Check In
Well, not much to say at the moment. It's been quiet lately, but I think that is the new normal for me. However, in my newfound solitary time, I've been busy with some small projects to keep my mind sharp and to pass the time. I started up Resident Evil 4, a classic I haven't played in years. It turns out that, while I don't think I'm as adept at it as I was in my younger years, I'm still smarter than the AI, thankfully.
However, I must add that this title fails the Bechdel test miserably with it's less than stellar portrayal of it's women characters. Ashley is depicted as weak and dependant upon Leon, unable to help in any meaningful way. When first meeting Luis, he points out immediately Ashley's figure as the game zooms in on her chest. Japanese culture has long had problems with it's portrayal of women, but unlike other Resident Evil titles with strong female leads such as Jill, Claire, or Sheva, 4 has no positive representation whatsoever. I know the mechanic is to have a dependant to ratchet up the tension of the survival horror aspects, but most everyone I know who has played this game has agreed that there is nothing memorable about Ashley besides her annoyance. The rosey tint of teenage memories and the fun of the core gameplay keep me going in this otherwise great game. Carefully managing your supplies while you struggle to kill zombies is still a blast, but it definitely gets minus points for it's blatant sexism.
Another game I've been playing is (the infamous) Halo Online. I've managed to write a PortableApps wrapper for it which cleans things up a bit. Needless to say, it's a pretty incredible project. I'll try to post a private link to it later so anyone who wants to try it out, and join me online, can do so.
I've been having to express myself in different ways while going through therapy. On one assignment, I was to talk about something I'm thankful for, albeit in a creative way. I wrote a silly little script to demonstrate an ascii animation of some hot coffee. I don't know why I never thought to store the text blocks in an array and loop through it, but it's giving me some ideas about other graphical tools that could be implemented. Good 'ol PowerShell.
I've split off some site content to keep things nice and tidyand I've also been messing with folder structures and whatnot to keep everything sane. There can be a lot to go through!
I guess there's not much else to say at the moment. Until next time!
Note to self: look up spell checkers for vim.