The problem with these black holes of updatelessness is that it becomes hard to remember what the hell has happened since the last time I wrote. My relationship with Tina is amazingly still intact, though I still keep wondering to myself every now and then why she puts up with me, silly girl. We’ve had our ups and downs — a very big down just recently in fact — but I think it has only made me realize even more how much I love this beautiful and wonderful girl with the cutest hiccups ever. Also, I should hire a professional bowling coach so I don’t get my ass whopped the next time we play bowling together. And no, I won’t tell you my score, shut up!

I sent my XFX GeForce 8500GT in for a replacement, and I got a ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT in return. Initially I had the most annoying problem with the ATI card; every time I rebooted I’d get a blank screen and the monitor would turn itself off. Booting into safe-mode helped, apparently the drivers got messed up every time I’d shut down, so I’d have to go into safe-mode, uninstall drivers, reboot, install drivers, reboot again and voila. Then if I shut my computer off I’d have to repeat the same process again. A bit of a bitch to say the least. I have no idea how it got sorted out, but it just stopped happening eventually thank god.

In WoW-related news, my mage pwns (well excuse me, but it does!). I’m basically stuck with it upgrade wise, as the notable upgrades I can get at this point are all from Mount Hyjal and Black Temple content, which my guild has not yet progressed to, though we plan to start on MH this week. I’ve got my warrior up to level 65, where it has been stuck forever now as I really hate the slow leveling process in Outland. My rogue is currently 62, pretty much stuck with that as well. My other characters are still lingering around the 30 range, easily the most painful place ever. Not sure which character I’ll concentrate on next.

I really was hoping to write something a bit more interesting when I sat down to write this post, but this is all you get, sorry.

Well howdy there. There isn’t really much to update I’m afraid, that is not to say that I haven’t had a good time these last couple of weeks, because I certainly have. Tina has stayed over for days on end, on several occasions during the last few weeks, and it has been really great having her here. Watched movies and played lots of WoW together, as usual — and it has been fun.

Christmas was rather uneventful. We’ve usually had a couple people from the family over during Christmas eve, but now that my dad passed away it didn’t really seem the same, so it was just me and my mom and uncle together. Strange how as a kid I was looking forward to presents like crazy, but now it’s not quite as exciting (not that I mind getting them!), and now it’s more fun to figure out gifts to give to other people instead. I fulfilled the male stereotype (i.e. being boring and unimaginative) and got Tina some sexy underwear. My oh my, did she look tantalizingly good in that.

As for new years eve, I completely slept through it, go me!

Bought myself a nice Christmas present; The EC Archives: Tales From The Crypt Volume 1 + Volume 2, along with Vault Of Horror Volume 1. I remember reading “Iskalde Grøss” as a kid (it was the norwegian name for Tales From the Crypt more or less — though it was actually composed of various other E.C. Comics series as well. A sort of potpurri of horror comics if you will), and how incredibly awesome the drawing and writing was. I was pretty young at the time (wohoo for kind parents that never really set any limits) and they scared the shit out of me, but I still read them. Ah, good times. Can’t wait to get those in the mail and reminisce.

Hmm what more? Well I’d tell you all about my awesome WoW adventures now that I’ve reached lvl. 70 (current level cap), but this post is boring enough as it is, so I’ll refrain from that.

Happy new year etc.

Funnily enough, even though I’m a complete nerd and spend my days in front of my computer, I’ve been able to keep myself away from World of Warcraft all on my own, despite its attractiveness. Then I actually go out in the real world, be social and meet a girl, and then on Satuday I found myself installing WoW. I started an undead mage while Tina guided me through the most basic things in order to get me started. She started a new character as well, and an hour or two later she told me it’d be nice to sit next to each other and play together, and asked if it wasn’t too late to come here. Of course I said it was alright, so she hurried to get her things together in order to catch the last bus going here somewhere around midnight.

Finally here, we tried getting internet to work on her laptop, but to no avail. The network connection icon would just say “retrieving network address” or whatever it was, and stall for a minute before it failed to get an IP address. I’ve had the issue before with another computer, but I can’t remember what the fuck had to be done to fix it. We tried my mom’s laptop, and it worked instantly on that. Figured I’d try copying over WoW to that computer even though it’s not exactly a powerhouse, but when Tina tried to log in she got a message about how her account has been authenticated before with the Burning Crusade addon, so she couldn’t use the normal WoW. And of course it was impossible to download Burning Crusade anywhere without running into problems with logging in and such things. So eventually we just gave up, which really sucked. I had looked forward to playing with her, it would probably have been the most romantic thing I’ve done in my life, hah.

It was nice to have her spend the night here anyway, we watched Seinfeld, I played WoW on my own a bit, and then we hopped into bed and enjoyed each others company there. Woke up insanely late on Sunday, then like our times together before, we just relaxed together in bed, cuddled and whatnot. Eventually she had to leave, so I followed her down to the bus terminal and said good bye. This last week has been an incredibly happy one.

I feel a sore throat coming on again, and am not looking forward to it escalating into something worse. Nothing much else going on in my life at the moment (surprise, surprise). I finally got around to trying out Final Fantasy VII, which I’ve wanted to do forever. Whenever I’ve tried downloading the PC version there’s always been some issues about getting it to work properly under Windows XP, and I always ended up giving up on it. This time however, I decided to just download the Playstation version and play it in a Playstation emulator, and yay for that! Really loving it so far, a bit surprised how similiar it actually is to FF6 (one of my all-time favorite console games). Also a bit surprised to find out that Sephiroth is not a complete douchebag, which I always had the impression of him being. Well, besides killing basically everybody and everything in his way, I felt mostly sorry for him when the flashback of him and Cloud occured. Still waiting for a moment sad enough to make me cry like the ghost train scene in FF6 though! I don’t doubt that one will come, considering how well written and thought-of the Final Fantasy stuff is.

The last few days has been spent doing the occasional 2-3hr hiking trip — it’s great to live in a city where you can take the subway for 15mins to find yourself surrounded by complete wilderness. I think I must have been inspired from watching Man vs. Wild, a newly discovered show for me. If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically a documentary series about this badass guy named Bear Grylls, who puts himself in the middle of nowhere all over the world with no provisions, and he then shows you how to survive and get to civilization so you can be rescued.

I’ve also started re-watching Star Trek: The Original Series, I had completely forgotten how good it was (though The Next Generation is my favorite). I had also forgotten how incredibly campy it actually is — not a bad thing.

Epp pasted a picture in #across of a celebrity a couple of days ago and asked if anyone knew who it was. I vaguely remembered her from somewhere, and after a while I remembered she looked an awful lot like Buffy’s little sister, and indeed it was. Which again reminded me that I never really watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer properly before, I’ve only seen an occasional episode or two from the TV when it’s been on in the background. So I decided to give it a try since I’m bored out of my mind these days, and it’s been fun to watch so far.

When I haven’t been hiking or watching series, I’ve most likely been playing old console games through emulators. I just downloaded complete sets of all games for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and Genesis, together with a nice program to launch the games from, called QuickPlay. It’s been a lot of fun now that I have a controller to play with, I’ve always had to use a keyboard before. The games that’s seen the most action so far has been Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario 64 and Paper Mario for the N64, along with Metroid Fusion and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for Gameboy Advance. Fun fun fun.

Started watching Traveler yesterday, quite alright first impression. Feels a bit too much like Prison Break (without the prison), not sure if it’s a good thing or not. I tend to get disinterested when the protagonists keep getting into more and more trouble, and the plot evolves into some crazy conspiracy thing that ends up with the government being behind everything and blah blah, you know the deal. Anyway, watched the current 5 episodes, and still interested enough to keep watching, will see how it develops.

Downloaded Need for Speed: Underground 2, which I didn’t have time to try before. Quite enjoyable. Also tried the newest in the NFS series, Need for Speed: Carbon. Somewhat enjoyable as well. I loved NFS Most Wanted, and it seems Carbon is a sort of mix between that and Underground 2, the only problem is that it’s sort of missing the most fun parts of both of them. In other words, it could have been a lot better if they had combined the best of both worlds.

Tried Tomb Raider: Anniversary as well, which was quite entertaining. Felt a bit more like the classic Tomb Raider instead of all these new crap versions in the series.

Been listening to these songs quite a lot lately, mix of old and new:
Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Snoop Dogg ft. The Doors - Riders on the Storm
Teuvo Loman - Kari
Hazza’ah Al Minhali - Naamat 3yoonik (?, no idea if right name)
Sting & The Police - Some “Best of” Album
Jay-Z - The Blueprint (album)
Journey - Don’t Stop Believin’ \o

Over and out!

I’ve got a new favorite game (well besides Elma obviously), and its name is DROD — short for Deadly Rooms of Death. I have to give a big thank you to axxu who requested this game from yoosef, who then uploaded it to my ftp so axxu could download it from there. I was curious about what it was, so I installed it and checked it out. I pretty much instantly fell in love with the game.

You can read more about the game here. In short, it’s a puzzle, hack’n’slash, turn based RPG all rolled into one. I’ve been playing it for quite a few months now, and it’s just as addictive as Elma is. You can even download “externals” made by other players or create your own, it’s immensely fun.

Why I decided to write about this now however, is that a week ago there was a new version released! I thought it was awesome enough from before, but now it’s even more amazing. The page for the game is pretty messy, so it can be hard to get around what version is the newest and what the differences are, but I’ll explain it in Elma terms, perhaps it’ll make sense. DROD: King Dugan’s Dungeon is pretty much the equivalent to Across. Then you have DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold, which is like Elma. In other words, the game’s core is updated, while you keep the backwards compatability of the levels, just like you can play Across levels in Elma.

The new version is called DROD: The City Beneath, which in context is like getting Elma 2. As soon as I saw it was available I bought it. I’m pretty much a pirate when it comes to games, music and movies, but when I have something which I like and use constantly, I will buy it. Or perhaps I just wanted to play the game straight away and not have to wait for a pirated version to surface somewhere, who knows. Either way I purchased it.

I highly suggest you give the demo of this new version a try and see what you have been missing all this time.

So, what’s going on in my life at the moment, besides cutting myself to pieces? A great deal of nothing really, life is utterly boring at the moment. I should be looking for a job, it’s been over a fucking year since I finished my civil service, yet nothing. But with this heat, I just don’t have the energy to do anything at all. And I should really cut my hair, it’s getting too long. It now reaches my lower back, and is getting increasingly annoying and in the way all the time. I miss the sub-shoulder length. So that needs to be fixed.

Tried some “new” games. Outrun 2006 Coast to Coast: meh. Prey: crap. New games, please for the love of god, stop using the Doom 3 engine, it sucks and every game looks the same. Titan’s Quest: awesome, for a day or two, then it’s get very repetitive.

Now, finally time for some good news. I’ve never played much console games after the Nintendo era, apart from winning a PSX with a few games (loved the first Gran Turismo to death!). N64, Gamecube, PS2, Xbox etc., all untested. So I’ve lived a sort of sheltered life console wise the last decade. Unfortunately one can say, as I’m sure I’ve missed out on a lot of great games. This truly became apparent to me two weeks or so ago when I downloaded Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition for PC, a port from the PS2. Oh my god! What a great game, I’ve been playing it non-stop ever since I got it. I even bought a Logitech gamepad just for this one game. I could go on and on about the awesomeness that is DMC3, but I won’t. As for consoles, I will be buying the Wii when it comes out.

Other things in life? Not much. Peanuts, roast beef sandwiches, movie watching, Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen, Oasis, dreams of rain.

I never tried Halo before, so I wanted to see what all the fuss has been about. Installed it yesterday, finished it a bit earlier today. What a huge disappointment! I at least imagined that it wouldn’t suck completely, seeing as so many people has been playing it over the last few years and how it became a hit. I found it utterly boring, why people like this game is beyond me. It feels like you’re playing the same 2-3 maps, with the same 5-6 enemies over and over. I think even the first Doom had more diversity than this. Yawn.

Half-Life 2: Episode One was released two days ago, something I’ve been looking forward to for a while now, I pre-ordered it like two weeks ago. The game doesn’t waste any time and puts you right into the action straight away, and continues from where Half-Life 2 left off, where you defeated Dr. Breen. The reactor core in the Citadel in City 17 is close to a meltdown, and you have to delay it in order to escape from the city unharmed together with Alyx and the remaining people from the resistance. It’s basically the same as the original Half-Life 2, only with some improved graphics, and new levels obviously. There’s one new enemy, that scared the hell out of me the first time I encountered it, I’m somewhat of a pussy when it comes to dark games, I scare easily. Zombines, are combine soldiers turned into zombies from the head crabs, just like the original zombies. The difference being that they can run. They’ll also quite often try a kamikaze attack against you, picking out a grenade and running after you. Not fun to encounter in a confined space, because even if you manage to kill them before they run right into you, they’ll drop the grenade anyway and you won’t have time to escape the blast.

The game feels somewhat harder than the original, but that might be just me sucking. I remember one level where you’re stuck waiting for an elevator in total darkness, and your flashlight won’t have enough energy to stay lit, so you’ll have to run around frantically in the dark trying to evade the spawning zombines and zombies, waiting for your flashlight to get back to life so that you can shine the light on them and get help from Alyx to shoot them. The game is rather short, but oh so fun.