It’s been kinda quiet here because I’ve been hard at work not being at work (don’t let them tell you it’s easy), and also because I’ve been making an effort to not talk about games here on my blog. All game talk and game reviewing has moved to rgbgamer.com, which I’ve set up specifically to cover only the most interesting game-related news items each day (generally the universe creates two), and talk about what I’m liking now and then. I hope you’ll go over and take a look, maybe even subscribe to the feed.

And with all the daily link cruft being swept under the rug at blast!, my tumblelog, I’m not entirely sure what to do with this original blog.

I guess I’ll have to make a return to horrid personal matters, details on how I eat… badly, stories about my home life and how my dog hates me but that’s ok because I hate her too because her breath really stinks, and other miscellaneous things that a future employer might come by and see, and then decide not to hire me on the intensity of my airheadedness that I do try so hard to hide from you, my loyal readers.

*If anybody wants to contribute material to RGB Gamer, the door’s this way.

EDIT: I’m on Leopard now and Connect360 works. Just had to rescan and add a new ‘Computer’ on the Xbox side.

—
According to a blogger named Jeff Henshaw, upgrading to Leopard breaks Nullriver’s Connect360 software. Connect360 lets Mac users stream video/music/photos to an Xbox 360, sort of like what Windows Media Center Edition does.

This article at Ars Technica includes Connect360 in a list of software reported to work. So, does anyone know for certain?

Hopefully Nullriver confirms or patches this soon, because there’ll be no Leopard for me until then.

Macrumors has a wiki list of all the apps reported to have problems with Leopard. Entries of interest include: Azureus (with MBPs), Sogudi, Peerguardian, and of course there must be one app from Roxio on there… Popcorn.

Q&A page over here.

Does this signal the beginning of the end for Twitter? How might this integrate with Gmail in a useful manner? Or perhaps Orkut is due for some tweaks and a relaunch to compete with Facebook.

How does Jaiku currently differ from Twitter? On the plus side, it has ‘channels’, which are like chatrooms or public streams that everyone can contribute to. It also has a separate status field for Location. So you can let people know what you’re doing/thinking, and also where you are. This comes in handy when, let’s say, you’re out in town and would like to find nearby friends. It also supports comments, without having to reply with something like “@dude I totally agree” and bothering everyone else. It works just like leaving a blog comment on the main website.

The philosophy behind Jaiku is more of creating a “Presence Stream”, optionally aggregating your blog posts, flickr, and other RSS feeds, giving your friends a single point of contact for seeing what you’re up to. This is functionality I originally intended for my tumblelog (blast.sangsara.net), but over time it became less personal and more about posting amusing links. Well, Jaiku might be the one service to draw all these parts of my online activity together, and STILL publish 140 character bits with every now and then. The question is, how do I get everyone to move off Twitter?

Are you currently on Twitter, and feeling Jaikurious? Sorry, sorry. Sorry. That was a bad one.

Further reading: Jaiku vs Twitter @ smartmobs.com, A Matter of Taste @ Pronet Advertising

From the first link above:

For me Jaiku is about:

1. Silent sociality – checking up on what my friends are up to when convenient, and posting my own state knowing that I won’t be disturbing others (unless they have explicitly asked to be alerted).

4. Background sociality – Jaiku allows me to integrate other online identities and feeds (including delicious, flickr and any RSS) into my single jaiku presence feed. This is done in a way that doesn’t confuse these background posts with my explicit state messages.

Yes, “The Joni Letters” is an album of Joni Mitchell covers and interpretations with guest vocalists (including Leonard Cohen and Tina Turner!)

About a month back, I quit my job. I meant to write about it sooner, but then personal matters have long been absent on this blog (along with new content in general). I largely enjoyed working there, but that’s a story for another time.

In the week just gone, my first sans emploi, I’ve become one of those annoying people who like to drop some French now and then – no, I’m just kidding – in the past week I’ve still been waking up in the morning with vague memories about dreams that involved getting work done. Last night I was working on my Mac in the office, but it was in the 1920s if you can wrap your mind around that, not doing my actual job but instead transcribing dialogue from old movies. So they could be made into subtitles, of course. From English to English. It sure made sense at the time.

It was a tedious and slow process, using some badly designed software, and I had barely gotten three lines done when a friend called asking me out for a drink with another mutual friend (they do not, and will never, know each other in real life but dreams are strange). I said alright, and then realized it would be impossible to transcribe the rest of that goddamned spaghetti western or train robbery movie given a whole, much less an hour. I was seriously stressing it, and then an email came in with EVEN more work from one of my freelancing clients.

Ah yes, that was the point I was finding my way towards. I’m now doing an experimental break/career calibration/freelance writing thing. Although probably not a viable long-term option, I’ve found that it’s possible to make enough, as much, or very much more money this way. Depending on how much time you want to put into it. And I get the added benefit of finally being able to work from home, on the large iMac I once blew most of my savings on. It helps with the guilt.

So now is a time for reading all the books on my shelves, going out whenever the urge strikes, getting to know Hyrule a little better, and maybe even populating this blog with regular posts again. If you look at my stats, the point at which all traffic went downhill was the exact time I started at my job last year.

In anticipation of my iPod touch being delivered today, I’m collecting some useful iPhone web app links. Came across one that promises MSN functionality, at iphone-msn.com, but I’d be wary of any site that asked you to input your IM password.

One thing I noticed playing with the touch on Saturday is that its Safari useragent string isn’t the same as the iPhone’s. Which means some of these sites which are meant to display their apps when loaded on an iPhone, don’t do so automatically.

Updated
These are the best-of-class web apps I’ve found so far.

IM: Beejive
Twitter: PocketTweets / Hahlo (when PocketTweets is down)
Facebook
Calendar: Google Calendar (iPhone only) / Mobile version

Because I’ve been playing this game so damned much since I got my Xbox 360, I thought I’d write a review of it.

Stuart and I have played it on Xbox Live! together twice, and both times the lag was pretty crap but we still had fun. The very first time, I had just started, and my Level 1 agent was completely unable to keep up with his.

Me: Where the hell are you?
Stuart: I’m up here, on the roof of this giant building, I can see the top of your head.
Me: WTF? What do I have to stand on to get up there?

——–

Crackdown (Microsoft Game Studios / Realtime Worlds)
Platform: Xbox 360
Score: 8/10

Criminals are a rotten lot. Turn your back on them and they’ll take over your neighborhood in a heartbeat. You’ll see them start to ride around in hideously painted cars overnight, blasting bad dance music everywhere you turn. The point where it really gets unbearable for me is when they add gunshots into the mix, leaving police corpses outside your home. That’s just not on.

Crackdown is a game where you are tasked with single-handedly crushing a crime wave that the combined efforts of all the world’s police have failed to stop. When I say ‘You’, I mean a heavily-armed genetically engineered agent of justice, of course. But it’s important not to let that minor detail turn you off because you’ll get used to being awesome.

In its essence, this is a game of many discrete joys. While crime-fighting is in itself a fulfilling goal, the numerous creative options and bonus objectives mean that you spend a lot of your time just exploring the limits of your cel-shaded sandbox. Set over five islands that make up the troubled Pacific City, Crackdown offers up plenty of room to play in. You can swim up rivers, drive down boulevards and crowded public squares in commandeered (really, stolen) vehicles, and gracefully traverse city blocks in giant loping leaps from rooftop to rooftop. The crisp, colorful execution has a comic-book playfulness to it, and you’ll find it to be a cross between playing GTA3, and watching Universal Soldier and the Japanese movie Casshern back-to-back.

Its gameplay design has been infused with basic RPG values: the more you do something, the more you’ll come to excel at it. Spend enough time challenging yourself to climb buildings and you’ll find your agility level rising. Mow down villains with mad driving skills, and your Agency-issued vehicles grow faster, and visually morph when you enter them. It’s like being in the boat from Hulk Hogan’s TV series, Thunder in Paradise, except none of the agents have mullets. All in all, improving your stats in a game of Crackdown feels far more rewarding than it does in most action RPGs. Every time your agent gains an extra star, releasing a shockwave of energy, you’ll run back to earlier areas to see if you can finally reach that elusive rooftop, or drive a car fast enough to jump over that bridge. By turning a modern city into a playground, Crackdown achieves a level of spatial connection between player and level that most RPGs do not. The feeling of wonder over new-found powers instantly becomes a deep-rooted desire to see them play out in a familiar setting.

Crackdown doesn’t just offer incentives for obsessive compulsive behavior. In fact, it nurtures it. Hidden across the city’s rooftops are 500 Agility Orbs, and finding them inevitably becomes an addiction to rival Pokémon collection. Elsewhere, you’ll find purple vehicular stunt markers hanging in the air, waiting patiently for you to find a way to get a car through them. Taken along with street races, rooftop Parkour races, games of Stockpile and Rocket Tag, and another 250 Hidden Orbs for those who’ll explore every inch of the virtual city, and there’s a raft of things to do in Pacific City besides hunting down your 21 gang bosses. Although fun is already its own reward, doing any of these tasks also rewards you with points that make you even more badass. Most achievements are also unlocked just by doing ridiculous things like juggling a car up in the air with a rocket launcher.

What you will find lacking in the experience, however, is something most 3rd-person shooters already suffer from: a poor camera. You’ll often find yourself just missing the edge of a ledge and falling 100 feet to the ground, ending your attempt for a record time on a Rooftop Race. All because you couldn’t move the camera quickly enough to see what was under you, after having moved it up to see what you were jumping at to begin with. It’s a minor niggle, and even with other complaints such as multiplayer lag, a lack of good in-car radio music, and the lock-on targeting system that favors parked cars over the guy shooting at you, there’s a significant amount of fun to be had.

The deal has recently been sweetened with the release of downloadable expansion packs (1 free, with another costing 800 MS points), and a patch that enables the resurrection of defeated bosses for more replay value.

It’s been a long time since I posted a mix online, and so I thought I’d let the next one form over time in a blog post, with descriptions.

These songs are currently being considered:

Leah Dizon – Softly
The first single from Chinese-Filipina-Caucasian American import car model turned demure, virginal Japanese idol Leah Dizon is an auto-tuned (har har) wonder of pop schmaltz. Except something about it just grabs me. It could be that little down-then-up melodic hook at the end of the first line. It might also be the cliched production – I think the term is ‘shimmering’ – that encapsulates the feeling of a sunny weekend, right at the end of summer holidays.

We all know it from younger days. That feeling that while everything is right in the world, it certainly isn’t going to last forever, and just at that moment you realize one day you will look back from the position of an older, more troubled person and say, “good times.” Summers are the saddest best times of our childhood, all opportunity, waste, and compromise. That’s what this song suggests to me near its end, and if we were all Portuguese/Brazilian I could have just said saudade and you would have understood without all this faffing about.