Nonsense

Let's get serious for a moment...

Okay, that's enough of that nonsense...

The Pitt is Bugged!

Ah, so apparently Fallout 3's latest DLC is just racked with bugs and issues. I'm browsing the TRIO of threads on the Bethesda Forums now, and it seems that known issues are a lot of missing textures and meshes, game freezes, among others. The forum community is guessing that the bugs are coming from either the file becoming corrupt when it was put up on XBOX Live, or issues resulting the the massive amount of info-suck generated by all the people downloading it at once. They're also suggesting waiting a bit, and then downloading to see if the issues resolve themselves. Re-Downloads may also be necessary.

It makes me glad that I didn't stay up late into the twilight to get my Fallout fix. Oh well, I'll wait till later tonight and see if things haven't been resolved.

Turkish Food Rocks

Saturday, after spending the day at the Renaissance Fair, we took dinner at a place called Efe's, which I have been informed is the only Turkish Cuisine establishment here in Arizona. I was a bit concerned about how the food and I were going to get along. Especially after Jade's husband (who IS Turkish), introduced me to a drink designed for those who've been out in the sun all day- which would be all of us. The taste was akin to someone mixing a dallop of sour cream in water and adding a pinch of salt.
When the food finally arrived, all concerns vanished. The menu only described the meat on my plate as simply "meat" roasted with garlic. A beti kabab it said. Served along with seasoned rice, a fire-roasted tomato, and delicious little pita breads for folding. My mind was thuroughly blown, and was the first to clear their plate. Which was a bit akward, with everyone conversing, and there I am just wolfing this stuff down. Jade offered me a bite of her dish, of which she was extremely proud of, which seemed like chicken and beef with a kind of nutmeg sauce and cabbage.

Around this time in the evening I learned my brother just finished with a visit to Urgent Care back home. He'd developed a heavy fever along with a real bad Canker Sore on the roof of his mouth. The fevers been kicking his ass royally, so I've been doing my best to baby him back to health. It's been frustrating for him, since he simply cannot eat without his canker sore emitting some serious throbbing pain.

I go back to classes today. Yay.

Why Scraps hates Dark Elves

Drow-- A race of cavern dwelling Elven offshoots. They live in a matriarchal society ruled over by priestesses in the service of a Drow-Spider amalgon named Lolth who will kill your ass for breaking any tenant of Drow society. Women are the strong, men are the support, and the less a Drow Woman wears, the prouder they are. They are evil for evils sake, enslaving other evil races just for kicks. Do a DeviantArt check on Drow and chances are what returns will be a strange crossover between an R.A. Salvatore novel and Victorias Secret.

I am not fond of this race of snide under-dwellers.

I feel my reasons for not liking Drow are simple...The average image of a Drow is Jessica Rabbit with dark skin and white hair who will eviscerate you with but a glance. They were created as a race by fantasy writers as a foil for masochistic players to sweat and drool over the fantasy of a dominating Elf-Chick. You can look, but no touchie. They represent the hot chicks that a Gamer could never get anywhere with away from the gaming table. The ones who would turn their noses up at you in High School at your futile attempts at courtship. The Mean Girls who's existance revolves around personal gain and the belitteling of others. If DnD was a High School drama on the Disney Channel, the head Chearleader and her little cronies would be Drow.

You can love them or hate. Me, personally, I could just plain do without them.

Memoirs of a Podcast Fanatic

When people see me, there's an 80% chance that I will have my earbuds in, listening a podcast of some sort. I normally load up my iPod with podcast subscriptions so I always have a welcome stream of something to listen to when I'm working (when applicable), driving, or running errands. Drives Jo to no end when we're driving somewhere. It's a good 45 minutes to Phoenix from the town we live in and she always gets stuck listening to RPPR or Order 66, maybe the occasional CAGcast or Sarcastic Gamer.
The chief reason for always being plugged in is in part of a resolution to stop being negative, and part of that process is interrupting any negative thoughts that may occur to me by distracting my attention away from such thinking.
It mainly began back when I was shoveling and running pizzas for Dominos. On really slow days there was really nothing to grab your attention, so I managed to get away with smuggeling in my mp3 player (A ZEN player...loved that thing), with it tucked into my shirt with only the earbud visible. Bosses didn't mind, most customers thought I was wired for bluetooth. I listened to a lot of comedy/stand-up. Dance Cook...Dimitri Marten...George Carlin...Robin Williams...Dave Chapelle. It was good stuff. Eventually though, other employees started bringing in iPods and it started causing problems, so from then on I could only use my player in the car during deliveries.

After a while though, it wasn't so much that I liked listening to the same handful of comedy bits over and over, it was just the fact that I preferred having someone elses voice ratteling around inside my head rather than put up with my own negative monologues. Around this point I started getting into Radio talk shows when they turned a popular local alternative rock station into a talk station. The morning guys were funny, but the evening and nights guys were horrendous. Tom Lycus (douchebag) and some other guy who did bad attempts at radio skit comedy. Hell I even enjoyed listening to broadcasted hockey games. Pretty much I saught out any reason not to think about my dead-end job.

So it was only natural that I drift towards podcasts when I got my hands on my first iPod Nano (which I still use). A half-hour lunch break when I was breaking my back for a big name movie theater became Podcast time, my little half hour of not having to think about work or anything. And so it goes and so it goes. Podcasts don't quite outnumber my music playlist on this little black wonder, since they tend to refresh to ditch the old ones after a while.

So if you ever bump into me, and I seem a little zoned out and appear to not be paying attention to anything you're saying, relax. Cheapy-D said something funny and Wombat's being an ass again.

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is definately a game that I both like and hate- I love the settup and the looks, but I hate the execution. The game feels like I should be attempting stealth and evasion with everything I'm doing, from finding alternate "safe routes" to objectives, to trying to sneak my way to an objective in the middle of a hot zone with no real stealth mechanic like in Splinter Cell games. I get the idea that the game tries to create a very realistic game world, but at times it feels a little too real. Not to mention, you can never frickin' tell where the gunshots are coming from until you've taken a view to gauge the direction of enemy fire. And actually seeing your enemies is a trick- they blend right into the foilage.

It's almost the same reason I couldn't get into the first Far Cry- I'm surrounded by goons who are ten times more equiped than I am, and will light me up like time square. Like a golf game, I tend to react in games like this like I would in real life- Hide, and strike from cover. Doesn't always work.

Bottom line- Not a bad game, but I just can't get ahead of it.

Lament for Ghost

I was reading a really old gaming mag on the john one morning, and I started to think about what the heck happened to Starcraft: Ghost? A Tomb-Raider-esque forray into the world of Starcraft, playing as a smokin' hot Ghost unit would seem simple enough. Hell a glance at the Tomb Raider series proves that just running around environments fulfilling objectives and killing enemies has been done with quite some ease.
Ah, but with Starcraft 2 out there on the Release Date horizon, I think attention will be shifted elsewhere, and Ghost will simply be one of those "What could have beens".

And I thought adult life was simple.

=Sigh= So it was inevitable that I was going to have to go back to the MySpace page, if not solely for a social purpose. I would still like this blog to be the official blog rather than re-route the whole business over the friggin' MySpace. I think it was Jo showing me the Buddy Poke app that made me change my mind.

Finally getting our Radio Drama in the works, however, it's beginning to shape a lot differently than I had originally hoped. I'm going to choose to be optimistic, which is a lot different from how I've been feeling about my past projects as of late.

I've decided to put up my Star Wars d20 books for the time being to experiment with other systems. Give me two, three months and I'll probably be back on that Galactic Horse again, but for now, I can't even look at my accumulation of Star Wars or DnD books without getting frustrated.

Five more minutes...

....nurrr....
Such a scattered sleep. I always keep my cell phone on the window sill right next to my bed as an alarm clock. At some point last night, I woke up, and it was gone. Apparently it wound up in the living room somehow.
Top it off with a Menagerie of dreams that really don't make sense.
Woke up in that state where the blanket feels really frickin' comfortable and you don't want to move.

Had to redo the podcast last night, and a cheap microphone from a local drugstore is to blame for the most of it.

fuuuh...Schoolwork to do...

...zzzzzz...

Don't wanna be a couch potato- playing Rock Band every day!

Been a real couch potato as of lately. Not a good thing. There's a great deal that I could be doing when I get off work-- Doing some sketchwork, working on material for a tabletop game, maybe do some actual fucking schoolwork, perhaps? Those are all very novel ideas, but I usually wind up plunking myself in front of the tv or the computer and waste time.

Tabletop-Wise, I've been busy constructing my own bastard-child born section of the Drow Underdark for our Star Wars/DnD crossover, and we've entered a part in the story in which the players are trying to stop the separatist invasion of the Underdark--This pretty much all means I have to actually learn a thing or two about Drow, a race I've come to have actually very little love of, and if I play this true to the material, liberating these onyx-skinned asshats from Battle Droids isn't going to be very easy. And believe me, I'll know if I commit a shenanigan, since Jo apparently sleeps with the damn 3.5 Drow reference manual every night.

Outside of that, Laundry. A good month of having not put anything in their proper drawers has turned mine and my brother bedroom into a sort of natural mountainous region, making it the least occupied room in the apartment. Last night while he was laying face-first in a pile of clean-yet-wrinkled shirts after a long day at work, we both agreed that starting tonight we'd start actually fucking picking up after outselves.

In closing, the title of today post was a lyric from Jimmy Buffets "Volcano" that was released for Rock Band 1.