Raithe

If your looking for the whole.. Ancient Ruins, Half crumbled castles and buildings over a few hundred years.. You should look up some of the English Heritage sites and plot out the places you'd really like to see. That might give you a better idea for travel within the UK.

I used to be pretty darn good at this stuff. I thought I was getting a handle on how it all works.. and poof. I find I haven't a freaking clue and my heads exploding. I think it might be time to take a big step back from thinking about this stuff and go have a cup of tea to ensure the day is survived.

Went through a night with some very surreal dreams. Surreal as in nazis, giant robots, spies, strange fluffy rabbits, and other weirdness. Trying to get my mind wrapped around the changes in programming that's developed in the last 8 years since I did any serious coding. Going from things like Cobol, Ada, and C where you had to dig in and get the grunt work of any engine done first, and then all the GUI was just the cheese you left till the end... and now it all seems to be quick iterations where you focus on the GUI and the engine side of things is practically all "plug and play" resources that these new-fangled languages seem to use.. C# I'm looking at you. Reading through code and I'm mostly understanding the logic of it all..but not recognising half the keywords and funtions being used.. sigh. Now I'm feeling old. old and depressed and a little bit slow.

That's actually one of the key reasons I've never gotten bitten by the console bug. The games are usually about

ah, the sweet, sweet nostalgia that always comes when remembering your favourite DeusEx playthroughs... Like the first time you realise that you could actually save Paul and he didn't have to die..

I think part of the trouble with Mat is that in these books we're seeing Mat more as the General type with that touch more sense of responsibility behind everything. Before, it was still Mat as the wilder, unrestrained individual... At least that's how I squint at it.. I'm not sure quite how to take the Rand transformation aspect.. in some ways it almost feels like a deus ex handwave excuse.. even if it does make a certain sense..

Sneaky gameplay doesn't always have the visual pizazz that cinematic ultra-violence does... So it's not exactly surprising that gameplay vids are going to push one style more then the other to attract attention to the game.

Just to carry on briefly from the old... I once got told in all seriousness by a friend that "love is something that happens when you're a teenager. Then you grow out of that and its just relationships and sex, there's no such thing as real love." It's interesting how much viewpoints can get split on whats sentiment, and what's real. Sure, there's the question of when melodramatic romance is out of place.. but should you really grow mature enough that love is meaningless? ---- On the other matters..staggered awake today and I think I've recovered from the sushi stomach issues of yesterday.. tis grey and windy outside.. I do enjoy the sound of wind hitting the trees... I keep poking at amazon, game and the other usual suspects to see about Tron Evolution for the pc.. and no-one has it available for pre-order.. even if they have stacks of the various console versions.. Still, time to gather my thoughts, enjoy a cup of tea, and make a proper start on various chores..

My first thought to the new gameplay vid was how some of the look of the animation reminded me of a toned down Borderlands almost... although the 2nd time I played it through it didn't come across quite as much.. hmm..

There's a big tradition of rigerous self-control and stiff upper lip bias among certain forumites here.. but that's just because we're old school English.. I'll admit, I've had my own share of troubles with that.. I became quite an expert at compartmentalising and shutting some things away. Although I shared certain elements of my troubles with a friend who persuaded me to see some of the councilors at my old university... and they were hm, kind of flabbergasted at the amount of control and compartmentalisation I was able to do. I think they classed it as a whole "it lets you get by day to day, but it doesn't actually solve the problem." I'd have something hit during the day to cause total emotional/mental stir up, but control the outward reaction to it well enough to go through the afternoon attending lectures, dealing with workshops, team work, coursework and revision. Then go home on the bus, talk to family, take the dog out for a walk, get back home, continue some pleasant conversation with family, then remove myself to the privacy of my room and then have a 10 minute breakdown before gathering myself back together. Some emotional scars just never heal up. Especially some of those early ones.

Has Ubisoft stopped doing that crappy drm with AC2 yet now that they've released Brotherhood?

Dang it..I can't make up my mind on the Tron Evolution game.. It's Tron.. so I'm interested.. but I'm getting a lil tired of all these "free running" games to make things look slick..so I'm not quite sure on that.. but then every game seller in the Uk still has the pc version as "not available in stock" compared to the console versions...

I need to figure out some game play... I haven't really sat down to do any serious gaming since I finished that first runthrough of FONV a couple of weeks back. Just not sure what I'm in the mood for, or if there's anything that really jumps out as appealing to me at the moment...

For some reason I felt completely shattered last night.. so I ended up sorting things out so I could hit bed about 3-4 hours earlier then usual and promptly passed out. Of course, that also had me waking up in the wee small hours of the morning to find the wind and rain hiding the dawn... Still, staggering somewhat on course for the day...but have to venture out into the gloom and heavy water to valiantly face the dentist appointment...

I'm up there with Planescape Torment as one of the best.. Hm, the various Wing Commanders actually had quite good endings..especially some of the early "variations" depending on how you managed.. Privateer 2 had a mixture of best and worst together.. I could never quite decide.. And how can no-one have mentioned the sheer fun of ending Alpha Protocol and heading off into the sunset on a boat with Scarlet at your side and the amusing conversation? A lot of the Star Wars games seem to have it both ways..the Dark Side endings tend to be gloriously cinematic...and the Light Sight endings can be quite..fizzly. Mafia 2 was quite a let down. There was no real emotional investment and it felt like it was just left for a future DLC to wrap up the story... No-One Lives Forever - the wrap up to that was exceptionally satisfying..

Not on quite the same track, but have you looked at the Ring of Fire / 1632 books at all? They do put some effort into historical accuracy to a point..and try to put the point of view of how people in the early 17th century saw science..and advanced technology... On the film front.. I caught Megamind over the weekend... which was fairly amusing. Nothing too stretching, but entertaining in its way. Not quite to compare with some of the laughs caused when I watched Machete.. now that's a glorious film in its way. The hospital escape alone is worth watching the movie. Throw in a large amount of typical Rodriguez violence, a bevy of cute latinas, and the fun of spotting every clip from the "original" trailer shown in the Grindhouse that they managed to get into the "real" movie..

Rationality and maturity might be able to affect just how much you react / hide your emotions, but they rarely seem to be able to control just how you feel... When the heart gets going, even when you know it's damned stupid or insane there's not much you can do to shift it. There's just how much you can control how much it shows to everyone else.

Had one of those slightly strange nights of vivid and surreal dreams that blended in to short periods of wakefulness and then returning to sleep and more weird dreaming... Pushing that first cup of tea to ensure my mind is in some form of proper cognition and getting the day started..

Working on a headache re-reading through some chapters of my copy Pro C# 2010 and the .Net 4 Platform... Sometimes it would be really nice if examples were given that were more then a dozen lines of code and one or two functions.. Just to give you a feel for how something more extensive is set up. Its barely gone 3.30pm and it's already dim enough to need the lights switched on..

After my mom's first knee surgery.. the joint goes clickety-click with a faint, almost sucking noise which surprised the head resident with the sound,and apparently made him want to vomit. The doctors had decided to let that heal up and mom go through the physio before doing the surgery on her other knee.. but then it was discovered she'd picked up the MRSE bug... So for a few years after that, every 6 months or so we'd get a call saying "you're on the top of the list for the surgery.. but if you keep refusing to do it we'll take you off the list" and we'd have to explain "hang on, no surgeon is willing to do the surgery because of the mrse.. it's the doctors who keep postponing it". Ah well. That's one of the minor issues of the inches thick medical file there... The day's progressed, the craftomatic bed is finally in place..other furniture has been shifted, oaken doors have been taken from hinges and then put back, cupboards were moved out of the way..then back but now it seems to be over for the moment. ... and my sister is trying to sneakily persuade everyone to accept her first getting an alsatian puppy..and then a main coone kitten to add to the ****er spaniel and persian cat already stalking around the house... Other family politics as well.. yeesh. No cooking at least, sending out for an indian just to avoid all that bother... Going to be ultra-lazy and have it delivered.

Cold, tired, mayhaps a touch depressed... but with the absence of rain today, that should allow some furniture shifting and get the old bed out through the french windows and the craftmatic bed moved into its place.... After yesterdays rather torrential downpours, it's being one of those really bright, crisp and downright windchilly days... I really would have preferred to linger in bed today, but that wasn't really possible.. dang it.

I got my mother a kindle for last christmas, with her joint problems holding a book was being a problem, but she's able to use the kindle with ease. The kindle is fairly easy to use, the text is smooth to read, and it's simple to scroll through pages and books. Once you've bought a book Amazon keeps a library of all purchases and you can re-download it to your Kindle whenever you want, but you can keep around 1,500 books on the device itself.. although that might be a bit of a problem to easily run through. One point is that while Amazon.com does do quite a few cheap/free books as well... you don't get access to them if you happen to be outside the states... Oh, and the kindle text isn't backlit. Which can make it easier on the eyes to read, but it also means the kindle doesn't produce it's own light when the room your in gets dark.

And sometimes.. all you want is generic, fun, fantasy.... There's no need to make something.. different and other..purely for the purpose of being different...

Finished off the new Wheel of Time book... Made the mistake of trying to read a few chapters in bed before sleeping ..and ended up several hours later going "crikey, it's nearly dawn". Threads are tightening, loose background bits are brought back together, characters are evolving.... and then it ends on what (according to the story so far) is the day before everyone heads off for the Final Battle....

Now you just need the physio to respond in a positive manner to make your week?