which would show each of the biomes compared to every other biome. The idea was that the graph below has too much information on it.
If you are thinking that 10,585 has something to do with this, in fact you are wrong. 10,585 is the number of days in 29 years (not counting leap days, because they are annoying). Today is my birthday and I find myself wondering about my life. I'm in a steady relationship and it seems to be going relatively well. But I have yet to be made a devout member of the church of Let's Have Babies! And although my job is pretty decent, I don't have too much job security and I'm basically taking training right now that will let me change jobs some time in the future. I still have a large amount of student debt from my MA, but I'm slowly whittling that down. I pay my rent on time, and for the most part I'm able to take care of my other bills etc without others reminding me about them. Yet in some ways I still feel like a child.
Perhaps adding to the "problem" is that I've been teaching an essay called "The Quarterlife crisis" to my Eiken students. It is an essay about 20-somethings that find themselves kinda stuck in a rut after finishing college, either in dead end jobs, jobs they hate, in relationships that aren't working or are heading towards commitment that they're not sure they're ready for, etc. While I don't think that the above points apply to me 100%, I still have some feeling that I'm not really sure what I want to do "when I grow up."
Although Michi is 6 years my senior, it seems like she is facing the same problem right now. She is the most competent person at her company, yet they refuse to raise her salary or give her adequate vacation time or bonuses. Yet because her company is small, she doesn't feel she has the necessary skills to cut it at a larger company. And she worries that her English would be inadequate for getting by abroad. So what are our options? I don't really expect answers to be forthcoming, but I do find myself wondering and feeling a little uneasy.
Cheers,
Dave
See if you can figure out the post title before the end of this post.
Been busy posting on the new course's website. For this course, you are required to post on a certain number of other people's posts each week, in addition to answering the questions the prof. assigns. It is actually part of your grade of the class.
Work has been busy. My private lessons seem to be dropping like flies, but the ones that stay are doing well on the Eiken tests. The Eiken is a well-known Japanese English test. My morning class and my PM class are both improving little by little, and in general I can't complain about it too much.
I took a break from Dark Souls to enjoy Batman and Battlefield, but now I am dying too many times and too easily when I try to progress further. It seems like my playing has deteriorated and/or I'm trying to get into areas that are designed for characters that have higher stats than I do. The main thing that has got me frustrated is that my character has been cursed, which reduces his health by half. The only way to cure this is by buying an item from a particular merchant, or by visiting a healer in a particular area. By accident, before I was cursed I attacked the merchant, and now she won't sell me anything because she's angry. The only way to fix that is by collecting about 66,000 experience points (for comparison, most enemies drop around 50-200 xp, which means farming about 330 enemies at minimum, and at my current level, it takes about 6,000xp to level-up). And I spent a good hour or so trying to get to the healer, but I needed to fight through these ghosts which can take away a lot of your health easily, and which can hide in floors, walls, and ceilings. I can't remember how many times I died. The other thing is that these ghosts don't give you any xp.
If anyone is allergic to math, you have been warned to turn your eyes away. As part of my work on the biome packet, I thought it might be interesting to have graphs which would show each of the biomes compared to every other biome. The idea was that the graph below has too much information on it.
And that graphs like the ones below would be more useful.
OK. So how many do I need? Take a few minutes and try to figure it out.
Done? Actually, I would need 63 total. This is basically a combinations problem. There will be six graphs which just show 1 biome by itself. That is the easy part: there are six biomes, so if you show one at a time, you need six graphs. OK. But what about two biomes together? It turns out that there are 15. How about three biomes? We need 20 different graphs to show these possibilities. For four biomes we need 15, for five biomes shown on the same graph at once we need 6 graphs, and of course only one graph to show all at once, like the one at the top. 6+15+20+15+6+1=63.
For those of you who were or are math geeks, this should sound familiar. That's right! Pascal's triangle and/or Newton's binomial theorem. If we go down to the 7th row, we see it: 1 6 15 20 15 6 1. If we add these up we get 64. So what happened to the other one? How come we only need 63 graphs, not 64? Because the last graph is an empty graph: it contains none of the biomes.
If you are thinking that 10,585 has something to do with this, in fact you are wrong. 10,585 is the number of days in 29 years (not counting leap days, because they are annoying). Today is my birthday and I find myself wondering about my life. I'm in a steady relationship and it seems to be going relatively well. But I have yet to be made a devout member of the church of Let's Have Babies! And although my job is pretty decent, I don't have too much job security and I'm basically taking training right now that will let me change jobs some time in the future. I still have a large amount of student debt from my MA, but I'm slowly whittling that down. I pay my rent on time, and for the most part I'm able to take care of my other bills etc without others reminding me about them. Yet in some ways I still feel like a child.
Perhaps adding to the "problem" is that I've been teaching an essay called "The Quarterlife crisis" to my Eiken students. It is an essay about 20-somethings that find themselves kinda stuck in a rut after finishing college, either in dead end jobs, jobs they hate, in relationships that aren't working or are heading towards commitment that they're not sure they're ready for, etc. While I don't think that the above points apply to me 100%, I still have some feeling that I'm not really sure what I want to do "when I grow up."
Although Michi is 6 years my senior, it seems like she is facing the same problem right now. She is the most competent person at her company, yet they refuse to raise her salary or give her adequate vacation time or bonuses. Yet because her company is small, she doesn't feel she has the necessary skills to cut it at a larger company. And she worries that her English would be inadequate for getting by abroad. So what are our options? I don't really expect answers to be forthcoming, but I do find myself wondering and feeling a little uneasy.
Cheers,
Dave
Friday, November 04, 2011
Monkies!
hey all,
I just stumbled across this one on BBC. I only hope that all waiters are so helpful.
Anywho, we just had a few medium sized earthquakes last night, about 4.9, but Michi and I were in the middle of watching Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, and the timing could have been better. It was really unsettling to think that we're on the 8th floor and if it were a major one, you end up wondering if the building would hold up.
My C/ID class has officially started, so I'm back on the discussion boards nitpicking unclear or confusing sections of the textbook, doing other things that endear me to the other students and the professor.
I'm going to try to get some errands done tomorrow, and to get some personal work done tonight so that I can get my game on with Bri tomorrow.
Cheers,
I just stumbled across this one on BBC. I only hope that all waiters are so helpful.
Anywho, we just had a few medium sized earthquakes last night, about 4.9, but Michi and I were in the middle of watching Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, and the timing could have been better. It was really unsettling to think that we're on the 8th floor and if it were a major one, you end up wondering if the building would hold up.
My C/ID class has officially started, so I'm back on the discussion boards nitpicking unclear or confusing sections of the textbook, doing other things that endear me to the other students and the professor.
I'm going to try to get some errands done tomorrow, and to get some personal work done tonight so that I can get my game on with Bri tomorrow.
Cheers,
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Teaching, Class, Games!
hey all,
I just realized that I've been at my current job for one year now. It doesn't seem like one year could have gone by already, but it has.
Work has been pretty stressful, but I think we're making some changes for the better. I'm going to try to design a reward scheme for good behavior/material mastery that will be game-like enough to motivate students to do well. For some students, it seems like I focused on punishing their bad behavior without motivating them to behave well (except in so far as not receiving punishment is a motivator). We started teaching my packet on biomes that I spent so much time on, and it seems to be going well so far.
I just got on to the new curriculum design course's website, and it focuses on assessment. So you "teach" something, and you want to see if your students actually learned it. So you ask them questions, have them take a test, write what they learned in their own words, connect it to something in their everyday lives, etc. These are all different ways of assessing your students. Of course, you can also assess your teaching, the presentation of the material, the sequence of teaching activities, etc. These are also part of assessment. Making sure that everything is coherent and congruent seems key.
Anyway, that stuff aside, I got my 3 games last weekend and it is safe to say that I'm a little crazy about games right now. I probably already put about 10-15 hours into Dark Souls. It is an amazing game, but I really hate this "spiritual successor" crap that everyone keeps bandying about in discussion and review of it. Dark Souls is supposed to be the "spiritual successor" to Demons Souls. Both games were developed by Japanese gaming company From Software.
Here are some key points about Demons Souls:
I've also got Batman: Arkham City and Battlefield 3. The single player campaign for BF3 kinda sucks, but the online play is great. Batman is fun, but I've easily put 4-5 times as many hours into Dark Souls. Not to rag on either game, but the difficulty of Dark Souls actually makes it highly motivating. You feel like you've really done something after you defeat the flying gargoyles that trounced you the first 10 or 15 times.
In non-game related news, Michi and I went rock climbing last weekend, and I spent most of the day climbing 5.7-5.9's, which is about 3 or 4 grades below my normal max. I didn't want to push my finger too hard, and we'll be going again this weekend anyway. I did finally get up to 5.10a, but that is normally my starting/warm-up level and I go up from there. Oh well, it has been about 3 months.
Cheers,
I just realized that I've been at my current job for one year now. It doesn't seem like one year could have gone by already, but it has.
Work has been pretty stressful, but I think we're making some changes for the better. I'm going to try to design a reward scheme for good behavior/material mastery that will be game-like enough to motivate students to do well. For some students, it seems like I focused on punishing their bad behavior without motivating them to behave well (except in so far as not receiving punishment is a motivator). We started teaching my packet on biomes that I spent so much time on, and it seems to be going well so far.
I just got on to the new curriculum design course's website, and it focuses on assessment. So you "teach" something, and you want to see if your students actually learned it. So you ask them questions, have them take a test, write what they learned in their own words, connect it to something in their everyday lives, etc. These are all different ways of assessing your students. Of course, you can also assess your teaching, the presentation of the material, the sequence of teaching activities, etc. These are also part of assessment. Making sure that everything is coherent and congruent seems key.
Anyway, that stuff aside, I got my 3 games last weekend and it is safe to say that I'm a little crazy about games right now. I probably already put about 10-15 hours into Dark Souls. It is an amazing game, but I really hate this "spiritual successor" crap that everyone keeps bandying about in discussion and review of it. Dark Souls is supposed to be the "spiritual successor" to Demons Souls. Both games were developed by Japanese gaming company From Software.
Here are some key points about Demons Souls:
- hardcore difficulty
- "souls" harvested from monsters are used to level up, repair and improve weapons, buy items
- if you die, you lose all the souls in your possession, and to get them back, you must successfully fight your way back to where you died and touch your bloodstain
- precise combat
- weapons and armor degrade through use
- dark fantasy setting
- bosses must be defeated to open up new areas of play
- enemies regenerate after your death, or after resting at a key point
- online play is done via indirect summoning of human or NPC characters, or by invading other human players games
- other online interaction is indirect, done through ghostly images, leaving/reading/rating (un)helpful messages, etc
I've also got Batman: Arkham City and Battlefield 3. The single player campaign for BF3 kinda sucks, but the online play is great. Batman is fun, but I've easily put 4-5 times as many hours into Dark Souls. Not to rag on either game, but the difficulty of Dark Souls actually makes it highly motivating. You feel like you've really done something after you defeat the flying gargoyles that trounced you the first 10 or 15 times.
In non-game related news, Michi and I went rock climbing last weekend, and I spent most of the day climbing 5.7-5.9's, which is about 3 or 4 grades below my normal max. I didn't want to push my finger too hard, and we'll be going again this weekend anyway. I did finally get up to 5.10a, but that is normally my starting/warm-up level and I go up from there. Oh well, it has been about 3 months.
Cheers,
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)