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Blurty for Cyril Slartibardfast.
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| Thursday, May 31st, 2012 |
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Diablo III. Oh, man. I got into Diablo largely thanks to its perceived similarities to Nethack, perceptions which turned out to be largely accurate. I also remain a PC gamer at heart (yeah, I've got an XBox, but eh). So when the next instalment of a pretty good game turns up, I'm on it. Released on May 15th, it took me a week to get hold of it because no shops sell PC games any more - or if they do, it's at a stupid price relative to everyone else (£45?! THIS IS WHY YOU ARE GOING BANKRUPT, GAME); however, it hit my doorstep on the 23rd and I blitzed through the first act in my two days off. It's great fun. I love that it's retained plenty of the Diablo basics while making levelling up a bit less punishing. I love that it's still structured virtually identically to Diablo II (second act goes east to a desert land with a locked off palace... hmm, where have I seen that before?), and thus it's still fundamentally Diablo. I don't love the DRM. Diablo III's DRM represents what some games companies see as the future - a mechanism whereby the game is registered and attached to a single account online, and the online status is constantly tracked to ensure that it's only being used by one person. Kills the second hand market dead (and boy do games companies hate the second hand market) and maintains company revenue. That in itself is relatively fine. Piracy has been a thorn in gaming's side ever since gaming has existed (how well I remember poring through a C90 cassette with about fifteen Spectrum games on it back in the day) and I understand the desire to fight it. I don't like the hatred of the second hand market - a lot of games these days aren't really designed with replay value in mind so it makes sense that somebody would want to pass it on after they've finished. But I also don't like the way certain companies - Game again - see the second hand market as their primary business model when it should be a back seat to, you know, the promotion and marketing of new games. Game made massive headlines recently by very nearly going bankrupt. I wouldn't have particularly mourned them - online is usually cheaper and their business practices have made them few friends - but several journalists noted that Game does perform one vital function. Gamers can pretend otherwise, but the fact remains that playing games is and will always be nothing more than a hobby; Game's ancestors were those tiny little shops tucked in back alleys that sold model aeroplanes and Hornby train track. What Game does, therefore, is give gaming a High Street presence; it keeps a (slowly growing) hobbyist market in the minds and eyes of the masses. That's why existing through their second hand market is a failure of an idea - because it puts the emphasis less on the promotion and development of new product and more on the raw cashflow of giving somebody £5 for a game and promptly sticking it back on the shelf with a £20 label on it. But I digress. Second hand gaming is a shit business model as long as it's a business model and not just mates swapping tapes, and Blizzard (Diablo's makers) are right to try and stomp on it. The other much touted reason for Diablo's permanently online presence is the auction house. Diablo is ultimately a hack and slash game in which you acquire vast quantities of probably useless loot, and so you can trade it off to other players for in-game gold. This is fine - MMORPGs like World Of Warcraft and EverQuest have been doing that for years. But Diablo also have a new thing up their sleeves - an auction house where you can trade in-game items for real-life currency. Again, this isn't really new. EverQuest had people selling good in-game items - and in some cases, entire characters - on eBay ten years ago. Blizzard are merely formalising this process to ensure they can get their cut of the trade. The problem is that good items are - by definition - rare, and Diablo II had a couple of known bugs which allowed people to duplicate rare items more or less at will. Duplicated items flood the market, economy crashes, Blizzard doesn't get their cut. Blizzard's solution, therefore, has been to make Diablo III an MMO in all but name. All character details are stored online, all item information, most of its randomly generated locations are hosted through an online server. The disc that you buy, or the "client" or whatever they call it, basically only holds the graphics used to render the location code the servers send down, and some of the story-related cinematics and sounds. The problem is that Diablo has never been an MMO. Hack and slash games are typically single player affairs, usually played locally on one's own system, with an occasional online presence for teaming up against bosses and maybe a certain amount of player-versus-player interaction so that people can wave their dicks at each other. So the company merely needs to maintain a few servers for those who want to do the multiplayer thing - or even let people host themselves through local area networks - and if they don't work one day there's always single player to fall back on. And all this rambling has finally reached a point. The always online component requires working servers otherwise the game is unusable. And, right now, they don't work. "Too many simultaneous login attempts crashing the server" is something they really should have planned for. Blizzard have been running World Of Warcraft and its servers for the better part of ten years now, and they've just cooked up the most anticipated PC-only title since... a very long time ago. The game sold 6.3 million copies in no time at all, and it's fast becoming obvious that Blizzard simply cannot cope with developing servers to host most of those people being logged in simultaneously. Which is leaving a lot of people pissed off that they just spent £35 on something that they can't use. I understand why Blizzard have made the decisions they have. If it sold 6.3 million then there'd probably be about the same again who'd pirate it - and maybe half of those who bought it would have pirated it too - and 9.45 million times £35 is a lot of money. But the fact is - it doesn't work. The perpetual online requirement means that they need to make sure that the system is operational; and while maintenance, upgrade, development and plain ol' technical issues may mean it's not going to be available 24/7, the amount of issues they've had so far have been frankly unacceptable. They knew how big the launch was going to be, they had ample time to plan for it (Diablo II came out 11 years ago), and they simply haven't figured it out even two weeks later. The launch of the real currency auction house has been delayed another couple of weeks with rumours that it's on indefinite hold. In other words, the single biggest reason they made the thing online only in the first place may end up not even happening. Ultimately, I think other companies will look on this as an interesting attempt to realise a thought experiment that they've all been pondering for a while - the idea of permanent connection to an account online as an attempt to circumvent second hand sales is something all the major players have been thinking about. And I think they'll realise that without colossal infrastructure outlay and maintenance for years and years - nothing annoys me more than the notion that they'll switch off the Diablo III servers in fifteen years and I'll never be able to play it again, but thanks to emulators it's all but certain that Diablo II will still work - all they're going to end up with is a very pissed off fanbase. And a very pissed off fanbase isn't one that's inclined to fork over the dosh. |
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| Thursday, October 6th, 2011 |
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*thud* So yeah. My first eye exam for seven years confirmed what I've strongly suspected for a long time - I need glasses. Apparently my right eye needs a -2.75 and my left a -2.5, whatever that means (I think it loosely translates as "my eyes suck"); I'm told that's quite high for a first prescription. The woman was very concerned when I, as a half-arsed estimate of the shitness of my sight, told her I couldn't read the writing on a poster on the wall just behind her (about 72pt - an inch high - Helvetica at a distance of about eight feet, although admittedly it was in pink on green; I could tell there was writing there but couldn't identify it). It's not just a reading thing - I will have to wear them pretty much constantly, probably to make my eyes adapt to the things. Thus, I have forked over a stupid amount of money to the monkeys at Vision Express and around the middle of next week (or however long it takes the lenses to come down from somewhere in Nottingham, or something) I will officially join the ranks of the speccy nerds (as opposed to a Speccy nerd, which I've been ever since I was 4). I suspect that I will be tied up and beaten if I don't furnish Facebook with pictures at the first opportunity, so... until then, then. |
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| Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 |
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Our first customer today was Charlie Higson. He's much hairier than he used to be. |
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| Monday, April 11th, 2011 |
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TCR finally got back to me today. I start there next week. Yeah, it's slightly fewer hours (30 vs 39), but it's slightly higher pay (the location allowance is 55p/h higher than Cambridge) so... yeah. I just need Richard and Stephanie between them to hash out an actual start date. |
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You can get a two-bed flat in my old block in Stillwater Drive for the same price I was paying for my old one-bed. If Cambridge PC World could sort me out with a transfer to Pin Hill (the giant one on Ashton Old Road, for those who remember it) I would be all over that shit. |
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| Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 |
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My seasonal bout of man flu may actually be real flu this time. It started bugging me on Thursday night; by Friday evening I was full-on dead. Went to bed at 10pm, woke up at 6am on Saturday for a 9am start at work, texted them to say I wasn't going to be in, went back to sleep, woke up at 4pm. Sunday, felt slightly better. Went in, did day of work, much rejoicing etc. Monday, documented elsewhere but upshot was "didn't go in". Tuesday, designated day off! Spent day recuperating (and fighting with my PC), felt better by the end of the day, figured I should be alright to go into work today. This morning, due in at 10am. Set out at 7:30 to get a train from Custom House to Westferry, and then one from there to Bank and so on. Well, that was what I set out to get, anyway. Unfortunately there was a bit of an incident towards the end of the first bit which stopped me doing anything else. I can't describe the incident in full for reasons which will become apparent. So. Got on train (stood in corner near the door), read Metro. Finished that somewhere near Poplar (stop just before Westferry). Felt slightly dodgy in the stomach. Thought "well, I'm changing at the next stop, maybe the few minutes of fresh air will help". That was about the last thought I can remember having. The next thing I knew we were actually at Westferry, someone was shaking my right shoulder and I was on the floor on my back; apparently very pale, in a cold sweat, and someone had pulled the alarm after I passed out. Yeah. From what I can remember, the passengers were all extremely helpful and concerned and such, and the guy from British Transport Police who turned up to help out was pretty good as well (and told me there was no way I was going in to work), although I'd have preferred it if he hadn't been so determined to get me into an ambulance. But yeah. I should probably dig out my NHS card from whichever box it's in and actually register with a doctor down here at some point... (My head still feels slightly dizzy.) |
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Man Flu claimed me for another day on Monday (the gunk ran down the back of my throat overnight and into my stomach, causing me to wake up with epic stomach pains and now I remember why Caitlin banned me from ever talking about my colds). Today, on the other hand, was an actual day off! Which I spent working on my PC. Having been unemployed for four years and quite, quite lazy for the previous two, my PC is somewhat behind the technological curve right now. It's had piecemeal updates to replace dodgy parts a few times now (the only parts still original from when I first built it in 2003 are the case, the cables and the floppy drive; even the motherboard replacement was done on the cheap to maintain compatability with my old RAM), but nothing really significant in the way of actual progress. A new PC has been on my to-do list for a while now and will hopefully happen once I get a few pay packets in at PC World, but for today it sufficed that I get a new hard drive. I've had 20Gb and 250Gb IDE drives sat in my PC for several years now (I always run two drives - yeah, I thought of the SSD idea before it became cool, man), but the 250Gb one has been clogged and sluggish and noisy for a long time and CEX has had a load of cheap hard drives in there for a while, so I grabbed a £50 1Tb drive. In SATA. I've had a SATA capable motherboard since the aforementioned replacement, but since that replacement was done in such a way as to preserve backwards compatability, it was still reasonably old. And SATA has had a couple of changes in standards in the intervening five years. As have operating systems. The net result was that a chunk of today was a fun series of games in figuring out how to hook up a SATA-II drive to a seemingly notoriously finicky SATA-I compatible chipset (it needed jumpering), transferring 225Gb of data onto it (7 hours), and then persuading Windows to acknowledge its existence (by the time SATA drives became the norm, everyone was on Vista and XP drivers were only developed later under much duress). But it got there. I now have a 20Gb IDE drive with Windows and whatnot on it, and a 1TB SATA drive with all the rest of my music and games and other such. Huzzah! I have also decided to break with the tradition of naming all my drives after Red Dwarf characters - they're now called Naomi and Emily because I am a Skins slut. (Which reminds me, I also finally figured out how JJ's S4 episode fits into the overall theme of the series! I've now cracked the whole lot! Except the baseball bat. That was just stupid.) Out of curiosity, I ran that old 250Gb drive through one of the hard drive testing programs we use at work. It failed the test after eight seconds. |
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| Thursday, November 25th, 2010 |
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The Job Centre - you know, those wankers who are supposed to help you find work? Might have just cost me my job. I've got the day off today - the first day off I've had during the week since the job was confirmed on Saturday - so I took the opportunity to go into the job centre and sign off. (Never again do I need to set foot in Canning Town Job Centre! Huzzah!) Went in, filled out the form, started work on Monday, last date of claim Sunday, yadda yadda. That'll secure me my last few days of JSA (I'm due four days, I think - about £38). However. My first pay date isn't going to be until December 9th. And the transport costs for this job run as follows. London Zone 3 to Zone 1 (Custom House to Kings Cross) - £2.40 each way (£2.70 during peak time); I can get a travelcard for £30.50 a week, but 5 * £5.10 = £25.50, which is obviously less - I've got my rota for the next three weeks, and I know I'm doing 11-8 Monday-Friday all those times (so I'll be travelling out at peak, and back during off-peak). Kings Cross to Cambridge - Peak return is £27.50, off peak £20. A weekly season ticket costs £94.10. Cambridge Train Station to Retail Park - £1.80ish each way. A weekly Megarider bus ticket is £11.50. Total transport per week, best case - £131.10. (When December 9th rolls round I'll be able to start buying monthly tickets, which will reduce the cost considerably.) That is obviously more than the £38 I'm expecting, so I asked the people in the Job Centre if there was anything they can do to help. I know there's a thing called the Advisor's Discretionary Fund of up to £100 available to new starters; it's typically used to cover things like work clothes and transpost costs to tide people over during the gap between signing off and first pay - i.e. the exact situation I'm in - so I asked about that. "Unfortunately, because you've already started work, your claim will have been closed effective on the Sunday - so we can't do anything to help now because you won't be down as a claimant any more." *headdesk* I really kinda needed that money. I've currently got enough money and weekly tickets to cover me for work tomorrow (I think I'm off all weekend), but that's it; my Oyster money will run out tomorrow, Sunday is the last day of my Megarider ticket and my London-Cambridge weekly runs until Monday (and that'll only get me there if I walk from home to Kings Cross and then from Cambridge to work). |
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| Saturday, November 20th, 2010 |
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| I start Monday. | ||
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| Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 |
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So my old school mate Richard Mitchell (now resident in Cambridge - yes, the same guy referenced here) reckons he's got a job going for me in the tech support department at the Cambridge branch of PC World (where he's virtually running the tech side). Apparently one of their people has gone on long term sick or something, they're a bit short elsewhere too, and they need somebody urgently who can hit the ground running on the tech side, and pick up their systems - all within about a week. Supposedly Richard suggested me, and they're allegedly desperate enough that apparently all I need to do is turn up, meet the boss, and if I don't look too much like a cuffy scrunt and sound vaguely like I know what I'm doing then the boss is prepared to take Richard's word on me being competent enough to do the job. London to Cambridge isn't the world's worst commute (it's about an hour from Kings Cross; and just for the record, I'm not up for moving again - yet, particularly given that this may potentially only be semi-permanent) and it'd be something to finally close the gap on the CV. It may yet be too good to be true... but it looks promising. (Richard's ringing me tomorrow to confirm if I can go up there and meet the guy this week.) |
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| Monday, June 21st, 2010 |
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The spotty twat behind the counter in HMV today called me "kid". Kid! He very quickly got a face full of provisional driving license. |
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| Saturday, June 12th, 2010 |
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1) Watch Emily's episode of series 4 of Skins. 2) Love the very first song that appears in the episode (because it's a good song, not because of Emily wandering around Naomi's house in her underwear). 3) When episode ends (and I've finished mentally processing it, which takes a while - it's a brilliant episode, but it's sheer hell to watch), get on the appropriate page at E4.com and find out what the song's called. They're good like that. 4) Get on Limewire and download said song, Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap. (And a few other songs from the episode too. Yes, I sit there with a notepad writing down moments that have music I want to get. Yes, I am a sad git.) 5) Play repeatedly until everyone in the house is fed up of it because they only listen to metal. 6) A few months later, go into HMV in Stratford. Spot an album I've been after for a while (Amy Macdonald's A Curious Thing) in their 2 For £10 gubbins. Pick up Conditions by The Temper Trap as a makeweight. 7) Rip albums to PC. 8) While in MP3 folder, finally get round to properly sorting out the directories and files for the last two Now! albums that I've had for months but not actually paid much attention to, or listened to. 9) Discover what track 12 on disc 2 of Now! 74 is. 10) Sigh. |
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| Saturday, May 29th, 2010 |
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Just got round to watching the series finale. (Hannah, I love you.) Apparently some people didn't approve. But... ( EPIC SPOILER ) All things considered... best grand finale to a series since Blackadder Goes Forth. |
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| Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 |
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I hate PCs sometimes. Those who follow my Facebook will know that I've been having a bit of a row with my machine over the last couple of months, trying to work out whether it's a faulty hard drive or a faulty graphics card that's been causing random system blackouts. Today I finally confirmed the answer I suspected all along. ( cut for punchline ) |
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| Friday, January 29th, 2010 |
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(Crossposted from ScoreHero/Music Discussion.) I've never liked genres. Most of the time, they have no real meaning; you could create about sixty new genres of music by perming two fairly basic lists. List 1: "ambient, neo, post, alt, speed, power, thrash, extreme, nu, kraut, progressive, indie, rap, emo"; list 2: "rock, metal, dance, pop, punk, prog, rap, country". Pick one from list 1 and one from list 2, et voila, instant genre! (I know Progressive Prog and Rap Rap would be tautological, but that's the point. And they would probably also be quite funny.) That's a hundred-odd genres right there, and that's before you start multiplying List 1 entries together ("Extreme Power Metal", anyone?). Can anybody honestly tell all of them apart? And can anybody else name a band who fit entirely and exclusively into one of them? Of course not. The other problem is that it encourages laziness. Whenever I talk to people about music (and, for that matter, anything else; it's a very common conversation starter), there's always one question that gets asked; "so, what sort of music are you into?" And I've never, ever been able to answer it to anyone's satisfaction, because I listen to what could be considered as "all sorts". For me, the only graduation that's important in music is "music I like" and "music I don't like". Breaking it down further is nigh-on impossible, because most bands don't stick within one genre for all their output; and it's also fairly unimaginative, because it tends to impose a lot of restrictions on what you listen to. "I like Progressive Rock, and that's about it." And the real point is that the biggest problem with that question is that it's very rarely asked in order to classify music; more often than not it's to classify listeners. "Cool people listen to Alt Punk! You do not listen to Alt Punk, therefore you are not cool!" It just bugs me. Thoughts? |
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| Sunday, December 27th, 2009 |
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| Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 |
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 You cannot BELIEVE how long it has taken me to get this fucker. |
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| Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 |
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Having left Stoke and Bally's quite wonderful Sky TV (complete with good ol' Sky Sports), I've found myself in London with people who have access to ESPN instead, so I've traded one load of Premier League football for another. Which is odd. ESPN are a weird bunch. 5:30pm on Saturday seems like a very strange time for football anyway, but that's not the issue. The problem is their closedown time. ESPN (over here, at least) ends for the night at 4am. Ordinarily that's not a problem (seriously, what's on at 4am? They show more German football than anything else!), but, say, if you're bored and feel like watching the MLS Cup final (kickoff was 2am GMT), it'd be nice to be able to do so in full. Not, for example, watch LA Galaxy boss the first half, Real Salt Lake come back in the second, and then be left with no idea what happened during extra time and penalties because the channel decided to shut down for the night five minutes in. Fucknuts. Apparently RSL won, which is moderately saddening. (I was supporting the Galaxy, due to a lingering loyalty towards David Beckham from his Manchester United days...) |
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| Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 |
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But it's so damn good! Anyway. These are the 33 songs I eventually downloaded from Series 3. Ashley Chambliss - A Little More Of You Asobi Seksu - Lions And Tigers* Asobi Seksu - Nefi + Girly* Au Pairs - It's Obvious Bon Iver - Woods Born Ruffians - Little Garcons David Holmes - Love Reign Over Me Deerhunter - Twilight At Carbon Lake Diskettes - Art Dodos - Walking Early Years - A Little More Elbow - Mirrorball* Electrelane - After The Call Fat Segal - Diver Revive Fat Segal - Lake Control Felice Brothers - Frankie's Gun! Glasvegas - It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry Glen Campbell - All I Want Is You Grouper - Heavy Water / I'd Rather Be Sleeping High Places - Jump In Lacrosse - You Can't Say No Forever Lady Gaga - Brown Eyes Little Boots - Meddle Low - Breaker Maps - When You Leave Millionaires - A-L-C-O-H-O-L Robert Wyatt - Just As You Are Son Lux - Break Sparklehorse - It's A Wonderful Life Steely Dan - Do It Again Susanna And The Magic Orchestra - Believer Tujiko Noriko - White Film Wilco - Radio Cure (* - subsequently bought on CD) Phew. Anyway. I've hit a bit of a snag. The Series 1 and 2 DVDs seem oddly lacking in music (the much vaunted Standing In The Way Of Control from S1 is conspicuously absent), which may mean that I'm going to have to rewatch them on 4oD anyway to see if they ever actually had soundtracks in the first place. Still, apparently it's still doing better than the American versions, where they replaced all the songs with rubbish ones and cut most of the contentious scenes to ribbons (they were perfectly happy to show Cook and Effy going all out in a closet, but a subtle scene between Naomi and Emily got shredded)... |
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| Friday, October 30th, 2009 |
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Ours is in the kitchen. Yeah, we need to fix the downstairs bog. |
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Blurty for Cyril Slartibardfast.
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weird.
amused.
surprised.
sick.
accomplished.
relieved.
bored.
contemplative.
curious.