The Olympics are about a time of neutrality and peace to play games against one another.

4) Want to really help the people in Tibet?

But most important of all:

Leave the Olympics out of it!

And that's what really grinds my gears.

We're forgetting something... - 08 Feb 2008
You know what really grinds my gears? When technology hinders more than it helps.

So I'm sitting in a lounge area on campus, and this guy comes up. He's a nice guy, but he's blind. As in, visually impaired. Legal blindness. And he told me some interesting things... behold, the other side of the looking glass:

Touch Screen Technology
So with touch screens, you can have infinite possible "buttons". You can move things around with your fingers alone. You can even use them as digital paper, like for signing for a credit card purchase at the store. So how can this technology be bad?

It is purely visual.
Blind people can't see the buttons, you know. So how will they know which one to press? You can't make braile appear on glass at will.

And with that, there is no tactile feedback. So unless the device plays a sound when you press a button, a blind person cannot tell if a button has been pressed or not.

Just stick to plastic buttons. They've worked so well before.

Hybrid Cars
Now, I know what you're thinking. "Why is this guy bashing hybrid cars? They're energy efficient, pollute the environment a lot less, and they're much quieter..."

It's that last part. Hybrid cars are too quiet.
This is very much a hinderance to the blind because they can't see you comming - they can only hear you. So if your car is silent, BAM! Didn't notice you.

So try to engineer some sort of noise maker that isn't the horn into your hybrid cars.

Schools For The Deaf
It's not about blindness, but this came up during our conversation. There's a SA goon who's deaf that made a "Let's Play" thread for both of the PC-DOS Megaman titles. The general consensus was: he was able to do it because he couldn't hear the shitty sounds. But there was also something noticable: the videos had no commentary, and his posts were written in poor English. This is because that, even though he's American, he went to a "School for the Deaf" that focused more on History of deaf people and sign language, and less on English reading and writing, phonetic skills to have some speaking ability, and even education in general.

...what?

Apparently, this man I was talking with had a similar problem: it was focused more on alternate means of reading (like Braille) and less on math, science, and English.

This is just... not right.

And that's what really grinds my gears.

HAY GUYS I'M RANTING ABOUT LINUX AGAIN - 14 Jan 2008
You know what really grinds my gears? KDE. Stands for "K Desktop Environment". It's GNOME's compeditor in the Linux desktop war (because nobody cares about XFCE et al). And, in my honest opinion, it's a bloated sack of shit.

90% of the available options are for tweaking individual fucking PIXELS on the desktop, and to find USEFUL settings it's a total pain in the ass. Furthermore, it insists on consuming 90% of my system RAM. So if I have 1GB of RAM, it will use over 900MB RAM from the desktop alone. For comparison, right now I'm runing Windows Vista on the same machine, with Pidgin (one IM window, with Trasher) and Firefox (one tab, the blog editor page), and I'm only using 624MB RAM.

But I'm not done! See, these were for KDE3. Recently, KDE4 was finally finished. I shall summarize all I could see in the release notes right here:
-We completely changed the interface to be more Vista-like!
-We added more eye candy!
-We replaced the Crystal icon theme with a new one that's more photorealistic!
-We tried to reduce memory consumption!

...That's it. That's fucking it. Also compairing to Vista, Microsoft explained how it's not all interfacelifting, but other changes under the hood did occur, and they said what it was (granted UAC can be a pain in the butt to some, at least Microsoft is trying!).

So it looks like there is something worse than Vista!

And that's what really grinds my gears.

If you are from Europe and are angry about Nintendo taking forever to localize a game, read on. - 08 Dec 2007
Hello, my name is NTSC! I'm a color encoding format used in televisions in many parts of the world, like the United States, Canada, Mexico, parts of South America, and Japan!

When a game company, like Nintendo, makes a game over in Japan, it's designed for my Japanese cousin, NTSC-J. Since NTSC-J and NTSC-M (that's me!) are very similar, the only actions needed by the game company's American branch is translation and localization. It makes their job very easy, and is the main reason why games usually come out in America second!

But, for my friends over in Europe and Australia, they can't use these games. That's because my friends, PAL and SECAM, are very very different from me! The PAL family members have taller screens than my family, don't require adjustment of tint or saturation, and have higher quality images, but they run at 50Hz! That's 10Hz slower than me!

The game consoles rely on the TV for timing. Since the game company designed their game to have a 60Hz clock (my frequency), it would not run correctly on a 50Hz clock. The game would also not fit the screen correctly, because PAL is taller than me! That's why the game company's European branch takes the games and fixes these problems, so that they will run correctly on PAL! But it's not just a simple code edit. They have to then playtest the game over and over to make sure that no bugs appeared while configuring it for the slower clock speed! That's why Europe and Australia get games third!

Since I'm just a television encoding, I don't know much about handheld games, but I can guess that it takes longer for games to arrive in Europe due to localization (colour instead of color) and the fact that there are many other languages spoken in Europe than in America and Japan.

I hope this helped clear things up!

Sprite "styles", and why most of them don't exist - 12 Nov 2007
You know what really grinds my gears? Something a large majority of sprite artists, sprite rippers, and sprite users on the internet tend to think of. "Styles" of sprites.

Yes, I know, there actually ARE specific sprite styles, but I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about fake ones.

The first one is the "Super Mario World" style. Anything that has been "sprited" in this style is completely bogus. There is no sprite style used in Super Mario World!

A sprite style is supposed to be uniform. That is, everything flows together and looks like it would fit without looking like a blood stain on a white tile floor. Super Mario World has graphics that do not fit together. Look at the Spike Top: it looks less like a Buzzy Beetle with a spike on it and more like a six-legged bug! A lot of the graphics in Super Mario World seem to have been thrown together by a bunch of random digital artists. There is little sign that any art direction was taken during the development.

The next major offender, and the one that caused me to write this rant, is the "n-bit" style(s). Just like with Super Mario World's style, these also do not exist.

See, people used to call a sprite as being in an "n-bit style" because of the console the game was on where the sprite originated. For example, the "8-bit" MegaMan sprite is called "8-bit" because it was ripped from a game on the NES. Then some people started saying it was because of the available color palette.

Neither of these are correct. At all.

Consoles are called "n-bit" not because of graphics or palettes, but because of how big word sizes are in memory. The NES is called "8-bit" because a word is 8 bits long - exactly one byte. The SNES was 2 bytes, the Playstation and a large majority of computer CPUs use 4 bytes, and the newest computer processors use 8 bytes.

The whole "available colors" crap wouldn't work, anyways. Have you seen the graphics the SEGA Master System and Game Gear can produce? It can handle 16-color sprites like the Genesis and SNES. Except the processor used in both systems is 8-bit.

And neither would the "native system" malarkey. Take a look at the graphics in SMB1 and SMB3. The styles are as different as night and day. Yet, by the "native system" claim, they are the same style.
No, they are not.

And that's what really grinds my gears.

Perpetual costs of a game - 04 Nov 2007
Sorry I haven't made any new rants as of late; I've been working on a new CMS for my personal site and the GDA Network, as well as dealing with college, real life, and gaming. Speaking of gaming, you know what really grinds my gears? Games that you keep paying for. You know, 99% of the MMOs in this world.

It's like this. I spend money on a cool new game. It's fun, and I really enjoy it! But there's a problem. I have to pay a monthly subscription fee to keep playing!

Why do I have to keep paying for this game? I gave you my $50, get the fuck away from my wallet you fat, sleazy cats. Make a whole new game if you want more money, I'm not going to keep paying you for this one game on a monthly basis.

However, I don't really mind getting items in a game as a gift for donating. For example, the free browser-based MMO Kingdom of Loathing gives you a special item called the "Mr. Accessory" for every $10 you donate. And this game is actually run on donations. So in a way, it's like buying a copy of a retail game, but gives you a bit of a fuzzy feeling at night. Plus, you can trade in those gifts for other items to get special familiars, spells, and gear.

Something similar to this, but not quite the same, is the ever-popular MMOs made by some group of Koreans. One of which (which apparently is a good game, from what I hear) is some game about a story... and a type of tree... well, a lot of the "cool" and "useful" items have to be bought. Okay, that's fine and dandy. However, these items seem to cost a lot more than the $10 Mr. Accessories, and to make matters worse, if you die, all your stuff is dropped and you can't get it until you respawn, which means some sleazebag can loot you. And to make matters even MORE worse, your items can be eaten by a specific and unkillable monster, never to be seen again.

The problem? You can lose items you paid for.
In KoL, items gotten by donation are items which cannot be stolen through PvP, and cannot be discarded or autosold. You can sell your items in the market for a lot of in-game currency, if you want. But your hard-earned donation-obtained items cannot be pilfered by the game or other players.

Back to the Korean MMO maker. They're making what seems to be a PC clone of Mario Kart DS, complete with online multiplayer. That's nice, except the official site is a bit... off-putting. Namely, it states that the only way to enjoy the game is to buy lots and lots of items.

I'm just going to stick with Mario Kart DS. Besides, I <3 Waluigi too much.

And that's what really grinds my gears.

College Course Cockups - 05 Sep 2007
You know what really grinds my gears? When colleges screw around with courses behind the student's backs.

Once upon a time, a professor re-nigged his promise to teach a Calculus II course at my college this semester. But wait, there's more! The professor that would take his place is the Calculus III professor. In order for this to happen, a course had to be dropped. That couse was Calculus III.

The professor argued that there are students (like me!) who need to take Calculus III in order to graduate. However, the Suits declared "CALC II IS MOAR IMPORTANT THAN CALC III DUUR HURR HURR". So Calculus III was dropped.

Then, at the last second, someone stepped up to teach the Calculus II course! Calculus III was saved! But it was too late, the Suits had given the order for the Calculus III roster to be nuked. And it was... for about 2 minutes. It was restored, but with only one student. That student was not me.

MEANWHILE, I went to print up a copy of my schedule, and something was wrong... Calculus III was missing! According to PeopleShit, the crapware my college uses for student/course management, I had dropped it! No! No! I did NOT drop it, nor did I want to!

So I checked with the Registrar on the first day of college, and the worker drone said "Whoops looks like it got canned due to lack of students". Well, crap, I said to myself, and sold back the Calculus III book I bought to the bookstore.

So today I decided to register for a History course to fill in the void... but PeopleShit said I was back in the class! I hurried off to the appointed classroom, and lo and behold the class was not canned! I ran down to buy back my book... no luck! It was sold less than a minute after I left there yesterday! All they had were "New" books, which cost "FUCKLOADS OF CASH", or $21 short of what I had on me at the time (the $95 from the return on yesterday plus my college food money).

Curse you, book sniper!

And that's what really grinds my gears.

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