Whoops, I had this scheduled to go live tomorrow instead of today. I FAIL AT CALENDARS. Fortunately I caught it before midnight!
 So I notice we’re back to showing three minutes of Coach doing Tai Chi every episode. Fantastic. And did you see his uncut, unabridged confessional about honor and integrity? I guarantee he rehearsed that in the hotel before he came out and then again in the jungle just before tribal. Meanwhile we have nobodies like Danielle and Courtney getting so little screen time they might as well be stick figures or flea circuses.
Candace is a terrible player, I’ve decided. J.T. told Cirie that Candace told him that Cirie didn’t trust her. Cirie relayed this lie to Candace, but didn’t reveal the source. Candace spent the rest of the day asking everyone at camp “Did you tell Cirie I said I didn’t trust her?” Candace, you are not in high school, sweetheart. The goal of this game is not to find out who said what about who behind who’s back. I’m not even sure what she was expecting, someone to fess up? Does she not understand the concept of lying? Sheesh.
Over at Camp Villain a few folks approached Russell with concerns that he’s spending too much time with Parvati. Actually it was just two folks: Coach, who I remind you is off teabagging Jerri in the woods during the sixteen seconds per day the camera isn’t pointed at him, and Boston Rob, who sex0red his way to second place in All-Stars. In typical Russell fashion, he responded by talking big in a confessional about how Coach and Rob need to go.
Also in typical Russ fashion, he responded by sabotaging camp life by throwing away the machete. I am reminded that these players might not know Russ’s game, depending on how much of Samoa aired before they started filming HvV. The answer must be “not very much” because, otherwise, “shit be goin’ crazy ’round camp” should lead directly back to him. I think we’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The challenge was purely physical, so the Heroes mopped up with a flawless victory. As long as they don’t have to solve puzzles these guys have the game in the bag. The “knock your opponent off the platform” challenge is simple and brutal. Coach proved how honorable and classy he is by using his arm instead of his sumo bag to score on Rupert and then flipping Probst off when he called for a do-over. (Rupert won the do-over handily.)
James vs. Randy was particularly good. That round was over in exactly two hits: James hitting Randy, and Randy hitting the ground about twenty feet away. If he’d been hit any harder the Villains wouldn’t have had to voted him off; he’d already be out of the game by virtue of geosynchronous orbit.
Randy did pretty much nothing to save himself after the Villains lost the challenge. He squeaked a bit about how Parvati is evil and has friends she’s going to hook up with after the merge… but he didn’t do anything to sell it. (Of course aiming at Parvati means aiming at Russell, so Randy was still doomed… but he didn’t know that.)
He flung his buff into the fire after he got voted out. Powerful message there, Randy. You sure showed them.
Who’s gonna win? Sticking with Russell. Nothing in particular happened this episode to change my mind.
Also, I don’t typically comment on the “next episode” bump, but it looks like next week Coach breaks down and cries about how nobody likes him. Oh joy!
Isn’t it a good feeling to know that you’ve put the final touches on a project? I wouldn’t know, of course, since today I didn’t finish the enormously long co-op Let’s Play series I’ve been recording on and off since November. We finished the game, sure, but there’s still a lot of footage to sift through, break apart, edit down, write descriptions for and upload to them thar yubbatubes.
But it’s good to have the first major phase out of the way. That it is.
Recording LPs is a lot smoother on this new monster computer of mine. I’m half-tempted to go back and re-record the entire X4 run, which I suppose would be a bad idea. Don’t worry; when the last video in that series goes live I’ll make sure to write about all the trials and tribulations that goddamn game put me through in excruciating detail right here on the blog.
Another thing I finished today: some weirdo indie platform game called VVVVVV. No, I have no idea how you’d pronounce that. “Vvvvvv” is too cumbersome to say, and “vee vee vee vee vee vee” just sounds ridiculous. Anyway, the demo is available up on Kongregate.com, and it’s definitely worth checking out. I’d think long and hard about plunking down the $15 for the full version, though. The stuff in the demo is fun, but extremely timid compared to the challenge in the rest of the game. I like the idea of taking a single gameplay mechanic and stretching it in a bunch of interesting directions, but VVVVVV feels like they ran out of directions about halfway in and decided their design goal for the rest of the game was going to be SPIKES ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE.
Also it’s a Flash game, so you’re going to want to bust out your Joy2Key. Personally, I never leave home without it.
Several commenters have informed me that those MMX “rom hack” maps I linked to yesterday were an April Fool’s gag, and also that I am an idiot. In my defense, being an idiot is awesome.
All the negativity towards idiocy in this country… well, it borders on racism. We idiots are a proud and bountiful people, sound of mind and mild of temperament. Idiocy transcends race, creed, nationality, religious and language.
But no seriously I am gullible as shit when it comes to weird videogame stuff. Did you know that if you beat the minus world in Mario 100 times you get the turtle suit from Mario 3? Or that if you beat Metroid without the Justin Bailey code Samus strips naked? It’s true! My friend’s brother can do it!
Just what is this Mega Man X: Guns of the Mavericks thing? Is this a real thing? Should I play it?
My experience with romhacks has been that they almost always, universally, overwhelmingly suck. And yet I am continually drawn back to them, like a Morph Moth to a Flame Mammoth. Maybe it’s better that I don’t know where to actually download this one.
Sometimes stories don’t go anywhere. Here’s one I’ve been tinkering with for a while. I think it’s a neat concept, but if there’s an actual story in here somewhere I’m just not seeing it. (Or, rather, I don’t think any stories utilizing this concept would be cooler than the actual concept itself.)
The first beacons were inmates, men awaiting execution who bargained their sentence down to life-without-possibility and lived out the rest of their natural days in a different kind of cell. Or mob snitches who couldn’t be made safe in even the most hopeless levels of solitary confinement. Or some white-collar criminal with a fancy lawyer who wants to serve out his five years in a place with booze, hot meals and nudie mags.
The project was almost killed after that first generation of beacons failed. The pods weren’t soundproof, see, and the ones who didn’t find some way to commit suicide were incurably insane upon retrieval. The ventilation systems were also a notorious weak point; seven beacons died by suffocation after the vents were disabled from the outside and became clogged with gore when zombies tried to climb through. In one case a beacon actually managed to escape after a chance earthquake upended the pod, granting him access to the floor hatch. Nobody knows how far he made it, but smart money says “not very”.
The military railed against the pods from the very beginning. Regular patrols had kept residential, industrial and agricultural sites safe for more than twenty years. Sure there was the odd coups or barely-contained outbreak. And yes, sixty percent of the world’s population was living under martial law to keep the gears turning. But it was war. That’s the price we had to pay for safety.
It may have all ended there if the story hadn’t been leaked. Once the public learned about the project’s spectacular failure, its most fatal flaw was diagnosed: they weren’t using the right sort of people for beacons. Indeed, for most of human history the right sort of person didn’t exist. But now we had them: folks who had grown up back in the aughts and teens, social hermits who spent their lives plugged into the Internet. People who neither needed nor craved actual human contact.
People who were immune to ennui.
Volunteers came out of the woodwork. Writers who wanted long stretches of uninterrupted solitude to complete their masterpieces. Forty-year-old children who wanted nothing more out of life than a steady supply of beer, frozen pizzas and computer games. Folks with crippling social disorders who couldn’t bring themselves to make a phone call let alone hold a job, but updated their blogs daily. By the time industry leaders had offered up the technologies required to build the perfect self-sufficient pod the government was holding lotteries to see who would win an eighteen-month shift.
Your standard L25-C beacon pod measures 40′ by 8′ by 18′ and is transported in two sections by armored flatbed truck. The hull is five inches thick, the outermost layer composed of a perfectly smooth and virtually fireproof polyetheretherketone synthetic, curved outwardly so as to be impossible to climb.. Layers of silica nanofoam for insulation and latticed ferrite for soundproofing are sandwiched between solid steel. The bottom half of the pod is populated by huge tanks of oxygen-producing algae and intricate low-maintenance ventilation and waste-removal systems. Power is generated by a compact nuclear turbine and supplemented by solar, wind or geothermal sources depending on climate and terrain allowances.
The beacon’s living area is more or less whatever he wants it to be. The required exercise equipment, removable pantry, med station and toilet facilities take up less than half of the 273′ square dwelling. Some luxuries are an impossibility; food preparation is by necessity limited to a small refrigerator, microwave oven and basic utensils. Bathing is limited to a standing shower unit only, cell phone service practically impossible. Windows are right out.
What every pod does have is miles and miles of fiber-optic cable giving them continuous, uninterrupted access to the Internet, television and cinema. Movies, books, magazines and video games are delivered digitally, as is a monthly deposit of $4,567.88 for services rendered. Though space is severely limited items like king-sized beds, sprawling multi-computer workstations and state-of-the-art speaker systems are common requests. Despite the lacking need for privacy most beacons still ask for a locking door on the toilet.
And every pod comes with zombies, clawing at the synthetic hull, trampling each other to sludge, groaning endlessly. Driven by some unquenchable instinct to move towards the closest human meal, they are attracted for hundreds of miles around. Z-MAC soldiers who accompany the monthly supply drops often find a pod completely buried in a mountain of grey, writhing flesh and have to burn or carve a hard-fought path for themselves. The beacon only learns of the raging battle just feet away once the chime goes off, harkening the arrival of his new pantry. In twenty-two hours the time lock will disengage and he’ll find it completely stocked with all manner of frozen and non-perishable foods.
When the second generation of beacons was an overwhelming success some number-crunchers got together and determined that it would take only sixty-seven strategically placed pods in various points of the North American wilderness to attract and contain the entire zombie menace. After a year of preparation, convoys of carefully-coordinated armored trucks left from every urban area on the continent, leading the undead away from civilization and towards a scorching desert or a broken mountainside or an arctic wasteland where a newly-appointed beacon waited for them. The media referred to the uncountable zombies shambling after the trucks as “evacuees”. Once the pied pipers had delivered their payloads they were airlifted out, leaving the zombies to converge upon the pod instead.
Z-MAC spent most of the following year securing city perimeters and overseeing smaller “evacuations”. There were only one hundred sixty-two recorded zombie-related deaths in the US that year. The year after, only forty-three. Year after that, 80% of Z-MAC were decommissioned or reassigned.
Year after that, the highways re-opened for the first time since the outbreak.
This year the EU voted to lift its ban on air and sea travel to North America. Time magazine did a twenty-page spread on the first family’s visit to Paris.
Two of the current New York Times bestsellers have come out of pods. Fudzuu, the new Internet phenominon people are calling “Web 4.0″ was programmed and implemented by a beacon during his shift. Hit reality show Todd in the Pod has no fewer than six knock-offs this season. One beacon requested external microphones on his pod to record the endless moaning, which he sampled into a revolutionary new style of music he called “greyscale”. His album went double-platinum.
A retired Z-MAC pilot invested his life savings in a run-down motel and as many high-powered sniper rifles as he could get his hands on. He opened up a bed-and-breakfast-and-shooting-range just outside the Death Valley perimeter. For $300 an hour plus the cost of ammunition you can go there and shoot as many zombies as your little heart desires. If you make twelve consecutive shots he puts your picture on the wall. He’s booked solid through November.
At this point I realized I was just describing and shaping the idea for its own sake rather than directing it towards any kind of actual plot. Ah well. Still a fun read, no?
 I think I might be more excited to play MM10 than I was for MM9. With MM9 there was that lurking suspicion that the game might suck, you know? But now that we know it didn’t we can pretty much look forward to MM10 completely free of apprehension.
There was a time when I would have hated seeing dorky bosses like Strike Man, Pump Man and Sheep Man… but now I kind of can’t imagine the game without them. It’s hard to articulate, but I can tell the difference between the “trying to be cool but still obviously running low on ideas” bosses from the latter NES games and the “they’re going to turn out cheesy anyway so might as well go full-hog” bosses of MM9/10.
I still don’t excuse the “dorky and they know they’re dorky” bosses from MM7/8/&B, though.
 Have you ever had so much mucus in the back of your throat that your gag reflex was sounding the alarms all day long? Because that has been my existence on this fine Sunday!
I don’t really feel sick per se, except for the five or six minutes I spent heaving globs of phlegm into the sink after I woke up this afternoon. It’s more annoying than anything. I hope it clears up before I go to work tonight.
“Hey Brick, why is there a bottle of mana potion on your webpage?” Good question, hypothetical inquiry. That’s one of the first images that pops up on a Google image search for “curacao liquer”, an unnaturally blue and unnervingly syrupy alcoholic beverage I had about three shots of on Friday night. I only bring this up because early Saturday morning before I left the game I had a very sudden and very inexplicable fit of intense nausea that is peripherally related to my current state of mild illness.
Was it the drink? I don’t know. It might have also been the pepperjack cheese or the proximity to my friend’s pet squirrels. Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation. Nonetheless, next time someone hands me a glass of pineapple juice and Windex I will be sure to politely decline.
Ever helpful in the quest to get my throat cleared, Peanut suggested I gargle salt water. I maintain she was playing a mean practical joke on me. Putting salt water directly into my mouth is one of the most uncomfortable experiences I have ever had in my life. Would it have worked? I don’t know, but I can safely say the cure is worse than the disease. After I made it clear that I was not willing to torture myself so she went and got me a Halls cough drop. That worked like a charm.
I’ll try not to think to hard about why she might have started with the salt water. I know she likes to see me suffer… I don’t want to know why.
Anyway, vlog tomorrow. Unless I’m a big fat liar again. (Which is totally possible.)
Still getting the computer put together, so you get Peemeister a day early! Huzzah!
From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted August 7, 2007.
Can’t handle the truth.
One benefit to my mainly-standard office job I did not have in the old peemeister-only job is that I don’t have to field nearly as many phone calls. Once in a while, though, I still get a particularly irritating one. I thought I’d share one from last Friday.
Our clients receive renewal packets from us, once a year. This packet comes with some fancy posters and stickers, a CD with all our updated rules and regulations, and a purty certificate to hang on the wall. This packet is sent out as soon as we receive their annual payment. We have too many clients, however, to handle on an individual basis, so we’ve settled into a month-behind routine that works pretty well for everyone. Basically I get a list on the first of the month of every company that paid their fees during the previous month.
I suppose most of our clients don’t mind waiting a few weeks for their packets, since most of them pay us a month or two late anyway.
So the ladycalls me up on Friday afternoon wanting to know where her renewal is. I look her up in the computer and see she paid us just last week.
“Yes ma’am, I see you paid. I’ll get it out as soon as I can.”
“When can we expect it?’
“Just as soon as I finish it, I promise.”
“And when will that be? What date?”
“I don’t know for sure. I send out a batch of renewal packets every day, though.”
“Which batch will ours be in?”
“Again, I don’t know for sure. I can’t give you an exact date.”
“Why not?”
This is the part of the conversation that makes me uncomfortable. This woman wants to hear “Yes ma’am I’ll get it out right away ma’am, it’ll be on your desk Monday, you are more important than all three hundred of our other clients expecting renewal packets,” and anything but that answer is just going to antagonize her. Like the moron that I am, though, I decide to stick with the truth.
“Because yours is one of many packets I have yet to put together. I’m working through them as fast as I can.”
“So when are you going to get around to it?”
“Ma’am, your packet will go out in the mail soon. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Not acceptable.”
“I apologize.”
“What date are you going to do it? Are you going to make us wait for a month?”
“That’s incredibly unlikely. I’ll probably be able to get it finished within the next couple of business days, but it’s impossible to know which specific day it will be.”
“Not acceptable.”
“Again, I apologize.”
“If I told any of our customers ‘it will be there when it gets there’ we would lose all our customers.”
Then she hangs up.
Thinking about it, there are probably two schools of thought on how this conversation went down. The first would be something like, um, hey peemeister guy, that lady has a point. And I agree to an extent. She is certainly entitled to the materials she has paid for, and she’s well within her rights to call and ask when they can be expected. However, just like the pizza guy really can’t give you a better estimate than “probably about forty-five minutes” I can’t give anyone a better estimate than “probably within the next few days.” (Actually, I’m betting it was more a case of “well it’s 4pm on Friday afternoon and I’ve had a crappy week but I can’t yell at my boss let’s see who can I call and give a hard time to oh yeah the drug test guys” than anything else, but I have no direct evidence for that.)
The other reaction is probably along the lines of, hey peemeister guy, that lady was totally a bitch, why didn’t you lay into her with sarcasm and snarkiness much to the delight of your readers? The answer to which would be: because that would have been rude and unprofessional. Had I given her actual cause to call my boss and complain, I would have been yelled at. And man, I really hate being yelled at.
For the record, I got the packet done yesterday and sent out in the mail, so she probably received it today. I wonder what would have happened if I had quoted her an exact date for next week. Would she call back to complain? “Yes I got my renewal packet, but you told me it wouldn’t be here until next week! Why did you lie to me!?”
(Note: I got my new computer built and will be spending most of the rest of today configuring it. As a result I’m posting the Survivor update today, and the vlog either tomorrow or Sunday.)
Camp Villain started this episode out in a state of complete disarray because they couldn’t figure out how to get a nice shelter built. Remember this fact; it will be important later.
We started out with a pretty terrible scare. Boston Rob, overworked and overstressed thanks to his fumbling tribe, fainted in the jungle and whacked his head on the ground. Jerri found him laying there helpless, unable to move or get up. Probst comes out with medical and, fortunately, Rob is described as “looking worse than he actually is”. Seems to have been a touch of the flu combined with exhaustion or whatever else. He wasn’t pulled from the game, and in fact bounced back pretty quick, saying he got over his case of “crybabyitis”.
I’m glad for that. I’m tired of seeing some of my favorite players pulled from the game for medical reasons. Penner and James in Fans vs. Favorites, Black Russell in Samoa, that mean old cuss in Tocantins… it’s been happening too much in recent seasons. I believe Rob’s bout with illness had two positive effects on the Villains tribe. First, it solidified Rob’s resolve. I think we’ll see less “make everyone happy” from him and more of the Robfather from All-Stars. Second, that much reality has a way of unifying a tribe, even for just a moment. Even Russell vocalized his worry about losing a strong player to illness. Anything that can jar King Russell out of the game for just a moment must be nothing short of an Act of God.
(He was back to his old self by the end of the episode, wondering if he should get rid of Rob before he gets too much control of the tribe. Good to have you back, Russ!)
The challenge was a complete disaster for the Heroes. The Villains bicker and backstab back at camp, but they are forceful in these challenges. The enormous block staircase puzzle was back, and Probst made sure to let everyone know that three of the players had done this challenge before: J.T., Coach and Tyson. Right away the Heroes saw their advantage: J.T. has won this challenge before, so they’ll let him be the caller and get the puzzle done. “One Voice” was their strategy and their mantra.
(Interesting side-note: a quick jaunt back through the archives reveals that in Tocantins I observed the reason Coach/Tyson’s tribe choked was because they refused to let one person take the lead and solve the puzzle. I doubt either of those egomonsters admitted their mistake to their new tribe, but if they did, I’d say it worked.)
Boston Rob is a madman when it comes to puzzles, and the Villains made short work of their staircase. The most iconic moment was when they were having difficulty getting one of the giant blocks up to the highest tier… Rob lifted it up on his back. Holy shit! This guy was on the ground two scenes ago! But they got it done, and took home immunity and a tarp.
So who ruined it for the Heroes? Maybe it was Rupert, who sat out the challenge because he wasn’t sure he could roll the huge blocks with a hurt foot. Maybe it was J.T., who didn’t solve the puzzle fast enough.
…nah. It was Steph and James, who were both instrumental in demolishing the “One Voice” mantra. Steph constantly tried to steal the spotlight from J.T. and solve the puzzle all by herself. (And, as a humble viewer, I’m about 95% sure J.T. had it right and she wanted to do it wrong. That might have been a trick of the editing, though.) And James, with his big booming man-voice, kept shouting Steph down. The resulting chaos caused everyone else to crumble.
I want to make this very clear. This tribe has Tom. And Colby. And J.T. And Steph. And James. The act of physically moving the blocks was zero trouble for them; hell, they might as well have teleported across the field. All they needed was one person to tell the workhorses where to position the blocks, and they would have won. J.T. knew this, and was ignored.
Back at Camp Villain things were looking up. The brief shake-up followed by a clear win did wonders for morale, and the addition of a tarp to their resources meant no more bickering about the shelters. Oh, and Russell speared a chicken, thereby covering the distance in food advantage as well. The Villains are living large. I am confident in calling them the stronger tribe at this point.
James went equal parts butthurt and ballistic back at Hero Beach. The scathing he gave Stephenie was legendary. He might as well have been preaching! At one point he had half of the Heroes gathered around, listening to the gospel of St. James about how the vile witch Stephenie survived a destroyed tribe and was therefore bad luck. Etc. etc. etc. He went on and on about it.
I think James’s tirade was out-of-place for three reasons. First, because it is not productive; arguing about who lost the challenge is almost never a good thing. Yeah, maybe Steph blew it today, but who will blow it tomorrow? J.T. took responsibility for not being as forceful in getting his tribe to focus as was Boston Rob, but of course Steph had already been cast the villain in this situation, so nobody listened to him. James should have just made a short comment, perhaps to Steph in private, and then got on with life.
Second, all this talk about how Steph is a pariah because she outlived her entire tribe in Palau… well, it completely ignores the fact that she made the finals in Guatemala. She’s played this game twice, James, and she spent her entire second round demonstrating how much she learned from the mistakes of the first. Willfully ignoring 50% of a person’s game is going to be more and more dangerous as you go forward, because you’re going to get blindsided by someone who ends up acting in a way you aren’t going to expect.
Third, if past experiences are such an important indicator… should the Heroes really be listening to the guy who let himself get voted off with two immunity idols in his back pocket? There’s only been one stupider move made in the entire history of Survivor, and the person who made it was too embarrassed to come anywhere near Heroes vs. Villains.
Let’s see if I have a good handle on the alliances here: Tom, Steph, Colby on one side… Amanda, James, J.T. and Rupert on the other. Cirie and Candice in the middle. I think? Those last two were the swing votes anyway. Tribal was more James vs. Steph bickering, with Colby and Tom rallying to Steph’s cause. It didn’t do them any good; the swing votes didn’t come through. There was a moment when Amanda looked worried — the moment, in fact, where Cirie pointed out how Amanda slit her throat in Fans vs. Favorites — but it was Steph gone home in the end.
Of course she had to have the last word. And of course James told her to shut her mouth.
Who’s gonna win? The Heroes are in bad shape. Everyone is too busy with the in-fighting to be playing any Survivor. It’s hard to call any of them a winner with the game in its current state. The Villains, on the other hand, seem… well, if not unified then at least somewhat content. They have good shelter now and a nice cushy numbers advantage. I’m sticking with Russell.
We’re playing Mafia over at Talking Time. You may be more familiar with the “Werewolf” version of the game (rules here). It is basically a game that feeds on paranoia and uncertainty, which is exactly the environment where assholes like me can thrive brilliantly.
After seven game-days and nearly a month of playing we have managed to get the game into a very strange state: I win. It doesn’t matter what team I’m on anymore, because whichever team I’m on has the best chance of winning. My life or death in the game is inconsequential. Whether or not anyone trusts me is completely beside the point.
Of course the game can and has switched around very suddenly. Who knows what game-tomorrow might bring.
Here is the game thread, which I’m told is entertaining as all get-out.
There are actually a lot of similarities between Mafia and Survivor, and several players in the game have been wary of me because of the analytical Survivor posts here on this blog. Analyzing the game after the fact, though, and actually playing it are two different things. It might be interesting to see how my first-hand experience at “this type of game” alters my perception of Survivor going forward.
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