Raithe

Love this idea! Hold the music though. Crickets, owls and night sounds are music enough for me! Well, I'm sort of on the outskirts of a city. So I tend to go with oh.. Gregorian or Two Steps From Hell music..

Hm, depending on exactly how you want to go.. sliced up bananas, build a layer, sprinkle dark sugar, cinnamon, maybe a dash of nutmeg, sultanas, splash of cream and rum (or brandy or..well, whatever you feel like), repeat layers like that until all the bananas are gone. Cook until the banana slices are juuust started to lose their shape and the sugars almost caramalising.. serve. Tastey, sweet, and ever so slightly alcoholic (depending on your chosen recipe levels..)

Remember to save the wood for bonfires. That's what I did when the old apple tree picked up a disease and started dying. Then you can split the logs, build a fire, and sit around under a star studded sky with a bottle of <insert beverage> and a good cigar while listening to relaxing music..

I blame Saints Row. Before Saints Row nobody would have called GTA the "serious note". Nonsense. GTAIV pretty much re-branded it as the "Serious, not really fun, almost kind of emo one."

Well, it's always fun when a professional opinion is given as "it's bollixed." So I can get a new hd and pick up a new op/sys and that will fix some things but not everything, due to age and wear of the motherboard and such they can't guarantee how much will be a problem unless they do a complete overhaul and diagnostic. So the likelihood is, a whole new motherboard could be needed...

Ubran Fantasy is currently sweeping along (mostly on adventure/conspiracy/murder mystery, with the odd horror styling) - Jim Butcher is still going strong, Kim Harrison, Carrie Vaughn, Ilona Andrews, Jennifer Estep - They're all managing to do some quite nice stories and charactesr without making it all relationship angst like some others. Sabrina Chase did a nice trilogy "Sequoyah" - out of time pilot, caught between an Alien-Human war, being hunted by elements on her own side because of information she has locked away in her head from the past.. Oh, the Kris Longknife series by Mike Shephard is generally entertaining, a nice mix of space opera / miltiary sci-fi with some low-level humour brought along by character dialogue. The "poor rich kid daughter" who in an attempt to get away from her politician father, business magnate grandfather, and "hero of the human race" great grandfather runs away to join the navy and has to both live down (and up) to the family name. Jean Johnson's started work on a sci-fi series , which is quirky because until now she's been a romance author I believe. But the sci-fi works on a certain level, a character with massive precognitive abilities joins the military in an effort to start laying the domino's that need to flow so that x hundred years in the future the right person will be born with the right elements in place to enable them to save the galaxy... Baen Publishing does seem to have a lock on a lot of Sci-fi/fantasy authors. Especially things that wander into military sci-fi areas. John Ringo, David Weber and the like. Oh, they've also picked up Steve Miller and Sharon Lee, so the Liaden Universe is still going strong. Seriously, if you like space opera that has a lot of banter it's worth a lot (best description I heard was "Star Wars meets Pride & Prejudice"). L.E.Modesitt is still plugging out intelligent sci-fi and fantasy. Steampunk in various forms is having a big swing out - both in variations of action / mystery / horror / urban fantasy styles. So a little bit for everyone. With general actiony sci-fi, there are a hoorde of self-published authors you can look at via Amazon on kindle. Some are crappy, but there's a surprising amount of decent stuff (if you can get around some annoying editing or lack thereof) for a dollar or two. Nathan Lowell's "Share" series was an interesting take on sci-fi, focusing on life on a trading ship across the stars. Very little direct "action" , no shoot-em-ups at all, but more character interplay, trying to make a profit and learning the ropes of the universe as they go. Thomas DePrima's "A Galaxy Unknown" is a mixed bag, harkens back to the style of E.E.Doc Smith's style of grand space opera, generally entertaining with a few odd elements.

Dammit, I want to get in and try it out. I have to wait until I get things fixed. By which time..event's will be over.

Getting my pc ready to crate up and take along to Novatech for that health check up and assessment. See what comes up with that. Hm, it's also turning grey and raining off and on. This kind of suits my mood.

BBC - British Library Wi-Fi blocks "Violent" Hamlet. Heh, once again highlighting how wonderfully well network filters put in place to stop children accessing pornography work, the British Library stopped users accessing online versions of Hamlet due to the text containing "violent content".

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/15/living/literally-definition/index.html The definition of literally is no longer the literal definition of literally. It now includes "Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling." So now "literally" means literally and figuratively, two things that are completely opposite. That... that seems like it's going to be problematic.

Heh, the Obs boards are on my phone's "bookmarks". Of course, since I'm at home, I just have it connect via the wifi and the router's internet. Not suck up data service..

Do you realise what you can do with a smart phone nowadays? It's not that hard to googlesearch "sfw cleavage"

Okay, I needed that smile. Thanks Wals.

Just so Wals has something warmer to stir his imagination..

I'm pretty sure I've got most of the ACTUAL important stuff covered at the moment. It's the little things. Like, the 120 Gigs of music I have stored there - digging cd's out of storage and re-burning them will be freaking murderous. Since backup software keeps failing, i've resorted to manual cut and paste. Of course, that's being a pain because a right click takes about 40 seconds for anything to happen now.. and even then half the time it just causes folders to flicker, go into "not responding" then back again. And if I have a big chunk of files, it starts making hacking noises. So I'm having to do it all in small, small chunks at a time...

Cursed mightily and verily for a long time. My computer is acting up a little, so I tried to perform a vital backup. Which failed due to I/O device errors and "cannot write this file". Started trying variations. My primary harddrive is now making assorted "tick-crack-crack-rraag-crack" noises.. Which is not so happy making. Further non-happy making is that my operating system came pre-installed, and that rather then giving me a disk with it on, they have all the install files in one of those nice "hidden drives" on the aforementioned primary drive. Now the last time I had a drive make that sort of noise, it went for about 4 days and DIIIEEEEDD in a most hideous and foul manner. So my optimism is fairly lacking. In fact, I'm feeling that the probabilities are quite high that my credit card and stash of emergency savings are going to be taking a hit this weekend...

For one that nearly all women I know have loved.. http://youtu.be/Vv7EgKoN0TQ

Feeling a bit more tired, cranky and stressed then yesterday. I have the urge to be incredibly anti-social for a bit, but am attempting to resist that. Crumbled up a cadbury's flake into some milk and heated it up, added some cadbury's chocolate powder and pondering on the remainder of the evening.

You get the feeling there's "much wub" about SR4?

Happy Birthday JFSOCC.. Party Fun, but don't party too hard.. Drawn out day, it's turned fairly grey with on/off rain. Juggling various things, and had a 3TB drive on format for..hm, just over 5 hours now. Of course, the little green bar seems to have crept about 1/5th of the way across.. Getting hit by waves of tired and trying to keep my eyes open.

Hm. dogs, cats, hospital appointments. grocery shopping. some minor bank weirdness. pc's still being a bit of an odd duck. Hm, a couple of friends and an ex-gf who had gotten back in email contact have all suddenly dropped silent for the last month or so without any word or reason of, which is both annoying and worrying in kind of equal measure. Novatech are apparently offering free "health checks" and general advice on how to upgrade your pc if you take it in and let their techs poke at it for half-an-hour. Might try that some point in the near future, see if they spot anything I've missed and to be amused or inspired by any suggestions they come up with. Oh, and apparently I won a competition Baen Publishing ran. So I'm going to be getting a signed copy of a book, and a bunch of free ebooks as well.

Human ass, family trauma. That's all you need to know. Is there no more love for the singing lizard these days?

http://youtu.be/DvGmANbPUNk Heh. "if we didn't have aliens in this one, we wouldn't have been able to do these weapons. None of them would have made sense" As if the giant purple **** bat really made any sense in SR3....

Oh and congrats Malcador. Hm, it's always a fun day when your pc decides to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things without any outright error messages to work from.. Running along on the tired, cranky, and somewhat stressed from that and various other things. Pondering on what will amuse, entertain and otherwise cheer myself up so I can properly throw myself at it all again on the morrow.

As long as they don't frikkin sparkle.