The Blog of Potatosheep

So, to fill in on what happened in my absence: Basically not much. My new game is up for bidding on FGL, and has yet to see much interest or any bids

Got back into Magic the Gathering, and am enjoying playing a far less luck based game than 40K. Going down to Anaconda to play in a tournament with a borrowed Superfriends deck, which should be pretty cool. Superfriends is definitely one of my favorite decks in the format right now, because it’s just hilarious to play, what with 12 planeswalker cards in the deck. Hopefully I’ll win something there, which is fairly likely with a deck like SF. Prize support goes to 8th place, I just hope there are some decent prizes towards the bottom.

Speaking of Magic, Drew and I split a case of M11, which was pretty fancy. Opening several thousand cards at once was awesome in itself, and we got some good stuff too. I got a primeval titan, baneslayer, playset of white leylines and 3 fauna shamans, plus misc stuff that was decent too.

Got the THQ complete pack while it was on sale for fifty bucks a while ago. Definitely a worthy purchase, what with DOW2 and COH in it, plus some random games that may or may not be cool.

Blargh. Not much else to talk about. I’ll update again if something happens or I remember I should update :/

Quick update, just to prove I still know this blog exists.

Just got back from Billings, where I met up with some people to do parkour. It was a good time, and there were ducks hiding in the bushes. One kid stole one of their gift cards. The duck’s gift card that is. Some pretty good parkour spots in billings. It was fun.

Engie update is supposed to come out soon. It’d be better be soon anyways. If valve time makes it take more than a week or two from now I’ll be pissed D:. Also, TF2 is now out for the Mac. Scary stuff. And they decided it would be a good idea to make the menu TERRIBLE so that the mac users who just got tf2 would know what they’re doing. Now it’s a menu designed for babies with buttons the size of a finger. It brings me much pain.

School’s out. No more Block. Ever. Ever again in my whole life. This year is my first year of school where I can truly say I am incredibly happy never to have to ever do anything involving it ever again in my life. Besides physics and art, which were great. Mr Gebert’s gone now, which sucks a lot. I really wanted physics 2 from him. But I got to see Star Truck, his/his brother’s star trek spoof. It was frickin’ awesome.

That’s all for now. I am now off to play some tf2 and wait for the engie update.

Been a long time since I updated, so I’ve got a fair amount to cover. First off, I got Bioshock 2. It’s really quite great. I don’t know what anyone who didn’t like it was talking about…it was basically the first game but with a different story, and some improvements in gameplay. It’s graphically exactly the same. Literally. But I don’t mind that, honestly. The gameplay is improved a lot by dual-wielding and such, and despite being fragile I still feel like a big daddy. As for the story, it’s not as good as the first one, but it’s good enough that it kept me interested throughout the game. Overall something I’d definitely recommend. 9/10 ish.

Also, I just got Just Cause 2. Frickin’ hilarious game. Haven’t finished it yet so I don’t want to give a final verdict on it, but from what I’ve played so far it seems like a lot of fun. No story worth paying attention to, but a lot of obscenely unrealistic and super fun mechanics, like parachuting and grappling hooking. A good time killer for sure.

Last on the gaming front is a hilarious TF2 exploit that came with the new update…there’s a console command that lets you build infinite sentries. Not quite as simple as that, but it’s basically what happens. Holy crap hilarious fun. Gonna be gone in less than a day probably, but it was good times.

New parkour video out:

Came out pretty well in my opinion. It’s about half Butte Jam 2010 clips and half U of M clips.

AP test for calc next wednesday. I think I’ll ok, because I’ve gotten 90s on mooost of the practice tests we’ve taken. Calc is kind of boring lately, but it also has no homework, so I guess it evens out. Past wednesday I get a study hall in that class the rest of the year, and no final :D. Good stuff. I’ll need the study hall to stay on top of everything else though, that’s for sure. I’ve got a 90.9 in english right now (lowest grade, which is ok I guess), so I’ll need to spend enough time to raise that grade before the final.

New steam UI. I like it a lot myself. There are still things that I think need improvement, and it’s a bit busy, but overall I think it’s an improvement. Steam for Mac is supposed to come out within a month or so, which’ll be great, because I know a few people with Macs that I want to play TF2 with.

I leave you with a couple of vids:

Hurrah! Freedom from tyranny, slavery and above all SCHOOL. For an entire week. Good stuff. I think I’ll spend it on a little experiment I’ve been trying to find time to run. Basically it’s just a super simple combat simulator I programmed in flash. Each team has 20 players and they fight and die etc. You can also change their accuracy, damage, health and range. So I’m collecting some results about how accuracy and such affect combat. Interesting results so far. I’ll publish what I find out on here in about a week, hopefully.

Went to Butte the other weekend to do parkour with the founder of MTPK and a few others. Overall a pretty kickass time. We got a lot of video, which I added to the newest video I’m working on. So far a great vid.

Got my sideflips down pretty much whenever and whereever. It’s grand. I’m working on flow right now, cause that’s something I need to work on a lot. And I wanna learn the cork. That move is crazy. But I need to learn other stuff before it.

Ryan Doyle, you are insane. If I can get one tenth as good as him in my lifetime I will feel accomplished. Haha.

Mismo Jam was tonight. Low as hell turnout, which made for a lot of gym time and no waiting in lines. Mismo probably hated it due to loss of profits, but I loved it.

Not much else to report. School sucks, but I can ignore it for a week, so I am semi-content.

Might try flying a permanent kite of the top of one of the surrounding mountains with a solar powered contraption of some sort soon. I dunno what I’d put on it though. Twas my friends idea, and we may be collaborating on it.

Bumblumplum

Friend of mine might be getting a Raven. The chassis that is. I’m scared, and eager to see it in action. That is all.

First off: Big news. Portal has been updated recently, with some crazy changes that hint at Portal 2. The main change is in the ending, which has now changed to this (spoiler warning):
Intriguing, eh? Also, all the radios in the game now play morse code when held in certain areas of the levels. This morse code translates to SSTV images, which have certain letters and numbers in them. The letters/numbers end up being an MD5 hash for a phone number, which was a number used for dial-up modems in washington. Eventually people discovered more images and such. You can check out the whole explanation of it here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1169027

Anyways, pretty crazy. I can’t wait to see what comes of it.

In other gaming news, I recently got Plants Vs Zombies. Frickin’ awesome game. Addictive as heck, and really really fun. I highly recommend it.

Dum de dum.

Here’s something I came accross that’s pretty cool:

Uses a ton of valve sound effects. The visual effects are pretty dang sweet though.

Finished with the second round of standardized tests. I actually like them because I can always finish early and have an hour or so to do homework. My family’s going out of town this weekend but I’m staying behind to celebrate a friend’s birthday and work on a paper for english. How I loath the amount of work we have in that class. It’s terrible. I can’t wait for next year.

Got chased by a bunch of drunk college kids last weekend. On the way back from safeway my friend decided it would be a good idea to yell at two carfuls of them. They proceeded to chase us through several blocks of houses, but we managed to remain uninjured thankfully. That same night we watched Dawn of the Dead. We had planned to get the awesome 2004 remake that’s supposed to be really good, but the person who picked it up from Hastings got the wrong one, and we ended up watching 3 hours of people messing around in a mall. Not exactly exciting. Hopefully this weekend we’re watching the good version.

I’m excited for Kick Ass to come out, speaking of movies. It looks like it’ll be amazing.

I don’t really want to write anymore right now, so here’s a couple of videos.

Bleh. We have standardized testing 2 periods a day 3 days a week for the next 3 weeks. Not gonna be fun to do. Those things are a waste of time and energy in my opinion. However, I do get to mist the english/history block that has so plagued me this year for the next 3 days. That is good. What is not good is that the teachers decided that, because there’s no class on those days, we should have to do work that we would normally do in class as homework. Thus, I have 4 homework assignments between those two that are all due friday.

D:

On the bright side of school we’re doing circuits in physics, something I’ve wanted to learn for a while. And our teacher figured out an awesome relativity paradox. I’ll see if I can find it online somewhere for the next post. I’m too lazy to explain it or his solution just now.

And speaking of physics:

Click to make it larger. It’s what I’ve worked out to be the sum of all the forces of all the particles in a planet of radius r that is distance d from another particle. Unfortunately I have no idea how to solve it…The reason I want to is so that I can test it against Newtons theory of gravitation. You never know.

But onto other things.

New Red Mongoose album! Wootwoot! Check it out here: http://redmongoose.newgrounds.com/news/post/438170. It’s actually quite good. His albums seem to get steadily better throughout the years. I now have eight of them.

Hurrah.

Last bit of news: I got to play a Korean kid at starcraft. Before anyone says I’m stereotyping Koreans, realize that this Starcraft a huge part of their culture:

Just check out the crowd at 2:28 if you don’t believe me.

So yeah, I got to play a guy from there. It was fun. He beat me of course, but it was close. A good game. And it got me back into the starcraft campaign, which I am now enjoying immensely.

Tis good stuff.

Zazzle is selling shoes now. Crazy, custom designed shoes. I don’t know if I like it yet. Time shall tell.

Well, not much has been going on lately. I was sick last week, so I’ve been scrambling to make up all my school assignments on time, which hasn’t been fun. Thankfully I’m pretty much all caught up though. English is no longer insanely hard, just fairly challenging now. The actual material hasn’t gotten easier, but either she’s grading more leniently or I’ve gotten better at writing. Either way I don’t have to worry about that so much anymore, which gives me more time to focus of stuff that I’m more interested in.

One of those things I can now focus on is art. This semester I’m taking drawing, having finished printmaking class. I’ll try to scan in my prints and upload them sometime, but I can’t guarantee anything. Right now I’ve got the drawing I did for the latest drawing class sketchbook:

We had to draw a “natural object”, so I chose an old shell that was sitting around the house. I think it came out pretty well.

Blah blah blah bleh

Going to hunt down an old gameboy color, or classic, and a copy of tetris/mario sometime in the next week or two hopefully. I found a gameboy color at a local store that specializes in retro games, but I’m going to look around to see if there’s one anywhere else for cheaper. We shall see. It’s been way too long since I played mario or tetris in their original format. Those were the days…

Nothing else to report today I don’t think. Duncan is working on a new game, which is looking like it’ll be done sometime in the relatively near future. Look forward to it.

Enjoy this as well…basically how most religions work on some level.

Finals are over, thankfully. I managed to pull off As in all my classes, like the slave to the system I am. Haha. 3/8 of the way through highschool…woo.

In more interesting news, I’ve been attempting to get a TF2 server up and running. I managed to get it to work over virtual LAN, aka Hamachi, but I can’t get it to work over the internet. I think my router is messed up, even though I have the port forwards set up correctly. Good thing is I know how to at least now, and I got one of my friends to convert his laptop to a server. So now we’ve got a server if we feel like playing with our little group of TF2 players. Woot. I’ve been trying to get a TF2 server online for a long, long time.

Speaking of things that I’ve been trying to get working for a while…

I found a copy of Gears of War for the PC today! Finally! After about two years of looking for that thing on and off, I finally managed to snag a copy at hastings. And boy is it enjoyable. I never had a chance to play through this icon of the shooter genre, or play it much at all, so now that I finally have it it’s like discovering something totally new. It’s been way too long since I actually found a new game that I haven’t played that’s good. Waaaay too long. Just in time for Winter-een-mas too. Hoo rah.

Bumbee dum…

Nothing else really. I’ve discovered that grooveshark is awesome, now that Imeem has been devoured by the horrible oozing pile of puss that is myspace.

I leave you with god warrior…the scariest person you will ever lay eyes upon:

Well, since I last posted I’ve almost beaten Red Faction Guerrilla. It was an ok game, but not too great. I liked the physics and combat, but to say the story was lacking is an understatement. Yet another victim of creating a gimmick (in this case the physics engine) and ignoring everything that doesn’t involve the gimmick. But it was entertaining.

Nothing much to report. Finals are soon. I think I’ll do alright on them, as I’ve got fairly solid As in all my classes. History and English are the ones I’m mostly worried about. And calculus. We shall see how it goes. In other school related news, school was actually delayed the other day! Apparently icy roads are more dangerous than -60 degree temperatures, as they didn’t close because of that last year, but hey, I’m not complaining. We ended up having 33 minute periods the other day for it. Awesome stuff.

Hopefully more news to come soon, maybe involving the new game. Maybe.