Psychic Detective (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

This week on Super Adventures, I've dragged mecha-neko back to talk about... whatever this is. Looks a bit like a game, maybe? Or perhaps a direct to video movie? Either way, I hope you enjoy reading about it at least twice as much as he enjoyed playing it.

My next game was going to be a cutesy platformer on the Amiga, but after unsuccessfully fighting my way through VectorMan, I thought we could all do with a change.

Developer:

Colossal Pictures, Electronic Arts Studios

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Release Date:

30th November 1995

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Systems:

MS-DOS, 3DO, PlayStation

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So instead, I've gone back in time and found a full motion video interactive movie, just for you. You can tell it's an interactive movie! Look, it's got a strip of film! And a CD-ROM!

Okay, you can stop looking now. Seriously, stop. That mess can't be good for your eyes.
Read on »

Favourite Games -V- Most Re-Played Games

I have been recently thinking about the games I usually say are my favourite, as in my "top 5 RPGs" or whatever, and thinking about how this list overlaps with the games that I have played again and again.

What I have noticed is the lists don't really overlap.

So, my favourite game and RPG is probably FFVII, but in actual fact, I actually haven't played this game through in maybe 15 years now. Is it really the game that I should say is the "greatest"? Is that really what I think, or am I really saying "the game I have the greatest nostalgia for is FFVII"?

I don't think it is all about nostalgia though, because I only played MGS through for the first time 5 years ago, and I honestly think that that game ranks right up there in my top list of games, and in fact, I have only played it through once.

Is this honest? Do we need to have played a game many times for it to be in our top list? When it comes to films, all the films I like the most will be films I have chosen to watch quite a number of times... but with games, maybe it isn't the case.

Perhaps this is down to the amount of time it takes to complete a game, the investment, compared to a film. But even with my favourite books, I have read them a number of times, though probably not all of them....

And then there is the really weird case of games that sucked hours and hours away from my life, but don't even appear on my tops lists. RPGs that I put way down the list but which I played every last bit of juice from them, and at the time must have really enjoyed them or got something from them.... FFVIII for example- I played that to death over a full year, or Age of Empires, or Street Fighter Alpha 3, or Fifa 97, or Altered Beast, all of these I played loads, more certainly than MGS yet MGS ranks above them for sure in my estimation.

Movie Reviews: Mission Impossible: Fallout, Ant-Man And The Wasp, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, The Incredibles 2, Breathe, Midnight Sun

See all of my movie reviews.

Mission Impossible: Fallout - A very good, but not great, entry in this franchise.

MI's plots are generally unimportant: a bunch of people want to kill a bunch of people, MI agents are the only ones who can stop them, but there are traitors in the CIA who are secretly working against them together with the bad guys. Lots of tropes: cool gadgets, deceptively getting suspects to talk, impersonating bad guys using fake masks, plans gone awry, Tom Cruise dangling off of something high, and last second triumphs.

This movie has a few things going for it that its competition franchises (MCU, DCU, James Bond, Fast and Furious, Transformers, Jurassic Park) don't. One is Tom Cruise, who is a great actor and action hero ONLY when he isn't carrying the entire movie. MI has a nice cast of characters that provide relief from endless shots of Tom running, dangling, and jumping. Another is that they manage to keep coming up with tense situations and action sequences that are at least plausible and thus captivating. And that Tom  does his own stunts and the CGI is minimal, which makes the action sequences more engaging and less like watching cool effects on a computer. Tom doing things while skydiving is really Tom Cruise skydiving, which is pretty cool. Mostly, it's that they take some time to give Tom, at least, some real personality, so that he makes different choices based on conflicting targets of loyalty.

The last one is important, and while MI:F includes this, it doesn't include it nearly enough. They keep trying to muscle in more action sequences and less character time. This may make Marvel fans happy but only makes the movie less engaging and more exhausting. The movie too often jumped from action sequence to action sequence without a breath, which left me just a bit numb. I'm sure there are people who like this; who would complain, in fact, if there were more character sequences. So it's just my opinion. These people also tend to overlook little problems, like how certain people deceive other people when these deceivers are under careful, continuous observation, how certain people could possibly know to be in certain places at certain times to meet certain other people when these other people are doing things purely randomly, and and how certain people would surely have to go through a number of checks before getting to where they got to. I guess I am not supposed to notice those things.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. Not as much as 1 or 4, but more then 5 (I didn't see 2 or 3).

Ant-Man and the Wasp - Marvel, yippee. I never actually made it through Ant-Man because it was formulaic and boring. Perhaps the only thing going for it was that at least the fate of the universe wasn't at stake, which was a nice change.

I'm kind of at a loss as to why I found this one more enjoyable. Not exactly a good movie, but better. The ending was poorly executed, and really the science doesn't make any sense. I'm happy that the fate of the world isn't at stake - just one woman. And I'm happy that the main "bad guy" is someone who has a compelling motivation and who isn't bad at all, just trying to survive.

I guess dispensing with a lot of the back-story helped, as did allowing us to see all of the many ways that shrinking/expanding can be used in a fight. Its lack of ambition made it feel less pretentious and thus easier to accept. It felt like a pretty good television episode. So it was okay.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom - The first one (Jurassic Park) was a classic; the last one (Jurassic World) was okay, but the characters were so flat as to make it feel like a Marvel movie. This one is about the same as the last one, but the plot is dumber and even less original. They need to either let the dinosaurs die or rescue them to some other island, and by the way, someone wants to steal some of the dinosaurs and by the way, someone wants to sell them as military weapons (somehow). It sounds familiar because it is.

Same kinds of bad guys doing the same kinds of bad things; yadda yadda. The characters from the last movie are a little different, but just as flat. It's hard to care.

The Incredibles 2 - The first was a great movie, marrying Disney with superheroes with some actual adult themes that didn't talk down to kids. This one is even more so. It starts exactly where the last one left off, only they have to deal with the consequences of the damage caused to the city after they stop the first bad guy (exactly like Captain America: Civil War). In order to solve their PR problem, they decide that Elastigirl (rather than the less PR-worthy Mr Incredible) be sent out to do some careful superhero work, which leaves Mr Incredible alone at home with the kids and their new baby of wildly unknown superpowers.

Cue a little male resentment and a touch of 1950s role reversal comedy, but really not too much. Elastigirl really is a superhero as well as a mom, and she does it well, and Mr Incredible proves that every stay-at-home parent is a superhero in his or her own way. Of course, eventually everything has to come to a head.

The plot is good and thought-provoking, but still full of humor and great action. Of course, it's beautifully rendered and well voiced. A worthy sequel to the original.

Breathe - The true story of a British flyboy who becomes paralyzed by polio while in Kenya in the 1950s. He is ready to die, but his wife won't let him and he goes on to travel home, leave the hospital (which never happened back then) and eventually design the first wheelchair with a respirator. His work (and his good friend the engineer) went on to improve the life of thousands of people in similar condition.

It's wrapped up in beautiful scenery and costuming and a true-life love story. It was interesting to watch, although I guess they glossed over some of the less palatable parts of taking care of a paralyzed person. Meanwhile, some parts of the movie went on longer than they should have, such as the entire last half hour where he decides he has finally lived long enough; these parts could have been shorter. I loved and was even surprised by, the scenes in Spain.

Worth watching, although I wouldn't go out of my way to see it.

Midnight Sun - This is a pretty terrible movie from nearly every perspective. It is about a girl with xeroderma pigmentosum.

In real life, this is a non-curable condition whose sufferers tend to sunburn or blister after small exposures to sunlight and who are therefore extremely vulnerable to skin cancer. People with this condition are visibly distinguishable as such, having typically found out about their condition the hard way. They may have special glass in their house windows, but they can go out in daylight with a lot of clothing and extra caution.

In movie life, the girl has movie-perfect skin and never goes outside during daylight. Furthermore, the moment she is exposed to a few seconds of sunlight she develops a brain condition that begins causing her death.

If that wasn't enough of a problem, just let the anemic characters and the predictable, manipulative, and poorly scripted and acted plot do the rest. And, of course, she is going to "hide" her condition from the first (and last) boy she goes out with, because we never get enough of that kind of thing from sitcoms.

Games Course Alumni Shares His Top Tips On Art Projects.

A big 'Thank you' goes out to our Alumni, David Woodman, who has shared some of his top art tips on ArtStation for our students to learn from his many years of experience as a 3D artist and Art Director in Research and Development at TT-Games!

Top Tips.

You can also see examples of David's work n his ArtStation portfolio.

All You Need To Do Is Have Self-Compassion! And It's Rather Easy!

In training, the first thing we learned in therapy techniques was Carl Rogers' approach of unconditional positive regard for your clients. For me, he was the GOAT. Those who are suffering most likely haven't been given the love and nurturing they needed in childhood, adolescence, and even adulthood. 

Therefore, as therapists, you accept and support the person, without question. You accept the client, including their flaws, after all, everyone has weaknesses, no one is "perfect".

By giving unconditional positive regard, the client then begins to regard themselves more positively after being heard, accepted and supported, they begin to see that they're worthy. And, because they're worthy, they'll be more motivated to change - you take care of things that are valuable, which includes you!

For some reason, this message has been strangely forgotten after my training, because the concept of self-esteem was the fetish. To the point where we have clients write positive things about themselves to improve self-esteem. Esteem, meaning, that you value yourself for your positive qualities, and the more positive qualities, the better your self-esteem. 

Do you see the fatal flaw? When you start thinking of your negative traits, and we all have them as human beings, your self-esteem will fall. Also, what if one of the things you find positive about yourself is that you have beautiful skin, but as you age, it will "sag" and then your self-esteem will crumble. Or, that you're a kind person, but there are going to be times when you act unkindly (out of stress, we're all human), so that will also lower your self-esteem.

However, if you can accept yourself fully, warts and all, because you know that you're not perfect, and no one else is perfect, you begin to accept yourself, and in turn, accept others for not being perfect as well! Thus ending the deadly poison of self and other-criticism, that destroys creativity, inspiration, passion, productivity, and love.

Once you have self-compassion, you will be more motivated to act in more healthy ways such as exercising, not procrastinating, not being critical of others because you see that you're a valuable person. And if you're valuable, like all valuable things, you want to take care of yourself.

Here is the scientific breakdown for why self-compassion works, and why self-esteem doesn't:



How do you have self-compassion? The easiest exercise is to treat yourself as a best friend would treat you. You don't even have to be that mindful it's very obvious when you feel bad because they're such strong, obvious emotions:

Anger, stress, hatred, comparing yourself negatively to another person leading to jealousy and envy, criticizing yourself (which makes you feel down in the dumps), and so forth.

In this post, I will outline the steps with the best friend strat, and then give five very common scenarios when we tend to be really mean to ourselves, and show how you use this best friend approach.

BEST FRIEND APPROACH

Step One: As soon as you feel that sinking, negative gross feeling, stop and think about what you're upset about.

Step Two: Talk to yourself (internally or out loud) as if you're your own best friend, using this three step method:

• Best friend will acknowledge the shittiness of how you feel and allow you to bitch and complain.
• Next, best friend would say this shit happens to all of us, you're not alone, and of course you'd feel horrible, who wouldn't?
• Lastly, how can we move forward and problem-solve?

EXAMPLES

Scenario One: You failed a test (or whatever project), you then begin to criticize yourself harshly and say that you're a complete loser and a fucking failure, you feel dejected and depressed. You feel like crap and crippled to do anything, which is the signal where you go into best friend mode:

As a best friend, he would tell you, that really sucks you got an F (or whatever failure), that's crushing and heart-breaking. He will say that we all fail, Edison failed millions of times, it never feels good but at least you tried and had the guts to show up and take that test (or do whatever project).

How can we do better to crush that test? And then come up with solutions in terms of studying "smarter" not "harder" (i.e. Gordon Greene's "Getting Straight A's"). You get excited and motivated so you order this used on Amazon.com and thank your best friend for support. Your friend says, "that's what friends are for!" You then get an A (at worst B+) on the next test.

Analysis: We see in this scenario how your friend acknowledged your feelings of suckiness when you got that big fat F.

He then universalized failure, that you're not the "only one" in the world who fails, so you're not the "sole loser outcast". Rather you're human just like everyone else.

Lastly, what can we do to change the outcome? Problem-solve and act upon the problem at hand!

Scenario Two: You're too tired to exercise yet again, even though exercising a mere 13 minutes, three times a week, can prevent major cardiovascular conditions that lead to death. 

You say to yourself that you're a lazy, pathetic, useless piece of shit who can't even do something as short as 13 minutes. You feel awful, which is the signal to go into best friend mode.

Best friend would say, no one likes to exercise, why do you think there are all these memes about hating exercise, and there's this viral cat video where the cat's so miserable to even move her left paw!

You're not lazy, you're human and like all the mammals in the world! ALL mammals are biologically wired to go the path of least resistance since calories are so scarce back then! Pampered pets tend to be overweight to obese, and inactive. The goal was to conserve the energy and hibernate in winter!

You feel better about yourself. Then he'll problem-solve and say, just go to the gym as the goal. If you don't want to exercise, then go back home. Most likely what happens is that you'll end up doing the 13 minutes, perhaps rounding up to 15 minutes or more.

Scenario 3: Your boyfriend dumped you, and you feel anger toward him. You also start feeling that you'll never find love again because you failed in this relationship. You tell yourself that you're unloveable, hideous, disgusting and trash. No one would love you ever again. You become depressed, which is signal to use the approach.

Your best friend might actually have a girl's weekend at your place to wallow in the sadness Friday night after work. She'll bring 12 different flavors of Ben and Jerry's, various chocolates, and order out pizza. You process the breakup and she tells you that everyone goes through breakups, it's a part of everyone's life - you're just like everyone in the world who's gotten rejected, I still love you. You feel better because of this truth. Then binge on Downton Abbey episodes.

But, on Sunday night, after you enjoyed the binge and wallow fest, your best friend tells you that you need to work on yourself and get healthy. She doesn't want to see you wallow in self-pity for months on end.

She tells you to go back to your life, go to work, take it one day at a time, socialize with your friends - you may meet eligible men. Feeling encouraged and supported, you begin to get over the break-up and taking healthy steps.

Scenario four: This is taken directly from my recent experience. You compare yourself negatively to another person. You begin to think why can't you be as fluent, as on point, as passionate, as humorous as Dr. Ramani:



Your friend notes that of course she's on point, she teaches this stuff every day to her students so she has to know the material like the back of her hand. For these interviews, she most likely prepared these answers in advance, and she has done so many, that it gets easier and easier!

I then feel better and interestingly, I felt gratitude (rather than feeling down on myself for "not measuring up") toward Dr. Ramani for helping people avoid getting involved with a narcissistic partner in the first place! Avoiding these people who destroy and crush others' souls (a malignant narcissist can conceivably kill his partner), literally saving lives.

Scenario five: You berate yourself for procrastinating yet again because you'd rather indulge yourself by playing video games. You call yourself pathetic, lazy and useless because you can't accomplish anything at all! 

How would you treat yourself with self-compassion? This is what I would tell myself, using the best friend approach:

It's so frustrating and annoying to not get things done because of procrastination! In fact, it's such a huge and universal problem that if you go to Barnes & Noble self-help section, most of the books are on procrastination! Of course you'd rather play video games, who wouldn't? Wow, you got work to do, so why not take a short break from gaming and just do 5 minutes of the chore and then you can go back and play the game. Feeling better about yourself for not being the only person who procrastinates, you spend 5 minutes and then more minutes as you get into the task, surprised that you got the bulk or almost all of the chores done!

I consciously tried self-compassion at work today which compelled me to write this post.

It was the first time where I felt light-hearted and a genuine joy, feeling full-hearted toward my coworkers without effort. I always feel the irritability when I'm at work, and use immense amount of energy to be pleasant to my coworkers since I like all my coworkers.

While they all say that I'm very easy to work with and non-intimidating, it takes up so much mental energy that I get drained at work. Which is why I end up playing video games after work. However today, having self-compassion, I have enough mental energy to write this post!

Despite being stressed today, interrupted every minute to sign, to make calls, and having to eat lunch in front of clients, I didn't feel mental fatigue, only physical fatigue. (The physical fatigue was my fault for not realizing I didn't have iron or synthroid in my weekly pill reminder box for the last 2 weeks, as well as untreated sleep apnea, and not exercising for being so tired).

At any rate, it was a wondrous feeling of being light and having this outpouring of love toward my coworkers (I do love them, I just don't feel it often due to work stressors), that I came up with rather creative solutions for a family, that surprised even myself!

The trap of doing any other exercises aside from self-compassion - activities such as keeping a gratitude journal, exercising regularly, and the like, is that if you don't do those things, you start feeling bad about yourself for being lazy, and you quit out of demoralization.

However, with self-compassion, you start feeling better. Even when you get down upon yourself for having a critical thought about yourself, you can snap out of it due to feeling the warning signs.

You may even laugh at yourself because of the irony. You're criticizing yourself for criticizing yourself! But by laughing at that, as your best friend would (perhaps even teasingly saying that you're a dork, but that makes you lovable), you can regain self-compassion.

Finally, as you accept yourself, flaws and all just like everyone else, you feel a sense of connection for others when you see them struggling, and end up having compassion towards them.

This feeling of love that you have to others make you feel even better and light - no jealousy, no bitterness, just a wonderful feeling of connection. We humans, as all the researchers say, are hard-wired for connection, and people tend to depression when you feel disconnected.

With self-compassion, as you feel better and find yourself worthy and worth doing all these hard things. You become more motivated to make healthy choices, do the gratitude exercises, eat healthy, get enough sleep, eat fruits and vegetables, just from self-compassion alone. 

The love you feel inwards and outwards becomes effortless, love being the powerful force, empowering you to do the hard, necessary things that are fulfilling to you.

The How of Happiness Review

Networking | Routing And Switching | Tutorial 2 | 2018

Welcome to my 2nd tutorial of the series of networking. In this video I've briefly described peer to peer network (P2P). Moreover, you'll see how to make a peer to peer network? How it's working? How we can intercept traffic over the network by using Wireshark? and many more. Wireshark tool is integrated with eNSP so it'll be installed automatically when you install the eNSP. On the other hand, you can install the Wireshark for your personal use from its website.

What is Peer to Peer (P2P) network? 

As when devices are connected with each other for the sake of communication that'll be known as a Network. Now what is peer to peer network? In P2P network each and every device is behaving like a server and a client as well. Moreover They are directly connected with each other in such a way that they can send and received data to other devices at the same time and there is no need of any central server in between them.

There is a question that mostly comes up into our minds that  Is it possible to capture data from the network? So the answer is yes. We can easily captured data from the network with the help of tools that have been created for network troubleshooting, so whenever there will be some issues happening to the network so we fixed that issues with the help of tools. Most usable tool for data capturing that every network analyst used named Wireshark but there are so many other tools available over the internet like SmartSniff, Ethereal, Colasoft Capsa Network Analyze, URL Helper, SoftX HTTP Debugger and many more.

What is Wireshark?

Wireshark is an open source network analyzer or sniffer used to capture packets from the network and tries to display the brief information about the packets. It is also used for software and communication protocol development. Moreover, Wireshark is the best tool to intercept the traffic over the network.