Raithe

Not sure if it's just the extreme monday effect or other matters, but I've just been in one hellaciously depressive mood today. Been trying to just suck it up and get on with things, but every little thing has just been a major effort. Keep trying to kick the mojo into action properly.

Woke up to a grey sunday. Technically it's my birthday... although upon waking I found that no-one else had emptied the dishwasher so I had to do a bunch of general household chores before getting a cup of tea.. Think I'll try taking the lazy sunday approach and generally switch off the mind mayhaps..

I did see some interesting talk about the upcoming "Bulletstorm". Developers who felt that the FPS genre over the last decade has tended to encourage the careful, stealthy approach, the scrooge effect on your ammunition and bouncing from cover point to cover point... and they wanted to develop something that was pure kick-ass crazy. So shoot your enemy? that'll net you 10 skill points. Boot kick him over a crate and then shoot him? that's 25. Use a whip to grab him, throw him up to impale on broken rebar, before shooting the explosive barrel under him to torch him as he wriggles.. possibly several hundred.. A game designed around you using your weapons, powers, and the environment to kill the enemy in as amusing a combination as possible to net the most rewards.. I'm curious on how much else it will bring to the table beyond some genral pulp silly fun.

Lair of the Shadowbroker is very good. Plus it has some quite amusing dialogue thrown in. Yes Omnigel, I'm talking about security.

Another Deus Ex Preview Which again seems pretty much of a love-fest...

Got dragged out to a birthday pub meal by some friends. Which was pleasantly entertaining. Balanced out with me bringing up a topic about this company that runs classic steam engines with oriental express carriages. Set up to do the whole, 4 or 5 hour round trips with luxury 5 course meals, wine/champagne, serious service and most passengers dressing up in formal old style... Which led to all of the couples deciding it would be a good idea to do that at some point in the near future. And which left me as the sole single person there not included because they tend to sell table seats and such in those groups of 2/4/6 rather then in singles..

Dabbled a little bit with Borderlands. Haven't really jumped into the story yet.. just got used to the general play...

Trying to push through the evening, but for some reason I keep totally fading out and feeling fairly shattered. I foresee an earlyish night coming up...

The Facebook guy has a net worth of almost $7 billion. When someone becomes hugely successful nearly overnight, there is usually a story there. I haven't seen the movie, but apparently they told that story in a very entertaining way. According to the Facebook guy they also put in a lot of false stuff, but you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Also, depending on how much you follow the various stories about it.. the facebook guy actually stole a whole chunk of ideas from various friends and such... Or (depending on the specific point of view) was very good at getting people to put in work developing things, then getting rid of them, getting a new guy in to finish off the development and then basically claiming it. So supposedly a fair few shennanigans went on.. but it always gets hard to sort myth, fiction, outrage and bad feelings out when one guy makes a fortune like that...

That potentially he's the annoying guy who owns the company and doesn't have to bother with the company dress code?

I miss you, Kings. Ian Mcshane, Eamonn Walker, and a complex, realistic storyline. Great show, unfortunately too expensive and cerebral for mainstream. Plus the advertisements basically avoided the biblical connection that would have drawn in viewers. I remember that, 3 episodes then it was done. Shame though, seemed interesting. Well, actually was about 13. They did the full first season... but it ended on one of the key cliffhangers of the story. Built up nicely, and Brian Cox as the imprisoned "evil" king Vesper Abaddon was very well done.

It's one of the key rights of being a geek. You can complain about upcoming games, based on what you think of the ideas that they've announced will be in it. You can complain about glimpses shown in dev diaries and trailers. You can talk about how it has the potential to be a big steaming pile of doggy doodoo. But then it also comes down to the balance, that if you never actually play the game yourself, you can't really justify saying "this game is crap." It puts you in the same group of people who never played Mass Effect and labelled it "pornography simulator for children" or the faithful christians who never watched the Life of Brian and claimed it was "utter blasphemy". Until we get to that point of deciding whether it appeals to us enough to at least give it a play, you can just say that it looks like it's going to be a pile of excellence / doodo (depending on your point of view) without stating it definitively. That, and occasionally wander off into discussions of breast sizes in computer games and in general.... (which again, is a pretty standard right of the geek.) And on the personal level, a handful is nice, a plump "pillow" to rest the head against can work..but overlarge can be a bit silly.

I miss you, Kings. Ian Mcshane, Eamonn Walker, and a complex, realistic storyline. Great show, unfortunately too expensive and cerebral for mainstream. Plus the advertisements basically avoided the biblical connection that would have drawn in viewers. I never saw the advertisments.. I'm kind of amazed at that though... how can you advertise the story of David..and miss all biblical allusion?? Although, I guess if you look at it... how much of the old testament is basically sex, death, politics, murder, warfare and things that were the soap opera stories of the BC world?

Being quite a grey day weatherwise, but pushing on and trying to keep the mojo running. The new tv arrived this morning so got that unpacked and set up..including hooking it into the router so it can access things like youtube and bbc iplayer... also apparently easy access for computer media filesharing. Of course, the trouble is that someone put on an episode of Planet Earth to see what it's like on that screen... So as I'm trying to work at the pc and actually produce something intelligent in the way of work.... I keep getting flashes of gorgeous views and impressive photography from across the room.

And Olivia Wilde is set to appear in a buncha films this year... Apparently she got a lot of work in during that sabattical from "House"... And on general film news ; With MGM emerging from bankruptcy, they've announced there's going to be a new Bond film coming in 2012... With the potential of doing something special with it being 50 years since Dr No was released.

I've always tried to be wary of judging a series too harshly the first season (as long as the actual premise is interesting). Ever since Highlander the tv series, the first season of which was really quite ropey, but once they all figured out what they were doing, they started doing some quite good episodes. So if I like the key ideas of a series I'm willing to overlook certain elements for a few episodes and see how things settle down.

What's kind of scary is it's already gotten a sequel in the works. Of course, the original Clash of the Titans had an amazing cast playing the gods.. and they were terrible. It was amazingly bad. I guess the remake decided to follow in that tradition... Although I missed the Harryhausen stop-motion animation.... On the upscale, Gemma Arterton was fairly decent. And always nice to look at. Edit: And for the trivia - Worthington's sandals are Nike trainers with toes painted on them; he didn't wear sandals because he needed shoes to perform the stunts well.

If you "died" in the dream, you ended up in limbo.. which was basically the subconscious area of coma-ville. The area that's really deep, deep down. So the time difference was vastly greater. Which meant that because the japanese guy had been "killed" on the one dream layer, his mind got cast into limbo.. and in the time it took for Leo's character to get there to show him the way back.. the japanese guy 'lived' another 50 years or so in limbo.. hence, being a really old japanese guy. Depending on how you look at it, the dead wife was just the subconscious reflection of Leo's guilt over how things happened. Or an "echo" of his wife left from their time in limbo together.

Well the pilot basically put Summer Glau in that role of mystery hacker/information specialist. Combining DC's Oracle and the old Dark Angel "Eyes Only" together... Plus the obvious "money" angle. From what I saw I'm getting a feeling she's going to have a serious connection to the civilian identity of Chess. Young enough to be a daughter of his perhaps? Something to add that sense of cliched twist to it all. The circus folk look to make an interesting area for potential background stories/hooks. And there was no explanation for why Chess' eyes go reptile style vertical slits... When he was in super-villain costume you could imagine flashy contact lenses for the effect, but when they briefly showed when he was in CEO clothing...

Most of the fantasy settings where nigh immortal elves linger with childhoods of 40-90 years.. generally have them read the 10-15 year old stage similar to normal "mortals" and then get stuck as teenagers for many decades.. Which is a bit different from spending years and years as the equivalent of a 5 year old. Throw in the low rate of birth, and they generally establish a sense of the whole community adores/looks out for any children within it. Thus adding a certain sense of protectiveness to looking after the young. Besides, look how we treat our young. Even if they're physically capable, we generally don't act as if they're likely to be emotionally capable for years... For a race that is able to live millenia, I'd expect that attitude to be really compounded.

Of course, thinking about some of these old shows that I really enjoyed right up until they got cancelled caused me to poke around.. Now I've picked up both the Threshold and Odyssey 5 dvd sets at fairly inexpensive prices. Just have to figure out the right time/mood to watch a few episodes in. Both of which have several episodes included in the dvd sets that were never shown on network tv because of cancellation. Although John Doe has yet to make an appearance in dvd country..

Well the guy who tried holding up a gun store in texas was stopped because the majority of customers were carrying...

I initially liked GTA IV once I got over the irritation of installing it, the rockstar social club and the games for windows live crud.....but within a few hours it took a downturn. It just didn't seem to have the snappy fun of earlier GTA games. All in all, I had a helluva lot more fun with Saints Row 2 then I had with GTA IV.

Just installing Bordlands Game of the Year Edition.. Of course, I have no idea when I'll be able to actually sit down and play some of it...

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