Ouchy-fuckitty-ouch

"A rainbow I shall never see, my cataracts are blinding me"

So, I'm at work yesterday, serving a regular and the last things he wants is a few fence panels. The panels are put together sawdust intact, so a small gust of wind blows up this sawdust and a piece of it goes into my eye.

4 hours later I've decided that I can't operate heavy machiney while blind, so i call the better half and ask her to come get me. Bit tricky as I've got the car and home is 15 miles away. Luckily her dad drops her off and it's off to A&E we go.

2.5 hours later and I'm finally shown into a cubicle where this nice big laydee drops some stuff in my eye to numb it. "It'll sting like hell" she says. "Have you seen my tattoos?" I say. "It probably won't hurt that much" she says. It was like the buzzing of flies to me.

So I've got a numb eye, she pokes it with a cotton bud (q-tip) to check there's no sawdust still in there, then squirts some dye in my eye, which is funky stuff and makes the world go orange. If the eyeball is scratched, the dye soaks into the scratches and shows up when she shines a bright blue light on it. Basically, i've done this;


That's not my eye, and the scratches don't actually look like that, but you get the general idea.

So I'm on painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and this gell stuff I have to squirt between my bottom eyelid and eye. Works like a charm, but it blurs my vision, and as I'm virtually blind in the other eye, I'm virtually incapacitated.

Most of last night I was as frustrated as hell. I couldn't see to eat. I couldn't watch the TV. I couldn't do anything that would normally be a breeze. My afflction is temporary, but I couldn't help but wonder how the hell blind people cope with life. I suppose they'd start off a little like me, as frustrated as hell and pissed off with the world. If they were born blind, then coping would be second nature.

So it's protective glasses all round from now on, because my eyesight is more fragile than I'd previously thought, plus I'll be damned if I'm gonna miss Luke growing up.

Oh, and the boobs. i'd miss the boobs...

Gap

There's a very good reason I haven't done any updates lately.

Please see previous post for details. (Pissed all over thunderhawk)

Memmweeeesss

"I looked at the past, it looked back. I didn't like that knowing look in its eye.."

Many, many moons ago, I was at the cutting edge of home entertainment. I owned not only a Sega Megadrive(Genesis) But I was also the only person I knew who also bought the Sega MegaCD, which was this huge slab like monstrosity which used far too much electricity (by todays standards), whined like a pussy and got incredibly hot. But still you could play shit-hot games like Night trap, Silpheed and the amazing Ground Zero Texas.

Yes, the video resolution really was that good. hey, this was 1992 and affordable laserdisc hardware was hard to come by. Hell, the pinnacle of disc-related home video was still contained on huge silver slabs of glass coated foil that weighed about 2 kilos and cost about £50 (in 1992) a disc.

Night trap started the FMV revolution, and it also got the mary Whitehouse Brigade up in arms. The premise of the game (if memory serves) was a bunch of chicks (which included the now dead Dana Plato) had a slumber party and all of a sudden these guys in bin liners broke into the house and dragged them screaming into the night. I also believe vampires were in there somewhere.

And so began the age old tale of uninformed morons spouting off about the evils of video games. Typical scenario: some old biddy hears from a friend who's gardener's son likes video games and they've heard a very vague description of said game.

Key words; 'Real video' 'Girls' 'Kidnap' 'vampires' 'badgers' (possibly).

What they would have discovered if they'd actually sat down to play the game to form an educated opinion on it, was that the game was abominally bad. Crap actors in a rubbish set. No special effects to speak of and the screen resolution was so poor that even if a nipple was on display, it would look more like an armpit than the source of the downfall of teenage america.

Sorry, went off on one there. maybe because some ignorant bitch is trying to get HP pulled off the shelves again...

Anyway. Nostalgia is all very well and good, but reliving old memories can be a task. There's a Genesis emulator called Gens32, which, if you know where to find them, plays roms of the old, old Genesis games. I downloaded it ages ago (freeware) mainly because I'd suddenly been attacked by this urge to play FlashBack again. If you'd played the game you'll understand.

Henneeway, long story short, played the decent games to death and wanted to expand my nostalgia experience some more, so after much searching for bios files and downloading 222mb bin files, burning to discs, then sitting back to a good old alien bashing in GZT.

Oh it's rubbish by todays standards. But it's exactly as I remember it. Basically you've got 4 cameras in 4 areas of this town, okay, each area has a crap actor playing a unconvincingly undercover CIA agent. Including Leslie Eastman as DeSalvo, a token chick with tits. Gotta piss off the censors somehow.

Bit of a specific topic, I guess. It's just I got caught up in the whole nostalic thang. I should also mention that I was also one of the less-than-thousand people in the uk that purchased, for the princley sum of £200 (instantly going over the limit on the 33% store card I'd been running up) the black mushroom of doom that was the 32X, with real polygon-shifting. Most mobile phones these days have better graphical abilities, yet, at the time, it was the shit.

This thing, coupled with the sega CD, made the whole thing weight about 5 kilos. You couldn't take it anywhere without doung calf-stretches first. Each unit had its own power cable, plus the interconnecting cables meant an extra 8 cables. plus the optional lightgun (yes, I did), and any games. Taking it over to a friends house entailed military-type precision planning & security. All told the whole setup cost over £600.

And it was shit. The graphics were shit, as were the majority of the games. Some have stood the test of time, but others that were considered classics at the time (aforementioned night trap, Roadrash, Lotus racing (a coup at the time as they got the official license) and the once-revered Mortal Kombat) Are blocky unresponsive clunkers.

So I'll close in saying, if you want to live in the past, just remember, it's a little more jagged then you probably remember.

But it's still as fun as a bikini-wrestling match between Alyson Hannigan and Amy Acker.

Right, I'm off to see if I can download Snatcher and then get disappointed at how crap it is...

Addendun: Something I've noticed is that all the CD roms come packaged with a whole bunch of MP3 files. When the megacd games were released, any large amounts of soundtrack needed were recorded separately (often with real instruments)and then simply placed on the disc as separate tracks. The game picked up and played the tracks when needed. This also meant you could play the CDs in a standard CD player (skipping the first track, as the code normally killed the speakers). Some tracks were incredibly good, some were shit. I managed to feed the audio from the MegaCD through an old ghetto blaster, which also meant I could record the CD audio onto a C90, for automotive enjoyment in my old Mark II escort.

Thunderhawk was great, the tracks on there, while not Slash-worthy, are indeed riffy enough of a few power-stances. Sol-Feace, however, is a bit crap. i'm ashamed to say I thought it was kinda cool. I was wrong. It's crap. Very crap.

The music you're hearing (assuming you've got the volume up) is the title track from the Updated CD version of Flashback. The game, when initially released on cartridge, was fantastic enough, but inbetween the motion-captured action were some short snippets of MSPaint-created animation. Given the new Freedom a 700mb cd offered, Delphine (Flashback's creators) ripped out all the old animations and replaced them with snazzy, state of the art CGI. Unfortunately, the CGI could only be recorded and played through the megaCD's FMV player, giving the impression you were viewing the screen through a cheese grater.




Cutting edge, I'm sure you'll agree. Anyway, having downloaded the flashback rom, I was more than happy to find the MP3 track you're now hearing, as I'd already recorded it onto that tape some 13 years ago. I am personally of the opinion that this track is still good enough to deserve the same treatment, what with my car stereo being able to play MP3's and everything.

Goes around. Comes around

Pimp my Snack - worthy of a Nobel Prize

This guy deserves a frigging medal Giant cadbury's Creme egg or peanut butter Kit Kat Chunky anyone?

(The giant egg sold for about £17, but the page on ebay had more than 22,000 hits)

(Peanut butter KK chunkies are the work of God himself)

(that is all)

Looks like goodbye was permanent

Remember my old car, the one I so poignantly said goodbye to a few weeks ago?

I get an e-mail late last night from Dan, the guy I sold it to..

Bad news already.. Car has been written off.. Some idiot decided to pull out on me at which point I panicked and swerved into a wall.. I am not happy at all.. Assuming damage to the wall has to come out of my insurance as he didnt actually interfere with my car.. Even though he pulled right out on me.. I have come off with bruising, cuts and an extremely sore shoulder.. Sorry mate..

Now, i shouldn't feel anything about this, but it was like learning a cousin had lost an arm. We had that car from birth, so to speak. Of course I feel sorrier for Dan. 18 years old and just spent £1500 on a car that had a life of roughly 2 weeks.

Ouch indeed...

At least she didn't call him 'Custard'

Gwynnie has had a healthy baby boy. She's called him Moses.

"What shall we call our child so that he does not get the shit kicked out of him at school?"

"We shall call him Moses"

I just don't get it. Yes, Moses is a nice enough name, and at least it isn't kumquat, but Moses? Are they planning to pop him in a basket made of leaves and float him down the river to escape persecution from the Paparazzi?

What the hell is wrong with Brian, or Richard? Maybe Chris Jr?

"Just Uncanny"

Those words, spoken by my boss, This afternoon.

As I posted a few days ago, My Grandfather passed away recently. As fate would have it, My Aunt and uncle were over from canada as my Aunt's (Non-blood rellie) father was also gravely ill. As it turns out, my Grandfather died while my Uncle was in the country, unfortunately, so did my Aunts.

Told my boss, and that was his response.

It's almost enough for you to start questioning fate.

And the first person that tells me "ooh, it comes in three's, you know.." gets a baseball bat.

Bloody Told ya..

Found this Link through Fark

I do believe I said it first...

(adopts smug pose)

(leans back in chair with hands behind head)

(falls off chair)

Hapland 3

The Guy that makes these puzzles is a complete bastard. There, that's made me feel better.

You can spend an hour clicking on random objects, thinking you're getting somewhere, until you realise that you shouldn't have pulled that lever until you'd pressed that button. So far I've killed four of the little guys, made a spider steal that little birdie's egg. Caused many explosions and fed the sea monster.

I thought I was getting really far until luke showed an interest in what I was doing and pressed the little 'close window' button at the bottom left of my keyboard. I started it up again but by then I'd completely forgotten what the hell I'd done the last time.

See, it's crap like this that's stopping me from becoming an award-winning novellist.