World of Arcana

My schedule for the ultimate week:

• TUESDAY: Attending a performance (with pre-concert lecture) of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
• THURSDAY: Good Karma Cafe and Lost
• SATURDAY: Jonathan Coulton/Paul & Storm concert!
• ???: TF2 Update!

Today was a lot of fun. I participated in PuzzleCrunch 2008, an online puzzling competition, with some friends from Unfiction. We didn’t win any prizes, but the puzzle solving was fun. Like it always is on Unfiction.

Also, I’ve been trying to figure out what I was going to play at the final Good Karma Cafe on Thursday. For a while I was thinking of getting some people together to do a full radio-version of Still Alive. Failing that, it was back to the drawing board today. But I decided to give another shot to an idea that I had in October (!). It actually turned out pretty good, and I’m pretty sure it’s what I’ll do Thursday. Hopefully, a video will follow.

Two parts to this post:

1. Last night’s episode of Lost, for those of you who saw it, was pretty incredible. I feel like this episode is the turning point in the season - up until now, conflicts have been set up, i.e. freighter people helping the losties? (hint: no) and whether they were going to attack the barracks (hint: yes). This episode started to resolve the conflicts and answer some of the questions brought up in the first part of the season. So yea.

2. Continuing with yesterday’s post, I’m going to give a list of my favorite TF2 custom maps below:

CONTROL POINT MAPS:

• cp_jailbreak_b3 (or cp_jailbreak_b2)
• cp_orange_x (or cp_orange_x3. Not cp_orange_x4)
• cp_orange_tower
• cp_toyfort (and any variation thereof)
• cp_tron_final

CAPTURE THE FLAG:

• ctf_avantown
• ctf_convoy_v2
• ctf_royal_b3

CHALLENGE/CREATIVE MAPS:

• cp_bestinclass_v2
• cp_highclass_v2
• volleyball

BAD MAPS:

• ANY surf map

I’m currently “working” in my “spare time” on two maps: The first is a one-team capture the flag map (i.e. one team tries to capture, the other team tries to prevent) taking place in a 3D version of Kanto (i.e. The world from Pokemon red/blue/yellow). Red team starts in Pallet Town, and needs to take the intelligence from Professor Oak’s lab to Giovanni’s gym in Viridian City, where the Blue team starts. The second map I’m working on is a “challenge” map similar to Best In Class - except instead of having a separate course for each class, there is only one course per team, but certain obstacles can only be overcome with a specific class, and the whole team needs to work together. Aw, how heartwarming.

So I guess I lied, here’s a third part to the update: I was reminiscing with some friends today of literature that we read in Elementary and Middle School. Here are some recommendations/anti-recommendations:

RECOMMEND:

• The Rats of Nimh
• Bridge to Teribithea (spelling? too lazy to check)
• The Frog and Toad series

DO NOT RECOMMEND:

• Johnny Tremain
• Kavik the Wolf-Dog
• Junie of the Wolves

Ever since I’ve gotten the Orange Box in January, I have been in love with Team Fortress 2. For not being a huge online gamer, I’ve had an incredible time on most of the servers I’ve been on.

Now as anybody who knows anything about videogames knows, for any given game there is a certain amount of high-quality official content, and a thousand times more craptastic fan-made content. However, I’ve noticed that with Team Fortress, there is actually a wealth of high-quality and occasionally very creative fan maps. One particular one that sticks out in my mind is the map Best In Class. As opposed to the play systems that Valve shipped the game with, Capture the Flag and Control Points^*, this map instead creates an obstacle course for every class in the game that, for the most part, only that particular class can complete. In addition, the map is bloated with easter eggs (i.e. hidden areas) to the point where I’ve played games were nobody actually kills each other, they just work together to get to the hidden areas. Some other maps that have been fun are the Orange series of maps, which are all incredibly evenly balanced.

Anyway, Valve has been teasing fans for a few months that a huge update was coming in April, after the 15th, which will contain 36 new achievements and three unlockable weapons (all for the Medic class), plus a new map with an entirely new play style.

I have been on the edge of my seat for this, and am starting to get a little impatient. Come on Valve, I want my update!

^{*Hydro doesn’t really count - nobody’s been able to figure out how to replicate it in Hammer.}

Firstly, two avid readers^*, I’ve done some updates to the “Things That Are Good” page - I’ve added in a new section of Music That Is Good, plus I’ve added a link for every item on the list. So yea.

Secondly, and slightly more excitingly, I’ve added a new sub-page under music for the music of the power-duo East Carolina, of which I comprise one half. In today’s day and age, what band is without an unlistened to web presence (hint: it’s not 2,000,000 terrible MySpace bands)? The page will be updated with more music, videos, etc. possibly.

^{*I’m told that the best cure for low readership is just to continue to post and shamelessly throw your URL into the pool of the internet. And so I will continue on.}

Because I’m just so excited to crack into the AP Econ review book I purchased today, I also picked up some “lighter” reading at the library, a fascinating new book titled Grand Theft Childhood. I first read about the book through GamePolitics.com, who also led me to an interview of the author’s by Adam Sessler.

I’m just over a third of the way through the book as of writing this, and I heartily recommend it to anybody interested in the video-games-cause-violence-in-our-poor-babies debate. The book’s authors are the first people to actually take a step outside of the debate and to look at all the studies done on the topic. And their general sentiment about them is: WTF. I don’t want to give away all the juicy details, but, for example, a lot of the studies that have “linked” violent videogames to real-world violence have measured aggression using a method that has never actually been verified as valid.

I’m also currently still reading I Am America, And So Can You!, which was a birthday present for me in January… As well as knocking off Brave New World for English Class. Both recommended as well.

Anybody who knows me knows that I am notoriously good at coming up with great ideas for projects, working on them once, and then never doing anything with them again. While this obviously has some ill effects, i.e. a lot of projects that I want to do never get accomplished, it also works as an indicator to me that a project that I’ve worked on multiple times is actually worth accomplishing.

So anyway, I’m cleaning out my room today, and I find a notebook from 4 years ago. Now notebooks are where most of my failed ideas reside, so I eagerly flipped through to see what I’d forgotten about. I was greeted with the index for a book I was planning to write where I ranted about various ideas that I had thought of. I only wrote the first three chapters, but here’s the table of contents that I had come up with:

• Foreword by J.K. Rowling
• F***
• If You Took a Dog
• Communism vs. A Plate of S***
• Bad Answers
• How To Kill A Man
  _{(and other things I learned in Canada)}
• Clowns vs. Statisticians
  _{(or: Communism vs. A Plate of S*** Part II)}
• Making People Sad
  _{(or: If You Took a Dog Part II)}
• What’s Up With Oregon?
  _{(or: The (U?) S of A)}
• Flying Monkeys My Ass!
  _Intermission

Yeah, and also, as anybody who knows me knows as well, I was not very funny when I was younger. But I thought I was. And that’s all that’s important.

Today I did a little more work on a project I’m doing to come up with a list of all the songs I’ve ever written. Currently I have a list including what I believe to be all the songs I have written up to this point in its time, with the following conditions:

1. I’m not counting arrangements or covers, but I am counting parodies
2. I’m not counting any songs that I’ve written as part of a musical (though I may tally those up later)
3. I only count it as having been written if I have both written it and played it at some point in time on some instrument. There are dozens of songs that I’ve written and never even played, and I can’t remember most. So those don’t count.

Currently, the list has 64 songs on it, and I think that it’s fairly complete. The interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that I went through and italicized all the songs that I’ve written, but have never played for anybody besides myself. I’ve noticed that this is more than half of the songs, which is interesting to me. So stay tuned, I may be re-recording some songs from out of the back catalogue, for first-time ever listenings.

Today when I was supposed to be taking notes on Chemical Kinetics, which I kind of did, I developed an interesting puzzle. Let’s see if anybody can formulate the answer. I am confident that the solution can be deduced using simple logic.

4 of the 8 numbers in this paragraph are incorrect. Every incorrect number is 1 away from its correct version. The first incorrect number is written as being no greater than 5 and no less than 10. Several of the corrected numbers contain two syllables. Added together, the correct versions of the incorrect numbers sum 23. The smallest number that can be formed by multiplying two correct versions of incorrect numbers together is 3.

Also, I’d like to wish good luck to all my friends with auditions today. I have great confidence in all of you.

FROSTBITE OF THE HEART’S DEBUT EP, “WHERE HOPE COMES TO DIE” IS NOW ONLINE!

Click on the link above to enjoy the album in all it’s…beauty…