Beautiful Creatures ( Tragic Disappointment )

Me and my girlfriend are both fans of this book series. I have read the entire series and am not ashamed to say I really, thoroughly enjoyed every moment I spent reading them. So naturally, I see this is coming out on Valentine's Day and I figure "Okay, this will be the perfect end to a wonderful day." Never have I been more wrong.

There were so many things wrong with this movie from the get-go and I can only hope that the horror stops here. I won't give away anything that spoils the story yet, that's below. But I will say that I really hope director Richard LaGravenese's career ends here. He twisted this movie into something that should have never been. I understand there are things that just simply cannot be feasibly done in cinema to create the reality that you'd expect from a beloved book series. But Richard didn't even try.

Let's start with a list of character that didn't appear in the movie or whose importance was completely undermined and ignored: Marian, Boo Radley, Ethan's Mom, Ethan's Dad, The Sisters, The Postman and I'm sure there are others I have missed. Within the first 15 minutes of the movie, I knew this was just going to be getting worse and worse. They didn't take liberties with the movie, they completely changed it into something else. This wasn't a movie for the fans, this was a movie for Hollywood to try and cash in on an idea. Which, I'm thinking even that is going to bite them in the ass.

[Spoilers Below This Point, possibly into further books]

Alright, now I'll get into some of the details that REALLY bothered me the most. First and foremost, I understand that Kelting was something deep and personal for Ethan and Lena and not something they could have probably easily portrayed in the movie, but I'm sure it COULD have been done. They completely ignored this connection they had from the beginning of the movie. It undermines the whole "destiny" aspect of their relationship. Just uuuugh.

Then there's the whole Amma being a keeper and a seer debacle. Come on. That just doesn't work lore-wise. It just doesn't. Amma got too involved and she got burned, now she's even MORE doomed to be involved.

Then they go and completely undermine the importance of Sixteen Moons which in turns, proves that they have no intention of bringing out the importance of Lily Wate in the rest of the story, if they ever go there.

Also, did they just kill Sarafine? Really? One of the main antagonists in the whole series? Dafuq is all I can say there.

Then the ending is just...what the hell were they doing with that? That, to me, signals that they don't care to tell any more of this story. Which is fine by me, considering what they've done to this one. I won't ruin the ending for you, I think the director does a fine job of that.

Overall, you can tell I'm pretty butthurt over the whole thing. It was a highly disappointing end to what was otherwise a great Valentine's Day. I hope everyone else had a good day as well and that your night ended better than mine :P

So, did you see this movie? If so, have you read the books before-hand? Did you love it/hate it? Let me know if the comments below.

Codeigniter RPG Tutorial Part 1

As promised, I told you I'd have something new and different coming down the line. I've recently had the pleasure of working with Codeigniter for the first time. Codeigniter is a lightweight php model-view-controller framework intended to provide maximum flexibility while still giving you all the tools and options you would expect from an MVC framework.

I used Codeigniter recently on a local project and thoroughly enjoyed in the experience compared to all of the other frameworks I have used in the past. I like how it doesn't force certain practices and conventions on you but still gives you the same workflow that you'd be used to if you've used an MVC framework in the past.

What I'm aiming for in this project is to introduce more people to CI and show solutions to many questions and problems I ran into during development but in a fun, practical way. This series of tutorials is aimed at intermediate to advanced programmers/web developers. You should at least know basic php/oop conventions and know how to work with database structures. I will explain things as I go and be sure to comment code, but will not explain things that would often be considered basic.

Setup

In order to follow this tutorial, you will need two things:

• Access to Php/mysql server. If you do not have your own webserver, you can set up something simple and private for yourself with XAMPP.
• To download the codeigniter framework (currently 2.1.3)
• To download the Codeigniter Tank Auth plugin

Once you have downloaded codeigniter, go ahead and unzip it and copy it either to the server you'll be working from or the webroot directory in XAMPP (c:\xampp\htdocs\ by default)

Once you've done that, you'll want to do the same with the Tank Auth zip file and upload it to the root as well, overwriting any files or folders it asks you to. Your folder setup should look like this:

Now, we need to do something with that schema file. Tankauth relies on a specific database structure for good login security, so next we'll need to set that up and accommodate for those requirements.

What we'll need to do, is create a database first and import the schema.sql into your mysql database. Below is an image showing how to do that in popular database management program Phpmyadmin.

You may not have to do steps one and two if you have a host like Hostgator that manages your mysql for you. Whatever your setup, be sure you note the full name of the database that you create, as it will be needed to finish the configure.

There is just one more thing we'll want to configure and we'll be done with the initial setup here. With your favorite text editor (if you don't have one, I recommend Notepad++, or Komodo Edit if you want a more fully featured editor), open up the following file <webroot>/application/config/database.php and look around line 51. We'll want to change the information to match whatever information we have setup earlier.

$db['default']['hostname'] = 'localhost';
$db['default']['username'] = 'root';
$db['default']['password'] = '';
$db['default']['database'] = 'rpg';

The above are my settings, for my personal server. If you're on shared hosting or actually care about your security, you'll likely have a password and not be using root to log into mysql. Once you modify that information to match the database you set up earlier, go ahead and save the file. At this point, we should be good to go and ready to begin actually throwing down some code.

Next time, we'll cover Codeigniter forms by looking at and modifying the default Tank Auth login/registration system as well as go over some goals at other information about the little text-based RPG we'll be making here.

What do you think of this tutorial? Is this something you'll enjoy, possibly share? Leave your comments below, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on this little project.

Hard Drive Failure

Woo! One day into coming back and I have massive hard drive failure. My OS drive crapped out and I really didn't want to install an OS on my game drive. I just got a new 10k 2TB drive and used my old game drive for the OS. Hopefully this will help quite a bit with my storage issues from recording games. I should have plenty of space going forward and hopefully no more computer issues.

So unfortunately, I don't have the Starcraft II gameplay that I wanted to put up. Which, I guess is okay. I'm getting better every day and hope to upload some footage soon. I wouldn't expect anything until Friday or later. I've got some things I need to take care of this week and won't have a whole lot of time to record. I've got something different for Wednesday, involving a little bit of programming.

Forgive my absence Friday, I haven't given up on this and don't plan on it any time soon!

久しぶり ( Long time, no see )

Long time no see, blogosphere. Do people even still use that word? Things have been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest for me since late October. I got a secure job that pays at least 40 hours a week. Unfortunately, it's left me with a lot less time than I would like to have any sort of fun. It's cut into my  Japanese studies, web development and everything else because of the wierd hours. I end up waking up at like 11, working at 12:30, get off at 9 and go to bed at 1. Needless to say, that's not many hours to much of anything.

While unemployed, I went through a serious period of depression from having to quit my depression medication. Starting this job, I forced the same depression due to lack of insurance for the first two months. I finally have the medicine I need and feel like I'm more in control and wanting to do more things.

Now that I'm no longer incapacitated by perpetual sadness, let's get back to business and back on our Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule!

I've recently picked back up on Starcraft2 and while I'm still in bronze league, I'm practicing for a few hours a day before and after work and improving pretty quickly. I've still got a lot of work to do, but if any of you are experienced Starcraft2 players, I'd appreciate input once I get some videos up.

I hope to get back in the swing of things and get some new, different content put up here soon as well.

So, do any of you play SC2? Are you Terran, Zerg or Protss? Play ladder? What's your rank?

Domain Resolution Issues, New Name and More!

It has been quite a long time since my last post, nearly a month as a matter of fact. For those of you who have been trying to access the site, you'd have been greeted with a wonderful 404 error compliments of Google.

On the 10th I purchased a new domain name from Dynonames for this blog (more on that soon), hoping I'd be able to get it working in no time at all. Being a web developer, I've done this multiple times in the past and am by no means ignorant to the process.

 I looked at Google's instructions for setting up a domain from another registrar and followed their directions, but was having no luck at all. I looked on the Blogger support forums and found a TON of people having this issue. Apparently Google has been changing around the way new domain names had to be activated due to some security issues in the past. They got this resolved on the 13th and provided us with instructions on how to make it work.

I followed the new instructions and was told to give it 48 hours for it to take effect. Come the 16th, I was still getting 404 errors. I started posting a few times back and forth daily on the support forums with no luck. It had quickly become the 25th and time for the new WoW expansion. So I got distracted by that for about a week.

 Finally, on the 5th, someone posted something that led me in the right direction. I still had to create my own way for making the domain work and posted it on the support forums to hopefully help others.

So here we are with a new working domain name, finally able to post again. I decided I wanted to change the name of the site to The Gaijin Gamer, which is what started this whole crazy DNS issue. Since a lot of my posts have been about gaming, I figured it fit more than the old title. With the name change of the blog, you can now also access the site from www.thegaijingamer.com.

I've got quite a bit to post about now, including WoW news, programming and some other things. Stay tuned!

Dota 2 Broodmother Gameplay

My lack of posting all weekend, including Friday, has been due to a series of extremely frustrating issues with what I had planned. Thursday, I recorded some Dota 2 footage of me playing as Broodmother. I combined it all up and found the 2.5gb file was just way to much to load up onto Youtube at one time. So I changed my mind and wanted to split it up into ten minute chunks. Well, It wasn't easy to do given that I literally have no programs to do this. I have VirtualDub for combing Fraps segments and handbrake to compress them to be friendly with youtube, but nothing to properly slice videos.

I ended up just re-combining the pieces manually using VirtualDub into ~10 minute segments, compressing them with handbrake and trying to upload them. I spent nearly all of Saturday without internet access to even upload the video. Some transformer blew somewhere and after power was restored, it had apparently still affected our internet. 

So finally, I wake up this morning and internet is up, running. The videos have finally started to upload. Part one is now nearly complete, just putting some finishing details on it, though it is now able to be viewed.

To view the video, you can click here or watch the embedded version below. However, I recommend clicking the link and watching the video in beautiful 1080p if your internet allows it.

Broodmother is one of my favorite heroes so far, but it seems like she's pretty easy to counter in PvP. I've been playing with some more heroes and will likely post videos of games that are interesting or once I've gotten good enough with them that I can give a good video of a typical game.

For those of you who aren't able to play yet, are there heroes you'd like to see played? 

Dota 2 First Impressions

I finally got my hands on Dota 2 yesterday, thanks to a generous friend. After playing about 6 games, I thought I'd give my first impressions on the game. I'll certainly do an update later on once I've had a lot more time to experience it.

So far I've played only a few heroes and suck with mostly all of them. My first champion was Death Prophet. From what I can tell, Death Prophet seems like a really basic hero for beginners. Don't get me wrong, though, she's a lot of fun to play and probably the most fun of the ones I've played so far.

After that, I tried Bloodseeker. That was an extremely confusing game for me right off the bat. I couldn't get the right items and at end-game, I couldn't compete with anyone. It seems like he should probably be in the jungle, but I didn't know to play him that way from the start. I abandoned him after the first game and went for another hero.

I also tried Windseeker after being pwned by her a dozen or more times by what feels like one-shot kills. I like the way she plays. I appreciate the skill and timing involved in using all her abilities to their maximum effectiveness and enjoy the run and gun play style.

The last champion I tried was Lina. Lina was also another hero that I had a lot of fun with. She's a pure nuker and chaining her aoe, cone and ultimate are a guaranteed kill, though it's definitely hard to do.

I've got a few champions I'd really like to try today:

• Wisp
• Broodmother
• Nightstalker

They are heroes that I've seen some serious ass-tearing done with or have a play style that seems really interesting to me, the wisp especially.

There are some new elements to Dota 2 gameplay that I'd like to highlight here for one reason or another.

Courier
The courier is probably one of my favorite additions to Dota. Not having to be near a shop is invaluable for solo-laning. It may be squishy and have a slow respawn rate, but if you're able to get to a safe place between waves, you're good as gold.

Items
Items are a pro and con for me, though mostly a pro. There are so many that do so many different and unique things. I love it. I love that there are so many situational items and less "core" items. On the other hand, this makes for a pretty steep learning curve until you've got many of them memorized (which I still have not anywhere near managed).

Denies
Denies are one of the more interesting but harder to use aspects of Dota 2. I like the fact that you can deny an enemy their gold for destroying a creep or tower, but the timing on doing this is so delicate. Especially with ranged that have slow auto-attacks.

I'm looking forward to putting a lot more time into the game and actually getting some kills. Has anyone else played the new Dota yet? What do you think of it?