I am a Level 3 Lawful Neutral Human Cleric

I Am A: Lawful Neutral Human Cleric (3rd Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-12
Dexterity-14
Constitution-13
Intelligence-18
Wisdom-11
Charisma-13

Alignment:
Lawful Neutral A lawful neutral character acts as law, tradition, or a personal code directs him. Order and organization are paramount to him. He may believe in personal order and live by a code or standard, or he may believe in order for all and favor a strong, organized government. Lawful neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you are reliable and honorable without being a zealot. However, lawful neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it seeks to eliminate all freedom, choice, and diversity in society.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron’s vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity’s domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric’s Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Detailed Results:

Alignment:
Lawful Good —– XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (24)
Neutral Good —- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (23)
Chaotic Good —- XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (14)
Lawful Neutral — XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (25)
True Neutral —- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (24)
Chaotic Neutral – XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (15)
Lawful Evil —– XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Neutral Evil —- XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Chaotic Evil —- X (1)

Law & Chaos:
Law —– XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Neutral – XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Chaos — X (1)

Good & Evil:
Good —- XXXXXXXXXXXXX (13)
Neutral – XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (14)
Evil —- (0)

Race:
Human —- XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (14)
Dwarf —- XXXXXX (6)
Elf —— XXXXXXXX (8)
Gnome —- XXXXXXXX (8)
Halfling – XXXXXXXX (8)
Half-Elf – XXXXXXX (7)
Half-Orc – XXXX (4)

Class:

Barbarian - (-25)
Bard ------ (-21)
Cleric ---- XXXXXX (6)
Druid ----- (-4)
Fighter --- XX (2)
Monk ------ XXXX (4)
Paladin --- (-19)
Ranger ---- (-2)
Rogue ----- (-8)
Sorcerer -- (0)
Wizard ---- XXXX (4)

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Netflix New Releases list changes

Netflix recently released a change to their Browse Movies -> New Releases page.  It is sort of cool and interesting for a casual browsing, but lacks some of the power of the old interface. 

What I REALLY miss and couldn’t live without was the “New This Week” page, which let me see what movies released for the current week.  Fortunately, the page is still there, it is just hidden (as in, no links to it).

http://www.netflix.com/AllNewReleases?lnkctr=NavAllNewReleases

In case you can’t find it in your history, I looked it up immediately when I saw the links to it were gone.  Enjoy.

The Fall of Atlas

Warning: Here be Spoilers!

So, I beat Bioshock.  Well, I actually beat it several weeks ago – I’ve just been too busy on my project from work to take the time to write this post.  My cousin James wanted to know how it ended for me, since I chose the “light” side: I saved every Little Sister instead of harvesting them.

First, I have to say the twist at the end of the game (after you “defeat” Ryan – pre-meditated murder simulator anyone?) is pretty brilliant.  Now, I knew that Atlas was evil, and not to be trusted, the moment he advised that I should harvest the Little Sisters.  I mean, it’s bad enough (for me anyhow) that you have to kill their Mr. Bubbles and make them cry – but “harvesting” them?  Yah, I smelled something fishy about Atlas – but it never occurred to me that he would turn out to be Fontaine.  The strange thing was that I felt like my little radio display in the corner had been lying to me – it showed a picture of Atlas when it should have known that I was really talking to Fontaine, shouldn’t it have?

So, when you play the light side of things, here are some things that happen that I imagine would happen differently if you played the dark side.  Someone will have to fill me in.  😉

• Every 3 or 4 Little Sisters that you save, Tenenbaum (aka “Mother Goose”) comes on the radio and gives you a heart-warming thank you, then says that the Little Sisters will leave you a gift at the next Gatherers Garden you come to.  The gift is a Teddy bear with 200-400 Adam inside, plus a couple of other nice things (rare ammo, new plasmid, etc).  I have to wonder what she is saying (if anything) to you if you keep harvesting her little girls.  Maybe Atlas says stuff instead – “That a boy, now, would you kindly continue harvesting those little girls.”  Hmm… kind of makes me wonder why Atlas didn’t use his mind control to make you do that.
• When you first come to the den of “Mother Goose”, all of the Little Sisters are sitting around playing cards and rolling balls around and such.  If you walk up to them, they said nice things about you to each other like “That’s the one that saved me.”  See the pictures below.  I wonder what Tenenbaum and the girls’ attitude is toward you if you Harvested a bunch of them.  Maybe they are not there anymore.
• The movie at the end is different, this much I know (see section below).  For the light ending, you float up to the surface with all the little girls, and then you see flashes of them going on to get diplomas, get married, and then be with you at your death bed – well, you see flashes of their hands. 🙂

The Videos

I know the ending video is different because I looked in the “BinkMovies” folder of my Bioshock install (for me, this is at C:\Program Files\2K Games\BioShock\Content\BinkMovies) and found some interesting videos.  You can watch the .bik files in this folder if you download and install The RAD Video Tools here.  Some of my findings:

• HarvestedGatherers.bik – this is the “dark side” end movie.
• SavedGatherers.bik – this is the “light side” end movie.
• KilledGatherers.bik – this is exactly the same (except file size) as the “dark side” end movie.  Maybe they originally planned a 3rd ending / mode, where you could Harvest the girls until you kill them?  I got the impression when I read the game manual that when you harvest the girls it was like a mini-game where you tried to get the most Adam out of them as you could without killing them.  Perhaps that was too violent, or they just didn’t get time to implement.
• attractMovie.bik – this is some sort of pre-release trailer, or maybe early concept video?  It’s not in the game, and I’d never seen anything like it before.  Think violent snuff film from the 1st-person.
• <plasmid_name>Clean.bik vs Plasmid<plasmid_name>.bik – each plasmid has a “clean” version, and then one where they add old-timey film and audio filtering.  Strange that they left the “clean” in the final version of the game.  Of course, if you look around a little more in the game assets, it seems like they left quite a bit of fluff.
• GathererTeddyBear.bik – this is the background image for the main menu of the game.  Not sure what went wrong with the name.  Maybe they were originally going to make a movie for when you pick up a teddy bear the Little Sisters left?  Still doesn’t explain why they used this name for the main menu.

Pics

Tenenbaum’s Hideout (“light” side only?, the 2nd pic is a little dark):

Disturbing end scene:

 

New Computer Software Essentials

So, I’m setting up a “pre-owned” computer for a new guy at work to use, and I thought I should write down the list of what I install on it as the “essentials.”  I’m posting this on my personal, not technical, blog because these aren’t my technical essentials, but what I think is essential for a non-technical person’s computer.  The new guy is in sales – a pretty typical “office desktop” user.  Without further ado…

• Firefox – Need I say more?
• Thunderbird – If an email client is required.
• AVG – Ant-virus, and now anti-spyware too.  They absorbed the popular Ewido anti-spyware company.
• Open Office – I must admit, I like MS Office better, especially the new 2007 stuff, but you can’t beat Open Office’s price.  It works too – mostly.
• Foxit Reader – Adobe Reader is free too, but Foxit is much faster to load, and doesn’t open stuff up in your browser, which I don’t like (Adobe does this, and since Adobe tends to crash more, it takes your browser with it).
• Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) – If you install this, you should be able to play just about any encoded video thrown at you.  Designed for anime fansub watching, but keeps people from bugging you later because they can’t watch some episode of Heroes the downloaded.
• TUGZip – Probably second best next to WinRAR as far as Windows archival programs go, but this one is free.  🙂
• Adobe Flash Player – You need to visit this link both in Firefox and in IE, so you can get the ActiveX version for Internet Explorer (an any other programs that might use the ActiveX component – for instance our  and the ‘plug-in’ version.
• Real Alternative – Lightweight version to RealPlayer.

The Crunch

If anyone actually reads this blog – I haven’t posted in a while because I’m nearing a “go-live” at work for a web application I’ve been developing for several months. I’m shooting for having something up for staging on our server by the end of this week. Hopefully I can return to regular posting after that.

Your bones will stay crunchy, even when soaked in blood!
— Cap’n Crunch, on a killing spree

Darth Pumpkin

This is a pumpkin that Brody traced and cut last year (or two years ago?). I figure his lady roommates will want buy some pumpkins again this year – in fact, I think they have a bunch sitting out front already. Of course, those will be rotten by the time Halloween rolls around.

Anyhow, I wonder what else might be fun to carve and actually work for a pumpkin like this. This one worked well, because it was a black and white emblem very similar to the final pumpkin image.

My ideas:

• Master Chief (Halo)
• Big Daddy / Rosie (Bioshock)
• Kitsune (狐) the nine-tailed fox demon.

Bioshock Easter Egg #1

I’m marking this as number 1, although I may not find anymore so this maybe be the one and only.  I think this was in the Winery, in the Farmer’s Market level.

Sadly, it took me like a whole 30 seconds to figure out what it was.  I saw the bullet holes in a line and thought "I didn’t do that, and no Leadhead Splicer did that… Must have been put there by the developers… hmm…" and then 20 seconds later I saw the cheese.

Now, someone should take this image and make a LOLCAT graphic.

Halo 3: Finish the Fight

Got THE Xbox 360 game Tuesday night after work. Sometimes it is good to live in rural Wisconsin – I went over to the Mauston K-mart (Big K?) and they had atleast 20 or 30 regular editions just lying there, along with 10 or 20 limited editions. There were some kids walking around electronics, but they were looking at music – MUSIC! The haunting chorus, soft violin, and wild jungle beat of the Halo theme song was the only music I was searching for.

My Bungie.net stats
My brothers

As you can see, Brody is already pulling ahead of me.

Now, I just need to force myself to finish Bioshock before I am consumed by the Flood.