One Long Year

Well, it's been a long year. Ever since my first post I've loved blogging. I had my doubts before, but they've all been erased.
Today marks the one year anniversary of The Student's Opinion. It' s been a long road, and those who have been following from the start (and kind enough to comment), you've witnessed my wit and humour, my life evolving as I got a job, had family troubles, sparked chatroom and forum-wide conflicts, and made profound statements that should be chronicled in some sort of large bound book called "The Annals of Wisdom".
With this news, I am also sad to announce that this will be the last post (despite what I said before) for The Student's Opinion. It's been a long year, it's been a good year. Now that I feel more confident about blogging, I've decided to move full time to my other blog on Vox, 127.0.0.1, which I was previously planning to only post technical stories on.
I'm glad that you (the reader) could enjoy my writing, and as I said, I love blogging, so I'll continue to update as regular as I have been on Vox, so I hope you'll continue to enjoy it.

Over the past week, I've collected a few memorable quotes from some of my favourite singers. These represent views that I share.

MC Lars - Generic Crunk Rap
This popular subgenre is brought to you by materialism.
We'd like to thank Bentley, Aliz© champagne, and Sean
Jean clothing. We'd like to thank the record industry for
Marketing hip-hop stereotypes to 12 year olds and a pop
Culture that unquestioningly consumes vapid,
Superficial entertainment.

MC Lars - Hot Topic is not Punk Rock
Hot Topic is a contrived identification with youth subcultures to manufacture an anti-authoritarian identity and make millions.

Less than Jake - Rest of my life
If you won't forgive me
The rest of my life
Let me apologize while I'm still alive
I know it's hard to face all of my past mistakes
It's gonna kill me for the rest of my life...

Less Than Jake - Overrated (Everything is)
Everybody's so afraid to be different
Please excuse me now if I don't get it

I think sex is overrated
So is always getting wasted
Designer drugs and dead end jobs
And classic rock is so outdated
I'm so sick of therapy
And all the things it's done to me
How can I be satisfied?
When everything is overrated

NOFX - The Irrationality of rationality
The guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to.

Alden Nowland
“The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise”

Pennywise - Fuck Authority
Fuck Authority

Dropkick Murphys - Barroom Hero
Face down in the gutter won't admit defeat though his clothes are soiled and black

Dropkick Murphys - Warrior's Code
You're the fighter you've got the fire
The spirit of a warrior, the champion's heart
You fight for your life because the fighter never quits
You make the most of the hand you're dealt
Because the quitter never wins

Dropkick Murphys - Your Spirit's Alive
We are the ones who will never be broken
We are the ones who survive
This is the sound that brings us together
You are the one by our side

And through it all, and through it all, the spirit's alive
And through it all, your spirit's alive

Dropkick Murphys - Last Letter Home
If I lead will you follow?
Will you follow if I lead?

Depending on people sucks, but we need friends and people to depend on. Being wholly independent for the reason of being not dependent on someone else is as stupid as not loving someone for fear of getting hurt.

The ability to forgive a wise man makes.

Everything we say is a puzzle



Have a good holidays, Merry Christmas.
For the very, very last time on Blogger;
Adios.

~ride the rails of unreality

//POST

Because Blogger has become sluggish and annoying to use in comparison to Vox, I'm moving full time to that.
To signify this move, I've posted the promised large post to this address: http://jayc.vox.com

For the last time ever, signing out
- Jacque

~adios blogger

Oooh, new blogger.

I know I haven't been updating regularly, and I apologise, but I PROMISE a new post at the end of the week. I'm gonna make it as big as I can, so I'm walking around with a notepad these days storing all my ideas to put in. Begin the salivation...


New blogger? Glad I didn't have to pay for this new update.

The MySpace quest

After reading about the Wired article, where one of their crafty crew wrote a Perl-based script to parse criteria and weed out potential pedophiles on MySpace (leading to the arrest of one man), I thought I'd try and find out just how easy it is to get friends on MySpace while pretending to be somebody I'm not.

So here it goes.
The mission: Pose as a 15 year old girl on MySpace.
Aim: To get 100 friends within 7 days
Hypothesis: MySpace users are horny as hell, so I won't have a problem pulling this off

Details
Name: Jamie Franklin
MySpace profile: http://www.myspace.com/jamie_franklin
Email address: jamie_franksta1@hotmail.com

Let's see how it goes folks. I'll be posting updates on the numbers here.
The game begins now: 16:32 Monday 23/10/2006

Shark

Holy law-system batman.
Shark is a great series. Only been 3 episodes, but it's got me hooked.


http://www.tv.com/shark/show/58080/summary.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_(TV_series)

If you don't live in America, or you otherwise don't have a network channel that doesn't show Shark, it's available using torrents. What better time to learn about BitTorrent than now?

Quick thought

I don't hate Microsoft, I'm just frequently disappointed by them to the point of contempt.

The mythical 40-hour gamer

http://wired.com/news/columns/0,71836-0.html?tw=wn_index_26

An interesting article which poses the question "Can developers ever develop a game worthy of all ranges of the gamer".
The simple answer is no.

In the article, Clive Thompson talks about how some gamers (non-surprisingly aged 6-17) can breeze through a game in one session, while other gamers take up to a month to finish it. Why? A number of reasons.
Time availability is one. Most kids in school have more free time and less responsibilities than an adult with a career and a family.
Another is experience (ie: skill) with games. The aforementioned adult gamers may not be as skilled at games like Halo as a 15 year old (most teens seem to have inherent gaming skills programmed into them now, making them more naturally capable than a 30 year old).
Also, reflexes. Tell a 56 year old to throw a ball, and then run and catch it, and tell a 17 year old to do the same. Based on a stereotypical 56 and 17 year old, the younger person will have better reflexes, and have a better reaction time to the ball. Reflexes play a large part in games these days, with micro-management being vital for victory.

So these factors combine to create a demographic. Which demographic do game developers aim their games at? Well, gamers.
However the problem is - now more than ever - is that the variety between gamers is increasingly large. You could have a 30 year old with reflexes of a trained sniper, and a 17 year old with the reflexes of a man with Alzheimers and Arthritis. Or you could have a stereotypically tactful and alert 17 year old and a distracted 30 year old with a family and a mountain of deadlines on his desk.

How does the industry overcome these problems? Really they can't, however there is somewhat of a solution (although I think it's a horrid idea).
Offer two or more game difficulty modes. The easiest one would be a percentage of time shorter than the hardest one (If the hardest game was 40 hours, the easiest could be 15% less or so). Also, in the easiest mode, the NPC difficulty would be significantly less. If it's an RPG, quests would take one (or more) fewer steps to complete.
Blizzard has somewhat put in a system like this (although it's ricockulously done, and very inefficient) with World of Warcraft. They claim that there is plenty of content for more casual gamers (which I must be missing, because I can't think of any), but a better reflection of the above method is their variety of realm-types. If a user has less time available to play WoW, they can roll on a Role-playing server, where they can play the game without the worry of being set back by getting ganked by the opposite faction.

So unfortunate as it is, if you don't have the seemingly unlimited time of younger generations, prepare to take significantly longer to complete games.
Take solace in the fact that at least you can get more out of the multiplayer modes. Grab and Xbox, a copy of Halo, and some friends, and take a night out to link boxes and match up against each other. Trust me, from experience, it's hell fun.


WARNING: If you roll on an RP server on WoW, prepare to be mocked by any friends you have that play the game. Rightly so, carebear.