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.

What would you do?

EDIT: was pissing me off

My Grandad died yesterday

...and I feel nothing. I dunno, when i was growing up, we'd go and see my nan every Sunday. She'd be sitting in ger chair by the 2 bar electric fire, a pack of No.6's on the arm of her chair. we'd do this every weekend, yet Grandad would never be there. Sometime's he would turn up, but I can only remember his Cement truck, the barrel turning slowly.

Xmas was a laugh though, he had this piece of sack-cloth with the card suits, a crown and another symbol on it, and he'd have three dice with the corresponding pictures. We'd place our bets (pennies) on the symbols and he'd roll the dice. if our picture was rolled, we got the money back double. 2 symbols triple. three symbols, a pound (the motherlode)

Then my nan died. cancer. Horrible. Grandad moved to a small bungalow over the road from my Mother's house. I remember I'd just been up town with my brother and I'd bought a lego cement truck, I wanted to show Grandad. He was happy to see us.

Then he met.. someone who wasn't nan. This woman didn't ingratiate herself to the family very well, even called my niece a bitch to my sister. Maybe she was, but we're not going to have this woman talk to us like her opinion matters.

This was many, many years ago. I suppose I'd met and spoke to him twice in 10 years. He didn't come to our wedding (didn't invite him, actually) And he never met Luke. I think I actually would have liked to have introduced them, but I didn't have the faintest clue how to contact him.

Anyway, for what it's worth..

Arthur Kench - R.I.P.

Tony..

Get a haircut, and a girlfriend...

(private joke)

Pear-shaped...

Well, Dan came and got the car today, meaning I was walking around with £1500 in tens & twenties in an envelope in my pocket for about 3 hours. The plan was, after work I'd walk a mile up the road to have a look at a Laguna. I'd driven past it last night but it was dark and pissing down, so i didn't get a good lok. More fool me.

Got there today and it's not so good in the daylight, peeling paint, hole in the leather seats. Ho-hum i think, i'll give it a spin. I call the guy, Paul. Nice bloke but a bit of a chav. Starts the engine and I can hear the tappits screaming.

"Oh, it's sounded like that for a while, still drives nice."

"Mm-hmm. Let's see.."

So i rip it around a few local roads (it's the same area as the flat I use to live in) braking sharply to check tracking and brake wear.

"So, when was the cambelt changed"

"?"

"It's done 111,000 miles, has the cambelt been changed recently?" This throws him, so he starts looking through the service records.

"It doesn't look like it's been changed. But it must be due for one"

"yeah, about thirty-thousand miles ago" (For the unmechanically minded, The cambelt basically stops the pistons trying to create a sunroof in the top of the engine block)

So I call annie and tell her to call the insurance company to see how much it would cost to insure it. I pop to my sisters around the corner and wait for annie's call...

£200 now until the end of the year, £600 a year after that.

I now have no car - which sucks...

Saying goodbyee to old friends

It's weird, but it's only a car..

It's a wrench getting rid of it, it's done us bloody good service. annie used it for Kleeneze (spit) and it's taken us, quite literally around the country, from Ashford, across to Bristol, through wales (and a bloody expensive toll bridge - next time we'll swim), up to Shrewsbury (shit) up to carlisle (before the flood), along Hadrian's wall to Kelso, just so I could see the place i might have got my original surname from, up around Edinburgh to Kircaldy to visit with friends, back down to Harrogate to meet up with Nathan and a few beers. Then it was a 4-hour slog back down to ashford, cutting the holiday short as my pregnant wife was feeling like shit - back home to the shithole flat and a fridge that ran out of electricity around Bristol-time.

Happy days...

An ego can be an awful thing...

Taken from imdb

" 'Brokeback' Actor Says He Was Victim of "Movie Laundering"
Randy Quaid has filed a $10-million lawsuit against the producers of Brokeback Mountain, claiming they misled him into believing that the film was "a low-budget, art-house film, with no prospect of making any money" so that he would sign on at a low salary figure. Quaid said in the lawsuit that he originally was approached in 2004 by director Ang Lee, who told him, "We can't pay anything, we have very little money, everyone is making a sacrifice to make this film." In fact, he says, the film has proved to be a box-office hit, grossing around $160 million worldwide. Quaid charged in the lawsuit that he was the victim of a "movie laundering" scheme intended to obtain his services as an actor in Brokeback "on economically unfavorable art-film terms."

Yeah, randy, I can see how you were really hard done by, what with you being an A-list celeb and everything... Twat

Fucking Warner Bros and their copyright bollocks.

(a.k.a. pissed post #1)

I'm a great fan of Harry Potter, as my friends and colleagues will testify. I'll defend the books until my ears bleed (The Nazi's were the last lot to burn books, lets get that one out of the way) but I'll stall when it comes to the films.

Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets were shit films. Chris Columbus painted toffee and candyfloss all over stories that, while child-centric, had a deep underlying dark tone to them. A tone that had darkened as the books progressed, reaching a low with the unheroic death of a liked character. But no. we had to end the second film with that embarrassing Hagrid-wank-fest.

Sorry, I digress. I got goblet of fire today, a film I like more than prisoner, mainly because there wasn't some mexican at the helm who kept trying to infuse subtle undertones of a pubescent threesome into the mix.

Anyway. I own it on DVD, having paid to see it at the cinema but WB have all the cash they're going to get out of me with regards to this film.

So why oh why oh why, after putting the DVD into my antiquated Sammy 709, does the unskippable "You wouldn't steal a car" bullshit advert come on?

Sorry, I haven't stolen this DVD and I find it fucking insulting that you are inferring that I would. So why should I see this shit EVERY TIME I WANT TO WATCH THIS FILM??

That said, there is this little chinese guy that comes around at work every now and again with his 3-syllable sales pitch "deeveedee?" I just tell him to go away, mainly because he's proving F.A.C.T right about piracy funding people smuggling.

No, I don't feel sorry for him. No, he legally shouldn't be in this country.

DVD's are great and everything, Hi-Def, 5.1 and DTS, extra features, but it's like I mentioned about the PSP, it's too easy to hack and exploit. They can try to enhance security on the DVDs, but the determined geeks with nothing to do all day except sit in their Mom's basement ripping programs apart are going to nullify all that work and release it as open source.

With the advent of Hi-def and Blu-Ray (can anyone spell betamax?) the pirate market will not go away, it'll just become more expensive. But no amount of cheaply-made anti-piracy adverts is going to make a hell of a difference to that.

Normal sevice might be resumed

Housework, chores, shopping, selling me car on ebay. All these things are stopping me from typing incredibly witty and verbose stuff.

Oh, and trying to get the cockateil back into the bloody cage...

Just in case another 2 turn up for dinner

Look Closely

Everything in Moderation

Now, I like my PSP, I think it's an incredible piece of kit, and Sony themselves have advertised the handheld as'opportunistic gaming', whereby you can just pick it up when you've got a spare 5 minutes and have a quick fumble with Tommy vercetti..

This guy, however, took 'opportunistic' a little too seriously. Prick. How the hell is he gonna get any kind of plot cohesion if he's only playing in 30 second bursts?

While I'm on the subject of PSP's, Sony have recently reported 'Disappointing sales' of UMD's, the 'dvd movie' side of the PSP universe.

Well, duh.

Upon the release of the PSP console, Sony were also good enough to supply 1gb memory cards, 2gb memory cards and include firmware that plays Mp4 video files. They also told everyone that software is available that can convert VOB files (Raw DVD Data) into MP4 file. All you needed was a program that could rip the vobs off a dvd. That'll be DVDdecrypter then.

Now, I have a collection of DVDs that could be described as 'healthy' (needs updating, actually), and is I'm getting quite adept at all this ripping and converting lark, I technically have over 300 titles I can watch on my PSP within an hour. I currently have Bill Baily: part troll and 2 episodes of Blackadder II ready for the viewing.

I bought Wedding Crashers on UMD, funny enough film, and it's got a few special features (deleted scenes and a commentary track) but it's simply not as good as the DVD, which is exactly the same price.

Unless Sony release certain movies exclusively on UMD, or include UMD only features on the discs, they'll never make money.

I'll repeat to the point of advertising that the PSP is an awesome piece of hardware, but Sony made it too user friendly. It was hacked within a month of release to play downloaded games.

I'll buy the games, but I'm not gonna pay for a movie that I can also enjoy in widescreen and dolby 5.1 as well

\rant off
\\ stop going to Fark

Gerry Adams gets detained by Washington Immigration

Cracks me up.

I'm just guessing that they had a problem with his answer to "Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organisation?"