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Yes, him again. :(

Assassin's Creed: Ezios Doing Things!

While taking screenshots of NPCs doing things for my previous post, I also wound up with several of Ezio going about his business. Without further ado, here is a day in the life of a master assassin.


The hobbies of a master assassin include perfectly normal things such as boating...


Sightseeing...


Hanging out with friends...


A keen interest in health and fitness...


And taking the occasional small adventure.


"Hahaha! You thought the Cluster puzzles were over, but they are really JUST BEGINNING! You mad?!"

I hate you, Subject 16.


Nice mesh tearing you've got there. Ubisoft, I am disappoint.


Hm...


Look, I'm Jesus! :D


Leonardo doesn't like me anymore. I keep saying, "Hey, man! Heard any good rumors lately?" or "How about building me another flying machine that can drop bombs? I could really use one!" But he just gives me a disgusted stare and gets up and leaves. I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS, LEONARDO. HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME WHEN THERE ARE STILL SO MANY THINGS IN THE WORLD THAT I HAVE NOT DROPPED BOMBS ON?


This NPC annoyed me, so he wound up in a fountain.


He was soon joined by a friend...


...And then several more friends. The overwhelming reaction of other cardinals to my viciously headbutting their fellows into submission and then chucking them in the water? A nervous, "Well, he looked like he deserved it!" See? Priests are just so punchable that even they acknowledge it.

At the end of a long, hard day, the master assassin returns to his hideout for a well-deserved rest. Unfortunately, there are no beds in his hideout and so he probably has to sleep on a chair or the cold marble floor.


Then again, perhaps the master assassin is like a shark and sleeps while moving. And killing. Either way, he does not have a bed in his hideout.

Assassin's Creed: NPCs Doing Things!

When they aren't behaving in ways that make you question the sanity of whoever coined the term "artificial intelligence," the NPCs in this game can be almost scarily lifelike. I've been taking random screenshots of them engaged in the aforementioned scarily lifelike behaviors because it is so neat.


For example, these NPCs are having a picnic!


So are these.


These NPCs have found love.


This NPC does not approve of my corpse disposal locations.


This NPC adores his lantern.


Either these NPCs have found love, or the one in the pink dress has found a hairdresser. I'm not sure which.


These NPCs do not know what to make of Ezio's attempts at blending in with them.


These NPCs are just hanging out on a flight of stairs, enjoying the view. The view of what, you may ask?


The view of this. Yeah, I had to stop and enjoy it for a little while too.


These NPCs cannot seem to agree on the nuances of fence repair.


These NPCs don't know when to quit. They are the Assassin's Creed equivalent of the Adoring Fan, and I hate them with the fiery passion of a thousand exploding suns.


To round it off, they occasionally travel in packs. ARGH!


These NPCs are drunk!


These NPCs were attempting to have a romantic, starlit evening out in the country, looking at the sky and whispering sweet nothings into each other's ears, but I think that Ezio's creeping may have ruined it.

Stop labeling me!

I went through all my posts and slapped labels on them. Because, you know, it would sure be difficult to find any particular entry in the sea of eight other posts!

Guess which label has already seen the most use? If you guessed 'whining about things,' you are correct. I am, after all, an extraordinarily optimistic and upbeat person.

Also, my computer is in the process of defragmenting itself and apparently my ninjalike ability to compress large amounts of data has blown its tiny little mind since it keeps finding space it didn't even know was there. I swear my C partition had 28 gigs free before I started the defrag, and now it has 30. And no, the fragmentation isn't even THAT bad. It was at 8% or something after my cleaning/shrinking adventure yesterday. Now it is at 2% and most of the little red squares in Defraggler have turned into little blue squares, which is all I need to know. Well, and there's also the patch of little yellow squares that represent my pagefile. They're kind of harshing on the nice blue color scheme I've got going and they're not even yellow yellow, more like a brownish, pukish shade of ochre that I don't like at all.

What? No, I'm not posting whatever comes to mind because I am bored and have nothing better to do until this is finished. Not at all.

...

I am freezing right now, but I can't be bothered to get up and shut my windows so for the past five minutes I have, more or less, been typing with three fingers while the others slowly blacken and shrivel with frostbite.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are reading the blog of the world's next great genius.

Edit: Okay, now my D partition, which was previously sitting at 19 gigs of free space, has 28 instead. I deleted nothing. I compressed nothing. Nine gigabytes have appeared out of fucking nowhere to surprise me, like David Hasselhoff.


I don't get it, but I'm not complaining.

Weird save names!

While on my space-saving file compression rampage, I couldn't help but notice that, while most of my Oblivion saves had the default naming format (Save Number - Character Name - Location, Level, Playing Time), others had been given some interesting titles. In no particular order, these are the most interesting.

Guh.ess
WorkPlz.ess
HaGotIt.ess
WorkDamnYou.ess
THERE.ess
AxeYay.ess
WtfLevel.ess
PlsDoNotKillMe.ess
ThisIsFaster.ess
FuckingCompass.ess
ARMANDGODDAMN.ess
DamnOgres.ess

I apparently have a lot of hate for the compass. And Armand Christophe. And ogres. (Actually, I remember the story behind ARMANDGODDAMN.ess--he'd become a shut-in and would never appear at the Garden of Dareloth, so I couldn't do any Thieves Guild quests. Turned out that a mod changing the Mages Guild advancement reqs had done it, if you can believe that. The others? I have no idea. I would particularly love to know what ThisIsFaster.ess was named in reference to. What was going on there and why was I attempting to do it faster? Was I cheating my speed up to 9000 to cross the world map? Using a Scroll of Icarian Flight so that I wouldn't have to walk? Brutally murdering people so that I could take their things and not have to waste time robbing them? The suspense is killing me!)

After reading these I kind of want to play Oblivion, but, knowing me, I would end up creating a blog to document my Oblivion-related adventures and we all know what happened to Pyramidopolis after I reinstalled the Sims 3...

I am the Super Space Saver of the Universe.

I need a bigger hard drive. I have already gone through and uninstalled all the useless programs I don't need, combed through my Downloads folder and nuked everything that has been sitting there for the past three years (well, almost everything...I'm going to install Arena someday and someday I will actually get around to moving my eBooks to their proper eBook folder, I swear!), and now I am left with the glum realization that I still have more things than I have space to keep them in. I've run out of stuff that I am willing to sacrifice for the impending Skyrim/Revelations explosion.

It's okay, though, because I have found the solution, and it is a simple, elegant one that allows me to keep all my stuff.

I am compressing everything. Everything.

7.30 gigabytes of PSD files? It is now 3.46. 3.81 gigabytes of Oblivion saves? No problem, it has been pared down to 933 megabytes. 1.70 gigs of Fallout 3 saves? Yeah, right! Try 675 megabytes instead. Exactly one gigabyte of who even knows what in my Miscellaneous storage folder? Err, well, it's actually still about the same size. It would be less, but images don't compress very well and my blog folders live in there and Allegorical Dullness alone is creeping up on 300 megabytes.

However, compress as I might, the stupidity of my hard drive's partitioning means that it is still not enough. Thanks, ASUS, for taking a 300 gigabyte drive and splitting it in half. That was really smart of you! Assuming, of course, that your goal was to make my space management experience a frustrating and impossible one.

So, yes, I need a bigger hard drive. At the very least I need a new external drive to play musical files with, but a new hard drive would be better since then I would not have to uninstall Sims 2 in order to play Skyrim. Remember, if I am forced to uninstall Sims 2 there will be no new Pyramidopolis posts!

Huh? What do you mean there will be no new Pyramidopolis posts either way since I last updated it sometime in the 18th century?

Err, well, um...

Screw you, gentle reader! Stop hamstringing me with your logic!

Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...a plane!

For the past hour I have been hitting up all the usual travel websites, attempting to locate cheap airfare from Philadelphia to DFW. Planes confuse me; ticket prices fluctuate based on the day of the week, the time of year, the phase of the moon and I thought that Wednesday was the time to get inexpensive tickets but it is actually Tuesday OR IS IT? Nah, it's Thursday. OR IS IT? Fortunately, the travel websites make your life easier with options like flexible departure dates and result-sorting by the lowest price to the highest. Put in your destination and a vague idea of when you want to get there and it will find the best deals for you!

Unfortunately, when the best deals to be found are in the range of $350-$450 for a one-way ticket, that's a bit discouraging. Actually, it's a lot discouraging. It's even more discouraging when you realize that the airline companies are determined to take what ought to be a short three-hour flight and turn it into a twelve-hour nightmare.

Yes, you read that right. Some of these flights are twelve hours long. Well, eleven hours and forty-some minutes, but the fact remains that you can get there in three, so what is the plane doing for an extra eight hours and forty-some minutes?

I found out when I began to check the connections.

At first I had a reasonable expectation that my itinerary would look like this:


How foolish I was! I quickly learned that instead of ferrying us from Point A to Point B, my pilot would be dragging myself and all the other hapless travelers aboard on a grand adventure through the United States. We would be going from Point A to Point D to Point L to Point X to Point B for no logical reason, in the process burning an unreasonable amount of jet fuel and destroying every last vestige of our sanity.

Yes, that's three connections. Three. You hop on this plane, and it takes you to Washington, Charlotte, Orlando, and then, finally, if you have not bashed your skull in against the window out of sheer frustration at the stupidity of it all, you might arrive in Texas and your bags may or may not arrive with you.

Expedia didn't actually specify which Washington you go to, Washington DC or Washington-Washington, so my itinerary could look like this:


Or, even more ridiculous, like this:


Then there's the nine-hour flight that goes to Orlando and Denver!


I'm not kidding. I wish I was kidding.

Perhaps the airlines are run by a cabal of sadists, or perhaps it is all a nefarious conspiracy to cheat innocent men and women out of their frequent flyer miles. I don't know, but, guys, if you really want to mess with your customers I have a better idea. Why not sweep us away on a fanciful tour of Alaska while you're at it? Actually, why don't you add even more connecting flights? I don't think we're angry enough yet!

Observe: 17,299 miles of fun, wonder, and efficiency!


You're welcome.

I am going to go bang my head against something sharp now. Maybe airline logic will then make sense to me.

The Unflinching

Two months to Skyrim and so I, naturally, am telling stories about a game that came out in 2002. Well, technically about an expansion pack that came out in 2003, which I suppose is somewhat more recent.

Well, there goes NaNoWriMo.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is coming out on 11/11/11.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations is due on 11/15/11.

y u do htis 2 me, u gaiz?!