Greetings, dear reader. It’s been a while, what? Things have been happening, but not to me. Obviously the biggest thing has been all the bushfires in Victoria. Given that my dad lives in St Andrews (half of which was on fire) I’ve been following it all pretty closely. Today I found out that a few people I’ve met, friends of my Dad and his wife, perished in the disaster. One of whom was Reg Evans, whom you may have seen in things. He was a really really nice guy, I saw him a few times while I was down there and we always had a good chat. He used to live one suburb away from where I do here actually. If you have a spare few bob, please consider helping the people out down there, this has by far been the most devastating set of bushfires in Aussie history and there’s a lot of people hurting down there at the moment. I suppose the obvious question is ‘Why would you live in an area like that?’ Having grown up in a similar area that was on fire at one stage while I was there (only a tiny one, I think no one died and it was under control quickly) I can tell you I’d do it again in an instant. It’s an absolutely lovely area, close enough to Melbourne (still technically in the metro area) to be convenient enough but nestled away nicely. Fires have long been a risk when living in areas like that, there are things that can be done to lessen their impact but in this case the record heat levels and 150kph winds meant that the fires were basically uncontrollable. The most galling thing is that some of them were deliberatly lit. Some %&#* went out there and purposely caused the mass murder of hundreds of innocent people for absolutely no reason. It’s simply unfathomable. At least terrorists have motivation, this was all just so pointless. There’s not punishment enough for people who’d do this, they simply need to be removed from society. It doesn’t matter how, reform is too risky an option when the results of re-offending are so devastating so just get rid of them. Anyway.. help em out if you can.
On a lighter note, I seem to have had a small win vis a vis my graphics card. I’ve not complained about it on here, but basically it’s been unstable and the driver would shit itself then BSOD the PC. It’s an ATi HD 4870×2 by the way. It got to the point where if I turned on the overdrive option (you can play with clock speeds and more importantly fan speeds) the PC would crash as soon as I launched a game. For a while I was playing games with the side of the case removed and my big desk fan blowing directly into it. A bit of poking about in the control panel for the card revealed that for some reason the tweaking of the GPU and RAM speeds are done on a per-GPU fashion, as the card has two GPUs and two banks of RAM. Given that having what is essentially the same card running at two different speeds just seems dumb, I never really thought to check this out. Turns out that ensuring both GPUs and memory banks are running at the same speed means I can clock them to whatever I want and speed the fan up to a level where it’s actually effective while playing games no worries at all. Handy!
This article on Mario’s motivations leads me to point out this to you all again. I rather like the fact that nothing is made of Mario’s motivation, it’s not actually relevent to the gameplay and I think they’d not be able to come up with something that’d satisfy everyone anyway, so leaving it to our imaginations ensures that those of us who want more motivation can explore that while playing, while those of us who just want to play it aren’t bothered by pointless cut scenes and excess flim flam getting in the way of the action. It also means that there’s freedom for those developing the extraneous games outside of the core ones have the freedom to take them pretty much anywhere they want to. Given that this leads to things like Paper Mario, the Mario & Luigi action RPG games and Super Princess Peach, it mus be agreed that this freedom is good. Goodness. Savoury goodness.
Mexico once had three presidents on one day.
Someone could write a song about that.. if they’ve not already.