Neolith.org
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Neolith.org |
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06-14-08 12:46 pm -- Neolith Good Motorcycle routes in Indiana, based out of Greenfield, IN...
04-23-07 01:13 pm -- Neolith I was searching for the lyrics to "Paragraph President" by Blackalicious the other day. As is often the case, there is one set of lyrics that gets copied to all the sites, and it is never corrected. The one I found was mostly correct, but had a few glaring flaws that I think the guy would have gotten right given a bigger vocabulary and better grasp of metaphor. Anyway, here is my take:
Paragraph paralyzer, rhythmic aristocrat Chorus: Hit you with the funk it's like, "who cut the provolone?" Chorus: Spoken:
I pledge allegiance to the pen and the pad
Leave your city burnin' like Gamera Paragraph President 12-28-05 09:46 am -- Neolith Its about time to rethink the website. I think I'm going to shelf the blogging format and just link to my project pages and update them with new information. I've picked up another new hobby, and started a page for it here. If you have about $300 you're wanting to get rid of, I can highly recommend getting an Esky Honeybee CP2 R/C helicopter, a good simulator, and some crash parts. Getting into R/C aircraft has truly been chicken soup for the geek's soul. 09-18-05 09:47 pm -- Neolith Anderson from ObWi: There are two kinds of people who enjoy discussing debatable topics with other people. One kind is dogmatic: "I know the truth, & it's my job to share it with you and to condemn those who disagree." The other kind is exemplified by Socrates, in one of my favorite Plato passages (heck, passages from anywhere), from the Gorgias. Socrates is about to demolish an argument of Gorgias's, indeed knocking him out of the dialogue (a student butts in & takes over), but hesitates before doing so (emphasis mine): You, Gorgias, like myself, have had great experience of disputations, and you must have observed, I think, that they do not always terminate in mutual edification, or in the definition by either party of the subjects which they are discussing; but disagreements are apt to arise —somebody says that another has not spoken truly or clearly; and then they get into a passion and begin to quarrel, both parties conceiving that their opponents are arguing from personal feeling only and jealousy of themselves, not from any interest in the question at issue... And sometimes they will go on abusing one another until the company at last are quite vexed at themselves for ever listening to such fellows.... Why do I say this? Why, because I cannot help feeling that you are now saying what is not quite consistent or accordant with what you were saying at first about rhetoric. And I am afraid to point this out to you, lest you should think that I have some animosity against you, and that I speak, not for the sake of discovering the truth, but from jealousy of you. Now if you are one of my sort, I should like to cross-examine you, but if not I will let you alone.... And what is my sort? you will ask. I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute; for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another. For I imagine that there is no evil which a man can endure so great as an erroneous opinion about the matters of which we are speaking; and if you claim to be one of my sort, let us have the discussion out, but if you would rather have done, no matter;—let us make an end of it.... That is outstanding. 04-12-05 03:21 pm -- Neolith I found this comment on Slashdot to be very sane and balanced on IP issues. I want to trot this out the next time I have a conversation with a practicing IP lawyer I'm friends with, and see what he thinks... Remember - just because YOU and YOUR FRIENDS buy what you download, most people do not. Regardless, they're not going to win this way. Before refridgeration was a household technology, people who needed ice had it delivered. There were lots of companies that provided this service. There were also lots of dairy-delivery companies too. My grandfather used to deliver milk. Anyway, enough people had refridgeration in their homes at a certain point that the death of dairy and ice delivery was inevitable. Some companies tried to fight this. Some tried to point out the flaws in home-made ice. Some tried to point out the expense. Some even appealed to consumers on the grounds that good hard-working men were losing jobs because the evil consumer was making his own ice rather than buying it from a good ol' fashioned American company. It all fell on deaf ears. Only one ice company survived the collapse of their market. It was the company that opened a new type of store - a combination service station/grocery. You could buy ice there, sure. In blocks or bags. You still can. They became 7-11, and not only did they survive the death of the ice market, they went on to insane profits that were never possible in the ice industry. Now, making ice in your home isn't illegal. Downloading copyrighted music that you haven't purchased is. So the analogy falls apart there. However, the RIAA's approach to solving his is akin to the ice delivery services trying to get in-home freezers banned because it's screwing up their business model. Well, tough shit. Agile companies that spot trends and capitalize on them survive. Bloated bureaucracies of self-serving directors eventually die. That's capitalism, and that's how it ought to work. It's a shame that their business model is failing because of massive copyright infringement, and not because of a legitimate new business. It's even more of a shame that stuff like iTunes came along as a solution to the piracy problem, when it should have predated it. They missed the boat on the Internet. Napster was there before iTunes, and the idea of free music is now forever ingrained into the social consciousness of on-line culture. Sometimes companies can divorce a culture of this link, but usually not. All photocopiers are the "Xerox" machine, all tissue is "Kleenex", all flying discs are "Frisbies" all adhesive bandages are "Band-Aids". Even RollerBlade was only partially successful in protecting their brand from being synonymous with the product. These companies would be foolish to spend money on a campaign to break this association. And that's why the RIAA is foolish. It's too late to stop this. It can't be stopped through legislation, legeal threats, copy protection schemes, the DMCA, or anything else. The only thing that can stop it is for them to find a way to make it more convenient for people to get the music they want at a cost so marginal that paying for the added convenience is worthwhile. Until and unless you run a very significant risk of getting caught and prosecuted, it won't stop. And people will suffer the eroding of their rights only so much in an effort to protect the revenue streams of millionaires. 04-06-05 04:51 pm -- Neolith Unintentionally hilarious error message encountered five minutes ago: Variable is undefined: 'submit' No, machine, I will NOT submit. It is you who will be ground beneath my heel! 01-20-05 11:29 pm -- Neolith I went ahead and textured and lit a few areas, just to see what they looked like. How'd they turn out? Eh. Judge for yourself. So far, they're too dark. The textures look muddier than they do in game, but to me the map looks too old school Quake-ish to me. Which since its a Doom2 port, makes sense. I hope the layout and weapons are fun and playable, but I'm not sure I have the experience to pull off a really beauty map right now. 01-17-05 11:21 pm -- Neolith Final Colts update of the 2004 season. From the thrill of victory, to the total agony of defeat. God. I'm so depressed. My only consolation is pounding the crap outta the Patriots over and over and over again in Madden until next year. Apparently, that's the only way I'll ever see the Colts beat those punks from New England. Yeah, stonehenge is coming along nicely. I'm learning techniques to speed things up quite a bit. For example, just yesterday I figured out by accident I could hold shift and drag a brush to copy it at the same height. This beats the heck out of cut and past which always shifts the new brush's position over all three axis. That alone saves tons of time. Sometimes I think I should actually sit down and read a manual once in a while. So far I have 100% of the stonehenge area, about 75% of the tunnels, two secondary rooms completely finished, one other room boxed out, and one more room not even started. After that's finished, I've got to light everything and make sure I'm happy with the textures, put in some models and fixtures and more phys objects, and finally do weapon and item placement. A few more weeks, maybe. 01-07-05 11:00 am -- Neolith Last 2004 season Colts update is up. Two of them, actually, the thrilling, record breaking Chargers game, and the meaningless, boring Broncos one. Bring on the playoffs. I dearly love the Don Cheedle commercials this time each year. They really capture the drama and suspense of the NFL playoffs in a way that brings a lump to the throat of the hardcore fan, and a new appreciation of the sport to the casual. I just found a game breaker with the BuggyBall mod: game_score is broken. How the $%&# you going to make a mod that involves scoring points if the entities that increment a team score are fundamentally broken? Huh? So, until that gets fixed, I'm shelving BB, and working on a few deathmatch maps. I'm really rusty at making any, and its good to be able to map well before you tackle a mod. First up is a remake of my stonehng map for Doom2. It was always my personal favorite, and at the time won some acclaim. I always wanted to be able to jump up on stonehenge, and now I can. The fact that you can pick up some of the shattered and crumbling pieces of the site itself and fling them at your opponents is just bonus. The only bummer is the relative lack of weapon selection you have in HL2DM versus classic. Really, excluding weapons you start with, you can only offer the Magnum, Crossbow, Shotgun, AR, and Rocket Launcher as upgrades. The ammo you can carry for each is minimal, which makes balancing the weapons out very challenging. I'm thinking of creating two maps, one that doesn't have any physics objects to hurl around, and instead focuses on weapon tactics. And the other thats normal. I have the stonehenge area completed, one of the two rooms, and about half the tunnels. I'll have some screens up soon. 01-04-05 11:29 pm -- Neolith Things I want to see in Madden 2006:
Other than that, man, Madden 2005 is just about the perfect football game. And when I finally got a dual-shock-style pad for my PC, oh man, its even better. When I see the defense pack the line? I audible that $&#! to my slot receiver. Or I yank the playmaker stick the other way. Either/or, the defense is left holding the bag. And I love how I can key my defense and swarm a run play, though I admit that I'm unusually suspectable to a well done play action pass. Which is actually really cool. Yeah, I know, EA is evil, and I'd hate to work for them, but they know how to produce a good football game, yessir. Blizzard is evil too, and I still buy their crap on occaision, and apparently so do a lot of other folks. Same with Microsoft. There is a certain threshold in any endevour where upon the fruitage is so delicious that you just have to take the apple from the devil himself. Madden is well past that threshold. Since I guess they have the NFL license locked up for the 21st century, I hope they don't lay a Front Page Sports-style turd next year. -- -- -- Show all updates from - 2008 - 2007 - 2005 - 2004 - 2003 - 2002 - 2001 |