Fall and Fallout 3

Fall is here. It's rainy and dark. I kind of like it.

This type of weather always makes me want to hunker down with a blanket and read a good book, or work on some long-neglected project. I have been feeling creative lately, and am trying to find the right outlet - there are some scripts I wrote in college for a screenwriting class that I always think about, but never dig out and actually work on. Also, I have some ideas for interesting artwork that i would like to try out. Unfortunately, I can never make up my mind, and usually end up giving up for the day to play some PS3 or Fallout3 on my laptop.

Fallout3 is the perfect game for me. It rewards exploration. I love games where I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want. I can just run around the Wasteland looking at the "beauty" of it all or I can work on my stats by just levelling. Or, I can do the tons of quests.

Last night, I noticed I had not explored directly south of Vault 101. So I just started running due south until I found something interesting. I ran into a village calling itself Andale. I knew right away something was horribly wrong there because the head honcho declared himself a Republican. YIKES. I almost capped him right there and then. Give me a Mirelurk over a Republican anyday. At any rate, being a pretty decent person, I maintained control of myself and let the guy live, despite the fact that I strongly suspected he was up to something. I did choose some of the more bitchy dialogue options when speaking to him however.

I don't want to spoil anything, but he WAS up to something. Speaking to the rest of the town , it was pretty obvious what was going on. Weighing my options (leaving the place altogether, or perhaps a little late night snooping), I decided that I would pick-pocket the Repuglican and see if he had a key to the locked basement on his person.

In the dead of night, when all good people are asleep and dreaming, I crept up the stairs to where Repub and his creepy wife lay sleeping. Interestingly, despite using my sneak skill carefully, the Hidden/detected meter kept switching from hidden to detected. Were the Rupubs only pretending to be asleep? Gathering my nerves I slowly reached out towards Mr. G.O.P. and pressed the "E" button. I rifled through his pockets and saw that he did indeed have the basement key on his person! SCORE! I was slightly disapointed to see that there was no well-worn gay porn mags on his person. Not very realistic...

Suddenly, the Smith's lept from their beds and came at me with knife and Shotgun! I had been detected! I have to admit that I was somewhat relieved at this turn of events, because everyone knows that self-defense is one of the only good reasons to blow someone's head off with an assault rifle. Fucking Repubs, look what you made me do!

Anyway, I brushed the blood off the basement key and hurried to the cellar for a look-see. It was just as I thought! Those bastards were _________!

HA! You'll just have to play the game and see what they were up to. 

I think I'm gonna go play some Little Big Planet now.

Robot update

It's been a couple months, thought I would update. The robot project is on hold due to lack of funds. I ran out of brackets and can't afford to spend any more money now. Sigh. Stupid money! Maybe I'll get some cash for X-mas this year.

About that robot...Part 2

I am building a robot now.

I found a Basic Stamp2 micro-controller one day at Radio Shack. While it is not the best by anyone's standards (in terms of processing power, etc.), it is easy to use and well documented and supported. So that will be it's brain.

I also have a servo controller board for all the servos. It will control the limbs. I am slowly building up a library of servos. Servos are pretty damn expensive.

Currently, Im trying to figure out what sort of features and form I want to have. A biped would be my first wish, but I understand that balance is a pretty tricky nut to crack... Might have to make something more modest.

More details as they become available!

About that robot...

Yah so, here's me:

A couple years ago, and episode of "The Amazing Race" was on that featured the teams going to Korea where they had to use a small robot to play a game of soccer.

"Holy Shit!" I was blown away.

Like a lot of kids, I loved robots. When I say robots, I mean the kind in Star Wars, not the REAL, BORING kind. The kind that actually did things and talked and all that. I grew up in the 70's and saw Star Wars when I was 5 yrs. old. It blew my mind, of course. Since that day, I loved movie robots. I always ran around telling people I was going to build one and that it would be totally easy and blah, blah, blah. I was 5.

Real-life robots turned out to be uninspiring. I came to realize that robots, in real life, are best left to academics. By the 80's, with no real progress in robotics that I could see - they weren't talking and walking and acting like C-3p0 or R2-D2 yet - I sort of lost sight of any interest I had in robotics.

Ages passed, then I saw Asimo in the 90's. It blew my mind. I gaped and googled and wow! But it was still a big company with lots of money kind of thing, nothing that really got my hopes up.

Then out of nowhere, Amazing Race did the Korea episode. The teams gathered in a small room that looked like an empty store front. there were some ping-pong tables set up with goals on each side and everyday-looking Korean guys gathered around.

And there they were: 2 teams of small, humanoid, bipedal robots! What the HELL!? Then they started running around the soccer "field" playing soccer in a amzingly human-like way! My jaw was on the floor.

This wasn't some University research lab, those weren't scientists with super computers, and their robots weren't small, dumb, wheeled platforms that could follow lines. The way those little robots moved was unlike anything I had seen outside of Asimo. I forgot all about The Amazing Race and excitedly began googling everything i could think of to find info about those robots.

That was a few years ago, and now Im obsessed with robots again.

Welcome to my stream

Hello humans!

This is my first post in my new blog "Ghost in the Stream". In light of that, I feel I should tell you about myself and what the blog will probably be about.

My name is Thomas. I live in Seattle, WA. with my partner and our dog. I am a digital artist by profession - I do 3d animation and modeling. According to medical professionals, my brain is afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder. My thoughts are zingy and zangy and given my interest in science, art, and building stuff, I have plenty of ideas, with no one to hear them.

So, to sum it up, this blog is a place to talk about my crazy ideas that, in real-life, no one wants to listen to me talk about for hours on end.

Things that will definitely be written about are: robotics, psychology, theories about video game design, ramblings on evolution and... whatever happens to intrigue me at the moment.

Given that I am not a scientist, my ideas may or may not be valid. I read a lot of science in various periodicals; I have subscriptions to Science News, Scientific American, National Geographic etc. and I have been reading them since I was a kid. I read the New York Times Science Times section every Tuesday. I have taken college level courses in psychology, archaeology, sociology, anatomy/biology, optics, etc. I have taken C++ courses and am teaching myself about micro-controllers. I am building a robot. All those things said, I am not an expert on any of those topics. I do not have a science degree of any sort.

Therfore, my thoughts in my posts shouldn't be used as evidence of anything. They shouldn't be viewed as any sort of scientific theory. You shouldn't quote them in research papers for class; your teachers will laugh at you.

Additionally, I am writing these things partly to clear my head, and partly to see if anyone has any further thoughts on them. Any relevant information on any of the topics would be AWESOME!

Tell me I'm wrong! Tell me I'm right! Or just tell me I'm uneducated!

So there you have it. I hope some of what I write is interesting to you.

Thanks for reading.