nastybun

I got new thongs! Now begins the arduous process of wearing them in.. and wearing out the sharp edge that cuts into the side of my foot. Still you know shoes look good if they hurt your feet, right? Isn’t that how it works?

I was coaxed out of my bed yesterday morning by the unmistakable sound of my PC restarting itself. This is usually a bad sign.. and this was no exception. Turns one of the drives in the stripe had disappeared.. if that makes no sense dear reader, it means that one of the two drives that were tag-teaming the job of beng the system drive stopped existing. This is bad, as it usually means all data is lost. Handily, switching it off at the back, jiggling cables and restarting it a couple of times woke it up.. at which point the important things were thoroughly backed up. It’s been fine thus far, so no change yet.. but if it happens again it’ll be re-install o’clock. Which will be a little irritating. Although I now notice that when one has a separate partition for the OS, Vista’s backup util is actually useful as it can be told to only back up the C drive. Again, if this makes no sense.. Vista’s backup util is too basic and not very useful in most situations. Also, my PC somehow has a non-existant floppy drive. Oh well.. I’ll just delete that and see what breaks..

Fallout 3 update.. it’s still fun, a little frustrating at times.. the random utter lockups when it autosaves are getting a little irritating, though they’re not too common. It seems the time, budget and game engine may not have been up to the task of making the game they really wanted to.. or they needed bigger ambitions. The character creation is basically pointless, as you’re pretty much guaranteed to be playing the game in first person. This is because the animation or your little doodman running about is pretty dang poor really. Also, in third person view, the mouse is both the angle of the camera and the direction you’re facing.. this seems logical, until you’ve run about in a game that has these actions disconnected and found how nice it is to be able to look around while running about and to see more than just the back of your character. The only time you see the face and can enjoy those tortoise shell glasses you found is in the glimpses you get when using the VATS targetting system. Still.. it’s not really possible to make a character that doesn’t look rather ugly anyway, so it’s not a huge loss. There are other issues like this as well.. not bugs or errors, but rather archaic design decisions that are a little jarring in a game in which you can easily spend upwards of 50 hours. There’s a lot of game to see in there, if you’re prepared to put in the effort to find it. It’s very much a free and open world game, in that you’re plonked in the middle(ish) of a huge open space with no walls to guide you and just a compass bearing pointing you somewhere. Just as long as you can be bothered walking there, anyway…

Alaska’s flag was designed by a 13-year-old boy.

I wonder if he could see Russia from there too..