Raithe

Or that point where a single god is worshipped under different names by different cultures.. and each one has slightly variant beliefs and touches the aspects of the god in different manners. Causing the single god to actually split into almost "multiple personalities" depending on who is around....

I have to admit, I'd like to see a god of Secrets / Mystery that isn't automatically also linked to Lies, Theives, Murder, Assassins, etc. More of a neutral toned god that no-one else truly understands where he/she is coming from. Even the other gods... Great for that pawn-moving and catspaw making with no one getting the grand plan and manipulation... Without an automatic "that guy is an evil git / good guy"

Caught up on odds and ends. Made that dentist checkup for myself and my mother. Looked at my sister's laptop to update a bunch of drivers and figure out why her dvd player has stopped playing dvds but still handles cd's normally. Gave the dogs some run around. Poked at some christmas gifts for family, pondered on when to start getting the decorations down and what needs to be sorted for that.. Spent about half an hour on TOR helping someone out, and contemplated returning to Hitman at some point in the near future to restart a level after a few days break.... Having a quiet cup of tea right this moment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFsx9dKLGlI

Thats tough Nep indeed. Heh, my iniitial university dissertation I'd planned out and done all sorts of research and prepared for it the year before I had to start it.. and I went to speak to my university advisor..and they said "that would be really interesting. no. Do something else.". Admittedly, they gave some good reasons for it over the difficulty in gaining data on certain things but still.. having to totally start from scratch on a totally seperate concept was a bit of a bitch. And then I had to drop out to look after my mother about 6 months later anyhow. Still, on the upside, she got discharged from hospital late this afternoon/evening.

Picked up the Gods and Kings expansion for Civ 5 on the steam sales and just tried playing some.. but so far in the space of about an hour and a half.. its locked up and frozen 3 times....

Heh, first time I played CK2.. I started as the King of Georgia.. by the time a few hours of gameplay had happened, I'd ended up with one of my children becoming the Byzantine Emperor due to some careful marriage proposal and a couple of lucky deaths... <whistles innocently>

Well happy birthday. So is it heading to that fine balance point where you aren't so much celebrating another year of life, as are more counting off one more year to the grave?

"That's a wildly inappropriate story that I can't tell you. But that's the point. Don't you want to have wildly inappropriate stories you can't tell your children about when you grow up??"

For the car related anecdote.. Some years back during university, a group of us were out at a pub with a live band. One of the guys feeling unsociable stole the taxi we'd ordered without waiting for the rest of us. Leaving the group to walk back a fair few miles (because it was murder trying to get a free cab at that time of night). Since the route we walked went past said friends place.. in a fit of general annoyance we decided to let the air out of his tires so he'd have to get them refilled... Not too much of a hassle since there was a garage about 5 minutes down the road. Go to a few days later when we next saw him.. and he complained about how he woke up, went outside and found "some git had slashed his tires" - not actually checking to see that they had been slashed, just assumed it due to their flat condition- so he drove his car with completely flat tires down the road to the nearby garage to get them replaced. So he pretty much ruined his own tires by driving there in that condition... We were all like "duude?!"

Trying to do work with random power cuts isn't actually the most productive... I'm keeping a small torch on me due to how dark its getting now. Otherwise everytime the lights go out it's pretty pitch black inside the house as well as outside..

Well I'm going to grab Civ V Gods & Kinds while it's down to sensible money..

Haven't been able to make headway on much of anything today.. Just having that mix of mental frazzle, distractions and procrastination that keeps merging and flowing around.

So, already the plans for the next Hitman are in motion.. RockPaperShotgun - Square Enix Montreal to make Next Hitman

Sounds like someone is stuck at home behind some defences.. Perfect for the zombie apocalypse? The important question is.. Do you have supplies of food, alcohol, and secured internet access?

To be fair, there are some really nice bits to it as well. It's just those couple of niggly game mechanics seriously push the annoyance factor.

Whilst there are some quite nice points to Hitman Absolution.. I really am coming to loathe the checkpoint system and Disguise/Intuition thing. I mean literally there are moments when folks in the same costume I'm in disguise in, will go from "hey" to "You're an imposter!" before I can take a finger off the W key and try to hit the S... That is how damn fast suspicion hits. Which when combined with the checkpoint system they have.. you can spend an hour or more replaying the same damn 10 minutes of gameplay... And then of course, any guards you have previously taken care of before that checkpoint are resoawned due to checkpoint reload...

Managed a little more Hitman Absolution time this morning. The levels do seem split between short linear maps to "sneak" through and some semi-wide open maps with lots of ways to assassinate a target. But I have to admit, the Intuition thing is seriously pissing me off now. You have enough to spend about 2 seconds walking past someone if you're disguised as that "type" of person. Ie; dressed as a cop and a cop walks past you. Which in a map full of a dozen cops makes it really freaking awkward. That and it takes them about a second and a half to go from "oh, I'm seeing a cop" to "this is some faker wearing a costume". So when you take a step around a corner and have 5 cops looking at you, it gets a bit awkward,. The other annoying bit is there is no save game. Just several "check points" scattered around the map that you can use once.. and they don't actually save the game per se, as if you reload one.. every single guard/enemy on the map will be respawned as they were at the very beginning when that level was first loaded. So if you're relying on having dealt with certain guards before hand.. boom. You're out of luck and might as well just reload from the start of the level. On the plus side, so far I've had plenty of options and methods to figure out to get by various sections of the maps / guards and deal with my targets. But it does seem awkward at times the way it bounces between those sections and straight linear ones.

Had a little play on Hitman Absolution this evening in some quiet time.. The first mission is incredibly linear, but then it's basically the tutorial. The 2nd mission is one space with a whole multitude of options.. although I think some of them are really only viable on certain difficulty settings. Or after you've played chunks of the game to unlock Abilities/Improvements. I've got to say, the way they've changed Disguise is a bit.. offputting. A disguise works perfectly against people not of the disguise type, but you have to use Insight against that type. So if you're wearing a Bodyguard disguise, it works against everybody but Bodyguards , who you have to use Insight as you walk by them or they notice you.... Which is a pain in the tucas if it's a level thats full of them.. Also, if you're trying to sneak, its a bitch to regain Insight on the Professional difficulty....

So my mother is heading into hospital once more today... Some of her usual troubles have flared up along with an eye infection thats been leaving her half-blind the last few days. And which she hadn't bothered mentioning because she thought it would settle down. It finally came up and appointment with the GP turned into a "you need to go to the Hospital to get this checked" which turned into a "you're being admitted and anti-baterial IV and assorted other shenanigans are to be conducted". S So now it's a back and forth day and dealing with the dogs who are rather perturbed by her absence while clothes and such for her stay at hospital are sorted.

The important questions get answered... http://youtu.be/9ysyZF-DZFY

If the movie industry was willing to make the attempt at compressing the entire Shogun mini-series into a 2 1/2 hour film.. they're willing to do it with anything regardless of how incomprehensible it becomes...

Hm, weird. I had managed to scrape some loose change to make a pledge on kickstarter for this.. and I've just received the message from Amazon that the payment to Cloud Imperium Games has failed.. but they don't say why. <grumble> Now i'll have to dig into this to find out whats going on.

"Lincoln - Doing well in theatres, despire what history might say."

Well I gave a brief poke at what you need to do to get the HK-51 companion with the new TOR patch.. So, with one of my level 50 characters I made my way to that new "Section X" on Belsavis, found there's a Heroic (2+) you do to actually get the Companion mission, which ends with giving you a second Heroic (2+) to find schematics... Then that ends with giving you a shopping list of components you need. Now, it tells you roughly where they are, but thats 5 worlds you need to visit , and then, for the final two components you have to get one via one of the level 50 flashpoints, and the other by doing one of the Revan flashpoints in hard-mode (or at least, The Foundry for the Imperial side. I'm assuming since they talk of Revan having the component it'll be the similar one Republic side). So it's pretty much non-soloable once you reach for those final two....