Month: September 2004

I went to see Journey’s End at the Playhouse Theatre last night. It was excellent. The cast were fantastic and I enjoyed it a lot.

That is all.

So despite some strong effort from a good few people, it doesn’t look like anything at all is going to change within Eve. Pretty resigned to getting into a new corp but I’m first going to give it a couple of weeks. I doubt very much (given track) history that anything will happen within those couple of weeks but after everything to date, it’s worth hoping and giving it a look.

Having given it some further thought, I don’t want to go and join Dave in a small corp with just the two of us. I still want the option to go down to 0.0 and fight when I want to. Xetic is a joke, the forum makes my head hurt. I did consider going to CA, but joining a loosing pirate alliance isn’t my idea of lots of fun. I’m quite tempted by pirating to be honest. I wouldn’t mind going out into some low spec space and have some fun. However I like my implants…

SA is looking like an option some good corps in there recruiting but I’m really thinking about going up the other side of the map, up North to places I don’t really know. Would be much nicer loot to say the least. Looking for a UK/Ireland majority in whatever I do end up going for. The other option and one that on balence may get it, is to actually train up an alt. Get a million skillpoints behind someone and then go out and have some fun. I can pay for it all with my main, I have some cash now and try and get into a BS and run rampage. I’ve enough stocks to kit up some ships nicely.

We’ll see, maybe this will just turn out to be idle speculation but I don’t have much faith based on track record to date.

In City of Heroes, well I figured that my fire/ice blaster wasn’t the best thing in the world so I made an assault/devices one instead. I have no end issues. I just took Hasten at level 8 and I’m looking forward to seeing how that lets me slaughter some more tonight. I can one shot minions 1 level below me, but it’s a two shot for the same level and sometimes a level above. Hoping that will get better when I can get some SO in there. Leveling nicely. Did 7-8 in about an hour in the Hollow’s last night. Tonight at least 9, 10 if I can get a good team and take on some higher levels. 10 has to be targetting drone for my accuracy and then it’s sniper rifle time. I really want to get my attacks up to good stuff at long range and make them damage. It’s one thing that I kinda dislike about CoH. I’m all planned out to at least level 16 and there is no real good reason for me to pick anything different. It takes some of the fun of levelling out when you know what you are going to get. At the same time, it’s always nice to have a goal.

On the non gaming front. My Soulwax and Modest Mouse tickets arrived yesterday which is good. I’m also going to go and see Charlotte Hatherley in a solo show on Sunday evening. Looking forward to it. The Prince Charles is showing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few times over the weekend and I’m very tempted to go and see it again. So not really much planned for the weekend I guess. Some power gaming I’m sure.

Alex often laughs at my musical choice while playing CoH. For some reason she doesn’t think that the clashing of swords and the sounds of flame mix well with some Dylan. I disagree.

Of late, I seem to have become fixated on two songs and am playing them over and over and over. Lay Lady Lay and All Along the Watchtower. I am really starting to think the latter is indeed the definitive version. There can be and indeed often is an arguement made that Dylan’s songs sound better when done by others. Perhaps they do sound better, but Dylan has a rawness to him and as he puts it ‘that thin, wild mercury sound’. It’s most apperent on some of the live take stuff (Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 & 35) and no-one else singing his stuff has that.

Flying through Richard Morgan’s Broken Angels. It’s a whole load of fun and fairly well written. I’m quite glad I’ve got another one lined up. It’s left me wanting to reread some Bester aswell. There are some similiarities in the style and indeed in Morgan’s lead character, Bester does it better but it’s a worthy effort. I’d assume that anyone writing sci-fi these days has read Bester (at the least). I’ve not enjoyed a new author as much since I started off on Alastair Reynolds. Which just reminded me he must be due a new book soon…and indeed he is. First week of November so that’s just gone on pre-order with Amazon.

It appears that Google are finally going around to building their own web browser. Lots of debate going here about it as you can imagine. I suspect that it could be a high single digit change in marketshare overnight (and I mean overnight) if not somewhere within the early double digits. Certainly a big area to watch over the coming year I guess.

I just thought of something that I wanted to blog about and it went in and out of my brain as quickly as that.

Any pub which plays Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer’s version of Redemption Song and Iggy Pop’s The Passenger in the space of 10 minutes is a fucking good pub.

Amazon brought me lots of stuff this morning. The next couple of Richard Morgan books (and I’m going to have to buy some Black Widow this coming week, the Fiest stuff I’m missing and the third Bendis DD hardback which I don’t know how I missed out on. Also the new Hives album and the Live Planxty gig from the Point last year.

Oh and a small DVD boxset which from all accounts there has been over 50 delivered to the office this morning, our poor postman ain’t too happy. I fully expect a general listserv this afternoon reminding us not to get bulky personal stuff delivered here. Ah well.

I went to see Collateral last night. It was fun, lots of Michael Mann styling. Not too smart but not really stupid either. with Alex summed up Cruise’s performance pretty well, “he does blank and emotionless very well”. Jamie Foxx was excellent. It was about an hour longer than it needed to be, but you didn’t really notice till it’s over, too busy watching the style Mann threw into everything. The nightclub scene in particular was excellent.

Not much on this week. I had to start a new character in CoH last night…

Respec is too hard. It’s as simple as that. I went from a debt free happy go lucky close on 27 scrapper to a hit the debt cap and came close to cancelling my account over 4 attempts. The first one ended with 36k debt and failure before we even hit the last room. The second was a complete disaster and fell apart straight away when the bad guys were 6 levels above us. The third had dropouts and then the fourth. Well the fourth was a fucking disaster.

Great team, healer, two blasters, an illusion controller and the scrapper me. We did well. We died a lot but we made headway and we were about to do it. We were doing really really well in the waves against the reactor. It was at full health, as were all of us and we had only two more waves of attacks to go. We finally thought we were going to do it. 3 of us had hit the debt cap, i.e. so much that we could not incur anymore so respec was going to be a big reward for us.

Until both the last waves came at the same time. They slaughtered us. We had no inspiration left. That’s got to be the biggest bug in the game, not being able to buy any during a TF. Blasters fell within seconds, controller followed shortly. I was next to the healer who just kept healing me but to no avail, I fell. He was able to keep healing himself to last another few minutes. A fast run from the hospital to get back was to no avail. The reactor blew and 4 hours of work and an extra 30k debt all for nothing. We couldn’t get the last 10 villains. It was about 10.30 on Saturday night and I was just wrecked. I actually felt tired and frustrated and upset by a computer game. I was not impressed. I had at least 3 deaths during the day due to patch issues that I could have petitioned but I really didn’t care enough to do so.

I gave some strong thought to cancelling my account. My main character just got gimped to hell. I need about 20k to get to level 27, double that because of debt and I’ll still have over 35k when I do level. Sure it will be good for influence and I’ll be able to afford to refit almost everything with 30 SO (nice for Stamina) but I’m not gonna be able to play it for a week or so. I doubt they are going to do anything for the chars. which did get gimped as it was too hard. It’s been made easier twice already in patches and hopefully more to come.

So I created a new character. A Fire/Ice blaster. Ice was a bad choice in hindsight, I’ve got 7 offensive powers so my end goes quick. I really need some stamina on this one. Not sure I’ll bother with a travel power. I would go for Hasten but it’s not a good power to combine with end issues. So I’m having fun with that and it lets me actually play in the Hollows for a bit which is nice. Got to fight some invasion last night, died a bit but had fun and took some of them with me. Much much easier to find a team at lower levels and it’s often players like me using an alt and just looking for a laugh so we have more fun. Hit 8 when I decided to sleep and I’ve not actually done any missions yet. I’ll kick them off soon and try and work up to 10 or 12 tonight. Blasters are fun. Main is a scrapper so it’s really nice to have ranged attacks so those running away can be hit. Ice Sword gives me a nice close combat attack too and it seems *really* powerful.

Anyway I’m having fun so far. On the same server as most of the V now, I suspect they are all way higher than me but I can power through for a bit. For all it’s issues, and there are many issues I’m impressed with the rollout of so much extra in such a short time.

If only Eve was as good. Roll on Shiva. Training for some of the nice gunnery skills will be preped on the 26th and the patch on the 28th seems set to bring the advanced learning skills which I want big time. Looking forward to getting them and to knocking some time off the longer tougher skills. I have some cash in the bank now to play around with and it looks very likely that I’ll actually get to make some more soon. Still having corp trouble despite lots of effort. Not quite ready to burn bridges but getting close.

Comics wise, DD 64 was a decent ending to a story I hadn’t enjoyed all that much. Not really sure where it’s going as a title anymore and I’m certainly not enjoying it as much as I use to. It’s still one of the best titles on the market but that’s not really saying much. Also enjoyed a whole lot, Ellis’ second(?) collection; Hellblazer: Setting Sun. Short stories through and through, but some really good stuff. I enjoyed Haunted a whole lot too, it’s a shame Ellis didn’t get to do more with Constantine.

It really must be coming into Autumn. I was walking to the tube station this morning (late as ever) and several chestnuts fell from the tree above me during a gust of wind. Something made me pick one up and it’s sitting on my desk now. I like chestnuts, always have. Not to eat, not to play just to collect. When I was much younger, around the start of October my parents took the kids to Malahide Castle which was only about a mile away to collect chess nuts. We’d wander around the grounds into the woods for a couple of hours with plastic bags that we would fill up. There was one spot in particular that I use to drag them along to. A couple of bigger tress had been chopped or blown down and there was space to move around a number of trees and pick up stuff. I don’t remember the last time we did it, I was the one with the most enthusiasm for it and would nag them into bringing us there most years. I can easily see myself picking up some more as I pass there in the mornings and evenings.

I watched the fireworks for the end of the Thames Festival last night. Sat ontop of Primrose hill with Hebe. It was pretty cold and they were not really all that impressive. I’d say they were a damn sight better actually on the Thames, they looked very much as if they should be going off above you and not in front of you.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040915.html

…going to see Planxty at the Barbican in late January next year. That brings it to 4 gigs booked before the end of the year (Soulwax, Hope of the States, Modest Mouse and The Pogues) and add REM for summer next year and it’s look good…and indeed varied.

Back in London.

Back in work in the morning.

I’m not really sure why.

This will probably end up as a rambling list type entry.

Saturday evening ended up with me telling things I never thought I’d tell to people I never thought I’d really talk to. It was quite surprising. I guess there is enough history, not quite 10 years but at least 8. It’s a long time. We were never really friends back then, we argued about stupid things which of course at the time were really important and equally of course in hindsight aren’t even worthy of footnotes.

My parents house, where I lived till I was almost 20 is right on the coast. The beach and a very nice beach it is at that, is less than 5 minutes walk away. Walking on a beach under the moonlight is really one of the best things in the world. A quick google search gives me this picture of the place. Not 20 minutes ago, I was walking up the little ramp you can barely make out in the middle.

It’s usually pretty clean. The village, Malahide enters the Tidy Towns competition on a regular basis and has won or recieved honours on almost as regular a basis. It’s cleaned a couple of times a week and certainly looked to have been tonight. Anyway a nice walk back from the village itself. The beach goes on for a good few miles from the Marina at the estury mouth moving onto another beach. You can probably walk a good 10 miles on it one way with just a few rocks to climb over. I suspect I’ll end up walking there tomorrow morning.

I really really do love the Irish accent. That and a nice Russian one gets me everytime. It’s so nice hearing the former everywhere I go.

I always said that I wanted to end up back in Dublin. I was never really that sure on it. I think now, I am.

This evening I saw the directors cut of Donnie Darko in the IFI. It’s easily the best film I’ve ever seen. I think I prefer the original release, the extra scenes are nice, some of them are really nice, but the pages from the Philosophy of Time Travel take away a bit much. They provide more of an explanation of what is actually happens than the original and I enjoyed thinking about what was going on a lot more than being told it. Still a certain purchase when it comes out.

Speaking of which, I don’t begrudge it a special editon DVD. Two main reasons, 1 it’s a directors cut and 2 it only managed that because it was so sucessful as a normal DVD. Even with the major takings in the EU market, the film was a flop in the US. What I do begrudge a re-release is The Godfather, there was full special editon box set a couple of years ago. Bastards.

Um yeah, so rambling.

It constantly amazes me how the most polluted place in Dublin (the airport) has fresher air than anywhere in London. It’s a pretty sad statement of affairs.

Something else I meant to mention last night which is really nice, not smelling like an ashtray when you get home from a night out. Sure there are some people smoking outside the bar but that’s about that. It’s nice and it struck me as I got to bed last night.

Saturday was really just catching up with friends. I was out with some friends that I only managed to hook up with about a year ago and man have we all grown up. Perhaps not completly but so much more than back then. Not surprising how mid 20’s is that little bit more mature than late teens. Anyway an excellent night spent mainly chatting about life and love. The theme of the evening was Amy and some debate over her or indeed his existence. A fun evening. It ended, as many a good evening does here in Supermacs quite late chatting just before running for a night bus.

I suspect by the start of November I’ll be looking to use up some holidays. I suspect a week back here again is on the cards. By suspect, I mean that I’ve already look up flights and started working out some dates. I see Modest Mouse have just announced another London date so I’ll have to make sure I’m around for that. It would be really quite nice if they had a Dublin date, I’d certainly try and work around that a bit.

Anyway I’m reading John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life which I’m enjoying a lot. Getting a good bit read at night and of course while travelling. I enjoy reading biographys quite a bit and should track down some new ones.

Typing mood is gone.