::A Geek in Korea::

It’s been a fairly annoyance free week in Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Since I didn’t have much else to do, I decided to check out some games I’ve enjoyed in the past. I’ve been trying, off and on for quite some time now, to find a rogue-like game that suits me. I don’t like Nethack, and can’t bear something having an excessive number of elves and Tolkien. While I like IVAN I haven’t given it a try in Linux. Besides, that thing has actual *graphics*. Pssh, graphical roguelikes? Might as well play Diablo.

Along the way bouncing from one version of Ubuntu to another , I’ve discovered “Lindsey’s Dungeon Crawl“. This is a full on ASCII rogue like. Characters are all represented by It’s got the standard “delve into the underworld, get the Orb of Zot from some baddie, the return to the surface” style plot (AKA: none, the way I like it.)

What originally got me started playing this game was the fact that I could watch it being played at crawl.akrasiac.org without installing anything. In theory I could learn how to play and get better at it. I’m aware that watching people play this game makes me the King Geek of the Internet. You want to talk about geeky? Watching Starcraft on television regularly is pretty bad. Watching ASCII based RPG games via telnet consoles? There is no meter as to judge how geeky that is. It’s seriously that far off the charts.

To play the game, all you need to do is pick a race, pick a profession,the go hack up some monsters. If you are as bad as I am, you’ll die often and restart. Simple, short, and quick to get (re)started. Print off a list of keyboard commands and get started.

I knew I was in for some problems when even hardcore players of the genre call this game “difficult”. Here is how hard this game is: At the moment, my highest scoring character is someone that ran out of the first level of the dungeon, quiting the game by returning to the surface without the Orb of Zot. Basically, my BEST character committed suicide on the first level rather than being inevitably slain by monsters. I’m so bad at this game, a character committing suicide by running away to quit the game is valued at four times the progress I’ve made so far in reaching my goal. That’s a tough game.

I’ve never been any good at any game in this entire genre. I play too recklessly because I’ve never gotten far enough to care about one of the characters survival. I also don’t know how to play well enough to get far in the game. Once I got over the controls, I didn’t have any difficulty playing the game, other than being absolutely terrible.

Games aside, I’m still using Linux as my day to day OS of choice. I haven’t booted into Windows in a week. My parents are set to call me over Skype, so I’ll need to eventually fire Windows back up so we can video chat. Also, Windows recognizes my microphone, unlike Linux. I’ve consumed all the media on my portable D2, so I’ll need to boot back into Windows to encode more videos.

I tried out Avidemux which looks like it should be able to do the video encoding I need, but there are too many options and settings I need to figure out. Any Cowon D2 owners want to help me out? I’ve got videos resized to 320×240 but that’s about it. When I load them up on the D2 they just skip or lock up the machine. What should the container files be? The codecs to use while transcoding? Anything?

I had some guests over today. One of the people in question had a severe dog phobia, to the point where a small dog like Yoshi could make her cry and go hysterical. I’ll never understand this behavior. I put Yoshi out on the apartment veranda. He hadn’t had his walk during the day, so he was a little excitable.

The other non panic prone guest was on the couch while I was helping calm the person down at the dinner table, offering something to drink. The person on the couch looked at me uncomfortably and said, “Your dog…is eating his own poo on the veranda now.”

No sooner had I got out to prevent this, than I had a knock at the door. The dry cleaner delivery, the reason we were waiting at the house had arrived. I had to quickly run to the bathroom, take off the plastic gloves, and answer the door, pay the guy, hang up the clothes, and run back to finish up cleaning the mess from the dog. It was rather frantic, and my guests were taken for a surprise.

After all that cleaning and running around, it’s kind of hard to pick up a conversation about how having a dog is great. Right now as I type it’s a rough sell for me, as my dog has gas from his little “meal” earlier, and he’s stinking up the entire room the computer and his cage share.