My friends and I here at UK are rabid Settlers of Catan players. So, it was with unbridled excitement that we broke open Seafarers of Catan on Saturday night. The additions to the game are really pretty minor, but they give the game quite a bit more depth and make it even more entertaining.
Playing the basic scenario forces players to re-value the Wool resource, which was probably the least-valued resource in the game from our experience. The need to build ships to get off the mainland for extra victory points and access to gold probably balances out the resources. With the addition of ships, each resource except Ore and Brick are needed to build 3 of the 5 units in the game, Ore and Brick only 2. However, the importance of roads and settlements in the early game counterbalance this for Brick. Likewise, the importance of cities in the end game counterbalance this for Ore.
In general, we had a hell of a time playing Seafarers. We even fudged a bit and played a massive totally random 5 player game of Settlers/Seafarers, with player 5's pieces being made of well-crafted... paper. It was extremely fun, with Brandon absolutely slaughtering the rest of us. We ended up playing like 5 games, until roughly 10 a.m., when we hit up breakfast at the K-Lair. Mmm.
So, as I mentioned before, I went to go see Mates of State tonight. Before tonight, I thought of Mates of State as a very solid band. But their live show is awesome, and I think they've managed to entrench themselves as one of my favorite bands. Perhaps not top 20, but up there. I really dig this stuff.
They opened up with one of my favorite songs, "Whiner's Bio", and played through just about all of their latest album, Team Boo. They played some older material as well. For me, though, the highlight of their set was the closer: an absolutely amazing cover of Nico's "These Days", which is actually one of my favorite songs of all time. Jason sang, no drumming. And Kori's organ was beautiful. That made the whole fucking night.
Mates of State's stage presence is really quite cool. You watch them play, and they're just staring each other down. It's so readily apparent that the two (husband and wife) are in love with each other, and it totally spills over into the music. It's great.
Also of note were the opening bands and the swag I managed to net. I can't say much about the swag until next I see Blake. He missed the show, but I've got a kickass gift for him. :)
The local bands were very good. Summer Melts Faster started out with a pretty rocking set to warm up the crowd. They're sort of a post-punk inflected At The Drive-In. Quite good. The second band really blew me away, though. Ulysses, typically a quartet, was missing their drummer for this show. The result was a much more subdued guitar/synth/synth act that absolutely rocked. Really awesome lyrics, great guitar, and these awesome layered synth sounds. It reminded me of Galaxie 500. But it rocked flat out. And the guys were really cool.
All in all, I had a great night. A lot of fun. The Mates set just left me feeling very positive. I've been in a great mood all night. It's great. Awesome music. Awesome night. It's good.
Walking back from class just now, I had a thought: would it be possible for a language to be purely semantic, that is, with absolutely no syntactic structures? The conclusion I came to was that, yes, it would be possible, but only theoretically. The language would have to have a symbol for every possible expression. That's extremely impractical. But maybe I'm missing something.
Another related question: what is the minimal syntactic structure needed for a language to be (and I'm making this term up) "linguistically complete" (think Turing complete, but for human expression)?
Also of note: I'm going to see the band Mates of State tonight. I rather like the band. They're quite quirky, and their music is fantastic. More when I get back tonight.
Sigh. And apparently Blake Ellis isn't coming. But, as he already knows, I'm going to go anyway. :D
In exciting pseudo-spiritual news, Slashdot reports that the seminal Monty Python movie The Life of Brian is being rereleased in theaters. Woo. BBC story is here.
Yes. "Always look on the bright side of life..." did pop into my head towards the end of The Passion of the Christ, which was otherwise quite a good film. And, yes, I am a terrible person. :)
Currently listening to some of the most exciting new music I've heard in a while. The band Ratatat is this sort of indie rock outfit inflected with kick-ass electronics. It's really awesome stuff. I'm sort of at a loss to make a good comparison. I guess in spirit they're a little like Stereolab, but less disco français and more of the Pixies, I guess. That's just a stab in the dark at a description, but don't let that stop you. Listen to this stuff. It's awesome.
Picked up a 160 GB external hard drive today. Not a bad deal, really. I finally have room for all those MST3K episodes I've wanted to download... :)
As I near the end of my junior year in college, it seems inevitable that I'll be going to graduate school. As such, I really appreciate this link, a pretty good web-comic about the life of grad students. Quite funny.
Posting that last thing from a WinXP box, I noticed that my page doesn't show up quite right in IE. Gaah. The title of each post is supposed to permalink to the actual entry's individual archive page, but the link is not supposed to change color on rollover. And on archive pages, the main header is is supposed to link back to the main page, but it is supposed to be white, as normal, and it shouldn't change color on rollover either. I'll have to fix that, eventually...
Well, after a good week+ of doing absolutely nothing, I'm about to head back to Lexington, for spring break is over. I'm sad. Really.
The week was good. Hung out with Blake a couple of times. Made it through more of Tad's copy of Final Fantasy III than I thought I would. Oh how much fun that game is. I remembered it fondly from childhood, but I appreciate it much more now. This time around, for example, I think the overwhelming emotion when Rachel left Locke was sadness, not utter thrill over getting a new piece of Magicite (although Esper-Lust is still rampant! :)
Well, I still need to pack up. Stay tuned later for my thoughts on The Passion of the Christ and also probably me complaining about how terrible CS 405 homework is.
One last thing before I go to bed.
Curious, I just searched google for my name. Now, back in the day, during the height of the first iteration of this very blog, I was listed number one, the very pinnacle of "zach may"-search-relatedness. Now, I'm not even on the second page.
That's awful.
So, if you are reading this (and at this point, admittedly that's probably no one), and you have a blog or other website type thing, please please link me.
I must reclaim my throne.
There can be only one.
I'm awfully melodramatic for 5:41 a.m. :)
Ok, I've made some major progress getting this thing up and running. All the archive pages should be working now. I think I still need to iron out some bugs as far as the informational panels on the right side of this page and the individual archive pages, but for now it's not very important.
Anyway, it's about 5:30, I think I should get some sleep. School starts back Monday. Man, spring break was way to short.
I'm feeling a little depressed. That happens when I listen to just about anything Mark Kozelek ever recorded. That's not to say listening to Mark Kozelek is a necessary condition for me feeling down, it's just that I always end up playing the Red House Painters or Sun Kil Moon when I'm feeling bad. Anyway, here's the song "Carry Me Ohio", by Sun Kil Moon, of the album Ghosts of the Great Highway, an excellent listen... if you're in that kind of mood.
No one seriously needs on of these.
I'm posting this from a sweet little OS X program called NetNewsWire. It's basically the ultimate blogging tool: subscribe to a Blog's RSS Feed, read posts, and even post to your own site. It's cool.
I'm so excited about renewed blogging that I think I'll take a minute to talk about my current musical adventures:
I'm currently listening to a band called Ganymede. They're synthpop. I've been quite into synthpop lately. Ganymede is quite good. Really, they sound like Apoptygma Berzerk and the like, but without being overly Industrial/Goth. This is a good thing, as I love the sound of AB and others of that ilk.
Listening to Ganymede's album Space And Time, I must say all the tracks (at least on the first disc, I haven't listened to much of the second, a remix disc. What I have heard is pretty good Euro-ish dance stuff, though.) are worthy listens, if you're into the genre. The highlights for me are:
- Hong Kong. This song reminds me of something, I can't put my finger on it.
- Frequency 1000. Lovely vocoder intro. And I'm sucker for vocoders!
- Daylight
I'm quite excited to hear more of this band, and similar groups. Once I get some more hard disk space, I'm probably going to check out the bands Isis and Neuropa. Because Neuropa is a damn cool name for a band.
Okay, as you can see, I've found the old template files for the blog. I still had some of the database information laying around in my CoE home directory. Had to wade through binary files in vi to find the chunk that actually represented the template. There may be some bugs hanging around though.
Also of note, archives are now working. I'm planning on fixing up the right-hand information panels. Moveable Type now offers archiving by category, so I'm going to play around with that. That way, you can read, say, just my elitist music rantings, or just my complaints about how terrible school is, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Anyway, I'm pleased with the progress I've made so far. And quite happy about the new domain name and all. :)
I'll be the first to admit that I went to perhaps two basketball games my whole high school career. However, my old school's basketball team actually made it to the State tournament this year. Big excitement in my hometown, let me tell you. There was even an article in the Lexington newspaper (well, not to mention, the weekly local paper was practically dedicated to the Morgan County Cougar basketball team.)
So, it was pretty exciting. The game was Thursday night, and disappointingly we lost by about twenty to Perry Co. Central. Our guys made about 1000 too many turovers. Can't win games that way, no sir.
Anyway, that's my local sports blog of the year. Thank you.
Well, after the College of Engineering's computer people decided to put lame 10MB quotas on all the student accounts, Sector 42, the original Zach/Blog, was forced to shut down, since I had at least 30MB of content created by that point.
So, after a brief stint at LiveJournal, which is way too utterly emo/teeny-bopper for my tastes, I dropped some cash for a suitable domain name and hosting. So Sector 42 is reborn. I have a bit of debugging to do, and I have to hunt down the old template files I was using and recreate them here. But for all intents and purposes, the Second Age of Zach Blogging has begun. Wee.