Well it no Friday but I thought I’d post anyhow.
It’s now 4 years since I had just arrived home from a rain-logged and very muddy Glastonbury festival. I left, with great difficulty through the muddy rain-sodden fields, on Sunday morning.
I probably wouldn’t have managed it without the help of Brian. I didn’t know Brian but my friends did. Apparently, when he wasn’t working as security at Glastonbury he lived in a cave at Cornwall.
Whatever, he saved my bacon that morning, fabulous geezer. Haven’t seen Brian since but if I ever meet him again I’ll probably kiss him. Or at least buy him a pint.
Glastonbury this year had a good lineup imo (apart, maybe, from Coldplay & The Wombles) but I noticed with some sadness that it rained again early on, lots of mud. But Sunday was sunny, I felt happy for the punters and they were going to see Beyonce as well. Strange choice for Glastonbury, certainly not my choice but she probably went down very well.
No Glastonbury next year, the farmer is ‘resting the land’.
Games.
I’ve been playing Duke Nukem Forever and enjoying it. I’ve also read the reviews and they’re mostly right. It IS a tedious ten year old old-school rubbish game with some extremely frustrating moments.
Now, I like old school, Quake, Doom, Unreal are the biz, but Duke Nukem Forever kinda shames the original a little, imo. As others have said, don’t be a numpty like me and pay £27 for it, wait until it’s at least a tenner then satisfy your curiosity for yourself and buy it. Verdict: 75% good; 25% you gotta be kidding.
Some newer games I’ve just had to give up on, too hard for me. I figure this is either cos I’m too old and my reflexes ain’t what they used to be or I ain’t got the patience to die 22,000 times before passing a level.
Probably a combination of each. I do know this though, lately I’ve been playing games between 10 & 13 years old, games I considered hard at the time but now consider dead easy. Prime example: Kiss: Psycho Circus. This tells me games are harder now.
Steam makes cheats in games impossible. Cheats in MP of course are a no no but within SP when you’re frustrated as hell using a cheat to get past a sticky part in my mind is quite justified. I paid thirty quid for this thing to enjoy myself, not be beaten up around the head.
So, I’ve had to give up (or go punch somebody through anger) on the following:
Batman Arkham Asylum
Battlefield Bad Company 2
Just Cause 2
Crysis 2
And there’s a few others I’ve paused but I figure I will get past the part I’m stuck at.
Those I have thoroughly enjoyed recently:
Mafia 2
Bulletstorm
All Quake games on Steam
Oblivion Shivering Isles
All Call Of Duty Single Player
FEAR 2
Lara Croft & The Guardian Of Light
Serious Sam 1st & 2nd Encounters in HD on Steam
Unreal 1
Unreal 2 (Both Unreals available budget updated to run in Win 7, and also included the 1st 2 Unreal Tournaments – bargain!)
Borderlands (Original plus all 4 add-ons)
Dead Space 1 (needs to be tweaked via Nvidia control panel to make playable on PC)
Dead Space 2 (Brilliant!)
Test Drive Unlimited 1
I’ve also been playing X-Blades and it’s mildly enjoyable but I have to get through this part now where blades pop through the floor and you have to perform this choreography to get past it. I’ve downloaded the sequence from a walkthrough but I don’t know if I can be arsed tbh.
Picked up STALKER (the 1st one) for 2 quid in a charity shop and applied the big patch. The first thing the patch does is not enable you to get the STALKER camouflage suit in the first level. Hmmph.
I’ve played a couple of levels, I can see it is a good game but it’s not really my thing, too slow, too much stealth. I will probably uninstall.
So, installed a new hard disk in my main machine to free up space.
My primary disk now less than 100Gb which means I could swap it (them) out for a 100Gb SSD. I could get a 100Gb SSD for £152 but I notice there’s a faster 100Gb SSD aavailable for a helluva lot more money, more than twice the price. The more expensive one is more than twice the price but also more than twice the speed, I think.
I do wonder whether buying the slower speed SSD would actually give me an improvement in speed over my pair of WD ‘Raptors in RAID 0. I think probably not a lot.
Anyway, put in new disk, in last remaining (of six) SATA slots and this is how things are now. All data on main computer is backed up to external disk.
About 15 years ago me and the ex bought our twin daughters a pair of bicycles from Makros for Christmas for their birthdays. Lucy doesn’t have hers anymore but Sophie does. Sophie’s bike is at Cambridge and she’s just moved in with her mother at Frome, Somerset, having finished Uni course.
‘Dad, would you go and collect my bike from Cambridge and store it at your place?’ Of course, my leetle pumpernickel. Hmm, thirty quids worth of petrol to preserve twenty quids worth of push bike, I must be mad. Still, sentimental value, as they say.
So Tuesday that’s where I’m going, have configured a few calls in East London and Thurrock on the same journey to attempt to make it worthwhile.
Work appears to be non-existent. I’m ok until August but August isn’t far away. Things are bad as suppliers are regularly phoning me now asking if I have work and would I like to buy some stuff? Sorry mate but no, Cameron and Clegg have made things even worse than Blair/Brown ever could have. That’s NOT a biased POV, it’s just fact.
Cameron’s mate died in a karzi at Glastonbury festival over the weekend btw, I’m quite speechless about that, a million barbed humour comments come to mind but I better not
I could think of worse ways to go.
Today was the first really hot day we’ve had this year. I was going to go out on my push bike, visit the pub in the afternoon, but the bloody lift broke down, blowed if I’m wheeling my bike up and down six flights of stairs.
So I applied the last coat of wood preserver to patio chairs and played computer games. And washing. And crap. Bored.
Bought a new washing machine cos 9 year old Indesit started going faulty. The Indesit had been good, flawless for 9 years and all that went wrong was it got stuck on wash cycle, had to manually move on with timer switch.
Bought a fancy-arse LG direct drive steam clean thingie for £650 purely because I had the money at the time and because I could. Possibly a wrong decision, couldda got another Indesit for about £280 and upgraded computer but what the hell, it’s a rather fabulous washing machine, washed my Duvet a week ago, yowsah.
This one. Ignore the price, they say they’ll match other online prices and they did.
Still, washing machine or DX11, hard choice eh?
After paying out 650 for this big black thing that sings a tune when it finishes it’s cycle I am now broke. Life’s endless cycle perchance?
And my plants. Others are now getting munched. This is war, I don’t care. Bugs is gonna die, lol
Well done, it is good to hear of young people going for their goals in life and succeeding, usually you only hear of the negatives with the young. They have obviously got their heads screwed on and well done the parents as well, as they have done their job well in bringing up their children.
