In the quest for bigger and better screens, the obvious choice is to play games in a movie theater. Right?

The only thing that can trump this is an IMAX Wii Experience.

this kid has a neck of silly putty:

It’s the week of dystopian movies for drzy. I just watched Children of Men tonight.

I am a tad biased, as my favorite type of books and films are social sci-fi of dystopian nature, but really most sci-fi films have a relatively bleak look at the future, even if it isn’t our own future. (or, even a long time ago… in a galaxy far far away) For the books there are many, but these type of films are few and far between. And pretty much all of the films are based on or influenced by a particular book anyways.

Anywho, the film was very good. I’m not a big fan of Clive, but he’s done a decent job in all the movies I’ve seen him in, including this one. I’ll try not to give out any spoilers here beyond what the trailers show. Man has somehow accidentally engineered fertility out of our human equation. In so doing, the world plunges into chaos, and those countries left standing become racist/nationalist to an extreme. There are rebel groups fighting the power, and there are people who are now considered subhuman that are herded into camps.

The characters in this movie are remarkably deep and original, especially considering their limited screen time. Michael Caine was awesome, as only he can be. Chiwetel Ejiofor I have a fondness for since Serenity, and he definitely does not disappoint. Julianne Moore was ok, but I’ve never thought she was that great. Even the side characters manage to have a distinct personalities rather than being Guard #1 or Police Officer #7. The characterization is the real triumph of the movie.

For those looking for an action film, you may want to skip the first half. Sure there is a bit, but most before the half is marked with philosophy and discovery. Things pick up towards the end in a stark turn towards all out war.

As with many of these films, there is no clear resolution at the end. The glimmer of hope just becomes a tad brighter.

I recommend it as worth the ticket price and maybe even worth a second viewing, if only because you are like me and had metalhead days that flattened your hearing, so that UK accents are harder for me to decipher. Much of the dialog is very good.

I also rewatched Dark City today which furthered my dystopian trend. And… I saw Rocky Balboa last night, which surprisingly was a good movie that was enjoyable.

The 1962 French film, La Jetee, details a fractured society in a dystopian future (or past?). There is one man and one hope to try and gain help from another time. This short film inspired Terry Gilliam to make the movie 12 Monkeys, and it mirrors the story somewhat.

The whole film (26 minutes) is on Google Video. I am embedding it here, but I suggest clicking on it so that it will open the larger version at Google Video.

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No matter what it is, celebrate something together in this dark of winter.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, Vesele Vanoce, and Happy Holidays!

I changed webhosts this week and just did the nameserver changeover last night.

Everything seems to be working, but if anyone sees anything awry, shoot me an email, leave a comment, or post in the forum.

Thanks.

This fact you often forget.

Here, let me help :

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Huh, I never saw this coming. The original bittorrent client, while still in active development, was eclipsed by third-party torrent clients pretty quickly after torrents became popular. I used Shadow’s for a long time, due to it’s speed and it was one of the first to utilize many modern features, such as adjusting bandwidth per torrent, and tweaking network settings. but eventually I went to more user-friendly apps when they got more robust, such as ABC and Azureus. When µTorrent came about it was absolutely perfect: snappy, highly configurable, and an extremely tight UI.

Now it appears that the original and the best have merged. This sounds like a good thing (especially in that sentence), but I fear for the future of µTorrent.

This is Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, and Ludvig (Ludde) Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent.

Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces. BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent’s efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent’s expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.

What does this mean for the µTorrent community? Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.

The existent µTorrent and BitTorrent communities are immensely valuable to us, which is why we are announcing this here first to make sure you’re all the first to know about the news. The plan is to continue to foster the health and growth of the community that has been critical to the success of µTorrent. Thank you in advance for your support.

Bram and Ludde

+++++

both Bram and Ludde are available now on IRC #utorrent and will be answering questions for the next few hours.

A new forum has been created - uTorrent/BitTorrent - please use this new forum for all topics related to the uTorrent acquisition

link on µTorrent forums

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Especially when you just make shit up. Apparently a

Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading’s computer science department, says his new theorem solves an extremely important problem - the problem of nothing.

link

He calls his “number” nullity, and it is a representation of a number “off of the number line”. He proudly touts in his video that he has solved the problem that has been plaguing mathematicians for 1200 years, ie: solving problems that would require division by zero. He thereby demonstrates solving 0⁰ with his nullity.

The problem here is, anyone can make up anything not attached to the number line (he showed integers in the video, but I assume he meant all Reals). He is attaching rules that were developed for Real numbers, and trying to say they work for things that aren’t on the Real number line. You can’t go arbitrarily attaching theorems to things, no matter how basic they are. He is making a label for the absence of division by zero, no more. And you can’t compute jack with just a label.

Well, if you can just make crap up like that, I could make, say, a “new” number 3! This number 3 doesn’t reside on the number line, but I’m going to brilliantly assign it the value of the integer 6. Sure, it isn’t actually six, but I’m going to treat it like six so, therefore by my theory: 3 + 3 = 12! w00t, I made new math!

I tried looking over the article to see if he tried, y’know, actually proving something like nullity should exist, but I didn’t find it. If anyone else does, let me know. The report states clearly he is a Computer Science professor at the University of Reading. I’m shocked. I love how he’s showing it to a bunch of pre-teens instead of his actual peers. The kids don’t know what the hell is going on and won’t argue against it. They get to be on TV for it, I mean, why protest?

I wish the semester weren’t over, but I may try to bounce this article off my Discrete Math teacher to watch his head pop off.

For those who love the game Risk, there is a simplified form of it called Dice. Actual dice take the place of your armies and sit on territory that you gain. You roll all the dice on a space to do battle with an adjoining space, whether defending or attacking.

While I’ve played a manual version of it, the best way to play Dice has been on the computer. There is a good single player version, called simply Dice, here. It is well done, but the real fun in a risk game is to piss-off compete against other people.

So I stumbled across kdice the other day, a multiplayer version that draws me in for a few games a day. It’s great, but does have a few flaws. They have a scoring system that fluctuates like mad, and you can only play 8 on 8 on a board a bit too small for that many players. It effectively makes the first 4 or so people who get eliminated based largely on bad luck. I have even seen a few games where people are eradicated befor ethey even get their first turn.

Hopefully it is in active development, and they fix these little glitches, and let us choose an amount of players or a board size. But it’s still plenty fun as it is now.

edit: No sooner than I post this article til there is an update in the game. They tweaked the point system so it has a larger base and doesn’t fluctuate as much. So now your 6 game winning streak won’t be wiped out with one bad game!

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They have pulled me back in.

As many times as I quit CS is the exact same amount of times I eventually come back to playing it. In honor of my recent collapse into playing Counter-Strike often over the last few weeks, and inspired by the Creamaid widget below, here’s some memories of competitive CS I have had over my many many years of addiction to this game.

The first fondest moment that comes to mind is the first CoFR Intramurals. CoFR is a gaming group I have been in almost as long as I have been playing CS. We got together mainly to play for fun without having to deal with random smacktards, by having our own private servers and restricting membership to mature people over 25.

After many months of pure fun playing, many of our competitive natures were building and finally we decided to have a totally internal competition. Not for prizes or anything, but just enough to slake our competitive nature without slagging or excluding anyone. Every CoFR that wanted to play could and would. We semi-randomly assigned teams. To be fair we identified those who obviously had more “skill” than others, and either made them team captains (if they wished), or made sure they were distributed fairly to the teams. I don’t recall exactly how many teams we had, but it was at least six.

We were to play a “regular season” and play pretty much every other team, and then have a playoff of sorts. This was several years ago, so forgive me if I forget or misrepresent details. I know we all did team captain writeups after most matches, so I will look for that and edit this post as necessary later.

I volunteered to be team captain, and I don’t exactly remember why, but I was offered it and took it. I participated in the “draft” and gathered my group of ragtag players. Our team was kt. The Knights Templar. We all had the same outlook. We didn’t really want to practice, and we only half-heartedly contributed to smack-talk on the forums. No, we just wanted some good games with relatively improv strategies. Honestly, I didn’t think we were going to do that well, but I knew we were going to have fun at it.

Until the first game. We had some general strategies such as: save for money as a team, and call positions and enemy whereabouts. But largely we relied on individuals to play improvisationally. I think the map was de_train and from the pistol round on we were slaughtering. We won the game with a sizable advantage and we carried that high into every other game we played. After that game was won, we steadily mounted our wins with only one loss, until the playoffs. We won with no practice (even though we tried to a couple times, it just never worked out), sometimes with not all our members showing up, little strategy, and usually half the team was a little tipsy.

During the season, we had to play against Running with Scissors. A team who had strategy, practice time, as well as a couple members who actually competed in CS regularly. They were undefeated. We pretty much figured we were toast. I thought: well, even though this will probably end our winning streak, we have done better than expected in this season, and we weren’t going down without a fight.

And so we did. Fight that is, not go down. The map was de_aztec, one of the most popular and one of my favorites. Also, it is one of the maps in cs that has been analyzed the most from every tactical mind that has played it. We knew this and we decided early to try and establish an early lead by eschewing armor and having everyone buy deagles or armor the first round. This goes counter to the usual strategy of saving for bigger guns later. We were CTs. We knew that the CTs have a bit of an advantage in the map, especially if they opt to largely defend. We decided to shake it up and go on a rush offensive from the very beginning.

The key moment in the game came early. That very first round, our star deagler was Shay. A gamer that many times in casual play will use a deagle for most of the game, neglecting the larger weapons. We all rushed together and stormed the bridge. Amazingly, Shay racked up 3 kills in the first round! She almost wiped the other team out single-handedly (there are 5 to a team). And while we mopped up the rest, our early advantage was capitalized on the rest of the map. We never gave in or let up and finished the map as CT with a 10-3 score. At one point we were 8-1, and we couldn’t believe it. Here’s the screenshot I still have of that moment.

This was a sizable advantage, but our strength all season had been defense. Now we had to switch to T, the attacking side.

We decided to foolishly do the exact same thing the first round. We were going to all buy deagles, rush the bridge, and try to take them by surprise. While not being pretty, it worked! We won the round and some money by managing to kill off the other team. But it was one-on-one at the end. Honestly, I don’t remember too much of the game beyond that except that we traded off winning and losing which kept both teams in the poorhouse for the whole game. Most battles were decided with pistols or submachine guns, with few exceptions. We were afraid of being shutdown by the AWP when they managed to save for one, but every time they did, we managed to make them lose it, albeit at great cost to our own.

We finished the T side with a win, 8-5, securing the match and a very unlikely win. The team captain of RwS was definitely known as one of the best players we had in CoFR and he received much ribbing for his one and only loss in the regular season. But again, it was all lighthearted.

We went on to the playoffs, and then the championship. Of course, the championship turned out to be a rematch between us and RwS. The intramural games had lost a bit of steam towards the end of the regular season, many people dropping out due to time constraints or lack of desire. Our team and most others had several replacements, and we even had to play some games shorthanded. Still most of us wanted to see it through to the end. While showing our mettle to its fullest, we were not the same team as before, and we did lose that final game.

While not getting quite as much press as the previous matchup against them, this final game of the Intramurals was still alot of fun. CoFR went on to have several more intramurals before the interest in CS for us as a group dwindled away. We never really got into a game as much as CS, so I’m not sure if things like will ever occur again for us as a group. But, I hope so.