Monthly Archives: May 2007

Uru Episode 1: Scars

This post is way, way, way late, but I’m going to post it nonetheless. So Uru is now an episodic game, with all the storyline advancements and content releases occurring in one week every month. This month’s episode (the first episode ever) was called “Scars”, and ran from the 19th to the 24th or 25th. There’s some disagreement about when exactly the episode ended, because there were new things discovered on the 25th and 26th, but they might have been released on the 24th.

Anyway the episode was very dramatic. It started off with a collapse in the cavern, which trapped two teenage girls, one being the daughter of Michael Engberg, a member of the DRC. The other girl was immediately killed. After some time, it was discovered that a Bahro was in the collapse with Wheely Engberg. The excavation continued.

On the 22nd, Wheely Engberg was killed by the Bahro. It was reported to have screamed “Noloben” (an age from Myst V on which the Bahro were tortured and experimented on), and then brutally murdered her.

On the same day, Douglas Sharper (another member of the DRC, who had been on a hunting expedition in Negilahn to try and find the predator killing all the animals) returned, and told a wild tale of a Bahro civil war he had witnessed. There were many Bahro who tried to kill him, and many who protected him, but the battle was brutal.

On the 23rd, Michael Engberg was seen at the memorial site, then linked to the Great Shaft and disappeared. He is still MIA.

On the 24th, the DRC decided that despite all the tragedy that week, they would go ahead with the planned release of Minkata, a new age. This cheered up the whole community a lot, as can be seen by this poll. The age is a huge desert age with a bunch of tiny caves in the ground. The goal of the age is to find all 5 caves and touch the stones in them. Touching a stone puts the entire desert into night, and touching it again brings it back to day. The age has a lot of new music, which is very awesome.

And that’s basically all that happened during Episode 1 of Uru. If they continue to be like this, Uru will definitely become much more popular in no time. This episode brought it back up to #1 on Gametap again, where it still is today.

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Pirates of the Carribean 3 Released

So yesterday (actually, the first shows were on Thursday at 8pm, but it was advertised as Friday), Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End (which I’m going to call PotC3) was released. I saw it at 4pm yesterday, at Fenway 13 (for those of you who don’t know, Fenway 13 is one of the largest screens in Boston. Awesome. Fun fact: the Fenway cinema was sold to Regal by AMC, and now the prices are crazy high. The sale was because of anti-trust laws. Who knew?

Anyway, a review. One word: Awesome. There was a ton of action, lots of plot twists, backstabbing (literally and metaphorically), and just the right amount of comic relief (remember that crab-head guy in the second one? Too much. Remember Jar-Jar Binks, C-3PO, and R2-D2 in the new trilogy? Too much. Jack Sparrow hallucinating about copies of himself? Hilarious). My favorite scenes were pretty much the entire Davy Jones’ locker segment, and the ending. I’ve always loved watching crazy people in movies, so the Locker scene with Sparrow was awesome.

There were some low points (Calypso=Same woman but giant? Nope. Fail.), but all in all, ’twas a great movie.

PS: Stick around after the credits, there’s a little thing at the end. Check the 3rd comment on this post for a description.

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I don't like USPS (AKA Mystery Package 5 part 1)

I’m waiting for a package to arrive via USPS, and it turns out that they only update their electronic package tracking system in the evening, meaning I have to stop myself from going crazy when I don’t know if my package has moved until 6 pm. I have a tendency to obsess over my packages, so this is a really, really annoying defect.

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Spleen Archive – New Buttons

The Spleen Archives has made some snazzy new buttons, check ’em out:
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Those are all custom buttons, which he made with Photoshop Fireworks CS3.

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Upgraded the Site

I’ve upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.2. Apparently K2 (the theme I use) doesn’t work with 2.2 yet, because of the new widget system. I had to disable the cool new widgets to maintain the blog’s look (which I really like), but yeah. The solution is here:
Forum topic on K2+WP2.2

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Optical Speaker Recommendations?

I’m looking into purchasing an item which has optical speaker ports and no analog out, so to use sound I’d have to get optical speakers. Does anyone know of a good speaker set for under or around $50 which has optical input? I really don’t care if it’s surround sound or anything, I’d actually rather just have a stereo set, it just has to have optical input.

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Two Projects

I have many projects going at any given moment, but currently there are two that occupy most of my weekends. The first, and more important, I can’t say much about at this point, but there will be a lot of info about it when I finish in a few weeks.

The second project involves the iMac I recently acquired from my grandmother. It’s a Snow G3 600mhz slot-loading, with 256mb of ram. I have pretty much no use for it, since it’s running OS X 10.2 (10.3 is really the cut-off point for modern application compatibility), but rather than let the perfectly good 40gb hard drive go to waste, I’m looking for a way to use it for backups. I know I can use Intego Personal Backup X4 to periodically back up my stuff to it over my network, but I was also thinking about possibly attaching my external drive to it so I can access it from anywhere in the house. I haven’t decided on this yet though, I need to see if it suffers much of a speed hit first (or if it’s even possible). I’ve named the iMac Hestia, after the Greek Goddess of the hearth. It was the only name that really fit 🙂

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Sorry for the lack of posts

I’ve been pretty busy lately with school and various projects and whatnot, so I haven’t been able to post lately. I’ll try to catch up tonight. 🙂

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Eve, Post-Op

Well, I’m happy to report that my computer’s surgical operation went through without a hitch. Well, there was a tiny little problem taking off one of the brackets from the disc drive, so one of the screws on it has been basically stripped of the teeth on its head, but it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that I successfully extracted the foreign object from the disc drive:
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A small, crumpled, ball of paper. It must have slipped in when the computer was in my bag. Well, what’s important is that it’s out now and Eve runs without any problems once again. Yay!

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Connecticut

I’m in Connecticut today for mother’s day (with my grandparents), so happy mother’s day, everyone!

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