Fear Complex

from the desk of ed…

- started writing for another blog this week. Battle to the max, baby…

- Red Cliff and Moon are out at the movies. Missed them both during the limited-time film festival run earlier this year, so must go see them while I can. Red Cliff, especially so.

- Still working through the itinerary for December’s TX3 summer shakedown roadtrip. retro-classics has the low-down on what’s up here. Basically it involves a shitload of driving, and catching up with people I haven’t seen in ages. Of course this all hinges on whether I can get the time off work to do so.

- bought Fallout 3 GotY edition and resurrected Little Miss Lysergia for another trip around the capital wasteland. I’d almost forgotten how sweet this game was!

- NFS: Shift is actually a decent game; refreshing given the wiggerized garbage the franchise has been spawning for the last umpteen years. there’s no chance in hell of me ever buying an Xbox 360 just to play Forza 3, and GT5 ain’t due until March next year, so this will do the trick for now.

Am I seeing things or is my twatter working again? Dare I try logging in, in fear of having it crap out in the middle of loading?

**edit** nope, still broken… but my tweets seem to be working again?

i am currently writing this entry whilst lying in bed, on a PC the size of an average hardcover book that’s balanced precariously in my lap.

yeah, I bought me an Eee PC, techno-geek that I is…

 

..and that’s it next to my hp nc6000 – not exactly a huge laptop to begin with.

the challenges: working out how to fit both XP and ubuntu on the 4GB SSD, followed by a few days of getting used to touch-typing on the miniscule keyboard (the placement of the right Shift key still confounds me slightly) and squinting at the 7″ 800×480 screen. And that was it; all of the expected hardware troubles were almost non-existent, mainly because the Eee is still just a regular mobile PC crammed into a space one-quarter the size of an average laptop.

it was that very same regular-PC look, feel and underpinnings that made the whole process of getting accustomed to the Eee’s compactness nothing more than a mere formality. Pretty brilliant actually – it’s not every day you buy a gadget that lives up to its reputation.

unfortunately, playing Quake on the Eee doesn’t quite have the same “what the fuck” factor as playing Quake on a cellphone. But the fact that gaming on the Eee is entirely plausible for anyone with the patience to sit down and tweak a few things beforehand earns it a few extra brownie points in my book… now if only I could force Diablo II to run at native resolution!

it’s definitely bound to incite some interesting conversation if I decide to fish it out of my jacket pocket at the next gathering I attend.

no doubt I’ll have more BS to wax regarding the Eee once I’ve used it for a bit longer. one thing’s clear though – desktop replacement, it ain’t.

suffice to say, I got caught up in the GPOD-GaRmania from the other night as well. (see previous blog entry by GaR himself, on this very subject)

can’t profess to be an expert at photoshoopery or anything, but for posterity, these were my contributions:

World of GaRcraft (random trivia – this was pulled from an actual screenshot I took of our alts, back in the day when we both used to play WoW)

SkwisGaR (click this one to enlarge it)

SchwarzenegGaR: GaRminator 2

now the last two are just plain creepy…

GaRma GaRmeleon (oh hai, it’s Boy George)

wake up and smell the GaRcass (the expression on his face sure doesn’t help)

and I do recommend checking out the rest of the contributions if you have time to kill. Content may vary.

Man, it were bad-ass.

So I scored an invite to Sony’s little “press-only” preview gig they held on Wednesday in Auckland. “Scored” as in “Brian from Geekpulp sussed out for me” but the result’s the same. So I headed to Orctown with Brian and Wugga, to do some journalising.

Some little backstreet in the Auckland CBD, adjacent to some park, or something. No parking. A large, bald-headed, ebon-skinned bouncer. Only this guy’s got way too much class to be called a bouncer. He’s more of a doorman. A doorman you’d suspect of both packing knuckle dusters and of not ever condescending to use such a thing.

A girl with a clipboard. A clipboard. All listing all the names.

“I’m with Geekpulp.”
“Austin?”
“Gareth.”

A crossing out of a line, and a “Thank you, have a nice time,” or somesuch, and I was in.

(more…)

I see Warner Bros. have announced that Traveller’s Tales are developing a Lego Batman videogame to be released later this year.

OK, gotta admit I’m a big fan of Lego Star Wars II (and to a lesser extent, the original Lego Star Wars) and I’ll probably also give Lego Indiana Jones a jam when that comes out next month, but heck, it seems as though nothing is safe from the monstrous licencing machine these days.

better stop there, before this turns into a rant about how Lego is concentrating less on their own unique product lines and is instead licencing everything within sight. Bring back the golden years of the ’80s and ’90s where themes like pirates and space ruled supreme and kids still used their imaginations (and whatever sets they had on hand) to create their own boundless universes.

sif happen… but if comic franchises are the next cash cow, what’s on teh cards? Lego: Transmetropolitan? that’d be a huge fucking laugh.

actually I’m still disappointed that Lego killed off the pirates theme, but at the same time relieved that they haven’t ruined mine fond memories completely by licencing that well-known Johnny Depp franchise…

I now have gutsy and fister (64-bit, vltimate) co-existing on the same machine.

and the world hasn’t imploded yet.

fun times ahead.