EXE: 2nd Gig

FYI

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:23:54 GMT

I may be in sporadic contact over the next couple/few days. Death may have come for my hard drive, and I don't think I can win his game.

First my glasses, now this. Ugh.

OTHER TEAM IS (literally) BABIES

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:46:26 GMT

BrainHex

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:55:34 GMT

Taking a cue from cal_renfro, I thought I'd try BrainHex out.

Your BrainHex Class is Seeker.

Your BrainHex Class Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Seeker-Mastermind.

You like finding strange and wonderful things or finding familiar things as well as solving puzzles and devising strategies.

According to your results, there are few play experiences that you strongly dislike.

Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.

Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:

Seeker: 20
Mastermind: 17
Daredevil: 13
Conqueror: 8
Survivor: 4
Socialiser: 4
Achiever: 3

Seeker
“I wonder what's out there...”

You like finding strange and wonderful things, or finding familiar things.

Your behaviour often shows curiosity, sustained interest, and a love of stimulating your senses.

Your major brain regions are the hippocampus (where memory is co-ordinated) and the various sensory cortices where vision, sound and so forth are processed.

Your chemical messenger is endomorphin, which is chemically related to opium, and has been linked to interest.

If you were an animal, it would be a cat.

Favourite games of Seekers surveyed so far include Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy, Grim Fandango, Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, and Zelda .

----
Mastermind
“I know what to do.”

You like solving puzzles and devising strategies.

Your behaviour is focussed around making the most efficient decisions.

Your major brain region is the orbito-frontal cortex, an area just behind and above the eyes involved in making decisions, and the nucleus accumbens (or “pleasure centre”) which is closely linked to it.

Your chemical messenger is dopamine, which is chemically similar to cocaine, and is involved in habit formation.

If you were an animal, it would be an octopus.

Favourite games of Masterminds surveyed so far include Animal Crossing, Chess, Chrono Trigger, Fallout, Half-Life, and Zelda .

Seemed about right.

The greatest thing ever.

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:07:09 GMT

Kill all sons of bitches.

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:31:28 GMT

I'll be honest. I was planning on waiting unless I could find someone who wanted to get in on a four pack deal. But after watching -that-? Damn.

In which a thrash band sings about Citan

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:20:11 GMT

After finally finishing that new OCRemix Xenogears album, I'm pretty satisfied with it. I like the whole dichotomy approach to it. The first half contains some really nice, soft, and as stated, human pieces. Lots of guitar and orchestral, and exotic sounds. The second half is more typical OCremix fair (faire?), metallic/synthetic, hyper at times, and sometimes weird. (the aforementioned "Shit on Citan"). Edit: Did I mention the polka-ish version of "The Sky, The Clouds, and You"? Well, I have now.

All in all, I like it. I think this was the first OCR album I've actually downloaded since Voices of the Lifestream. I don't remember any others that interested me after that one until now. In total, I've downloaded Relics of the Chozo, Hedgehog Heaven, Chrono Symphonic, Voices, and now this.

Oh, and I think there's a Pokemon album coming up. At least, it's been advertised when I've been playing on the OCR TF2 server.

Edit the second:
Video preview trailer for the album, check it out:

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:58:00 GMT

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
http://xenogears.ocremix.org/

Chasers

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:55:57 GMT

http://kotaku.com/5380925/new-term-xbla-chaser

Does anyone else do something like this? I usually use TV myself, though I've never really thought of using another game as a sort of mental degausser.

SGU

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:00:51 GMT

Spoiler alert.

So wait, what happened to those two that went to one of the locked-out worlds? Besides being left behind of course. Did I miss something or skip past it by accident?

Also, WTF at that ship at the end.

MUST HAVE MOAR.

First Deus Ex Overclocked Remix!

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:04:06 GMT

This is pretty cool. It's not only the first DX OCR, it's also the first one where the original artist (Alex Brandon) has collaborated with the remixer. Good stuff!

(hope you're paying attention karl)

http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01914/

Behold the power of Sandvich

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:04:37 GMT

The OCR TF2 server is just awesome.

Everything was normal until... Sandvich Heavy came. He decended upon the land, showing Red and Blu alike with the glory of Sandvich. He was kredit to both teams!

Slowly, people came to learn of his Sandvich ways and to entertain him... Soldiers juggled for him, Pyros air-guitared most humbly, and Medics regaled him with the soft sounds of Ubersaw.

So inspired were we that we had a boxing match of Heavies, to honor our king of the Sandvich.

Later, we played Bat Wars on Well, and it was glorious. We attempted to homerun each other into the train, played catch with the Sandman, and tried to stop the train with a dispenser and an ubered spy.

All thanks to the gift of Sandvich. OM NOM NOM, my friends. OM NOM NOM.

House would take all the pills

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:10:47 GMT

http://kotaku.com/5370888/left-4-lupus

Terrible and AWESOME.

Make a funny and roll to credits

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 07:05:07 GMT

I was remarking on how my tastes have changed and matured with regard to TV (and other things). I've been rewatching the first season of Knight Rider, and I constantly cringe at the production values, the pratically mandatory "get the girl" bits, and the also mandatory "AHAHAHAHAHAHAH" moments at the end of every episode. It's like, if it doesn't end on a joke, then it's just not 80's TV.

In regards to production values, it's understandable. At the time, the show was a risk, I think. Still, when KITT's appearance can change from one scene to another for no real story-related reason, it can be offputting. For instance, one scene, the car's got a bar under the front end, probably used for towing during "looking through the front windshield" scenes. In other, the bar's gone, and the hood is misaligned with the headlights and sensor bar light thingy. In another, the bumper lights are there, but covered, and then suddenly the front end's a solid piece. Let's not talk about silly things like KITT being horribly dirty and then suddenly clean as new. (Perhaps the Molecular Bonded Shell is delayed-action teflon? :P)

A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that they had multiple cars to use for different purposes. There was the general use one, one for turbo boosts that had different suspension and no internal bits, and I think another for stunt driving use.

Beyond all that, another instance that came to mind is when KITT gets mauled by Goliath in season... 2 was it? Anyway, back when I was a kid, I was dumbfounded at this moment. How could my hero, the seemingly invincible combo of KITT and Michael Knight, be rendered asunder with such careless abandon? Now, in TV shows, I don't think I could enjoy a show where the protagonist is nigh perfect and always wins the day.

80's show's aren't the only ones. Take SeaQuest for example. Gratuitous reuse of (then quite new) CGI scenes, somewhat hokey storylines at least in the second season on, and near the end of the second season, a glut of "which popular sci fi movie will we rip off today?" stories. In the span of a few episodes we have a Thing -and- a Predator ripoff. It can be hard to stomach after the likes of Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, and other more modern Sci-Fi. And even they fell into some tropes.

Anyway, I blame the nostalgia-tinted glasses. Or not. I still like 'em, they just have moments of WTF that makes me wonder why I do.

Amusement!

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:24:59 GMT

Check it out, Karl. (and other half-life 2 and/or portal fans)

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:57:04 GMT

http://www.moddb.com/mods/research-and-development

"A puzzle-centric mod that features an unarmed player but plenty of violent mayhem."

So far I'm enjoying it immensely.

Mario Marathon #2

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:01:35 GMT

They're at it again. Up to over $3000 bucks for the kiddies.

http://mariomarathon.com

Donate and get the word out!

This is Three-Dog AROOOOOOOOOOOO with your Fallout 3 Crash update!

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:26:18 GMT

Good news! I got some more ram, and so far it seems to be helping immensely! *knock on wood* I have 4GB now, though I'm still running XP 32-bit so only 3.25 of it shows up. Still, that should be more than enough for the games I have currently, and I can always upgrade in the future.

I was really worried my video card was failing, or had too little ram to effectively run Fallout 3, but I guess that wasn't the case. At least on medium settings.

Fallout 3 and assorted other nonsense

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:59:21 GMT

Tried a few more things today to try to get Fallout 3 to stop crashing. None really did anything, sadly, and a few broke other things on the computer (easily remedied, thankfully). I guess I'm out of luck short of someone giving me their 360 F3, me finding a sale on it, or Point Lookout coming with a patch that magically fixes the crashing issues (without invalidating my save games plzkthx!).

Today wasn't a total wash though. After finally getting tired of the stock ATT TouchFlo3D theme on my ATT/HTC Fuze/Touch Pro/Raphael, I found out how to properly reskin it, and now it uses a nice minimalistic black theme, similar to the original theme the phone comes with unbranded (minus the somewhat garish green selection color). It involves a mishmash of several cab files, but it works (phew). And best of all, my home screen's wallpaper is Mega Man standing on top of the building from the title screen of Mega Man 2. All thanks to CurlehMustache at the Capcom Unity blog.

IT'S SO PRINGLES.

Home is where the file cabinet is

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:36:55 GMT

So far, I've had fewer crashes than before. Probably some combination of the defragging, tweaking the page file, and such. But essentially, I'm down to one crash every two hours or so. Which is much more managable than every five bloody minutes. Still, I'm quicksaving like crazy because I never know when it's going to happen again.

Edit: Looks like I jinxed it, it's crashing a bunch again. Sigh. And just when I was enjoying fighting off fire spewing ants.

The saga continues

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:22:55 GMT

Yeah, I lied. I reinstalled because I found some new tricks to try. I cannot leave well enough alone.

The first was disabling "AGP Texture Acceleration" in dxdiag, which didn't work.

Right now, I'm trying the old classic "turn the sound accelleration slider down". So far, so good. *braces for a crash now that he's jinxed it.
Update: Nada. Just got lucky.

Assuming that doesn't work, there's a few other tricks:
1. Disabling the page file. This is from a old thread from when the game first launched. Seems risky, however I don't use that computer for more than gaming, so it probably doesn't matter.
Update: WTF, how could this possibly work when I only have 1 gig of ram? lulz.

2. Locking the page file's size. Supposedly this allows the following:
2a. defragmenting the partition with the page file. Locking the size will allow it to be properly defragmented. Plus, the max dynamic size is currently set to something larger than the remaining free space on that partition. Who knows, that may be doing it when too much crap gets paged and an overflow occurs.
Update: Ladies and gentlemen, I think we might have a winner. I just played for about two hours, going through the Maresti tunnels, a bit of the wasteland, several zone changes, and many game saves, and no crashes. All I did was lock the page file size, and make sure through defragmenter that it was as contiguous as I could make it. I'm running 1.5 and everything.

Which leads to:
3. Reducing draw distance. Just thought of this. Perhaps if I reduce the draw distance, it'll reduce how much is loaded into memory at a time.

Finally, if I get really desperate, I can try the 1.0+fake patch+unofficial patch combo I've heard about... however, the unofficial patch really made 1.4 MORE unstable.... so I dunno.

HOPE.

You want Fallout? I'LL GIVE YOU FALLOUT

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:45:29 GMT

God damn son of a whoremonger GRARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Fallout 3 PC, while a pretty thing, has an atrocious crash rate for me. I've tried disabling GFWL, downgrading to 1.4, using the unofficial patch, defragging my hard drive, upgrading drivers.... Nothing will stop these crashes. They make the game unplayable for me because every time it happens I have to restart the computer. Blindly in fact, since I think it sets my resolution so low that my monitor hates it and won't display anything. It mostly happens when a lot of stuff is loading, or I change areas. Generally. Which is why I defragged first off. And that actually did help some! But not for long enough.

I'm more frustrated than I should be. Lord knows I've played buggy games PC games before. (What PC gamer hasn't?) Still, I'm not putting this back on my hard drive until Bethsoft gets off its bloody arse and fixes this shit. Or some fans manage to fix it themselves.

Of course, this begs the question: Should I just pay for another ticket and get the 360 version? At this point I really don't want to put more money in Bethesda's hands after my experience. But I also want to play a game that seems like it would give me hours of enjoyment, assuming they weren't punctuated by cursing at crashes every 20 minutes or less.

Damn.

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 03:34:20 GMT

Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Smurfs

And then note that the publication date of the comic is BEFORE any of George Romero's movies. Ain't that some shit?

Furthermore, am I crazy for thinking a black smurf Left 4 Dead mod would be amazingly awesome?

News Flash

Sat, 30 May 2009 08:46:25 GMT

I want more Xenosaga.

Good news, Slayer!

Tue, 19 May 2009 16:09:00 GMT

Fallout 3 DLC Coming to PS3, Two More DLC Packs Coming to Everyone, Game of the Year Edition for 360 « Archive « RandomNPC

In this day and age, “exclusive” rarely means what it used to. Fallout 3 on Xbox 360 and PC touted exclusive downloadable content that will soon be coming to a PlayStation 3 near you. After a patch that will allow PS3 owners to download the DLC, Operation: Anchorage will hit the PS3 in late June with The Pitt and Broken Steel following four to six weeks apart.

Curiosity.

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:23:14 GMT

I may have asked this before, but I can't remember and can't find any posts, so I'll ask again.

To those that have/had them: Is there any real benefit to getting a PSP-2000 or 3000 when I can get a 1000 for around 80 bucks in good condition? If it helps, I fully intend to pandora it and put on some custom firmware.