PixlBit

Your beloved monarch returns from a brutal conqest, to share more pictures of pups in costumes! Haloween season is almost in full effect. The leaves are falling, the mountains and forests here in Colorado are blazing with color, and the harvests have come. In monarchy-school nobody ever tells you how much work it is harvesting the souls of dissidents and burning their crops to ash. Trust me, it's tough work. I would've broken a sweat if my knights weren't doing all the beheadings.

Anyways, the time for statecraft is well overdue and I must fulfill my duties to the fine people here.

Happy Birthday Pixlbit!

It's been five years since the site launched and it's better than ever! I followed Julian Titus and Jesse Miller here back when they started writing and podcasting for the site, which makes this my third year skulking around Pixlbit I suppose. Here's to another 5 years of tyranny kingdom-wide peace, brought to you by yours truly, the one and only M-117.

What I've been playing

Fallout New Vegas - I completed the Old World Blues DLC and I'm a few hours into the Dead Money DLC now. OWB was really tough, even for my high level character. Old World Blues is full of robots that are highly resistant to most damage types. I had the Robot Expert Perk (+25% damage to robots) and I was still having a lot of trouble. The robo-scorpions are really fast, they use powerful lasers, and they tend to hunt you in packs. The robot-skeleton people had powerful guns that degraded my light armor to the breaking point in just a couple firefights. Overall it was challenging and required me to use a lot of strategies I don't normally have to resort to.

The story was kind of funny. It's a super joke-heavy DLC with tons of sexual innuendo and silly characters. By the end of it I was glad to get out of the Big MT before all their jokes starting driving me crazy, but the writing definitely has some entertaining moments.

Undead Nightmare - I started playing this expansion for Red Dead Redemption for the first time, and it's pretty fantastic, when things aren't buggy. I've been having some issues every time I play where I come into a town to liberate it from zombies but all of the zombies have no heads or arms, basically just the clothing textures remain. The scripting is also broken so I can't complete the liberations. Luckily it all usually fixes itself when I reload my save, but the same bug keeps happening when I come into any new town. It's been difficult to get immersed in Undead Nightmare since I'm always waiting for the next bug.

Borderlands 2 GOTY - I'm playing the Siren class. I did several quests and leveled up a few times. I'm in some cave right now with a bunch of high level corrosive monsters and Super Badass level bugs that are tearing me apart. I've died enough times to have lost at least 20-some thousand dollars (you get charged loot every time you die). This cave sucks, it's like the Blighttown of the Borderlands 2 world.

What I've been listening to

 

The old Amorphis album, Tales From The Thousand Lakes, is my favorite thing in the world this past month. The whole album is pretty much a melodic doom metal masterpiece but these two songs are some of my favorites.

The first song, To Father's Cabin, starts out with a riff slightly similar to Metallica's Orion, but it quickly transforms into doomy prog-rock with spacey-vocals, sweet keyboards ala The Doors, and ends with a great straight forward riff.

The beginning of the second song, Magic & Mayhem, is beautiful, doomy, and has great keyboards. Then a couple minutes into it a super heavy Deep Purple meets Black Sabbath style riff takes over. It's sexy, thick, crunchy, and dark. The riffs in Magic & Mayhem make it feel like sludge is pouring through your veins and somebody lights it all on fire. I learned to play the whole album on guitar earlier in the month. It was weird trying to figure it out because it seems like they tune the guitars to D standard but then go a little further down (or is it up?) so that all the strings are flat I guess (or is it sharp? I wouldn't know, I don't study music I just play it). It sounds cool though and I have strings that can make that tuning sound okay so it works out I suppose.

School

Things have been going alright. Midterms are coming up and I have straight A's so far. I only have three classes this semester but they're all worth more credits so they still end up eating away most of my time, both weekdays & weekends. As you can tell from my list of games I played, I got around to a grand total of three games over the past month, and only accomplished a little bit in each.

College Algebra is demanding the most time but it's actually pretty fun. Our math book is full of word problems containing Ice Road Trucker references and other weird Western things that let you know Americans were on the authorial team. I did a problem a few weeks ago where I had to create an equation comparing the weights of two buckets of chicken, and then use quadratics to find the percentage of white meat in each bucket, or something along those lines. It was a classy time.

The only thing I've struggled with comparatively is working with the conic sections and all the terminology. I'm still not exactly sure how to find the directrix and focus of a parabola. In Astronomy we are doing math in every class. We deal with algebra and geometry in every piece of Astronomy homework, and for some reason it's much simpler to absorb conic material in that context than it is in my actual math class.

Programming class has been the easiest so far, but it still has its challenges. This week I finished an assignment that introduced us to if/else statements in DarkBASIC via a simple program where you ask for a user's input (the user types a number, 1-4), and in turn they receive a message on-screen, like "Your color is Red!", placed randomly within a range of X and Y coordinates I set.

The first three options account for red, blue, and green, and each message had to have its text be colored appropriately. Option 4 gives the user the ability to exit the program, and any integer that wasn't 1-4 gave the user a, "Not a valid selection" message. It's the simplest of if/else programs but I spent all of Monday's class period staring at the screen not sure how to start. I didn't end up coding at all.

When the next class day came around my friend Lauren reminded me that the user's input needed to be stored as a num variable, and the messages defined as strings. Once I saw her first two lines of code the rest made sense and my brain felt less foggy. Next week I'm doing a similar if/else user input project but instead of the color coded messages I have to show a color coded ellipse, triangle, and square for those first three options.

Last night, we went stargazing in Astronomy class! I've only ever used a telescope once before, to see Jupiter. Our professor got the Northern Colorado Astronomy Society to bring out some of their hot telescopes and host a stargazing night for our class. There was a variety of refracting and reflecting telescopes, and they were all proper expensive amateur astronomer scopes. One guy was an engineer that personally built his own and lasered the mirrors I think.

Anyways, the evening of stargazing was incredible. To say my mind was fucking blown would be an understatement. We saw dozens and dozens of objects last night. Open clusters, globular clusters, nebulas, planets, moons, double-star systems, even double-double star systems, and three different galaxies. They also helped us identify some of the constellations in our local sky.

I not only saw Saturn, but we could clearly see the rings, and even Titan. I never thought it would be so bright and clear. The double-double star system was mind boggling, that was the coolest thing I saw all night. Two stars relatively close to one another orbiting some center of gravity between them, and another separate pairing of stars doing the same thing, and both pairings each orbiting another center of gravity between the pairs.

All the game industry drama and stress of everyday life just melted away when I was looking through those telescopes. I highly recommend it. Go look up a local amateur astronomy club in your area, get in touch with them and ask if you can hang out with them when they take their telescopes for a star party. It's so worth it.

What's on the horizon for your monarch?

Well, Alien Isolation comes out in less than two weeks, and if you can't tell from my avatar I'm super excited for it. That's my most anticipated game of the year, so I might go buy that?

October is practically here, so by the time I do my next update I will officially be doing my month-long celebration of Halloween season! I have FEAR 3, Resident Evil 6 & Revelations, Undead Nightmare, and Saturn 9 ready for me to play. Slender: The Arrival just came out on consoles for $10 and I'm definitely going to buy that as long as I can afford Alien Isolation first. I don't have much money so I'll have to sell a textbook from the summer semester in order to get Alien. Maybe I'll have a few dollars left over to get Slender: The Arrival also!

Look forward to the start of horror month, and to more pictures of pups in costumes. Also, get outside and look at the stars!