Matthew Supert

Time for another video game update. First up is my thoughts on the Ouya. So far, I have to say that it is a Beta of a 1.0 product. I see the potential, but there isn't much there yet. I have to say that the SNES emulators on it are pretty good and you know what is a good game? The Secret of Mana. I wanted to play that game so bad when I was probably 10 years old and I unfortunately never got it back in the. I must have spent a good four or five hours last week playing through that. I am not sort of stuck at what is known as one of the harder boss fights with some sort of fire breathing tiger. Man that guy is hard. 

The other game I am working on right now is Dragon's Dogma, which ironically enough is another Japanese RPG. I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised by this one, even though it got high praise from the Giantbomb crew on their podcast. It has a little bit of a Monster Hunter vibe going to it. It is difficult, but not brutally punishing. Stick to the story elements early on and it is very satisfying. My only major complaint however is that the Japanese tropes and mannerisms come out too much in the characters. You of course are playing the silent protagonist and the facial expressions they use to try and convey emotion for the character just seem silly. 

The pawn system is really cool though when it is shared online with the world. I love looking at how other people designed their pawns.

Alright, so those who know me know that I am a gamer. Last year I was a backer of the kickstarter for the Ouya project. The Ouya is a small, very cheap open source gaming platform built on Android. The whole concept is actually pretty cool. This week I received my kickstarter Ouya and decided to take some photos. 

From a hardware perspective it is actually a pretty nice looking little box. The build quality seems pretty good and it is really easy to get access to the components. The control is nicely ergonomic and the face plates for the batters are held in place by magnets that attach to the screws on the chassis of the controller internals. A really interesting design choice which I think is brilliant. 

Overall the software at this point is still pretty rough. This is a beta of a v1.0 production. The Ouya interface is pretty bare bones and a bit laggy at times. You can see a lot of elements of the underlying android mobile interface if you delve too deep and there really aren't too many games for it at this point. I really hope it succeeds in the long run though. The idea of having the open platform that is cheap to develop on for students and whatever is really promising. It really connects with some of the DIY nature you see coming out of the Make people with the 3D printers and Arduino, etc. 

Last weekend my Dad, brother and I went up to to Wisconsin near the Middleton area to do some fly fishing near Black Earth Creek. We are terrible at fly fishing, but doing these little adventures is always a lot of fun. Black Earth Creek is a lot closer than the streams we tried to hit up last year and it was only about a 2-3 hour drive since it is just west of Wisconsin. Overall our experience was a lot better. The creek area is much more accessible than the creeks up near Viroqua and despite having more people overall on the water, it was wooded enough where you didn't really see that many people. 

We (my brother) caught one fish this year, which is fine, but I would definitely hit this place up again. There is also an excellent fly shop in the adjacent town of Cross Plans called "On the Creek". They sort of open up whenever they feel like it, but the guy working the shop was super helpful for giving us some tips on places to start. They also have an excellent map on their wall of the entire creek area with information on parking locations and access points. Highly recommended. 

It has taken me forever to get this stuff uploaded. This week has been a nightmare, but last weekend I had a wonderful time doing my first Slimy Crud in Wisconsin. It was a blast......Well it was once we got past our first hiccup. The day started out with us all meeting at the Belvidere Oasis off of I-90. Not more than five minutes into our ride one of our riders crashed on an off ramp. What turned out to be an annoying inconvenience turned into something much worse when a state trooper showed up and immediately was a jack-ass right out the gate. 

The crash also unfortunately resulted in our group getting split up at first, since about half of us didn't see the crash and kept on riding. This led to one of our other riders (Hans) and I getting split up from the group and partially getting lost. We saw some people double back to try and meet up, but it was a divided highway. Hans and I ended up continuing to ride for a while, but we were not sure what the turn off was. This ended up in a rather funny incident with us trying to find out where people were and us following a random guy who was headed towards Galena. 

In the end though we found our group, literally as we were about to turn around and the ride ended up being one of the better ones I have been on for a while. Great roads up in Wisconsin, some good people and a fun bite to eat at the end. 

Went for a nice ride today and decided to just sort of head south on 55 and then turn off to head west somewhere. I sort of randomly found myself ambling just south of the Des Plaines river. There is a nice bit of scenic riding through here and i was pleasantly surprised.

After a few hours of riding i came upon route 23 and thought to myself that looked awfully familiar. After taking a pit stop and then checking my phone, I found that I was right near Starved Rock. Who would have thought.

Apparently there are two nuclear power stations in this area and i even happened upon a wind farm on my way back that I had to check out. Riding through the wind farm was actually really cool, despite the roads just being straight. You can see in my map that I zigzagged through that for about 20 minutes.

The Dresden Cooling Lake also had a really interesting covered bridge going over it that at first had me thinking that I stumbled onto some sort of private access road or something.

Several months ago I jumped on an opportunity to purchased some really nice Giclée prints for my office and home studio. I had them sitting at my house for months knowing that the framing would cost a fortune. I finally bit the bullet and had them framed and the end results turned out really nice. 

The first set for my studio are three limited run Zelda prints from Marinko Milosevski.The printing took a while, but the end result was gorgeous and it was really cool to have the individually numbered prints

The second batch were four art deco sort of science fiction travel posters from an artist called Steve Thomas. Again, the results turned out quite good I think. 

I have come to realize as a motorcycle owner that part of this experience is lusting after more and more motorcycles. It really is too bad that there isn't more opportunities to rent motorcycles for a day or two. I also of course feel I need a larger garage for all of these lusts. A two car garage just doesn't cut it unfortunately. 

All right, so here is my new list of wanted motorcycles. 

1. Ryca CS-1 (aka Suzuki Savage Conversion)
2. Ural (Orange!!!)
3. Harley Davidson XR1200 (best looking HD no one bought)
4. Royal Enfield Classic 350
5. 197X Honda GL 1000 Goldwing (Strip it down to cruiser)
6. Honda VFR400 (Love the ugly headlights)
7. Triumph Street Triple (2012 Purple)
8. Yamaha TW200 (Dat ass.....I mean tires)
9. Honda NC 700x (Ultimate Commuter)
10. KTM Duke 690