nastybun

I just watched A Clockwork Orange and Dr Strangelove Etcetera. I’d tell you how great they are and how seminal they are to cinema history, but you probably all know that by now. Just watch them. Please. It’s all part of your education. Noaw. Plz2Bseeing themz…. very entertainmentising.

Last night we went and saw Sneaky Sound System at the Enmore. It was pretty topsmax. They put on an excellent live show, really engaging the crowd and engendering a nice atmosphere. There were a few crowd issues, but you kinda expect that when it’s an all ages gig.. lots of ‘aren’t we hardcore’ teens and a fair bit of shoving about. Not enough to kill the fun though. They were supported by Dukes of Windsor, who seemed a little disappointed by the somewhat lackluster crowd.. there was little movement or response, as made obvious at the end of the set.. “Do I hear you guys yelling encore!?” [mostly silence] “All right, one more tune!” Still, they were ok.. showing potential, with some good tracks in the mix. Their guitarist is a little unfortunate though.. he’s one of those who reckons that a guitar solo just means ‘make a lot of noise with my guitar’ rather than anything worthwhile. Also, they all wear tight black jeans. This song is probably their highlight, so enjoy it.. if you dare. I rather like it…

So onto the main event.. SSS really play to the audience, with the front people pretty obviously enjoying themselves, playing off each other and so forth. It was great fun to watch them, they definately work better live than on a CD. At the end there was about 20 minutes of full on dance set happening, which was really excellent. They really should put a set like that out as a disc two to their releases.. it’d make me buy one. Excellent show though, if word gets out about how good their shows are they could go far.. they just need to up the ante a little on the CD releases. Songs.. try UFO and Hip Hip Hooray.

If you travel across the Soviet Union, you can cross seven time zones.

Seems my trivia book is a little old.. still, I was in four different ones across Aus. There’s a stupid +8.75 time zone on the eastern edge of WA…

Recently I’ve been playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King. It’s a WiiWare downloadable game on the Wii, not an old game but a new one. It’s basically an RTS with little to no unit management combined with a very basic city building game. You start with a blank slate of a city, and you have to rebuild it one building at a time. This of course requires resources. Being a king, you can’t just wander out and start offing monsters left right and centre.. that’s just not cricket. What you can do however is recuit the residents of the houses that you build. Of course you have to make sure the residents are both happy and well equipt, so you can also make shops, parks and training facilities to accomplish this. The strategy for the town planning aspect comes from building everything in places that are streamlined to get to.. your little warriors and co will visit shops, training areas and taverns before venturing out into the world to slay the baddies, so if they have to criss-cross (will make you jump) the whole city before leaving, they’ll have less time to attack things. Your time during the days is spent planning and expanding your city, chatting to the locals to raise their morale and spending cashola on upgrades for training and kit for your little mans. It’s oddly addictive, and is rather more fun than I thought it would be.

All is not completely rosey though.. at 1500 Nintendo Funbux (A$22.50), it’s not the cheapest title available.. and you don’t even get the complete game for that. There are extra races to download, new duds for the king and a castle renovation.. as well as some more things.. (I didn’t really explore the options..) but there is still much fun to be had with the base product. That’s all I got, but if I give it another play through I’ll probably look at getting some of the expanded content. Another downside is that it feels like it was rushed to release somewhat.. there are a few little bugs around, and it suffers from some pretty horrible slow-down when building something big. Still, it’s nothing that breaks anything for you. Just make sure you put your parks exactly where you want them.. there’s no way I could find to dismantle them like you can other buildings.

When it all comes down to it, FFCC:MLAaK has been a fun diversion for a few nights.. it’s one of those games where you’ll think ‘I’ll just do one more day.. just one more day..’ and before you know it, your sleep cycle is being compromised. It’s a very syrupy sweet game though, so if you get sore teeth from that sort of thing you might be best looking elsewhere. Though there’s just something about sending children into battle for me that I like.. it must be my inner terrorist shining through…

I’ve finally got my twitter thing on here! I may even use it appropriately often! Mainly for random thoughts that only require a little line o’ text. I’m still telling myself that I’ll try to update this place regularly, one day I may even start taking that advice…

It came up somewhere that this will likely kill you before you have a chance to get old. It was then asserted that if combined with the Schadenfreude Pie, you’d likely not see the week out. I’m pretty sure these people have a point. As much as I’d make a Schadenfreude Pie, I’d probably not eat any of it. I believe I’d take it somewhere and attempt to goad people into seeing how much of it they could eat. This both sounds like fun, and a way to live up to the pie’s lofty aims. Brilliance.

Last Friday we put on a presentation. It was pretty easy really.. though all I had to do was organise everything around the conference room in the hotel. It went pretty smoothly, I reckon. Should get some sales out of it also, which will be nice. If anyone is curious, we was selling to people Check Point’s Eventia suite, and Tufin Securetrack. Both are technologies around monitoring, maintaining and improving security and networking installations. Sounds boring, but if you’ve ever had to clean up an old security setup or attempt to track things down through log files and poking at the rule base… they’re very handy. All in all, it was a successful day.

Rio de Janerio translates to River of January.

There may be a better translation though.. anyone?

‘Ello ‘ello ‘ello… wots all this then.

So, I’ve not had a good time of it lately. I’ve been ill for the past week or so, which has been putting a dampener on things. It started last weekend when I was nauseus and a little woozy. I ended up having to skip watching Batman and go home, which was unfortunate. I couldn’t face the bus, so I caught a cab home. By the time we got here (about a 7 minute drive) the cabbie was looking real nervous.. I wasn’t in a good way. Still, I made it upstairs and into bed without causing a mess. I steadily improved through the week, though a flu has set in good. I can pretty much go places without needing and escape plan though which is nice, as long as I have some tissues in my pocket. Sigh…

To make matters worse, my PC is dying badly. It takes about six months to open a website, which is irritating. It stills IRCs, plays music and plays movies though, so it’s only mostly bad. Also it seems to be ok accessing mapped drives and whatnot, it’s just webpages that mess it up. I imagine it’s the amount of TCP requests going in and out that’s tripping it up more than anything else. Still, it’s irritating. Very irritating. I’ve currently given up with it and am using my laptop here, which is far newer and functional. Still, a replacement for the ol’ boat anchor desktop isn’t far off. Speaking of that…

… My car is for sale. It’s official, it went up online today. It would have been earlier if I had managed to remember to bring all the papers I needed to the RTA offices the first time I went there, but hey.. you get that. Still, it’ll be a weight off the ol’ noggin once it’s gone. One less thing to think about. I imagine I’ll be transportless for a little while, then I’ll look into getting a motorbike license and a little postie bike or similar. They are very cool. Alls I’ll need then is an open-faced helmet and some goggles, and I’ll be all set!

I bought Gears of War recently.. I know, I know, I’m about two years late with it. Bite me… I’ve only had my Xbox360 for a year anyway! … Anyway, I’m enjoying it rather more than I thought I would. See, I’ve of the opinion that FPSes should only ever be played with a mouse and a keyboard, to give ultimate control over the surroundings. Turns out GoW is more like a second person shooter. They’ve managed to make it utterly acceptable on there. I still die a lot (on Casual mode too..) but then, I suck at FPSes in general no matter how I’m controlling them. But yea.. I’d describe it as Half Life 2 for the Halo crowd. No puzzles, more visceral, more shooting of things. It is a shame that they didn’t do some of the exposition in the same way.. not a cut scene, just people talking while you’re hanging around.

Maxwell Klinger (from the TV series M*A*S*H) wore a 36B Miss Highrise bra.

The things you learn from books… seems he was a little flat chested.

This what happens when you mix an engineer, beer and some magnets.

engineer, beer and magnets

I just watched Tron! It’s astoundingly not rubbish! I was expecting it to be an amusing subtext to the failure of the ancient times to appreciate the future of technology, but a better description would be ‘an homage to the appreciation of computing and technology available at the time’. It makes total sense without succumbing to the old trick of trying to anticipate the future while not knowing anything about it. I’d say the best way to describe it is a generic action film written by a programmer/gamer in 1978, then filtered gently through someone making sure the general public aren’t going to be put off by the programming/CLI side of it. If anyone ever tells you that every geek should watch this film, they’re not just saying that. Grab a nice bottle of wine and sit down with it.. it’s worth a peek. It’s kinda like the Matrix, only in reverse. With some Terminator for good measure. Only it was obviously before these two. Amazing!

Also, now that we know that Retro Studios can make a great adventure game (the Metroid Prime series) they should totally make an ‘inspired by Tron’ game. It could be staggeringly brilliant.