All right, lunch break. Snow is calmly falling.
I put the wrong kind of cheese on my bagel.
I have not yet purchased RX 10, but I got more reinforcement from Mastodon of it being a good choice for improving my audio files. I realized the software could have expensive future implications as well. The reason is this: processing a whole recording takes multiple minutes, and all my computers cores are being fully loaded in the process. Which means that more and more powerful cores would make a big difference to my wait times. That right there is the least bad reason I have had in years for thinking about more powerful computers. Surely, a dedicated audio workstation computer with lots of cores is something I need to have?
For my work.
Speaking of audio and work, I realized one possible reason this week feels a bit out of whack is that I have done a lot less podcasting than usual. That could be why I am walking around with a faint feeling of having missed something I should be doing.
Karting and volting
Another expansion pack to Mario kart 8 landed yesterday, so I gave one of the new cups a go this morning. I find it interesting how Mario kart is something I have learned to such a degree that I can just plow through new cups and win all races in the first go. I am not playing at the highest difficulty level at the moment, but I think that matters less than the whole game series somehow staying true to itself in such a way that you actually build experience which transfers between games almost completely intact. I wonder if Nintendo has formal processes in place to ensure this, or if it happens simply by the degree everyone involved cares about what they do? Is there a huge design bible about the feel and calculations behind bike drifting, or is it re-implemented for every game and just happens to end up feeling the same?
In the same genre, I came across a Youtube video about Re-volt, a great remote control car racing game from the very end of the 90's. It was fun and challenging, it played great, it looked great, and it also - for some reason - had plenty of fun weapons to pick up and use while racing. It was also quite extensible. I remember a friend discovering that all car physics properties were editable in plain text files, and that the physics engine was realistic enough that outrageous values would simply result in an undrivable vehicle. But it apparently did not stop there. One could build levels, and people have created launchers for the game which adds tons of options and even fixes bugs in the game. I should give it a go again, see if I have retained any skills whatsoever. I at least remembered some of the levels I saw in the video, as well as the very cool menu system.
Enough nostalgia, time to clear a path to the weekend!