Whiteboard Jungle: SPECIAL Annual Reviews

Yes, it's that time of year again in my whiteboard jungle, employee reviews. The process actually starts in December when we all panic and write our self-review the day they're due, only to find out they gave us an extension. (They're using a new online app this year that will apparently let them lock us out if we haven't submitted on time.) We're also supposed to submit the peer reviews that were requested from us. I had 9 this year. 9. I'm pretty sure that, even if I know 9 people at work, I definitely do not like 9 of them. Self-review is hard for me. I was brought up not to brag about myself, besides which I thought my awesomeness was self-evident! Um, right. Anyway, I decided this whole process would be so much simpler if they would adopt the Fallout SPECIAL stats system, which runs on a scale of 1-10. Then my self-review would end up looking something like this:

• Strength - N/A Only relevant when I need to kick someone's ass for being, well, an ass. Unfortunately, the person whose ass needs kicking always seems to be in a different office location, rendering this moot.
• Perception - 9. Unfortunately, a high score here feels like a curse, because it means I seem to notice brokenness that either eluded other people or that they were better at ignoring. Sadly, the person who finds the brokenness often seems to end up being the person who gets the "privilege" of fixing it.
• Endurance - 3. The st00p1d has worn me down.
• Charisma - 10! Of course!
• Intelligence - 9. Of course, I still work here, so I'm probably overstating.
• Agility - 6. This would be higher, except I often seem to end up getting hit in the face by the brokenness.
• Luck - 0. (I mentioned that this was on the scale of 1-10, right?)

Now we have to wait 2 months for the results. My boss asked what he could do to keep us from worrying about it. I suggested BevMo gift cards.

Minecraft: And Friends

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My MONSTER Monster Smasher!


Also:

• Online Gaming as a Grown-up
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  see more TDW Geeks
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  see more TDW Geeks

PLUS: I'm going to MineCon in November! Whee! My only trepidation is fear of excess creeper cosplay. And being in a hotel room next to creeper cosplayers having loud creeper cosplay sex. HHhhhh.

Minecraft: Artsy-Fartsy

• I've cut out all the pieces from this awesome Mine(Paper)craft project, but they're sitting in my desk drawer at work, waiting for my next nervous breakdown for assembly.
• Share and try out seeds for the coolest Minecraft worlds.
• Minecraft as a teaching tool.
• The Smithsonian's American Art Museum will host an exhibition next year of "The Art of Video Games." Included on the list are my great love, Fallout; my great disappointment, Fallout 3 (Fallout 2 is missing); and... Minecraft! And a bunch of games, most of which I never heard of or gave a crap about, because before Minecraft I was too busy playing Fallout 1 & 2 over and over. Or something.
• I would totally get one of these if it came in diamond. But these magnets are pretty cool, too.

News: Closeouts

I love yarn closeouts. I get high-quality yarn cheap. And then I realize 2 years later I don't have enough for my sweater so I scramble to find more of it. Crap.

Some of these have been sitting in my starred items folder for awhile, so I'm clearing it out.

Geeky:

• Someone built a replica of a Fallout plasma rifle. Maybe I'll crochet one for Brad for Xmas. Or not.
• It's been several months since I first read this piece on some dumb-ass AMD executive who is furthering gender and geek stereotypes, and I still want to bitchslap the woman.
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  Word.

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Just plain mind-bogglingly wacky:

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  Awesome! All my friends and I could crash for one low price!
• These photos that Life magazine apparently printed in 1942 look like something out of a bad 60s low-budget horror movie, but apparently the venerable magazine saw fit to report on voodoo hex parties that took place during WWII aimed at killing Hitler with the power of the occult. Or something. Yes, humans have always been nuts.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Knittin' Crap: Handmade Christmas Round-up

As I stated before, I made every present this year (except the book I got Caden for his birthday, then forgot about until Xmas.) Everyone's gotten theirs now, so here's the roll:

Who	What	Why
Brad	Vault Boy from the Fallout computer game series	Because he got me addicted to Fallout all those years ago
Caden	Totoro bonnet pattern by Adrian Bizilka	To keep his noggin warm (although he doesn't seem too big on the hat concept) and to, um, "help" daddy
Mary	Sweater ornament pattern by Emily5446	Um, because I thought she'd like them
My mother	Block pattern from 201 Crochet Motifs Dogi vest pattern from Knit Kimono And the other sweater ornament	Because apparently I forgot I was going to try to ruin Christmas
Tom	Pattern from the Japanese book Amigurumi Collection Vol. 2	Because he has a black cat named Dex Flikky Something Something
Steve	The Bride With White Hair	Because hell hath no fury like a kung fu mistress scorned!

Other: Escape from the Vault!

I previously reported how, over a year ago now, I had tried to get into Fallout 3. After I finally worked out the graphics card issues, I couldn't get out of the vault. I set it aside, for what turned out to be over a year.

Then, a little over a week ago, I decided to try it again. Why? (****SPOILER ALERT FOR BRAD****) For Brad's Xmas present I made him a Vault Boy amigurumi after the game's mascot.

That made me itchin' to give Fallout 3 another go, so I did.

I was barely heard from for 9 days. (And I don't think anyone noticed I was missing.) I "finished" the game earlier this evening. (Note I have none of the add-ons.)

Mini-review: Yes, overall, I'm disappointed, for several reasons.

• Gameplay: Sorry, I'm just not into FPS. I prefer the old interface. Yes, I'm old and stodgy. So shoot me with a plasma rifle.
• Stability: I cannot count the number of times the game crashed while I was playing it. It would just die. Usually it would fairly quickly come to the desktop again and I could restart, but occasionally it would hang, and I even got a couple BSoDs. So Fucking Annoying. And they weren't re-createable either. I'd load, try to do what I was doing when it crashed, and it would be fine. Fucking Windows. (I don't own an XBox or a PS3, so those weren't options, but the original two were PC-only anyway, and, well, I'm old-school anyway.)
• Fun: You know, it just lacked some of the magic of the first two. The first two games had this great sardonic humor. This one tries to re-create it, but that's exactly what it comes across as: that it's trying to re-create it. I never thought I'd say it, but I miss awesome characters like Myron. I miss the bit from 2 where you can actually be forced into a shotgun wedding for seducing a rancher's daughter... even if your player is female. (This happened to me once, and try as I might, I never could recreate it. Ever after, I would just get shot at.) Almost everything in that vein that does happen in 3 just seems forced.

I avoided the help guides and cheats for the first several days, but annoyance with the amount of time I wasted getting lost in buildings because they were dark, repetitive, and the Pip Boy map was nearly useless, drove me to lose patience, and I ended up spending a lot of time at the Fallout wiki. Oh, that's another thing. I replayed the first 2 games several times, and even now I start to think it might be good to try again... (No! No! Bad Karen! You need fresh air!) Replaying this game doesn't interest me. Oh, and it's annoying that, unless you buy one of the add-ons, the levels cap at 20. And once the game is over, without one of the add-ons, it's over. You can't keep exploring or finish up any side quests.

Anyway... yeah, it did keep my interest enough for over a week that I didn't do much else, but I wanted to squeal with delight so much more. Playing that much also seriously messed with my dreams. One involved Super Mutants and kittens, although they didn't interact directly. Aw, but wouldn't it be cute if a mean ol' Super Mutant had a snuggly pet kitty?

Other: My To-Do List

• Get more exercise.
• Get rid of this stupid low-level summer cold that's been making my throat scratchy for the past few days. It's too hot to drink tea with honey.
• Get started on Xmas presents. (One is mostly done.)
• Teach Dipity about keyboard etiquette.
• Get Dipity to stop scratching unsanctioned scratching items. (An herbal spray I got at the pet store seems to be helping.)
• Get Dipity to realize that Spoon is harmless and impossible not to like, so I can get the damned litter box out of my bedroom.
• Install FreeBSD on my laptop because upgrading to Fedora 11 makes mplayer playback suck ass.
• Try playing Fallout 3 again to figure out how to get out of the Vault without getting killed by rad rats.
• Convince Dan to write a program for graphing amigurumi crochet patterns. Bribe him with some dorky Harry Potter item if necessary.

Other: Fallout 3 Update: We Have Contact!

I finally caved last night and went to Fry's to get a new video card that could handle Fallout 3. Halfway there, I realized I had forgotten the printout of the supported video chipsets. Crap. I was too lazy to go back and probably wouldn't have made it before closing, so I decided to give it a go.

You can always tell the Fry's newbies (or the inveterate morons) at the Burbank Fry's because they drive the wrong way through the parking lot.

I'm looking at video cards and.... holy crap, there are cards that cost over $500! WTF! And you practically need a water-cooled system with a 6 billion watt power supply for some of them!

I refused to pay more than $100 (and I would rather have gone way below that) for a card I really only wanted for one game. I finally found one based on the NVIDIA GeForce 9400GT chipset. that looked like it would work with my power supply, which I guessed was about 300W (turned out to be 288W, but close enough), and ran about $70 (less $10, assuming I actually get one of Fry's notorious rebates), was PCI-X (because I knew I had a slot for that), and had 512Mb of on-board RAM. Sounded good, and if it clearly looked like it wouldn't work, I just wouldn't open it, and I'd bring it back and stand in the returns line for an hour.

I got home and... the GeForce 9400 chipset wasn't on the list. I looked at the box, and the copyright date was 2008, so I figured it was so new that, eh, the 9600 series was on the list so hopefully this was close enough. I put it in and... it worked! Fallout 3 started! Yay! It even autodetected the card and said I could get away with Medium-quality graphics over performance! Wow!

I played for a little while, but I was pretty distracted. I didn't even make it out of the Vault alive yet. Damnable radroaches. It doesn't help that I suck at real-time combat. The old games were turn-based, but I'm too spastic and easily distracted to handle real-time well. Maybe I'll get into it more when I can sit down with it this weekend.

Other: Fallout 3 Report to Brad

I just sat down to install Fallout 3 and it installed, but it won't start because it "can't initialize renderer." I assume because I have a crappy embedded graphics card that's not on the supported chipset list.

D'oh!

Oh, wait, that was the super cheap PCI card that I had bought because at the time FreeBSD didn't have drivers for the on-board one.

fiddles with BIOS settings...

Windows is giving me the finger now. "Bitch, you told me a long time ago not to use that display adapter!" It was showing just a little too much loyalty to the old one there, no matter how many times I tried changing the Display settings and/or rebooted, until I just out-and-out disabled the crappy adapter. Geez.

Yay! It likes the other card! Of course, when it auto-detects to set the video options, it goes for "Low Quality." *cough* But it starts! Um, scratch that. It gets farther than before, then crashes. Crap.

And Bethesda doesn't have any patches up, yet.

ETA: I think it's because while the chipset of the on-board card is supported, it only has 128Mb of RAM (and it uses system RAM :P). I may have to cave and get a decent card.

Other: ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG It's Fallout 3 Day!

After a wait of 10 years since Fallout 2, (I don't count the Fallout: Tactics spin-off line), and various software company failures, it's finally here! Fallout 3!

So why haven't I rushed out to Fry's to buy it? Um, I'm lazy.

And I'm not even going to tell you how many hours I spent on the first 2 installments, but you can thank Brad for my addiction. Or curse him.