Cool Hats

This is going to be a strange post.
Especially coming from me. Or maybe you've come to expect strange things, and thus, no matter what I do, it will seem ordinary.
Anyway, you have officially been warned.



Yesterday I discovered that I am totally obsessed with cool hats.
The worst part is that I think I've been like this for years and I wasn't even aware of it. It's entirely possible that everyone but me knew about this already.
I'll give you all an opportunity to laugh at me now...


...OK, now you're done.
Seriously, though. Cool hats... they're really cool.
I often talk about how strange it is that nobody wears hats anymore. Why does nobody wear hats anymore? I guess I have no place to talk, since I don't have a hat. But if I had a cool hat, I might wear it. But hats (like most clothes, really) are expensive. And I don't have money.
If I did have money, I probably wouldn't spend it on clothes. Not even a hat.
But if I found a cool hat in a thrift store that was cheap, maybe I would buy it. Because hats are cool. Not all hats though. Only cool hats.

Allow me to talk about some hats, perhaps, in the process, attempting to explain why they are cool:



FEDORA
This is pretty much the ultimate cool hat. It's not necessarily the coolest hat ever (although they're definitely one of my favorites). It's just the best, most generic one.










It is often associated with gangsters, detectives, newspaper reporters, and... well pretty much all kinds of people from that culture/era (specifically, 1930s-ish USoA).
The coolest fedoras are definitely pinstriped ones. They're obtusely snazzy. And trendy, too.
Believe me, I know about trends.
(I say this a lot. I'm being sarcastic. FYI.)










See? Amazing.
Here is the Wikipedia article on fedoras.



BERET
This is a classic.



One of the cool things about hats is that they say so much. They're often symbols of status or rank. Hats are representational. You can say, "Oh, I can tell he's in charge here because of the hat he's wearing." But can you say "This man must be important; look at his socks!" No. No, you can't.
Berets are used by military forces all over the world. A lot of times, the color will indicate the person's rank or what branch of the military they belong to.
I think berets are best a solid color. Maroon is good.



Oh yeah, that's the other cool thing; you can pin all sorts of shiny insignias and stuff to berets, and they're even better, usually.
Here is the Wikipedia article on berets.



CUSTODIAN HELMET
Not technically a hat, but whatever. Isn't a helmet just another kind of hat? I would say so.

You know, the ones that police officers (particularly in the UK) wear. They're spiffy!
They can have all kinds of shiny things on the front and the top.


Why don't more police forces use these hats? It's a shame, really. It seems like a lot of times police officers go running around wearing something boring and flat, or even worse, no hat at all!
Here is the Wikipedia article on custodian helmets.



BOWLER/DERBY HAT
An older hat; reminds me of Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges.

These hats look kind of dignified. But they can also look menacing. It depends on who's wearing it, really. If you're an evil mastermind, you can wear the hat and look even more evil and mastermindly. But if you're a sophisticated banker, you can wear the hat and look even more sophisticated and bankerly.
Bowler hats don't really vary much. They're almost always plain black. But they can be cool in other colors too.

It's like the Riddler in Batman!
Here is the Wikipedia article on bowler/derby hats.



CABBY/GOLF CAP
Simple, but very cool.

I always associate this kind of hat with Oliver Twist. It was pretty popular in the nineteenth century, I think.
There are lots of different variations on this same basic style.

This is more like something people still wear sometimes today. Like Shiki Misaki.
Here is the Wikipedia article on cabby/golf caps.



SALAKOT
A nice, largish sort of hat.

I couldn't really find any pictures with a plain background. Just do a Google image search or something.

These hats come from the Philippines. There are a lot of different interesting styles. Usually they're simple, but they can be pretty fancy sometimes.
Here is the Wikipedia article on salakots; there are a couple pictures of fancier ones there.



ROGATYWKA
This is one I just discovered today. It's not too unusual, but not too plain, either.

These hats are used by the Polish military. Different colors can denote different unit types.


Here is the Wikipedia article on Rogatywkas.




...That's it for today.
Two posts in a row!


:::Source=
:::Paul M-unit 19.91 MKII
:::19.10.08
:::STOP

Every Game (Part I)

I am now going to tell you about games.
Specifically, every. Single. Game. That I have on my computer.

Why?
I don't know.
I must really hate you.

OK, so I'll skip over some, like the ones I've never gotten to work. But I will include the ones I never play because my siblings installed them a really long time ago and I'm too lazy to get rid of them.
In some cases, I may have never played the game even once; I don't know. If that is the case, I will have to play it, just so I can tell you about it. Except I probably won't. Because they're mostly MMOs and the like, and require way more time than I'm willing to invest.

I can't necessarily say that all these games will work for your OS, or that you would even like to play them. But I'm not entirely convinced I'm doing this for your benefit anyway.

These will not be arranged alphabetically or in order of coolness or anything like that. I'm just putting them in in the order I see/find them, or whatever I feel like, really.
This is going to be a pretty long list, because I hardly ever delete games when I'm done with them. I figure I might come back to them every once in a while, and that is often the case.

Let's begin, shall we?




THE BATTLE FOR WESNOTH
It's a great turn-based strategy game with a fantasy setting. You command armies and... destroy evil goblin hordes, and all that cool stuff.
It's free (and open source); you can get it here: http://www.wesnoth.org
It's one of the best strategy games I've ever played. It's certainly the best free TBS there is, at least. If you can find a better one, show it to me. But that's going to be difficult.

MAJESTY: THE FANTASY KINGDOM SIM
This is sort of a real-time strategy game, but you only control construction and things like that. Your subjects, and the various heroes that live in your kingdom, can go and do whatever they feel like doing. You can do things to motivate them, like offering rewards for killing certain monsters or destroying certain buildings. You can also do more subtle things like building statues, which generally increases their loyalty to your kingdom (if they aren't very loyal, they'll often just help whoever offers the most money, even if it means destroying their own homes).
This is a commercial game, but it's pretty old, so if you do happen to find it it will probably be pretty cheap. Otherwise, they're making a sequel, so you could just wait for that (assuming it's actually good).

SAVAGE: THE BATTLE FOR NEWERTH
This is... whoah. It's played online or over a local network. One person on your team is the commander, and controls everything like a real-time strategy game. They choose where to build things and give commands to all the ground troops. Each ground troop, though (not counting workers), is an actual player. So everyone else gets to control an individual character and go around blowing stuff up and whatnot.
It has a cool setting, too; sort of... primitive... yet... steampunkish. It's different.
The game was commercial, but they made it freeware to advertize the sequel. Go here: http://www.s2games.com/savage/downloads.php

DOUKUTSU MONOGATARI / CAVE STORY
This game is great. It's one of the best free games ever created. Get it. Get it now.
http://www.cavestory.org.
I guess you want more information than that. Well, it's an adventure-based platform shooter. Kinda like Metroid.
Now go play it. That's all you needed to know.

NETHACK
YES. Nethack. Every self-respecting computer user has to play this game at least once, even if (s)he hates it. If you DO hate it, what is your problem?! But I'm not here to ponder your insanity.
Nethack is a sort of role-playing, dungeon-crawling game. You make a character, and then you go through various perilous circumstances, and then you die. It's possible to win, yes, but you have to be really, really good at it. And/or obscenely lucky. Usually you die in some ridiculous way, like kicking a wall too hard or choking on your food. And when you die, that's it. There's no coming back, and there's no loading your game back at the last place you saved. Your character is gone.
Nethack is incredibly deep. If you can think of something to do (something feasable, I mean), you can probably do it. The game doesn't really focus on looking pretty, though. You can choose to have everything reperesented by text, or you can also have small, static, "old-school"-looking graphical tiles. There is no sound whatsoever. But this hardly matters. Sure, it would be cool to see a version of the game that has cool, fully animated graphics, sound effects, and background music. But is it needed? Certainly not.
Nethack is free. http://www.nethack.org/.

EGOBOO
Naturally, I am going to tell you this game is great, as I have contributed a small portion of that greatness (primarily, I run the website).
It has a really bizarre style. Kind of cartoonish. So sort of lighthearted. But it contains all sorts of gigantic, frightening beasts. It's weird, in a good way.
It's an action-role-playing / dungeon crawling game. It's basically what Nethack (see above, if you haven't yet for some reason) would be if it was 3D and in real time. Which would basically turn it into a totally different game. And that's what Egoboo is.
Egoboo is free, and open-source, under the GPL. You can find it here: http://egoboo.sourceforge.net/

BOTS
This is an online fighting game. With robots.
It's OK, but it's nothing extraordinary. It's fun for a while, but then it gets boring.
The game is free, but then you can pay money to get... I dunno, extra stuff, or something dumb like that. http://bots.acclaim.com/botslanding.html.

CIVILIZATION III
Ah... CivIII. Where to start? Maybe I shouldn't bother. I suggest you look it up on Wikipedia.
I'll give you a very brief overview, though: It's sort of a strategy game (turn-based) where you build a nation from the ground up. You start in the stone age and keep playing until you land a spaceship on Alpha Centauri (or you wipe out everyone else; whatever works).
You can actually learn a lot from it. Play this and you hardly even need to take any history classes. Sure, It's not always entirely accurate. But for a game that is primarily for your entertainment, it's very educational.
The game also has tons of extra tools, like a map editor and such, so you can make your own stuff. You can edit basically every part of the game if you're willing to invest enough time. There are really cool mods out there that totally change the content of the game, so that, for instance, it is based on the Star Wars universe.
CivIII is a commercial game, and it's somewhat old. There's a newer one, too, CivIV; it's still being built up with various expansions and such, I think. I've played it before, but only briefly. It might be a better overall game, but III is still a classic.

DARK OBERON
This is a real-time strategy game... there's not too much about it that's terribly unique, but the graphics are interesting; they made everything out of clay and then took pictures of it or something. It's pretty cool.
Unfortunately, the project seems to have totally died, and they didn't get all that far before that happened; there isn't even any AI, so you can only play against human players. I think you can play online or over a local network, but the first option is totally useless since next to nobody plays anymore.
Anyway. It's free / open-source, and it's worth looking at, if only to say "Aww, this could have been pretty cool."
The website is here: http://dark-oberon.sourceforge.net/

GLEST
Here is another RTS. I haven't played this one too much, but it's pretty cool.
I don't think it's very unique; RTSs in general seem to all be the same to me (I feel the same way, except to a greater extent, about FPSs). There's so much potential for them to be different, but most of the time they aren't.
Anyway, this one is solid, and it has a fairly interesting setting. You can choose to be the team that relies on technology, or the one that relies on magic. Then you go... command your armies to defeat the other people and such. Pretty regular and straightforward.
Glest is free, and the engine is also available for programmer-types to mess around with and make their own games. http://glest.org/en/index.php.

HOMEWORLD
This is an RTS. I think it would take too long for me to get familiar with it, so I'm not going to bother. If you want details, ask Seth about it, I guess.
I haven't played it myself, but what I've seen looks decent.
It's commercial, and pretty old, I think.

TALES OF PIRATES
I haven't played this. Oh, actually, maybe I have. But hardly at all.
It's an MMO. Seems pretty typical. Not too shabby. Interesting setting, I guess.
It's free. There's probably extra content you can pay for. http://top.igg.com/.

SCORCHED EARTH 3D
Scorched Earth is an old classic wherein you contorl a tank and bombard other tanks with various interesting weapons. The terrain is dynamic; it blows up when you shot it.
It's very similar to Worms, except it's not nearly as goofy, and you only control one tank.
This have been many updates and variants of the game. This one is 3D. It's pretty neat, and it's free. It might be open-source, too? You can get it here: http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/

CUSTOMER SERVICE ROBOT!
I downloaded this game purely because James Paige, one of my great heroes of the Internet, was one of the people who developed it.
Right now there's not a whole lot to it, but they plan to add more features and stuff, and what it is now is pretty fun.
You control a robot, and "provide customer service." For whatever reason, this consists of going to the building the person calling is in and completely leveling it. The customers seem to find this very helpful.
The gameplay is simple, but it's the little quirky things that make it fun. At the top of the screen, it has displays that say "Deaths:" and "Miraculous survivors:". The "Deaths" counter never goes up, but every time you smash things the "Miraculous survivors" increase.
This is a free game. http://motherhamster.org/index.php?title=Customer_Service_ROBOT!.

FLYFF
Ehh, it's an MMO. What can I say? For what it is, though, it's one of the best.
You go around and... kill monsters. Also, if you progress far enough, you can fly. It has sort of an interesting style. By "sort of", I mean that almost everyone wears a cool hat. There are other things that sort of make it different, but I can't think of them. Oh. One character fights with yoyos.
It's free. There's probably extra content you can purchase, but I don't remember. http://flyff.gpotato.com/.

GATE 88
This is a pretty cool game. It's a shooter with RTS elements... You control a space ship and blow stuff up, and then you can build stuff to improve your ship, defend your base, or attack the enemy.
The graphics are simple and different; I like them. The music is pretty cool too.
Gate 88 is freeware, and you can download it here: http://www.queasygames.com/gate88/

SLASH'EM
This is a sort of extended version of Nethack. It has more features (more playable classes and the like), but I don't know if I'd necessarily say it's better.
http://slashem.sourceforge.net/.

MABINOGI
I've talked about this before. I haven't played it in a really long time, but I will probably come back to it at some point. It's one of the only MMOs I've ever really liked.
It has a lot of interesting, unique things, and it doesn't put too large of an emphasis on improving your character like most MMORPGs, where you keep trying to progress, and you never really have any fun in the process.
Mabinogi is mostly free. There are quite a few features and such that you can't get without paying money, but there's still a good amount of stuff you can do for free. You can get it here: http://mabinogi.nexon.net/

MAPLE STORY
This is a 2D MMO. It's actually a really good one, but the problems with every MMORPG are pretty obvious here. That's why I haven't played it in a very long time.
Still, it has an interesting style... I think I liked the music in particular.
The game is free, but there's some special items and stuff you can pay for. http://maplestory.nexon.net/.

ZOOMBINIS
There are three of these games (as far as I know; those are the only ones I have, anyway). They're educational games, mostly, and I guess they're geared towards a much younger audience, but I enjoy them a lot. They involve logic puzzles, not things that focus on specific knowledge. And they're the sort of puzzles that change every time, too, so it's not like it's only fun the first time you play through it.
Anyway, they're fun. Goofy setting. I like the first and third ones better than the second, and overall, I think the puzzles in the first game are the most interesting.
All of the Zoombinis games are commercial.

THE BLACK KNIGHT
Ah, this is a Flash game I downloaded a very long time ago. Let's see if I can find it...
Ah, here we go: http://www.arcadetown.com/blackknight/gameinfo.asp
It's very silly. You play as a knight who is collecting taxes for the king (who wants to build a new sqimming pool) by smashing the living daylights out of all of the peasants.
It has this great visual style; very cartoonish.
The gameplay is very simple, but it's a lot of fun.

SOULFU
This is another ARPG made by Aaron Bishop (the original creator of Egoboo). It's similar in many ways, but it's also quite different. Your average person is going to prefer this game to Aaron's first effort, probably, because it has a more approachable look (cell-shaded, cartoony graphics as opposed to Egoboo's watercolory appearance) and a lot more polish. But it's more or less a finished game. Sure, it could be improved, but it doesn't have nearly as much potential as Egoboo.
So ignore what you might read online where people say "Forget Egoboo, Soulfu is a much better game!" because they're two very different things.
You can get Soulfu at http://www.aaronbishopgames.com/.

RUMBLE FIGHTER
This is another online fighting game. It's similar to Bots in many ways (so my complains that it gets boring after a while go for this one too). But it involves humans rather than robots, and generally seems to have more content. I'd say it's better, but it's still not necessarily a great game.
It's free, but (are you noticing a trend?) you can pay money for extra items and such. http://rf.ogplanet.com/.

N
Here we have an amazing -- and incredibly difficult -- platformer in Flash. It's been remade (/sequelified) for the Nintendo DS, PSP, and Xbox Live Arcade. I should be getting the DS version in the mail pretty soon here (I won a contest)...
It's not for everyone, of course, as it's a pretty hard game. But it's difficult to stop playing. It will frustrate you to no end, but it's so entertaining to watch your character explode when you die that it removes your desire to stop playing.
http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html.

ROM CHECK FAIL
Wow, this game is crazy. You start out as a character from some classic game; say Mario or Pac-Man. You control the character exactly as you you would if you were playing that character's game, and you kill your enemies in the same way. The enemies are also from some classic game, but not necessarily the game your character is from. They behave just like they would in their own game.
Your goal is to clear each level of enemies. Then you go on to the next level. If you beat all the levels (I don't remember how many there are; twentyish?) it starts over, only faster.
The really crazy part is that every few seconds, the background, the music, your character, and the enemies all change into something from a random game. So it's all very bizarre. And awesome.
ROM CHECK FAIL is free: http://www.farbs.org/games.html



...That's it for now.
In the future I will probably do more on this theme; all the Game Maker games I have, all the games I have but haven't installed on my computer yet, all the DS games I have, etc.

If you get any of these games, you should tell me about it.

What happened here?

...So I guess I owe you an explanation.

You can see that at the start of things, I was posting every day... then things dwindled... then I sort of got back into it, and now... I'm hardly ever posting.

The reason for this is that for a while, my blog was my primary project. I was willing to devote the time to putting in a lengthy post every day
Right now, I'm working on a ton of random stuff (I've been working on a game of my own, and some Egoboo stuff here and there).
It's not that I couldn't take time out of my day to post something, it's just that it wouldn't be interesting. I'm keeping my mind occupied, and I constantly have these ideas bouncing around in there for all of the different projects I'm working on. So there's not much room for dwelling on strange inconsistencies or annoyances that will eventually become the basis for a blog rant.

The point, then, is this:

My projects tend to run in "phases." You'll recall that at one point I was in a serious Egoboo "phase", and apparently I was into a pretty good game building phase at one point, as most of the games I have on YYG right now were posted in fairly quick succession. And as I already said, I was in a blog phase once, too. And I've been in ficiton-writing phases a couple of times.
Right now I'm in a "miscellaneous phase." I really don't know if I could say one thing is my "big project" right now... maybe I could, but that may not necessarily be true for very long.

Don't misinterpret this post. I don't mean that I'm putting my blog on hold, because it's not that I'm not trying. I've had an insightful post going for a while, and I've added bits and pieces to it now and then. I'll post it later on if it gets finished.
But right now, I'm just too serious about too many things to put much thought or effort into blogging.
Like I said, there's Egoboo. I want to start working seriously on the manual for that (in case I haven't mentioned it here, I'm rewriting the whole thing from scratch in order to make massive improvements).
Then there's my own game with the purple jelly. I'm determined to finish this one, so I want to keep working on it, even if progress is really slow (right now, it has been).
Then there's some other miscellaneous things that I don't feel like going into in detail right now, mostly because I can't remember what they are. =D
Plus, it's getting to be crunch time for the ACT; I'm taking that on the twenty-fifth.

Then I've been afflicted by an enormous distraction that manages to remove my focus from any task I try to perform. I know there are a lot of things that are contributing to this, but when I examine it, there's one portion that is much larger than any of the others.
I refuse to complain about it. That's childish and it accomplishes nothing (which, naturally, is why I only complain about things that are stupid, things that I know I cannot change, or stupid things I can't change).
I will, however, tell you (though I'm not going to go into the details) what I'm talking about. I remember one time I said "I won't be doing as many blog posts lately because I don't feel up to it and I don't want to tell you why" and that was stupid.
It's difficult to summarize a huge problem like this, but for what it's worth, here it is:
Our youth group is messed up, broken, and falling apart. Yes, you guys (if you're reading this, which is possible, though I think it unlikely), it is.
It really needs to be fixed, but it can't be if people refuse to fix it.
If something doesn't happen, things are going to get extremely miserable.
And they're not very pleasant as it is.



...That, then, is my explanation.
I hope to do more blog posts in the future, when I get more motivated. By "the future" I mean "it will be very strange if it gets to be a month or two from now and I have only posted two or three times after this."
So don't worry about it! I didn't say I wasn't posting at all, I said just not as often. And these "phases" I speak of are usually fairly short.

VPK collection 01.6

Download!
(This is actually in the old post now, too)

Replace the lame, obtusely large folder you have now. This is much better! It has .mp3s instead of .wavs. So it's smaller.
Not only that, but there are also two new chiptunes.



...Real posts will come later, though possibly not until I come back from the trip tomorrow.