Gremlins.

[prog]

I am making a new Jmac's Arcade but I officially declare its production as bedeviled, which is to say that progress is slowed due to interference from imps. Gremlins! I have no other explanation.

* The music I want to use is from a local band whose email bounces. I got an alternate address through a mutual contact, but he's not certain that they're still together.

* I sunk hours into getting my screen-capture software to work with the game I'm recording. It was failing only with this one game running in MAME, and not any other title! Argh! I finally found a configuration that worked.

* My Mac's display is wacky, but only for my account. I'm investigating the cause, but it's hiding quite well. While it's happening, Final Cut looks like crap (though its output quality is unaffected) and the capture software is hard to use, since my cursor vanishes while it's running.

* My microwave blew a fuse halfway through rendering a long video clip. But at least it had the sense to do so after making my mac-n-cheese warm so at least I had that.

Ugh. Taking hours and hours longer than it should. It will be OK at the end, though.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

i don't want to know what you were doing with your microwave :)

[xach.livejournal.com]

Do you feel weird about using * for bullets in 2007?

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

It's LJ's fault for not supporting wiki-syntax. ~~~~

[prog.livejournal.com]

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[xach.livejournal.com]

I can't tell if that means yes or no.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

The curious thing, I say after a week spent threading various technological needles, is that these things are always just overcomeable. Nothing is ever easy. Nothing is ever outright impossible (because then you could justifiably quit, which would be easy.) The universe is like an anti-Einstein: everything should be as hard as possible, but no harder.

I'd like to believe there's some economic rationality argument for why this should be so, something to do with externalities coming home to roost, but the randomness of events that allows things to be overcome is difficult to square with that. The drivers for a client's hardware wouldn't install properly on my XP box, but I happen to have a Win2k frankenmachine that my kids use for games, and it would work on that. Even so, the USB interface wouldn't let me burn new firmware, but I happen to have a USB/RS-232 bridge that let me do the job. A series of petty irritations that added up to a lost day, any one of which could have been fatal had I not by purest chance happened to have had some more-or-less esoteric work-around at hand.

Ergo: all this is proof that God hates us. I recommend hating him back.

[brentdax.livejournal.com]

My microwave blew a fuse halfway through rendering a long video clip.

How did you get a microwave to render a video clip?

(SCNR.)

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

My thoughts exactly.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

im in ur rss feed downloading ur podcasts

Coincidentally, this article from Gamasutra on difficult games might interest you, speaking of arcade games. I enjoyed the discussion of how early games were more a "measure of skill" rather than something to be completed.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Early console games were somewhere in between. Playing the original Mega Man now on an emulated NES, I'm kind of gobsmacked; I remember this being a fun action/adventure game when I was a kid, but now I see the game as only this incredibly cruel and merciless exercise with every object on the screen there to kill me. It's not more difficult - I'm as good now at dodging bullets as I was then, thankyouverymuch - but my definition of what an action/adventure game felt like has changed a lot since 1988.