Replaying Nox, Again

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I have never bothered to create a top-ten list of my all-time favorite video games. Maybe I should since it seems the only way to get people to read your Web site is to organize everything into numbered lists. In any event, were I ever to compile such a list Nox would be somewhere in the top five for me.

After a recent upgrade to Windows 10 (excellent by the way), I was going through and making sure all my treasured old programs still worked. In the process I booted up my GOG.com version of Nox and noticed it had some issues. After much searching and fruitless forum posting I finally found a workaround. In case you are wondering, you need to install a game mod called “Nox SDL.” You can download the patch here. Once I got the game running, it wasn’t long before I was sucked back in to my fourth play through of the game.

This game is so great. I don’t know about you, but I immediately realized that when I could play with my character stripped down to his briefs:

Nox Underwear

Beating the game would be difficult, but you could play the entire game running around like a crazed streaker if you so chose.

The game was marketed as a role playing game in the style of Diablo but that’s not what it really is. Although there are a lot of standard RPG tropes—leveling up, collecting loot, upgrading spells and abilities—Nox has much more in common arcade-style top-down action games like Guantlet and Smash TV. The game play is fast, exciting and there isn’t much thinking and strategy. If it moves, kill it! As simple as this sounds it is sounds, the game is incredibly fun. There’s just enough exploration and level variety to keep you going. The story is paper thin but it’s filled with humor and the main villain Hecubah is terrifically voice acted.

I even bothered to record a bunch of game play footage to post on YouTube and make tons of money off of the idiot millennials who watch other people play video games:

See, what I mean? It’s just awesome! I really wish someone would take up the mantle and reboot Nox. A few modern games like Torchlight look like it but are still firmly RPG games with horrible inventory management and no twitch game play. Magicka comes close, but I felt the mechanics were too complicated and the game seemed overly concerned with co-op play. For now, the GOG.com version will suffice. As soon as I finished this playthrough as a conjurer I immediately felt the itch to start over again as a fighter or wizard.

Major Overhaul of Planet Pimp Web Site

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Did you know I maintain an informational resource page dedicated to Planet Pimp Records (the greatest record label ever to exist)? Well, now you do, and today I uploaded a massive update to the site. This is mostly behind the scenes stuff that makes the site easier for me to update, but I have also added some new features including links to external video and audio. There have also been some fancy style tweaks so the site now scales to fit mobile devices.

There are still some quirky buts, but I am working on cleaning everything up and reviewing the site and links. A big thing on my to-do list is getting rid of Flash elements and replacing them with more mobile-friendly HTML5 widgets. As always, if you have anything to add to this vital historical record, please send your contributions to me.

My First Foray into SASS

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As I mentioned a few posts ago, this site has received a major theme overhaul. Aside from a couple form element styles, this change was mostly structural and behind-the-scenes. The new theme is my first foray into using the SASS CSS preprocessing language. Let me tell you, it was a revelation. SASS allows you to write CSS using a super-clean tabbed coding style and (finally) allows the use variables and expressions in styles. I mean, look at this OCD coder’s dreamscape:

Behold the beauty of SASS!

Gone are curly brackets and semi-colons. Now elements can be nicely nested within each other and there’s lots of neat shorthand to make code more portable.

Now, I am very late to this party and it turns out much of the SASS code you find on the net is written in a more standard CSS syntax (those sass files are saved as .SCSS rather than .SASS). I hope this cleaner, more modern syntax remains supported because I am completely sold on it.

For quite some time I have heard of SASS but have always been hesitant to dig into it because I always assumed that it was some server-side application that would require SSH and Linux and a bunch of crap I don’t care about. I have since realized that this is not the case. SASS files are compiled locally into a single, standard CSS file. Still, the first thing tutorials seem to tell you to do is to go install Ruby and dive into the command prompt. Yeech! Thankfully, smart people out there (“there” equals Nepal in this case) have developed a windows app that will compile and upload everything you need.

Prepros Screengrab

Prepros is a tiny little app that does it all and I highly recommend it if you are developing on Windows. It processes many other languages as well (including Jade and JavaScript) and, regarding SASS, also includes Compass.

Compass is a set of functions and extensions to SASS that makes cross-browser development super easy. A word of warning about Compass: unlike pure SASS it doesn’t work out-of-the-box and requires some research into creating a “config.rb” file. The Zen Drupal theme includes this file and I used that as a base, and I think I understand it now.

In any event, I’m syched about Web development for the first time in a long while and I am glad I made the leap. Also, support Prepros and buy a copy (or two).

Another Site Update

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Well, recently I’ve been trying to learn how to use SASS for styling Web pages and have kind of fallen in love with it. So here is my first go at it in the form of a new site template. Not much has changed visually, but, trust me, there have been a ton of changes behind the scenes. I will post more about this and the trials of retrofitting a Drupal theme for SASS sometime in the near future. In the meantime, look at the neat comments buttons I made!

Drupal, Pathologic and Corrupted URLs

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I’ve been having some technincal issues with this site lately. Strange links to content within the site have been appearing at random. I would insert a hyperlink to an archived post and then, days later, I would come back to see that the URL has been rewritten with a random sub-domain prefix. My domain would appear as www.wqw.robertgomez.org or similar.

I am not entirely sure what was going on but I think bots and the Drupal Pathologic module are to blame. Pathologic is a great module that will convert any internal site link into a standardized absolute URL. In my code I would create a link with an href of “node/1098” and Pathologic would convert that href to “http://www.robertgomez.org/blog/2014/03/17/drupal-my-list-essential-modules”. However, I suspect that when various bots crawled my site they used weird sub-domain prefixes in hopes of doing… I don’t know what?! Occasionally, one of these bots must have triggered a cron job, and my links were rewritten with the phony sub-domain. Seems feasible, right? If there is a real reason why this was happening, let me know in the comments.

The bad links could be fixed by opening a node and re-saving them. I used the Resave Nodes module to bulk save everything again. However, by the next morning the bad links had returned. The phony sub-domains were still being crawled. The next step was to use a rewrite rule in my .htaccess file that would force all subdomain traffic to a non “www” prefixed URL of the site. I then re-resaved everything, an so far thing are back to normal. Again, if you know what’s going on, shoot me a comment.

And Why Are You Telling Us This?

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So, here we are post mid-term Republican take-over of the legislature. As one might expect, my Facebook feed been awash with bitter and angry lefty losers (Although it hasn’t been quite as bad as I expected. I guess the election outcome was not much of a shock). Posts range from the typical “I don’t know anyone who would have voted for these monsters” to expected sour-grapes cries of cheating, etc. Fortunately, there were none of the usual calls to violence and injury as I have seen in the past:

Something came across my feed this morning that had me thinking, and when I start thinking it’s usually a good idea fore me to log off of Facebook and take to my blog where my rants won’t lose me friends (and won’t be read by anybody). A friend of mine linked to an article about the CEO of ULINE and how he was the a big-time contributor to conservative candidates and causes across the state. He is, as the headline put it, “The Koch of conservative politics in Illinois.”

As an aside, What’s with the left and their continual need for boogeymen when advocating for their causes? These days Koch brothers are the anti-christ du jour. Had this article come out ten years ago it would reference Haliburton. Ten years before that, maybe Mark Furhman? I guess there exists a sort of transitive property in politics that makes any problem more dire simply by association. And before you cry partisan foul, I realize that Republicans can do this to… I remember ACORN… but I feel it is much more rampant on the left.

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand. This friend linked the article then proclaimed that, of course, he will no longer will buy anything from ULINE again. Now, I am all for using the pocketbook to express a political position. You think GMOs are bad, by all means buy your organic small-batch artisinal what-nots to your heart’s content. But I don’t quite understand what the end-game is here, especially since he felt fit to announce this to world via social media.

Let’s just say everyone sees his post and decides never to satisfy their cardboard shipping needs at ULINE ever again. ULINE closes shop and all the workers, drivers and office drones there, regardless of their political convictions, are out of a job (something like 2000+ employees). I don’t think that’s the result anyone wants. Ok, if that’s not what we’re after, let’s say the CEO is starting to feel the economic pressure of the boycott. Then what’s he supposed to do, abandon his political convictions in favor of yours? That seems rather narcissistic. Why should everyone agree with you? As the old cliche goes, do you think you have a monopoly on the truth? Here in Chicago, if I only patronized the businesses of people I agreed with I would go hungry real fast (grocers are a secret Marxist cabal from what I hear).

I think what really burns me here is that the boycott is being called not because of the way the company runs its business, rather it’s to punish one man over his political beliefs, and, in the process, punish tons of people who are just living their lives. Can’t we just accept that people have different views? Don’t be a fool, buy from the company that offers you the best product at the best price and use whatever money you saved to fund your pet political cause and don’t let petty politics run your life.

Drupal: My List of Essential Modules

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Taking a break from my usual and completely unnecessary review posts, I thought I’d take a moment get a little technical. This site and many others I have developed use the Drupal open-sourced content management system. Drupal is great. It’s incredibly flexible, powerful and yet moderately easy to use if you have a little Web design experience.

Other systems I have used in the past, including Microsoft Sharepoint and WordPress, don’t hold a candle to Drupal. Sharepoint is an abomination and the only reason you should ever use it for a public facing Web site is if you work at Megacorp, Inc. and some idiot I.T. guy bought it as part of a multi-million dollar corporate enterprise package. Customizing Sharepoint is an exercise in futility and self-immolation. Just assume that your clean standards-compliant code with get destroyed and converted into a stew of redundant tags and impossible-to-style markup. WordPress is much better than that but it still falls short of Drupal when it comes to customizing your content types and controlling look and feel. You can hardly do anything custom in WordPress without having to hand code PHP. Simple tasks like adding an extra field to a post-type are just a pain and require some sort of third-party plugin (of which there are many and all of them do it differently). The only area where WordPress is better than Drupal is in installing and updating plugins and core systems. Drupal is getting better at this, but it still has a way to go to match the ease of use that WordPress offers.

For all my Drupal love, it still isn’t perfect right out of the box. Any Drupal install is going to require also installing a number of add-on modules to get your site fully reach its potential. So here is a list of the modules that I will include in every Drupal site that I create.

Views

Views is the reason you are using Drupal. It allows you to build custom pages, feeds, blocks, etc. based on specific database queries. There is nothing like this for WordPress. You want a page of only posts created in June with the word summer in the body? A list of recent comments? A slideshow of art from posts tagged NSFW? Boom, Views can do that and sort it, make it filterable, restrict access… almost anything you can think of. Views puts you in control of your database. Installing views in Drupal 7 also requires the Chaos Tools Suite, so consider that an essential module too.

Administration Menu

This module puts a thin flyout-menu at the top of all pages that will quickly allow editors and admins to perform tasks without having to click down through multiple pages of admin content. The default Drupal 7 toolbar plus shortcuts is pretty close to providing this functionality but Admin Menu just does it so much better.

Module Filter

Module Filter is like Admin Menu in that it takes a core system interface and makes it just a bit more user friendly. In this case it tames the often over-long list of add on modules. During the development stage of any Drupal site, this saves you a ton of time scrolling and searching that page.

Backup and Migrate

This module has saved me many-a-time. It provides a way to backup your site’s data via a simple Web interface. You can also set schedules for daily backups and you automatically backup to the cloud if you so desire. It is also the easy way to get a site from a test environment to the live server.

Wysiwyg

The main thing that turned me off about Drupal when I first started using it was the lack of any sort of visual text editor when creating content. You still needed to know HTML to style anything. This problem is easily solved with the Wysiwyg module and another third-party visual editing library (in my case I use TinyMCE). The need for a library kinda makes this module a pain to install, but, once you get it up and running, composing posts becomes much easier especially for non-technical users.

IMCE

IMCE also fulfills a very basic editing need that the Drupal core lacks. It allows users to upload and embed images into the body area of their posts via a pop-up file browser. It integrates smoothly into your visual Wysiwyg editor by also installing the IMCE Wysiwyg bridge module.

Read More Control

A final basic Web design flaw with the Drupal core is that it places a truncated post’s Read More link way below where a user might actually notice it. Read More Control brings it back where it should be, within the text of the post’s teaser content.

Menu Block

The default main menu of Drupal is okay, but it is limited in that doesn’t easily let you create CSS flyouts or create sub menus in the sidebar as you dig deeper into the site. Menu block provides you with a highly customizable way to display menus whereever you want.

Pathauto

Pathauto is one of those modules (like views) that really just needs to be part of the core. It gives developers a way to create custom URL aliases based on all sorts of variables (using Tokens… see below). I typically use it to fake an organized directory structure to my sites. And, unlike WordPress’s path customization, it can be as general or specific as you like and doesn’t need to be based on dates or content IDs. 

Menu Position

This module is the second half of my strategy to get my sites to follow a psuedo-directory structure. It allows you to create rules that will make a particular set of content nodes appear as though they exist within a menu structure without having to individually assign each item to the menu tree.

Token

Token is a behind the scenes module that provides a way for Drupal and other modules to use simple placeholders to output small bits of text like post titles, fields, tags, dates, etc.

Honorable Mentions

There are a few more modules which I install most of the time but are not really essential in the way I believe the proceeding are. These include: DateField GroupCaptchaWebformColorboxEntity and Libraries. Follow the links for more information.

Halloween Movie Nights Part III

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It was a rainy Halloween here in Chicago so my usual program of manning the front door, blasting creepy sound effects records and watching old (mildly) kid-friendly horror movies was cut a little shorter than usual. I did manage to watch Mario Bava’s Baron Blood. Not his best work but it has its moments. If you think burnt pilgrims are scary, this is the movie for you.

I also re-watched Four Flies on Grey Velvet. This is another Argento film that gets better with every viewing (I gave it a 7 when I first saw it). The plot is full of holes and has a vital clue that relies on such phony, crap science that it’s hard to suspend disbelief at all. But this is another Argento that is filled with humor, stunning visuals and another great, experimental Morricone score. So, if I were to rank Argento films this is how I would do it:

  1. Suspiria
  2. Deep Red
  3. The Bird With the Crystal Plumage
  4. Inferno
  5. Tenebre
  6. Four Flies on Grey Velvet
  7. Opera
  8. Phenomena
  9. Cat o’ Nine Tails
  10. The Stendahl Syndrome
  11. Jennifer (from Masters of Horror)

Beyond these there’s just a bunch of forgettable garbage.

Halloween Movie Nights Part II

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I managed to watch a couple more Halloween themed films this weekend. This included another Fulci film,  A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, whichI rank as his best along side The Beyond. Unlike most of his other work, this one is tightly plotted and suspenseful. It features a bunch of deranged hippies, surreal dream sequences, a fantastic Morricone score and a compelling performance by David Horowitz of TV’s Fight Back:

I got the entire family to watch the “Drop of Water” segment from Black Sabbath. This is Mario Bava at his best with loads of colored lights, sets that look like renaissance paintings and a super creepy corpse. I like the rest of the film too, but the slow pacing probably wouldn’t have kept the attention of the crowd that evening.