Musings of a Cat

Well, as it turns out I am a much better gamer than I am a blogger, even that assertion is suspect. In any event, this is a few thoughts on disappointing ending the Mass Effect series concluded on. If it wasn’t already apparent this post will contain spoilers, you have been warned.

This is the fist game I have gone to a midnight launch for and I spent that night and the majority of Tuesday riveted to the story as it unfolded. I was feeling this story especially Mordin’s last mission on Tuchanka. I really think that Bioware got it right here. This moment was true to how Mordin played in my paragon Shepard’s universe, his redemption and self sacrifice showed what it was to be a true tragic hero. It left nothing to interpretation everything was tied up nicely.

The conclusion to Shepard’s story does not have anywhere near the same motivations or impact. The fact that Shepard would die here was expected but it always felt arbitrary. Instead of a tragic hero we had a case of the giving tree on our hands. Shepard gave and gave until there was nothing left to give. All this sacrifice then culminates in one of three choices which are very far devoiced from everything I did in each of the previous games.

Shepard didn’t do anything demanding redemption, especially if you played paragon. The choice to force his sacrifice was completely arbitrary on the writer’s part. I don’t mind the fact that such sacrifice was needed, the game probably should end on a bitter sweet note. However, I cannot deny the part of me that wants to see a battered Shepard climb out of the London rubble overlooking a reaper dreadnought’s hulking wreck, just before the Normandy flies overhead launching a crippling salvo against harbinger reminiscent of the final blow to Sovereign in Mass Effect 1.

I waffle back and forth over weather I like the last mission in it’s entirety. I want to see the war assets I spent my time gathering on earth fighting with me, not just a couple small generic cut scenes with the species shooting reapers ineffectually. Yes those scenes reinforced the fact that this was all around a hopeless battle but it is all so static the whole thing felt like it was on rails.

I do not get the point of the mounted turret in the safe “good bye Shepard” outpost. It did nothing but slow you down and was completely out of place given the context of what you were supposed to be doing. There didn’t appear to be any consequences for letting the husks in it was all just pointless.

As for the very end everything went off the rails. So many new questions are introduced here that I will not even spend the time listing them all, there are plenty of other places to get a synopsis of the problems brought up at the point Shepard enters the beam. The things I didn’t like immediately as the odd way that Anderson was injected into the plot.  He followed me up but isn’t near me, is behind me but walls move and he is ahead of me. What ?! But wasn’t everyone wiped out according to all com traffic. It is all more than a bit messy. Then there are the poorly explained three choices which all amount to pretty much the same thing the only thing that differentiates them is how much you were prepared and even then they are still so very similar that they could had just left them the same and dropped the pretense of choice mattering at all.

For all the end’s faults I cannot deny that it was well produced. Considering the end in isolation from the series, it is incredible. From the music and the portrayal of the state of affairs the scene works and is wonderfully scored. I just hate that it had to throw out the rest of the game to do it.

I remain hopeful that a simple expansion of what we have of the ending will be enough to help me make peace with the game, otherwise this whiny, entitled, of the minority, obviously incapable of seeing the brilliance the ending, gamer will simply stop playing the game after storming the illusive man’s lair.

Stringify is a small javascript library for rendering complex json objects as strings; for easy transmission to and consumption by server-side libraries.  Stringify parses simple types, objects, arrays, and specialized types like dates. For more information go to stringify’s project page.

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After a great deal of accomplishing very little on many different projects, I’ve decided that trying to build a custom cms for my church was overly ambitious. Now, I am planning on creating a new template for Drupal, or another open source cms. I have used Joomla in the past but found it to be too complicated. Hopefully Drupal will provide the correct balance of power and usability.

As usual, my posts are at best coming in fits and starts. But, it’s my blog so I don’t care. Anyway, of the projects I had mentioned in my previous post, I’ve only been able to progress with my church’s website. It has been online for some time now but for the most part the content is static. This is mostly a consequence of the desire for more content quickly from the stake holders. However, again, as usual, I’m a bit lazy and life is life.

I have finally settled on using Python 3.0 for my software key management utility. The problem I keep facing is that there seem to be few decent IDEs for Python in Linux. Eclipse is the best one I have tried so far but that was for python 2.5 so more investigation in to 3.0 integration is needed. If you have advice on IDEs or a direction to start in I’d be happy to know of one.

In addition to the two larger projects my wife and I have embarked on a new collaborative project. We began work on this project in early January with the first deliverable scheduled for early to mid October. With God’s blessing we will see this project through. It will be a long term project, and it is one we are both looking forward to.

A great many things have happened over the past year; three relocations, college graduations, new jobs, etc. So most of the projects I had started before have either become lost, forgotten, or irrelevant. But now as the instability of college wears off and life begins to take on newfound structure the projects I start should see the light of day in the future.

The first project that I am working on in my free time is a website for my church. The current website is many years old and out of date. My plan for the site is to start out with a simple three column page with headers and footers. It will start out mostly static but as time goes on it will become increasingly interactive as administrative interfaces and database backends come online. Hopefully, by the end of the development they will have a fully modern, cms like, interface for managing content and communications for the congregation.

The other project I am working on is an application to manage and store software licence keys. Over the past year, my wife and I have combined our software libraries and increased the number of computers we own. Needless to say storing all of the software keys is a bit haphazard and error prone. At this point we have probably lost close to 100 dollars worth of software due to misplaced keys. I am still struggling over the scope of this project so we’ll see where this goes. Rest assured that it will be the subject of many posts in the future.

While pouring over the available themes for the revival of this website, I cam across Unnamed Lite by Xu Yiyang. I loved its simple gradients and clean presentation. However, I have never been a fan of the right-side sidebar. So, I have modified the primary stylesheet for this theme, to put the sidebar on the left and decrease its width and margins. Several other modifications were made to make the header text more readable, given my choice for the header image. Unnamed Lite is distributed under the GPL. In accordance with the GPL, you may download a copy of the modified stylesheet below. A detailed list of all changes may be found on the Unnamed Lite project page.

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After about a year I’m finally back to using my site for something other than e-mail.