OCTOBER 29, 2002 - To the fray!

Neverwinter Nights online is damn good. Better than damn good. Much fun to be had here. Freedom Force Center doesn't seem to be working, which probably isn't all that big a loss since it hadn't been updated in months...

OCTOBER 20, 2002 - So chocolately...

Not surprisingly all the commericial networks have continued to try to milk the whole bali thing for every single thing it's worth - which doesn't translate into news; it translates into innane, boring and irrelevant bollocks. 'Transformers: Armada' isn't getting any better and the word is that it's not doing anywhere near as well as they expected. What they hell do they expect when they release garbage like that? Came across this site which is one of the better Transformers sites out there - some very impressive artwork indeed. Talking about crap cartoon (Armada - not Transformers in general); there's one on here called 'Beyblades'. Yeah. Sure. Right. I hope the person who came up with this drivel is taken out the back and whacked across the back of the head with a really large brick. And I finally found a Playstation Emulator which works fine under Windows XP and plays Macross VF-X 2 flawlessly. I be happy on that front now...

OCTOBER 14, 2002 - Badda bing, Badda boom

I was just watching the 'Channel 7' News story about the bombing in Bali. It had to be one of the most blatant ratings grabs I've seen for a long time - it wasn't news at all, just one big grab. As opposed to the SBS coverage of the bombings which reported the facts and nothing else; which is what a news service is meant to do. Well done to SBS and a leaflet titled 'How to be a Journalist' to Channel 7, please. Before I forget, the Corries have just opened for 2002; so if you're a member of CBR then go vote! Replaced some of the .. less appreciated avatars with some new Discworld based ones. You now have The Patrician, Cohen the Barbarian and the Death of Rats. ...And Xp-erience.org has decided to surface again. Typical.

OCTOBER 13, 2002 - Oh my god, they killed Kosh!

Bought Icewind Dale 2 this week and it's not all that bad. Think the original game with some 3rd Edition stuff tacked on and you've pretty much figured it out. Don't expect anything too new but it's still not bad at all... You've got to love stable websites; XP-erience.org is a great site for WinXP stuff - then they changed to NTFS.org which lasted for about a week. Now they're back to XP-erience.org ... and the site has been suspended. How useful. I should be working on the new H.E.A.T. website but I really can't be bothered...

OCTOBER 05, 2002 - Four whole fried rats and Coke

Took this 'How Jedi Are You?' test and apparently I'm a Jedi Master... From the files of the weird and quite probably tasteless comes this little gem; Galactus destroys New York. Some people have way too much time on their hands ... like me. Heh. TF Archive.com has Transformers: Armada episodes for download which is handy; a pity the series itself is so far a load of complete bollocks. Not quite as bad as 'Robots in Disguise' but not that far off it either ... definitely not good. Directly opposite to Armada's suckiness is a neat series I found out about called 'Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law' (yes, it's old but stuff like this just doesn't get shown on Australian TV, dammit). This series is extremely funny ... hell, anything where Fred Flintstone is the head of a Mafia family has to be funny! Good stuff.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2002 - We're on a mission from Glod

Changed the look of the site somewhat in a fit of boredom as well as doing minor updates here and there. Pretty much the same content though some stuff has changed - thinking about redoing all pages.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2002 - Lord Nelson with a gun

Things annoy me, as they tend to annoy anyone else. One of these things would be the way certain groups act like complete morons and get away with it. I suppose I should explain; a couple of years ago and certain amalgamation of fringe groups calling themselves S11 decided to hold a protest againt globilisation. That's great and fine; people have every right in the world to protest. More power to them, yadda yadda yadda. But their protest soon turned into nothing more than a bad excuse for behaviour surprisingly like rabid baboons with acts such as; stopping people going about their lawful business, large amounts of vandalism, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest and assaulting police just to list a few. Remember those last two ones for they be what the main problem is. These pseudo-protestors did such socially acceptable things as spitting in the faces of officers, spilling marbles onto the ground to cause horses injury and throwing many different kinds of projectiles (bricks, chunks of concrete, etc) at Officers. The general situation was well out of hand with the pseudo-protestors generally holding their own little unlawful mini-riot. And so the Police on scene did what they had to to restore order. Putting up barricades, forcing crowds back, arresting the more violent pseudo-protestors, etc. And now quite a number of the Officers involved are being investigated for supposedly using too much force while the pseudo-protestors got off scot-free. Wonderful world we live in, isn't it? On a lighter note, here's a passage from the Discworld novel 'Mort' which I found quite funny; Only one creature could have duplicated the expressions on their faces, and that would be a pigeon who has heard not only that Lord Nelson has got down off his column but has also been seen buying a 12-bore repeater and a box of cartridges. I seem to recall a time when the Anime Turnpike got updated more than once every six or so months. How a once mighty site has fallen... I noticed that someone found this site by searching for 'second coming jesus christ'. I knew I was good, but I didn't think I was that good..

SEPTEMBER 15, 2002 - My hat's on fire

Added some more information to the TARDIS over-view during the week - things will most likely be added sparodically as old books and old shows are looked at again. British people are annoying. Rap is annoying. Last night I saw on TV - yes, you guessed it; British Rappers. The only thing which could probably be dafter would be French Rappers, but even they seem to have the sense to regard Rap with the scorn it deserves. I still want life size Dr Who replicas, damn it. I would love to open my door to people I don't like and greet them with a Dalek. Yes, the look on their faces would be quite funny indeed..

SEPTEMBER 07, 2002 - insert smartass comment here

The Dr Who kick is continuing with a quick look over TARDIS technology/abilities being added to this site - have a look at it here. Still on things Who, I stumbled across a site which sells 1:1 replicas of many Dr Who items - from Daleks to K-9. Such a pity these people have stoppped making TARDIS' and only ship inside the UK. But if you want to take a look, try here. For those interested in bypassing the innanely stupid DVD Region Code bollocks, try this site which claims it sells Region Code bypassing materials. Of course, the site might be full of garbage but any chance of getting rid of the damn region codes has to be good. I had to have a good laugh at the Australian Liberal Party during the week; one of their ministers was on a late night news program and she said 'we give australians more choice.'. Of course, this is coming from the government which has extremely tightened regulations on the unemployed, disabled people, single parents, family allowances, taxation and various other fields - not to mention their slashing of the social security, education, and health budgets. The current government is the one that has tightened the most laws and cut the most spending in many a year - the claim they are giving citizens more choices is laughable at the extreme. No wonder voters regard politicians with such derision and scorn.

AUGUST 31, 2002 - I didn't lose my life - it just left without consulting me...

Fear the awesome power of Hello Cthulu! Lack of updates? Blame any of the following; Real life, other people, apathy, good books, neverwinter nights. Finally got to see the trailer movie for Macross Zero and it looks very good, indeed! It certainly has a nice Macross Plus feel to it - which is a considerable relief after the crapfest which was Macross 7. If you want to see the trailer for yourself, then you can download it here. The first full version of Netscape 7 is now out and I'm using it right now - and it's quite good. Better, obviously, then the preview 1 version and superior to Internet Explorer 6. If you want to give it a shot, then try downloading it. Someone could almost sue Hotmail for it's slogan 'More useful everyday'. I can't see how it can be more useful when it would seem to be ceasing service after service. That and 80% (and that's the figure that Hotmail has admitted to) of all mail that goes through the Hotmail servers is nothing but spam. Useful? No way in hell is it useful. I replaced the wallpaper on the front page with another based on Neverwinter Nights. I think this is even better than the previous one for sure. Still on the subject of this great game, I've been working on converting the Ravenloft adventure 'A light in the Belfrey' into a NWN Module. All the outside areas are done but the scripting for certain inside sections is proving to be tricky... The long wait for Winamp 3 has appeared to be something of a bust. It's slow to load, still buggy, and generally uses too many resources for what it does. Winamp 2.81 would seem to be the way to go still. Been on something of a Doctor Who kick of late; bought two Dr Who DVDs ('Tomb of the Cybermen' and 'Remembrance of the Daleks') as well as finding an old 1975 Dr Who annual in an old storeroom. While looking up some Dr Who websites, I found the image to the right of a TARDIS control room; yet I can't find out where the image is from...

AUGUST 04, 2002 -

Went through my links section and cleaned out a bunch of dead URLs as well as adding some new ones I've had stored in bookmarks for a while. I also shoved all the links onto a single page. Netscape 7 is going along just fine - not one crash yet and it's generally a hell of a lot better than Internet Explorer so far; it's fair to say I'm very impressed. Doubly so when you consider this is still just the preview version... Bought The Whitlams new CD last week, the one called 'Torching the Moon' - and it's very good. Probably not quite as good as 'Introducing the Whitlams' but still very, very respectable.

JULY 28, 2002 - APATHY ERROR: Don't bother striking any key

Added even more avatars to the Avatars section during the week. Changed the wallpaper on the Front page to one of Aribeth from Neverwinter Nights - edited out the annoying company logos, though. Speaking of Neverwinter Nights, I'm currently playing through it again; instead of using a Male Elven Fighter, this time I'm going with a Female Elven Bard just to see how certain things differ. Just starting chapter 2. I finally found a site where the full installation of Netscape 7 is available - and thus I downloaded and installed it. And guess what? Netscape 7 is damn good and it is now my browser of choice. Take that IE6, you foul unholy abomination!

JULY 21, 2002 - Ah see you, Jimmah!

I've still been playing with the Neverwinter Nights Toolset a fair bit and it's not as complicated as it first looked. I know have a module of numerous areas with random encounters and lots of other neat things. When it's done I might publish it here but since it's only a play-around with the Toolet, maybe not. I added about 10 more avatars to the CBR Avatars section ranging from TV to DC Comics.

JULY 13, 2002 - Space Monkey Mafia

Lack of updates? Blame Neverwinter Nights - I bought it on the 3rd and been playing it ever since. Freedom Force is a game which is pretty hard to beat in terms of sheer quality but Neverwinter Nights manages to do it without slowing down - it's a damn fine game by any account. And now that I've finished the solo campaign, I'm starting to fool around with the included Toolset and seeing if I can make my own adventures - with full scripts and all... I've been reading the stories at Whirlpool.net.au regularly of late - and it really does show what a complete farce Australian Broadband is. 3 gig/month caps? Pathetic and doubly worse when you also take into account the ridiculous prices being charged for this 'service'. Then again, no one has ever accused Telstra of actually having a clue... The first DVD of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring should be out reasonably soon - but don't buy it. Wait until November and buy the Collector's Edition which will have up to an hour of footage which wasn't included in the theatrical release - that would make it nearly four hours of LotR goodness! Some news about Macross Zero has finally come out; It's set in 2007 (2 years before Space War One) on a South Pacific Island. Some secret about the Macross Universe will be revealed and characters from the original series may make some cameos. If Macross Zero ends up being as bad as Macross 7, I am so going to kick someone's ass...

JUNE 30, 2002 - Haven't you always wanted a monkey?

During the week I added a CBR Avatars section to the site, to act as a small collection of Avatars for the CBR Message Boards. I should be getting Neverwinter Nights this Tuesday so I'm going to be kept busy for a while, I think. The World Cup Soccer is almost over, Thank God. It has been one boring mess from the start ... but now we have friggin' Wimbleton Tennis starting which is just as bad. How can people watch just boring bollocks on TV? Have you ever actually tried to sit through a telecast of Golf? It's so very, very sad.

JUNE 23, 2002 - Two headed spitting monkey cat

Lack of news seems to be the order of the day at the moment - Neverwinter Nights still hasn't been released here and no further news about Macross Zero has come to light either. CBR has started a Games Board, so go and check it out - it covers PC Games, RPGs, Board games ... well, almost any sort of games, really. I finally saw the 'Dungeons & Dragons' Movie during the week and I wish I hadn't. If you want an example of a simply horrible movie, then this is one to pick. The one sole redeeming feature of this entire sad excuse for a movie is the cameo appearance of Tom Baker, who was an actor in 'Doctor Who' back in the 1980's. This is an extremely bad movie, stay well clear of it.

JUNE 16, 2002 - God has a sense of humour - just look at the platypus

Occassionally you come across a site and you have to think 'what the goog is this guy smoking?!'. Chick.com is one of them. Normally, I'm all for people having the right to their own religion - but I also believe in laughing at idiots who hold unbelievably stupid and ignorant beliefs. Want a good laugh? Then try here and here. I read it and thought it had to be some sort of satire, but the scary thing is the guy actually believes all this ... very, very sad. But also amazingly funny. Windows XP is still running fine which is good - not one crash yet and I've been doing some pretty intensive things with it just to see how it handled a heavy processor load. Just a couple of days until the long awaited Neverwinter Nights hits the stores; I already have a copy ordered but I'm not yet sure of the exact Australian release date - I've heard various days being thrown around.

JUNE 10, 2002 - I hate Zombies.

Got my hands on an outstanding comic this week; 'Green Lantern: Legacy - The Last Will and Testament of Hal Jordan'. I personally rate this Hardcover 106 page book higher than the famed 'Kingdom Come' - it fixes almost everything that was flushed down the proverbial toilet in 'Emerald Twilight' as well as being an outstanding character study into Tom Kalmaku. I changed the wallpaper on the front page to a page from Legacy, just because it looks really neat. Various soccer riots are being shown on the news with predictable regularity. What makes soccer fans act like utter morons whenever their team loses? I'll tell you why: They're bored. They've just had to sit through a sporting match where nothing happened - there was no scoring and they feel ripped off they had to shell out hundreds to see a whole lot of nothing. Of course, soccer is a load of bollocks to start with - but that's another story entirely.

JUNE 05, 2002 - Windu!

Who's the bad ass Jedi that knows all the Force tricks? Windu! I like good news and good news I received - a new Macross series called Macross Zero is set to be aired in Japan late October. Nothing is known about this OAV so far but it has to be better than the generally woeful Macross 7... (how I despise Basara Nekki, damn annoying little bastard...). Of course, if the new OAV is anything like Macross Plus then I will be very happy indeed! Time for a very geeky moment; I had to have a laugh over the past week - on the CBR Rumbles Board (which I moderate) some people actually claimed that a feeble Federation ship could actually beat an Imperial Star Destroyer in this thread. Gee, what do you think this scale comparison shows you? Yeah, size isn't all that important but in this case anyone with a brain knows that one ISD is incomparably more advanced than a Star Fleet ship. Want to disagree? then go visit here and get some learnin'!

JUNE 02, 2002 - it.

First off, two things which piss me off; * Web based program installations; For example; Recently the preview version of Netscape 7 was released and I thought that I'd give it a shot - when I went to download it, all that was available was a 2 meg 'smart install' program which would then connect to the Netscape server and get the rest of the 30 meg. That is completely useless to me - there is no reason what-so-ever that the big install file can't be available for general download. * Australian Broadband Providers; almost all broadband providers have placed a ludicrous 3 gig/month cap on downloads in Australia. Want to know why it makes little sense? On my 56k dial up I can get roughly 200 meg/day - 200 meg x 30 days = 6000 meg/6 gig. Therefore I download twice as much as someone on a supposedly lightning fast connection. It quite literally is a case of being able to download stuff fast, but not much of it. You're getting little fast and they wonder why the take-up rate for broadband is below expectations... The new version of KazaaLite is out - much better than the spyware riddled Kazaa... I'd still love to know how spyware makers can possibly sleep at night. Kind of weird how Willow with black hair is even cuter than Willow with red hair...

MAY 28, 2002 - Insert weird phrase here

Over the past few weeks, two women I know have had their husbands walk out on them. Now there's nothing wrong with these women that I know of and they're great people by any measure. But it struck me just how cowardly a guy would have to be to wait until his wife is out of town and then simply leave, leaving a letter requesting a divorce. If you think a marital situation is so bad you want out then at least have the guts to say so to your partners face - you never know, you may even be able to work it out and be happy. Bought a couple of music CDs today (hey, if you like a band/performer buy their stuff otherwise they'll stop doing it) - both were of the same band; 'The Whitlams'. Generally very good stuff though there were a couple of songs I didn't care for. Still, all the songs were light years ahead of most of the soulless garbage piled onto the music industry these days. Added screenshots of the eight Freedom Force skins I've made in the Fan Art section. I'm not going to post the skins themselves due to space constraints but if people I know ask for then, I'll e-mail them out.

MAY 26, 2002 - Kung-Fu Muppet

Confused about what's happening with the copyrights to Macross? I found this good summary which should clear pretty much everything up. For a long time I've been using Windows ME but as time went on, it just got more and more unstable - therefore I made the switch to Windows XP. I have to say, it's certainly stable and I've had no troubles with hardware detection or the like. It also runs quite smoothly on my Pentium III. Customising it isn't as easy as 9x versions of windows, but changing the logon and boot screens is still easily done - themexp.org is the best source I've found and here are some other decent XP sites; xp-erience.org, TweakXP.com. A really great general Windows site I came across was Annoyances.org. Saw the Spider-man movie and wasn't terribly impressed but Attack of the Clones was very, very good. Well, the first half was mostly complete bollocks but once they got down to the real Star Wars stuff the quality of the movie rose dramatically. Of course the best scene in the movie was Yoda vs Dooku and I don't think you'd find many people who'd argue otherwise. Added a story to the Fiction section - just a quick one I did. America is to this very day freaking out about September 11, which I find rather silly in the grand scheme of things. The ever out-spoken Seanbaby pretty much wraps up the entire sad scenario in this fun little article; The Nation that Freaked Out. Of course, if that pisses you off then you can always Be a Wrathful God. Onto the great subject of PC Games; I've still been playing Freedom Force a lot - nice to see an Optimus Prime mesh released. It's such a good game, I even bothered to create some custom skins for it - I'll include some shots of those next update. I also got my hands on Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast - apart from some better graphics and better Force Power controls, it really isn't all that much different to the first game and quickly loses its appeal. Apparently there's another mod out for Baldur's Gate II called Epic Endeavours; it looks quite interesting and I'll have to give it a go in the near future. Finally found a great alternative to the accursed ICQ - I'm now using Trillian which is stable, full of features and takes up almost no system resources at all. An impressive little program it is indeed.

APRIL 27, 2002 - Terror, like charity, begins at home

Rather large update this time, with a complete redesign of numerous sections and the addition of some entirely new areas. Check out the examination area for looks at what makes a super hero super, green lantern ring in the real world, and a brief look at Macross vs Robotech. Since the last update I went and bought Freedom Force and it is simply a great game, especially because of all the custom skins and mods being produced for it. I highly recommend this game and you can see a screenshot I took of it to the right, featuring Parallax, Sentinel and the Flash.

APRIL 01, 2002 - P'LL'X

It seems that Palestine and Israel are set to prove their own stupidity yet again. Actually, that statement is untrue - the Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists from boths sides are doing the majority of the brain dead acts over in the middle east. Even if some sort of peace treaty is reached by Officials, it's going to mean exactly nothing; you'll still have the Palestine fanatics blowing themselves up in a cowardly manner, likewise you'd have Fundamentalist Jewish people calling for their heads and military retaliation. Of course, that military retaliation just pisses the Palestinians off even more which results in more cowards blowing up buses. Pretty sad situation where nobody involved seems to have any brains at all... Saw a couple of movies recently; From Hell was excellent, with an astounding atmosphere and extremely good ending. K-Pax was also good but in a different manner - you're left at the end scratching your head and wondering just what exactly happened. A superb performace from Kevin Spacey once again. I've been giving the demo of Freedom Force a fair hiding of late - it sure looks like it's going to be outstanding game by no small measure. A pity that the full version is not released here for another ten days or so...

MARCH 14, 2002 - A swarm of Santas! Yule tide!

Happy to see some people with brains out there; Morpheus may have become really crap but at least someone out there is doing something right. Grokster connects to the same network that Morpheus did but it comes with the accursed spyware. Well, these great people show you how to install grokster and get rid of all the accursed spyware. And that brings me onto the subject of Spyware/Adware - to anyone that makes applications/programs that fall under these catergories ... fuck you. These things have no right to report any details at all about any user, regardless of whatever fine print may or may not be in a user agreement. 'Oh, but they keep other programs free' .. whoopee. If that's the best solution some companies can come up with to make some money then they ought to get out of the goddam business. There is a game in my country called 'Australian Rules Football'. At the moment there is a story being splashed across all the news programs/newpapers/etc about the captain of one team quitting because he slept with the wife of a team-mate. Here's a hint: I don't friggin' care. It is unimportant. It is so unimportant to me, I would rather hear about the digestive tract of spiders than have to encounter this worthless 'event' yet again. Plus, there's the whole 'oh, but the fans of this hero are shattered' thing - if a brain dead footballer is the best hero they can find, then they need a shitload of help right now. He's not a hero by any stretch of the definition; he gets paid to run around on a ground and kick around a fake pigs bladder. That is so heroic I can hardly contain myself - oh, his courage is so great I can feel is radiating from hundreds of mile away (that was sarcasm for anyone that's slow witted (AFL fans)). Seriously, go out and find a real rolemodel if you really need one - else get a goddam life. Since my last update (sometime during Queen Victoria's reign, I think) I have done another piece of drawing - this time of the current Spectre. I tried some new colouring tools with mixed results - you can find the new piece over in the art section.

MARCH 03, 2002 - I have come to clean ze pool

Morpheus got screwed over this past week but now have a new 'preview version' out. I'm using it right now and I really do not know what to make of it - it's missing some features the old version had and its obvious there aren't as many people on the network as before. Freedom Force should be out very soon which is good - it really does look like a good game. There are three PC games I will have to get my hands on this year; 'Freedom Force', 'Neverwinter Nights', and 'Icewind Dale II'. The Winter Olympics have been and gone - and thank god for that. Why they must insist on giving us every insignificant detail on the accursed over commericialised event is beyond me. Then again, I don't think sport should even be on television. You want to go watch a game? Then get your lazy ass off the couch and go see the game with your own eyes.

FEBRUARY 17, 2002 - Let there be light.

Not much to say; life is going as expected with no big hiccups which is great. Australian Prime Minister John Howard has been caught lying his ass off (again) which really isn't surprising in the least. His track record with honesty is dodgy to say the very least. There were two science fiction movies on here last night; 'The Fifth Element' (really expensive hollywood movie) and 'Dark Star' (1976 el-cheapo movie). Believe it or not, Dark Star was easily the superior movie. Bought a couple more books last week; Part 1 of Tolkiens Lost Tales and yet another Forgotten Realms novel. I have yet to find the time to start either, however.

FEBRUARY 07, 2002 - Life is tough. Life is tougher for the stupid.

I bought three more books during the week (the joys of having a decent bookstore! woo!). They were; 'Dr Who: The adventuress of Henrietta Street' which, quite frankly, is a really, badly written book, that has, way, too, many commas and goes on way too many tangents. This is not a good book and I'm quite surprised it even got published. The other two books were 'Temple Hill' (a 3E Forgotten Realms Book) and the novelistion of Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal. I haven't had time to read the latter two yet, however. I also ditched the old 15" monitor I'd been using since 1995 - I now use a great Auriga brand 17" monitor and the difference is jaw-dropping. CBR added a brand new Anime & Manga board to its large selection of forum choices during the week, and traffic on the new board is higher than even I expected. There was an incident during the week which still has me laughing to myself; a group called the Dole Army basically made the 'current affairs' shows 'Today Tonight' and 'A Current Affair' look like the gits they really are. Of course, both these TV shows have all the journalistic integrity of a used car salesman wearing an old tweed jacket but to finally see someone make them look like morons was a good thing indeed. I really hate so called journalists who sensationalise every story in a pathetic attempt to try to boost their ratings - if the stories were interesting in the first place no embelishment would be necessary...

FEBRUARY 02, 2002 - One man, one vote. I'm the man and I have the vote.

'Bullet Time' (see last entry) was better than I expected; one of the most liked Who characters dies in it but I'm not sure if the book is in continuity or not. There's not much going on at the moment which makes a nice change to a certain degree. Ho hum. Oh yeah, I finally added a whole bunch of sites to the Links section which have been sitting in my bookmarks for ages. One of which is this wonderful game called catapult - cat lovers will get a kick out of it...

JANUARY 28, 2002 - Nobody tosses a Dwarf!

I finally saw the Fellowship of the Ring movie last week and it was as good as I expected - which was pretty damn extraordinary. I could not spot one serious flaw in the entire thing. Some people complained how it ended abruptly but I didn't think that was the case at all; it ended just in the right spot. Overall it was simply an outstanding movie. I also bought and read The Last Hero by Terry Pratchet. It's simply one of the funniest and well written books I have read in a long, long time. I also bought one of those new Doctor Who novels 'Bullet time'. I'm not overly thrilled with it so far but I'm a third of the way into it, so it may very well get better.

JANUARY 24, 2002 - No, I don't want any fries with that!

A whole week with no updates - heh. Thing have been happening on the ... personal front which have been keeping me pretty busy recently. But we won't go into that. CBR has launched a whole new set of New Message Boards which boast some outstanding features. Go have a look. You know you want to. These are not the droids you're looking for... And for some mindless fun, try this online test: What's your pirate name?. Aaar!

JANUARY 17, 2002 - It'd be the beginning of the end, if it weren't already the middle.

Added two very quick sketches of a couple of Dungeons and Dragons characters I ran once. I'm not very happy with either, especially the first one whose head is clearly stuffed up *sigh*. Pity, that one started off really well... These two sketches can be found in the good ol' Art section. What got me sketching old AD&D characters of mine is that I got my hands on some of the rules for 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons. They're certainly different and my initial thoughts are that they do seem vastly superior to 2nd edition. I'm going to attempt to convert some of my old characters to 3rd and see what happens...

JANUARY 16, 2002 - Bad cow pun

Mirabalis ICQ, by almost any standard, is bloatware - eg, it eats up far too much system resources for what it does. So I went looking for an alternative; and I found a decent one. I tried an ICQ client by Miranda and while it's still in its early stages, it sure looks promising. The TF Archive is stopping it's regular posting of Transformers episodes which annoys me no end. It's not their fault, though - it's yet another case of 'Yahoo!' being utter pricks once again. Still, I should be able to track down most of the TF eps I want with Morpheus so it's not a complete disaster.

JANUARY 14, 2002 - This dance is more powerful than all the decepticons put together

Someone posted a news story, which may or may not be true, that George Lucas has approached Celine Dion to do some sort of theme for 'Attack of the Clones'. I find myself asking; 'Why?'. Not only do her 'musical talents' not match the films sci-fi setting in any way but also, as someone I know said, Her musical talent does not just make Banshees sound good, it makes them run for the hills. I never did play Fantasy Empires like I said before; instead I temporarily became hooked on a not-quite-so-old game called Deadlock. Nothing beats the Cyth ... what a cool race. But I'm over that game now; it gets old quickly. Now I need something else to keep me occupied game wise. I find myself missing one of the websites I used to run; Hal Jordan: Lord of the Green. It died when NBCi decided to be bastards and shut down their webhosting service and, quite frankly, there isn't one decent free webhost left anymore. Geocities is pathetic, Crosswinds was good when it started but is now something of a joke. FortuneCity and Tripod ... well, let's not even go there. While looking around some Transformers sites yesterday, I came across this rather ... disturbing page. Do not go there if you are easily scared. But on another site I did find the image to the right and it makes me chuckle whenever I look at it. Does anyone (yeah, like anyone actually reads this) know anywhere that has more SD Transformers images? Speaking of websites; a website I used to love has reappeared again. Cheeks the Toy Wonder - or some of it at least. This is one of the funniest websites I know of and the way it examines comic books of the silver age is insightful yet still entertaining.

JANUARY 12, 2002 - Doom decrees you must buy a vowel!

Decided, just out of curiosities sake, to add a statistics thing to this site. I was quite bored, OK? Not that I expect there to be much activity, there's not exactly much here. What sort of Flame Warrior am I? According to this site I'm an Admin. I can live with that. Still on Online Tests, here's one based on 'Which Kevin Smith Character Are You?'. According to that thing I'm Brodie from Mallrats. Weird. It appears there may actually be a viable contender for the 'biggest lack of brains' award. That's right ... it's Ireland, for arguing over a Primary School. For the love of god, grow up already! Your political system is shot to hell, you've got cowards in black masks running around being jackasses, and you've got complete morons arguing over religion ... I think you've got more pressing concerns than where one school is run. I've had something of a rediscovery - retro-PC games. I've been playing 'One Must Fall' (where the hell did I get that from, anyhow?) pretty solidly all day. I have another one here called 'Fantasy Empires', I might have to try that a bit later.

JANUARY 08, 2002

Morpheus is a neat program and all, but I wish its creators would put in a friggin' thing like Getright - as in, if your PC should suffer a power loss (eg, a black-out) then you don't lose all the files in transit. Morons. Speaking of file sharing programs; it seems that Napster plans to charge a monthly fee for a limited service. Here's a hint: People, unless they're unbelievably stupid, will not pay good money for a service which is inferior to one they can get for free. Since I'm in a bitching mood today; anyone that makes a website to be browser specific (eg, only work in internet explorer) is a complete idiot. Any website should be fully viewable in both netscape and ie in any resolution greater than 620x480. Sheesh... Recently I've managed to watch Clerks, Mallrats, & Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Kevin Smith is a damn good writer (as we all know from Green Arrow) and his movies are a great testament to that.

JANUARY 07, 2002

Heh, been a while since I've touched this thing; not that much has been happening. My New Year was actually pretty good; got together with a bunch of my old high school friends and just hung out down on the beach/carnival area. And I mean friends, not just people that were in the same class. It really was a fun night and it ended up quite interesting since I hadn't seen some of the people since probably 1998. This is really old but Throne of Bhaal won Best Game Expansion for 2001. Like there was any doubt - Diablo 2/Hellfire is just pure crap compared to Baldur's Gate 2. Can't wait until Neverwinter Nights comes out. Talking about Baldur's Gate, I really have to give a hand to the people who made The Darkest Day - a fan made expansion for BG2. Sure, it's buggy as hell atm but it's still quite good. And the Dumbest People On the Face of the Planet award ... is a tie. That's right, the teams of Israel/Palestine & India/Pakistan get to share the award for the biggest lack of brains and common sense.