Now, especially for such sandbox style games where your decisions matter (be they shooting people in Red Dead, or choices in the dialog system of Alpha Protocol), I can understand not having a quick save feature. I remember the times when shooters on PC still had a quick save and load feature that was always active. I also remember killing an enemy, quicksaving, killing the next enemy, quicksaving, getting spotted by a camera when I was supposed to be sneaky, quickloading, not getting spotted by the same camera, killing the next enemy, and quicksaving again.
I can understand why developers don’t want that to happen. And as a player too. It takes the challenge out of the game.
Shenmue didn’t have a quick save feature for that matter either. While you could only save your regular game in your house, at the same time it did allow players to save all the time when they really needed to save right now. The only catch? It was a “save and exit” feature. As soon as you used the save-anytime-anywhere feature, the game would exit after saving without being able to play further.
Perfect when you look at the clock and it’s 1 a.m. again and you need to get up in the morning. And all the other times when you just want to exit (and of course save your current progress, not the one from the last checkpoint) the game right now and not play the 15-30 minutes till the next checkpoint / chance to get to the saving location.

I can’t understand why there isn’t a single game since Shenmue - that didn’t have a quick save feature - that included this save and exit functionality. It would be such a simple and elegant solution for the “when do I let the player save” question.

I bought Call of Duty - World at War today, and played some time into the singleplayer campaign. While some loading screen was showing up after a perticular intense battle scene, I had this here thought:

“Damn. This really is intense; and horribly frightening if you imagined this would be real, this would be you on some remote japanese isle fighting for your life, (for what you believe in?), probably not really knowing why the hell you’re even here. The same was probably true for your enemy. Why did you have to go through hell, not knowing if 5 minutes later you would still be alive, all because of the doings of some fucked up dudes like Hitler and all the others…”

probably because of Hitler and a whole lot of others. One man cannot start a world war. But if he has the power you might call it charisma in a strange sense to sway the opinions of others… well if enough mindless people follow one lunatic… nah this is already too much of an aside, back to the main Gedankenexperiment -

Millions of ordinarly people had to die because some few who thought of themselves as primus inter pares basically ordered them to with no right to order them in the first place.

“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.”

Now this is basically the emotion… the thought… I get out of playing something like the Call of Duty series (especially the last 2) .
Now this is basically the emotion… the thought… I get out of watching something Platoon, and especially Full Metal Jacket.

Yet, especially in germany, my neighboring country, there is this whole “Killerspiele” (murderer games [sic]) discussion. Some big bosses say that they (the games) are - pardon the tactless and geeky analogy - what would basically amount to the emperor [violent video games] luring luring Luke [adolescents and/or video game players in general] to the dark side.

While at the same time anti-war movies like the ones above are hailed as what they truly are - anti-war movies. Those movies don’t show you how awesome it is to be in war. To shoot someone. To be shot at. Those movies show you that you never, under any circumstance, would want to experience those things.

So why are (certain?) anti-war movies hailed, while such games are looked down upon, when one gets the same feeling from experienceing both?

The only ones who are allowed to shoot are those who are prepared to be shot themselves.

Lelouch Lamperouge, Code Geass

It’s been quite some time since I last posted something here on my little blog. There were various things that I did or had to do besides blogging. I’m gonna tell you a few of these things here:

Age of Conan
I longed for so long for this game. It was hailed as the true alternative to World of Warcraft. It had stunning graphics and an innovative combat system (at least on paper). It had storytelling (at least for the first 20 out of 80 levels). It had a PVP focus with sieges and mounted combat and whatnot (at least it was planned). But what truly happened was this:

May - the game comes out and 1 million players subscribe. Magazines give it the highest rankings. It is a blast to play the first 20 levels, with voice acting for every quest. As players realize that after level 20 all the voice acting is gone they are really disappointed though they cope with it. I for one didn’t really expect to have voice acting after the “tutorial” that was the first 20 levels.

June - players have to grind a lot, an aweful lot to get to the maximum level of 80. From level 50 onwards there were practically 5-10 quests per 10 levels that would give you 2, maybe 3 levels. The rest was pure, unfun, grinding.
Players at or close to level 80 want to do what Age of Conan was focused on: PVP. Yet there is no reward, no nothing, for doing PVP. Plus sieges are buggy as hell, world PVP is practially dead with every zone being instanced. Funcom says “dudes, we will get the big PVP patch out in june!”. Players wait.

July - while at the start healers seemed completely imbalanced, with having high dps and survivability through heals and tank classes couldn’t kill anything because of low dps, things changed when players discovered gems. Soldiers who socketed only +damage gems could one-to-two-shot everything in the game bar other soldiers. I had fun with my soldier for a few days doing this but it got boring pretty fast. PVP patch is still to be seen. Funcom says, early August is the new release date.

August - no PVP patch, no fix for the completely unbalanced gems. Players start to cancel their accounts. I do so too.

September - I only read the forums for this one but it seems sieges are still buggy as hell, PVP is unbalanced for healers again with gems being completely nerfed, all damage cut by 40% in pvp, but heals stayed the same. Plus raids are broken because tanks needed the gems to survive.

October: I am back to playing World of Warcraft and enjoy it a lot. Although I don’t want to raid anymore, I now focus on having fun with reallife friends in the game, doing the occasional 5 man instance, and a lot of PVP.

Work
Got a lot of programming to do with the new project. About 2 weeks every month I work for 50 instead of the normal 40 hours. Although that is most of the time only because I go home early most of the time in the first 2 weeks of each month, so I have to do the minus hours on the last two weeks so I will be at +/- 0 hours at the end of each month. The joy and pain of flextime.

Anime
I have been watching a freaking lot of anime in the last half year. Too much to count actually. Lucky Star, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Monster and some I forgot to mention (damn short term memory!). Especially Code Geass is the best thing since… a freaking long time. The storytelling is at the same level as Lord of the Rings and Babylon 5. I will write a post about the anime next probably.

Other stuff
I have been reviewing anime for Anifreak for some time now also.

You can count on more (more or less) interesting posts from now on again on this blog.

Sayonara!

Today a lot of games are entitled RPGs, Roleplaying games, but few really deserve it. Morrowind was a true roleplaying game, where you only controled your alter ego, and saw everything through his eyes alone.

But almost every so-called “Japano-RPG” (like the Final Fantasy franchise) lets you take full control over a whole party of characters. I don’t see much roleplaying in that. In the same vein, one could call StarCraft a roleplaying game, because you order a few heros around in it. Nothing could be further from the truth though.

So back to Persona 3: It’s the first true RPG I have played since ages, and the first truly astonishing one since Morrowind. While the combat system is fast but tactical and there are around 100 different monsters (Personae) you can summon to your aid, the game truly shines with its storytelling and atmosphere. It’s the little details that (at least to me) make this a true roleplaying game:
Not only do you not control your whole party during combat, but to equip them, and see their status, etc. you have to talk to them and ask them how they feel. If you want them to only concentrate on healing in battle, you tell them again through dialog. While other games have cascaded menus for such things, being able to talk to a party member and tell him/her what to do, makes the game so much more realistic.
Another detail is, why do I, as the player, always hear music in the game? Simple, because the main character has a Portable Music Player equipped which even shows up as an item.

Little details such as this, combined with an awesome and fresh combat system, make this game truly a Milestone in “Japano-RPGs”.

A high quality version is available at AnimeMusicVideos.org (after a free registration you can download each and every AMV on the site, which are tens of thousands).

Another spoof was done by the IT Crowd:

And last but not least, as a reference the original annoying ad™:

I can understand the notion of putting those ads on rental disks, because franky, those are probably the disks that are copied the most (leaving bootlegs and camera recordings of movies not even on DVD out of the picture, because those don’t have those ads in front of them anyway). What I don’t quite get is why they have to lock out all of the buttons to forward/skip the ad. I mean seriously, is that going to stop anyone who wants to copy the disk anyway? Not at all.

Which leads me to my next and more important point:
Why in [whatever-you-believe-in]’s name do they put those annoying ads on every buyable DVD? Of the about 200 DVDs I own I’d say 190 have the ads, 180 have unskippable-but-fast-forwardable ads, and 10 have ads that can’t even be fast-forwarded.

So why the hell is it like that? I take pride in my collection, and if I like a movie I will gladly spend the few bucks to own it and all the specials that come with it on the disk. But I’d rather pay 5$ more to skip that damn anti-piracy ad. Not only are they awefully bad most of the time, they also really insult the paying customer which has to spend his or her time watching the ad all the time the DVD is put into the player.
Do they really think that some rediculous ad is going to stop anyone who wants to burn a disk, to do it? If they burn it, you can be sure that they will remove the ad from the disk anyway, so it really serves no purpose at all. Well maybe its purpose is just to be damn annoying.

The following image sums up my opinion on that pretty much:

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote

Tracking your fingers with the Wiimote

Also very impressive: a low-cost interactive whiteboard

I planned on installing Linux on my PS3 some weeks ago, but only in the christmas holidays did I find the time to do the task. And I intended to journal my experience and write a guide so other users can have the joy of Linux on the big screen too, and don’t have to work a whole night to get everything working.

Note: For this guide I will assume you have the latest PS3 firmware upgrade installed, which changed some wifi stuff so all the updateing at the end of the guide is nessecary.

You can install Linux on your regular PS3 harddrive, or you can opt to first upgrade the harddisk.

Things needed for the hdd upgrade:

• Phillips head screwdriver
• Flathead screwdriver (a fingernail or knife or other sharp object will do too)
• 2,5″ SATA harddrive with either 5400rpm or 7200rpm

• A PC with internet connection
• CD-Rs to burn the image files
• Storage media with a few hundred megabytes space, formated with FAT32 (a regular USB stick works best)
• USB keyboard and mouse (wireless ones with a receiver so they only need 1 USB port together work best for the PS3 versions with only 2 USB ports)

• Some time

Note: Before you change harddrives on the PS3 you should back up all data you want on the new disk to an USB stick or external drive. Backup can be done via the built-in backup utility to backup the contents of the whole disk. If you don’t have enough external storage space, you can back up individual game saves and data via the XMB in the game menu, under the entry Game Data Utility and/or Game Save Utility.
Also, of course, the PS3 should be powered down full via the switch on the back before you attempt to change the drive.

The first step is to remove the plastic cover from the hdd tray located on the left side of the system. Use a flathead screwdriver, your fingernails, or something else which is flat for this:

Next you have to remove the blue screw which holds the tray in the case:

After that flip up the metal handle on the caddy and move the it to the front of the PS3 with the handle to dislodge it. Then you can remove the caddy with the drive in it:

Use your Phillips screwdriver to remove the 4 screws holding the harddisk in the tray, and exchange the old one for the new one:

After that just put the 4 screws back in, slide the caddy into the PS3 and move it back with the handle to connect it, put the blue screw back in and finally put the plastic cover back on.
You’re now ready to boot with your new disk!
The system will ask you to format the drive, just use quickformat for this.

Now you are ready to begin with the Linux installation steps!

First things first: Download the XUbuntu PowerPC LiveCD iso file and burn the iso to a CD-R using your favourite burning program (if you don’t know how to burn iso images, refer to the Ubuntu Help forums).
In the PS3 menu navigate to the system settings and start the Format Utility, and choose “allot 10GB to the OtherOS”. After that insert the XUbuntu disk and choose “Install OtherOS” in the system settings menu. Confirm to restart the PS3 and you will be greeted by the kboot boot loader.

Protheus wrote an extremly detailed installation guide in the PSUbuntu forums so I’m gonna skip the whole procedure here. Just do what he does in the guide step-by-step (although you could and should skip the “compile your own kernel”) and you will be fine. The guide also details how to update your kernel so the wifi which broke with PS3 firmware 2.0 will work again in Linux.

But another problem arrived with the 2.10 firmware - Ubuntu wouldn’t boot anymore. So after you upgrade the kernel as described in Protheus’ post, follow the instructions in the next guide.
AliasXNeo wrote a detailed guide how to update your kernel once more so it works with the 2.10 firmware again, again, follow the guide step-by-step.

Once that is finished you will be able to boot into your newly installed Linux system on the PS3! Now you will have to configure your wifi or use a regular LAN cable so you have net access on the box. Firefox comes preinstalled with Ubuntu so once you have your network configured you can surf the web. You’ll probably want to play sound files and movies now, so just install VLC media player using the command sudo apt-get install vlc from the terminal.

So there you have it, a working Ubuntu Linux on your PS3. You can play movies, dvds, mp3s, surf the web with a real browser opposed to the PS3 one, and do everything that you can in Linux that doesn’t need more than 256MB RAM (so SNES emulators and the likes will run fine, but 3D apps probably won’t).

And to finish this guide, a screenshot from my working system (don’t mind the crappy quality of the movie in VLC, that’s normal when screencapping movies, windows media player shows just a black window on screencaps), click the image for a better quality one:

Further reading:

• PSUbuntu.com, home of the distribution
• PS3 board: Linux 101, general questions and answers about Linux
• PS3 board: Flash in Linux, because the normal flash plugin won’t work on the PPC64 architecture

While browsing one of my favorite webcomics, xkcd (a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language) I stumbled upon a sideproject of its author. The project are 3 minimalistic (in terms of design, not content!) websites which have only one goal: to find out The Funniest, The Cutest, and The Fairest pictures of all the internet.
A noble goal you might say, but what on these sites is different than all the other countless funny-picture-websites? Well first of all there are no comments, and not much design around the site. On all three sites you get a white page with a little introduction text and then 2 pictures at random, and you click the one you think the funniest, cutest, fairest. A system in the background registers all clicks and makes a ranking out of them.
And even if you are not particulary interested in the ranking of certain pictures, the sites still offer longtime fun and amazement in those boring hours. And while I really got good laughs out of The Funniest the pictures I adore most are from The Fairest because it shows absolutely awe-inspiring nature pictures.

While you can argue if this is funny…

…you can’t really argue that this is an really fair picture:

No one can deny that first person shooters (FPS for short) have evolved greatly from their ancestors like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Of course graphics get better from year to year and the gameplay changes depending on the focus of the title (e.g. Hero-against-everyone-else or a tactical team shooter). But for a long time, the story told, and especially how it is told, was stagnant.

At the start, Doom had only a few screens of text mentioning why you were thrown onto a demon-infested Mars. Then came prerendered cutscenes and around the same time, ingame cutscenes that the 3D engine rendered. But if you wanted to tell a story good, back then you had to use cutscenes because the graphics engine couldn’t handle things like lip-syncing, detailed models and animations.
Half-Life was the first game to use ingame cutscenes, and to not change the viewpoint in them. Before that in most cutscenes you would see your own character through a camera, like on film. But Half-Life changed the way a story in an FPS was told. I think there was not a single moment in the game where you would see your character through others eyes. That was really an experience, to see the whole story through the protagonists eyes, without a cut.

Flash forwards a few years and the change of a century. First Person cutscenes are pretty much given now in shooters to let you identify more with your character. For me, there were 2 games in the last year that really stood out with their story telling: BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Warning: huge spoilers for BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare up ahead!
If you haven’t played one or both of these, and plan to do so… then read on if you like but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

While both of them are excellent games on their own, BioShock had a more fascinating story and Call of Duty was more of your regular War-Against-Terror story, there were two points in those games that made me, even as an old school gamer, take a breath and ponder what just happened:

In BioShock it was the scene where Ryan makes you kill him by using the phrase “Would you kindly?”. It’s not that I havent killed countless thugs and bosses in first person, but the intensity of the scene - first you cannot do anything about it because you are brainwashed to respond to that particular phrase. And second it is a really gruesome death being strangled. After that scene I was vexed.

The scene in Call of Duty, while on a grander scale, felt even more personal to me: After heroically rescuing a female pilot from a downed Apache, you fly out with her and your crew, the city behind you. Then the unspeakable happens - a big missile explodes in the middle of the city, and the mushroom cloud it leaves makes it clear that it was a nuclear head. Your helicopter goes down and the screen goes black.
While the nuclear explosion surely was shocking, so far it didn’t me bother too much. The debriefing of the mission showed a board with dead and missing Marines, and listed your name on it. It wasn’t so much irritating that your character died because so far in the story you played 3 characters so you still had the others.
But when I started the next mission I was vexed again, and at the end of it, disgusted: The screen fades in from black, and you find yourself in the downed helicopter. Corpses around you. You cannot walk you can only crawl or kneel. You get out of the helicopter and look at your devastated surroundings, everything is reddish still, and on the horizon you can still se the big mushroom cloud. And then finally, after a few minutes in the debris, you fall to the ground, everything goes white, and you die.

Gulp.

That realy took me by surprise. A whole level just so you can experience your own last few minutes. As far as I know that is a game-first and has not been done before. And while it is shocking, disgusting and irritating, it is non the less - superb storytelling. After that scene I played through the rest of the game in one fell swoop because I was so pissed at the Terrorist who planted that bomb and I just wanted to get rid of him.

And that’s what good stories do: They move you.

I hope we will see much more bravely and oddly told stories in the future. Because a really good gameplay also deserves a really good story.

There’s good promotion. There’s epic promotion. And then there’s promotion that sways you to take initiative yourself.
The last kind is probably the best one, because when you talk about and think actively about a product, whatever it may be, you are more inclined to remember it than if you just saw an ad on TV while zapping. And “thinking about” brings me back to the topic at hand:

The Thinking Blog is holding a big giveaway to celebrate its first anniverary. The price is a sparkling new, completely waterproof Laptop from RuffPC.

I can’t imagine a better promotion for a blog. Because what do bloggers need? Computers. Better yet, Laptops so they can blog wherever they are at the moment. And if the Laptop is shock resistent and weatherproof that is just a huge bonus.

The only thing you have to do to have a shot at the price is blog about the contest. And even if you don’t win, you get a free link back to your blog from the Thinking Blog, which has according to the site, more than 1600 subscribers and I-don’t-know-how-much daily visits. So it’s a win-win situation!

What are you waiting for?


P.S. The line “a winner is you”, which was voted fifth worst video game line ever, is from Pro Wrestling on the NES.

Although the video is filmed upside down, I still watched in awe at their formations. And to do all this at a football game (where I imagine there aren’t too much video game players in the crowd) makes the spectacle even better.

Video games they march to:

• Pong (at the very start, looks like some guys running around aimlessly, but it’s definately Pong)
• Tetris (with the music everybody knows so well)
• Mortal Kombat (you can even hear a feint Mortal Kombat scream when the music starts)
• Pokemon (they even have a little Pikachu-ish dude fighting, probably the team’s mascot)
• Zelda (complete with Tri-Force and the Master Sword)
• Mario Bros. (the ending especially rocks, with the castle and flag like in the game)

Anyway I’ve never seen that commercial on german television, although it is supposedly a german production. They only show the worst commercials on TV here nowadays.

So without further ado here is the brilliant ad (I’m still laughing after watching it 5 times in a row):

And for you non-german speaking folk out there, the translation what the old guy says:

“Das hier ist mein Sektor” - “This here is my sector”
“Das hier ist das wichtigste Gerät des Küstenwächters” - “This here is the most important device of the Coast Guard”
“Das Gerät und das Gerät” - “That device and that device”
“Überlebens… Radar” - “Survival… Radar”

Cheesy? Maybe. Accurate? Hell no. But funny non the less!

And as a comparison the real 300 trailer:

Yesterday I’ve watched Toki o Kakeru Shōjo, Tokikake for short, or as the english call it - The Girl who leapt through Time. While the title may suggest a flick for girls only, I thoroughly enjoyed the move as a man in his 20ies too.

After getting the special edition DVDs recommended by amazon while browsing for animes, the customer reviews got me hooked. Reading that the movie wasn’t even mainstream in Nippon but still won all kinds of movie festival prices helped made my decision to buy the piece clear.

So the story goes: Makoto, a 17 year old girl is about to die in a freakish train accident when she suddenly finds out that she can leap through time into the past and redo things there. At first she only uses her new-found ability to make things right for her, get good test grades and make less of a fool of herself in various situations (although they then turn out pretty funny with her knowing stuff all the others don’t). She has two male friends in the school with which she playes baseball and hangs out all day. But as more as she jumps through time to have fun all day long she realizes that maybe, if only good things happen to her, more bad things will come to others.

The movie is a rather unique time-travelling movie, with more focus on the moral and philosophy of ones doings, and with the central phrase the charakters learn in english class, “Time waits for no one.”

Besides a few scenes the movie is relatively action-free (i.e. there are no big explosions, but still action happens between and to the characters, just not on a action-film level), but it had everything else a movie need to succed: Loveable characters all with their little quirks, a really interesting story, very funny moments, sad moments, moments of romance and, while not an ending with everything one could wish for, and ending with everything one could hope for.

It is really a feel-good movie, with the ultimate motto of “seize the day” and “do things as your heart tells you to”. The last time I have seen such a heartwarming movie was probably Tim Burton’s Big Fish.

I can only recommend this masterpiece to everyone interesting in anime, or good storytelling and interesting characters. And although the Wikipedia entry only mentions the Japanese and German DVD releases (amazon.com only lists the region 3 DVDs, but with english subtitles still so that is an option), the film was shown on canadian and american film festivals so it is bound to be released in the US too.

And on a last side-note: The anime is based on a story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, whos other film adaptation was Paprika which was also a very philosophical flick about dreams in the real world, only bound by imagination.

Step 1: Take a rock video

Step 2: ???

Step 3a: Make a similar song and video referencing oversold and former popstars instead of living-on-the-edge rockstars, and use image samples instead of real video footage to make is look poorly done, but focus on the lyrics:

Step 3b: Use the exact same video, but add characters from a game to it, and write a song about the game:

And if the sidekick happens to be male and saves a heroine from the brink of death (or vice versa) they usually breath with their last words something akin to “I love you”, which according to Hollywood laws the hero/heroine has to respond to with “I will always love you” or something kitschy like that.
While this surely is a nice gesture for the dying person, it is all too often used in movies, and fiction in general. When grave danger awaits the protagonist, someone has to step up and sacrifice him- or herself for the greater good. Yada yada. Obi Wan did it in Star Wars to get Luke and the others an escape route, Bruce Willis did it in Armageddon for his daughter and her fiance, Boromir did it for Merry and Pip in the Lord of the Rings, and countless others did it too.
So, apparently, the story-act of a character sacrificing him- or herself for a more relevant character is often employed and people are kinda used to it. But here I have to add that especially in Hollywood movies the sacrifice normally happens all of a sudden when the to-be-saved character wouldn’t expect it; i.e. the sacrificee jumps around the corner to catch a bullet for the protagonist or some such thing. Getting shot, stabbed, etc. - things movies and stories often employ. Getting beaten to a bloody pulp is not often seen, because it is much more gruesome. And exactly that (and much more cruel things) happen to the sacrificial character I want to write about in this post:

This is Judeo from the manga Berserk, after getting his hand chewed, his back whipped and his chest stabbed by demons, while trying to save the love of the main protagonist (Guts), Casca. And although one as a reader could have picked up that Judeo himself was interested in more than just friendship and camaraderie with Casca, he did never say such a thing.
Why there are demons attacking and devouring them doesn’t matter to make my point, and it would spoil the story too much too (knowing that Judeo will die is a big enough spoiler already). It are the two very last pages of his life that matter only:
As I said before, at least I am pretty used to see characters die as a sacrifice to save others, and I have seen a lot of horror and splatter movies, mangas and animes where people die gruesome deaths. But never before has the death of a character touched me more, emotionally, than Judeo’s. That is because it is the most personal death I have ever seen. How much more personal can it get, than to watch something through the characters eyes?

“Are those my last words?”, “I’m glad to see - you cry”“; Just reading and writing these very two lines makes me shiver again. It is so very honest, personal, human. The last thoughts of a dying man, as seen through his own eyes. To me, this death scene is more gruesome and touching at the same time, than every on-screen death I have ever seen. Sure, the medic in Saving Private Ryan died a tragic death as did lots of others, but never before could you see the last moments through a dying ones eyes.


And the saddest thing is perhaps that she would never know that he was in love with her. Because only in Hollywood have the dying a chance to say “I love you” as their last words before they close their eyes. Life (and mangas) are another matter:

Those two pages I have to say are the most touching (to me) thing I have ever seen or read in fiction. Can’t get anymore personal than that scene.


Phew, what a long post, but at least I got time again to post my thoughts here… and I hope that I got you interested in Berserk, if so, you should try out The Hawks and Evil Genius if you can’t get your hands on the manga (because, as in germany, older volumes may not be available anymore, and newer volumes take their time to come out).

I am pretty much swamped with work right now, programming the interface and protocoll for our new machine, doing the system administration stuff (as there is always something wrong when Windows systems are involved) so I’ll keep the posts short and witty for a while. But the long stuff will come back too, I promise.

So here’s for now, a name generator that translates your name into japanese kanji, arabic, hindi, hieroglyphs and even Tengwar (elfen script from J.R.R. Tolkien).

Found on the Thinking Blog.

“When goblins blow themselves up, it’s called stupidity.
When humans do it, it’s called heroism.”

Shock Troops [Magic: the Gathering Card] flavor text

P.S. All work and no play make me go… something… something…

But somehow CNN probably thought it would interest much more people to hear about “Sheryl Crows toilet paper square”, “Heather Mills tumbling out of a dance show” or that a suspect bolted out of a local court room “hollering for mom”.

I never really thought of CNN as one of the best news around, there are lots of better informed ones, and especially more objective ones. But this frontpage just screams “boulevard tabloid” to me:

Found on the Applegeeks Blog

I just wish that you would actually be able to do all these crazy moves in the video games!

Anyway, I saw the movie 300 a few days ago, and while I really wanted to like it, the best thing about it I can say is that the action was very cool. Story- and character-wise I would have anticipated more from the creator of Sin City.

But nontheless, this edition of VG Cats is genius, mixing Mario and the probably most-shown-scene from 300:

And it’s true, Windows Vista does that kind of things to you!

Yesterday I watched Children of Men, a movie I haven’t heard of before seeing it in the “new releases” stand at the local video store. The blurb read interesting so I borrowed it. And what a great and fascinating movie it was!
I’ll try not to spoil the story for you, but the essence of it is: It is the year 2027, mankind is practically infertile, there has been no baby born sind about 18 years now. Britain is very isolated and tries to keep all the (illegal) immigrants from the mainland under control - with extremely harsh restrictions and lots of violence from the police and army. Everything is very dystopian, the world seems at its end.
But then a pregnant african-american woman surfaces, and the story around our everyman hero Theo (Clive Owen), his ex-wife and resistance-leader Julian (Julianne Moore) and their friends and foes begins to unfold.
That basically is the beginning, anything more and the spoilage would be too much, but rest assured, this is no Hollywood production where protagonists magically dodge bullets.

Anyway, the visual style of the movie is deeply impressing. In a world of ultra-fast-cut MTV-style action flicks, Children of Men scores with extremly long takes, documentary-style camerawork and of course, its brilliant character actors. The longest take in particular, that I had to watch 3 times in a row just to believe there wasn’t any cut in it, is as follows:
Our heroes are running through a dark tunnel towards the street where there is heavy fighting. They come along a T-crossing where some random guys get shot, there they get stormed by the resistance and are nearly executed on the spot. All of a sudden their would-be executers are shot themselves, and the party is on the run through the street again, with the camera chasing behind them. All this time there are cars coming around corners, people getting shot left and right, families running around and hiding, and so on. They get around a few corners, ride through a shot-up bus, and then watch as army troops shoot a building where the resistance hides with tanks. Between two shots they get into the building and up the stairs where there is more shooting and explosions. They don’t know what to do when tank shells explode on the walls of the building and troops come storming in.

The take doesn’t end here, but anything more and the ending would be really spoiled if you haven’t seen this brilliant movie.
I really love movies with long takes and slow cuts, because it emphasizes the actors (and cameracrews) performance on screen, and this one here did particularly well in that respect. Anyone can shoot 2 second takes and cut them together in the editing room so a half-way good movie comes out of it. But working with long takes really brings the actors to their limit, because everyone know if (s)he fucks up, the take is gone and there have to be another 5 or so hours of preparing the next take.

Apart from the brilliant execution, Children of Men is an inspiring movie about hope, the ability to stand above racism and see mankind as a whole, and loyality to one owns friends.
On top of all that I dig the fact that the movie has Michael Caine smoking and growing pot as a die-hard hippie. He cites the fact that in 2027 there are instant-death pills available everywhere (called “Quietus”) but Cannabis is still illegal. Food for thought.

At last, one of the biggest music distribution companies, EMI, is going to ditch the Digital Rights Management DRM. The company will offer all songs of their artists first on Apples iTunes store, but will charge a bit more per song (album prices stay the same) for better quality and a file free of DRM.
The only band still not available online are the Beatles, whos company Apple Corps still doesn’t want their songs to be downloadable.

Source: derStandard.at [german]
More information:

• EMI press release [emigroup]

• EMI unlocks anti-piracy software on music [reuters]
• Beatles catalog not in Apple deal [Forbes]

There isn’t much information in the trailer (as was expected) but now it is clear at last that the next part of the franchise will be settled in New York.

“The Secretary-General of the UN can be distinguished from the General-Secretary of the UN in that whilst one is in charge of the entire world, the other types letters and answers phone calls.”

from Wikipedia, “Ye olde Badd Giokes and other deleetid Nonsense” [sic]

Inspired by Cheers Beer [Dan’s blog].

Do you know Jack? If you don’t, it’s no problem at all, because You don’t know Jack is back!

But the franchise isn’t coming back to CD-ROM games (or DVD-games nowadays), now it is a free online flash-game in your browser. Sweet!

Cookie, You don’t know Jack’s moderator of old is back with it too, and he is as witty and as cruel if you answer a question wrong as ever.
Each week a new episode is released featuring several questions, including a DisOrDat as well as Jack Attack round.

So wherever you are, be it at work, at home or even at the beach, go to www.youdontknowjack.com and play a few rounds of this great game, you might even learn something (you will laugh, that is for sure).

Found on: Dan’s Blog

Last year Google bought YouTube for 1,65 billion dollars - and now the aftermath has hit the fan: Viacom, owner of such tv stations as Nickelodeon and MTV, is filing a lawsuit against Google for “massive intentional copyright infringement”. The statement goes on, “In fact, YouTube strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.”

This is the first major company to go after the Google/YouTube connection and its alleged copyright infringement. If it goes well (for Viacom) maybe others will try to jump the wagon too. Only time and probably judges will tell what becomes of YouTube when major tv players go hunting for it.

More Information: “Viacom sues Google and YouTube” [guardian unlimited]

That’s what happens when even big broadcasting stations like NBC don’t check the sources their images come from. This one’s probably off of Google Images. “So good you’ll suck dick” - the anchorwoman even looks like she knew what was being shown there on the screenshot.

If such obscurities bring even a little smile to your face, the following page might be worth a visit: Unusual articles on the english Wikipedia

Read more: Students assessed with Wikipedia [BBC]

But back to gmail itself: There is even more to it, you can use it as your personal nerve center, doing things such as: Using gmail as a personal database, getting real-time news updates, bookmarking, calendar and todo lists, and even write blog entries via mail.

Read more: Turn Gmail into your personal nerve center [micropersuasion]

I don’t know why Microsoft doesn’t get it that a flashy interface isn’t exactly the same as a resourceful and efficient interface. The first may get the product some new customers because it does look rather with all the eye candy, but the latter is what binds the consumers to the product - that you can do your work efficient and without the interface always getting in your way.

More information:

• ‘Tricorder’ Sensor Has Real-Life Promise [photonics]
• We’re one step closer to Star Trek [neoseeker]

What?

Not the idea. They still think they were right there. They just overestimated the ability of certain policy makers to be able to pull it all off. Vanity Fair has an eye-opening article online that details their current thoughts on the matter. An article that illustrates the idea that friends can be the harshest critics…

read more on Neo Culpa: Politics & Power

The courses they provide are manifold: ranging from “Aeronautics and Astronautics” through “Music and Theater Arts” to “Writing and Humanistic Studies”. A great opportunity for everyone that wants to learn new and exciting stuff!

Pro golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is teed off over what he calls defamatory statements about him on Wikipedia.

But instead of suing the popular online reference site, Zoeller is taking a swing at a Miami company. In a lawsuit filed last week in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, Zoeller — suing under the name John Doe — alleged the statements were posted from a computer belonging to Josef Silny & Associates.

read more on MiamiHerald.com

Just a terrific still frame from Berserk.

(click the above image for a wallpaper-quality version)

The song has got some great lyrics about oppressive bosses and stressed out programmers too, available here, if you want to read them to the song.

… would normally be out of our reach. Yes, you can argue that about 4 million people are going to have sex just now, 15 million are sleeping in their bed, and around 9 million are surfing the web just this moment. Don’t sue me on these numbers, they are completely unrelated, and everyone knows 96% of statistics are made up on the spot anyway.

If you would like to take a look at what random people from all over the world are doing just now, the new fad when it comes to publishing your thoughts online might be Twitter.
It’s a sort-of-blog where you can register and then answer the only question they ask you there, over and over: “What are you doing?”
Then you will see yourself in the twitter timeline together with what all the other user have done or are doing at the moment. More or less another service mankind didn’t really need to surive, but a fancy thing nontheless. I like to give the site a visit whenever I am bored on the net, i.e. when I’m at work.

Also there is the option to use Twitter productively [lifehack.org]

“To better understand this thing we call ‘the bluff’, I did what any creditable researcher would do and I Googled the hell out of it. I gave the word an unmerciful Googling, the kind of Googling you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. From my intensive research, I learned that “bluff” is a verb that means roughly ‘to deceive by pretending to be something you aren’t,’ a noun that means ‘an act of bluffing’ […]”

Chris Millar, “Rough, Tough, Etc.” [mtg.com]

Browse through all the Fraud of the Rings comics at Tolkien Gateway.

Having trouble keeping up-to-date with your favourite weblogs and/or news sites? Don’t want to install just another program to read those handy RSS feeds almost any website has today?
Then maybe RSSfwd is for you. It’s a service where you just have to enter a feed and an e-mail address and the magic is right on its way to you: From now on you will get the updates on the selected feed as e-mails - especially handy if you got sophisticated labels and filters in your mail application (web Gmail that would be for me) so your feeds get automatically categorized and archived.

And because I mentioned filters and Gmail, a quick and last aside: Using Gmail to… [ExtremeTech article]

Around 2 weeks ago Microsoft released Windows Vista to the public. The consent from the masses is divided, some hail it for the security features, some for the usability, but most (including me) just fail to understand what makes it so better than XP, and especially why an operating system need such highend hardware to run smoothly.

Also around 2 weeks ago, PC World released two articles called “15 Reasons to Switch” and “Wait! Don’t buy Vista“. I’ll list their 15 supposed reasons to switch and the 6 reasons to stay with XP here and give me own comments on them, because frankly, most of the info from the first article sounds like it came straight from Microsoft PR. So prepare for the view of a programmer, network admin and freelancing web-designer on these reasons pro & con Windows Vista:

15 Reasons to Switch - I don’t think so…

1. “It’s the Interface, Stupid”
   The new interface is probably the number 1 hardware monster in Vista. Flashy animated menus, a 3D taskswitcher, transparent windows, etc. Who needs this anyway? I haven’t seen too much users that still have the flashy Luna theme that came with XP - either they downloaded a smoother theme or used the old classic Windows theme. Flashy is not the same as userfriendly!
2. “Flip Over Windows Flip 3D”
   As I said on the first issue, who needs that 3D taskswitcher? Those users that want a really flashy OS are better served with Media Center Edition or other such OS’s and the ones that want to work (and/or game) efficiently on their machine will still have to endure the slowdown that the feature produces especially on machines older than a year.
3. “Live Thumbnails”
   Okay, I admit that feature is kind of nice, especially because the thumbnail is live and therefore will play a video if the program does it and so forth.
4. “Boost Performance With ReadyBoost”
   When the OS is performing lowgrade, you just put in another tool to boost the performance? Great idea… but wouldn’t it be better to have the system itself perform better in the first way?
5. “Cool Performance Tools”
   Well okay, nice to have. But I have tons of these already working on my harddrive, all of them freeware.
6. “Better Security”
   The only thing that really is better than XP, because comparable to Linux when you try to do something only an admin could do, you get a login dialog so that you will have admin rights only for this operation and can then continue to surf the web or whatever you did without the crucial admin rights.
7. “Find Anything Fast With Search”
   One word: Google Desktop Search. Okay that were three, but an URL sure has to count as a single word right? desktop.google.com
8. “Nifty Software Gadgets”
   Everthing that Vista wants to have as “new gadgets” was already available since aons on Linux systems, and even on windows machines as Freeware like Desktop Sidebar or many others.
9. “Better Wireless Networking”
   WLAN without a hassle when you try to connect to a network after using your laptop in another wireless network? I’ll believe it as soon as I see it.
10. “Map Your Network”
    Nothing else than another way to view the network neighborhood in essence.
11. “Better Graphics With Windows Photo Gallery”
    IrfanView for viewing, PhotoShop for editing. Nothing comes even close.
12. “Become a Director With Windows Movie Maker”
    Windows Movie Maker was already in XP. And it was crap. Okay some amateur (video) editors may have used the program to cut a few holiday videos, but nothing good has come of it. If you really want to edit video professionally, you want to use Pinnacle Studio, Adobe Premiere or the most highend, an Avid.
13. Better Notebook Support”
    Wow, I can turn on and off my wireless adapter from within Windows? I can do that now on XP as well with the laptop tools provided by the manufactor. And to top that, Windows XP uses a lot less hardware power and therefore battery life power so it will run longer than Vista.
14. “File Sharing and Syncing”
    I admit being able to sync different directories over the network without any installed tool is kinda nice.
15. “Protect Your Kids With Parental Controls”
    Yada Yada Yada, “Killergames”, “Erfurt”, “Columbine”, Yada Yada Yada. If you spend quality time and conversation with your child it won’t need to be locked out of the PC, and it surely won’t shoot random people just because it was able to do so on a screen. I’m not saying 5 year olds should play Doom 3, but reasonable parents should come up with something else than just locking them out without a reason.

And now, for something completely different!

Wait! Don’t buy Vista - That’s my kind of talk…

1. “Vista Is Incomplete”
   Indeed it is. Hotfixes and Servicepacks come out for every Windows. But there have to be drivers available at launch too. Surround sound, for instance, only works with certain Creative cards and not with most others, those only output stereo. nVidia and ATI graphic card drivers are still in beta, etc. Why switch from a perfectly fine running system to a proably broken system if I can’t even install all the drivers needed?
2. “Vista Is Expensive”
   Indeed it is. And Vista Ultimate is the only version I’d settle with.
3. “Vista Wants a New PC”
   If you PC is older than a year Vista probably won’t run as smoothly as you see in the presentation videos. 2(!) Gigabyte of RAM is heavily recommended for it, a number that was before reserved to gaming stations and CAD machines or the likes, is now needed by a simple operating systems?
4. “Vista Is Time-Consuming”
   Well once it is truly running it probably won’t be, but until then, good luck. Again the thought comes to mind, “never touch a running system” - why spend days of work installing and configuring a new system when the old one is perfectly fine?
5. “Windows XP Isn’t Obsolete”
   Everything I said here written in one italic sentence.
6. “Vista May be the Best Reason Yet to Buy a Mac”
   Well I didn’t expect that as a reason not to buy Vista! But there is truth behind the statement: If you have to get your employees used to Windows Vista, you might as well get them used to a mac, and in the meantime do away with virus problems and all the likes that bug Windows.

Read more about the Hidden Costs of a Windows Vista Upgrade.

According to a press release, Intel was able to produce a single CPU with 80 cores, that is able to deliver 1 Teraflop (1 trillion operations per second).

The now-called Teraflops Research Chip is composed of a total of 80 independent processing cores, which Intel refers to as tiles. The tiles are organized in rectangular fashion, with 8 tiles placed across and 10 down, adding up to a total of 80.

Though the company has no plans to release the 80 core chip to the public market, it claims that it offered specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth interconnects and energy management approaches.

We’ll see what will come of it. In the meanwhile you can read more about the project here:

• DailyTech
• PhysOrg
• New York Times
• International Herald Tribune

It all happened on the 28th of March in 2003. The second Iraq war just started 7 days ago. Two US A-10 tankbusters are flying their mission. After they attack a convoy of what they believe to be enemy rocket launchers, the truth is made clear to the two pilots while still in the air circling their prey:

Hey, POPOV34, abort your mission. You got a, looks we might have a blue on blue situation.

Friendly fire. Probably known to man since man started wars (so since the beginning of mankind that would be..?). But in modern times, with all the advancement in weapons and armors, and especially the way the military “advertises” their strategy, that of a “surgical strike”, friendly fire still happens a lot. And when it happens it is almost always deadly.

Yeah, I know that thing with the orange panels is going to screw us. They look like orange rockets on top.

More than two years passed since the incident was in the news. But today it came up once again because british the Sun newspaper revealed a tape recording the actions and dialogue of the pilots and their home stations on the mission. The controversy around the subject is that the US government tried to hide the tape for two full years, and now at last it is brought to light.

More information via the Sun:

• Joy at direct hit turns to horror
• Cockpit video stuns world
• The tape they wanted to hide

Found on: the thinking blog and must have GIZMOS respectively.

Hooray, no spam here!

GMail message in Spam folder upon finding no entries in there

That message just flickered on my screen while I was cleaning up my GMail account, filtering and labeling everything I had bunched up in my inbox, so now it is neatly ordered. Anyway most “professional” programs just use the standard yes/no/cancel dialogs and all the stuff standard libraries give you. But I was always a digger for the unusual (error) messages, like the great game Civilization III, where the dialog to quit the game wasn’t prompted with yes/no but “Get me the hell out of here!” and “No I’d rather stay.” respectivily.
Another funny - while probably not intendet that way - message will be output by most BIOS’s when there is no keyboard connected to the PC:

Keyboard not found. Hit F1 to continue

Yeah right. I’ hit the imaginary F1 button on my imaginary keyboard that I connected to the imaginary USB port over there.
But as usual, the best stuff comes from linux/unix systems. If your user entry cannot be found in /etc/passwd on some systems, you might get

You don’t exist. Go away.

• Just what do you think you’re doing Dave?
• That’s something I cannot allow to happen.
• This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

If only there would be more Windows programs that would abandon the standard dialog boxes and use their own individual messages, life@windows would be much more fun…

DJ Wiij [prounounced deejay wee-jay]: the original bluetooth wireless dj control setup using Wiimotes.

A very interesting application for the Wii remote controller indeed. Check out the technique and features over at the site DJ Wiij.
They are using a freeware application called GlovePie, that is able to recognize the Wii remote controller as an input device for the computer, and with that program they than control the (digital) turntables. There are a few scripts already available for GlovePie, and it features much more than just the Wiimote, e.g. Gamepads, Joysticks and even VR Gloves.

Just if you are wondering what the banner above this line displays, it’s the Google logo in braille. Anyway, I am using Google mail since about half a year now, after a presentation at a friends place convinced me that sorting mails by conversation is extremly convenient. The only not-so-good thing about gmail is that is does not support PGP encryption. But there are some clever plugins (mostly javascript) that enable the webmail to do even more than it normally does:
First, there’s the complete collection over at GmailTips.com and a very interesting guide I found on another blog - Hack Attack: become a Gmail master. The latter site, Lifehacker is especially nice for so-called geeks and in general everyone who wants to be more efficient when using their computer.

That kind of deadpan humor happens when dynamic pages get created with database entries sometimes. I don’t think that anyone who wants to “break” this “record” would first announce it to Guinness…

I already wrote about how funny the 30-second Bunny Theatre from Angry Alien Productions are almost two years ago. I almost forgot about the sheer craziness that evolves when bunnies re-enact famous movies, and when they don’t have more than 30 seconds time to pull off the particular story. So without much further ado, I’ll just take you to the latest entries from the troupe:

Borat: Cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Bunzakhstan
Brokeback Mountain
Caddyshack
Fight Club
Highlander
King Kong
Pulp Fiction
Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark
Reservoir Dogs
The Ring
Rocky
Star Wars
Superman Returns
War of the Worlds

The most laughs I definately got out of the Star Wars one: not only does it feature outtakes which no other of the features has, but there is a short frame of the famous Cantina, and the bunnies hum the cantina melody - how sweet! And of course the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs ones are great too, especially the scene with Butch, Marsellus and Zed from the first one. Here all the bunnies have to say after the humiliating scene is “We cool?” - “We cool!”

Experience teaches that, of all the emotions, fear stands alone in its power to move us, or to capture us in its grip forever. In a world of terrors, there is nothing more fearsome that the unknown…especially when what is unknown is ourselves.

The Outer Limits

LiteStep, Sphere XP, GeoShell, I have tried lots of alternative shell replacements for the user-unfriendly and unefficient Windows Explorer. As an aside, I still cannot figure out, why Microsoft has to make explorer.exe the shell, file manager and browser - if one of them crashes it will pull the others down with it into the data abyss. Anyway, I was never truly satisfied with any of the shell replacements - Talisman was too slow and clunky, LiteStep (while being probably the most-customizable of them all) too bug-laden, Sphere XP too funky and GeoShell was on the side of LiteStep. Also there is always the problem when you have a system crash or need to reinstall the OS, all your flashy desktop features will probably be lost in oblivion, and some applications and especially full-screen ones don’t work too well with the shells.

But now I may have found revelation where I did not suspect it - the data storage folder on the netdrive of my new workplace. The name of this little application is Desktop Sidebar. It is not a shell replacement, rather a shell enhancement. A sticky sidebar for the left or right (or anywhere else) side of the desktop which is highly customizable. Although it isn’t Open Source it still is Freeware and doesn’t come with any spyware attached. On the website there is also a community place with lots of useful plugins and skins.
This sidebar is just like a regular application that can be loaded when Windows starts, but it also can fully replace the standard taskbar if you choose to. I for myself really like to have a neatly ordered space on my desktop where I see if I got new mails (and from whom and about what those are), control Winamp, check the latest news, blogs and comics via RSS feeds, play a little sudoku, and of course - manage up to 4 virtual desktops, which no “cool” shell should miss.

So if you are generally interested in making your workspace more efficient (and stylish if you like) you should give the sidebar a try.

That Murat Kurnaz - a turkish citizen and legal german resident - was imprisoned for 5 years in Guantanamo Bay, is old news already. At last he was released from his agony in august 2006 and shipped back to Germany. News agencies around the world covered the evolution of his sad story: Spiegel, BBC, Washington Post, Deutsche Welle, International Herald Tribune, Yahoo!, and countless more.

But also german right-wing boulevard tabloid BILD covered the story all the way through, and of course according to their point of view. On January, 31st one of the tabloids daily commentary authors, Franz Josef Wagner wrote the following in his column “Mail from Wagner“:

Sie hätten den Häftling erlösen, befreien können. Sie haben es aber nicht gemacht. Ich hätte es übrigens auch nicht gemacht.
[…]
Der Bremer Türke ist für mein Leben nicht so wichtig. Wichtig ist für mich die Sicherheit.

Translation:
You [the government] could have freed the prisoner, redeemed him. But you did not. I wouldn’t have done it either.
[…]
The Turk from Bremen isn’t crucial for my life. Only safety matters to me.

If he had written “I do not care about the life or death of any random turk, I only care about my own personal safety and the pureness of Germany” it’d carry the same message, but at least it’d be the honest truth (of what Wagner and most of BILD think) and not some kitsch that tries to emulate journalism.

Just recently I found a website which offers “free” cellphone games for downloading, without any subscription added. I put the free in quotes because usually when it comes to software for cellphones, smartphones and PDAs nothing is completely free of charge. Anyway, the name of the site: GameJump. The premise of the site: Offering free cellphone games with the presumption that advertisements will pay the bills.
So I got there, all psyched up about all the free games that are about to happen to my new cellphone, and although it was not exactly what I expected, it was a pleasent surprise non the less.
When I thought “ads pay the bills” I thought there would be a lot of pop-ups and annoying banners on the website where you download the cellphone games. But there was just the usual one or two banners per page. Flash-forward to downloading the first game, Ghost Hunter RPG (a little roleplaying game with turn-based battles á la Final Fantasy) - you don’t have to register on the site, you don’t even have to specify your carrier and phone number. There is the option to do so, and then you will get your game sent to your phone ASAP, but the second and third option provide safer results: getting a link that you can surf to with your cellphone to download the file directly, or just downloading the file onto the computer and sending it to the phone via USB, bluetooth, etc.
So far, so good. I entered the quick-link into the phone, and moments later I had the game saved on the memory stick.

Upon first starting the game came the great revelation then - the game wants (sometimes, not every start) to shortly connect to the internet in order to load an (picture) advertisement before you’ll play it.
That information really took me by surprise because I haven’t seen such a business model before. And I have to admit, although I hate aggressive advertisement, this one is alright - no flashy screen, no sound, just some message from your “sponsor”. And with todays competition on the cellphone market (at least in europe) GPRS transfer prices aren’t high anymore, so downloading a simple picture won’t cost more than sending a simpleSMS.

So, for everyone who is disgusted by the horrible subscription fees that Jamba/Jamster & Co charge, but is still interested in pastime games, GameJump may be a very wellcome alternative.

Until then, may your MP3 ringtones not give any eldery person a heart attack upon ringing.

If you are going to be worried every time the universe doesn’t make sense, you are going to be worried every moment of every day for the rest of your natural life.

Citizen G’Kar

Source: Yahoo!

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

Robert Benchley

So true. Too true. I am at work now, it is friday afternoon and the weekend is about to start. Everyone is listening to music or comedy MP3s and tries to get the last few hours of work to pass - although everyone would have something else to do.

And I for one don’t think demons ought to be Paladins. Well neither are Blood Elfs per se, but the unofficial title for Elf Paladins is Blood Knight, so at least from a fluff view that is almost correct.
But the backstory of the Draenai… is another matter, one which Dark Legacy Comics put into view much better than I could describe it with words:

>> “Sci Fi” at Dark Legacy Comics

In memory of all the joy Elisabeth Volkmann brought to the german speaking Simpsons and Comedy communities alike.

Kinder Eggs containing toys are not suitable for children under the age of three due to the small parts which may be ingested or inhaled. They are sold all over the world, however they are banned in the United States where the Food and Drug Administration has deemed the encapsulated toy to be a choking hazard. Kinder Egg-like confections are available, but only in a form filled with small candies and/or stickers. There are some stores in the United States that sell genuine Kinder Eggs, often in conjunction with other imported British or other European sweets, although their importation is technically illegal due to the FDA ban.
(from Wikipedia)

That’s right. In the country where every twenty-something can legally buy a gun, small toys encapsulated in a chocolate egg are banned because they are “hazardous”. Ah, the sweet smell of irony.

But at least, according to the Washington Post there a a few remaining resisters which still sell this product of terror. Viva la Revolution!

On a sidenote, watching videos and flash animations never quite worked flawlessly for me with Firefox. But there is a very useful extension called IEtab which displays sites within firefox but with the Internet Explorer engine, so stuff that works in IE works in firefox too.

World of Warcraft. What a huge timesink.

Anyway, I finally pushed myself to try out Gmail, Google’s eMail service after seeing it in action at a friends. And it really has a very intuitive user interface. And nice options. And a chat with other Gmail users. Of course there is still the man in the back of my head saying “Google information is not safe dude!” but it offers so much stuff, and with all the other services you get with the account, extreme personalization. I just love the google personalized home, where I put stuff like quotes of the moment, google news relevant to me, or even the last eMails received in Gmail.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

- Stephen Hawking

Just read on the net, that, finally, a portation of the ever-will-be-classic Doom is available for the Apple iPod Photo. Although you have to run linux on the pod, but usually running linus on any hardware is more an enhancement than a downgrade. So for all you people out there possessing an iPod Photo check out this site: www.ipodlinux.org/Doom.

Do you know what a handy is? A dressman? An old timer? Probably not if you are a native english speaker. Anglicisms were always and will always be a part of the german language since we first met people speaking english probably a very long time ago. And most of the time, they help us a people communicate - for instance technical terms: it is much easier to talk about a Motherboard and the RAM than to explain to someone what a “Mutterbrett” or a “Zufälliger Zugriffsspeicher” could be.
But there are some things I really do not understand - things which probably some executive name designer at J. Random Company brought to life. Why, for gods (or whoever you care for) sake, do we have to invent english words and phrases in german, when there are perfectly acceptable phrases already there? Maybe because almost every Twen thinks it is cool to throw in random english words, when their grasp of the english language is in reality non-existent.

So to end this rant, I give you a link to some really weird angicisms on Wikipedia.

And for the native english speakers out there, if you were wondering: handy is the “german” word for cellphone, a dressman is a male model, and old timer in “german” does not mean an old man with a stick, rather a vintage car. And a Twen is a twenty-something.

I just realized, while surfing the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), that on there is an entry for “Your mom“. Surprisingly, she was the composer of “Cabin Fever: Beneath the sky”. Just imagine the paradoxon that would come up when your mom was watching a movie where the credits listed “your mom”. ^_^

There’s probably some spoilage ahead. If you haven’t seen “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” yet you shouldn’t probably read on. If you do however, don’t say I didn’t warn you afterwards.

Somewhere in the roaring mass of Wookies is probably Chewbacca standing and shouting. After their furious battle cry they storm forward and engage their druid enemies in a brutal combat. Cut. Obi Wan and Anakin are flying their agile spacecrafts thru a storm of raining fire in an orbital battle scene. Swoosh-Cut (one of the kind that only looks really cool in any Star Wars movie, but looks amateur in every other movie because it is basically one of the standard transitions digital editing suites offer).

Today we watched the latest and last Star Wars movie. And I really liked it, I could say loved it, though not as much as the old incarnations (nothing gets close). What really was brilliant about the movie was the constant feeling of war going on around and the lurking shadow hanging above all things. And the way characters, especially Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader evolved. Especially his reasons in finally giving in to the dark side were completely reasonable and understandable. To save the life of the woman he loves, and their unborn children. What better reason can a man have to fight?

After Episode I “The Jar-Jar Menace” and Episode II “Attack of the Lovescenes” I really hadn’t high expectations about the last one, but I hoped that it would be darker than the first 2 ones. And it really was - though not in visuals, the fights and locations were as bright as ever (ever being Ep I+II) - but in the context of what was going on with the characters and the worlds they inhabit. All this really makes the movie seeable, logically understandable and what it does superb is making the jump back to the old Episodes from times back. And that is a major accompishment even from George Lucas himself.

So to sum this up, if you haven’t done yet, go watch “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” in cinema as soon as possible. That is my only recommendation for today ^_^

I haven’t got much time to do anything else besides studying for exams at collage and playing Guild Wars. So I just resent to showing you some pictures of my ingame characters here:

This is AetherMcLoud, my Ranger/Elementalist, although lately he had to make space for a Player-VS-Player character (damn that 4-char per account limit!)

Alamos Undomiel, my Elementalist/Monk, currently sporting his Pyromancer outfit, although he plans to rework his skill in favor of Air or Earth magic later in the game.

Kitsune Torinasu, a Necromancer/Mesmer showing off her dark minons in the right picture. Mesmer in Guild Wars are the finessé class, they interrupt other warriors, disrupt enemy sorcerers’ spells and so on. Which works pretty well with the Blood & Death based Necromancer class.

Mononoke Hime was already in use as a name, so I baptized her Rei Mononoke. She’s a Warrior/Necromancer and curses her enemies before she strikes them down with vengeance and her sword!

… bestow a monthly fee upon its gamers. Guild Wars that is. Since the first true Massively Multiplayer Onlince Roleplaying Game (MMORPG for short) Ultima Online there were and are many contenders for the throne of this market - Everquest 2, Dark Age of Camelot and Asheron’s Call to name a few. World of Warcraft started a whole new hype for MMORPGs, particularly because it was both easy on beginners to the genre, and also hard to master for the experts - just like all of Blizzard’s games. Though any of these games use completely different worlds, inhabitants, engines and play mechanics, they have one thing in common: first they want money from you for the game on CD/DVD and then they want a monthly fee so you can play the game you just bought.

I recognize that developing games and getting the server farm needed for such bandwidth-heavy online games, and keeping them alive all the time costs (a lot of) money. It’s just that not everyone (and I believe almost noone) can and will play the game in question every day-in day-out. So if you got an exam-ridden time at college, you got another nice game, or for whatever reason you just can’t play the game for some weeks, you are still paying as if you did.

Guild Wars is the first Massively Online game that doesn’t use a monthly-fee system. Instead the publisher will release expansions on a regular basis, but you can still play and even meet people who got the extension, if you didn’t buy it. So you really only play for what you get, and not for what you already got.

Great, at the start I wanted to give a quick review on Guild Wars and point out all the things that are so great about it, but then I quickly driftet into politics and business. So I will just give you some likes to reviews from guys that do them much better than me anyway ^_^

GameSpy Review
pc.IGN.com Review
Game Revolution Review
UGO Review

Can’t write… must… play… Guild Wars…
I had some issues for new topics in mind recently, but I didn’t get to write anything specific down because all my spare time gets used up by the new king of online RPGs (Role Playing Games) - Guild Wars. In the next few days I will publish something more elaborate and in-depth about the game, but at the time I really have to level-up, search for skills and quest, form parties, and generally have a great time in the game world. But for now, just to get you hooked up on the game, a few screenshots from my charactes made:

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/05/20/the-great-time-consumer/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/05/04/and-you-call-me-a-rules-lawyer/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/05/04/and-you-call-me-a-rules-lawyer/#comments Wed, 04 May 2005 21:36:32 +0000 Aetherfukz Outer Rim http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/05/04/and-you-call-me-a-rules-lawyer/

Just read a post on the Games Workshops forums about which rules, rules-updates and FAQs one is supposed to play Warhammer 40k by. Which brought up a though I have about that firm since long time ago: They have all these awesome miniatures, stories, universes and characters, and yet their codices (army specific sub-rulebooks if you want) have ruleholes as big as a sumo-wrestler in it and they bring forth nazi-like policies about their stuff.

As a counterpart to Games Workshop (GW hereafter) I will list Wizards of the Coast because they are the other major player in the otherwise known as geeky or even worse art of playing games (Tabletop and Trading Card games that is). Wizards cashcow is without a doubt Magic the Gathering. Sure the cards aren’t particularly cheap, but especially when you start buying individual cards you need rather than hoping to get some good card in a random booster pack, you won’t spend as much as you have to on a nice and shiny Warhammer 40k army, models, painting stuff, books and all.

Anyway, to get to the punch line: Games Workshops rulebooks get revisions like 1 or 2 weeks after release. And of course if you want those revisions nicely printed you have to buy a new book, or download them from the net (if they are nice to you), or often you have to buy their monthly magazine to get the latest updates. So after a while you have like your rulebook, codex, 5 sites of printed out FAQ text, a few magazines with erratas and so on.
Wizards on the other hand update the texts on their cards regularly, and when they find a loop in one of the rules they will close it immediately. Also they have constands, as in daily, updates, news, tips, articles, rants, features, tactics and more on their website. GW, while having a forum per sé, have a policy about their stuff that isn’t funny anymore. I mean I can fully understand wanting to license and copyright your work and all. But closing threads and banning people because they quoted 2 lines of text from the rulebooks to proof some point or show something that doesn’t quite fit with that rule is nothing but rude and (for a lack of a better term) Micro$oft-ish.

Now, to finally come to the conclusion of this rant: Wizards primary sales come from their cards, which they of course copyrighted, but they give the players an always up-to-date rules library and articles on the hobby to really keep them at bay and into the game. It is understandable that they want to let everyone know, when some card or art from them is shown somewhere that it comes from them.
Now what would GW do in such a situation? Right, sue everyone that uses images from you on their private homepage that they made because they love the hobby and want to tell people about it. Or stop letting other stores selling your stuff and therefore giving you money passivly and just sell everything via your shops that are like 1 per 50 kilometers at best.
What Wizards did was the following: They coded Autocard. Now you only have to implement 2 lines of javascript into your website and can make links to every card (image) they ever produced in a nice and shiny popup window from your site. Now that’s what I call a good decision both marketing- and player-wise.

So does this mean that GWs primary sales come from rulebooks too because they guard their written rules like a 6 inch diamond? Of course not, their biggest sales come from their miniatures - so keeping everything that evolves around them, like making good rules for fun games with your expensive minatures would be a good idea.
Of course I know about next to nothing about big business strategies, I only see 2 very different companies with 2 very different approaches to 2 very similar markets.

I hope GW will somehow get a huge market decrease to let them think about their position again, may it be for the first time. Now excuse me while I kiss the sky.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/05/04/and-you-call-me-a-rules-lawyer/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/27/joint-iq-4-mail-iq-10/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/27/joint-iq-4-mail-iq-10/#comments Wed, 27 Apr 2005 21:05:00 +0000 Aetherfukz The Real World http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/27/joint-iq-4-mail-iq-10/

The british-based TNS Research group found out that constantly checking Mails at work, writing SMS’ and stuff like that drops a workers’ IQ temporarily by 10. Smoking a Joint only lets the IQ drop by 4 for some time. Very interesting, indeed… ^_^

You can read the whole article over here at CNN.com.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/27/joint-iq-4-mail-iq-10/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/23/planned-and-real-time/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/23/planned-and-real-time/#comments Sat, 23 Apr 2005 20:50:57 +0000 Aetherfukz The Real World http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/23/planned-and-real-time/

After the last week of more or less chaotic planning, today we finally got to the first day of filming our current shortmovie, “Catch Mr. Parker”. Anyway we wanted to start shooting all our outside shots at 8 am, and finish at like 3 to 5 pm. Of course, what really happened was, shooting started at around 9 am, and we finished at half past 8 in the evening. Thing is, on such occasions you (or at least, I) plan ahead the day, like “smooth I can makeup lost hours of sleep from yesterday this evening if we finish early”. And then you hit home at 10 pm completely exhausted, and the next day will start at 8 am with shooting again.

Thank god I got a free monday after this weekend ^_^

But as hard and long as the day was, our pictures takes were smoothly done, and we finished all the work we planned for today at last. And when the team is good, reliable and nice to each other, working is half as exhausting and double the fun.
Well I guess it will be often if not always like then out in the movie industry after I finish my studies, but I can only hope that the teams are as comfortable as here then too. It’s really as the old saying goes, “hope dies last” ^_^

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/23/planned-and-real-time/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/13/the-story-of-our-lives/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/13/the-story-of-our-lives/#comments Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:35:48 +0000 Aetherfukz Film Fanatics http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/13/the-story-of-our-lives/

Good Music. Good Video. Good Animation. One Eyed Films’ “I love Death” tries to re-capture famous and not-so-famous memories of live and put them into a neat animation and a good song. Which I have to admit, it does very well.
Oh, and the music from the video is from the Helsinki-based band Lodger, their website with their songs from the debut album and other videos like this can be found at lodger.tv. This seems to be the bands official music video, but I don’t know if it runs on finnish television or is just made for the internet - but they should broadcast more alternative videos like this on MTViva rather than the standard band-is-playing-to-some-footage kind of videos.
I really love the way all their videos are completely politically incorrect though in a nice and witty way. But I hate that their website has a really aweful navigation where you have to spin a one armed bandit in order to get to the menu entries. So I will post here the actual links to the other videos or, where the website just wouldn’t show the actual link, a mirror site:

I love Death
Doorsteps
24 Hour Candy Machine
God has rejected the Western World

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/13/the-story-of-our-lives/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/10/get-perpendicular/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/10/get-perpendicular/#comments Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:27:23 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/10/get-perpendicular/

I found this little Flash animation very funny and entertaining. In its heart it is a advertisement for Hitachis new harddrive technology, but it is deliciously executed, and you even learn something about harddrive techniques in general!

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/10/get-perpendicular/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/07/disneys-wwii-propaganda/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/07/disneys-wwii-propaganda/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:43:04 +0000 Aetherfukz Film Fanatics http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/07/disneys-wwii-propaganda/

World War II is one thing. Propaganda is another, although closely intervened with the former. Disney is a whole other thing, one should think at least. But Disney did a lot of really cliché propaganda flicks during the war, including most of their leading characters at the time. Also uncle Scrootch (Dagobert Duck for the german readers) was introduced at that era, as the cruel and (axis-) money-loving uncle to Donald.
Anyway, the 2 most popular (while still not really popular at all) warflicks I will review here. They aren’t, at least to my knowledge, anywhere available on the www, at least not hosted on a free site. You can get them thru various file sharing tools though, like Kazaa (Lite), EDonkey and others. So without much further ado, down to the reviews of the 2 shortmovies…

Just to make it clear from the beginning: I despise everything the nazis did in World War II. I did not, do not, and will never be attracted to anti-semitism or war in general. But neither do I like war-propaganda, from which source it may ever roam. All I want to try with this post is inform you about the propaganda the US made in the war - and how much they sometimes disturbed and clichéd their enemies to strenghten the loathe for those people in the own population.

“Der Fuehrer’s Face”

This one starts out with german soldiers walking the field making military music. They walk the now-forbidden scissor-stride (don’t know the exact english word for it, but you get the point from the pictures. They walk with their legs streched out, not bending their knees). Also everything in the landscape is swastika-shaped. Trees, windmills, bushes, fences, even houses. The “song” they sing is “Der Fuehrers Face”. Lyrics go like this: “When der Fuehrer says, he is the masterrace We ‘heil, heil’ right in der Fuehrers Face Not to love der Fuehrer is a great disgrace So we ‘heil, heil’ right in der Fuehrers Face When Herr Göbbel says, we own the world in space We ‘heil, heil’ right in Herr Göbbels Face When Herr Goring says, they never bomb this place We ‘heil, heil’ right in Herr Gorings Face Is he not a super-man? Aren’t you a super-man? Ja he is the super-man Super-duper-super-man! Is this nazi-land so good? Would you leave it if you could? Ja this nazi-land is good We wouldn’t leave it if we could!” Then the camera pans over to a little house in the land. Inside good-old Donald Duck is sleeping in his pyjamas, doing the Hitler greet asleep as the troops walk by. After greeting Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito, Donald puts on his brown uniform (at least now we realize he’s in the german army) and dunks a coffee-bean into a cup of water to make it taste like coffee-something. Together with a breeze of “Aroma of Bacon & Eggs” and a stone-hard piece of bread that makes up his breakfast. When the soldiers walk by his door, one steps in and suddenly makes him read from the book “Mein Kampf”. All the chapel soldiers walk in and take him outside with them - only to hit him and make him hold up one of the large instruments they are playing. The scene then fades into the shot of a smoking industry building, and a narrator speaks the following lines: “Workers of nazi-land The glorious priviledge is yours to be a nazi To work 48 hours a day for the Fuehrer When the Fuehrer says, we never will be slaves We ‘heil, heil’, but still we work like slaves While the Fuehrer frags, lies, rants, and raves We ‘heil, heil’, and work into our graves” Donald has to work at the assembly line in this building, assembling bullet shells. The various bullets fly by him faster and faster, always more. When he secretly mumbles something not-so-good against the Fuehrer, guns and bayonets come out from everywhere, yelling at him “Schweinehund, Heil Hitler”. After some more incidents like this, and a short vacation (that means, a background of the alps gets dropped behind him and he gets to do some gym workout for the Fuehrer) Donald freaks out completely. Suddenly the whole movie turns into a LSD-like horrortrip, with swastikas, bullets and Hitler-lookalikes flying around everywhere and the theme music going completely crazy! After the horrortrip reaches climax, Donald wakes up in his bed again, this time in his stars-and-stripes pyjamas. Spotting a human shadow with one arm up on the wall, he quickly rises to do the Hitler greet, only to realize at last that the shadows is not a nazi, but a miniature of the statue of liberty standing in his window. With the words “I am proud to be a citizen of the united states of America” he kisses and hugs her, and the movie fades out. But it’s got one scene still left, a comic-ish picture of Hitler with the theme song “Der Fuehrer’s Face” playing. A few rotten tomatoes get thrown and mashed at him, and “The End” appears onscreen.

“Spirit of ‘43″

Spirit of ‘43 starts out with a bell ringing the sweet sound of payday, and blowing little steam-powerered dollar signs into the air. The narrator voice tells us: “Yes, payday. Millions of dollars pouring into the hands of american workers. Though in the mind of the average worker live 2 separate personalities. One, the thrifty. And often idle money burns a hole into your pocket. This brings up the other personality, the spendthrift.” The thrifty is manifested through Uncle Scrootch, who made his first appearance in this movie. The spendthrift type is manifested through someone who looks like Donalds cousin, but could really be anyone in chic clothes. He tells Donald to spend his money for some dates in the girls club, or other good stuff. The thrifty tells him he has got some better deeds. We hear the narrator again speaking: “Important deeds too. Every american should pay his or her income tax gladly and proudly. This year, thanks to Hitler and Hirohito, taxes are higher than ever before. Will you have enough money on hands to meet your payments when they fall due?” The spendthrifty personality tells Donald “we can take care of that later, forget about it now”. Uncle Scrootch insists Donald to “not forget about our fighting men, do ye?” which he replies “No sir!”. So Donald is torn between those 2 suggestions, spending the dough because it is his, or saving it for income taxes. After a short brawl between the 2 personalities for Donald, they both get kicked away to either side. Then the narrator asks: “Now, what are you going to do? Spend for the axis? Or save for taxes? Just remember, every dollar you spend that you don’t need Is a dollar spent to help the axis!” Of course Donalds option is clear: He saves for taxes. Maybe he heard the narrator, too, telling us: “For it is your taxes, my taxes, our taxes that run the factories. American factories, working day and night. Factories making guns, machine guns, anti-tank guns, long range guns, guns, guns, all kinds of guns - to blast the aggressors from the seas! Taxes for american factories working full blast making planes, bombers, dive-bombers, flying fortresses, interceptors to stop the birds of prey that fly by night. Taxes to bury the axis! Taxes to keep them flying! Taxes to keep them rolling! Taxes to keep them coming! Taxes to beat to earth the evil destroyer of freedom and peace! This is our fight, the fight for freedom. Freedom of speech, of worship. Freedom from want, and fear. Taxes will keep democracy on the march!”

Closing comment: In war, every side does cruel things. Not all nazis were the flesh-eating berzerkers the propaganda displayed them like. And not every ally soldier was hospitable to german civilians. World War II had to be fought, at least from an allied point of view - Hitler had to be stopped. But the ones to suffered probably the most in the war were all the children, old and women in their bunkers, or working on the streets of even at Flaks in the last stage of the war. And now, to not let this end up in an endless rant, and to have a nice quote to think about, the very last sentence of this very long post:

“The only one who wins in war, is death himself.”

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/07/disneys-wwii-propaganda/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/04/everything-is-lost/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/04/everything-is-lost/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2005 20:51:25 +0000 Aetherfukz Film Fanatics http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/04/everything-is-lost/

After like 3 month of advertising, today finally the first episode of the series “Lost” aired on german, and therefore austrian television. After all the hype the local broadcast station made about the show pre-release I set great expectations in it - and have to say, the show lived up to them!
To american readers this is sure old news, because the show is probably in the second season over there now. But anyway, for all who don’t know about the show yet, here is a quick synopsis:

Darkness. Pain. Then the shining sun. A bamboo forest. Smoke and screams.
Slowly Jack regains conciousness. And realizes the gritty truth - the plane he was in crashed into the jungle.

The surviving passangers are made up of families, friends, foes and strangers. Some do not lose hope that a rescue team will come and find them, therefore staying calm. But others freak out and show their very darkest sides in this exile.

But in order to survive, they have to work together. Because not only weather and the rough terrain of the island they are stranded on are their enemies, also there are bone-chilling sounds and screams all day and night. A deadly power - the island has its own gruesome secret.

So 48 people struggle to survive the horror.

What I really liked about the first episode is that you don’t really see the plane crash in the beginning of the show, rather it is shown in perspective of some characters in flashbacks - which makes it even more thrilling and dramatic. And what showed up in the first episode too, was that almost everyone of the survivors has some secret the others shouldn’t know about.
And of course another reason to watch the show, is that it’s got Dominic Monaghan. Who was absolutely brilliant in the role of Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

So to finish this long post up, if you haven’t done yet, you should really check out this series, very well done, both actor- and director-wise. Pick your local station for airdates (in germany it’s on ProSieben every monday evening).

Edit: For those in germany or austria who missed the first episode, on next Sunday the first episode gets aired again, on 10-something in the evening, on ProSieben.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/04/04/everything-is-lost/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/28/the-luckiest-men-alive/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/28/the-luckiest-men-alive/#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2005 20:47:10 +0000 Aetherfukz The Real World http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/28/the-luckiest-men-alive/

Oh my sweet god! Now that’s a radio station I’d like to volunteer at. SLAM!FM from the Netherlands held a girls kissing contest. One more reason to like that country ^_^

Click here for the photos.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/28/the-luckiest-men-alive/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/25/which-movie-hero-villian-are-you/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/25/which-movie-hero-villian-are-you/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2005 04:47:26 +0000 Aetherfukz Film Fanatics http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/25/which-movie-hero-villian-are-you/

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/25/which-movie-hero-villian-are-you/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/24/famous-movies-in-30-seconds/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/24/famous-movies-in-30-seconds/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2005 21:13:20 +0000 Aetherfukz Film Fanatics http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/24/famous-movies-in-30-seconds/

… and re-enacted by bunnies.

You know the times when someone talks about a famous movie, but you cannot enter the discussion because you haven’t seen it? Or you try to mention something very cool about a particular movie, but the others don’t get your point because they haven’t seen it?
These are the times for the followind Flash-Animations. Jennifer Shiman from AngryAlien has done all of these re-enactments, and they are a) funny as hell and b) really made up of the most thrilling and describing scenes of the parent movies. And now, without further ado, just watch them for yourself and have a good time talking about these:

Alien
Freddy VS Jason
It’s a wonderful life
Jaws
Scream
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Titanic
The Exorcist
The Shining

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/24/famous-movies-in-30-seconds/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/22/the-truth-about-windows/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/22/the-truth-about-windows/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2005 00:24:57 +0000 Administrator Outer Rim http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/22/the-truth-about-windows/

I stumbled over this story while reading some Crackpot Theories about J.R.R. Tolkiens masterpiece over here. While this particular story dates back to a 1996 posting in the rec.humor.funny newsgroup, it is nonetheless still funny. So humor really spans across time and maybe space…
Anyway here is the story about how one company poured all their malice and cruelty into one particular OS:

“What you did not know about Windows 95″

Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit.

As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows 95 on my PC. I told him how happy I was with this operating system, and showed him the Windows 95 CD. To my surprise he threw it into my microwave oven and turned the oven on. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: ‘Do not worry, it is unharmed.’ After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: ‘Take a close look at it.’ To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw a inscription, an inscription finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:

12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE8209450
920F923A40EE10E510CC98D444AA08E1324

‘I cannot understand the fiery letters,’ I said.

‘No, but I can,’ he said. ‘The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:’

     One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
     One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them…

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/22/the-truth-about-windows/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/21/the-lord-of-the-bricks/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/21/the-lord-of-the-bricks/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2005 02:43:01 +0000 Administrator Outer Rim http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/21/the-lord-of-the-bricks/

The Lord of the Rings, Tolkiens epic Story of good and ill, one of the most timeless books ever written.

LEGO, one of the most timeless and intelligent toys ever created.

It was only a matter of time until those two would collide. And while it would be neat to style LEGO-models like our most beloved heros, people out there even take the time to LEGO-ize entire excerpts from the books! I think that everyone alive has played with LEGO, or at least seen their children or grand-children play with it. Imagine back into the times when you made up your own reality, heros, villians, and even worlds. Only your imagination was the limit for this. While there are entire websites dedicated to so-called Brickmovies (like Cool Brick Movies) these websites only carry pictures imagined from the Lord of the Rings:

LotR Bricktales
LotR Brickshelf Gallery
LotR LEGO customs from the Movies
The advantures of Samwise (german)

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/21/the-lord-of-the-bricks/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/21/the-political-quiz/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/21/the-political-quiz/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2005 01:14:49 +0000 Administrator The Real World http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/21/the-political-quiz/

Just found another of those tests on the internet, this time about your political preferences. I came out as an Anarchist, although tied with Democrat. This pretty much matches my real preferences, although I do favor Communism (the real Marx’ism one, not the russian bastardization) much more than those bars represent. Well but it’s a good guess I suppose and I just too 1 or 2 minutes to finish…

What Political Party Do Your Beliefs Put You In?
created with QuizFarm.com

Anarchism 100% Democrat 100% Socialist 75% Green 67% Communism 58% Fascism 17% Nazi 0% Republican 0%

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/21/the-political-quiz/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/20/all-things-video/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/20/all-things-video/#comments Sun, 20 Mar 2005 04:04:14 +0000 Aetherfukz Film Fanatics http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/20/all-things-video/

Ever wanted to convert a Quicktime movie into a DVD-compative MPEG2 file? Ever had problems with capturing your video via Firewire? If you ever had questions or problems with video stuff, especially the technical side, then these sites are made for you:

slashCAM (german)
VideoHelp.com (english)

There are a lot of insightful and helpful tutorials, how-to’s, FAQ’s and answers on those sites, that have helped me often. And if you really can’t find your particular information on the sites, you maybe able to get help in their various forums.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/20/all-things-video/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/14/google-news/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/14/google-news/#comments Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:04:07 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/14/google-news/

Just in case you didn’t know already: When someone talks about Google News, they probably aren’t talking about the Newsgroups Reader (formerly known as Deja.com) but the real and new Google News Beta.

Now Google News really is something cool and serious at the same time. What it does is gather headlines from around the globe (or just your local area, whatever you tell it to gather and sort them into their respective ressorts. And so, when you read a headline on Google News, the link will take you to the page the headline comes from, like Time or Spiegel or others. But the real clue is that there are also links for all the other sites that have that particular headline and and article about it.

And this brings us to freedom of choice and freedom of information. In these strange times too much people only get their news and therefore their options from CNN or other big stations. But those of course only represent that the majority in the country (the Bush cabinet in case of CNN) wants to see and hear. So if you have the choice of reading the same news on like 20 different stations, you can gather the truth for yourself and really make up your own opinion.

Google News Beta

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/14/google-news/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/05/nights-of-the-old-republic/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/05/nights-of-the-old-republic/#comments Sat, 05 Mar 2005 02:10:25 +0000 Aetherfukz Outer Rim http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/05/nights-of-the-old-republic/

Well… it’s been over a week now since my last entry here, which has to to only partly with my second & final exam for the winter semester. But mostly it has to do with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 - Sith Lords. Every day and every night since I got the game some days ago I play it. Although it is a bit bug-laden, and the engine is old now, but the game spreads its Star Wars flair everywhere!

And it is the most intelligent game I ever played, and the first game that not only touches, but dives deep into the realms of philosophy. In the gameworld you will learn to judge your moves, think about if helping everyone/killing everyone is really the right way to go, and for me, the most important question the game rises: Can the cruel deeds that one does in war be forgiven?

I have never before seen such eternal questions raised by a game, so this puts it very high upon my list. Now if you can get your hands on a copy of Knights of the Old Republic 2, and you are interested in either/and/or role-playing, tactics, philosophy or of course, Star Wars, go and get the CDs!

Or if you are still sceptic, read some reviews here, here or here.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/03/05/nights-of-the-old-republic/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/23/did-hobbits-exist/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/23/did-hobbits-exist/#comments Wed, 23 Feb 2005 03:03:42 +0000 Aetherfukz The Real World http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/23/did-hobbits-exist/

This article of National Geographic brings up that particular question.
Scientists made one of the most spectacular discoveries in paleoanthropology in half a century: The skeleton of a 18.000 year old 1-meter tall adult. They determined that this human species is completely new to science.

However they also found pieces of dwarf elephants and lizards, so the species was probabaly a hunter just as our ancestors were at that time. And although the adults body was the size of a 3 year old modern human child, its brain was only one third of the size of such a child.

So the romantic view that hobbits did really exist gets hammered down in the same article, but scientists find it spectacular none the less. But it would still be a nice and beautiful image that the Lord of the Rings is indeed a historic journal, just like J.R.R. Tolkien described it.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/23/did-hobbits-exist/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/22/google-ism/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/22/google-ism/#comments Tue, 22 Feb 2005 05:46:36 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/22/google-ism/

I just read an interesting article about Google. Seems that google puts some serious cookies on your PC which expire sometime in 2030. Normal Cookies have a lifespan of a few days or weeks. Although Google is big in the ad-business it is far from a “nasty” company (like lets say the Bayer Pharmacy group which invented heroin and morphium) - and anyway there isn’t any real alternative to Google.

So in the end, read the linked article and make your own decision if you will use Google freely in the future - I for sure will, because if any company got some data from me, I would have it to be Google.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/22/google-ism/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/17/the-worlds-tallest-virtual-building/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/17/the-worlds-tallest-virtual-building/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2005 02:53:36 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/17/the-worlds-tallest-virtual-building/

The concierge says about the worlds tallest virtual building:

Did you know that this building ist taller than the Petronas towers, the Sears towers and the Chrysler building put together? In your face, rest of the world!

I say: really cool.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/17/the-worlds-tallest-virtual-building/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/17/clash-of-the-superheroes/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/17/clash-of-the-superheroes/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2005 02:37:25 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/17/clash-of-the-superheroes/

Ever wondered what would happen if He-Man met Superman? You can read for yourself over here. Of course I wouldn’t assume that somehow some unknown writer just got stuck with his ideas, so naturally he just let two heros clash together against a foe of one of them…

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/17/clash-of-the-superheroes/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/15/south-parkified/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/15/south-parkified/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2005 01:23:14 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/15/south-parkified/

I just found the South Park Studio V2 where you can make a version of yourself South Park styled. This is what I would probably look like if I hanged out there:

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/15/south-parkified/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/14/valentines-day-and-freedom-of-choice/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/14/valentines-day-and-freedom-of-choice/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2005 06:16:13 +0000 Aetherfukz The Real World http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/14/valentines-day-and-freedom-of-choice/

I just realized, while reading other blogs, that today is Valentine’s Day. Besides the fact that I have no Valentine to make a sweet present to, I can rant about this and other business-holidays:

Valentine’s Day, just as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, even New Years Eve and some other holidays I sure forgot to mention now, are probably just made for people to go shopping. If you really wanted to show someone that you care for her/him, or appreciate what your parents did for you, you could and should show them every day. Not in buyable gifts, but in gifts of heart.
It doesn’t change anything if you are an ass to someone most of the time, only to go to them on one special occasion that the “moral majority” told you and bid them forgiveness.
The same counts for New Years Eve. Sure it is really nice to celebrate the new year with all your friends and party till midday on the 1st. But (with a big B) what are all those good intentions made on this night for? After a week or even less they are gone with the wind. “I will stop smoking this year” and all the other “good” intentions made could be made any other day the year too, but with a lot more will to do them and a higher chance to succeed. It is all too easy to say something you will/will-not do in the next year on New Years Eve. Really starting/stoping something out of your own choice, not because a holiday told you to, those intentions will last. And because you made them on your own free will, you will know why you made them and with what sacrifices they come or go. But you made a choice, not the day.

What is freedom but the ability to make choices? Between courage and cowardice… duty and love… or even heaven and hell. The nature of the choices we make define us as human beings. We choose the world we inhabit. Each of us creates his own world… We conjure paradises from our hopes, and nightmares born of fear. What if they are both illusion?

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/14/valentines-day-and-freedom-of-choice/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/14/what-type-of-tea-are-you/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/14/what-type-of-tea-are-you/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2005 03:58:22 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/14/what-type-of-tea-are-you/

…Chamomile Tea…

You are Chamomile Tea.
Your an original! Helpful to anyone in need and
always willing to lend a hand, you take action
but not through violence, people listen to you
for you have a knack for giving wonderful
advice! Many look up to you and you try your
best not to let them down. You have many
friends steadfast or no who consider themselves
lucky to be near you. You may have been hurt in
the past but you dont let that stand in your
way! You have a wonderful outlook on life and
try to see the good in people which is an
awesome gift!

What type of Tea are you? {-With Anime Pictures!-}
brought to you by Quizilla

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/14/what-type-of-tea-are-you/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/13/fast-games-for-slow-pcs/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/13/fast-games-for-slow-pcs/#comments Sun, 13 Feb 2005 04:07:14 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/13/fast-games-for-slow-pcs/

You sure know the times when you come around somewhere with only your Laptop with you, half an hour or so sparetime while you are waiting for the bus or train or whatever, and you don’t know what to do with those minutes. Todays link, the Home of the Underdogs has a sheer endless amount of old and new games, be it some quick action, long advantures or just your good old puzzles. Especially if you don’ have the latest hardware (or just some old office PC who doesn’t play any now-buyable games at all) you should check out some of the Underdogs’ games because they have real gems there!

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/13/fast-games-for-slow-pcs/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/13/bush-hitler-comparision-wins-school-award/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/13/bush-hitler-comparision-wins-school-award/#comments Sun, 13 Feb 2005 02:36:13 +0000 Aetherfukz The Real World http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/13/bush-hitler-comparision-wins-school-award/

Just read this about a students anti-bush artwork: link

The art itself really has some truth in it, because Bush does at least in some parts, act like Hitlers. He invades countries that don’t even threat him, installs new governments there and more. The 17-year-old artist wanted to express this in his project - which he had to do for school. I don’t want to play down the Holocaust, Hitler or any of his methods, those very unhumanly, cruel to the last, and if somebody sometime gets access to a time machine, Hitlers death would be worth risking a time paradoxon.

But back to the points, the pupil now gets bashed from media being a “leftist” and the teacher who gave him an A also because she “demonstrats to her other students that Bush-bashing and America-hatred, are commendable pursuits, worthy of reward.”

Which shows once more that America really is black and white, without any memorable shades or gray…

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/13/bush-hitler-comparision-wins-school-award/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/12/free-videos-till-brooklyn/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/12/free-videos-till-brooklyn/#comments Sat, 12 Feb 2005 04:18:11 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/12/free-videos-till-brooklyn/

If you ever didn’t know what to watch, or just got some minutes or even hours without something really useful to do, just watch yourself some music videos, anime episodes or other short & longer movies at those free video-on-demand sites:

Sputnik7
Video-C

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/12/free-videos-till-brooklyn/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/11/livelife/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/11/livelife/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2005 04:25:58 +0000 Aetherfukz Film Fanatics http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/11/livelife/

Imagine that all your live revoles around Internet, Computers, Television, Mobile phones and other medias. What if all of a sudden there is a power failure?

“Live / Life” by Hi5 Productions picks up just that track and puts it into a 3-minute movie. You can check it out here, it is only 8mb:

Download Live / Life (thanks to theGreySheep for the mirror)

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/11/livelife/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/09/really-objective-news/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/09/really-objective-news/#comments Wed, 09 Feb 2005 00:46:32 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/09/really-objective-news/ If you don’t know it yet, you have to check it out: Google News. Google does what it does best, meta-crawling the web, this time for news around the globe. When you see an article about something interesting there, there are always links to like 20 other sites that had an article about that particular newsflash.

So with all the news from different sites and headers you now really can get an objective view of things, not only the one view that your local paper throws at you!

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/09/really-objective-news/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/05/4-out-of-hi5/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/05/4-out-of-hi5/#comments Sat, 05 Feb 2005 01:17:22 +0000 Aetherfukz The Real World http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/05/4-out-of-hi5/ This is a snapshot of 4 people (including me) out of the 6 people who make up Hi5 Productions ^_^
Hi5 is a group of DTV (digital TV) students whos profession is to make movies, imagine new formats for TV and other creative stuff.

(Eyes have been blacked out to save the guys from Spam Snail-mail)

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/05/4-out-of-hi5/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/04/firefox-for-opera-users/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/04/firefox-for-opera-users/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2005 02:30:29 +0000 Aetherfukz Internet Treasures http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/04/firefox-for-opera-users/ I always was a defender of the Opera Browser, although it isn’t freeware as Mozilla Firefox is. But I always loved some key features of Opera, like the mouse gestures, the option to save your windows and tabs when you close the browser and others. This was what really prevented me from trying and using FireFox.

But now, lo’ and behold, I switched to FireFox, because every feature Opera can throw at you FireFox can now emulate, or even evolve. So to make the long story short, here are some links for FireFox extensions that make it behave more like Opera:

Dictionary Search
All-in-One Mouse Gestures
Paste & Go
Session Saver

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/04/firefox-for-opera-users/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/02/tolkien-esque-name-generators/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/02/tolkien-esque-name-generators/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2005 03:01:56 +0000 Aetherfukz Outer Rim http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/02/tolkien-esque-name-generators/ If you ever wanted or needed a (nick)name that sounded like something straight from the Lord of the Rings, this is the place for you:

Elvish name generator
Hobbit name generator

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2005/02/02/tolkien-esque-name-generators/feed/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2004/12/01/lotr-special-trilogy/ http://webex.blogsome.com/2004/12/01/lotr-special-trilogy/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2004 21:04:49 +0000 Aetherfukz Film Fanatics http://webex.blogsome.com/2004/12/01/lotr-special-trilogy/ Mae Govannen!

On the 14th of December (and 10th here in europe) it is time, time for the one story. The story to bind them all. The Lord of the Rings, brought to film by Peter Jackson. On this day the Special Extended Edition Trilogy set will be release, so if you are akin to me that you haven’t bought the DVDs yet, now is your time to get them in all their glory.

You can advance order your copy at amazon and other retails.

]]> http://webex.blogsome.com/2004/12/01/lotr-special-trilogy/feed/