Subject To Change

Title kinda says it all really

Nothing much has been happening, life is continuing, much in the form it has for the last however-long. Updates will still be sporadic at best, no New Year’s resolution to update to a schedule, so if you hold your breath waiting for a new update you’ll likely asphyxiate before January’s through.

I found this the other day whilst randomly browsing. “Meh”, you may say. “Sims 3″, you may utter. “Flossie’s gay”, may well be something that escapes your lips.

But read it. Give it a chance. And then laugh. Because it’s really quite funny. Like I said, it’s not my usual kinda thing. But this dysfunctional family gave me a few laughs.

And no, I’m not gay. Sorry boys.

I’ve recently been watching, and rewatching, some TV shows. Some good, some bad. When I say good, I mean the best TV show I’ve ever seen actually - The Wire.

Now, I enjoy some cop shows. Not many, but some. People kept telling me how good The Wire was and I’d keep telling them I’d watch it some time. And finally I caved in and got it. Well, I got season 1. Thought I’d give it a watch, tell the people who’d told me I had to watch it that I’d seen it, it wasn’t bad and get on with things. So, I stuck season 1 on and watched it. Then i got season 2. Then 3…4…5…

There’s no one thing that makes The Wire as good as it is. Sure, the acting is excellent, but there’s a lot of shows with good acting. The script is excellent, but there’s a load of some (remembered some of the other shows I’ve watched recently, sorry) good writers out there.

What makes The Wire the best show I’ve ever seen is the fact that everything about it is: a) excellent, and; b) totally believable. It almost felt like watching a dirty, nasty, gritty documentary apart from the fact that the stories were so well told that they’d never happen that perfectly in real life. And it’s not just a cop show. It’s a show about a city. About politics, crime and society. I could happily eulogize for hours about this show, but I’ll leave you with two words: WATCH IT.

On the flipside of my recent TV watching is something else people have been bugging me to watch for ages - Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Once again, finally I gave in and borrowed the DVDs from a friend.

Now, after watching The Wire, I was expecting a bit of a comedown, a bit of a jolt back to the reality of TV normalcy. But not quite this big a jolt.

Buffy and I don’t get along. In fact that might be sugar coating it. I hate it. I hate the writing, the characters, the acting, the music (apart from one song in one episode). Nothing about it engaged me. The dialogue was awful, badly written and stilted, though the acting “talent” saying the lines certainly didn’t help. I’m going to stop writing about Buffy now, otherwise this will turn into a Yahtzee style rant, and I can’t talk as quickly as him.

As far as the second part of the title goes, I’m hungry. There’s a reason for this - I’m on a diet. There’s a reason for this too - I’m overweight. There’s probably a reason for this too, but as this isn’t a psychology essay we’ll skip that bit.

So, having decided to lose some weight I’m hungry. I still eat, don’t get me wrong, but now I eat food that’s not fun or filling. Food has gone from a pleasure to a nasty, low fat, low calorie, high fibre chore. And it doesn’t even fill me up.

I’d love to say I’ve given up drinking and smoking too, but I need those to cope with my boring diet.

…may have given the idea that I’m the kind of guy who compulsively fills in these sort of surveys all the time. I’d just like it to be known that I’m not. I was instructed to do one and the other interested me for some reason. They seem to have replaced the cats for some reason.

I may have to go back to the cats…

It forces an element of creativity

1. Where is your cell phone? Drawer

2. Your significant other? Nonexistant

3. Your hair? Shaved

4. Your mother? Work

5. Your father? Forgotten

6. Your favorite thing? Alcohol

7. Your dream last night? Bizarre

8. Your favorite drink? Wine

9. Your dream/goal? Happiness

10. What room you are in? Bedroom

11. Your hobby? Drinking

12. Your fear? Spiders

13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Elsewhere

14. Where were you last night? Bed

16. Muffins? Chocolate

17. Wish list item? Ducati

18. Where you grew up? Scotland

19. Last thing you did? Cook

20. What are you wearing? T-shirt

21. Your TV? Adequate

22. Your pets? Virtual

23. Friends? Minimal

24. Your life? Idling

25. Your mood? Bored

26. Missing someone? No

27. Car? No

28. Something you’re not wearing? Lingerie

29. Your favorite store? ebay

30. Your summer? Allergies

31. Like someone? No

32. Your favorite color? Black

33. When is the last time you laughed? Yesterday

34. Last time you cried? Forgotten

35. Who will resend this? Nobody

36. One place that I go to over and over? Toilet

37. One person who emails me regularly? Ex

38. My favorite place to eat? Paris

39. Why you participated in this survey? Boredom

40. What are you doing tonight? Little

So, I’ve been told I have to do this, so here goes…
Ok, game is played by collecting all your music in one music player software, setting it to shuffle and answering each question with the song it plays for you, one after the other.

What is your name, or what should it be?
Fingathing - Drunken Master II

How’s your life now?
Avril Lavigne - Nobody’s Fool

What’s your theme song?
Slayer - Criminally Insane

What’s your best friend’s theme song?
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Knock Me Down

How will your life go?
Outkast - Hey Ya!

Will you marry?
Ensiferum - Battle Song

Will you have kids?
Pixies - Dead

What will be your job?
Black Label Society - Genocide Junkies

Will you finish school?
Arch Enemy - Hydra

Who is your best friend?
Emilie Autumn - Dead is the New Alive

Who will be your significant other?
Primus - Winona’s Big Brown Beaver

Who do you fancy?
DJ Format ft Abdominal - Ugly Brothers

How will you die?
The Killers - This River is Wild

How do you feel at this moment?
Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata

What’s your favourite song?
Jurassic 5 - React

How would you describe your folks?
Queensryche - The Needle Lies

And your best friend?
The Cure - Catch

And your teachers?
Jane’s Addiction - Stop

Your significant other or the one you fancy?
Tool - Sober

Yourself?
Insomnium - Dying Chant

What’s your best trait?
Muse - Hyper Chondriac Music

What will you be or should be when you grow up?
Weezer - Say It Ain’t So

How would you describe this test?
Sikth - Such the Fool

What makes you angry?
Norther - Going Nowhere

What makes you sad?
Black Label Society - Won’t Find It Here

What makes you happy?
Emelie Autumn - Swallow

What makes you want to dance?
Fiona Apple - Better Version of Me

What is your favourite colour?
Bloodbath - Slaughtering the Will to Live

How would you describe yourself?
Tool - Wrong Way

Who is your biggest enemy?
Porcupine Tree - Collapse the Light Into Earth

Who do you hate?
Norther - Midnight Walker

Who do you love?
In Flames - Drifter

Who do you want?
Goldfrapp - Eat Yourself

Finish the sentence!

I wish…
Metallica - Disposable Heroes

I’d like…
Eels - Abortion in the Sky

I wanna kill…
Ministry - Just One Fix

I wanna eat…
The Smashing Pumpkins - By Starlight

My head…
Talib Kweli - This Means You

I am…
Depeche Mode - Policy of Truth

My best trait…
At The Gates - The Red Sky is Ours

My eyes…
Arch Enemy - Aces High

My hair…
Pantera - This Love

My face…
DJ Shadow - Guns Blazing (Drums of Death)

You should do…
Revolting Cocks - Dead End Streets

Advice:
Red Hot Chili Peppers - If

How do others see you?
The Strokes - Hard to Explain

How do you see yourself?
Dragonforce - Trail of Broken Hearts

So, some look almost relevant to the question, most are just random stuff

Or to give it its full name “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning”, the new pretender to WoW’s MMO crown.And I’ve been playing for a week or two now in open beta and pre-order early access.So, how does it rate, compared to the current crop of MMOs out there? Well, it’s a lot like WoW in certain ways. As soon as I loaded it the UI looked very familiar from my time playing Blizzard’s world conquering offering. The skill bars look the same, the menus are similar, in fact the resemblance is spooky. But once you get into the game itself the resemblance pales slightly (in some aspects, at least.) Sure, you could grind through “Kill x rats” quests if you wanted to, and doubtless doing so would give you a pretty similar experience to most PvE-centric MMOs. But you can grind your way to Rank 40 (the highest level in WAR) purely through PvP. In theory you can get to R40 without doing much more in PvE than running to the first warcamp and entering scenarios and Realm vs Realm combat. You gain experience and Renown Rank (another type of experience used to unlock extra talents and weapons only available through PvP) just by playing PvP.And from the little I’ve seen, the PvP is good. Not quite as tactical on the face of it as Guild Wars, but more tactical than WoW. Fast paced, very well balanced for a launch title. Most classes have counters, none seem obviously overpowered so far (though that will doubt come with time and people learning to exploit mechanics…)All in all, WAR looks good, only time will tell if it’s going to be another WoW or an Age of Conan/Tabula Rasa/Hellgate London (the list goes on…)

…in the browser wars.

Yesterday Google dipped it’s toes into the murky waters of internet browsing with it’s beta app Chrome. Built to take on the might of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera et al. it’s the first browser (to my knowledge) that multi-threads tabs. From the limited time I’ve played with it this seems to result in excellent speeds without any of the bloat that has recently afflicted my Firefox (ever since v3.0).

Chrome asked, on first running, whether I wanted to import my Firefox bookmarks. Can I get a “Hell Yeah!”?  Good first impressions count for a lot. Memory footprint was small, pages loaded quickly. As well as Firefox bookmarks, Chrome imported my saved passwords and browser history from Firefox, another point in it’s favour as I hardly ever remember all my saved logins etc. No need to re-install Flash and I’ve yet to have a problem with a website loading, though I’ve seen reports of a few. RSS feeds are, as yet, unsupported, so if you used them a lot in FF then maybe it’s best to wait.

So far it seems like Chrome is a decent browser with a lot of potential. The signs are that plugins will be supported much in the same way as Firefox (and without Adblock any browser is going to struggle to replace FF for me). The multi-threading of the tabs is probably, for me, the best part of Chrome as it gives excellent speeds, far outperforming FF for multi-tab operations from what I’ve seen so far. As a beta app it’s polished and seems highly functional, no less than you’d expect from a company with a brand like Google.

Chrome is available  here if you fancy trying it out.

I think I have a problem…

I’m addicted to headphones. When I get bored, I buy headphones. Or headphone amplifiers. I now have…more pairs of headphones than I care to admit to.

There’s the Alessandros. They’re lovely. Sparkly, with that great Grado fun sound. I love these headphones, they’re great for most types of music, but they can be a bit fatiguing with their sometimes over-sparkly high-end.

There’s the Equation RP-21s. Great closed pair of cans, look as daft as can be when you’re wearing them but they kick out a nice sound and have excellent immersion.

There’s the Koss Porta-Pros. They’re a fun, funky lil pair of portable headphones but they’re open, which can be an issue in the great oudoors.

There’s the MylarOne X3is. My fave IEMs, they have a nice bass kick, but they’re fragile.

So I just bought a pair of AKG K81DJs. And they’re really neat too. They were kinda bass heavy until I took out the foam pads. And they were uncomfortable until I “modified” the headband (read “bent it with a fair amount of brute force.”) And now they’re great, and destined to become my standard outdoors can. They isolate well, they sound excellent, especially for rock and metal, which is my main fix when I’m on the train to work.

You wanna know about the amplifiers? Well, I have a crappy no-name one that actually gives a decent enough sound and is rugged as heck. Then there’s the Total Airhead, which is my standard portable amp, it  gives a nice boost to the AKGs and delivers a fairly nice soundstage without eating too many batteries. And then there’s the iBasso D1, combined amp and DAC which runs from a USB port on the PC and delivers lossless music to my cans of choice at the time via ASIO4ALL and Foobar2000. You haven’t lived til you’ve heard Nine Inch Nails in FLAC through that setup with a pair of Alessandros stuck on the end…pure bliss…

So, yeah, my name’s Flossie and I’m a headphone-aholic…

…is doubtless how some think of me. With a certain amount of justification, to be fair.

I play, as I’ve mentioned before, Guild Wars, a MMO-type game which includes guilds (failing to do so would probably incur the wrath of various advertising bodies). And I’ve been in a few guilds in my time, but there are two that may have the right to accuse me of the aforementioned activity, namely the Scouts of Tyria and Blu Ray (henceforth to be known as SoT and BR respectively). I’ve been in BR twice and SoT three times now. I started in SoT, moved to BR at a point when SoT lost a lot of players, especially Europeans which is the time zone I generally play in. I spent some time in BR then my amount of play time dropped off for several reasons so I left and formed a one-man guild which I was happy in for a couple of months. Then I headed back to SoT. After a while I was invited back to BR and for various reasons re-joined. Then, a mere 2 months later I left to head back to SoT where I am happily ensconced once again. The reason for my return? Friends and fallouts. I had the former in SoT (though I still have many in BR) and I had the latter in BR (with 1 or 2 people who shall remain nameless, but it seemed these problems were insurmountable without causing more fuss than it was worth).

So I’m back in SoT is the long and short of it. And until the advent of GW2 I’m unlikely to be leaving.