Warning: this post is pure self-indulgence, being a gallery of my Champions Online character designs and the backstory I’ve come up with for each of them. It’s not on par with Shamus’s efforts, either serious or silly (parts 1, 2, 3, 4), but what it lacks in prose style, it makes up in… well, nothing, really.

Many pictures follow, each linked to an expanded view of the costume.

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The character designer in Champions Online offers a ridiculous level of customization, so much so that it can be difficult to find some of the parts. Sometimes it’s because they’re only available with a specific parent part, sometimes just because they’re buried under three levels of pulldown menus. One of the best ways to find the part you’re looking for is with the randomizer, which can be used to replace anything from the highlight color on a single part up to a complete rebuild of face, body, and costume.

You can spend hours tweaking everything about your character until it’s just right, or you can click on the randomizer until it throws up something that doesn’t suck, and jump into the game. Of course, one man’s superhero is another man’s eye-searing disaster (and, yes, you can).

Sturgeon’s Law definitely applies to character design, deliberate or random. I’ll post screenshots of my creations soon, but here are two examples that show exactly what the randomizer can come up with, good and bad.

[click on the image to see close-up and side views]

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…is that I only have eight character slots. I could spend weeks just creating cool-looking characters, posing them in various in-game locations, and taking screenshots. I’ve only owned it for three days, and I’ve already used up six slots. And that’s after throwing away several things that didn’t work out.

The game is fun, too. There are some rough edges, but it’s quite playable.

The character generator is insanely complex, but there are some reasonable canned options, overridable theme colors, lockable randomizers, a big undo stack, and the ability to not only save your designs, but send them to a friend. I can see a small cottage industry of designers springing up to help people create cool superheroes.

[Update: I wanted to really turn up the graphics settings, so I rebooted my newer MacBook Pro into Windows and tried it. And I can crank up almost all of the options and still get a smooth framerate. BUT it looks like crap because of a lighting issue in the latest patch that blows out all light colors when you’re near a non-diffuse light source (like, say, “sunshine”). I thought it was my drivers at first, but it’s busted on the other machine as well; I didn’t notice right away, because there’s not a lot of bad lighting in the tutorial missions or in Canada.

Second problem: I’d forgotten that Windows doesn’t work with Japanese keyboards, unless you select the right keyboard type during the initial Windows install. Seriously, even with Vista, you can’t say “the keyboard I just plugged in has a Japanese layout, you know, the kind with an Eisuu key and nothing to the left of the ‘1’”; all keyboards that don’t come with their own special driver are assumed to be the same as the one you installed the OS with, and none of the suggested hacks I’ve found works. For more fun, unless you buy Vista Ultimate, you can’t even select the Japanese keyboards while installing an OS purchased in the US. Ultimate is cheap for me, but come on, that’s stupid.

I’ve learned to cope with it in VMware sessions, but playing a game where some keys are in the wrong place and others don’t exist just doesn’t work out. I’ll have to use an external keyboard to play on this machine.]

Over at Celestia’s place, she commented that she had the day off and not even her Japanese co-workers knew precisely what the holiday was. This led to the discovery of two rather intriguing clauses in the law governing national holidays:

国民の休日

Kokumin no Kyuujitsu, "national holiday", defined as a weekday between two holidays. (this year, the day between Respect The Elderly Day and the Fall Equinox)

振替休日

Furikae Kyuujitsu, "transfer holiday", defined as the first non-holiday weekday following a holiday that fell on a Sunday. (this year, Constitution Memorial Day was a Sunday, but the next two days were already holidays (Green Day and Children's Day), so Wednesday became a holiday)

Can I please have my one-click “show all tracks from this album” back? Clicking on the little arrow next to the album name takes me to the iTunes Store, which was always a pathetic and useless “feature”, but it used to be that alt-clicking on the arrow would take me to the album that I already own, thank you very much. Now it doesn’t.

It appears the only way to select all of the tracks from an album is to select one track, switch to grid view, and then double-click the album cover (which is either a blank square or an automatically-downloaded incorrect picture). And then switch back out of grid view, because it’s pretty-but-useless.

While I’m ranting, wouldn’t it be nice if the new Genius Mixes would show you the tracks it’s going to play, or allow you to rate the current song while it’s playing?

In a surprise announcement that has left fans reeling, Satan (aka Koharu Kusumi) is leaving Morning Musume and Hello!Project, at the tender age of 17. Like fellow “graduate” Erika Umeda, she’s announced plans to become a model; unlike the 18-year-old Umeda, however, she has a stack of popular photobooks and DVDs attesting to her solo popularity, so she’s guaranteed some initial success.

This is on top of the mass exodus of the grownups earlier this year, and the curiously-handled retirement of Kanna Arihara, so it’s been a rough year for H!P fans, and with star-pimp Tsunku bringing ever-younger girls (6? WTF?) into his stables, I suspect it’s a bit nerve-wracking for the surviving members as well.

[Update: pimp-blogging reveals that she didn’t jump, she was pushed. That should make both fans and fellow members even more nervous about the organization’s future.]

Someone just sent out email to the company saying “free cake shavings in the break room”.

My first response: shouldn’t cake shavings be served in a paipan?

Given the state of California’s finances, I had my fingers crossed that my usually-small Japanese reading class would survive the inevitable cuts, but it turns out it was canceled for an unexpected reason: high enrollment in other classes in the department. There’s a contractual limit in how much one instructor can support, and my class was taught by the only salaried professor. Her time is already paid for, but each part-time instructor is a new cost.

Not sure what’s going to happen next quarter. Enrollment typically drops significantly in Winter and Spring quarters, as students discover that Japanese is the wrong language to study if you’re just trying to meet the language requirement to transfer into a four-year school, but that may not be enough to reinstate the class. She’s going to try to restructure it as an online class, but I’m not sure how it would work out. The group dynamics are a large part of what made it work, with people bringing in a wide variety of material and working together to understand it, with her guidance and cultural insight.

And I had some really fun stuff prepped for this quarter, too…