ChainMaille

Chainmaille, class of 2005. Current location: Seattle. Not working for TheEvil?, thank-you very much.

Call me Chainmaille. Or call me Chris. What the hell. Call me Joe. But don't expect me to answer. I'll flesh this out later when I have more than two minutes to browse FunWiki.Stupid Bio 52.

• The relevance of this paragraph after two years of not taking Bio 52 has been called into question. However, the questioners, being ferrets on sugar highs, promptly forgot to wait for an answer.

Okay, I have more than two minutes.Let's do this.

Chainmaille (that's me) is currently an alumnus who likes putting parenthetical comments (like this one) in his sentences (perhaps too often). He's primarily known for making pretty little things out of bits of metal, hence the name. He has a website on Turing (yay free webspace...I'm only paying 35k or so per year) dealing with these bits of metal [here] (long since moved [here]). Threaten him too much and he may beat on you with some of the larger bits of metal.Or at least threaten to do so. Or maybe he'll just throw shiny things at you. Don't tempt him.

Bah. Enough with the third person.

Largest bit of metal currently: a 3' 7/16" steel rod. Fear me. DTO!

I'm mildly obsessed with videogames (as opposed to freshman year, when I was a semipermanent fixture in front of the lounge TV). I'm more or less omnivorous, although I have a fairly heavy bent towards old games. Y'know, the ones that weren't capable of being shiny, so they had to focus on gameplay instead? Ahhh, gameplay. How we miss thee. Some examples of games I think did particularly well:

• SuperMarioBrothers. Has to be on this list.
• TheLegendOfZelda?, LoZ?: the Adventure of Link, and LoZ?: A Link to the Past. All three before they started having a fanfare for each rupee you pick up. LoZ?: OcarinaOfTime? gets an honorary mention, as despite the fanfares and other silly bits of gameplay interface, it set the tone for basically every 3D over-the-shoulder adventure game.
• Metroid, Metroid II, SuperMetroid. The best exploration/platformer games I have ever seen, bar none. MetroidFusion? was decent but I don't like some of the game mechanics. MetroidPrime was damned good for the first game in its genre (first-person exploration/shooter; are there any that predate it?) but the genre needs some heavy thinking to make it more playable; Prime has control issues despite making significant use of every button on the GameCube controller except for the Z button. The first three games of the series had beautiful level design and clever gameplay.
• TetrisAttack. It has nothing to do with Tetris at all, but it's still damned good.
• AngBand. This thing's huge. Has a world about, oh, ten times larger than that of DiabloIi? Admittedly with no plot, no graphics, and no sound effects. But the vanilla version of AngBand also has over 500 different monsters and some variants more than double that. There's way more content in the sense of stuff-you-don't-skip-after-the-first-playthrough in this game than any other game I can think of with the possible exception of NetHack. And NetHack has that minor little problem that you need to read the developers' minds to figure out what to do.
• Gradius. So fnarking hard, but excellent gameplay. The nice thing about this game is that its sequels don't tone down the difficulty all that much. Good show. Crappy music, though.
• EscapeVelocity. Combines 2D space combat with RPG-style storylines. A bit of a pity that the "Brave Sir Robin" technique still works in EVNova, if less well.
• CastleVania (SotN?, CotM?, and AoS?, three of the later series). Taking a note from the second Zelda games, these improved on the old series by basically making it not suck. Excellent work, great game world, and halfway-decent writing.
• KatamariDamacy?, because it's on so much good crack.
• More to add as I think of them and remember to update this page.

Current classes: N units of RealLife? lab.

So yeah. I have a FunWiki page. It's about damned time. The following may not flow in any logical sense from one item to the next; it's not so much that there is no structure as that what structure there is is fragmented, self-centered, and not about to deign to actually be helpful in any meaningful sense of the word.

I supplied the torch for the ScaryCheese experiments. Dayamn. Glad I don't eat that stuff...

• Though apparently it's less-scary now, I still avoid it and most other cheeses, though. General principle and all that.

I've taken up an interest in poi spinning, which should be fun. Dangerous for innocent bystanders, but fun.

• I assume that's refering to the Tennis balls on strings I've seen you with. Because when I read the word 'poi' I think of the Hawaiian food that is a blandish PurPle paste made from the Taro plant. That sort of Poi is neither fun nor dangerous to innocent bystanders (these qualities are related). -LoganGordon
  • You'd be correct as to your assumption. Poi as I'm using them are related to tho Taro plant, too, though. You stick the root into a package, tie the package up with rope, and then pulverize it on whatever's handy so that it's edible. Then you realize that you're overdeveloping one of your arms, so you add a second rope and package for the other one. Then you get bored and start making pretty patterns. After that part, lighting them on fire follows naturally, especially if you're a frosh.

I also have a sideline in making ConLangs. Well, I more like to make interesting character sets, but the ConLang stuff kinda goes hand in hand with that.

"When I was in school, I had to walk twenty miles, through the snow, uphill, in a vacuum!" - ProfessorKuenning

"They're different. They may be different in the sense that they're the same, but they're different, dammit!" - ChainMaille

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