The Eight Ball [8Ball]

It does’t take much to ‘feature’ in someone elses song these days. Akon is more famous for performing in other peoples music than his own, sometimes just for making wooping sounds and not even words as heard in Gwen Stefani’s “Great Escape”.

Not only does he act like a dick he looks like one too!

These days it’s really bordering on ridiculous what it takes to feature in someone elses track though.  The best and most recent example I’ve found is Kanye West.  Not only is he undoubtedly the most arrogant musician around at the moment, he is so big that he ‘featured’ on Michael Jackons’s Thriller 25 Year anniversary remix track “Billy Jean” with the following ground breaking contributions:

“Yeah, uh, uh huh” before the first verse and ending the song with a breath taking, “”Uh huh, Y-Y-Yeah, Number 1!”

Thanks Kanye, you really rescued this remix from becoming an absolute disaster.  I suppose the next step is nominating yourself for some kind of award for this now?

What are they? Lego bricks. Lego has become my new (old) hobby. I spend all my pocket money on it, even though I still owe Nez about sixty bucks. (Sorry bro, I’ll get it back to you eventually). And Lego has got cooler since I was a kid. Most things have turned to shite since we grew up. “Back in my day…” blah blah blah, but Lego seems to have somehow avoided the deterioration in quality that seems to have affected most things that we love about our childhood (Transformers, Matchbox cars, etc.).

To be fair, they make a lot of their pieces in China and Hungary and the Czech Republic and whatnot, and sometimes there can be some barely perceptible differences in colour between pieces that should be the same colour, but on the whole, it’s great. What makes it great? Well, the first thing is that they have made new pieces. I used to think that “modern” Lego was just pre-set pieces that could only be used for one thing, and yes, there are some Lego sets like that, but I don’t go in for that. They have made new pieces like the slope 31 1 x 1 x 2/3 (Yes, I love Lego that much). This is basically a 1 x 1 piece with a flat slope. This piece alone has just about revolutionised Lego.

And it’s not just the pieces, it’s what they do with it. They have released a whole series of Lego sets called Creator. All of these sets come with instructions to make 3 different but related constructions. This makes the Lego even more useable. Normally, you buy the Lego, you build the thing, and then play with it (if you’re into that. I’m not…. Much.) and that’s what it does. If you’re feeling adventurous or creative, you can pull it apart and make something up, but I’m not much good at that. With the Creator Lego, if you feel like building something, you can pull apart your built object and make something else. Two other things, in fact. Awesome.

I get away with playing with Lego because I’m a dad. I build it, Jonno plays with it, pulls it apart, puts things in strange places etc. I have to restrain myself from interfering with his creativity when he wants to put a rocket blaster on top of a car or whatever.

And as if having lots of Lego wasn’t enough, I have discovered the next level of Lego. It’s called LeoCad and it is great. It’s a free program that some other enthusiast (bless him) made and other enthusiasts have added to. It gives you access to every brick ever made (if you find the right libraries) and combined with POVRay, you can render ray-traced images of your Lego. This makes it a whole world better than the prettier-but-uselesser Lego Digital Designer, which limits the types and colours of bricks to only those which you can purchase. Some of the colours are not available in LeoCad, but you can tweak the .inc files of the POV export before rendering to fix them up.

So this is what I like to do now, along with boardgames, which I will talk about another time. At the moment, I own:

• Propeller-powered plane, jet plane, helicopter
• Street-car, dragster, hotrod
• Steam train, diesel train, electric train
• Truck & buggy combo, pick-up truck, 4×4 truck
• Troll catapult, which actually fires projectiles
• Drawbridge defence with crankable drawbridge on chains
• The piece de resistance, a GIANT transport ferry with jeep and caravan that also makes a hovercraft and two cars or a cargo plane and semi-truck that drives into the cargo hold.

And I haven’t even started getting into Lego Technics yet. There is a dude who sells custom-made sets at this website that let you build vehicles and planes from the World War II era, all to proper minifig scale and some of them even motorized. This combines Lego with another of my interest areas, World War II.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures of the Lego that I own and have created in LeoCad.

Wikipedia Definition: A kill screen is a stage or level in a video game (often an arcade game) that stops the player’s progress due to a programming error or design oversight. Rather than “ending” in a traditional sense, the game will crash, freeze, or behave so erratically that further play is impossible.

Programmers back in the day were so limited by the amount of memory they had at their disposal that they would design levels in isolation of the whole game and test them but may never have actually played all the levels of the game from start to finish so would only ASSUME that there would be enough memory for someone to actually complete the game.  I find it so amusing that so many games were originally designed assuming that no one could ever possibly finish them so there was no need to provide a proper end point!

Brian Kuh tells everyone at Funspot arcade to witness Steve reaching a Kill Screen in Donkey Kong. This truly is the epitomy of geek.

Which brings me to my first film review!  Go and watch, “King of Kong : A Fistful of Quarters“.  It’s the story about the world record holders for the classic Arcade Games in particular “Donkey Kong”.  This game is so tricky and complex you need to be a very special kind of individual to even make it to level 8.  This is a brilliant story about the record holder, Billy Mitchell, who is a COMPLETE geek, the biggest computer geek in the world with the most inflated ego you could imagine.  He seriously thinks he is perfect.  He proclaims throughout the film that a record is not a record unless it is publically scrutinised, if it isn’t, it means nothing and he would settle for nothing less yet his Donkey Kong high score was NOT produced in any kind of public forum.

A young man called Steve Wiebe manages to beat Billy’s world record but because it was not done in public it was not recognised.  The governing body of the worlds high scores (which Billy is a member of! Biased much?) also invalided Steve’s score because it was done on a machine that was provided by a player who had a beef with Billy Mitchell so they claimed the board could have been modified to make it easier to play!

It is a brilliant story about the little guy trying to be recognised as the best, up against the World Number 1 who has the governing body of the Worlds Top Scores eating out of his hand.  Can Steve beat Billy’s score publically to claim his rightful place as the Donkey Kong champion of the world?

Anyone that has ever been interested in gaming or gets nostalgic about the old Arcade Games should watch this film! 4/5 Stars!

My workplace has a pool table and a pool ladder.  This, in itself, is great, because the CEO will oftentimes walk into my office and tell me that I am corporately mandated to not work for the next 10 minutes while he challenges me.

There are two games you can choose from, which I shall refer to as The 8 Ball and The 9 Ball.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses as challenge selections, which I now present.

The 9 Ball

9 Ball is played as a “best two out of three”, which is sensible, because there’s so much luck involved.  In general, the rules we play are the ones we would play at home – hit the lowest numbered ball first; sink the 9, and you win.  Illegal shots give you placement of the cue ball, which means you can aim it up and do something like cue-ball—one-ball—nine-ball—pocket, which means the winner is almost certainly decided by who makes a mistake.  On top of that, three mistakes in a row is Sudden Death (which you must be warned about after two mistakes, which doesn’t make it seem very sudden).

If I’m playing a much superior opponent, 9 Ball is my way to go, because they can sink 1 through 8 and then make a mistake (cue ball in after the 9 ball is my favourite) and then leave you with only one trivial shot to win.

However, watch out if your opponent is superior and vindictive, because those opponents will wait until you foul, and then play a shot to put the next ball somewhere you can’t possibly hit it: rinse, repeat, simple win.

The 8 Ball

Everywhere you go there are different rules for 8 Ball; where you can shoot from, what happens in the case of a foul, etc.  Something we have discussed recently is how a number of the rules that I used to take for granted — for example, sinking the 8 on the break is an instant win — are the result of pub pool tables where you can’t get your ball back.  If you sink the 8, it costs you $1 (or whatever The Outback charges per game now; does NZ have $5 coins yet?) to get it back, so you may as well just start again.

What bothers me most about 8 Ball is that the challenger breaks, and on a good break, can sink all the balls up-to-and-including the 8, thus winning the game without you even needing to be there.  Two possible solutions: ensure the defending player breaks, so they get the advantage, and live with it; or allow the loser the chance at the same feat, and if they do make it, playing best-of-N, which again, at the pub, requires another offering to the machine that can only swallow money.

Getting good

There are a class of people in life that improve linearly with time.  The more you play, the better you are.  I have a colleague who likes to play a lot (at the expense of working) and he has worked himself from pretty useless up to contender over the last few months.

Then, there are the class of people that seem to be good at things without any effort ever, like Paul Hardy playing Shadow Warrior.  I like to sit just below those guys on the ladder, waiting for someone I can challenge who isn’t as demoralizing.

The aforementioned CEO, already a serious contender for top of the table, was given a pool lesson as a birthday gift (possibly from himself).  He was, of course, told that everything he’d been doing these last 40 years was wrong, and actually played quite a bit worse until he broke all the old habits and replaced them with newer, shinier habits.

I watched a few videos on YouTube to try and see if I could pick up any technique to improve my woefully bad game.  I ended up suffering from the same problem – I can concentrate on trying to get good shape on the next ball, but then I don’t even make the shot, so it doesn’t matter.  Maybe you need 40 years of doing it wrong to get it right.

In or out?

This reminds me of a question, which I believe related to ten-pin bowling, but probably applies equally well to pool.  I think I learned it at high school, but don’t remember anything more than I must have asked it once of Vernando.  I say this, because he reminded me several years later, so it must have done its job!

The question: “do you breathe in or out when you let the ball go?”  Ask someone, and watch them become really self-conscious and start missing simple shots.