Final Entry
This will be my last entry on this site. However, this is not the end of Proper Gander, but a new beginning. You see, I’ve moved to a new domain: http://www.matthewgraybosch.us.
There should be more games like Demon’s Souls
Imagine yourself approaching a ruined castle on a lonely island. The wind howls. Waves crash. Great beasts that resemble manta rays soar in the distance. You advance with care, peering behind your shield with your sword at the ready. A pile of bones begins to glow, and assembles itself into a huge skeleton bearing a curved sword that strong men would have trouble swinging with both hands.
The skeletal warrior begins tumbling towards you. When it gets close enough, it leaps out of its roll and swings its sword at you. The blade crashes against your shield and breaks your guard. Before you can recover and defend yourself, the skeleton strikes a killing blow. This is Demon’s Souls.
Sounds tough, doesn’t it? It is. And it gets worse. Many videogames put you in the shoes of an near-unstoppable badass like Link, Simon Belmont, Samus Aran, or Squall Leonhart. Developed by From Software for the PS3 and published in the US by Atlus, Demon’s Souls is different.
In Demon’s Souls, you are a single mortal for whom even death is not a release. If you think you’re invincible, or even that you can take just one hit, the game will prove you wrong — over and over again.
Every enemy has its own pattern, which you must learn to exploit if you want to get past it. Even the weakest enemies can kill your character if you’re unprepared or inattentive. Demon’s Souls does not pity the fools who rush into a room and let themselves get surrounded. Nor does the game coddle players who neglect their defense in their rush to kill the enemy
And what are your defenses? You have a shield. You can roll if you’re not too heavily armored. And if you let your stamina run out, even that won’t help you. Your best defense is your own intelligence and memory.
You see, most games start out easy and gradually become more difficult. Demon’s Souls is different. It starts out hard. You die at the end of the tutorial. If you’re really good, you can get in a couple of hits on the demon that kills you first, but you will die.
It gets easier, because you get better at the game. You learn how to move and defend yourself. You get to know the enemies, and learn how to keep them from kicking your ass. You find better equipment and learn to use it to your advantage. You adapt to the game instead of the game trying to adapt and cater to you.
My wife doesn’t like the game; the slow pace and unforgiving gameplay doesn’t appeal to her. But that’s all right. I can’t get enough of it, especially now that I’ve gotten to a point where I can really start developing my character. I enjoy the challenge. I enjoy the realistic combat, as Demon’s Souls is probably the closest thing one can find to a fencing simulator. If you’re using a rapier and buckler, and can get the timing right, you can even parry an enemy’s attack with your buckler to knock the enemy off-guard, and kill him in a single blow with a riposte.
Try it. You might like it. Just remember to check the wiki, be patient, and have fun. When you get good at it, you’ll feel like a bad motherfucker even when you lose a fight.
New Prologue for Starbreaker
If I’m going to start blogging again, I should put up something interesting. And since I’ve started writing again, I figured I’d post the first bit of writing that I’ve finished in over six months. It’s a new opening to my novel, Starbreaker. Everything that will happen in the book will happen as a consequence of this event.
Imaginos took a step backward. He had selected every element in the scene before him to enrage one man: the woman lying on the floor, the strands of his own hair beside her and on the pillows in the bedroom, and the manner of her impending death. From another angle, he saw a set of dominos waiting to fall into place. A single gesture would set everything in motion.
He felt a hand caress his shoulder, and turned to face a pale, amber-eyed woman. Her hair shimmered as black in the moonlight as the evening gown she wore. As he took her hand from his shoulder, she asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“It’s too late for such questions now.”
Ashtoreth shook her head. “Not at all. Your victim is still alive. You could spirit her away from here, remove all evidence of your presence, and find another way to ensure the destruction of the Power beneath the ice. You could endow her with a mind and let her have a life.”
He considered her words. They were words he had spoken to himself often in the past month, after learning that his time was more limited than he had realized. Though the body on the floor did not contain a mind, her existence still represented a significant investment of time and money. It would be a shame to destroy her.
“Destroying the Insof is no longer enough,” said Imaginos, referring to the Power by the name it gave its own kind, “That will not be enough to set the devas or humanity free.”
“You could still reason with M—”
“No names. Not where humans can hear us.”
“We still have time to overcome his skepticism and persuade him to aid our cause.”
“Even if you persuaded him, destroying the Power beneath the ice would not solve the entire problem. We will do this my way, and I will pay the price.”
He withdrew a handheld from an inner pocket of his jacket and used it to trigger a routine that he had preprogrammed into the body lying on the floor. The woman began to convulse as the nanoengineered cells of her body kicked into overdrive and began to cook her from the inside out. After a minute, all that could be recognized of her was her hair.
He shook his head as the scrubbers built into the flat’s ventilation system cleaned the smell and the smoke from their air. “We are finished here.”
Ashtoreth nodded, and disappeared from sight. He regretted not being able to do the same, but one final bit of business required his attention. Another woman stood in the foyer of the flat. Had disgust not twisted her features, they would have revealed her as a reflection of the woman that Imaginos had just destroyed in order to set his gambit in motion.
The woman pulled away as his fingers brushed her temple, but the brief contact was sufficient for him to use an energistic pattern to wipe her short-term memory and put her to sleep. As he caught her and drew her into his arms, he whispered in her ear: “I told you not to look.”
Ye gods! What happened to the last seven months?
Oh, wait. I know what happened. I completely forgot that I had a blog, and that I found it amusing to post on it. I suppose I should pick it up again. Then again, I should also get back to work on Starbreaker; I haven’t done much with that lately either.
Adventures in Apartment Hunting
Now that I’ve got a job, it’s time to get an apartment. I hadn’t thought that finding one would be as much of a pain in the ass as finding a job had been, but it’s still in the running.
I did find a place about 20-30 minutes from work. It’s a two-bedroom apartment with an enclosed front porch, combined kitchen/dining room, laundry room with washer/dryer hookup, one and a half crappers and some storage on the second floor.
The rent is $700/month, which is fifty bucks more than I was paying for a one bedroom/one crapper apartment in Waterbury, CT. It’s right off a main road, so getting to work is straightforward.
Catherine and I are going to check the place out tomorrow. I hope it’s right for us; I want my own place.
Renaissance 2009
I came home from work early yesterday afternoon to find that my wife and I were going to go to Harrisburg, PA with my parents to see Renaissance. Of course, it was only Annie Haslam and Michael Dunford with some other musicians, but they’re still worth seeing. They played plenty of classics, including “Prologue”, “Carpet of the Sun”, “Northern Lights”, “Black Flame”, “Running Hard”, “Ocean Gypsy” and “Mother Russia” — and saved “Ashes are Burning” for their encore.
My father had turned my on to Renaissance as a kid; he was always a big fan, and would play their albums whenever he had time to sit back and crank up the stereo. He also had a crush on Annie Haslam, to my mother’s chagrin. Unfortunately, the band fell apart after 1983, so I never got to see them as a kid.
As I got older, of course, I made a point of getting my own copies of Renaissance’s albums, but my collection is not yet complete. So much rock, so little money. I turned my wife onto the band early in our courtship; one of the first gifts I gave her was a copy of their Tales of 1001 Nights compilation.
Renaissance even has had an influence on my writing: I came up with the idea of Crowley’s Thoth by wondering what Renaissance would sound like if they did heavy metal, and Naomi Bradleigh owes a bit to how I imagined Annie Haslam on stage back in the 1970s.
So, being able to see Renaissance perform live means a hell of a lot to me. Thanks, Dad.
Here are some videos of Renaissance:
I’m goin’ to Zombieland!
Catherine and I just got back from seeing the new Woody Harrelson movie, Zombieland. It’s funny, it’s violent, and even though it doesn’t use Romero zombies, it’s got the most plausible explanation for the zombie apocalypse’s cause I’ve seen yet: mad cow disease mutated into mad human disease.
Go see it. Now. And if you don’t trust me, Ebert gave the movie three stars.
Back in the Saddle Again
Here I am, blogging on my lunch break on my second day working for Conduit IT. I’ve already impressed the boss to a small extent, and have gotten to work with some interesting tech. I’m working on extracting data in XML format from a client’s parts catalog files (which were done in QuarkXPress 7), so that I can use XSLT to massage the data and standardize it so it can be imported into a RDBMS.
I’m not starting at as high a pay rate as I had hoped for, but it’ll do for now since I haven’t paid my dues yet. To be fair, the boss was receptive when I made my case for a higher starting rate, but she doesn’t have the authority to sweeten the deal. That has to come from the owner of the company. At least I’ve gotten more than a foot in the door, the cost of living in Pennsylvania is supposed to be lower than that of Connecticut, and the work has been interesting thus far.
A new twist on the Nigerian Scam?
The fun-loving, enterprising criminals of Nigeria appear to have come up with a new scam. This one is aimed at people desperately seeking work, but promises to be a new way for somebody half a world away to “chop your dollar”. If you get an email that reads like the following, don’t believe a word of it. Instead, report it to your ISP as spam and a phishing attempt.
Dear M—— G——–,We would like to tell you about a newly opened vacancy of Transfer Manager at our Company for US citizens. We are large firm registered in Finland, Stockholm. We are engaged in the business of buying, selling and exchanging of various Internet currencies. In list below you will find job description and general requirements for the vacancy. If you find these compatible with your temper and personality, and consider that you meet our requirements, we would be pleased to offer you a new career, competitive compensation and opportunity to work at home.
Job description: Position of Transfer Manager requires part-time work from the candidate. The job consists in receipt of funds from our US-based customers. Our customers make transfer with payments directly on the bank account of our Transfer Manager. These funds should be retransferred to our Company via Instant Money Transfer Systems or Wire Transfer (Western Union, Money Gram and etc.). You will be provided with detailed information for each transaction. All the fees and relevant side payments are paid by our company.
Our best candidate should:
- be a responsible, honest and punctual individual
- be US citizen or US permanent resident of full age
- have basic knowledge of PC
Our company offers you following opportunities:
- High salary and rewards
- Lawful tax-free activity
- Availability to work at home with a flexible working schedule
- Hospitable and professional team
To get additional information and file an application please visit our site and register. Our managers will contact you promptly and provide you with all the information you might need.
With regards,
HR manager
Figure 3 Use of cashless payment instruments within the EU-25, based on total number of with an integrated online communication function). It does not require the use of specific, protected hardware for 68 See for instance table on �National rules related to the right to provide payment services�, in European Commission, identity of the originator accompanying the transfer. The aim is to assist authorities in combating services. Payments initiated through mobile phones etc. are called mobile payments. They are a sub-group of have a fundamental impact on their future market structure (e.g. on competition and cooperation coordination of e-payments in the market, and to disseminate structural insights and theory, and refers to a business strategy based on a combination of cooperation and competition, derived from an direct debit transactions in euro both cross-border and national.� European Payments Council, Communication on The main traditional payment instruments in the European Union currently being used or further
I knew there was a reason I said something about “chop your dollar”. There’s actually a song by a dude named Osuofia called “I Chop Your Dollar”. Here’s the video:
