The Long Road

Archives: October 2007

Friday, October 26, 2007

I know that title is currently reserved for Bioshock or Super Mario Galaxy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's Warcraft 3's custom map DOTA. Defence of the Ancients is a user created and updated map run on Warcraft 3. Like all good games, it's easy to pick up the basics, but hard to master the intricacies. I've been playing DOTA on and off since around 2004 and it's never gotten stale; each new match is a new experience with an unpredictable outcome. There are almost 90 unique characters to choose from, with 10 player matches, that's 90c10 possible game scenarios.

I love the intense high of victory and the ignominy of defeat that makes me say "We will have our revenge!" (ie "RM!!!"). There's also no feeling quite as satisfying as the successful execution of a trap or seeing your character do so well that he can go against 2-3 opponents at once. My favourite characters include Razor who can unleash endless bolts of lightning to accumulate thousands of dollars, or Mercurial who's the best character to suddenly ambush opponents running away from a fight, and Lina Inverse, the Hermione of DOTA, her incredible array of magic spells can kill an opponent in one salvo. Of course there's also the Lich King who can own your soul for just 3 cents a day.

I don't know what the total number of players worldwide is for the game, but it's surely huge. When you log onto battle.net to play a custom game, the vast majority of open games will be DOTA. It is, by far, the most played and visible map on battle.net. If you don't own warcraft 3, you should get it just to play this game. If you do own Warcraft 3 and have never played this...what the heck?! It's the best game not on a Nintendo console, Cuz those are on a seperate plane of quality that other games can't even think about. *bows*.

It randomly occured to me that Dota would make for an incredible XBOX Live game. The experience of playing it on a large screen with HD graphics would be all that and a bag of chips. The only difficulty would be in translating the mouse and keyboard controls to a dual analog scheme, but consoles have been making huge strides towards RTS feasibility so I'm sure something like DOTA could easily be done.

Posted by Long @ 04:42 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [2 comments]

Monday, October 15, 2007

So I was trying to pick what to wear the other day when it occured to me that this is what girls must feel like. I've never really had to choose what to wear before, it's usually just a simple of matter of grabbing clean shirt and pants and putting them on. You know why girls have this problem? They have way too much clothes! I've seen some go on for months at a time without doing laundry. That's pretty crazy.

Last year, I made the conscious decision to have two weeks worth of clothes. Amongst other things, this also meant the acquision of several pairs of underwear and many hundreds of dollars in clothes. But it was all worth it! I don't know how I ever had time with having to do laundry every week. Nowadays, I'm on a 12-13 day cycle (it's just too dangerous to be down to your last pair of underwear! what happens if something comes up and you don't have time to do a wash!?), but it's starting to feel like it's too short of a span. With all of my recent clothes purchases (syracuse! viet nam!), I think I can make it a whole month now (especially in colder weather when there's more clothing that's useable), but to reach this milestone, I'll have to buy more socks and boxers tonight. I'm conflicted on whether I should buy 1 or 2 more week's worth. I'm not exactly sure if I can make a full 4 weeks without doing laundry. There's an oddly satisfying feeling to doing large loads of laundry, though. It's like I've accomplished something major. But still, this can't really compare with this one girl's mass of clothes where she can do a full load of just underwear, or Karine's 200 pair of jeans.

How about you guys, how long can you make it without having to wash your clothes?

Posted by Long @ 11:07 AM EST [Link] [Karma: 9 (+/-)] [2 comments]

Thursday, October 11, 2007

HERE. Also, Picasa is pretty cool. The combination of web-interface and windows application make it extremely easy to upload, organize, and share pictures.

Anyways, I liked my presentation of the pictures from my trip to China a lot more, but I had way more free time back then.

Posted by Long @ 12:52 PM EST [Link] [Karma: 6 (+/-)] [No Comments]

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

If there's one word I feel after coming back from Viet-Nam, it's this: Retarded. Okay, not really. More like "guilty". Cost of living, and all prices in general, are dirt cheap there. Meals for 30 cents, custom tailored shirts for 10$, prescription glasses for 25$, full service hair cuts for 1$. Everything is super cheap. I feel utterly silly coming back here to Canada and spending 2$ on a coffee, 8$ on a sub, 40$ on shirts that don't quite fit as well. It's just senseless, I'm never going to buy anything here again that I can just fly over to developing countries and buy for a tenth of the price. Getting 2 pairs of glasses for under 50$, 2 suits, 3 pants, and 3 shirts all tailor made for under 250$ basically saves me enough money to justify the plane ticket.

And this is where the Guilt part comes in. I have family there and they're not exactly leading the high-life. There's a reason why we came to Canada, after all, and it wasn't for the snow nor the skinny white girls. One of my aunt makes about 125$ per month, which even figuring in the difference in purchasing power does not seem like enough to live comfortably with 2 kids. And here I am budgetting myself 100$ per week for eating out and drinking. If I manage to curb my enthusiasm a little bit and send just 100$ her way each month, I could almost DOUBLE her monthly income and make a huge difference in her quality of life. I've never sent money back home before though, and now I can't help but think back to all the times I had disposable income and spent it on ridiculous shit instead of helping out family.

The problem is there's LOTS of family. My mom has 7 siblings, and 7 nephews/nieces. I can't exactly just send money to my favourite aunt without everyone else finding out and feeling left out. And sending money to everyone is just well out of my income bracket. I've come up with a plan though, set a couple of things in motion and if this all works out, it will be the greatest thing I've ever done.

Posted by Long @ 09:20 AM EST [Link] [Karma: -2 (+/-)] [11 comments]

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