At one point I ended up seeing so many movies that I couldn’t keep up with my log, and it dissipated into nothingness. Not that that would refrain me trying again. So I may. No, I will. The next time I see a movie, and in the meantime I may, no … I will, post on some of the more memorable movies that I’ve missed commenting on.

At least that will leave the spammers out there some new posts to spam

2) Automated quests
Automated/Game generated quests kills creativity, and leads to a powergaming mentality. Very quickly the casual roleplayer will find himself just running waypoints, killing X amount of mobs and returning for the reward. “What story?!” GuildWars has kind of tried to fix this problem in a few neat ways like instanced maps and cut-scene driven “main” plots. However it helps little when you reach a town to hear the cries of “SUP? LVL?! ASL?” or “WTS God-defying fullplate only 100K” over and over and over.

Heroes of Might and Magic V (the coming online variant) has tried to take the “small league” world of NeverWinterNights and turned it into an MMO world, where players match-up in a “chat-room” and launch an instanced map of the “mission”. So far, I’ve yet to get past this match-up section so I can’t say how well the game will work – but I have my doubts.

Most games have crafting of some kind – which we all know leads to farming. Even the first futile attempts at crafting back in Exaria (a NeverWinterNights “persistant-world”) led to a handfull of farmers. In the end, farmers ruin crafting, which ruin player economy, which leads everyone to farming, which… well…

Other games simply leave out the Massive part of the game, like AutoAssault, and works best when soloing. Unlike AutoAssault, at least GuildWars is designed for parties of players – though with the addition of AI Henchmen the game can be played solo aswell.

Unfortunately I have no real solution to this. We all want a game where we can play when WE want, and do what WE want. And for this we look to MMOs… when really I believe we should be looking to pen and paper or the instanced world of NWN/similar-game where there’s 4-8 players and 1-2 DMs following a tightly plotted scenario.

However, I’ve said this before, MMORPGs we won’t have, and why they call them that is kind of beyond me. Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games? Well, most are fantasy themed atleast – however I think there’s a reason why more and more people just stick with MMOs…

Well, installing seems to be easier said than done. I believe my problems stem from the fact that I decided for a server install instead of a preconfigured desktop install. Anyways, my first attempt using the Wizardry-like simple server setup resulted in a bootable Ubuntu server with no network. However hard I tried to convince the stuff to setup networking I failed (even though networking worked fine during install!)… so I decided to try the expertly-like server-expert setup options. A lil’ hour later I had a fresh server installed, and wooo I even had networking! Next, I wanted Gnome (a graphical user interface for linux’) so I used the install manager to download and install all the packages… high on exciteing linux stuff I quickly punched in “startx” to launch the GUI. Wooo! A screenfull of linux-techno-jibber-jabber-gibberish that looked very much like a head ache inducing error message…

So, that was it for me and my Myth box… We’re going back to gentoo. Sure it’s slower to update, sure it has it’s weaknesses like eliminating all your hard-worked-out configuration files… but at least it let’s me decide for the most part what’s happening – and the docs doesn’t say “not yet done”

Now, I probably wouldn’t have done it… but the idea that my body is limiting my choices for fun or fear is rather unsettling. Actually, it pisses me off.

I think I will use this agression to work more intensively with my physioterapeut to get my body and specifically my back in better shape. Perhaps there’s other fears I can face

I can probably say this is the best series I’ve seen that got canned so quickly and undeservingly. Sure, the first episode wasn’t that great (The Train Job) in my opinion, but from reading on the net I understand FOX made Whedon (creator of the series) do that episode instead of the pilot to have a more action oriented start for the series. (Note to fans, I did watch the series in their correct order as presented on the DVD set not in Broadcast order).

There were some episodes that were more or less good than others – but I hardly think there is any TV show that escapes this peculiar phenomen. At the End though I really craved for more – and I’m now looking forward to the Serenity movie – though my real wish would be that Sci-Fi Channel bought the rights to this and continued production with Whedon at the helm.

As with Buffy it’s got a quirky off-beat humour – I especially loved the Jaynestown episode and “Hero of Canton” written by Ben Edlund (creator of another fun character… The Tick!), and the setting is rather unique… Welcome to the Wild Wild Space – where there are no Aliens, people fire beefed-up black-powder guns and lasers are extremely rare.

I never knew driving could put such a demand on you. After the warm up and qualifying heat I was desperate for some water, my throat was hoarse and my back strained (which may be a side-effect of me having back problems for 3 years, but I heard the “healthy” guys complain aswell…). And when I came home I felt almost as worn-out as after a training session, and had the perspiration to show for it.

But man did those small carts go! This being my first try at such a “sport” since 1997 (which coincidentially was just a “gimmick” ride) I must say it could have fared worse. The “Winner” of the A cup had a best lap round of 25.56 seconds, with me clocking in at 28.40 seconds. In my defence it quickly became clear that the Cart I was racing was not quite as good as the others, it flattened out on the long stretches never reaching it’s top speed. Still, I don’t think I could’ve coped with the Winner – he was a joy to watch fly around those bends … and with an average speed of 52kph compared to my 44kpg it was a good thing that we were in different finals.

Certainly a fun experience, and one I could redo…

Which of course resulted in me spending a lot of energy on reconfiguring dozens of virtual hosts and secure servers… (not to mention that ClamAV stopped processing my emails on Thursday – so I had to debug that aswell earlier… oh and nothing on the system really told me that it was ClamAV that was the culprit )

Slowly regaining his sense of life, being partly nurtured by a good friend he had there, things were looking bright. He had found a steady job in Brazil and he had a lovely new girlfriend. Unfortunately, this sat poorly with the girlfriend’s ex – whom in a fit of rage/jealousy/isthereanyexcuse shot and killed my good friend.

As I said it’s about time to move on for me, but I’ll never forget him or the times we shared. Rest in peace friend, thanks for everything!

“Shouting and howling from a house in Haugesund (NO) caused a full alarm and turn-out from the local police.

When the neighbour noticed serious shouting and bawling from the house next door, he immediately took action and called the police.

Says Police Superintendent Reidar GaupÃ¥s, ‘He said the noise sounded like someone was being beaten to death in the house. The informant was extremely worried as to what was happening next door.’

The local Police was quick to respond and dispatched three patrols to the house, fearing the worst as they themselves heard the howling from outside the house.

When the police officers rang the door bell they were met by a healthy and unhurt, though somewhat perturbed and sweaty man.

The man had apparently played a football manager game, where his hometown club Lyn had just lost the Champions League on overtime. According to GaupÃ¥s the man was totally shaky and very disappointed.”

But what is so GREAT about it is… these people have managed to make their own programs run on it! Of course Sony’s shitting their pants – but I love it. I can now have homemade games (like Casino Addict, and Rick Dangerous) for free… aswell as other system emulators! That’s right, the little PlayStation that could can now emulate GameBoy, GBAdvanced, Super Nintendo, Turbo Grafx-16, Sega Genesis and a whole bunch of other systems. What is so great about that is that as a “gamer” I can finally try out lots of old but good games that ;

1. I never had a system to use on (come on, as a kid I had limited funds, and so did my parents – the C64 was enough)

2. I can enjoy games/systems that never was available in my country (being only 4 million people makes us not a very attractive market for struggling businesses).

3. I don’t need to pay! Now this would border on Piracy (I know I know) but the fact is I would 99.9% certainly never have spent a dime on any of these systems/games anyways because I simply can’t be arsed to play a game for that long. The only games I’ve spent a good deal of time on since 1992 has been a few co-ops or head-2-head games along a few good friends.