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1. Create gmail account.
2. Use it to sign into Pokemon Go.
3. Power-level using a GPS-spoofer to constantly "visit" areas densely populated with pokestops.
4. Sell account.
5. Profit!

It looks like the folks at Niantic didn’t have anyone onboard with experience at handling the inevitable issues with running an MMO. Besides just trying to reliably run a 24x7 online service for the biggest mobile game launch ever, there’s “my friends started at launch, and if I want to train at gyms and take them over for my team, I need a well-stocked high-level character”. People foolish enough to start playing the game now cannot compete (you get nothing if you can’t win a fight, and you can’t beat critters with 10x your combat points), which means the only portion of the game open to them is the basic “gotta catch ’em all”. Which they made more difficult in the latest release, rapidly using up your precious supply of pokeballs, primarily acquired through microtransactions (2.76-5 cents per ball).

If you’re near an area with a lot of pokestops (or spoof GPS to visit them…), you can pick up balls and other goodies for free, but there’s nothing even vaguely fair about their distribution around the world. It more or less comes down to how many people in your area tagged locations in Niantic’s previous game, Ingress. In my neighborhood, that means a handful of badly-painted transformer boxes, fountains (one of which is allegedly in the changing room at Marshalls), entrance signs for public parks, a sandwich shop, and some benches at a golf course. In downtown Palo Alto, it means “at least three pokestops per block”.

The team has promised that Real Soon Now they’ll be introducing inter-player trading, which means even more opportunities for professional farmers running on hacked platforms. Hopefully before that gets too far out of hand, Niantic will hire a few clued-in MMO veterans with the estimated $10,000,000/day they’re grossing.

If you’re over a certain age, this picture is sure to be triggering. You’ve been warned!

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Last year, the little-known idol group Tsuri Bit got a lot of attention at a live appearance where 14-year-old member Sakura Ando demonstrated that she was not only lovely and lively, but also stacked.

They were surprisingly subtle with this year’s summer-bikini song (pretty much every idol group does one of these now…). Rather than giving her jumping jacks and other obvious titty-action moves (like Erika Yazawa in pretty much every Idoling!! video), they simply put the rest of the group in bikini tops that masked their relative development.

The County called my home phone number this morning, instructing me to stay indoors with my windows closed. I can’t imagine why.

The closest point is a good 20 miles from my house, but part of what keeps Salinas cool and damp in the summer is the wind coming in from the ocean, so while the fire won’t come anywhere near me, the particulate matter will.

It doesn’t look like they’ve caught the person whose illegal campfire started it.

Small plug for a book of poetry by my old Japanese teacher, Yumiko Tsumura. Scheduled for release in November.

Sigh. My neighbor’s son is rapping in the back yard while shooting hoops. Badly (the rapping, at least). I presume he’s wearing headphones, since all I hear is his attempt to sound black.

Bad time to cover your face?

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I’ve been playing Fallout Shelter for a while now, first on my phone (until my vault got big enough to crash the game constantly), then on an iPad Mini, and now also on Windows, where despite its tablet origin, it doesn’t support multi-touch on my Surface Pro. Fortunately, the keyboard controls are so nice that I don’t mind.

I made a few in-app purchases, because I like to pay what I think a “free” game is worth if I keep playing it. However, the items purchased are tied to a specific vault, so if you have 3 vaults and want to buy pets, you have to make three separate purchases; you can’t buy N pets and divide them between your vaults. Worse, if you delete the vault or the save file gets corrupted, you lose your purchases. For the final straw, the basic Lunchbox purchase is a total crapshoot, emphasis on the “crap”; you can spend real money and get nothing worthwhile. The only nice thing I can say is that the new Starter Packs appear to be guaranteed to have useful content, but if you buy an N-pack, they still all go to the same vault.

People quickly discovered how to read the file format and wrote a variety of tools to edit saves, but the most-recommended one runs under the Android emulator. I didn’t care about most of what the tools do, and I have an aversion to downloading anything that’s advertised as a cheat tool, because malware, so I poked around until I found the cleanest solution that used simple command-line tools. Specifically, OpenSSL and JQ.

After a little tinkering, I knocked together a simple (okay, it’s gotten rather elaborate…) bash script containing some common operations. Specifically, decrypt-and-pretty-print, convert to survival/normal mode, rename your vault, “buy” a bunch of lunchboxes and resources, and apply arbitrary JQ filter expressions from a file (for more complicated modding).

As for moving the files around, the PC version puts them in a quite sensible location. The iOS version is only accessible if you’ve enabled iCloud sharing, and then you have to go hunting in obscure sub-directories to copy a save from your iDevice, and to sync it back, the only way I’ve found is to copy it somewhere else, delete it from inside the game, copy it back (possibly increasing the last few digits of the filename), and then click the iCloud checkbox on the now-empty save slot (waiting a bit to give iCloud time to copy back and forth).

If I get motivated enough, I’ll sort through the Dweller data and make a tool to batch-rename them and sort out their relationship data (the game prevents direct incest, but after playing for a few months, I haven’t the slightest idea who bred with who). [update: turns out they don’t accurately track parentage. If a parent dies or is kicked out of the vault, the next person to arrive will inherit their id number, effectively adopting any children.]

I’m not sure this qualifies as a dance move, but it’s definitely a performance.

No offense, but I usually only see this sort of thing on Amazon Japan, and the quality of the material is higher there.

(NSFW)

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Very rough at the moment, with lots of issues that make it an early Beta, but it was nice to be able to scp over the save-hacking bash script I just wrote and have it Just Work, including creating a symlink to the save directory used by the Windows version of the game so that I could easily go back-and-forth between editing and testing. The supplied version of Ubuntu came with an old version of JQ, but I just grabbed the latest Linux binary with wget and all was well.

I’m going to try to build a decent Perl environment with Perlbrew, so that it survives reinstalls and upgrades. Then I can have some fun. If they ever get the Japanese IME working with WSL (or more precisely, their console window), I can have real fun.

…too late.

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Everyone knows you should know better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon.

Well, maybe not everyone.

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[update: based on my testing, I’d say that the typical NMS “planet” is considerably smaller than Skyrim in square footage. And, of course, NMS has far less diversity in terrain and only one biome per “planet”. One simple test is to use the “crashed-ship upgrade” trick repeatedly on your starter world, going up to orbit after each swap and returning to a completely different region; count how many times the next transmission tower directs you to your original starting location.]

Going through the forums, reviews, gameplay videos, spoilers, and rants, I’ve come to the conclusion that No Man’s Sky is the Obama of video games: dazzled by the demos and convinced by vague, evasive statements that it will fulfill their heart’s desires, people blindly pre-ordered, and now they’re stuck defending something that can never live up to its promise.

On the plus side, Steam gives refunds. :-)

Most disappointingly, I was right; the NMS universe really is ruled by killer robots who occupy every single planet that you “discover”. And not only is there no depth to combat, trade, or exploring, the procedurally-generated worlds are maybe 10% as cool as the cherry-picked scenes in the demos.

Bottom line, think of it as an early beta of a 3D version of single-player Starbound, with no mapping functionality and only one scripted NPC on screen at a time (plus the sub-Spore procedurally-generated animals). And what passes for an “ending” is just a hastily-added NG+.

I went in with my eyes open, and wouldn’t have played it much if I weren’t too sick (still…) to do much else. It’s compatible with codeine cough syrup. Actually, I think it helped, since I had the patience to decipher the baffling and inconsistent user interface. Seriously, in a game where you walk/fly around entire planets, there’s no autorun key; you have to hold a key/button down constantly to move at a slow walk across the mostly-desolate wilderness, and another to toggle bursts of sprint/jump. People are now begging them not to fix the glitch where you hold down “walk”, toggle “sprint”, then press “melee” and press-and-hold “jetpack” to zip forward at high speed.

What went wrong? A lot of people have started trying to put it together, but it sounds like a combination of feature creep, a cash infusion from Sony that came with PS4-shaped strings attached, a sudden need to dramatically scale back and ship the damn thing, and Sean Murray talking out of his ass at every opportunity, in the classic “hey, guys, I just promised that we already do X; can we do X?” (for many values of X). Also, the primary QA was done by a Sony team for the PS4 platform, leaving them a bit under-prepared for the 200,000+ day-one Windows users.

Evidence for the big scale-back can be found in inconsistencies all over the place, but here’s a simple one: observatories. If you walk into one and solve the (trivial) puzzle, it will add a marker guiding you to an ancient ruin located nearby on the same planet. But the flavor text when you activate it still talks about locating things in deep space. And, by the way, the markers that get added by interacting with beacons, observatories, and transmission towers never go away; they’ll clutter your display even if you’re on a different planet in the same system. The only way to dismiss them is by walking to within a few meters of the designated spot.

Not recommended if you want the game from the trailers. Not bad for what it is, although it costs three times as much as the usual paid-beta indie game on Steam.

The pilot for Amazon’s new The Tick series is pretty good. I hope it gets a full season. Vote Tick; the only sane option in 2016.

I’d like to believe that all women in the Hotta family live up to the promise as well as Yuika (now 35 and happily married; perhaps the next generation will be Mo’ Hotta).

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Pokemon Go released an update. The big feature is that your team lead can advise you on the quality of your stable. Which turns out to be a set of canned phrases that are completely meaningless:

This is looking more and more like a squandered opportunity, turning the biggest mobile-game launch ever into “remember that game we played for a few weeks?”.

(the joke here is that コイキング aka Magikarp is the most useless Pokemon of all, which is one of the very few poke-facts I know, along with what the dirty old man actually said when he saw Misty in a bikini)

[Update: this feature collided badly/hilariously with The Bloggess’ naming scheme.]

In December. Possibly the finest example of an anime adaptation that’s not only better than the source material, but much better.

Also, epic troll:

Another strike against 2016. Dammit.

Voice actress and singer Haruka Tomatsu is at her best when she’s being adorkable. Most of her photoshoots recognize this and stick with showing off a pretty girl and a smile, not trying too hard to sex her up.

Sometimes, though, they insisted on trying for steam, and the best of the bunch end up as “hot shot of someone who looks nothing like her”. The rest include some of the most awkward cheesecake I’ve ever seen. She really looks like she wants to be somewhere else, and the outfits do not flatter her gangly frame.

This one is nice, but she’s almost unrecognizable.

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Now this is an AKB48 outfit I can get behind!

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