PlasmaFire.org

Similar to a post in RELAy several months back, I’ve continued to make more simfiles and YouTube autoplay videos for StepMania 3.9. This time around, I have a non-lagging version of Animusic‘s “Stick Figures” and a brand-new stepfile built around Animusic‘s “Drum Machine.” The latter was a lot of fun to make, but I’d say it’s very difficult even for experienced keyboard players; actually dancing to it on a pad would impress me immensely because of the number of 3/4-panel hands involved. Finally, there’s a tricky negative BPM/mine-laced singles file created around Jimmy Luxury’s thumping “Cha Cha Cha” track.

All of these simfiles are Challenge difficulty, with “Stick Figures” clocking in at 12-foot difficulty rating (for a dance pad), “Drum Machine” at 13 (keyboard), and “Cha Cha Cha” at a whopping 20 (dance pad). Each video has a second version where I turn on the assist tick so that viewers can understand the rhythm better; for couple-type tracks such as “Stick Figures,” the tick is enabled for just the left side instead.

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It’s interesting how I’ve moved around the scene of PlasmaFire.org over the years. Blogging in general, too. For one thing, I’ve never turned serious about weblog writing at all; between my very first Xanga post and my final RELAy.PlasmaFire.org writeup, one could possibly tell the inconsistencies that abound. Respectively, I still can’t get myself away from using netspeak and l33tspeak (LOL, JK kthxbai… :/), nor can I ever complete a simple writeup of an anime convention experience. The only exception would probably be the Tesla Coil Graduation Project, but that was never summarized in full detail during the aftermath: I never wrote up what happened after the device was completed and presented to my Physics II class.

The PlasmaFire.org domain is quite a journey in itself. Back in 2005, I thought about creating a website dedicated to figuring out how science was used in the production and play of video games. It came to be “PlasmaFire.org – Video Game Science HQs.” Rather a low-key name, but what really killed it, along with the forums (COMm.PlasmaFire.org), was my lack of time to write worthwhile articles. Yes, the founder became unfounded in his premise. The community died a quiet death due to a conversion from phpbb to SMF forums, and more importantly, a switch from the Mambo CMS, to Xaraya, and finally to Drupal. Ah well, it’s lamenting something that someone else could easily take up and expand upon by someone else–or some other community (take Stephen Loftus, who wrote several pages about Halo‘s science and story for Halo.Bungie.org, or the Halo Science 101 article on Gamasultra.com). If anything ever comes to mind once again, I’ll write it…assuming there’s time apart from college.

So as of today, welcome to the new, and possibly final destination, of PlasmaFire.org; it is now mostly a slice of Kevin’s life again. Enjoy!