Terry Poulin

Jedi Traps and Entertainment

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One of the periodic thoughts that I have is about how easily my brain comes up with random shit from its inputs that often is some kind of amusing. That tends to remind me that as a child, I was often bored and had to entertain myself for hours at a time. Recently, that train of thought made me recall one of my favorite past times from that stage in my childhood: designing Jedi traps!

It’s a great problem, it works like this: your goal is to kill the Jedi in the trap but they are a bloody space wizard with a laser sword, so they can do just about anything! Literally, you’re trying to stop someone who can do nigh anything.

Let’s say you drop a Jedi through a trap door. Okay, let’s put shooters to storm him, a dozen blasters! Well, between a lightsaber and the force that won’t work for long. The Jedi could deflect the blaster bolts back at them, go melee with their saber, even knock them over with the force or fling lightning bolts until we run out of cannon fodder.

Okay, let’s make it turrets that are remote controlled! But the Jedi could deflect bolts, so let’s put shield generators to protect the turrets. But what if they rip the cameras off the walls with the force? Okay, if the shields can’t guard agains that then we make the turrets automated – blast anything and everything ahead of them.

But, what if the Jedi just keeps deflecting blaster bolts until the shield fails? We can make redundancies, we can make multiple turret systems. We can solve that!

Alright, damn it, the Jedi will just do some foolish shit like cut a hole through the floor and escape. Okay, let’s put spike traps on the lower level and when they force magic themselves out of that deadly drop, we put dart throwers or more turrets to plunge them back into another more deadly trap.

And on and on it goes from the prospective that yes, that darn space wizard with their laser sword, I mean, that really cool Jedi with a lightsaber, can basically cheat their way out of anything that you can think up, but if you make the trap large enough and keep the pressure up, eventually the Jedi either escapes or they are overwhelmed by exhaustion or they just happen to make a mistake and get unlucky. May the force be with them.

Yeah, as a kid I was often really bored and often had to wait around for stuff or be dragged around as an extra bump on a log. The kind of mechanical, orderly problem solving type of thinking that designing Jedi traps calls for can also be pleasant for passing the time. It also has a fair bit of room for creativity, unless you just assume the Jedi will have a force vision of your trap and decide to hide in your closet to whack you over the head with a rubber hose instead of letting you turn them into a rat in a maze.

It was probably a good thing that my mom bought me a GameBoy Color at the pawn shop, lol.

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Various posts about the Google Anti-Trust ruckus and the question of whether the Big G is a monopoly occasionally provide nuggets of enjoyment. But I think my favorite is the quip that no price Microsoft could ever offer, because it’s pretty much true.

Having lived through the era that was MSN Search in the 1990s, I have a mostly negative inclination towards Microsoft as a search provider, although the times I’ve ended up using Bing (usually not willingly), I haven’t had any particular complaints about. Nor other major providers this side of millennium.

But I think it’s still a simple key fact that Google does dominate search. DuckDuckGo, for example, is rather successful. We even have several general search engines, and some (maybe even most) don’t suck. But there’s no chance in hell that most would ever stand a chance at unseating Google in monetary terms such as getting made the default engine. Nor, do I really anticipate them being unseated by simple technological advancement or their own ineptitude because unless Google Serious Fucks Up(tm) they will likely remain dominate.

So yeah, there may be more than one search engine, but good luck competing with that. Ya know, it’s billion with a B, right?

People still love WordStar?

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Encountering a nifty article on Robert Sawyer’s recent release of WordStar, I can’t help but think that by now, even the creators of WordStar would agree that it is abandonware.

Actually, just about any piece of software with its heritage in the CP/M era should probably be considered past its commercial viability. In the sense that if you’re still making a living off software that is over 40-years old, it may be time to encourage your customers to upgrade their software 😂. I’d be surprised to find many younger than myself who even know what the program is, never mind learning it today, because it’s been quite a freaking while since it was a popular program.

WordStar 7 at least is a version from a time where MS-DOS was mature, and still predates most of what people younger than me identify as a computer. Looks like Mr. Sawyer went full-tilt boogy with trying to make it a full release, if anyone is fond of old software, it’s probably worth a shot. As for myself, I’m more of a vi kind of guy once we start going down that hands on keyboard rabbit hole.

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I’m reminded that one of the best parts about using a docked laptop rather than a desktop, is when the power goes out, your shit might disconnect but your main body of computing power just happens to have its own integrated power supply :D.

Also yay for few clocks to reset.

The Standard Intel Response

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Reading a recent article on the 13th/14th Gen Debacle, I’m reminded of how problems with Intel typically roll:

  1. There will be a microcode fix if people will shut and enough complain.
  2. Haha, you think there’s really a fix for that!?
  3. Please buy the next chips!

My mind kind of flashes back some years to the errata documents for various SoCs that I was working with, and deciding not only were there a scary amount of Won’t Fix and Even We Don’t Know What Will Happen items and other run-away-screaming level worrisome things mentioned, it made me rather start to wonder what does Intel ever actually resolve? Because quite frankly, my Latitude experienced similar issues to some of the errata items despite being 3 – 5 generations older than the SoCs that I was working with at the time.

Actually, that’s the main reason Zeta was built on an AMD platform. Having been an Intel brat since Tandy made computers (đŸ€Ł), I’ve tend to prefer Intel processors over the years. Having to work more closely with hardware for part of my career, rather soured my relationship and goodwill towards Intel. What do I say that? Well, Zeta’s my first AMD machine in about 17 or 18 years….and that gives me the startling realization that it’s been almost two decades since my darling Dixie, my first laptop.

Experiences with Rimuru’s 10th generation processor and various motherboards, further exacerbate the feeling that it will either be my last conventional desktop PC, and that Intel Inside probably won’t be a boon when building or shopping for its replacement someday.

Diacritics and homographs

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One of those occasions where I’m reading, and just go “oh” at a realization. Reading through Wikipedia’s article on diacritic marks, I couldn’t help but notice a superb example of both what sound diacritics represent and homographs in my language.

A homograph is on for more words that are spelled the same, but differ in the pronunciation or meaning. Something that, frankly as a native English speaker, I rarely notice. I’m not sure if that’s because of many fail to stand out that audibly when you’re been made accustomed to spelling our fucked up language from an early age, or not.

Loanwords that frequently appear with the diacritic in English include café, résumé or resumé (a usage that helps distinguish it from the verb resume), soufflé, and naïveté (see English terms with diacritical marks).

I have to say that rĂ©sumĂ© / resume is a great example of this in common English. The difference between ‘re-su-may’ and ‘re-zoom’ is spoken distinctly, but in writing is usually rendered the same leaving it to context to understand. Whether that happens to be the logical context, or you know the whole difference between nouns and verbs. Diacritics are increasingly less common outside of publications who care, and virtually unused by the common people writing shit be it by pencil or typed text.

I’ve always been kind of fascinated by such words in other languages, along with words where the distinction in pronunciation between two words are more subtle in how it alters the meaning.

In some ways, I think it is a little sad that diacritic marks are less common in actual practice because of the mess that is English spelling and its representation to how we pronounce words. Diacritics greatly help disambiguate sounds in ways that are less clear (at least to me) without relying on memorization; or as I remember it, literally having English all but beaten into my as a child. In English, we’re pretty much just forced to learn the various oddballs until we remember them. It’s a problem that becomes even more relevant when presented with loanwords and their bastardizations into the vernacular.

For example without knowing nor marking the sounds, the word ‘souffle’ is kind of a “What the fuck did I just read?” kind of word in English. I assume it makes sense in French. Perhaps in English, you might read it and think ‘so-uf-fle’ or ‘sou-uf-fle’ because of words like shuffle (‘shuf-fle’) and soup (sou-oup), which are frankly far more common words outside of the kitchen (and perhaps even within). Yet soufflĂ© is clear as ‘sou-flay’, a word people will probably hear more often than see unless they study French cooking. Whether constructs like ‘ou’ or ‘o͞o’ or hell, even plain ‘oo’, would be a better way to spell a word like soup, are fair debate. Particularly if you discount the existing domination of how letters are input on computers and (gasp!) typewriters. But such things are unlikely to ever change that drastically, given how much now depends on relatively slow to change language practices. Diacritics are darn useful but underused IMHO.

Coincidentally, a lot of the constructs in American English that I find difficult to spell, often have relationships to old French and bastardized latin by way there of. The more germanic influences on English might be more gross in influence, but I tend to find more orderly. I suppose, I should just thank goodness that English has relatively simple constructs compared to more inflection heavy and gendered languages.

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Visiting the original mansion again for the first time in this millennium, it’s an interesting exercise in how much I’ve forgotten, how much I’ve remembered, and how much comes back to me when I’m there.

On one hand, after do many years it’s kind of hard to remember which door leads to zombie ridden stairways and which leads to almost becoming a Jill Sandwich in the name of acquiring a shotgun. Honestly, I don’t remember that horrible joke at all even though I still remember the distinction of Jill gets rescued from becoming a human pancake by Barry, while Chris has to bugger about looking for a broken shotgun in order to win.

Access to guides that have been around for years, and I can’t even remember the name of it, but there’s a wiki somewhere that goes into posting the maps and details (I’ve probably written about that here, regarding the RE2 remake); certainly make for a good augment to the old ‘what order should I?’ problem but not so much the minute directions.

The mansion has always been a hard place to navigate because of its size. It’s pretty easy to remember the general flow, especially easily reached locations like the hallway you meet Cerberus or the balcony where you acquire the grenade launcher. But smaller details like which door in the upstairs east hallway leads to the knights puzzle or what’s at the end of the ground floor dining room hallway, is a bit harder to remember.

This is kinda nice. Like one how it’s easy to remember there’s little point to grabbing the wooden emblem, but hard to remember when it’s time to bring it to the piano room. Couldn’t remember where the knight puzzle was but on the flip side once finding it, I did remember to avoid the poison gas on the first go, lol.

Some parts are a lot harder to remember than others. For example, I have pretty much no real recollection of the layout of the guard house. Just old mental images of things like pool tables and giant spiders.

But unlike the “Huh, what the frell is this?” feeling the GameCube remake always gave me, the GOG’ified PC edition is more like an old stomping ground. If one filled with zombies and horrors that want to decapitate you, lol.

A real original RE at last

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Over the years, I’ve generally considered GOG a good thing but haven’t cared terribly much given my focus elsewhere. But much to my pleasure, it turns out they have a real nice treat that I never expected to find: Resident Evil.

While I appreciated the HD version of the remake, I also didn’t enjoy my childhood memories being made useless by the fact that it was built from the GameCube remake rather than one of the original PlayStation releases. Meanwhile, the version recently released on GOG looks like it’s a fairly vanilla build of the PC release of Resident Evil rolled up for modern machines without extra hackwittery.

I haven’t really played the original since the 1990s and the original PlayStation. Within moments of launching the game, I felt like a proper trip backdown memory lane — in just about every way, it’s how I remember it from almost 30 years ago.

Metal Gear Solid Delta Trailer

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I’m going to take this as a good sign that the remake of MGS3 will actually be released closer to ‘soon’ than ‘later’, as in we may actually get to see it this year.

The original Snake Eater was one of the more personally significant / formative video games that I played as a teenager, and remains my favorite in the series. Literally, if they throw modern controls in the sense of MGS5 at it and remain largely faithful, I’m likely to be happy. When I originally learned of Delta, my first words were probably in the vein of ‘Shut and take my money!’, so it’s likely I’ll be buying it and finding out 😀.

Playing Snake Eater in the 2020s has generally been a somewhat grainy problem. My Play Station 2 can only output 480i, which looks pretty damn grainy on a modern 2160p screens compared to ’90s era tube televisions. That’s sort of alleviated by the ‘HD’ release for modern consoles where we get progressive output, but there’s really no fixing the control scheme with that. It’s ingrained in the design, just like it was in its predecessors.

I love Metal Gear Solid 3 very much. But even at the time it came out, the choice to retain the control scheme (and I assume engine) from Sons of Liberty made the Snake Eater experience less than ideal for the jungles. The mechanics and such worked really well in the first two metal gear and virtual reality training missions, where the majority of your environments are close quarters or high octane. Creeping through the jungle would have been better served by an already then contemporary shooter control scheme, like that seen in SOCOM and many others. The controls never were the good part of MGS3, but yet the game was freaking brilliant and the story poignant. Everything else about the game was superb, and perhaps was Metal Gear Solid at its finest.

Here’s hoping for a solid remake, and that we don’t end up crying tears of blood.