nfinite effect

I hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving day with lots of good food - whether they be "a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of turkey or ham" or "an Asian-ized fancy dinner". In either case, I'm thankful for having you all read my blog for its amazingly average content. Here's to waiting a month for another big meal on a much grander scale! But most importantly, here's to waiting another month for... PRESENTS!

Speaking of which, yesterday was Black Friday right? Well, I have a story to share about this yearly event of mass awesomness. But before I do, perhaps I need to go into a little detour that will set me up better for the story. I was playing Mass Effect last week - this game is pure win by the way, as expected of a BioWare RPG. I'll have to admit, I stayed up one night until 4am playing this baby. In any case, at one point my character, who I named Nfinite Shepard since the last name is fixed for cinematic and cutscene purposes, was speaking to an advanced intelligent life form of sorts. The conversation went a little something like this (I really don't remember the exact dialogue. It's been a few days. I'm also not putting the NPC's name since it might be a little bit of a spoiler for those who might play it in the future. It will simply be referred to as Being.)

Nfinite: Who are you?
Being: You cannot fathom our existence.
Nfinite: Where are you from?
Being: We simply are.
Nfinite: Who made you?
Being: We have no makers.
Nfinite: I'm going to kill you.
Being: We have no end. We have no future. We are infinite.

This made me smile because I was thinking You bastard, you're not infinite. I'm nfinite, biatch. But my happiness was short-lived because soon after I thought this, I realized that I could not give the NPC this type of retort. I suppose BioWare can only be so good right? *sigh* I wonder if there will ever be a day when an adventure/rpg game will be able to hold this type of open-endedness. Remember back in the days of Zork when you could type in things? That would be amazing if in the future they could meld RPG and text-based adventures into one seamless speech recognition interactive RPG. That would lead to even more separation of gamers from society I guess.

I digress. Now that I have touched the subject of my conceitedness, I can further boast of my glories and accolades of Black Friday shopping. I'm not sure why, but Black Friday is very exhilarating for me. Getting up early in the morning, standing out in the cold, waiting in a very long line, freezing your butt and everything in between off. These things are necessary sacrifices for the emotional rush of being a ninja. Wait, ninja? Oh yes - ninja. A nfininja™®© comes prepared to his mission. He has researched the exact mission requirements in the form of an objectives list:

• Gain the assistance of fatherinja™®©.
  
• Split up and collect the items of interest (10/10 remaining)
  
• Review mission target floorplan.
• Side Objective: Keep a watch for free items not previously researched.

So, I was set and waiting in line at 4:30. Unfortunately, I was at the middle of the line that had formed. Not so bad right? Middle of the line? For the experienced ninja's, they know that "not so bad" is WRONG. Middle of the line means standing at the back of the side of the store. Only a slight setback. Nfininja™®© was prepared for this. 5:00am. Opening time. It would take another 5-10minutes for nfininja to reach the initial entrance checkpoint. Once this happened, nfininja was offered a shopping cart.

Screw the shopping cart. This is the nfininja characterization prompt. You know the one that makes you distribute your stat points? If you go for all mobility, you lose storage capacity. This means you reject all forms of carrying equipment and are able to dart around using only what you can pick up for inventory space. No good. If you customize yourself for full capacity, you lose mobility. The shopping cart allows for a functionally unlimited space for the required quest items. In the process of customizing nfininja in this manner, he would lose the very meaning of his name. Shopping carts destroy mobility and maneuverability, you are limited to travel only by avenues in which the shopping cart may fit.

Aside: This post fits so well with a post back in June of mine: the random game of life. Soon my theory of life and reality shall be complete.

The compromise? Hand baskets. If this customization screen had a presets selection, the picture on the right would be what it looked like. So with hand basket in... hand, I burst through the entrance gates at a speed walk. Those who run look are ungraceful. An nfininja™®© must stay cool under all circumstance, no matter how dire it may appear. Darting in, out, between, in front off, behind, u-turning, detouring, shortcutting across the store, I hastily grabbed everything that I needed, as well as things that were cheap. Everything is fair game with one rule of thumb: Grab first, decide whether you want it later. There is no room nor time for faltering. If it's a good deal, it will be gone when you come back for it. In a counter-clockwise motion, nfininja sweeped the grounds. At one point, there were tables set up with various loot. The tables were setup in front of the desk and office chair displays. Other citizens were in the walking lanes browsing the table; nfininja went on the other side of the tables - it did not matter the price signs were not facing this side, nfininja knows a free after mail-in-rebate selection when he sees it.

But wait, what was fatherinja doing? Why, he was sweeping in the clockwise manner of course. All-in-all, we landed plenty of free after MIR items, some webcams, some graphics cards, backup battery, laptop cooler, mice, keyboards, flash drives, TV tuner, and other fun goodies. I don't really know why we do it. Most of the stuff we don't really need. Maybe it's just a bad addiction. Oh, an $8 conventional oven didn't hurt to grab either - but that was after we realized we needed to level up and rearrange our point distribution to get us a shopping cart. We no longer required mobility after getting what we needed. It's just plain fun. Ninja'ing items off shelves before other people get to it. Watch as the inexperienced look dazed and attempt to find a store assistant who in turn looks overwhelmed with requests.

Oh, in your holiday shoppings, keep an eye out for these miniature RC helicopters; they seem to be everywhere! My dad ended up getting one for $10 because he thought it was amusing. We went on to other stores like MC and C---co (even when I went to the mall that day) and they were there! They're everywhere! I guess it's a quick stocking stuffer? Who knows, but I've never seen them prior to Thanksgiving at least. Then again, I don't go shopping. They don't look quite as big as it does in that picture. It's actually quite small - about 10cm long.

Anyway, that probably wasn't as fun a read for you as it was a morning for me. Oh well, happy holidays! Don't get run over while shopping!

LOAD Monkeys ........... STORE Barrel

I think I've been staring at too much assembly code.

今週、毎日ラボにプロジェックトをしにいきました。ビデオゲームの時間がありませんでした。悲しいねえ　＝（

La semana pasada, cuando tenia tiempo libre, fui al laboratorio de computadoras para trabajar y... code-r una robusteza. Por eso, no tenia tiempo de jugar videojuegos. Estaba triste.

Tuan moi qua nay, luc nao ranh, toi di computer lab de code cai robot. Khong co thi gio de choi game het. Buon lam.

This past week, whenever I had free time, I went to the Digital Design lab room to work on the final project which involved coding a robot. Because of this, I had no time to play games the entire week. It made me sad.

Now that my brain has switched tracks from the logical computer and code side to the less logical language side, I think I'll be able to blog some. That was my attempt at very poor Japanese... I'll get to fluency eventually *sigh. Spanish is also rusty as well. My mom always says I need to practice it so that the four years spent in high school isn't going to waste. So that sentence was for her... the Vietnamese as well. The English was for.... no reason. Maybe I'm trying to redeem myself. I just read over my last blog entry, and the grammar and typos in that post are horrid. My apologies for making you try to decipher awkward sentence configurations and misplaced words.

Anyway, if you haven't gotten the general idea by now, I haven't played a single substantial game since last Sunday. I say substantial because maybe I played some Flash games in physics lecture. That's beside the point! Ok, I don't know how long its been since my last post. About a month maybe? Speaking of 'month', does it ever strike you as odd that "in exactly one month" isn't really *exact* at all? We can say "exactly one day" - and that means 24 hours. We can say "exactly one week" - and that means 7 days. What happens when we say "exactly one month"? Does this mean, the same date but increase a month? One month from today is December 10th? But wait, one month from December 10th is January 10th. How can this be exact? One is a period of 30 days, the other is 31 days. Not to mention February screwin' everything up. They need to make conventions for this kind of stuff.

Kind of like they need to make conventions for passing people traveling in the opposite direction. I know for a fact that every one of you has been in this situation:
You: Walking along sidewalk, eyes at the ground
Pedestrian: Walking opposite direction on sidewalk, also eyes at the ground.
You: Look up and notice that there is a person in front of you.
Pedestrian: Also looks up and notices you.
You: Lean towards the right to pass.
Pedestrian: Leans towards the left to pass.
You+Pedestrian: Awkward moment where you're not sure if the other person is going to correct themselves or if you have to take the initiative to go around them.

There should be a universal law:

If one finds oneself presented in a situation where one must move in order to pass another person...
a) If you are already slightly off center of the person, go in the direction that will result in the least side displacement.
b) Turn slightly right. If both persons follow this universal law, many awkward moments can be averted.

Wouldn't it be great if people actually did this? The issue becomes particularly troublesome when one party is riding a bicycle and the other party is walking. Bicycle person is paying attention. Walking person is not. Bicycle person makes clear intention of leaning to the right to pass. Walking person looks up and decides to jump in the way of the bicycle person. Bicycle person must then make hard swerve left because any further right would result in wipeout onto turf. Walking person gets mad and curses as bicycle person. Bicycle person thinks walking person is an ingrate. Personal experience? Mine? Surely not....

On a similar note, let's talk about road ethics. This is going to be short, don't worry. Have you ever been happily driving along in your car (ドライブをする) down a bi-directional highway with a middle turning lane and then the car in front of you indicates the intent of changing lanes into the middle turning lane. Of course you have, unless you haven't driven much. Soon, however, you realize that the car is halfway in between your lane and the turning lane and slowing down considerably. If you're going to change lanes, gtfo the way! Do the slowing down after you're in the turn lane. But no, cars aren't this considerate. The car is almost stopped, however it is straddling the lane line. You now have to quickly look to your right lane to see if you can simply swerve around it. If not, you now have to brake. Stupid braking for no reason... when it could easily be avoided if the other car had changed lanes properly. Again, personal experience? Of course not. Oh, don't get me started on people who slow to a stop just to make a right turn from a main road. Your car is not going to flip over; you can enter a turn *with* speed.

Well that was an amusing rant. I had more to say, but I'm hungry now. Maybe next time. I'll note it here so I don't forget: campus evacuation (that was almost surreal for a few moments) and silent headphones.

じゃね
Hasta luego
Chao
Later

CodeMindset: JUMP CodeMindset