Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:24 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:28 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It also has a much more complicated plot than ten (or even eleven) episodes can comfortably hold. There are significant time jumps between episodes. This is noticeable not just in the character relationships - a startling development at the end of one episode has become part of the background at the start of the next - but explicitly in that the seasons change over the course of the series; the elapsed time must be six months at a minimum, and possibly more. So there are some things that are simply never explained.

Many spoilers follow. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:09 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's an open source subset of Virtuozzo, which is a virtualising system aimed primarily at hosting providers. Mughi, the latest addition to the mu.nu family, is a virtual server running under Virtuozzo.

The neat thing about OpenVZ (and Virtuozzo) is what it isn't: It isn't a complete system-level virtualisation. It's a user-level virtualisation. Under OpenVZ, you have one Linux kernel for the entire (physical) system. Under something like VMWare, you have a separate kernel for each virtual machine. The VMWare way gives you complete isolation (good), but it means that each virtual server ends up trying to manage its own disk caching and virtual memory (wasteful). With OpenVZ, you have a single caching and virtual memory pool, but you can restrict how much memory (and also CPU time) a single virtual machine can take up. This does mean that I can see how much physical memory the server has (8GB, of which 256MB is guaranteed to Mughi), but for many purposes that matters less than the efficiency gained by the sharing of that memory.

There's a 119 page PDF manual available if you want to know more.

It is only supported on certain specific versions of Linux (the manual lists Fedora Core 3 and 4, and Red Hat Enterprise 4), but you can run other distributions inside the virtual machines; it's only the kernel that must be shared. (It looks like CentOS, Fedora 5, and SUSE 10 are now supported as well.)

Ooh. And they also have checkpointing and virtual server migration, which is pretty neat for free software.

And then there's Xen. I really need to read up on that too.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:56 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Susie, first citizen of Munuvia, has her third birthday next week.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:03 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:56 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Some role-playing games are criticised for being too linear, too focused on the main story. The best example I've ever seen is the final chapter of Hordes of the Underdark. Not only do you travel in a dead-straight line from your starting point to the goal, but you pass through a series of one-way gates so you cannot retrace your steps (or return to town for supplies) and there are arrows painted on the ground telling you which way to go.

Oblivion doesn't do things quite like that. There is a main quest: Go here, do this, go there, die. Well, the die part is optional, but it's not avoidable. If you follow the main quest without going and doing other things first - finding better equipment, new spells, and generally levelling up like mad - you will die.

On the other hand, if you wander around near where you start out, you will get bitten by a vampire, and contract vampiritis.

Assuming you don't want to have pale-skin and glowing red eyes and catch fire when exposed to sunlight, you'll need to find a cure. The local temple might be a good place to start - but the only thing they have to offer is to kill you on the spot. When you decline their kind offer, they suggest you try the Wizards Guild. The Wizards suggest you speak to someone at Unseen University. The bloke at Unseen University tells you that he has no idea how to cure vampirrhea, but tells you that the Duke of Dartmoor does. The Duke of Dartmoor (once you get in to see him) tells you to seek out Wendy the Wicked, Witch of the Western Wastes. Once you find her (getting killed only twice along the way) and break into her house, she tells you that she can tell you what the cure is, but first you have to bring her seven Greater Spotted Hufflepuffs. Since you've never seen one Greater Spotted Pufflehuff, much less seven of them, you decide to kill her instead. Or get killed by the monster she summons which attacks you from behind; either way works.

When you've only been playing the game for ten hours, being told you have to go on what sounds like a thirty-hour quest merely to rid yourself of a chance affliction is most unwelcome. Far easier to go back through your saved games to before your encounter with the bipedal mosquitos. But if you're just going to throw away half the time you've spent playing the game every time something like that happens, what's the point in playing it in the first place?

The thing is, it's not fun. There's no sense of accomplishment or adventure. The graphics are extremely detailed, but also thoroughly uninteresting. I think it was Might & Magic 7 that first presented us with a world that was - in the name of realism - the colour of mud from one end to the other. Oblivion is HD mud.

But it's a huge world! It's a huge, boring world.
But there's so many things to see! They all look the same. This town is built on a hill, and that town is... Okay, also built on a hill. Actually, all the towns I've visited so far are built on hills.
But there's so much to do! Perhaps. But do I want to do any of it?
But once you get past (some point involving two weeks of dedicated effort) it's much more fun! Don't. Care.

Score

Graphics: Mud
Sound: Mud
Gameplay: Mud
Overall: Pfft

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:09 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:58 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And it's region-locked. Retards. It's hard to even find a region-locked DVD player in Australia, except for the Playstation and the Xbox. And now, of course, the 360.

Graphics are pretty darn good; games are pretty bad so far. I should probably have got Kameo instead of Oblivion.

It really is noisy, isn't it? I said, it really is... Never mind.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:59 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Since four of those are running Windows XP, I keep getting them mixed up. I'm posting this from my desktop PC, but I'm typing it on my notebook. I didn't mean to do that; it just happened. Maybe it would be a good idea to change the theme...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:52 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Still a pretty crappy opening to the game.

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Three!

I'll need to take a break for a bit - other things I have to attend to - but I'll have some more episodes for you next week.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:42 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Episode Two.

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:08 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Forums here. Or comment here. I'll be interested to know what the more polyglot of my readership think of the translation, which is not mine, but one I found several years ago.* I tidied it up, fixed the grammatical errors and some inconsistencies (the spelling wasn't too bad), and retimed everything, because the timing was kind of poopy. A tenth of a second makes a big difference, and some of the titles were off by a second or more. Um, anyway, the translation, from my limited Japanese, seems reasonable except for the opening song, which doesn't sound right to me. I have an alternate translation of the song - actually, two alternate translations - and also the transliterated Japanese lyrics, so I'll post those over at the Language Lab tomorrow.

Ooh, And It Makes Me Wonder...

One thing of interest - I'm not sure quite what to make of it - between 1997 and 1998, fifteen groups set out to fansub the original Dirty Pair TV series. Only one (Fuzzy Productions) completed the job, and they have vanished from the face of the net.** Makes me wonder if there is some kind of curse on Dirty Pair fansubs.

If you suddenly find one day that the whole of mu.nu has disappeared leaving nothing but a smoking crater and a mile-high stack of damage claims, at least you'll know why.

*Here, as it turns out.

** I actually found a copy of the Fuzzy Production version. It's a completely different translation to the one I'm using, which might be useful for cross-checking. Unfortunately, it looks like a sixth-generation tape run through a budget 1998-era video-capture card and then later transcoded from MPEG-1 to DIVX with the quality slider set to "crap". In fact, it probably is a sixth-generation tape etc etc.

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:08 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Video editing on a Celeron M 1.4 is not a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, my choices are basically (a) a Pentium 4 notebook which weighs twice as much and has a 15-minute battery life, (b) a Pentium M or Core notebook which is 50% faster, tops, or (c) wait until there's a low-power version of Conroe.

Or (d), of course: Wait 'til I get home and run the job there. A Northwood Pentium 4 2.6 may be a long way from the latest and greatest, but it does chew through the video at a healthy pace.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:14 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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(I've also started uploading some AMVs.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:11 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Which Haibane Renmei Character are you?

You are Nemu! Nemu is kind of a big-sister figure, always overseeing things and helping raise the children. She reads a lot, and is always sleepy, but that's because she's always doing more than her fair share of work.
Take this " href="http://quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=17&url=http://www.quizilla.com/users/divadrummer/quizzes/Which+Haibane+Renmei+Character+are+you%3F">quiz!

;" target="quizilla" href="http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=18&url=http://www.quizilla.com">Quizilla | ;" target="quizilla" href="http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=21&url=http://www.quizilla.com/register">Join | ;" target="quizilla" href="http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=20&url=http://www.quizilla.com/makeaquiz.php">Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | ;" target="quizilla" href="http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=19&url=http://www.quizilla.com/codepastes/?quizid=133039">Grab Code

(via Haibane.info)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:26 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pixy Misa, April 5 (scroll down)

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The mission is set to launch in October 2008, with a rocket that carries both the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and impactor. The orbiter will circle the moon for at least a year, mapping the surface, searching for water and scouting for potential future landing sites to send astronauts. The orbiter will pay particular attention to the south pole, which NASA considers a prime candidate for a future outpost.

The lunar spacecraft will target the south pole too, releasing its SUV-sized impactor probe in January 2009 on a suicide plunge at about 5,600 miles per hour toward a frozen crater believed to contain hidden ice.

(via LGF)

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