Locoluis's activity log.

SmackDown vs RAW 2010: FAIL

2009-11-02T14:24:03Z

Huge rant about the just-released wrestling game from THQ.

Well, they improved several aspects of the game, including new match and tournament types. The new achievement system for created wrestlers is a mixed blessing, though: although you have more freedom into what aspects of your created wrestler you want to improve, you can easily raise most of your stats to 99 and still earn plenty of points with which you can't do anything at all. This both breaks balance and leaves an uncomfortable sense of " well, so what? ". In 2009, raising a wrestler's attributes beyond a certain point was hard enough to prevent most abuse, which seems better now than before.

However, I'm writing this because it seems that WWE got news of one of my lesser pasttimes of 2009, namely humilliating WWE superstars by defeating them in legend dificulty with a created wrestler with substandard attributes and well-thought moves who insolently refuses to be called a "Diva" and to appear in public wearing unsubtly revealing clothes.

They took action against such blatant defacement of their spirit, and made many changes to their 2010 release in order to enforce their fantasy world ideals:

- They created a special kind of match, "Mixed Match", in which you can tag a "Superstar" and a "Diva" against another tag of "Superstar" and "Diva".
- The catch is, once the tag is made, the other team must also tag, because the legal wrestlers must be of the same gender at the same time. If a team doesn't comply after a count of five, it's disqualified.

This seems to be buggy, though. My female wrestler (i'm not using the term "Diva" to address her, since that would be humiliating) refused to comply, and instead decided to apply her finisher to the superstar who just entered the ring; this caused the referee's count to stop; she could even have won the match by pinning him, though this was prevented by the diva's intervention. Later, however, i made a man-to-woman tag, and then my female wrestler continued attacking the superstar without letting him tag, and this caused my tag team to be disqualified.

- That's the only way a diva could ever hope to face a superstar. Single matches are one gender only, you can't select an opponent of the opposite gender.
- Career mode, which in 2009 allowed divas fights for all but one of the championships, is also gender only. Which sucks for divas since there are only two belts and no opponent offers a real challenge (My female wrestler moped the floor with all ten divas easily, and didn't even reach 45 points overall).

That's my biggest gripe with this game. Only male fighters are allowed to fight their way to the top and to get any respect. The ladies are nothing but mere ornaments, pulling each other's hair and doing some show to satisfy the audience's most perverted desires, and their actual fighting skills are sad. I'm a man, and I find this disgusting and sexist.

Unfortunately, WWE still has the most detailed, realistic Create-a-Fighter system in the market, or at least the one I most like. I tried Soul Calibur III, MK: Armageddon and UFC Sudden Impact (with, AFAIR, only male created wrestlers, as Erica Montoya is the only female fighter in the universe...)'s Create-a-Fighter systems, and I wasn't happy with the results. Honestly, I haven't looked much, since I can't afford to buy computer games at all - all games I can play belong to somebody else.

Much less, say, create one that's half decent. 15 years ago, I thought I had a calling to create a fighting game with a fighter creation system. I was wrong, naturally, that's not something a lone man with diverse interests can do in his spare time. It requires something the size of, say, THQ. However, I still dream with something like, well, KOF: Maximum Impact 2 with a create-a-fighter system (like that of the WWE games, except with more size/weight/hair length options, less wrestling attire and more real world attire), less fireballs and more tournament types. And, please, balance. There are too many munchkins who want their created fighter to be more powerful than Rugal or, worse, Igniz.

Until someone like SNK (or maybe Capcom or Konami) decides to finally board the - rather successful - user created content bandwagon, I'm not optimistic about seeing this dream come true.

Failed try at leaving something for the future

2009-10-23T21:31:00Z

Clearly I need to try better.

Note to self:

2009-10-05T20:25:43Z

Instead of reinventing the wheel:
	try reading the fscking Inform 7 documentation.

locoluis @ 2009-09-22T16:02:00

2009-09-22T20:06:23Z

8F 5F 57 6E 6A 7E 48 6F 00
EB A4 B9 B4 F3 B6 EC B9 00
67 59 02 00 8F 5F 57 6F 00
D5 A1 A4 A8 FC EF A4 A8 FC 00
6E 00 D5 A1 F3 00 67 59 02

Hint: The message contains no Latin-1 characters, and it's trivial to decrypt.

I have a word against stupid URL filters.

2009-09-22T00:49:54Z

Classics.

Oh, and who the heck puts a power off button right below a delete button!?!?!?!?

Dear Google

2009-09-16T17:54:40Z

I know I've failed the Turing test a bunch of times, and that I exhibit a chaotic, bot-like thirst for information.

I think I might have some mental disorder. I can't put my finger on it yet, but given how certain things don't make sense to me and how certain things that make sense to me don't make sense to anyone else, among other things, I think I lost my mind.

Whatever the case, I know I don't have a normal search behavior. I tend to just follow whatever seems shiny at that moment, often profoundizing, ruminating and being too curious about the world outside my imagination. One of many reasons that keep me playing with little toys and talking to imaginary friends instead doing whatever men in their thirties do, thinks like having sex, raising a family, going to parties, etc. I know little about such things.

I would also like to make it clear, once and for all, that despite all of the above, I'm still a human.

And I'm already getting tired of decyphering that unreadable captcha scribble and clicking the "I'm human!" button.

☧

2009-09-08T14:33:17Z

Ο Χριστός δεν έχει σημασία για αυτούς, μόνο που νοιάζονται για χρυσό.

locoluis @ 2009-08-31T15:13:00

2009-08-31T19:16:55Z

All there is to know about that site's shutdown is at the relevant forum. I won't further about it, sorry.

On why I haven't updated Sueños del Sur lately...

2009-08-24T18:42:06Z

The skinny: what I found publishable 10 years ago, today I find it's crap.

I had to cut off and edit a great amount of this chapter, one of the longest in Sueños del Sur. A lot of such length is comprised of dialogue, of which a larger amount is... uh...

Think of a nearly 11 years old girl discussing with a 9 years old boy of serious matters. Both are stubborn and think they're right and the other one is wrong. And it goes on and on for hours, while their 15 years old brother is snickering at them both and slipping jokes in the middle of the heat of the discussion, and their nearly 13 years old sister is... off somewhere else, looking at the clouds and the little birds.

And, from place, to place, I find stuff that's wrong. Stuff that's not just decidedly out of character, but also threatens the very fabric of the Sueños del Sur universe. To be fair, the stuff I've been publishing since October 2007 is not quite clean and correct; just look at the house's front window. But this...

Oh, and I think I found out the cause of this trouble. The very idea behind publishing Sueños del Sur in webcomic form was just a lame excuse to let that out of my system just so I could forget about it and move on with my life. Oh, and to do so without actually doing any writing. An idea that, today, I find disgusting and mediocre.

I'm ruining this story, folks. It's probably the work of my life, and I'm turning it into a pile of poo. If I keep doing what I've been doing, I will keep having the same problems, turning a solution into a problem, over and over again, fixing little things instead of focusing on the big one. You know what I should do? STOP IT.

I'll keep what I've done so far online for a while, but Sueños del Sur as a webcomic is officially over, folks, at least in its current form. I'll revise the whole thing, as a serious work, and if I have to add or delete scenes, episodes, chapters or even characters, then so be it.

Oh, and this is very important. Once I'm done with polishing my story and it's ready to be published in a satisfactory form, only *then* I'll consider translating it to English. Foch.

prototype

2009-08-06T17:30:32Z

myClass = function(param)
{
    this.counter = 0;
    /* ... */
    this.timeout = setTimeout(this.refresh.bind(this), 1000);

    this.refresh = function()
    {
        /* this is the right this */
        this.counter++;
    }
}

locoluis @ 2009-07-31T14:21:00

2009-07-31T18:26:47Z

My mind's "surreality simulation subsystem" (a.k.a. "dreams engine") is somehow programmed to give better, more realistic, involving and lasting performance during the morning, from 06:00 to 12:00.

Unfortunately, I'm supposed to do other things during that timespan. Like, say, showing up at work...

I wish I could reprogram it somehow. Like, say, from 00:00 to 06:00. Oh, that would rule...

Lost in the forest, away from home, in my dreams...

2009-07-29T22:55:22Z

Oh, this story in Sueños del Sur... if I flip the page and start with the entries for Monday, January 16, 1995, I find stuff so vile and unspeakably horrible that I can't understand under what circumstances I could ever be capable to pull that stuff.

From that mess I can rescue, well, maybe four particular events... and how about I just throw away the rest and replace it with something that doesn't give me a headache when I try to read it?

Next update will instead feature a single scene of the four kids walking towards the camera, while I sort this out...

locoluis @ 2009-07-23T09:33:00

2009-07-23T14:15:13Z

“There are ‘extremists’ in the free software world, but that’s one major reason why I don’t call what I do ‘free software’ any more. I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred.” - Linus Torvalds.

locoluis @ 2009-07-17T13:31:00

2009-07-17T17:33:08Z

... get a fucking degree or get my fries! Your choice...

New format for Sueños del Sur

2009-07-13T23:01:20Z

Posted on Saturday and Monday. I won't call this a success until I can consistently post a mid-week update.

It's not just a matter of schedule; the story calls for it.

locoluis @ 2009-07-06T17:44:00

2009-07-06T22:08:13Z

Imagine a large army of nameless minions for a great big blue organization.

They're armed with a gadget, one unit per head. This gizmo doesn't just let them communicate between each other, call back $HOME, or take beautiful (and not-so-beautiful) pictures and videos.

Point that thing to some place, and let it take a picture. It'll answer with lots of information about the place in front of you, including a map view (with directions from $HERE to interesting places) and what other minions are saying about such place(s). Of course, you too can add your bits to the massive knowledge database.

"Welcome to live coverage of just about everything." That's their message to the world.

Last thing I know about them, they invaded Wimbledon. God knows what's their next stop, and what surprise will they bring with them next time.

Switch

2009-07-06T19:20:44Z

I can't adapt this story to webcomic format as I'm doing now. Not with my work and class schedule.

Therefore, the next one will feature a mixture of text and graphics similar to an illustrated novel. Which is what Sueños del Sur was meant to be in the first place.

Pros: Truer to the original format of this story, more narrative detail that might be lost in the conversion to webcomic form, search engine friendly, more content for each update, maybe even more updates per unit of time. Also, speech balloons often tend obscure important details, which made them awkward to use for me.
Cons: Less images, ComicGenesis might not like this(?)...

If I do this well, maybe I can fix some of my lack-of-free-time problems too! Wish me luck.

Edit: What do you think of this page format? I think I like it, but let's see how it actually looks as an update to Sueños del Sur...

House, M.D. Season 3 Episode 22

2009-07-03T22:23:23Z

"Addie" was played by an actress named Lyndsy Fonseca. She was born January 7, 1987.

3-22 was aired on May 8, 2007. Which makes her just 20 years old back then.

... darn, she's cute.

@font-face

2009-07-01T19:19:49Z

Testing @font-face support in Firefox 3.5

I also hereby claim the 4096 Private-Use Unicode characters U+FC000 to U+FCFFF for use in my personal projects.

I broke my promise of non-self-inclusion

2009-06-24T14:21:58Z

Well, not really, since that's not a character, just an illustration of a fear.

Anyways, that's me, as I looked like around 1995. At least I updated. it's been sluggish now with all those tests and class reports...

In other news, this sunday I went to visit my grandmother. She had a trombosis, and we were all scared for her life, but she's okay now, and no longer in the hospital. She still has one side of her body slightly paralyzed, and needs to pass through a rehabilitation process, but it could have been much worse.

One of my sisters went to live with her (and an aunt that I don't like), so we'll be ready in case anything bad happens.

Hebei! :D

2009-06-19T20:36:10Z

This is for you:

http://abowman.com/google-modules/turtle/

Twitter and ignorance about Iran

2009-06-19T18:21:32Z

Specifically, it has come to my knowledge that there are twitterfolk, complete with green icons and stuff, that are using the Iran events as an excuse to... bash Islam.

As a female twitter user insightfully noted, "The people you want to help are muslims after all...they just have a crappy gov't.". I thought that was obvious since, well, the "green" in their icons is a symbol of Islam after all. But many people are just too... ignorant.

Ignorant, and quick to yell without knowing what they're talking about. Which gives me a headache.

Edited Oh, the irony. I thought I made my homework, and wrote "Iran free" in Arabic (Square Kufi script) in my icon. It's Persian, not Arabic, what I should have looked for. It's fixed now.

Stupid drone

2009-06-15T21:20:58Z

That lady over the phone insisted to talk with a "Luisa González Miranda", and kept addressing me as "Mrs".

This keeps happening to me, but this time I told her that my name was Luis, and she kept thinking I was a she.

I should MMS a mugshot of me with this full beard, but that will only make her assume I'm a bearded woman from some circus.

Oh, and she was supposed to ask for my personal information so she could update it. Bah. If she can't even read her console correctly (It's says "Luis A.", not "Luisa"), it's very likely that she will turn my profile into garbage.

Hence, I refused to give in.

Stupid drone.

To heck with it.

2009-06-15T13:54:57Z

Analysis shmalanysis. You know what? The script is just a guideline, I'll just go with what's in my mind, and draw this storyline as I saw it in my imagination. After all, this comic is named "Sueños del Sur", it wasn't supposed to be realistic at all in the first place.

What motivated the realistic wave that invaded me up to last week? Oh, I know what was it. It was ME. Fool. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's not outside, it's INSIDE, fool. Note to self: don't plan another of those "visits" to the south for the comic's sake. There's the Internet for pictures and other information, don't waste your money.

Oh, and also to heck with the "new site design". The English version of Sueños del Sur now has the same design as the official one. Which is the way it should have been since the first day I moved the English version to ComicGenesis.

If I ever try to redesign the site again, I won't upload a half-working hacked-up version again. I'll just stick with what I know, and test it thoroughly before uploading it.

Statistics...

2009-06-09T18:00:54Z

I found a website that, given a sample from a random variable, will show graphically how such data is distributed. The procedure is called Kernel Density Estimation, and I haven't seen that in any of my statistics courses. I also found a website that will compute your ideal weight based on age (including children) and height.

I took age, height and weight data from certain event in Sueños del Sur (that happens close to the end of the story), and calculated the difference between each person's actual and ideal weight. I fed said difference to the website in order to find its distribution.

The website showed me a nearly symmetrical mountain-shaped curve. A single outlier to the left, two dense zones at each side of the center, and some outliers to the right. Not exactly a bell-shaped curve, but considering the small sample and the nature of the data fed, I'm happy with the results.