hermiene.net

I went through all the single player levels in Mutant Storm Reloaded's Tally Mode and improved several of them. My new score is 20,342,880, which places me around place 60. I tried and tried and tried, but neither my Mutant Storm Reloaded Adventure Mode high score nor the Geometry Wars one has been beaten. Why are those games so damned hard? If my bragging annoys you, please recall my shameless braggard policy.

I cleaned up the Links page a good deal by removing the Internet radios section (I don't listen to them anymore) and rewriting a lot of stale things. I also added Sokoban++ (a puzzle game), War§ow (a first-person shooter), and Dinosaur comic (a comic about, surprisingly, dinosaurs). I think Links is becoming a pretty comprehensive archive of cool and interesting links. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about my other pages.

I've started my first week at NITH (the Norwegian School of Information Technology). I'm eager to start doing real programming, which starts next week.

I've gathered a few new music quotes and added an Antiquity section to my Quotes page. My Links page's Gaming section gains even more weight: Enigma (a huge puzzle game) and Warning Forever (a manic 2D shooter).

As if anyone actually cares, I'm ridiculously close to the six million mark in Geometry Wars: 5,993,910. This places me among the two hundred best in the world. Before you accuse me of being a shameless braggard, remember, I already admit to this.

I recently changed my nickname from Håvard (which is derived from an old Norse name and which is my real name) to Hermiene (which is an old German female name and which is not my real name). By a funny coincidence, a Harry Potter character happens to have a name that is not similar to Hermiene at all: Hermione. Get it? This is not a reference to Harry Potter. Admittedly the fact that my facial appearance is close to that of Daniel Radcliffe does make the correlation seem stronger, but the truth is that I didn't even know of Hermione until people started harrassing me about it. (If you want to know what it's really a reference to, contact me.) Until next time: Learn the subtleties of spelling.

Scant five days have passed, and lo! An update.

Part of what prompted me to update is that my Geometry Wars score is 4,848,820, very close to five million, and this needs celebrating. (Some people celebrate by eating a cake. I celebrate by updating my site.) Also, a new section has appeared on the Random page: Xbox Live Arcade scores. I'm just a shameless braggard. The numbers don't really mean much by themselves if you haven't played the games. The important thing, rank, is omitted for obvious reasons (it changes, and I can't be bothered to update it every time someone climbs over me).

The other part of what prompted this update is Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, which everyone interested in freedom, culture, and copyright should read. Some parts of it are dryly written and in Lawyerese, unfortunately, but that's not important.

Parts of my site's visible and invisible architecture need an overhaul. I'll get working on that next.

This concludes the first of many timely updates.

Greetings, fellow netizens. I return from meatspace bearing lots of news.

My parents generously invited me to move back in with them, and I accepted. Living away is really fun, but I can't afford to now that I'm done with my civilian service, which paid for my apartment. I'm not really a fan of burning bridges nor of invocations to the Devil, but I suspect Satan played a role in putting me there. Drafts are idiotic in the first place. If a nation can't muster the patriotism among its citizenry necessary to defend it, it doesn't deserve a standing army, and an alternative to military service is really no alternative at all.

Religion bashing time again! This time it's the creationists' turn. A meme I've only recently seen (but one which I suspect has been in circulation for some time) got my attention and it goes like this: Evolution is a dangerous philosophy (philosophy?) because Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot used it to justify their atrocities. It's completely irrelevant! It's like blaming the theory of gravity for murders committed by pushing people off high places. In other words, totally nonsensical. Watching creationists debate biologists is somewhat akin to watching a paraplegic compete in the Olympics. Ken Miller is my new hero.

Moving home involved the end of the trial period, if you will, of 1080i 360 gaming, so I bought my own 360. Here's a cool thing: When you retrieve your gamertag you also get to download everything you've paid for again. This is the way it should be, but it's neat that it's actually implemented. The only regression is SD, and SD sucks.

I bought and framed three prints from deviantART: Apollo, Pepper by the window, and Scythe Dancer. I love 'em.

I pulled myself together and fixed the sorry state of my music's metadata. Every file now has shiny ID3v2.4 metadata attached to it, and I used foobar2000 to do it.

My Links page has had enough stuff added to it to make a neutron star envious. The most noteworthy updates are in the Gaming section: 3D Logic (thanks Joakim Næss Lea), TrackMania Nations (thanks again Joakim Næss Lea), Gridlock, Tiltilation, Neverball, Hamsterball, and Narbacular Drop. There's a link to foobar2000 too, naturally. In the Reference material section there's Unwords (a dictionary of invented words) and The Phrontistery (at which you can learn what rhochrematics and grammatolatry are). The Online comics section has seen two updates: xkcd and Dungeons and Denizens (thanks Alexander).

Books have been read. The Satanic Bible, Accelerando, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Alchemist, and the Rama series, to be exact.

I also played and finished Prey, a game that makes you feel like you're walking through an Escher painting. It's very good, but it contains almost zero puzzles! Oh, the potential.

Yes, my updates will be more timely from now on.