Raithe

I heard they've even set up special provisions for the wedding in case anyone tries objecting. They're going to set up several short seconds for that part of the ceremony..and they've set a small room aside to interview any objectee. I believe they call it a police cell... But eh, I have to say, weddings don't exactly fill me with happy feelings the last oh, bout 10 years. And this week has been chock full of wedding fever. So while I might be a bit on the monarchist side, I'm trying to ignore much of the day's media coverage.

Eh, after Oblivion I'm barely paying attention to Skyrim. I'm firmly on the Deus Ex bandwagon for anticipation this year. ME3 is kind of hand-wavey-in-the-future-anticipation. Not actual anticipation.

While it's staying quite bright and sunny, the temperature seems to have dropped and tis turning quite chilly. My sister brought the dogs back and the puppy wandered into my room and took a leak by the window.. I'm going to exercise my mind a little with some sudoku and logic problems before I have to do the run up to the doctors to pick up the value pack of prescription pharmacuticals. Edit: And for the silly news story of the day - "Pets" Should be called 'Animal Companions' Trying to suggest we should use a new style of pc language to encourage better treatment of animals. Including dropping the terms "beasts, vermin, creatures" from academic papers and then common usage. Oy Vey.

It's a Deus Ex game. You don't want smooth dialogue in casual tones. It has to be stilted lines with that noir tonal speech. o O (Just all done in a smart way rather then a 'crappy' one)

Infiltration Interview

Struggling with procrastination today. And I keep getting distracted from that by other assorted mini-tasks that need dealing with. ... and putting it that way does look kind of funny.

It's kind of scary isn't it. We wouldn't buy a used car from most of these people, but we still end up voting for them to run the country...

Maybe I'm jaded or too cynical, or just weary of it all.. But the trouble I have is there just doesn't seem to be that much different in the various leaders and main people in the parties these days. They all seem to be from the same cookie-cutter mold.

On that long running Democracy.. well it kind of depends on what elements you qualify as democracy... and whether interruptions to said democracy count. I mean, the Polish had that sort of democracy where all the nobles had a vote around 600 years back. Of course, that screwed them because bugger all decisions could be made in that situation since each noble pretty much had a veto to the whole government. Part of the reason they kept getting invaded and made the whipping boy of Europe for a few hundred years... England has had Parliment and certain elements of constitutional monarchy for about as long, although not everyone counts that as a valid "democratic" form of government, but that came about with the Magna Carta back in the late 1200's (I can never remember the exact year). The Allthing was in Iceland, which from what I understand was pretty much the morphed results of early Norse popular support for leadership. (Same with the Scandinavian Things). Although the key thing for all of those "democratic" forms during the middle ages were that they were only democratic for strict minority groups. I think Wals might have an edge with his view, because the UK's government has pretty much run uninterupted from that form for nearly millenia. Even when Charles lost his head in the civil war, they kept parliment ticking along (well, at least the people who could vote on it).

Just doing a quick set of pushups.. when suddenly there's a rustling noise..and the cat bounces down the stairs with a plastic bag in it's mouth. He stops about 4 inches from my face, looks at me, mews, and then starts wildly humping the bag right there. Kind of distracting to the concept of pushups.

Scream 4 Eh, entertaining for the most part. Although the "deconstruction of reboots" was rather thrown away. I think the key trouble is that you know there's going to be a twist - so a part of the mind is looking for the hints, and you go "Ah hah! That's what it's going to be!" before the twist arrives. Neve Campbell still looks kinda cute.

It's the slight ret-con on the Hyperspace War - The "original" Sith/Dark Jedi got into the war, then the Republic stormed in and wiped them all out. The ret-con being that certain Lords fled into the dark reaches of space unknown by the Republic and spent the next millenia slowly rebuilding. What kind of scares me is I was in a gaming group that did that with the Star Wars d20 pnp ... playing the dark side characters in the run up to the Hyperspace War and then during and after. Which led to much fun sith politics in the background and had some characters arranging the whole flee-ing thing. Which has me going "Hey! Bio Stole that Idea!"

I think Mythbusters took a look at Pykrete and the "ship made of ice" in an episode some time ago...

Watched a History documentary about "Weird Weapons". Some quite funky things in there. The Aircraft Carrier designed of ice. Well, ice mixed with sawdust. Which apparently made it resistant to shattering and could even be shot at close range and would ricochet bullets without taking harm. The only reason it didn't get built? They found out that the only way to create it would be to build refrigeration units that would end up using more steel and metal then would be used to build the carrier from metal in the first place... Or the Russians in WW2 who trained dogs as tank-busters. To run under tanks with mines strapped to their backs and automatic triggers.... But they made the mistake of training them with Russian tanks that ran on diesel, while the German Panzers used Gasoline. Lots of cases of friendly fur. Hm, is it weird that I kind of feel that that's a little bit more sick and twisted then actual suicide bombers?

Having one of those kind of peaceful sundays actually. My sister has disapeared for the weekend and taken the dogs with her, so I don't have to worry on that. My mother's taken her daily assortment of prescription pharmacuticals and is half-dozing away with the kindle in hand so I don't have to look after her at the moment. Trying to figure out if I'm in the mood to poke around at some computer games or not. Although I did catch that old song by Bryan Adams "All for Love" which was strangely depressing a short while ago. I might just try re-reading some of the Belisarius books instead....

Hm, I want to play something but I just can't figure out my mood. I finished a rerun of Alpha Protocol the other day so I don't want to jump back on that.. I got about 20 minutes of GTA IV done but meh, I'm not really getting involved in it. Can't seem to focus for Civ V... hm, maybe I should try to break out Alpha Centauri..

Of course then it'll be based off the WoD 2.0 not the classic WoD then I would hazard a guess.. So all the people expecting something similar to the previous Vamp games could be disapointed (beyond the mmo version)...

Sahara A film adaption of a Dirk Pitt novel by Clive Cussler. Actually quite enjoyable in that silly way. Mathew McConaughey and Steve Zahn do pretty damned good to make it almost a buddy movie in the midst of the pulp adventure of it all. Penelope Cruz is more of a throwaway role as the eyecandy romance aspect. William H Macy growls his way as the unconventional Admiral, and Lambert Wilson does his stock role of urbane evil mastermind in a fairly decent manner. Plus it's got a killer soundtrack. And it kind of makes me sad that they scrapped the idea of doing some more..

Finished a run-through of Alpha Protocol. This time I made allies with everyone, turned Marburg and Parker, joined Halbech and betrayed Leland. That was the first time I saw that ending... and that look on his face with the "oh, that's not a pda, that's one of my remote mines.."

Took a brief moment during lunch to put on GTA IV again. Found out that my last save was made in 2009 with a progress of around 55%.. So I poked up a fresh game just to try to get a re-feel for it all and got in about 30 minutes or so of actual playing.

It's not overlong (compared to the others) and the combat mechanics can be a little meh, but overall JE has a nice story, some fun dialogue and a few twists here and there. And you can actually lose and get a very bad ending.. which is actually kind of funky interesting.

A Giant Space Hamster? o O ( Okay, my spelljammer days are showing through there..) Finished off the eArc to Ghost Ship. A nice run of space opera follow-on to other Liaden books. Although they had to jump around various characters in different locations, it nicely fleshed out some of the "epilogue" moments in the earlier books. But it does have a rather cliff-hanger style ending... I don't remember where I read it, but the Liaden Universe was once described as "Star Wars meets Pride & Prejudice" and I do have to agree that that description works on a lot of levels. Not many authors can write that sort of snappy dialogue based around a (not-stictly human) culture's modes of courtesy. It's kind of interesting that the authors (a husband and wife team) used to be death on electronic copies of their books and very anti-book-piracy and suchlike.. but now that they're getting published by Baen they seem to have jumped on the Baen Bandwagon in respect to how electronic books and getting out sample chapters and free books can attract readers that otherwise would never have looked at them.

I'd actually forgotten tomorrow was Good Friday and there was the resulting bank holiday here. The days seem to blend in together. Although not as bad as last week thinking wednesday was tuesday and that thursday was friday...

Hm, and for some reason that brought to mind "Armageddon: The Musical" and "Armageddon 2: The B-Movie." Although in my moments of peace I've been working through the eARC of Ghost Ship, the upcoming latest in the Liaden Universe books.

At least it's not mushroom management. "Keep the employees in the dark, and occasionally throw chits at them."