August 13, 2005
My web comic rampage continues, and the victim this time is Questionable Content. A link is as usual on the Links page.
I've finished Fantastic Voyage II.
Read the essay What You Can't Say by Paul Graham.
"The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know."
Mr. Schrøder is working on something which gets abbreviated to BS, and is not bullshit. The reason I'm writing about it here is that I'm looking forward to it and I want him to finish it.
You should play BloodRayne 2. This game is pure fun and the attitude of Rayne (the protagonist, a female dhampir) is badass. (Don't bother with BR1 unless you're curious; most of what they did wrong in BR1 is culled in BR2 and everything that made BR1 fun is even more fun in BR2.) If sucking blood from the neck of a punk, cutting off his head, and impaling him on a sharp object is wrong, then I don't want to be right. The level design is so awesome, and on par with that of, say, Max Payne 2. (In fact, I suspect that BR2 is heavily influenced by MP; there's the NPCs' banter, the slowmotion camera when you finish off an enemy in a cool way such as throwing him off a high vantage point, and a slowmotion view with similar post-processing effects as those in MP2.) The art is also fantastic, and the design of your opponents is simply beautiful. One of the things that makes this game so fun is the death traps into which you can thow your enemies. My favorites are a fan that you encounter very early in the game, and Tesla coils (the scream they produce when you throw them into a Tesla coil is simply classic).
When you finish the game, it unlocks, among other things, several new outfits for Rayne to wear, among which is a schoolgirl uniform complete with a short skirt (feminists would object), a penguin backpack, a dangling cellular phone, and katanas instead of the normal blades. This is truly dolls for geeks, and should give you an incentive to finish the game.
"How is living away from your parents," you say? Infinitely better, of course. I can't believe you even had to ask.