Put your music player on shuffle.
Press forward for each question.
Use the song title as the answer to the question.
Terrifyingly true answers and scary.


Will I get far in life?
Subline - Smoke Two Joints

How do my friends see me?:
Tsuyoshi Kaneko - Salome the Traitor


Where will i get married?:
The Who - Baba O'Riley

What is my best friend's theme song?:
Armored Core - Follow

What is the story of my life?:
Billy Joel - It's Still Rock And Roll To Me


What is/was high school like?:
Reel Big Fish - Skatanic

How can i get ahead in life?:
ZZ Top - Tush

What is the best thing about me?:
The Pillows - Back Seat Dog

How is today going to be?:
Dragonforce - Through The Fire and The Flames

What is in store for this weekend?:
Ian Brown - One Way Ticket To Paradise

What song describes my parents?:
Tiamat - Gaia

my grandparents?:
Iwasaki Taku - The Wars of the Last Wolves

How is my life going?
Nightwish - Two for Tragedy

What song will they play at my funeral?:
Marilyn Manson - Cake and Sodomy

How does the world see me?:
Genesis - I Can't Dance

Will I have a happy life?
Richard Jacques - Everybody Jump Around

What do my friends really think of me?:
The White Stripes - The Hardest Button to Button

Do people secretly lust after me?:
The Littlest Man Band - Happened Again

How can I make myself happy?:
Basement Jaxx - Do Your Thing

What should I do with my life?:
Sonata Arctica - Peacemaker

Will I ever have children?:
The Flaming Lips - All We Have Is Now

What is some good advice?:
Kraftwerk - Popcorn

What is my signature dancing song?:
L'Arc~En~Ciel - Driver's High

What do I think my current theme song is?:
Dream Theater - The Root of All Evil

What does everyone else think my current theme song is?:
DJ Q-Bert - Razor Blade Alcohol Slide

MMOs are expensive, right? You'd much rather be spending that on food or something, correct?

Well, last night I went and got bored, so I went and put together a little list.

Check it out here. (The forums its hosted on are a little out-of-whack right now, so you may need to refresh it to access it).

In short, it's a list of MMOs that are free, more or less. More being 'totally free' in some cases, 'less' being, say, a one-week free trial. Most of them lean towards the 'more' end of the scale, though. So, check it out, post this link on your journal (might as well share the free gaming love, hrrm?), and enjoy. Oh, and be sure to check the list now and then - it's still having stuff added to it on a very regular basis. It started last night at about 30 games, and is bordering on 90 now.

Happy gaming!

It just occurred to me that there's an experiment that I'd like to try, if and when I have a few hundred quid spare to waste on accidentally blowing up computers.

PC = Good.
Overclocking PC = Faster, but hotter.
Too hot = PC burn out.

So, what keeps things cold? How about.. a freezer? Most notably, one of those big deep-freeze cabinet ones. What would happen if I put a really heavily overclocked PC into one of those, perhaps with a small fan to keep the air circulated, and with wires leading out to the monitor and such?

Would it work? Would the PCs heat output negate the cooling effect of the freezer? Would it be able to vent the hot air in time?
Would I need to overclock the freezer?

I must know the answers to these deep philosophical questions.. I also wonder whether frozen condensation would be a problem - naturally, the freezer would have to be totally dry. Ice + Computer = bad. Perhaps a few packs of silica gel scattered around? Does that even work at low temperatures?

Hrrm.

In other thingies of stuff, here's a funny book to read. The prologue alone had me in stitches.
Also, the music I'm playing is by MC Frontalot (nerdcore rapper) and Kompressor (angry german man in a B-movie mask who sings about crushing people). The track in particular is available on Frontalots site. And here's a direct link for the lazy.

Remember - if the Germans annex the muppets, you're next.

Oblivion is a very neat game.

The most shocking thing about it, though? It doesn't need a massive PC to run.

My system:
Athlon 2700+
1024mb DDR RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb

All in all, that's a pretty creaky old machine. You could probably pick up a system like that for the price of an Xbox 360.

And here's how it looks:


That's at near-full detail (exceptions being self-shadowing and HDR lighting off - the former as it looks horrible, the latter as it requires a Shader 3.0 card), but everything else cranked to full, 1024 x 768.

Outdoors it runs at a nice 15-20fps (plenty playable). In crowded towns it drops to as low as 10fps, but it's no big deal as combat doesn't happen there anyway, and in dungeons, it's nice and smooth, 20-40fps.

So, yeah. Bloody good engine it runs on.

Money makes the world go round. It also pays for neat PC upgrades, and my machine is ageing pretty badly, so I've made some tough choices and decided to sell off most of my games, save for a number of classics that I'd rather hang on to. I hope to raise approximately £400 for a PC upgrade. Anything after that is a bonus - if I make a full £700, I plan on buying an Xbox 360 as well.

Everything is in good-to-perfect condition, unless otherwise noted. Original cases and manuals fully intact. I treat my games very well.

Click for more info, and a list of things being sold, spanning the following systems:
PC (CD/DVD), Gamecube (UK/US/JP), PS2 (UK/US), Xbox (UK), Nintendo DS (UK, although there's no region locking on the system), and a handfull of video DVDs
( Read more... )

Have you ever had one of those days, where everything you do or hear or see or read brings up old memories? Ones you'd rather leave gathering dust?

Well, I'm having one of those. But I'm not going to angst about it. Instead, I'm going to share a little bit of awesome. Today's Something Awful Flash Tub.. the Karnov Playset.

Long story short: SA art guy Shmorky draws a bunch of flash animation sprites based off classic old platformer Karnov (in which one plays a fat russian guy who breathes fire). He then gives this art to the forum community and says 'You have two weeks to make something'.

Magic ensues.

The girl looks up to me..

Curiously? Perhaps.

And she smiles.

I catch her glance over the top of my book, cracking the fresh spine as I do so. My own smile is half-hearted, less than I intended. I follow it with a faint nod to her. I don't know why. My eyes fall back down, and I lose myself in part to someone else's reality. An imagined, fictional reality, but an interesting one.

I sip my coffee, my mind wandering from the dark story unfolding on the pages before me. I small, idle question presents itself.

Should I say hello to the pretty girl in the coffee shop?

And in a flicker, an instant, the answers come to me. So fast as to probably not even register on my face.

She's probably not interested.
She just works here.
She's probably not single (ha, getting ahead of myself).
She'd want nothing to do with the likes of me.
I'd probably say something stupid.
I'll be gone from this town soon anyway.

And so I finish my drink, dog-ear my page and slip the book into my pocket. I nod politely to the girl as I leave, smile and say 'thank you' and walk out the door and into the chill wind.

And I wonder, was I wrong? Am I afraid? Is this any way to live? One of life's little tragedies plays out, and I walk away having almost introduced myself to the pretty girl. I find myself wondering just how many times this has played out, in a multitude of settings, and with a whole plethora of players, with a number of extras that the mind doesn't dare tally up.

Perhaps it's just today. Sky grey like wet slate, wind whipping past me, chill enough to numb my face, keeping my thoughts from manifesting themselves further. Perhaps it's me. Perhaps it's life.

Hmm.

I will never, ever beat R-Type Final.

That is all.

Well, that was quicker than expected. My budget pack of WW2 games (Sniper Elite, Blitzkrieg 2 and Silent Hunter 3) just arrived. This is surprising because, as of last night, the delivery estimate on Amazon UK was 'March 27th to April 4th'.

So, yeah. Guess they were off by a couple of weeks. I got these three games together for £30 (£10 each, free postage), which I'd say is pretty damn good value.

So, that's five WW2 games in three days. Red Orchestra (multiplayer teamplay FPS), WW2 Online (general purpose MMO sim), Sniper Elite (singleplayer third/first person sniper sim with a morally ambiguous story involving kicking off the cold war early), Blitzkrieg 2 (tank-focused strategy game) and Silent Hunter 3 (german U-boat sim).

All in all, that probably cost £45 in total. Not a bad haul, all things considered.

Just been browsing through the Silent Hunter manual here, and setting up my microphone so I can shout orders at my crew and make them do things. I'm tempted to do things in a thick, badly approximated german accent, but this will just confuse the computer and make it liable to launch torpedos when I want to turn twenty degrees to port.

Oh yeah, on that note, I've been mucking around with speech recognition on this machine. Works remarkably well - doesn't want to dictate swearing above 'bloody hell' level, but generally speaking, it works well. Need to train it more, but I'm surprised at how well it works.

And now I.. I POST!

(And I need to update my friends list here - it's all emptified!)