He never asked for this

Armsfalloff

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10 Years in Infosec: The Obligatory Blogpost

I didn't intend for the face to face meetup I had with the BBC to turn into some sort of  gonzo summing up of the last ten years of my life, but looking at it - with pictures of Batman and giraffes as you scroll down the page alongside tales of Chunkylover and the Nigerian Astronaut it's difficult not to feel that your life is pretty weird. Ten years in infosec is nothing, really, given many people have done it for that length of time three times over or more. But when you thought you'd be getting paid money to make bad movies or paint pictures riffing on the best aspects of high renaissance art via comic book sensibilities, it feels a lot longer. I'm a "Veteran" now! I'm old! I might grow a beard! I'm still pretty new to the infosec scene, but I think I earned my blogger Vet stripes thrashing it out with all those incredibly rich Adware companies of old at a time when hardly anyone else was, and in very public fashion I might add. I also managed...
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Thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda

Yeah, I saw all the bad reviews and laughed at the hilarious wonky animations. I've discovered ways to make Ryder either do a crab-walk shuffle or look like she's on rollerskates. Sometimes I load up the Tempest and she's vibrating up and down while team mates stand on tables. My biggest concern was that after having played an hour or so of Andromeda's demo, I didn't like it. The introductory planet feels wanky, with vision obstructing grass and awkward to climb rocks all over the place - not what you want when trying to get to grip with a new game and its mechanics. The combat seemed like some weird throwback to ME1 where everything is floaty and underpowered. Once you get past the first not particularly well done first hour or so, the game opens out into something I'm finding to be hugely enjoyable. It's gonzo ME1. It's all those Mako planets from the first game, but jammed with stuff to do on them. If the original ME, which felt like a lost s...
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Untitled Space Game: Dev Diary 2

I decided to go with Twine because it's (fairly) easy to pick up, and it reminds me of making way too many text adventures in BASIC on a Commodore +4. I knew going in that it was (in theory) mainly designed for interactive fiction, and you had to sort of bash things into shape in another direction if you wanted to make a game - or at least something people more readily associate with a game. First time around, I just couldn't work out how to make it do what I wanted. When I returned, there were now multiple versions galore. The default version, Harlowe, seemed to have more features. I just sort of vaguely assumed it would now be very easy to add additional elements like audio and visuals. Whoops. As it happens, I realised about 40 locations deep that actually I should probably be using the version called Sugarcube. Why search desperately for code that allows me to save and load games, which may not even work anymore, if it does this in Sugarcube by default? Why struggle with au...
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