[caption id=“attachment_4589” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Walking Around in Mass Effect”] [/caption]

I recently bought Mass Effect in a Steam sale that knocked the price of Bioware’s RPG to $5. Thanks yet again to the guys at the Giant Bombcast (seriously, this is the second or third I’ve bought because of them and fourth or fifth from podcast recommendations), I’d wanted to play the game, but was waiting for a sale price since I have tons of other games I haven’t even started yet. Having finished Final Fantasy X and the single player mode of Portal 2, I started on Mass Effect.

Here are some desktop background calendars for June 2011!  Just click on the image and then set it as your background.

[caption id=“attachment_4585” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“June 2011 - 1024x768 for square monitors”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_4586” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“June 2011 - 1680x1050 for widescreen monitors”] [/caption]

Just used preupgrade to go from Fedora 14 to 15.  The entire process took about 3 hours.  That’s not too shabby!  In the old days of disc upgrades it had to go for days.  Yum upgrade often had to work overnight.  This one was much faster!  After the upgrade, I had to turn off my dropbox repo - apparently they don’t have a Fedora 15 repo turned on yet.  That allowed me to run yum distro-sync which bought me up to more or less at least what’s in Fedora 15.  Otherwise you’re just upgrading your packages, but you may be missing some new ones that were added in.  That’s what messed me up on the last upgrade.  I still have to work on the rpmnew thing to get my config files as close to what they should be as possible and I have to figure out if the orphan packages I have installed are programs I should get rid of to make sure they don’t potentially cause problems in the future.  KDE is working just as good as before.  GDM looks very different - very similar to Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell.  I’ll have to sneak in there later on in the week and try Gnome Shell out.  Sound works and everything else works.  (I only use an Ethernet connection so it’s not too complicated of a situation)

This Photojojo consists solely of 365 Project photos.

note: this game came out ten years ago, so I’m going to speak about spoilers freely

I finished Final Fantasy X a few weeks ago. I’d started playing it a long time ago, but the horrible voice acting grated on my nerves and I stopped playing. But, as I was making a list of games I owned but hadn’t completed, I decided to give Final Fantasy X another shot. And I ended up getting sucked into a story that I enjoyed for its uniqueness. Final Fantasy VI and VII are essentially the exact same story. In fact, the reason I have always been mystified about the love for Final Fantasy VII is that Final Fantasy VI did the same thing with a larger cast and more emotion. And Final Fantasy IX was essentially a love letter to Final Fantasy fans full of inside jokes and references. Final Fantasy X is, to borrow a phrase from The Giant Bombcast, a Japanese-ass game.

There was a time when I loved video games.  I subscribed to EGM and EGM2.  I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news.  I read IGN religiously.  The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation.  Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions.  Most of the video games of that time period were still very arcade-y in nature.  Or they were platformers like Mario or Tomb Raider that had the flimsiest excuse for a plot.  Yo, the princess got kidnapped again.  Run through a bunch of levels to get to her.  No exposition or reason for anything going on.  You just needed to complete these tasks to unlock the final boss fight.  Of course, games were starting to have cut scenes between levels to keep the narrative going.  And I remember the great FMV flame wars that caused.  Were you just working to unlock expository videos?  This was better than the Mario case, but there was still just a small correlation between what you were doing to get through the level and what was going on in the story.  The biggest exception was the movie tie-in game, but those tended to have gameplay elements that were full of suck.

It’s been a little over a year, so I wanted to make a new, updated list of the podcasts I’m currently listening to.  For shows I covered before, I’m just going to copy the description over, verbatim.

Science

The Naked Scientists - This has nothing to do with nudity.  It’s a British thing, like The Naked Chef.  This great British radio show covers science topics equivalent to what you’d read in Discover Magazine in the USA.  It’s informative while being entertaining, and I learn a lot every week.  (Approx 1 hour long)

Today’s Top 200 Photo features me again.

photo #118 is:

I wanted to play around with ideas of censorship and division of photos into frames.

Back to Cornell for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #199 is:

This is Cornell’s famous clock tower and the attached Uris Library. The clock tower is called McGraw Hall. I knew that at some point in my freshman year, but pretty much everyone just calls it the clock tower. It houses chimes that are played throughout the day. Every quarter hour it’s the usual chimes that every clock tower plays. About four times a day they play a few songs. At least once a day they’d play our Alma Mater. I loved hearing that when I walked through campus. It almost always brightened my spirits and made me feel happy to be a student there. Also every day (or nearly every day) they played the evening song at 1800. At one chimes concert I attended they cheekily said that it “resembles Oh Christmas Tree”. No, it IS “Oh Christmas Tree”. But they invented these songs back before copyright. For example, I learned that something like four other schools have the exact same Alma Mater song as ours. And I think that it, like The Star Spangled Banner, also was originally a drinking song. According to Wikipedia (caveats about the accuracy of Wikipedia apply), our Alma Mater, “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” is “set to the tune of “Annie Lisle”, a popular 1857 ballad by H. S. Thompson about a heroine dying of tuberculosis.” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Alma Mater “theft”:

Cardinalis cardinalis is featured in today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #120 is:

Danielle and I love cardinals. We love how bright red they are, their “masks”, their mohawks, and the way they hop around on the ground. The funniest thing about cardinals is that they try to act tough with the smaller birds, but the cardinals are the first birds to run/fly away whenever something scary happens. And they’re the last birds to come back to eat.