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I downloaded Surgeon Simulator 2013 wishing for a lighthearted game to play between bouts of studying. It’s like the QWOP of job simulators. The controls are quite difficult and hard to engage with the world. For instance, I found the easiest way to open the chest cavity is to take a drill and drag it around the rib cage as my hand limped from the weight. Tonight I invited Matt over to try. He took to it well and I have an amazing snap of him beating open someone’s abdominal cavity with an alarm clock. After some play we decided to see how speedrunners took to removing the ribcage.

Here’s how

Yep, hit them across the chest with a hammer fast enough and all the ribs just fly off. I hope it works that way in real life.

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Yesterday’s return to sugar resulted in some neat ancillary benefits. My weight lifting capacity seemed to jump suddenly as I can now do a whole 2 pull-ups in reasonable form. Additionally, I’ve found my mood to be generally better although that may be other factors.

This evening, Randy and Kelly Booz held a game night where I took pictures and I discovered a wonderful game called Jungle Speed. It’s like a combination of Uno and prison rape or Egyptian Rat Screw meets rugby. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

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Note: I play 2 video games a year, and I’m good at saying why they suck. Oddly, I can generally say why a movie is good but not why it’s bad.

I wanted to finish Portal 2 single player before leaving for Chicago and did… in under 6 hours. While the co-op may prove much better, I was underwhelmed by the single player version of the game to the point that I’m telling people to wait before buying until the game’s cheaper. Despite the awesome voice acting and humor of the game as well as the reasonably high level of visual polish, the flaws of the game were glaring.

My qualms:

  • UI Tweaks – Portal 2 has many more Aperture Science Material Emancipation Fields, so instead of the semi-circles around the reticule showing what can be targeted, it instead shows what portals are deployed. This made some areas a tedious case of “fire until it sticks” as the visual clue for Portal adhesion in the first game was flatness, here, it’s largely color (sometimes) and other times flatness.
  • Confusing Environments – HL2:E2 showcased the Source engine’s ability to render large scenes. Portal 2 also contained these elements but often in the vintage Aperture Science areas, I found this eye candy disorienting as sometimes those massive objects in the distance are where you’re going, or where you came from, or are just background effects. Puzzles required more footwork than I’d want as a solution often involved just walking around to find the right surface rather than the puzzle unfolding.
  • Embedded Test Sequence – My response to learning that Wheatley had generated test chambers was a sense of dread at the realization that the game had introduced another countdown.
  • Ending – Really? The moon? The portal beam moves as a finite speed that seems slow AND while the paste made of moon rocks makes something a portal-able service, I am skeptical that the portal would apply properly to lunar regolith.
  • Linear puzzles – Few puzzles seemed to have multiple good solutions and their spareness made solving them easy as one could pick out the game elements present and just figure out how to jam them together for victory. Kind of like how you can brute force a jigsaw puzzle.
  • Interactions with GlaDOS – The reasons why GLaDOS or Wheatley couldn’t interactive with you were stupidly forced. “I’m going to think about this” *silence for rest of test chamber*

Things I did like:

  • Voice acting and dialog – Awesome.  I hope that I can quote “if we’re going to explode, let’s explode with dignity” until I die.
  • Fluids in games usually suck.  This didn’t appear to.
  • Sound cues to new mechanics.
  • Introduction of mechanics without a formal explanation until later.
  • The portal aim-assist and magnetic falling where helpful.

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Banks woke me at the crack of 8:30 and we went to breakfast at one of the chain knock-off restaurants that in this case seemed like the illegitimate stepchild of an IHOP and a Cracker Barrel.  All the breakfasts were named after presidents or generals causing me to wonder if the General Sherman was named after its effect on the human colon.  I was feeling seditious and had the Jefferson Davis whose sausage gravy tasted freshed squeezed from the pig but I paced myself and was rewarded by not clogging Banks’ toilet.  My next stop was Livonia and still being a bit gun shy after yesterday’s ticket, I tooled there at a stunning 45 MPH, the posted speed limit… plus five miles per hour.

Livonia is part of a bouquet of towns that surround Detroit, my guide to the area, Ryan Pooya/Hellfighter has what I can only call encyclopedic knowledge of his area.

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Human GPS

The burb clocks in at 100k people and has its very own abandoned mall.  The area has mile streets as vestiges of a French survey plot and my guide showed me his area on foot initially.  He lives near a retirement community and there was a continuous stream of emergency vehicle sirens.  By the time we finished our walk I think the home may have acquired some spare space.

Ryan offered to take me a picturesque spot in Detroit on the way to dinner and in about 20 minutes I was in a weed-encroached side street taking shots of what I think was Ford Stadium.

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A sport field of some sort.

Our ride to meet Brad Stephens/Azuretruth at Fuddruckers was interrupted by traffic and we arrived about 30 minutes late, a perfectly acceptable delay in exchange for their Diet Peach Green Tea.  Upon arriving, I learned they didn’t have this divine beverage, the second of two times I found this deficiency which I assume is merely an oversight on their behalf.  No company would be daft enough to exclude this elixir of life from their drink line-up except due to sabotage by industrial spies.  I had a back-up though; when picking up some items for my future Canadian hosts including two boxes of Trix, a 2-liter bottle of Fanta, and some American Heinz Ketchup, I grabbed the relative of something I hadn’t had since I was 9, diet Squirt.  It was terrible.  It tasted like watered down Fresca that had been mixed with flat Sprite and instantly my fond memories of going to Mexico for my parent’s 25th anniversary were destroyed.

Thursday is game night at Brad’s house and I played one of my favorite games, making color commentary while other people play games.  Brad has a custom table made of white board material which allows everyone to draw an impressive array of multicolor penises and scrotums while waiting for ones turn in 1990s grand strategy boardgames.

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Guns don't kill people; magic missiles do.

The other game for the evening was Magic: The Gathering, something that Brad’s friends play loosely with a format I call “kitchen table type 1”.  Their decks lacked familiarity with basic building tenets like managing manabase, having an appropriate curve, and streamlining win conditions and I got to deck clinic a few of their creations.  I got bored after a bit and build a B/U tempo deck out of someone’s spare cards and proceeded to absolutely crush them.  It felt nice.  A friend of my Minneapolis host had given me a pile of commons which I gifted to these players while giving them a primer on some deck construction ideas.  When they left I felt like I had made the world a better place.

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The evening of the first day of Woodbadge we played a game called “Who Me?” where players landed on colored spaces and could choose to answer questions to advance or not to stay in place.  There was  a spectrum of questions and I was blessed with the following:

  1. What is your biggest regret in life so far?
  2. Give an example of something you’ve failed to achieve that you thought you would have by now.
  3. What was your most embarrassing life moment?
  4. Give an example of a big mistake you made.
  5. Is there a personal tragedy that’s shaped who you are?

The person immediately to my left got:

  1. What’s your favorite color?
  2. Tell a story about something funny that’s happened to you.
  3. What animal most represents you?
  4. What’s your favorite food?
  5. Give an example of a TV show you like to watch.

The agony and the ecstasy…

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I’ve never played Magic at Six Feet Under Games and bein’ in God’s country I was walking on egg shells to a certain extent.  This was amplified when the store owner issued the following warning to a Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament that was about to start:

Attention Yu-Gi-Oh! players.  You are the worst bunch of people that are ever in the store.  You are foul-mouth, rude, don’t pick up after yourself and are horrible human beings.  If you disagree with this, you’re lying and should leave.  If you’re anything but polite you’ll be kicked out.  If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.  I’m posting the store rules and if you’re under 13 I’ll need your parents permission and want them to know who you hang out with.

Well then.  I was a bit concerned until I started yelling “IN YOUR FACE!” at someone I beat without reprecussions.  Maybe years from now the pursecution of Yu-Gi-Oh! players will be recorded as one of the moral outrages of the early 21st century.

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An activity I enjoy doing in Engineering merit badge is the neutral buoyancy contest.  Scouts receive a collection of wires, cork pieces, and washers and attempt to create a device that’s neutrally buoyant, failing that, one that falls the slowest.  Today’s youth are quite clever but sometimes fail to grasp how the challenge works, like when I said the device must be free-floating and can’t touch the container, one kid thought that making a wire hook on the side was “free floating” or another that made a compression pin that held the device fast against the sides of the container.

Groups would drops their devices in the test column and watch in wonder thinking they’d reached neutral buoyancy as the downward force of gravity and upward force of Brownian motion and a density difference cancelled out.  “Terry, come quick while it’s balanced!”  If it’s neutrally buoyant now, it should be neutrally buoyant 10 seconds from now.  The containers slowly grew cloudy from many unwashed hands and the children learned the importance of contaminating ones test environment.  These budding astrologers were also quick to blame the pseudoscientific ,from air bubbles stuck to the side of containers to my mere presence one kid saying “you did that” followed by the angry glare.  I’m not sure if there were commenting on my carriage or my ownership of an anti-physics gun.

The winning group fell 14 inches in 30 seconds and proved that kids could be competative about anything as the gaggle of winning 12-year olds went over to older kids and started chanting “In your face!  In your face!”  I imagine Nobel laureats have a similar ritual.

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Egyptian Rat Screw is a fast-slapping playing card game I’ve loved for years.  I played it at first in elementary school but not until I had hours to kill as a Scout volunteer did I really develop retarded skill at the game.  My current streak is 74 games most against Joe Naylor.  Some of the persons present when Joe an I were player weren’t familiar with my preternatural slapping speed.

Pat: How are you so stupidly fast at this?
Me:  I think it’s a combination of spending my youth summing house numbers on my way to school and screwing with my cat.
Pat: How did the cat help?
Me: He was never declawed.

This last part came back and bit me when I was screwing with Joe’s cat, and in an attempt to avoid getting scratched I pulled my hand away whiping like 9 drinks off the table.  I later found out it was declawed and getting pawed by it was like being a attacked by a handful of Q-tips.

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For the last year or so I’ve joked that I’m a Level 2 actuary and can cast magic missile.  A joke about which I don’t think anyone has yet laughed.  What once started as a joke now may become reality with NASA starting an MMO.  Besides being quite possibly the dumbest premise for an MMO I’ve ever seen except for possibly the Shakespeare MMO I can only assume that it’ll be identical to WoW except for with fantastically more ridiculous classes like Darkwater Physicist, Mathematician of the Holy Nimbus and some sort of Materials Scientist/Druid combo that allows players to transform into carbon nanotubes.

Having trouble running rocket simulations?  Slide-rule of Prediction +5!  Challenger mishap repeat?  Resurrection bitches!  I look forward to the world’s nerdiest PvP games.

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For the last year or so I’ve joked that I’m a Level 2 actuary and can cast magic missile.  A joke about which I don’t think anyone has yet laughed.  What once started as a joke now may become reality with NASA starting an MMO.  Besides being quite possibly the dumbest premise for an MMO I’ve ever seen except for possibly the Shakespeare MMO I can only assume that it’ll be identical to WoW except for with fantastically more ridiculous classes like Darkwater Physicist, Mathematician of the Holy Nimbus and some sort of Materials Scientist/Druid combo that allows players to transform into carbon nanotubes.

Having trouble running rocket simulations?  Slide-rule of Prediction +5!  Challenger mishap repeat?  Resurrection bitches!  I look forward to the world’s nerdiest PvP games.