We’re in furniture renewal mode these days. A new sofa and love seat were delivered this afternoon. Since they clash with our current living room furnishings, we’ve also purchased a new TV stand and end tables.

This means that it was time to clear some items out of the basement to make room for our old sofa. Mostly, I dumped three chairs that I had acquired from Target a year ago.  My goal at the time was to populate the room with enough chairs to enjoy killer games of Amplitude, but my largely anti-social nature kept such gatherings from ever happening.

Those chairs are on their way out, having been sold to a co-worker.  But I still craved a gaming chair.  My desk chair is not comfortable enough for long periods of time, and I’ve never been a fan of gaming from a couch (no idea why).  So it was time to find some new furniture.  I looked around at several local stores and did research online before ultimately purchasing the horrifically named X-Rocker Pedestal Wireless chair.  

Recliners are just too big, and typical game rockers are just too low.  This one looked like it would hit my Goldilocks sweet spot.  I didn’t really care about the wireless sound, but the swivel action, the recline, and the arms were all enticing features.  And Wal-Mart had a ton of them.

Got it home, busted it out, and had it put together in just a few minutes.  Taking it for a test drive with an episode of Doctor Who and a game of Viking proved it to be a very comfortable seat for my 209lb 5′8″ mass.  The only thing I didn’t like was that my head actually rested too far back, driving my line of sight to the top of my projector screen instead of holding it to the middle.  Backing off on the recline or getting a pillow will easily fix that.

The sound was something I had prepared to dismiss out of hand, but I actually do enjoy having it on.  A nice feature of the Xbox 360 is that it will simultaneously output digital and analog audio, so I was able to pump digital to my surround system while outputting analog to the chair, giving me a nice bit of added sound detail right in my earholes.

Now all I need to do is figure out how I can attach my Ace Combat flight stick to the chair arms, though for the sake of authenticity, I guess I should be figuring out how to mount the joystick between my legs.  I don’t think I could get used to that lack of symmetry.

I rarely do maintenance on my hosted web space since my provider just keeps increasing my quotas, but something made me look inside the old FITHlan folders today.

And out popped a whole buncha photos.

News out of New York state shows that Governor David A Paterson has signed into law a bit of legislation regarding video games.  Specifically, the law compels the state government to conduct a study of video game violence and its effects on children, requires consoles to have parental lockout controls by 2010, and requires games to show ESRB ratings.

Sounds pretty reasonable, except for three major things.

1. A couple thousand (might be exaggerating here) studies have already been done about video game violence.  Why can’t NY reference those?

2. All modern consoles already have parental controls built into them.  The industry has already addressed that concern, so legislating it makes no sense.  They had that one taken care of four years before the 2010 deadline.

3. All games sold at retail already carry an ESRB rating.  Most retailers require it.  Again, legislating a practice currently in practice.

So what did this legislation achieve?  Absolutely nothing aside from letting politicians look productive and fooling the public into thinking something will be done about this video game menace.

Well New Yorkers, you just paid for fluff legislation.  If you’re hoping it will reduce youth violence, you’re in for a surprise.  You see, poverty is a much larger contributor to youth violence than video games could ever hope to be, but nobody is trying to outlaw poverty.  No, let’s go after the inconsequential targets and hope the public doesn’t notice the dodge.

The good news is that this law doesn’t actually change anything.  The bad news is that making a law just to make it is asinine.

“They” being RBR. During my last stop in the shop, Rob approached me about helping with a redesign of the RBR site. What made him think I’d be good for that? He found Disjunction and liked what I was doing here (specifically the regular blog entries).

So there you go, kids. Fill a blog with articles about bikes, furries, charities, electroshock therapy, and gadget reviews. It might just get you some site work. It’s not that I’m afraid of people finding Disjunction, it’s just that I never assume anybody is reading it beside my wife and folks reading FnDragon’s LJ friends list. I’m guessing that Rob was checking out his referral logs and saw it mentioned there.

In other news, I’ve sold my kayak. I was sad to see it hauled off in the hands of another man, but I was happy to see $350 in 20s and 10s in my hands. Next to go will likely be about 25% of my book collection - the stuff I have no intention of reading again or of reading for the first time. Normally, I’d trade those in at Webster’s for store credit, but getting credit just means I would replace books I didn’t read with more books I won’t read. For once, I think I’ll see what Webster’s will give me in cash.

Oh hey, I know… How about I turn this post into a virtual yard sale? Check my goods after the cut, yo. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m really getting into this game. Even stupid shit makes me laugh.

For example, I was standing across the street from the house of one of the crime bosses watching a woman walk along with a coffee cup. She decided she was done with it and dropped it to the ground, so I ran over to the cup, picked it up, and chucked it into the back of her head.

Give a hoot, bitch.

As in, this game has stolen my free time for an entire evening.

I’ve never been a fan of the GTA series, not even when it got its start on the Amiga. The idea of an open expanse of game world populated by thugs, cops, and hookers never clicked with me. This isn’t to say I never tried. I did own a copy of Vice City for a while. I logged two hours of play time in it before giving up on the sub-par graphics and 80s satire.

For some reason, though, the massive hype train that brought GTA4 down the tracks hooked me and pulled me in. It was almost as though I would be missing out on the cultural gaming event of the year if I didn’t get in on this, so, with an established disdain for the series, I purchased a copy of GTA4 for the PS3.

I sat down in my gaming lair wondering if my $60 purchase was a mistake.

Five and a half hours later, I stumbled off to bed.

In between those moments, a lot of stuff happened:

1. Watched the game do a 3.3GB install to my PS3 hard drive
2. Played a more “mature” version of Crazy Taxi with the first few missions
3. Sat and watched stand up comedy on the virtual TV on my real TV
4. Stole cars to my heart’s content
5. Bowled, threw darts, and played pool
6. Beat up a homeless guy on the beach during a beautiful sunrise
7. Played Carmageddon
8. Took a girl out on a few dates, tried to make a move, was rejected
9. Picked up a prostitute, got the premium service, followed her out of the car, beat her with a bat, got my money back, watched the blood pool under her head as she lay on the pavement, backed my car up over her, hung out for a while until the ambulance arrived, pulled my gun on the driver who then exited and ran away, stole the ambulance, raced it through the streets with the siren blaring
10. Offed the first crime boss

Now, I’m not proud of #9. That was mostly done for the sake of having that experience in the GTA universe. Chances are quite good that I’ll never patronize a prostitute again in the course of playing this game. But I did want to do it at least once to see why everybody thought that was such a big deal. Turns out, it wasn’t.

I can’t tell you whether or not the game is fun. I only know that I want to play more of it. That’s not the same thing as “fun”. It’s more along the lines of curiosity - what will happen next? Will I ever have better clothes? How long until I can actually understand what the rastafarian is saying?

When my Rock Band drums broke, I placed an order with WalMart.com for new ones since they were a mere $54.  Shortly after that, Brandy told me to just go buy a set in the store so I could get back to rocking.  I did so.

And then I sent my broken drums back to EA.

Earlier this week, the EA replacements and the WalMart order arrived on the same day, giving me three sets of drum kits for Rock Band.  That’s some major overkill right there.

I’m actually going to keep two sets and return one (unless somebody reading this wants a cheap set of 360 drums), but the important part is that I’m back in action.  And tonight, Brandy will join me in a drum duel.

I guarantee this will be the first and last time she plays drums with me.

Noooo, NOOOOOOOOO!! Not my Rock Band drums! Anything but THAT!!!

Alas, it is true. Last night while pounding out the new Boston tracks on Hard, I noticed a weird shadow on my yellow drum pad. That shadow was actually the rubber cover folding in slightly because the underlying plastic of the head had cracked from one side to the other.

It still responds, but I’m understandably reluctant to pound upon it further. I’ve taken a two step approach to fixing the situation: filed an RMA with EA; ordered a new set of drums from WalMart.com (they have them for $54). At worst, EA will refuse to replace the drums and I’ll just play on my newly purchased ones. At best, EA will replace the drums and I’ll have two drum kits for drum duels.

Now all I need are friends for the duels.

I held off purchasing the PS3 for a long time because it didn’t have a library that appealed to me. Two things changed my mind and compelled me to jump in: HD-DVD went away; Remote Play promised to give my PSP new life. Since I wanted to start watching HD movies, the PS3 was the natural choice as a player, but I got some other benefits as well. Here’s how to maximize your use of the PS3 for stuff other than games.

1. Replace the hard drive - It’s commonly known by now that the PS3 hard drive is not quite as locked down as the 360 drives, which is interesting since the 360 drives are portable and the PS3 drive is inserted into the system. For just over $100, you can plug a 2.5″ 250GB SATA150 drive into the PS3, format it, and be up and running in mere minutes. Might as well do it right away to save you the minor hassle of backing up and restoring files (plug in USB HD, copy, put in new hard drive, copy back).

2. Get an external drive enclosure for the drive you took out of the PS3 - These can be had for $10-15 and will provide you with an external drive for extra data or PS3 backups.

3. Have a media server? Get TVersity - You can certainly use Windows Media Sharing, Media Center, et cetera to stream content to your PS3, but TVersity handles on the fly transcoding for a wide range of formats while being smart enough to not transcode natively PS3 supported formats and also allows streaming of pod/vodcasts. Want to catch up with the 1Up Show? Zero Punctuation? SModcast? Pull it up in the PS3’s XMB via TVersity and have at it. Pair up TVersity with uXM and uSirius to stream audio from XM and Sirius radio to your PS3. It works great, though you won’t get current song/artist info. Of course, TVersity isn’t the only option. There are lots of other DLNA compatible servers out there that will work just as well.

4. Take everything off screen - If you have a PSP, adding a PS3 to your life can be a rather liberating experience. Recent firmware revisions for both devices introduced Remote Play - essentially, remote desktop for the PS3. Any of your streamed media can be played wirelessly on the PSP through the PS3. The limitations are that you can’t play Blu-Ray discs or most games through Remote Play (PixelJunk Monsters and Lair both work), but you can play your stored or streamed audio/video and play PS1 games via RP, both downloaded and off the disc!

5. Use RP way remotely - Access to the PS3 XMB also means access to the Playstation Network Store. When new demos, trailers, and other content arrives, you can pull out your PSP from any spot with open wifi, connect to your PS3 at home, pull up the Store, and queue up all your downloads. Later on, you can log back in and do any installs of demos you might have grabbed so that you can get right to playing when you arrive home. The PS3 now has a form of wake-on-LAN so that it does not have to be left on to allow for this remote functionality.

6. Let your PSP control your PS3 jukebox - Later this month, PS3 firmware update 2.20 will add an “Audio Output Device” option for Remote Play, allowing you to specify that all audio should be played via the PS3 instead of being piped to the PSP. This will allow you to play all your music from your home theater speaker system without having to turn on your display (a major bonus for those of us on projectors who are sensitive to bulb life).

7. Install another OS, stream your games to it - Yep, if you want, you can go about installing Yellow Dog Linux and set up the PS3 to dual boot. Why would you want to do this? Geek factor, mostly, but once you have Linux up and running you can also install StreamMyGame to “play” your PC games on your PS3. I have not tried this yet, so I can’t speak to how well it actually works, but it’s an interesting idea. And yes, since you’re in Linux, you can use your mouse and keyboard as inputs.

That pretty much covers what I’m doing with my PS3 when I’m not playing games or watching Blu-Ray. The upside in my life is that I’m a lot more in contact with all of my media. The downside is that I haven’t finished a book in a month.

I’ve been digging through my book collection looking for tomes with which I can part for the good of a breast cancer fund raiser.  Goodbye Anne Rice collection.  I am not emo enough for you anymore.

In one box of largely technical books (CSS, HTML, Java, C++, Photoshop, HTTP), I spied my Quake 3 Arena Linux collectible tin box.  It occurred to me today that, at one point, I was all excited about the future of playing games on Linux.  I was even a Transgaming subscriber for a while.  But, of course, Linux gaming never really took off - Tux Racer was cute, but come on.

Why is this notable?  Only because of this thought: I once wanted a Linux box that ran games, but I now have a game box that runs Linux.

This is not to say that I’m actually going to install Linux on my PS3.  With as much as I’ve been using the Remote Play feature and its WOL capability, I’m afraid that the bootloader would require input to select the PS3 GameOS and not allow me to control it remotely with my PSP.  But I sure would like to be able to use Firefox instead of the PS3 browser.

It’s a real shame, too, since combining Yellow Dog Linux with StreamMyGame would allow me to play PC games from my PS3.  With StreamMyGame, the game executes on one PC and is streamed to another device - including a Linuxfied PS3.   I find it hard to believe this would be any good for a first person shooter, but if this gets me playing Battle for Middle-Earth on my projector, I’m all for it.

Aw hell, what do I have to lose really?  I can always reset the PS3 and reformat should I need to wipe out the Linux install.  Weekend project HO!