10 posts tagged “vista”
The notion of celebration on New Years Eve (Is it New Year's? Apostrophe confusion has gripped the many...) is an old and tired one for me. Maybe it's because I'm old and tired. I've been party to many frustrating New Year Celebrations - one of which I will never forget. It happened in The Krazy House in Liverpool and one hilarious female reveller thought it would be funny to steal the glasses from my face and disappear into the throng. I was seething and (even worse) pissed so I spent a lot of time shouting at blurry strangers. I got my glasses back but they were scratched to buggery. I rarely get lucky with people on New Year too. You'd think that would be the best time to play tonsil hockey, but alas. Nope. I've had little luck in that respect. Fireworks also lose their appeal after you've seen them for the first... I dunno... ten times? So sod it. I'm staying in.
Party Pooper!
Yep. Even my headings pour scorn on my decision to stay in, but I'll be slowly drinking while watching the terrible television schedules and/or drunkenly increasing my Gamerscore through online Xbox Live antics. The service has recently been up and down and Xbox Live frontman Major Nelson (aka Larry Hyrb) has tried to calm down a lot of angry people who have received Xbox 360 consoles for Christmas and discovered that they can't play online, although the problem is a lot more than that - the fact that the console needs to be online to do certain things. When the service goes down, people piss and moan - although they have a right to if they've paid for the service. I've not noticed that much because I don't normally play online with randoms because it can be a scary process. I remember a long session of Uno where a lot of the players were half-naked men in darkened rooms. I know of this because they all owned Xbox Live Vision cameras. It's quite something to actually know who you're playing with. Still, I'll see if I can pluck up the courage to go online tonight.
365 Update!
Well, one of my resolutions is to get 365 finished - it's all well and good to have all 365 pieces of artwork to hand but I spent last night arranging them into folders. I need to scan in a load more and track down what pieces of artwork were done on what date. I'm going to be using CreateSpace to get the book published - I used blurb and although they did a great job with the printing of my 365Lite! book for my Mum as a Christmas pressie, CreateSpace offers a lot more than blurb - including the acceptance of .pdf files (meaning InDesign!), your own ISBN number and - because the company is owned by Amazon - the book will be sold through their website! I'm also wondering about connecting the book to charity so profits raised will go to good causes. I ran many miles for Cancer Research UK and Macmillan Cancer Support and I'm thinking I can raise money for them without all that painful training stuff. As way of an apology, here's a sneaky peek at a piece of 365 artwork never seen anywhere else -
I'm looking forward to getting everything arranged. One of the lovely things about Vista is that with the large icons, it'll display a sexy large icon with a preview image of what's in that folder - this'll prove invaluable for seeing what gaps are left in what months and tracking down that artwork. While on the subject of "Good Things About Vista" - the tabbed folder navigation is pretty awesome too and helped me cut through the monotony of arranging images in various folders. Actually, it feels a lot like when I was younger and I filled out sticker albums. There are gaps which will slowly get closed off. I'm actually very excited by it all - it'll show a snapshot of my year as an artist. There were times when it felt like a chore, but they were few.
Get Me Back To Work!
Honestly... I'm fed up of being holed up here with no work to go to. "You must be mad!" I hear you shout. Nope. Work kept me busy and industrious. Anyone who's been in a state of depression will understand the importance of this. When I was unemployed, it did no good to me and was a factor in my second Trip To The Abyss Albeit In A Different Coloured Submarine. I was thinking about getting my job at Midway and the interview I had with them was such an incredible thing - they were friendly, warm and generous in their comments. The previous interviews I had with other companies were a different matter. Shall I name names? One interview was wonderously confused by the interviewers changing the job role halfway through the interview thus making my carefully-collated portfolio pretty redundant. Another interview almost felt like a bear trap - like they wanted me to fail, slip up or make a wrong move. I think in this industry there's sometimes a feeling that some people are piss-takers. I've worked with a few in my career who have basically blagged their way into the job and they've been instrumental in ruining games. It's a shame, but there you go. I'm glad I'm in a studio where (mostly) everyone has an enthusiasm and a feeling they don't want to produce a turd of a game.
Avoiding The Brown Stuff
Wheelman is always in my thoughts. I guess it can't be helped when I've been working on it this long... there's still obstacles to vault over and negotiate although I'm determined to do a good job. One thing about working for a company which practically saved your life is that you don't take the piss - I'm not exaggerating either. I was quite close to something horrible and I was pulled away from that. I looked at the Midway site last night and was freaked out by the forums and the general concensus on the company's image. It is frustrating in a way - I was very lucky to see Stranglehold's progress on our company twiki and when it eventually became a physical entity on shelves, I was proud and happy to see the game's lifecycle. The guys in Chicago worked crazy hours to get the game produced, and it shows. I was even lucky to thank one of the designers for producing the Museum Level - which I really, really enjoyed. So you have Stranglehold which I consider to be a very un-Midway title. There's been un-Midway titles in the past like Psi-Ops and The Suffering which have been bold in their direction although the sales figures painted a different picture. Talk to people who played both games though and they will state how much they enjoyed them.
On The Other Hand...
...there's Cruis'n.
Yep, that's not a PSOne title. It's on the Wii and sometimes it frustrates me that stuff like this comes out when Midway are trying to "not do an Atari" and end up in the shit. Sadly it's more commercially viable for them to release the game as is instead of spending more time working on it. All the rep built up by Stranglehold gets put back... the same happened with Hour of Victory too - it could have had more time to be tinkered with, but it came out and received a panning. Recently Blacksite also suffered the same fate - not enough time to make it the game it could have been. I was gutted when co-op was dropped and when I got my hands on a copy, there are moments when it truly shines (the first appearance of the spire hitting that shopping plaza in slow motion comes to mind) but there are also moments when there's literally nothing happening. The driving bits are frustrating at first, but you soon get kinda used to them. Harvey Smith did comment about development on Blacksite being "fucked" in an obvious attempt to get kicked out by Midway so he can work on Deus Ex 3 - but when you have worked in the industry for as long as I have, you realise that all development is fucked to a certain degree. I think it was a shame that Blacksite appeared so close to the release of Call of Duty 4 - which is a simply astounding assault on the senses. It does a lot of things very well indeed and really immerses you.
What I'm Trying To Say...
I'm a gamer. I've played games for a long time on a variety of systems and I love the immersion. Getting into the industry was great for me as a gamer because I got a kick (and still do) out of the creative processes behind the games which have given me so much enjoyment over the years. The mistake people make with companies like Midway, Rockstar, Ubisoft and EA (to name a few) is that their output is from one studio when it's actually a collective from many different studios. Midway Newcastle is the only UK-based Midway studio and I think that's going to be hugely important in the games we produce. You'll find Wheelman will have a different feel and look to the US-based Midway output and that's something I'm glad to be part of. There's not been much press of the game though January will change this as Midway's Gamers Day will give gamers the chance to play the game for the first time. I chatted to one of my superiors about how worried I was that Wheelman wasn't in many of the "What to look out for in 2008" articles in the gaming press, but he assured me that Midway didn't want to shoot their load too soon with Wheelman coverage. There's a method to this madness...
Secret Sauce.
There's things we're doing with Wheelman which are quite, quite insane. For a start, we're using the Unreal Engine to power the game and the engine in question wasn't really designed for high-speed action/driving games. Thankfully we have a team of programmers who have come up with scary miracles. The game is looking gorgeous and I really want to show people the game in action too. We have gameplay elements which are quite fresh and different to the norm. We have a soundtrack which fooled me into thinking someone was watching The Bourne Supremacy on DVD for research purposes - they were actually playing a build of the game..! We don't have a huge tacky graphic with the word "Nitrous!" pop on screen and block your view (although if it does come up as a suggestion, I will shout it down from the highest mountain). Most importantly - we have a team of people who are mostly gamers and know what's great and what's shite. Things have been designed, re-designed and tested. I like the fact there are outspoken and vocal people on the team who aren't treating the job as a way to pay off their mortgages. In short - Wheelman isn't even close to Cruis'n. Be assured of that. To get you in the spirit of Wheelman, check out the FMV trailer which has been doing the rounds for some time. I'm hopeful that gameplay footage will soon be forthcoming and people can start judging for themselves... (This is a YEAR OLD..!)
Finally...
Well, it's been something of an update (and a long time coming) but I hope you all had a great Christmas (or whatever festiveness you happen to celebrate around this time of year). Christmas at home was bliss - almost no arguments (although there was a minor squabble over sausages) and it was good to see everyone again. I also hope you have a great New Year although it's already technically 2008 on the other side of the planet. My resolutions? I have quite a few, but I will take a leaf out of Tracey Emin's book regarding them. I'm treating them more as rules than resolutions which I will stick to. I think as you get older that re- rules become more and more important to the way you live your life. When you're a carefree hipster (you know - the type that ruined the third season of The Mighty Boosh), you don't care much for them. You're more interested in kissing random strangers when the bells chime and have no fear of you losing your spectacles as you have perfect eyesight anyway. Grrrr. I'll leave you with a clip of when the Boosh set its adventures in fantastical places and not some grim area of Camden...
Tomorrow (er, today) is "Let's See How Many Things I Can Put Right With This New(ish) PC Day". I'm going to make a last-ditch effort to try and save my soul and my sanity by fixing all the things which are wrong with this PC. There's a bit of a list so I'll plough through it when I wake up tomorrow (well, when I had breakfast) before I make a very firm phone call to my friends - The Tech Guys! I'll tell them what an absolute disappointment this PC is, and would gladly trade it all in for a log cabin in the middle of nowhere and a big bushy beard.
Been playing Assassin's Creed for quite a while today too for the first time. Plus points - looks lovely, some satisfying combat, Crackdown-style "Hunt The Flags!" hidden stuff, jumping into hay. Minus points - glitchy (some gameplay bugs) and starting to get repetitive. Plus the stealth mechanic is essentially borked. I'll comment more when I play it some more,,,
Well, this is a first. I type this on a replacement keyboard with a replacement mouse from the guys at PC World. No ordinary guys though - The Tech Guys! They did what HP couldn't do, and I'm pretty impressed that this new keyboard apparently works better than the grouchy old one. So that's one more problem sorted. The next problem is the mouse is still sticking to various things on Internet Explorer - it jerks about at times and I'm not sure if it's due to the excessive hard drive access when Vista starts up (although I'm told this is all down to Vista making the hard drive more streamlined and sexy, which it does automatically) or it's the fact I need to grab the latest Nvidia hotfixes for this computer as well as the latest drivers - although trying to find the specific drivers for my graphics card is a bit of a giggle at the best of times. It feels like I'm slowly making progress with getting Vista doing the things I want it to do.
XP SP3?
Cryptic acronym? Well, not really. Windows XP will soon get it's next Service Pack - SP3. Insiders in Microsoft's HQ in Redmond have cited they've managed to get a speed boost for XP, whereas Vista's still as slow as molasses even with the forthcoming SP1 (currently in Beta). The article which I read this also mentioned that Vista's biggest rival is... XP. This is a surprise for me, as I couldn't find a copy of XP for love nor money anywhere once Vista was released. It'll be nice to get a shiny updated XP for my old computer, but I don't miss that horrible fan hiss one bit. Enough of the techyness...
365 Is Go!
I've bitten the bullet and started to design the actual 365 book - where I spent this year and a bit of last year creating a piece of artwork a day - and I'm using blurb's BookSmart software again though this time actually using it the way I should have used it for the trial book I produced for my Mum for Christmas. I'm changing individual page layouts, adding notation for reminders of artwork I still have to hunt down and generally feeling an awesome sense of accomplishment of actually getting off my arse and doing it. I think I can move onto other art projects once this book is finished as I haven't done any artwork in an age - either been busy with work-type stuff or playing videogames. I think I've silently promised myself that I won't play any more videogames until the first pass of 365's layout is finished. I was pretty dismissive of BookSmart to begin with, but it's great as long as you're careful and you know what to do beforehand. When the book is finished and I've ordered a copy for myself, I'll sling you the link to the book so you can perhaps check out my mad skillz.
Drink And Draw Christmas Bash!
I'm really looking forward to Saturday - it's the Drink and Draw Christmas Bash! It's taking place in a backroom at the rather masculine Sports Cafe in Newcastle and I'm excited because a lot of the Midway Newcastle Concept posse will be going including Mack Chater, Corlen Kruger, Peter Thompson and my good self. I think this time round I'll stick to shots... if you haven't heard of Drink and Draw, shame on you! It's basically where you go to a pub with a sketchbook and a drawing implement, and you get drunk as you draw stuff. Simple. The exciting stuff comes as you can vibe off each other with collaborative pieces. We'll be drinking and drawing along with the Miami Chapter of Drink and Draw when they start their session over in the States too. I still think that the Sports Cafe is a bit meathead-filled - Trillian's would be a better bet with its darkened corners and goth presence - but the actual room we draw is vast and has a huge projection screen playing geeky movies.
Cold!
I thought I shook my cold, but it's back. I was coughing via my chest today a bit too much, and I'm getting a blocked nose again. I always thought I was quite immune to the bugs which went round, but I don't think I'm that immune. I've got a holiday on Friday which I'm putting to good use - grabbing Christmas decorations and wrapping paper to make this bedsit a bit more festive as well as wrapping the presents I've already bought for just about everyone. It seems weird that I've already done my Christmas shopping, but I'll leave the wrapping of presents until December sometime. Work has generously given us two days of holiday for free - so I'll use those days to come home early for Christmas. My Mum doesn't know yet because I've not managed to get through on my phone. The Pick Household are rather averse to any outside contact even when I use my super-special secret ring.
Soup!
My local supermarket has started to stock my beloved Butternut Squash soup again! The Soup King will be pleased. Soup and crumpets is the perfect combination. Never will I go back to using mere bread for soup dipping. My older brother is a god when it comes to making soup and it's great we have veggies growing in our front garden. He also doesn't like presents, though sod it - I've got him one for Christmas. He'll be kind enough to provide us with a lovingly-cooked Christmas Dinner so it's the very least I can do. I look forward to coming home especially for Christmas - it'll be great to hug Mum again and see what antics she's been up to.
For Old Time's Sake...
Something for Ronda, because I know she's a bit disillusioned with life at the moment and I think the world of her enough to show her beautifully-animated bunnies in a prison cell.
Last night was a good night out. I've not had a night out in Newcastle for some time and it was in the Union Rooms where drink was enjoyed to wish our good friend Piotr all the best for his journey to London after leaving Midway Studios - Newcastle. I thought Piotr was a hoot, so I'm sad to see him go. The reason why he's off to London is because his wife (he got married recently) has a job offer in London, though although he's not fond of leaving Midway, he has to support his missus. This is weird because I sometimes think what would happen if I ever got my act together and got myself hitched, only to have her alter my plans. Sometimes it's good to be single, except the periods of time when you're lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering if being single is part of some divine plan which you have no idea about.
This is Ben Marsh. He works as a programmer at Midway Studios - Newcastle, and recently he found himself in possession of the super-sexy-but-sometimes-slightly-disappointing iPhone. When we were drinking lovely alcoholic liquids, he was showcasing the powers of the phone - the browsing mostly. You look at it and think how something so technologically amazing could exist ten years ago. There it is though. The future. Right there.
When You Leave Technology Behind...
After enjoying the company of many workmates and some new friends (including some Polish people who recommended we enjoy a meal at the Polish restaurant in town), we went our separate ways and ended up in a taxi. We nattered about stuff like the Christmas do and other bits and pieces. I tried to entice Ben to come with me and a few workmates tomorrow to a spooky castle, but he wanted to veg out. We got dropped off and there was no tip for the cheeky taxi driver who decided to add his own tip to the price it would normally cost to get back home. Thinking back, we did almost toy with the idea of walking back like the good old days - but it was freezing. Thinking about that though... *sigh*
A Cautionary Tale
To cut a long story short, Ben left his iPhone in the taxi. He only realised when he was home and the iPhone wasn't in his pocket. In his panic to remove himself from the O2 service, he realised he could have phoned his iPhone and hoped a kind soul would have picked it up and kept it safe for him. Sadly, no. The taxi company stated that this type of thing happens regularly, and he may as well treat the phone as "gone and forgotten". This came as quite a blow for Ben - evenmoreso that he didn't take any insurance cover out on it, so the phone couldn't be replaced. It's on a contract too, so I think he'll have to pay out the rest of the contract for - well - nothing. That can't be right, can it? I hope not. It must be quite a horrible thing to lose something that technologically amazing and personal. Then again, it's another reason why technology sucks.
"Get Off My Land!"
I sometimes yearn to be a Grizzly Adams-type of the woods. A huge white beard and an angry temperament in a log cabin deep in the woods of somewhere desolate. Any strangers come by and I would pop out with my shotgun, maybe fire off a warning and shout at them to get the heck away from my cabin. No technology. No mobile phone. No games console. No PC. We rely so much on technology, that it'll be interesting to see how we survive without it. Amazon recently announced they were releasing some stupid ebook-type device which has a battery life. A book with a battery life? That makes me giggle somewhat. What the fuck is wrong with a book? A normal book? No battery life to speak of there. Speaking of books, I ordered myself the 365Lite! book I produced on blurb. When I get it, I'll see how good the quality is, and I may start on the actual 365 book on their BookSmart software instead of InDesign. We'll see.
Technology Update!
I phoned up HP to enquire about my wireless keyboard woes. Sometimes it repeats letters. Sometimes the left shift key doesn't work. The first voice I heard when I phoned HP was a recording of an American woman. Not a good sign. Second voice was an Indian in a faraway call centre. Great. I'm not racist, but my heart sinks when I hear an Indian voice on a phone. It means they can't really understand me and HP are cheapskates. First Indian bloke passed me onto the desktop department and I got another Indian bloke who couldn't really hear me because the connection was dodgy. Well, sod this. I gave my favourite Tech Guys a call! The wonderful PC World "Technical Specialists" who are there to help out, though really all have access to google. The funny thing is that they actually did a very, very good job of satisfying me - they ordered me a replacement keyboard and mouse and I joked to the lovely lady on the other end about how terrible Vista is... and she agreed!
Oh, that reminds me. I need to order Nero. Grrr.
The Lovelyness Of Games
Lastly, I'm still enjoying Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii. It's seriously good fun. I need to order some of those free Wii Jackets for the Wii Remote though... you can order them here. All you need is your serial number and address details. Super Mario Galaxy is, well, fun. Some games these days play more like chores than actual exclamations of enjoyment, and Super Mario Galaxy has proven that Nintendo still have it. The game has become the fastest-selling Mario title ever. Half a million units sold in the US in the first week! It's amazing that I know people who still want a Wii, but can't get their hands on one because Nintendo can't make them fast enough. I love the analysts who harp on about the Wii being a flash-in-the-pan, but I don't think so. Not at all. I finished and adored Call of Duty 4 on the 360 (I need to get online with it though, although the thought of going on Xbox Live with randoms these days chills me to the bone) and I've started on the sublime Mass Effect - a game full of epic wonder and excitement.
I'm off to order me those jackets.
Vista. Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day? Or more likely - an old tramp pissing down some corrugated iron?
When I first got Vista with this new PC, I admit I was pretty excited. It's always nice to have something super-new and super-recent. You feel special. You feel like part of the trendy hipsters who mock you with their... hipness. Vista enticed me with its beautiful presentation and frosted windows of sex. "I can see stuff going on in the background, but it's all blurry!" I exclaimed. The "Wow" factor continued with the funky alternative to Alt-Tab - all the Windows you have on your desktop turning on their sides in perspective 3D and you can zip through them as you see what's going on in them in realtimes! Oh joy! Well, here's what's happened a month on...
"Whiiirrrrrr...."
For a start Vista used to be as slow as heck. The hard drive was whirring and doing strange stuff, though this was down to Vista settling into its new environment like an old man getting into a comfy chair while lighting his pipe. I also laughably got some Blue Screens of Death for the first time in an age too. These were all generated from Windows Explorer 7 and I shook my head in disbelief at how a web browser can stop an entire OS dead in its tracks. Recently though (and with some updates), the BSODs have disappeared. Again, Vista's settling into its comfy chair. I still need to get used to the terrible permission pop-ups which keep appearing when you're doing stuff. Imagine clicking "Yes" on a pop-up which asks you "Are you sure?" and then the same pop-up appearing again with "Are you really sure?". Vista's like that.
Time Remaining - 7 Days 8 Hours
Yep, that old chestnut. You know, I wonder if they got the most terrible programmer around to calculate all the time it takes for stuff to be burnt onto DVD-Rs or CD-Rs. Now this is the funny thing. Vista, it seems, is absolutely terrible at burning DVDs. It sucks. I chucked a blank DVD-R into the drive and it warned me that "It may take some time to format this DVD-R". Right-oh. Popped in the disc and a cheery message telling me there was "60 seconds to go" appeared on my screen. 60 seconds? Surely such a reasonable time to format a DVD! Well, we know that the lousy time-ignorant programmer also worked on XP and I expected the worst. Sure enough, it was tellng me there was 60 seconds to go for quite some time. I twiddled my fingers. I had a bath. I returned to see there was "5 seconds to go", followed by the classic "0 seconds to go". When it eventually sorted itself out 25 minutes later, I could drop my files onto the DVD. Except it would take 7 Days and 8 Hours to do so. Eventually this turned into 4 Hours and 30 minutes, but still very unreasonable for a DVD-R.
"No Problem, Sir!"
So I rang the Tech Guys Customer Helpline which I was paying money for. It's 24 hours and a local number, but normally the guy on the other end of the line basically uses the internet to search for the problem and sure enough I had another random foreign-sounding gentleman doing exactly that. His advice? Get Nero. Of course! Get Nero! Why didn't I think of that? Why the hell do I have to pay more money for something I should get out of the box? I then thought around the problem and decided that maybe I can burn CD-Rs instead and beat Vista at its own game. No so. It turns out that it's just as bad at burning CDs as it is burning DVD-Rs. It started off well with single files, but I got cocky and tried a whole bunch of them. Even as I type, the CD-R process is "canceling..." and not really stopping like it should do. I will cancel my Tech Guys support very soon because it's quite, quite useless. The CD drive has stopped whirring, but Vista is still "canceling..." as I type. This OS is turning out to be quite something.
XP - How I Miss You.
If I had the chance to XP, I would have - but XP has become extinct. It's nowhere to be found on shop shelves, forcing people to grab Vista instead. It looks like I'm going to lug my external drive to work to grab those files I need... but I shouldn't have to. Surely I could just burn those files to CD? XP was a lot better at the disc burning than Vista. I thought a new OS meant a better OS. Maybe I should have got a Mac instead. All I know is that it feels like I've downgraded from XP to Vista and it's no fun.
The scary thing is eventually XP owners will have to get Vista by some devious Microsoft arseyness. Grrr.
Update!
It's an XP classic - the "canceling..." box wasn't going away and when I went to Task Manager, I was greeted with a process which used "Windows Explorer". Cancel that process, and the entire taskbar at the bottom of the screen disappears and basically makes Vista unusable. I restart and am treated with the "Logging off..." screen for about 10 minutes. The hard drive now appears to be back to doing its usual stuff. Word to the wise - don't upgrade.
The wind is howling outside my window like an angry banshee, though the house remains still and calm on the inside. I remember back to my old flat in the quaint-but-shame-it's-full-of-violent-pissheads Welsh town of Mold. Basically I was renting out the flat for a song because it was slowly falling apart. When I left after four years of living there, it was said that the flat was close to being condemned and had a load of renovations for some lucky couple to move in and experience the joy of living right next to a main road with several pubs, a kebab shop and many, many shouty pissheads. I miss the place, but definitely not the people. I digress though - the wind. This flat actually swayed in the wind. You could feel it in bed. I was sure that one day I'd wake up mortally crippled in a collection of fallen masonary. But no! Here I am today. More tales of the flat in the future.
Technology Sucks My Balls Pt 251
Since purchase, my supposedly-swanky HP IQ771 is a bit crappy. For a start, the wireless keyboard has some.... interesting quirks. I can't type with it on my lap and it works perfectly when it's right next to the unit, which begs the question - why the fuck make it wireless? I replaced the batteries not long ago and it's got a little better but it still replicates apostrophes sometimes. Also the left-hand Shift key sometimes doesn''t want to work. Hey! Double apostrophes! Thank you, wireless keyboard of my shattered dreams! The mouse is a bit goofy too. But the point of this post is my technology freak out...
When Firefox Attacks?
So I was chatting to my very good friend Annie about stuff on IM and the topic was the evils of Internet Explorer 7. I phoned up Tech Support regarding my 4th Blue Screen of Death which spookily enough happened at the same time as I was using Explorer 7. Tech Support guy says the usual stuff though he mentions that I could put Firefox on and see if the blue screens still appear. So I attempt to put Firefox on my Vista-infected PC. Now this is the interesting thing - at the same time I did this, my live-in landlord was pissing about with his wireless router, so when I installed Firefox and my PC started freaking out then I thought the worst.
I tried opening ports to my firewall for Firefox to use after I couldn't browse with it on the internet and that's when the router was KO'd. I suddenly got very paranoid that Vista basically hates anything non-Explorer to browse with and started to commit suicide.
Drastic Measures...
I messed more with the firewall settings and freaked out, though one thing always worked with Windows if you ever messed up - System Restore! It's like a magical spell, reverting all of your ill-advised amendments back to normal. In this case though, it didn't actually work. I panicked and tried to log into Xbox Live to chat to Annie and see if she was still there, though because the router was KO'd - yep, no Xbox Live. I freaked out more - did Vista destroy all my wireless connections because I had the audacity to install another browser? Thankfully, the landlord told me soon after I disturbed his viewing of a pirated copy of Ratatouille that he had tried something extra special with his router and all was well.
Except I'm scared to install Firefox. I vow to do it tomorrow or else I can't really call myself a man anymore.
Oh, and I got 14 trillion points in Every Extend Extra Extreme tonight as well as Ranking 1st on the Career Mode of PGR4. Either this is a testament to my mad skillz as a gamer, or I need to get out more. Here's some footage from E4 - I warn you though - it's very hypnotic.
Last night I left the office at 10.30PM. Yep, you can tell crunch is upon us!! I did all the tasks required for this next milestone and left the office tonight about 9.30PM - and I swear there were about 30 people still there milling about. It's strange to feel guilty about leaving the office at 9.30PM, though that's par for the course in this industry we call game. In the taxi on the way back home, I reiterated my intentions to ditch this industry when I get myself hitched to some lucky lady because I wouldn't like to jeapordize any relationship through overwork and underlove. As I type, one of my housemates is still in there... and it's 1.02AM..!
The Next Technology Woe.
This wireless keyboard is starting to fuck me off. I don't know if it's a battery issue or just plain crummyness, but it often forgets keypresses and freaks out a bit. I get the feeling it might be an issue with Explorer 7 - I need to chat to the only other Vista user in work about a pain-free install as I've heard some horror stories. Saying that, the PC has behaved quite well(ish) today. It's accepted the DVD from work and also copied over that lovely 365 goodness. Hey, the keyboard works totally fine when it's right next to the unit! Hmm, makes you wonder why the fuck it's wireless, right? Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Once more technology has stuck its finger in my eyeballs.
Helvetica - The Movie!
I was happy to catch a documentary on telly tonight on BBC1 - it was a cut-down version of the Helvetica documentary I tried to catch at the Tyneside when the DOTT festival was on, though work and bad planning didn't allow me this luxury. It was pretty engrossing to a point - I'm sure the average joe would switch over straight away, though I got a kick out of learning a bit more about one of my favourite typefaces. It originated from Switzerland 75 years ago and was originally going to be called Helvetcia - which I think is Swiss for Switzerland, but they changed it to Helvetica to make it more "of Switerzland". I was geeky enough to acknowledge that some of the examples which were presented as Helvetica were anything but. Tsktsk. *cough*research*cough*
I've embedded a clip of it below and you can learn more here.
Whatever Happened To Late Night Television?
When digital television was the murmurs of a crazy prophet, we had very few channels and that concentrated a lot of decent programming on them - so much so that a surplus of which filled late night schedules. I remember watching the bizarro art/porn movies of Channel 4 complete with that red triangle to denote the rudeness of the art/porn. Kolchak the Night Stalker! That was quite a discovery. Fantastic rare animated films. Wrestling. It was quite a pot pourri of entertainment, though these days it's nowhere to be seen. All of a sudden we've been mugged by a scourge of evil - the late night quiz show channels.
I hate them with a passion. They are basically ways to fleece you of your money. You can't escape. The cheesy-grinned presenters inject the unemployed and gambling fraternity of the UK with promises of hopes and dreams and so many people fall for it. The questions often have stupidly obtuse answers and often have ways to con you. For fuck's sake! It's bad enough they've invaded my viewing and then they take the piss... It gets worse though. Music channels suddenly forget they're music channels and do the same at the foot of the screen. I'd be pissed off if I was a music promo director these days to see all the visual faffery going on and distracting the viewer from his or her artistic masterpiece.
Imagine if Chris Cunningham's acclaimed video All Is Full Of Love gets tarnished with such visual shite. It's unthinkable. It makes me sob a tiny bit.
Whatever Happened To The Sexy Sitting Ladies?
I used to be semi-hooked on Party People - a show on SmileTV where lovely ladies would talk to pervy men on the phone and those pervy men would ask them to sit in different positions. They'd ask them to jig about and dance. I really used to enjoy having it on in the background like a warm fire while I did sketches and the like. Plus it had lovely ladies in a variety of semi-dress. Almost as if the television gods realise that I enjoyed some late night television, they smited it down and replaced it with... Psychic TV. Instead of lovely ladies, the screen is full of pre-pubescent teenager psychic beardedness. People actually fall for this shit and all the channel consists of for a few hours is his face talking. There's no sound, except maybe the sound of the cash registers at SmileTV.
Maybe one person complained and they took the channel off Freeview. One person can change the world. Sadly it's often for the worse.
There are also zero clips of Party People on You Tube. Maybe I dreamt it.
Well, I caught the latest episode of what is something of a treat - Top Gear. In its original form, it used to be a TV show where cars were reviewed and not much else. Something happened a few years back though. Top Gear suddenly realised there was more to just reviewing cars, and soon became insanely addictive viewing. In recent times, it has become something of a no-brainer to watch and the three hosts of the show - Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May - are genuinely likeable hosts. You wouldn't mind bumping into them in the pub and chewing the petrol. Er, fat.
"The First Time This Has Been Attempted In A Car"
The latest episode was shown tonight and it's another hour-long special where the producers of the show ask the Top Gear team to do something no sane individual would do. In this case, they were asked to buy a second hand car for £1500 and then drive across Botswana. The cars though - they had to be 2 wheel drive and also not modified in any way to cross such hazardous and varied terrain. In essence, it's basically a road movie - but a road movie where you genuinely care for the well-being of the people involved and you are absolutely engrossed in their efforts. The last time they had an hour-long special like this, they were driving to the North Pole. Except, it hadn't been achieved by car before. In this episode, they crossed over the salt flats of Botswana - again, never been attempted in a car.
The aforementioned Polar edition of Top Gear is out and about on the internets in HD format in some form or another, and I implore you to grab it. There's so much genuine love and old-fashioned adventure to the special, I guarantee you'll be hooked.
Take Me On A Rocket Ride
Richard Hammond is something of a miracle. A year ago he was involved in a 325mph crash in a jet-turbine car. You read that right. 325mph. On his third attempt to break the land speed record in a jet-turbine car, the front right tyre blew out and sent the car skidding and turning off the runway into the grass verge. Many people thought he was a goner and he was in intensive care for a while. The amazing thing is that he fully recovered and looking at him, you wouldn't guess that he was even involved in such an accident. Of course, they showed this on Top Gear and I've embedded the movie for you to check out below. It's insane.
So I feel quite lucky that living in the UK means I can enjoy Top Gear first when it is broadcasted on a Sunday on BBC2. It's acquired quite a following worldwide and there was talk of a US version of Top Gear, although Clarkson didn't really want to live in the US - especially when one of the hour-long specials involved the three of them getting chased out of Alabama by rock-throwing rednecks. Why? One of the evil producers had challenged them to paint offensive slogans on the sides of their car. Hard to think that Top Gear used to review cars and not much else...
Vista Is Still Shit.
...or rather Internet Explorer 7 is shit. Yesterday I was innocently swanning about YouTube when I got a pop-up message telling me that there was a problem with Internet Explorer and it was restarting. Soon after, I got my second Blue Screen of Death. Yep. From a web browser. I'm going to put Firefox on this very, very soon. It amazes me still that new technology is so disappointingly bad. Case in point - I thought I'd listen to the FM Radio on my crummy Samsung U600. I do so. A gust of wind blows on the faux-buttons and phones up a random person for no reason. I text them to apologise and lock the phone. They text me back, phone unlocks and once more I phone them up without me touching anything. All this was happening inside my pocket, by the way.
I've looked over the reviews of the U600 and they're glowing. Okay, here's the thing. It's fucking awful. It's a shit phone. The UI may look nice, but the execution is terrible. The G600 has proper sodding buttons - there are two types of faux-button on the U600 and both of them are lousy. The light-sensitive faux-buttons don't work well and the touch-sensitive faux-buttons work too well. The documentation for the U600 is also lacking. I'm not sure if I'm locking my phone properly or not - I press the on/off button to supposedly lock it, but not so. So a plea to anyone who may want to get a U600 - don't. For the love of god, don't. I lust for the iPhone, but I get the feeling it will disappoint as well.
Finally...
Nintendo have done it again. They're impressed me. They did it with Metroid Prime 3 and now with the new Zelda DS game. It's the nicest-looking DS game out there at the moment - apeing the look of Wind Waker on the Gamecube, it features cel-shaded 3D characters in some lovingly-rendered cut scenes. I hear there's a wealth of things to do, too! In other news, there's too much cheating in video games. Not with other players - the games themselves. I constantly shout "cheat" at Puzzle Quest. In much the same way that the computer players in Uno will fuck you over if you ever dare to play a game with three of them (a good alternative to the horrors of half-naked men in semi-darkness on their Live Vision cameras), Puzzle Quest's opponents not only have the ability to see above the top of the screen, but they're also very good at stringing lucky combos together. Frustrating.
Check out the Zelda DS footage below!
Well, almost time for bed and I feel the urge to blog a little something. For the past year I've been entertaining myself by working on an art project called 365 - basically I produce a piece of artwork every day for a year. Sounds tough? Well, yep. It can be. Sometimes art kind of happens. Sometimes you force yourself to do it. I did kind of cheat a little and hawk a day onto the next day so I produced two bits of artwork, but I stuck to the daily structure of the project 95% of the time - which is good for me.
So tomorrow I produce my last piece of artwork. Of course, it's going to be Halloween-themed and I'll lovingly put some care and attention into it. After that will come the long process of composing the thing and laying it out in InDesign. The problem is that now I'm Vista-ised, a lot of my old packages won't work any more so I'm tempted to get myself an early Christmas pressie and pick up the latest version of InDesign... as well as some other packages I miss. People at work call me batshit-insane for even considering a spend of £1,600 on all the main Adobe packages but fuck it. I'm getting old and this Rapidshare-piracy bullshit is not going to wash, especially when I have more money than sense at the moment. I need a woman to come and take it away from me. Still, I want 365 to be a living breathing book which I can handle and show to my grandchildren on my death bed.
The K-Man Is Back!
The fantastic Channel 4 documentary of one of my favourite people ever - Karl Pilkington - has inevitably made it onto YouTube and I've posted the first part of the clip below. Part two is here and part three is here. It's a pretty interesting documentary and you get to see Karl talk to some luminaries like Germaine Greer, David Icke and Will Self - who I hope is taking the piss in a light-hearted way because he comes across as a complete arsehole in the documentary. I'll always forgive him though for taking part in the genius which was Shooting Stars!
Time to hug my hot water bottle once more while the wind whistles loudly outside.
I'm currently at home on my new spanky PC after the old one conked out on me after almost 5 years of noisy service. It was built for me by a good friend of mine and he saw fit to not only include a fan with a metal biohazard symbol, but many more fans too! Some neon finished the look of black exterior with a blue sheen emitting from within. I soon named this once-amazing beast Flawed Jesus - as I spent a lot of time trying to get the thing working well without all the coughs and hiccups. It got so bad I had my mate's phone number on the desktop so I could remember it from memory if anything happened.
"What fate befell Flawed Jesus?" I hear you ask. Well, all it took was one 2Mb file to make Windows stop working and halt my machine. *sob* I looked on my live-in landlord's PC for any way of fixing it. One idea was to take out and plug the keyboard back in. Surely not..! Nope. Not. So what else? Techy stuff, obviously. Techy stuff involving administrator passwords. Problem was that my friend couldn't remember if a password had been put in there, let alone if there actually was one. Soooooo, I turned to the dark side and used a dodgy copy to repair my copy of Windows XP. When I say "repair", I actually mean "install everything again without touching the stuff which isn't Windows-based". The code gave me 0 days of usage and now I can only access my hard drives via the Safe Mode - and sadly I can't extract any of those files unless I grab a USB cradle thing to slot the drives in and transfer to Stalag Vista.
My Computer Is Personal Again. (TM)
People have mocked me for my purchase. The HP IQ 771 is helluva sexy with zero fan noise (it's strange to hear a hard drive click and whirr again), integrated DVD, Live TV tuner, Windows Media Center, slots-a-plenty, wireless shizzle and - get this - a touch-screen monitor. For an arty-type like me, this is a nice thing. Sadly I'm unsure if all my old XP programs will work on Vista. I need to check out whether I can use Painter with the touch-screen on this. I want my AdMuncher back! I hear Firefox is possible to put on Vista, but it's painful. Vista itself looks lovely - lots of gradients and glass effect windows which doubtlessly put my Dual Core processor in a spin. For fuck's sake, this is meant to be the future. Why the hell does stuff still not instantly appear on here? Where's my jetpack? Etc?
So until I get myself all shizzled up here, there will not be much art created and uploaded. It'll take a bit of getting used to. Meanwhile, I'm tempted to set up the other PC and get XP on there - a proper copy of it. Maybe. It's very hard to track down copies these days - in PC World, you would think they would give the user a choice. Nope. No choice. As it says on the back of their products - "One Microsoft Way". I did muse about getting an Apple Mac, though that would instantly make me a smug fucker and that's no good. Those PC Mac ads... the PC seems a nicer chap than the Mac arsehole.
Getting To Know Me...
So a little bit about me - this bit is known as "my job". I'm currently working as a GUI Artist at Midway Newcastle. This means I get to design the gift wrapping of a videogame - in this case, Wheelman. It's a next gen racer-type-shooter thing featuring everyone's favourite bald-headed actor. No, no! Not Ben Kingsley! Although... no, it's Vin Diesel. He who has a name which is an anagram of "I End Lives". You don't fuck with Vin, especially when he's making films like The Pacifier. Didn't harm Arnold's career, right?
Hmm.
I use a lot of packages including Max, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects. I'm also doing some Actionscript-type logic with Flash to produce the front end and HUD elements. It's a bit laborious, but worth it in the end - although I will be getting into work at 7ish in the morning and leaving at 6.30 in the evening. If I had a wife and kids, I would surely be divorced by now. Luckily (?) I don't. Nope. Plenty of spare time and no one to hug in the middle of the night. I need to be productive or else this solitary fact grows and grows until that's all there is and there is nowhere to turn. If I'm creating or working on something, I'm not thinking deep dark shit like that.
The Cake Is A Lie.
A quicky on the joyousness which is Portal - one of the five games to come from the Orange Box including the seminal Half Life 2 and the beautifully-realised Team Fortress 2. Portal is short but very sweet - you start off as a test subject for Aperture Science Enrichment Center who is lucky enough to test a handheld device which can create two portals on walls - one as an entrance and the other as an exit. Like all the best videogames - a simple idea fantastically implemented with one of the best videogame endings known to man, woman and child because it features the sweet melodies of Jonathan Coulter who I am lucky to have discovered and currently listening to his excellent tunes now. Click on that link to check out some free music and also a chance to purchase - I intend to grab everything I can off iTunes as soon as I decide what to remove on my stuffed-to-fuck iPod.
Lovely Camcorder. Shit Phone.
Going back to technology letting me down - the latest kind, anyway - my Samsung U600 just played a tuneful melody of death as its batteries have drained. "How so?" you ask. Aha! Well, there's this wonderful quirk with it - besides the fact it has magical buttons which aren't really buttons. When it loses network coverage with O2, the huge LCD screen will switch back on and not turn off. Forever. So this is extremely unhandy when I have it in my pocket and I need it in a hurry. Al Gore won't be happy. I'm guessing it's something O2 have done to it. Maybe the shamefully-trendy animated screen which may need to be changed as part of an experiment to see if anything happens. If not, I'm tempted to swap it for something more capable. Get this - one of my workmates has gotten a Sony Ericsson which not only has actual buttons to answer the phone, but also live TV. For fuck's sake. I use my phone to browse online until I discovered I spent a tenner doing that after going over my piss-weak weedy limit of 512k. No, not Mb. K. As in 1024 bytes. Needless to say, I don't use it much any more and I've switched off all the images.
I miss my old Nokia. Not my 6600, but my 3310. A brick but a dependable brick, it was a phone at best and a calculator at worst. These days my U600 is a better camera than my current digital camera and a better camcorder than... well, it's better than the phone part. The iPhone? Yeah, right. It's bound to be a crushing disappointment. I don't think it's a case of me getting older, but technology getting more shit and needless. We're headed for Hades!
I'm going to end every post with a YouTube clip, and this one is a new favourite of mine -
I was going to embed the Official BBC YouTube Clip, but sadly they've removed embedding from there. Why? They don't want people worldwide to enjoy their programming, even though they hawk it across the seas for other international networks anyway. Here in the UK we still pay our TV Licence and yet the BBC have debts to pay off which could include selling off the iconic BBC Television Centre. Stupid sods.
