Month: November 2004

A slight (and incomplete) cleanup pre ASP fun.

I have nothing much to talk about and yet I feel like typing.

So here is a quick weekend recap.
Saturday:

Some CoH through the afternoon and then off into Soho for Andrew’s birthday. A good night, with a good few pints in The Ship. Amusement throughout and good conversation, all fun. Rang a friend in the US when I got home (fairly late) as we hadn’t talked in a long time and so we talked.

Sunday:
Halo 2 day. A few people around for some fun and tanks tanks tanks and combat by sword. Pub before and after, much laughter throughout the day.

Little Eve too, broke the 12 million skillpoint mark, yay me. So I’m uber of course if somewhat directionless. I’ll give Exodus a chance and then decide whether to keep up or not.

sleep

*ding*

32 with a sucessfull run on Bastion’s Taskforce. Quite pleased with that one. Cloak of Darkness for me now, a stealth/defense power and of course acess to level 35 SO’s. I had almost a million influence, now I have around 100k. Nicely uped in a lot of things and so far I’m impressed with the power.

Sat in Starbucks for a couple of hours this afternoon. Read through an Irish Times (yesterdays unfortunatly) and a couple of hundred pages of The Sacred Art of Stealing by Chris Brookmyre. Enjoying it a lot and I can see myself picking up a lot more of his books.

Thursday was a decent V evening, good small crowd and lots of conversation. Shame the pub had to close early due to not having any water. It threw us out around 9ish. Guess it was all they could do but still…

Pretty tired after the lack of sleep last night, time for some reading in bed.

Not to self, never ever buy food late in the evening anywhere in Camden.

Bad things happen.

For one amazing week in November, Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco has agreed to allow its estimated 20,000 books to be reclassified by color. Shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, the books will follow the spectrum continuously, changing Adobe from a neighborhood bookshop into a magical library—but only for one week.

Info here

I’m not sure but I think I like this a lot.

The US has a new attorney general. This one is on the record thinking that the Geneva Convention is “quaint”.

It’s going to be a pretty horrible 4 years to be an American, I only hope the rest of us get off lighter.

Bush names Texas ally to key post

I hold Doug entirely responsible for all of this! And halfway through I have the sudden urge to prefix the rest with a blanket statement. I have never LARPed!

I bought some B5 CCG cards on ebay the other day, by some I mean I bought two boxes worth. For almost nothing really, certainly compared to the prices I use to pay for them. They arrived yesterday. So last night I spent about 20 minutes ripping through packages looking for good cards and having bits and pieces of the game come back to me.

I realised that I miss it quite a bit. I use to spend a whole lot of time playing CCG’s. Mainly media tie in stuff, B5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Tomb Raider all spring to mind, Lord of the Rings for a while, I have a couple of nice decks there and of course the odd game of Magic. It should be noted that I do not and have not ever own any magic cards. I did go along to various gaming events I spent some time a lot of Irish events in the mid to late nineties, Gaelcon being the big Dublin one, and an odd weekend down in Cork at a bigger event that I can’t for the life of me remember. Played at a few cons over in the UK aswell but nothing really major there, it was more a case of meeting someone I knew who played and dragging a game together.

Pre CCG, I use to play Heroquest and Space Crusade. These naturally lead into 40K and I still have a very basic Space Marine army back in Dublin. A friend and I created our own game using the Star Trek micro machines. We spent a long long time writing out some rules and created at least a 6 foot by 6 foot playing board. I remember we once played it on the roof of a decent enough sized kitchen and it took a whole lot of space.

Never really got into D&D, I did play a few paper based RPG, I don’t remember what they were. That was in my early teens I guess, there was a group of around 6 of us that use to play but the group disintegrated/grew apart as they tend to do at that age.

I did bring most of my cards when I moved to London, aside from them being valuable (at the time unfortunately), I wanted to have them to try and find a group that I could go along and play with. I never really did. I went to a LOTR tournament once but after signing up for everything and never hearing back from the organisers, I gave up. Not being the best with new groups of people I don’t know and not liking walking in blindly, I really didn’t feel like doing it again. I’m sure I still have decks made up and unsorted cards for a few things.

Sometime soon I’m going to sit down and organise all my B5 cards. I’m not sure when but sometime when I can have some space and time to work. That pretty much means when the mood strikes, but unlike the rest of the things I want to sort out (books, dvds, cds) I don’t need new furniture to do it and it will no doubt clear me up some space. I had pretty much a complete set until later expansions, I have several unsorted boxes of said expansions that will be fun to go through some rainy bored afternoon.

That’s one thing I dislike about online gaming. There is always something to do, I rarely have a boring Saturday afternoon. I just have to log on to Eve or CoH and I have something to do. It’s not a bad thing really but it does leave everything that’s waiting for a little time waiting that little longer.

Anyway someday maybe I’ll look into some gaming in London, more than likely I’ll end up ebaying more B5 cards and pining for the good old days 😉

Oh and the reason it’s all Doug’s fault? Well he use to play B5 CCG too and it came up in conversation and I dug at my cards at the first Halo night a few weeks ago. Looks like a second Halo night this coming weekend in honour of Halo 2 out at all good stores Thursday!

Lots to catch up on and at the same time, not really that much.

I signed up to Blockbuster’s online DVD rental service last week so I’ve been catching up on movies I missed. I have to admit to being very impressed with the service. I had done one of these schemes before and didn’t last long. I never got the movies I actually wanted, i.e. the ones at the top of the list. So far in two postings from BB, I’ve had my top three movies both times. So I’m going to keep them on after the trial and see how it goes. Also impressed by the turnaround. I sent two movies back on Thursday and had two back to me by Saturday. So I have watched:
– Identity was fun, not a bad thriller to start with (helped by a decent cast) and a nice twist of the type that I like to end it pretty well.
– 25th Hour. It was setup in everyway to be the type of drama that I really enjoy but it just seemed to miss on everything it promised. Nothing was wrong with it, and I did enjoy it but it could have been better.
– Dogville. I got about 20 minutes into it and I didn’t like it at all. The set threw me, it certainly helped put me off, but not a single thing in the first 20 minutes interested me.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. I’m not actually finished this, I’m about 70 minutes into it. So far, nothing special, occasionally funny and Drew Barrymore again playing more attractive than she really is, which is I guess a plus.

On the cinema front, it’s quiet. I was at the premiere of I (Heart) Huckabees with Alex last week. was not the best movie ever. It was funny in places but it really wasn’t anything special. It had it’s head stuck up it’s arse way too much. Not a bad movie but not one I can see myself watching again.

I found it fairly hard to read text on a screen during my cold, hence the lack of updates and various other things I’ve not gotten to, so I’ve been catching up on books. Jamie lent me Christopher Brookmyre’s One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night  which was a whole lot of fun and I’ve picked up a couple more of his books. I seem to have jumped back into a crime mood and I’ve been reading some Michael Connellys. Mainly Bosch stuff, all solid but unexceptional. I finally got around to reading The Poet which I did enjoy a whole lot and will pickup the follow-up whenever it comes out in paperback. Nothing in particular lined up to read next, I have a very tube unfriendly omnibus to wade through and then I do actually want to read some Iain Rankin I think. Highly rated but I’ve never gotten around to checking any of them out. I have Watchmen so I’ll start off with that. Finally on the books front, the new Alastair Reynolds is out at the end of the month and I’m looking forward to that a lot.

Unsurprisingly I gamed a bit over the weekend. I’ll ding 31 in CoH later tonight, I only need about 10k. It’s gone pretty quick even with a whole load of debt due to lots of team fun. It’s so much easier to work off debt and indeed make money now. 30 seems to have been a massive change. Street hunting actually earns nice XP and cash very quickly. I think it’s due to being able to hunt 2-3 levels above safely enough, and indeed I think given enough inspirations I could go 4-5 levels above. The XP doth flow. The news on Issue 3 is good, it’s going to reward level 50’s big time. I’m sure there will be stuff in there for everyone else, it would be nice to get a bit closer to the big five O during the next few weeks. Alts on hold.

In hindsight, Dark Armour was a really poor secondary choice, I should have gone regen. It’s handy in places but most of the time it’s not so. I’ve just picked up Obsidian Shield and I do love that (no psionic/hold etc affects me), it’s helping me bigtime with Vamps and Ritki already. Very unsure what to take at 32. Cloak Of Darkness sounds really good, the associated stealth would be awesome. I like the idea of opening the fighting pool. The more I read, the more I think it should be opened up to boost my defence. It will leave me with more attacks than I need tho, I may wait and open it with my next respec, in fact I think that makes a whole lot more sense. All fun and games still 🙂

NME is running with the U2 album leak (surprise surprise). Hopefully it will be moved forward, that would be a good thing. Reports in this afternoon are all good.

Bendis and Maleev are off Daredevil as of December next year. So only around 12 issues left. It’s been a good strong run, could be close on 50 issues. It’s been the best thing on the shelf for a long time and I really can’t see a follow-up sticking to such high quality. I’ll hold till closer to the time to see of course.

Saturday night I had a ticket to see the Polyphonic Spree, I really wasn’t feeling up to it but I figured they would at least put a smile on my face. Thinking they would be on stage around 9, I thought I would skip the support and get there sometime after 8. So I took my time and got there about 8.20 to hear them in full swing. I hadn’t taken into account that it was on in the Astoria which then reopens for GAY at 11 or 12. Turns out I hadn’t missed much. The entire place was alive when I got in there. I was stuck at the back on the far left but I had a good view of the stage and the crowd. There was no mosh pit but at the same time there was no-one standing around. Everyone was moving and having so much fun. It was an astounding sight.

I owe the Spree an apology. I saw them about a year ago in the Forum While I enjoyed it a whole lot, I really did think they were a novelty act and said as much (and a little more). I only booked a ticket for this one because it was a) something to do and b) not a bad follow-up album came along a few weeks ago. Happily go and see them live again, I felt a whole lot better afterwards and was grinning like a loon throughout. Great gig. In the encore, average Solider Girl it never works as well as it should or at least as well as I expect live. Great flute intro to it, I thought I knew it straight off but she teased it out for a moment and then the song, average…until they cut the music and Tim led the Astoria in an acoustic version. Then, then it was glorious. It was one of those perfect moments in music. I’ll be there the next time they play London.

Emails are strange beasts. Often I’ll take time over them and work things out and look at them at least twice. Other times like now to two friends in Dublin, I’ll just start typing and lay out whatever I intended to write to them about and just ctrl+enter to send as soon as I sign my name. I do this a good bit, there have been times when I’ve signed emails “s” instead of “d” and various wrong letters in “Dave” due to my fingers being off and not even noticed till I actually see the email sending. I don’t do this in work, it would be bad. Work emails can take several drafts and every now and again a read-over from someone else before send is hit. It’s just not worth the hassle that could come with it otherwise. It’s rare that I spellcheck my personal emails, it’s rare that I don’t spellcheck my work emails.

I tend to spellcheck everything that gets posted here. Twice for LJ. Once using whatever client I write it in (usually AOL within work) and then in the LJ client I use to post, it does it automatically before posting. I often don’t accept the spelling changes, as far as I am concerned “tho” is a perfectly legitimate word to use, and I use it alot.

Reading a nasty (and as yet unsubstansiated) report that Apple’s latest OS X update leaves your hard drive marked as Read Only when it’s done. I do have my doubts but it’s a good source on it. Why there would be a need to do anything like that I don’t know, having just typed all that really does leave me to think the report is wrong. I guess I’ll find out shortly.

I’ve had this one saved for most of the day. It’s just been sitting here in a window getting stuff throw at it every now and again. I sometimes prefer to write like this, it gives me a long time to organise my thoughts or more so to not post 10 times when I can roll it all into one.

Gah I’m way behind on everything.

This shitty cold is really getting to me.

– I think the venting was just that. The over-riding feeling I’ve seen is incomprehension.

– I’m tired and I have a cold. I need to sleep.

– I’m not going to type anything else.