InvaderJim42

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About InvaderJim42

About Me

I'm a 21-year-old computer programmer from Massachusetts. I'm also truly nobody really important, but because I feel Unwarrented Self-Importance, I'm going to talk about myself anyways.

Programming Skills

I'm quite familiar and skilled with several programming languages (listed in order of learning them):

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Edsger Dijkstra

"Sir, you could not be more wrong. Good programming is not about languages; it's about problem-solving." -- My Response

Programming Projects

I've written a professional application, in Visual Basic .NET, which I use extensively as a tool for analyzing the formats of various file types. Using my tool, I've figured out the formats (and in some cases also written low-level viewers and editors) for many file types including...

SimCity 2000's saved cities (.sc2)
SimCity 2000's saved tilesets (.mif)
Star Wars: TIE Fighter's various types of resource files
Some file types for the PC version of Final Fantasy VII
- Character Model Meshes
- Character Model Hierarchies
- Character Model Skeleton Animations
- Textures
Some graphics files for Final Fantasy Tactics
Dark Cloud 2's data archive file(s)
Dark Cloud 2's texture files
The Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire and FireRed/LeafGreen ROMs
Fallout and Fallout 2 custom character files
Files for other games and programs I can't remember at the moment

For those who are interested, I won't be publicly releasing my File Viewer until I'm fully satisfied with the features I've programmed and will program into it. But if you ask me really nicely, I'll let you try out the current build. Consider it an open beta of sorts!

Current Wikipedia Projects

My job queue is currently empty. So I've entered my "passive editing" mode where I make minor changes and corrections as I encounter the need for them.

Significant Rants

Foreword

I'm the kind of person who has no problem voicing his opinions. If something needs to be said in a potentially offensive way to get my point across, I will not yield to being polite or courteous. As such, some of my rants can be offensive to some people, especially those borne out of anger or frustration with something. When I get frustrated or angry I can sometimes lose control of my tongue and lash out viciously, we've all been there. So take my more angry rants with a grain of salt, if you must. Fortunately, not all of my rants are borne out of anger. Some of them are borne out of discussion with other people, or through philosophical thinking. Either way, my opinions define who I am. This collection of concentrated opinions provides others with a window into how my mind works.

The Brave Little Toaster - Too Scary For Children?

What follows is a post from an IMDb thread discussing whether or not The Brave Little Toaster was too scary or too inappropriate a film for children to watch.

Gyah! I have to agree with you all over the place here. The Brave Little Toaster was one of my absolute favorite childhood movies. Such a favorite that I quested on LimeWire and downloaded the songs from the movie, and I'm currently in search of the parts I need to rip it from my VHS copy (there are ways).

Secondly, Little Nemo WAS scary for me as a child. When Flip first unlocked the forbidden door and crazy stuff was happening I was freaking all over the place. That Nightmare King was a scary character indeed. Nowadays though, I went back and watched it with some friends, and we got a kick out of MSTing some parts of it.

Even as a child I actually understood some of the underlying and subtle things pretty well. I immediately recognized Kirby's chewing on his cord as a suicide attempt, I knew that Toaster was sacrificing himself to save his master, I knew that Lampy was also in a way sacrificing himself to charge up the battery and give the rest of the party hope for success, I knew the parts shop guy was literally ripping the guts out of the blender, and so on and so forth. The only part of the movie that actually scared me was the moment Kirby leaped off the cliff and into the waterfall, solely because the sudden noise startled me after about 5 seconds of silence.

<RANT>
And I also have to agree with you about giving kids credit. It seems these days that parents and other adults believe that they have to shelter their kids from everything that seems too mature. Some adults treat the television and video games as a babysitting device. They plop their kids down in front of the TV and expect them to stay out of trouble while they go off and do other things. Then they start a riot when they discover their beloved electronic babysitter isn't doing what they want. They demand that their children be sheltered from so many things. But this can do far more harm than good. Take, for example, a hot stove. If a child puts his hand on the burner, he's going to get burned once. It'll hurt, yes, but he probably won't do it ever again. He learned from his experience that putting your hand on a hot stove will hurt. Now let's put a protective parent into the scenario. The child reaches for the hot stove and the parent swats their hand away because they dont want the child to get hurt. The child doesn't learn that touching the stove will hurt because the parent won't let him find out. What happens when the child grows up and leaves the family? With his parents no longer there to give him direction, he can touch the hot stove all he wants, and by this point he may not care if he burns his hands (while this makes less sense for a hot stove, it makes more sense for a real-life thing like unprotected sex or drug usage).

What the world needs today is parents who actually act like parents. What we need is parents who will sit down with their children when they watch a movie and put things into context. I've got friends who've been sheltered from sexual things all their lives, and most of them are now far more addicted to sex and such things than I'd say the average person would be.

Well, I've said my piece. I hope this has been enlightening.
</RANT>

Winamp Generated Playlists - The Bane of My Search for Music

This rant was the first entry in my very sporadically-updated LiveJournal. I had been reminiscing about television shows and songs from my childhood that I really enjoyed, and wish I could have to listen to again. So, in order to please my nostalgia, I searched on Google for sites where I might download some of the songs (this was before I had accepted peer-to-peer software as a better method). To my frustration, the vast majority of the results that were returned were peoples' Winamp Generate Playlists that they had posted online.

Ever searched the internet for a specific song or track, and come across the dozens and dozens (or even hundreds) of pages that are merely a list of songs without links? I damn well have! I'm getting really sick of it, too! Just now I was searching for the song "Do De Rubber Duck" from Sesame Street (a wicked cool song), and most of the results I got were peoples' lists of all the songs on their playlist or in their possession. If I had a nickel for every "Winamp Generated Playlist" I've seen, I'd probably be rich enough to buy out Microsoft and modify the Windows Automatic Update so that anyone who tries to post a playlist of songs (without links to song files) would have their entire song collection deleted. That would be sweet. But anyways, back to the issue at hand: posting your playlist online. Why do people even do this? How many people really care exactly what songs you listen to? What good does posting your extensive list of songs accomplish?? What does it prove?? I'll tell you exactly what it DOES accomplish: it frustrates people searching the internet for music, it wastes bandwidth and internet storage space, and it just shows that you probably lack self-confidence and feel that you must post your exact musical tastes online to get people to like you. The latter may not be entirely true, but let's face it: it's quite a good possibility. Seriously, this is a habit that NEEDS to be dropped by all of the morons of the world who feel or hope that anyone actually takes interest in their lives.

Electronic Arts - The Anti-Christ of the Video Game Industry

This rant was also an entry on my LiveJournal, and was written shortly after I had encountered Wikipedia through Trillian. In the rant I vented my frustrations and voiced my opinion of what Electronic Arts has done to some of my favorite video game series and studios.

While cruising around on Wikipedia, I came upon a list of now defunct computer and video game companies. Feeling a twinge of nostalgia, I decided to look at this list and read about some of the companies I was familiar with. I came across one of my all time favorite companies: Westwood Studios, the makers of the awesome Command & Conquer series of games. Seeing Westwood on the list reminded me that they had been bought out and later dissolved by Electronic Arts. This has rekindled the flame in my heart that is the hatred I feel towards EA. They've taken many a good company and game series and turned it into a mediocre franchise. My first run-in with this fallacy was with their game Command & Conquer: Generals. Playing it for the first time, I was pretty ticked to find that they had done away with many of the concepts that were constant throughout the C&C games, such as the Construction Yard. Instead they used these homoerotic oversized bulldozers to build structures much like the SCVs in StarCraft. They also did away with the Harvester and Ore Truck concepts and replaced the raw harvested materials with boxes of money on a loading dock. Worse still was the loss of any sort of character to the game itself. The briefings were incredibly impersonal, and there were no major characters to speak of in the game. It felt NOTHING like Command & Conquer. It felt like something new and crappy published under a label which should have never been tarnished! Westwood isn't the only company that has fallen to the Microsoft of the gaming industry; several other companies have been absorved and either dissolved or disturbed by the evil of EA. One of my other favorite companies, Maxis, is now owned by EA and has yet to turn out any sort of Sim game other than The Sims (and I'm getting tired of playing God on a personal level, I want to go back to city-scale games). Every time I see the EA logo and their horrid animation that accompanies it, it makes my blood boil. I would boycott EA, but unfortunately some of the stuff they churn out is still half-decent (but probably won't be for long). So, instead I'm encouraging everyone to make things hard for EA and don't buy any of their games. Steal them or copy them; do anything you can to bring down this self-glorifying brothel of evil, whose whores are actually men in business-like attire! Every Jedi is now an enemy of the Republic! Do what must be done!! (Had to get a Star Wars quote in.) But seriously, someone needs to give EA a wakeup call to CUT THE CRAP and MIND IT'S OWN BUSINESS. I'm sick and tired of really bitchin' companies being bought up by these horribly carnivorous corporations!

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