Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• Why did the turkey cross the road? I can ask as there’s one walking back and forth by street near my house.

On the way to run some errands, there was a turkey standing at the curb at this intersection. It stopped traffic in both directions as it took its time crossing the road. This is in addition to the 4 owls I’ve seen in the past two weeks. Omens I say!

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• T’s mixed about the Pats win: Jumping up and down like a schoolgirl turned to pouting since we can’t watch the Super Bowl live this year.
• What’s up with all of the owls? Seen maybe one in 4+ years I’ve been back east; seen 4 in past two weeks!
• Last of Xmas gifts swapped. Sister will pay dearly for musical dog toy the pooch found already.

NOTE: I’ve been looking through the stats to see what people are still looking for that was on the previous version of the blog. I’ll try and report some of the more popular ones.

This one in particular is a good post because it yields a very nummy concoction. Soooo…, pulled out of the archives, here’s my recipe for: “Pieracos”. (Last posted: April 6, 2006)

Ingredients:

• 1 package Taco Seasoning
• 1-1/2 packages pierogies. Regular size works fine, but the Mrs. T’s mini-sized are better.
• 1lb ground beef
• 1lb sausage
• 1lb bag of frozen mixed vegetables
• 1 24oz and 1 16oz jar of Salsa (mild or hot)
• 1 can red kidney beans
• chopped green onions
• some chopped garlic
• 1 lb bag of shredded cheddar cheese

Directions:

• Bring large pot if water to a boil
• Once boiling, add frozen pierogies and continue to boil for about 8 minutes
• Drain pierogies
• In a deep pan, brown ground beef
• Once beef is browned, add 3/4-cup of water and taco seasoning and cook for 5 more minutes
• Remove ground beef; replace with sliced-up sausage and brown that
• Open kidney beans and drain (optional ingredient)
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees
• In a about a 15”x11” casserole dish, add pierogies, beef, sausage, 1/3 of the bag of cheese, mixed veggies, kidney beans, onions, and 1/2 of the salsa
• Mix around, try not to break the pierogies
• Pour rest of salsa on top
• Pour rest of cheese evenly on top of salsa
• Bake for about 40-45 minutes
• Eat!

Let me know how it turns out.

For the vegetarians out there, replace the beef and sausage with chopped mushrooms and black olives. Put like a 1/4 pouch of the taco seasoning in before mixing with the rest of the ingredients as above.

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• Build a map and custom game variant for Halo 3 over the weekend. Named it "ZigZag Boom!"

Over the weekend I took a crack at designing a custom game type and map variant in Halo 3.

For those unfamiliar with this, the game contains a map editor called “Forge.” This allows you to move and manipulate many of the items on the map, but not the base map itself. There is also a “Custom Games” function to configure game options and settings like health, gravity, ammo, etc. Put the two together, you can make your own game variant and share with others.

My first effort at this I’m calling “zigzag boom.” It’s a symmetrical map variant of “Foundry,” one of the new maps which can be almost completely cleared out. My base map was actually derived from another customization of a variation called “Grifball” by BurnieBurns of Red Vs Blue. I used it because the author did a great job walling off the map to make it a clean rectangular space; it saved me a bunch of time.

The map is set-up for Capture the Flag or Assault games. I took a nod from the Unreal Tournament games we used to play at the office and set-up the map for low-gravity and instant kills. The point was to make a map you had to think about moving around in instead of a spray and pray map. Here’s the map overview as it stands now:

• Players start of with shotguns only. This is because long range weapons would create a game of dodgeball with players just standing at opposite ends of the “hallways” shooting at each other from afar.
• The armor is white and can’t be killed for 5 seconds after spawning. They also can’t cause damage in that time either. This was to prevent spawn camping and to give the player time to get out of the way since it’s instakill.
• There’s one set of rockets at the center of the map but it doesn’t spawn right away and there’s only two shots in it. This is to prevent rocket hoarding.
• There’s two custom power-ups which make the player unable to be shot for a brief period. I wanted it to be long enough to allow players a shot to making it tho the other end of the map, but not so far they could score without being stopped. The player’s armor turns gold to make this more readily visible. These also do not spawn right away, encouraging players to get into the action at game start instead of running for power-ups and power weapons
• The flag/bomb carrier has slower speed and turns a nice zombie green. This forces the rest of the team to work toward protecting the carrier.
• I’m old school, the team’s flag must be at home for them to score
• There’s shield doors at key locations to force close combat. Smart use of the environment will keep a player alive.
• The environment can also kill a player. Around every corner, power-up, hiding spot, and object to interact with, there’s apt to be something that will explode and get you, all set to respawn quickly. So you can hide in that storage container, but beware that a wall of fusion cores may appear behind you. Shooting first may not save either player.
• For CTF games, a team only has to return the flag, not retrieve it as well.
• If the flag or bomb is away, players trying to recover will respawn in the middle of the map, giving them a realistic shot at recovery.
• Grenades are very limited. Again, this map is about getting up close and personal. Besides, the large amount of explosive items on the map make it risky anyway.
• I had gravity hammers, then took them out, now will put them back. Using the hammers made it easy too easy to go over instead of around. After feedback from playing with friends, I’m going to just raise the wall height in certain places.

As of this writing the maps are at version 1 on my Bungie File Share. Over the holiday break I’ll look to update them. It’s still a work in progress, but so far, so good. While I don’t expect an award for “best map,” I found it a very good exercise in learning how to adjust the environment and player options to get very different kinds of game play. It’s given me some additional perspective and ideas on the cause and effect of designs. Very applicable.

Hope you like the map and game variant. Please feel free to send feedback.

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• "Friends’ Recommended Links" on Mahalo Social is great! Using as a mini stumbleupon/digg-ish thing wandering from user-to-user.
• It’s hard to follow someone else’s Twitter "@" thread when you can’t find the
  tweet that’s being referenced in the reply.
• Riffing a lot on television today for some reason.
• Waiting for "Rob These Twits" mash-up site for burglars of Twitter users posting they’re away for the holiday. Tech savvy "Wet Bandits" FTW!

So while talking about the network rerun strategy, the topic also came up about shows who get the axe and the die hard fans who send food products to the network in an attempt to put them back on the air. I can see the argument from both sides: The fans have an emotional investment in the story and feel the networks are screwing them; The networks look at the ratings and want to maximize profit for the time slot.

As a side note, I find these campaigns to send rice, nuts, whatever a little misguided and annoying. If you have all that food laying around, send it to a food shelter. Help someone out how doesn’t even have a television. The only productive thing you’re doing by sending that stuff is aggravating the mail room staff at the network and giving an extra paragraph or blog post of material to the entertainment pundits about the show being canned. You can be vocal and effective without being at-this-point cliche and sending food. No network executive is going to be like “Oh my, look at all these jelly beans — 13 new episodes immediately!”

Since these shows will be canned anyway, I propose something else: The Closure Clause. I think the contract with the network and studio, producers, actors, whomever should state that in the event of a cancellation they will still be able to write and shoot an episode from scratch to bring closure to the story line for the fans. I listen to the Lost podcast and have heard their producers state a number of times that they have a fast-track plan if the show were ever to get canceled to tie up the loose ends of that universe.

With the power that fans now have via the Internet, networks will continue to have to pay more attention to the sense of entitlement that viewers feel they have toward a particular program. Being proactive will help with viewer relations and will make sure that the mail room staff is taking home less leftovers.

So the writer’s are on strike. This means that we have months of bad reality TV on tap. I know we’re all excited about that prospect!

I have a suggestion for the networks: Restart the Fall Season. I’m talking with a buddy yesterday about shows we watch. He’s very into Life, a new show on NBC. I’ve never watched it. Even with a dual-tuner DVR, I just don’t have time to watch a lot of tube. Anyway, my buddy explains the basic premise of the show; it sounds interesting. However, I’ve never been able to get into a show I’ve latched onto mid-run. So in addition to moving shows over from sister cable networks, they should re-run the reruns of other shows from the beginning so I can give them a try and watch them in order if I like them. Deal?

Recent tweets to http://twitter.com/quixado:

• Prototyping Swag!
• Goal for evening: playing grifball with the Loco Bandits. Forge games in H3 rock!