Geekyness Overload

Now optimised for mobile!

2011-11-17T06:56:00.001Z

So, my blogs should now be optimised for viewing on mobile devices. Like the mobile look?

Epilepsy Awareness Month - My Epilepsy

2011-11-03T20:54:00.001Z

So, November is as stated above, and as someone with epilepsy, I guess it's partly my responsibility to make others more aware.

I'm going to detail how I discovered mine, what a seizure/fit feels like, how I cope now and so forth.

I've basically had my head issues as long as I can remember but as they were never serious, and were more of a nuisance than anything. During a normal tidying up of my flat, I had my usual head thing happen, which is:

I get a loud ringing in my ears, like a flatline sound, and then a series of images akin to a film plays in my head. There are three or four sets of films and though I can't remember it once my attack is over, I recognize the start of them when I am having them. Then an immense pain in my head, followed by pain in other areas every so often.

Usually that's where my thing ends, but during this time I blacked out.

I was aware I had been unconscious for a few minutes thanks to the clock in the living room but I was otherwise okay. I got up off the floor and continued to clean and then it happened again and I was out for nearly 10 minutes. I had bashed my arm against the doorway so had flailed in my vulnerable state and injured my arm.

I then panicked and realized that my local doctors wouldn't be open due to the time, but rationalized that I could call NHS Direct and ask them about it.

They said it sounded like a seizure, and advised that I go to the walk in center in town. I went there and they did a few tests and then referred me to my current epilepsy doctor, who ran some MRI tests and others and gave me the diagnosis of epilepsy.

Since not too long after that I've had medication, and haven't had anything else happen. I wasn't able to drive until I was fit free for a year, but then I got a free travel pass which has proved very useful.

I hope you are a bit more aware now, I'm not sure what else there is left to say.

Apprenticing in Pokémon

2011-01-20T09:22:00.001Z

I've been playing Pokémon Emerald a lot again lately, and have remembered my favourite feature.

It's the apprentice in the Battle Tower. They are a trainer who asks you questions about which Pokémon they should use in the Tower, and battle moves and the like. They ask you one question a day until they feel successfully mentored by you, at which time they are replaced by a new one.

Then they are assigned a position in the Tower's single rooms, so that you meet them in battle or team up with them in the Multi rooms.

However, when you mix records with another Emerald game, you also share all your apprentices and a trainer of yourself for use in your friend's Tower.

I also really like Record Mixing, just because of all the data it shares amongst games, and to see all the data the game tracks. Make a big purchase at a PokéMart and then mix records, you'll be on your friend's TV on a show. You'll also be in their Record Hall for the Battle Frontier.

There's also the sharing of secret bases, which not only shares your base, but all the registered bases you have and vice versa.

Record Mixing is still present in the fourth generation games (Diamond/Pearl/Platinum) but doesn't share as much data as Emerald, nor are as many in-game things changed.

I'd love to see the feature return in a big way.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

iApp Review - Board Games

2010-12-30T10:15:00.001Z

These are apps in my "Board Games" folder.

Price:59p

Who doesn't love Scrabble? Scrabble on the go on the iPhone is very good, and essentially the same as playing it on a board.

There's quite a cheating "Best Word" button that though you can only use four tines is really cheap.

Pass and Play is good, and can be done over one iDevice or via WiFi between them.

Your other option is to buy "Scrabble Tile Rack" on four iDevices and then the main Scrabble game on an iPad and then have a super expensive game of Scrabble.

3.5/5

Buy it here - (UK iTunes) Scrabble

Price: Free

Words With Friends is a game like Scrabble but you play against other users and at whatever pace you want.

I could play a move soon after someone else and then be waiting a few days for them to make a move, or if they're in a different time zone it's convenient too.

There's also a chat feature which is sometimes handy. There's still a Pass And Play and local multiplayer options available but the main bulk is playing against other users online.

Words With Friends (Free) is an essential app if you like games like Scrabble.

4/5

Download it here - (UK iTunes) Words With Friends Free

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Another side of Twitter

2010-11-28T18:16:00.001Z

I've been using Twitter now for over two years and my main account is pretty active.

I started following a Kingdom Hearts RP account a few months back and then eventually set one up too. It reminds me of my old time in e-Feds and writing Pokémon stories. It is here if you are interested.

It lets me be a bit creative in a very short space of time but also provides a good base background to work from and as I like the character's personality with poker playing, Time control and being a good wordsmith, it suits me.

I've not many followers so far outside of others who do the same thing, some of whom do seem a little nuts about the whole thing, and I didn't know this whole RPing side of Twitter existed until last year.

Twitter is constantly growing and evolving and it's great.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Things I cannot touch

2010-09-30T13:18:00.001+01:00

You may have seen me mention #thingsicannottouch as a hashtag on Twitterbefore now and I thought it best to explain further.

Basically, touching certain things like peaches, dry sponges and unglazed pottery makes me feel queasy. Not sure why, it just does.

I work with fresh fruits amongst other things so that makes the peaches and pears bits rather annoying. I'm pretty sure I'd vomit if I had to hold one of the things for a certain length of time.

It's just an annoyance at times, when I can't get pasta bake trays/casserole dishes in to an oven because of it's ceramic base. I'd drop it.

I guess I'll get over it one day.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Finally don't care

2010-06-15T08:06:00.000+01:00

During a few conversations on Twitter, I realised that I no longer cared about future Final Fantasy titles being released.

I used to be a day one purchaser (from VII onwards when I had my own cash and knowledge of the series), so where did it all go wrong? I guess it started with XI, a little, when I knew I wouldn't be buying a MMPORPG, even if it did pretend to be Final Fantasy. Then XII was released and became the biggest Final Fantasy dissapointment to me since playing Final Fantasy II, right after finishing Final Fantasy I. I thought XIII might manage to draw me back in but all that seems to be is a long tutorial in sparkly destruction. So, unless it's remakes or things linked back to older games, I consider myself done with Final Fantasy.

Fortunately, Squeenix still get my money because of Kingdom Hearts, a franchise I really like, though I know it is sometimes childish. There's a "new" (been redesigned for DS, tweaked, new features etc.) game coming out soon called Kingdom Hearts Re:coded, which ought to be good, then that'll be followed up by Birth By Sleep, which has been anticipated since Kingdom Hearts II came out many years ago, then Tetsuya Nomura says he's also working on two other KH titles so they should keep me going really.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Going Postal - Upcoming

2010-05-30T20:15:00.000+01:00

This aired recently on Sky1, so a review of the book and the Sky1 adaption will soon follow. In the mean time, can I recommend you follow @goingpostalnews on Twitter?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A pressing engagement

2010-05-17T09:45:00.000+01:00

I’ve not posted in a little while, and this one will just be a tweet that speaks for itself.

Wii Fat

2010-03-22T18:03:00.000Z

Now anyone that knows me will tell you (or maybe not, depends how nice they're being) that I'm overweight.

About eight months ago (when this post was started and drafted, then forgotten about), I weighed almost 18st, and had a 40 inch waist.

Of course, as fellow chubby gamers might know, there is an alternative to doing any real excerise:

Wii Fit, for it's few faults, is quite good at keeping you on track as it sets a goal weight for you and tells you off for putting on weight, to which you have to designate a reason.

It's a good way of tracking your weight and seeing where you're going wrong if you stick at it, but there's little structure. You could play only the balance games and ignore all the muscle workouts.

My fiancée recently set me on to this other Wii workout game and it seems to work very well.

EA Sports Active More Workouts (yes, long title) comes with a leg strap and resistance band. The idea is that you put the leg strap on and insert the Wii's nunchuck in to it so that it can monitor when you're running or lunging. The resistance band is a peculiar pink rubbery strand with two handles at the end. Most of the time you stand on the rubbery part and pull the handles towards you whilst excercising.

With the game, you start a six-week challenge, during which you work out for four days of the week (of your choice) and then it assigns you different sets of workouts for those days, getting progressively tougher as you continue. During the "days off" you assign you still need to fill out the "EA Sports Active Survey" detailing what you've eaten, sugar intake and the like.

I didn't mean for this to turn in to a review but it sort of did. Using both these fitness games and doing a few other things means that my waist is now 34" and I now weight 16st, so it's all good.

If this is a review the games need scoring, but I'll forgo my usual system as it doesn't suit fitness games and just go for a score out of 10.

WII FIT: 7/10
EA SPORTS ACTIVE MORE WORKOUTS: 8.5/10

Please note that they don't fit in to my usual scoring and are more of an "excercises game" score.

-- Posted from my iPhone

Kitties Part II: Extra Ginger

2010-03-05T22:08:00.000Z

The family's cat had more kittens. Six this time.

I promise I'll post some actually interesting stuff later this month.

Merry New Catch-‘em-all-up

2010-01-08T13:09:00.000Z

So, my last post on here seems to have been quite some time ago. Firstly I should wish you all a belated happy new year and then let you know what’s been going on in the interim.

RelationshipThe main reason I’ve not been blogging is because I’ve got a girlfriend recently, and I’ve been rather busy with things that aren’t blogging whilst getting a new relationship started up and making her happy.

Head IssuesThe problem with my head seems to be epilepsy to let you all know, but not the usual photosensitive kind that people think of when they think of epilepsy. I don’t know what triggers it yet, but I’ve been told I can’t drive for a year to ensure I’m free of any attacks. I’ve also got some medicine for it to take every day and then I’ll be updated on it in about four months.

I’m too young for this I’m now going to be an uncle, as my little brother’s girlfriend is a few months pregnant. It’s a bit odd, as he’s the youngest member of the family, but the first one to be having a child. Still, I am quite happy for them.

KittensI don’t know if I mentioned it on here before, but we now have kittens, as seen above. They are very cute, and are named Charlie and Hiro.

That’s all I can think of that you need be caught up on for now, I’ve got a few reviews that I’ll get around to writing when I’ve the time, and a few tales to tell, but for now this is goodbye again for a bit.

Who lives in a house like this?

2009-11-06T10:49:00.000Z

Wait. I do. Though it’s a flat, as opposed to a house. You might recall when I showed off the pictures of my flat not long after I moved in and got sorted out. I thought now that @benjirino has moved in and I’ve almost been here a year, I’d show off some before and after pictures to show you how things are now. Above is the kitchen.

Bedroom

This is before, when it was very basic. It’s not changed much but has become a little messier, and then tidy, and now should remain at a standard of tidiness. Now let’s see today:

It’s still a little messy, but it is in my nature. The sofa that was in the living room is now in there, as is a TV previously in the living room. Posters are now up too, to make it seem more like an actual room. I think it’s quite an improvement. Also out of shot, my clothes are a lot more sorted.

Kitchen

The previous kitchen shot is at the top of the page, so then let’s see today’s:

Not a big change on the surface, but plates and things are a lot more decluttered now in the cupboards. To be fair, I already had the main things like a dishwasher, washing machine etc. but Benji did get a much needed microwave a few months ago.

BathroomVery boringly basic before. A small stack of Penny Arcade books in the corner, and not really many other defining features. So now, how does it look?

Many new things in here! Coffee table for the Penny Arcade books, which are now accompanied by copies of Nintendo magazine, Lost magazine and Powerslam. There’s now a large mirror and even *gasp* a shower now, as you can see the rail just at the top. There’s also two washing baskets in here, one being Benji’s. This room has probably changed the most besides the living room.

Living Room

I didn’t actually show off the living room last time, but instead have two photos.

Yes, we have two TVs before you state this, being geeks it’s required. Can’t be playing Kingdom Hearts and hogging all the TV, so having two makes sense. There’s a fireplace behind that airer, but I’ve only switched it on three times since I’ve been here. Now on the other side:

Yep, two sofas too, and two bookcases, though you can’t see mine too well.

Shan’t show off Benji’s room as I don’t think he’d want me to post it on here without prior knowledge. But, that’s where I live. Looks much better now than it once did.

Smoking!

2009-11-05T11:28:00.000Z

What a way to start a story about bonfire night, with a picture of Jim Carey as The Mask. Man, my blog is awesome. :)

So perhaps you celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Night, to go with the tradition of celebrating the downfall of the infamous gunpowder plot. If you don’t, the basic tradition is to launch fireworks and have a bonfire like the one above, whilst eating unhealthy foods like hot dogs and burgers.

My family often celebrated this, until we all got a bit too old, but are doing it tonight for my little brother’s girlfriend as she’s not ever had a fireworks display before. I am alas working, but I don’t mind.

Anyways, if you’d like to cast your mind back a few years, when I was 16 I think. I had just been out with a few friends and was ludicrously chilled out, and it slipped my mind that it was actually bonfire night.

I got back home and the festivities were about to begin, and the grandparents arrived, as did the next door neighbours I think. I was happily rocking about and enjoying things, when I was pulled aside and entered in to a conversation I didn’t think I’d ever have. I’m obviously paraphrasing, so if my mother comments, she might recall the situation better than I.

Mum: “Joe, are you stoned?”

I was quite taken aback by this, as previously mentioned, no drugs ever. I’ve never even had a cigarette.

Me: “No…why?”
Mum: “Yes you are. Don’t do it again when you know Gran and Grandpa are going to be here.”

Now, I understand that most folk think I look constantly stoned and worry what I would actually be like if I were stoned, as I’m laid back enough as it is, but to think that I actually was?

I don’t think I was spoken to for much of the rest of the evening, having somehow let people down by supposedly doing something which I’ve never really even entertained the idea of doing.

Yeah, that was certainly a fun conversation, in which I seemed like the bad guy without even realizing it.

I was also accused a few months later of leaving discarded cigarette packets in the garden, but I’m sure that was really my youngest brother starting smoking back then.

That’s my super fun bonfire night memory, anyone else got any good ones?

Remember Novémbré

2009-11-04T10:31:00.001Z

I’ve had a busy, but fun past two weeks, so didn’t prep a “monthly look ahead” post as I usually do, so it’s being posted now instead.

Sketchy on the details I’m going to try and keep at a steady pace with my drawing once again, and try as hard as I can to get the comic started before the end of the year.

Job HuntingI often get fed up with my job, and I know it could be a lot worse, but it could also be a lot better, so I’m going to see what else is on offer out there this month.

Brains! I’m going back to the hospital on the 20th of this month, to see if they can tell me any more about my seemingly mysterious neurological problems. I am hoping that they stick me with some medication, or run some more tests. Anything else than “meh. You seem fine.”

Unfortunately that’s all I can think of for this month, well, as long as I’m happy right? And I’m currently very happy and often ecstatic. :)

I’ve been having these weird thoughts lately…

2009-11-03T13:59:00.001Z

Well, in truth they are more peculiar dreams. I have been mentioning them on Twitter, but I’d rather go for a full blown explanation on here of the past few in reverse date order (so most recent one first).

A new ace attorney In this dream, I was in a courtroom over some trivial matter, and had a strange defence lawyer. It was the honey monster from the Sugar Puffs adverts. He was dressed rather plainly in a suit, parading about the courtroom and defending me and appeared to be winning the case. No-one reacted to it, and the judge passed it off as normal and I ended up being found not guilty for whatever it was I had done.

RAW’s scary guest hostWWE RAW has a thing of having a guest host each week at the moment, and in my dream, the next guest host had been announced as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and I started off watching next week’s show in the dream, enough to see the marshmallowy giant walk out in to the ring, only to realise he couldn’t get in it.

What an interesting revolution In this next dream, I was watching TV and a newswoman was recapping the recent overthrow of the US President, Barack Obama, claiming he had been replaced by a sentient LEGO person, and that now we know they had been secretly living within society and waiting for their time to rise and had chosen now to do it, and then we cut to a speech from the new president, and I changed channels.

Not as stealthy as they once wereFor this one, being the one from last night, I had a tool shed in a long garden and had gone there to do some work when I noticed some people that resembled The Borrowers sneaking around the plant pots and stuff. I had a quick conversation with them, telling them I already knew they were here and didn’t mind. They spoke of getting ready for Christmas and I informed them to borrow what they like, just stay out of sight of others besides myself, and then wandered back out to the garden leaving them to their own devices.

Just for the record, I have never taken any illegal drugs, not on any medication or anything like that, these are just my regular dreams from my subconscious.

Blinkered Season Two – Fire Retarded Review

2009-10-25T16:57:00.001Z

Season Two of Blinkered started recently on NudiaTV and as I reviewed season one before as a whole I decided to do this season as an episode by episode basis, so here’s the first episode review, named “Fire Retarded”.

Characters/CastAside from the new female character that I noted on the season two preview that I did, Frazzle has his own spot in the introductions now, and we’re a character down with Jimbo’s chubby friend having been taken off (presumably due to him leaving for storyline reasons along with Lance Volcano, a guest character last season). Character development remains strong, and doesn’t focus too much on the new character as a show might.

Brandon Carr (Richard Pohl) remains the funniest cast member still, with his odd quirks.

I also noted that the courier seen in this episode is related to the newest cast member Wendy Joelseph (Lauren Knust) and filmed alongside Joel Henderson.

Sets

The rarely seen meeting room gets used in this episode to show off Big Al, though he is not in the episode apart from this appearance.

I’m not sure how many different sets you can really have in an office, so I feel this segment should actually be replaced. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Comedy One of the funniest moments for me in this episode, was when the usual “pick on Jimbo” part was going on and he was informed he had a courier. Then we flash to Dennis who says “I love how I can confuse Jimbo by using a word with more than five letters…” Then starts to count them aloud. This was made even more funny to me when @comeuppence mentioned to me on Twitter that it wasn’t even intentional.

Parts about the GPS post-it notes also raised a few chuckles, as did Big Al’s video. Jimbo bashing remains funny too, with tweeting “Jimbo is gay”.

Soundtrack Aside from a little singing from Brandon Carr (who is in a band by the way who happen to do the intro music, which as much as I slated it, has now grown on me) there’s not a whole bunch of music, which would have been nice to dub over the outside shot scenes or perhaps in the background of Big Al’s video.

There was quite a catchy tune after the bloopers however.

Plot This episode may have revealed the name of the office/company at which they work, probably not significant or interesting to anyone else, but it’s been bugging me since season one. Dennis looks through a file labelled “RDS” when looking for a “Jimberly Holton”.

Seeing Wendy being nice to Brian/Jimbo was a bit strange (not for the character, but because I’m used to seeing the whole office pick on Jimbo), but I’d like to see where that goes. But then he finally reaches breaking point and snaps. I expected him to quit, but it all turns out to be part of a joke, which he then takes rather well.

Closing Comment
An average episode overall but a nice start to the new series…let’s see how it all goes from here.

Characters/Cast: 6/10
Sets: 6/10
Comedy: 7/10
Soundtrack: 6/10
Plot: 6.7/10

62.40%

0 – 19% Unwatchable - why the hell did I even watch this?
20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the show hold it back
50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
70 – 84% Good – This is what you’ll be talking about with people in the office the next day.
85 – 89% Excellent – This is what you’ll be talking about for the next month.
90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – This is the best TV show ever, therefore going by Josh Whedon logic, it will soon be cancelled.

Parapraxis is hilarious

2009-10-23T19:51:00.001+01:00

Better known as a Freudian slip, or slip of the tongue is when you say something that you thought etc. but didn’t mean to vocalise. I guess the story I’m actually telling is about a slip of the mind (but in a similar sense to a slip of the tongue, rather than another phrase for forgetfulness) but it remains funny nonetheless.

Firstly, you need some back story to fully understand this. My youngest brother’s girlfriend had a large fall out with her parents who weren’t exactly nice, or the most attentive or aware of parents (She’s never had fireworks on November 5th, and got a £3 t-shirt and a sandwich for Christmas gifts and Christmas dinner) so she decided to move in with our family and now my parents are her guardians and she’s not had much contact with them.

However, they did recently apologize for some things that they’d done, and as she noted "They made up just in time for me to get them Christmas presents” but I was told of a phone call she made recently that got them not talking to her again. Her actions below:

*looking through phone to ring my mother*
Finds the ‘Mum’ contact to ring, and calls her
Her actual mother answers, as she’s the “Mum” contact
”Hey, is Pete there?”
”No. Why would Pete be here?”
”Oh, er never mind. Bye”

Yes, she called her actual mother when she went to call my parents. So I guess her parents aren’t speaking to her again. Oh well, no big loss there.

Also, this is my 100th post of 2009. Woop!

Kitties!

2009-10-22T23:01:00.000+01:00

This is the family’s cat, Ruby, who recently had kittens, and I thought I’d show them off here. That’s the entire post for today I’m afraid folks.

Aw, kitties…obviously click the images for bigger versions.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days Review - DS

2009-10-17T11:49:00.000+01:00

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days is a DS RPG telling the story of Sora’s Nobody and Keyblade wielder, Roxas spending his time within a strong group of Nobodies who call themselves The Organization (often nicknamed Organization XIII) who have the intention of completing Kingdom Hearts to become real people once again, and fills in gaps during the GBA adventure Kingdom Hearts: Chain Of Memories as well as adding in multiplayer missions.

I previously blogged a few spoilers about the story here so if you just want to leap straight in to my pre-playing thoughts check that out.

StoryThe game starts from Roxas’ seventh day within The Organization and a new character, named Xion (pronounced She-On) who can also wield a Keyblade and collect hearts by defeating Heartless. There are some great unexpected twists within the story, though I was disappointed that the group who went to Castle Oblivion (the world played in Chain of Memories) are slain early on eliminating story missions alongside them.

Gameplay This is the first game of the Kingdom Hearts series to feature multiplayer and has a mission mode system for playing with friends. Alas, as none of my friends play Kingdom Hearts I haven’t been able to capitalize on this aspect of it. The main mode is the Story Mode where Saïx hands out varying missions to aid The Organization. Gameplay on this feels very much like Kingdom Hearts II, with the exception that you have a specific goal in mind when visiting each world. New types of Heartless appear to challenge you, and some such as the Dustflier are a real challenge.

Also introduced is the Panel System, which determines what you take with you on each mission, and what weapon and magic you carry. By gaining experience, your levels also fit on here too. You can find various Gears for your weapon to add on to your panels and then store these panels to use in multiplayer to give you an edge. Once you find a system that works, there’s little point in messing with it, until you gain a better Gear.

Graphics The graphics are okay for a DS, but in a similar fashion to how the cutscenes stunned me on the GBA for Chain of Memories, I am floored by how great it looks when we’re getting over forty minutes of beautifully detailed cutscenes, though after the start of the game, there’s a large gap before you see any more.

SoundtrackUnfortunately, this game heavily borrows from previous Kingdom Hearts titles for it’s music, only having a few original songs for new characters and the like, so it gets knocked down here.

Replayability Whilst playing through Story Mode again would be a waste (unless you gain extra achievements for finishing on Proud Mode) Mission Mode allows you to attempt previous missions and try to completely fill the mission gauge to gain all the extra things but unless you are a fan of the series you probably won’t want to 100% complete it.

Story: 7/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Graphics: 6.5/10
Soundtrack: 4.5/10
Replayability: 5/10

58%

0 – 19% Unplayable - why the hell did I even buy this?
20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the game hold it back
50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
70 – 84% Good – A nice franchise or single game, that just misses out on being great because of a few flaws.
85 – 89% Excellent – You could play this for ages and be happy
90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – You should have this game and play it every single day.

Want me to review a game? Comment and let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Com-poké-pletonist

2009-10-16T20:11:00.001+01:00

I’m sure a lot of you are aware that I play Pokémon games as I go by the name of “PkmnTrainerJ” all over the internet. You can say “it’s for kids” and all the stuff I’ve heard many times before, but I don’t mind. It’s still an enjoyable RPG and like most RPG’s it makes me want to 100% the game.

In case you’ve never played a Pokémon game before, the basics are that you raise a team of monsters, beat a varying amount of tough trainers (gym leaders) and then move on to tougher challenges (known as the Elite Four and occasionally a Battle Frontier) and your team of Pokémon gains levels, get new abilities and evolve and so forth.

However, there’s also something called the Pokédex which will fill up once you capture Pokémon, and as the amount of Pokémon available leaps up each generation, filling it becomes a little more difficult each time as it went from 151 (first few games) to 493 (current) but I try and fill it each game by legitimate purposes, rather than buying a gameshark or similar device and simply cheating.

This does mean that I’ve had to go to events for it, and other things such as downloading special things via wi-fi, but it’s all worth it. I love when I go to events and meet fans, especially those that I know off forums or social networking sites and it’s fun to actually explore the whole area of the game when it gets unlocked by these events. For your information, my Pokédex’s stand at:

Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow – 151/151 (I had to exploit a small glitch in order to catch Mew)
Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal – 250/251 (For everywhere except Japan it was impossible to obtain Celebi, due to an item never being released anywhere else)
Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald/FireRed/LeafGreen – 386/386 (This generation was relatively easy, Deoxys from an item, Jirachi from another game, Celebi from a friend who attended an event in America, all legendary birds from an event in the UK and various others picked up at events. I also encountered my first shiny this generation with a green-coloured Mewtwo)
Pokémon Pearl/Diamond/Platinum – 492/493 (This generation bought WiFi with it making things a lot easier, but the final Pokémon, Arceus, has yet to be released to the UK)

So, yes. I love completing the Pokédex. I apologise for all the colours too.

Book smarts

2009-10-07T13:32:00.000+01:00

I have always considered myself an avid reader who blasts through, even back to when I was reading decent young books (read; NOT vampire angsty type books) such as Goosebumps and Animorphs and I was later introduced to what fast became my favourite series of books, and as the author died a few months back I thought it would be appropriate to discuss them.

The series is referred to as “The Belgariad” and is a great story about a young boy (Garion) who starts off an a journey to recover a mythical item, known as The Orb of Aldur to stop an evil god.

As generic as the plot sounds, the first book of this series was written almost 20 years ago, so many people that have written similar things since may have taken inspiration from it.

The characters within are very rich, as are the descriptions of the locations and people, and there are many turns along the way and some suprises such as there being something more special about the one boy who can touch the Orb without being burned. Many religious themes run though this as there’s multiple gods for multiple races of people and even gods that interact with characters like Belgarath.

This series served to introduce me to the fantasy genre which I now so love and has helped me get in to games such as Final Fantasy and even Pokémon to an extent, to which I do love.

I do hope to someday write something that is as good as the series, or even any of David Eddings works but that’s quite the pipe dream.

If it weren’t for reading the books, I doubt I’d be able to blast through 800-page plus books as quickly as I do these days and I wouldn’t have even glanced upon Terry Pratchett’s books.

If you want to know more about the books (I’ve attempted to avoid spoilers in case you haven’t read them) then start here with Pawn Of Prophecy and hopefully you’ll enjoy the books as much as I do.

This is the story of my old man

2009-10-03T21:54:00.000+01:00

This is the story of my old man, like his father before him (probably, don’t know much about his family).

I realise I’ve mentioned my parents divorce before now, as well as my father a sample of times. When I usually speak of my dad now, I mean my mother’s fiancé and the man that I should really call my stepfather, but refer to by his first name. However, that’s only been the case since I was 15/16, and long before that back in my childhood it wasn’t so great.

People often ask me about my biological father, and my response usually is that he was a bastard. If there’s ever any follow up questions I respond with a rough count of how many times he broke my mother’s nose, or pushed her down the stairs when she was pregnant. After that people clam up.

When I was younger, my house was not a quiet place as you’d expect with four siblings, a drunk for a father and various other things. My father left the house “forever” (which I took to mean for a few days/hours in his head) more times during my youth than I can count, regularly threw insults and fists at anyone who’d look at him wrongly and arguments between my parents could go on for days and weeks.

There were times where he could be an okay parent, but I think he always felt let down that his first son had turned out to be a geek, as opposed to a manly man who was in to sports etc. It didn’t go well as the next son entered in to the fold of cooking (a subject my father had minimal knowledge of), the next one was a geek too but then finally the final son did have an interest in sports and all that stuff, and he seemed overjoyed and willing to neglect the others to lavish attention on the son he saw as a younger, less balding version of himself.

This isn’t to say that brother of mine didn’t also receive regular beatings from my father as did the rest of us. Everyone was equal in that regard.

We sometimes went to his mother’s house and I do have some fond memories of that (playing with LEGO, eating broken biscuits) and some not so good (crashing through their glass door to the garden) and I learned that she had been informed of the abuse that was administered to the rest of the family by my father, but chose to shrug it off and ignore it, which simply isn’t right in it’s own way.

Eventually, and thankfully my father left for good (after what I remember being most of the kitchen smashed to pieces and being told to go to the neighbours house whilst the police were called) and moved on to another woman (though I would not know this for several years).

He told us he’d moved far away (down south somewhere) but this fallacy didn’t last long as I soon spotted him in town and others mentioned spotting him with the aforementioned woman, as well as a pushchair avec le baby at points.

I must admit it was comical that we saw him after boarding a bus and got the driver to hold it for us whilst my mother spoke with him and made him feel so guilty (about not paying anything towards his kids etc., we got £1 off him for child support each every month I think…) that he slinked away with his head hung low and wouldn’t even speak a word to me. Oh how funny it was.

He still came to visit the family, somehow forgetting or pushing aside all he had previously done. He’d try and integrate himself back in to our lives, seemingly missing what he had done his best to cock up. Initially I did think about forgiving him, but for all the bad shit he’d done, I soon realised that forgiving him would be useless and any apology he offered would be fleeting. I’d still receive Christmas money and birthday cards, until one day I was just so angry and fed up with him.

It was my birthday a few years back and he’d sent me a text wishing me happy birthday and the like, and I responded by sending him one telling him to stay out of my life for good and launched quite a tirade of words at him.

Since that I’ve heard nothing from him, one of my brother’s still keeps in regular contact with him to the point that he’s been to his house a few times (I still have no idea where he lives and don’t care to know) and everyone still gets birthday cards and Christmas money from him. I don’t and I am so fucking glad for every day that I have that man out of my life.

I even go under a different name these days to new people in order to further distance myself from him (as my middle name and last name used to make up his name) as much as the rest of the family may think I did it for other reasons, that’s why I decided to do it.

I really fucking hate him, and he’s the only person I’ve known personally wherein I wouldn’t care if they died.

Look at how I have to communicate my thoughts via Lost. I just thought it was a nice parallel actually.

Podcast Mention #5

2009-10-02T00:39:00.000+01:00

Not me this time! My friend @benjirino was mentioned for rising from his grave in this episode of 2P START LIVE!.

2P START! is a great video games web comic which updates every week, and has a weekly podcast which might actually be funnier than the comic. Give ‘em both a try.

Ho-Oh-Ohctober!

2009-10-01T12:02:00.000+01:00

So in case you haven’t been reading my blog for long, I like to blog about what I’ll be doing for the month on the first day of the month, just so you might get an insight in to what I’ll blog about.

Blinkered

So you’re probably fed up of me hammering on about Blinkered now, but I’ll be doing episodic reviews and thoughts as they air on Nudia.

Archery I’ve been thinking about this for a time, and now I’ve found a place to actually practice and a shooting club to maybe join, I’ll get practicing and get behind it.

FlashForwardFlashForward is a new ABC show that recently started here and I’ll be cranking out my thoughts on the show that may eventually replace Lost when it’s finished.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 DaysAccording to my site statistics, plenty of people come here and read the posts I’ve made on Kingdom Hearts, so a review of the DS game will be a necessity I feel. I am looking forward to it, though I know a lot of stuff about it already.

Podcast?I’ve also been mulling on doing a podcast on TV shows. If you’d like to discuss this with me, please do leave a comment and let me know.

That’s just a brief look, I’m not sure what else will come up this month, but it will be blogged about.

This city’s made us crazy and we must get out

2009-09-30T22:18:00.000+01:00

A short flash fiction, completely not based on current resentments towards work and the village I live in.

“Same shit, different day” was a phrase often uttered by those who were happy to go through the same rigmarole all the time, as a way to ease their own life passing them by.

It was also what David thought as he started to get changed for work. He pulled on his black work trousers and mumbled to himself. He stumbled towards the kitchen and grabbed the silver flask on the worktop and took a swig of whatever it was he’d put in there.

“Tastes like limes” he noted to himself. He managed to get to the kitchen, and looked out at the street he’d known for almost 10 years. 10 years in the same job, promoted just the once. He knew it was going nowhere. Briefly he looked at his pitiful bank balance online, despite only having recently been paid, and it simply depressed him further.

He walked out of the door, with his rucksack of regular clothes and laptop in, walked by the same buildings that he was sick of seeing and walked by the same unknown people, who still gave him a greeting each morning, despite him not knowing their names or anything about them outside of their shopping habits.

As he walked up to the entranceway to what would be eight hours of stupid customers, incompetent staff and a stressful day, his mind urged him to simply walk on. So he did without hesitation.

He carried on to find his car in the car park of his workplace, got in and saw a colleague headed to work.

“What time do you start?” piqued the small black haired girl.
”I’m finished actually” stated David, matter-of-factly and drove out of the car park. He was done with this part of his life and the same people day in, day out.

Some hours later, David would be in France, going under the name James Harbour and with a whole new backstory for himself. As far as he was concerned, when burning his passport, David had died.

A friend in need is a friend indeed

2009-09-29T20:09:00.000+01:00

I’d say I’m a good friend to all who know me, though I may be a little unreliable and temporarily steal your stuff from time to time, I’d like to think I’m always there to at least be a sounding board for people. Wherein I’m excellent at listening, but my advice is mediocre at best.

However, this week I was able to help two of my friends, though I suppose one is more of a work acquaintance than a friend most times.

Let us begin the first of these stories:

I’m 22 now, so I’ve ended up making a few good contacts via Fanpop, Twitter and friend through friend etc. and a co-worker who plans to study criminology has mentioned it to me many a time, yet I for some reason hadn’t thought of putting her in contact with a retired shrink/criminologist I know so she could ask her about any thing she was unsure of. That was done, so now it’s up to her to pursue these things.

I’ve helped set up the connection though and that made me feel good. On to the second tale now.

I was in my early teens when my parents finally broke apart their troublesome and violent marriage, so evidently this makes me an expert on dealing with divorce? One of my friends parents have grown apart, and now they’re getting separated, so I took a night time stroll with the aforementioned friend and discussed a multitude of things with him, despite not getting to bed until 2am, then having work at 6am, but that’s just what you do for your friends. It seemed to qualm some of his fears on it at least.

FlashFכrward Preview

2009-09-28T19:23:00.001+01:00

In a few hours, I’ll be ready to flash forward when the show begins over here and I could not be more excited for it. It’s being branded as “the next Lost” and certainly contains enough similar elements to Lost, and even some former stars and a great cast.

John Cho (well known for minor American Pie appearances and Harold & Kumar films) is an actor who I hadn’t known was in previously and is great in his appearances. Sonya Walger is also appearing as a main character which is cool.

The basic story of FlashFכward is that the whole world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds during which time they see glimpses of their future, April 29th 2010 to be exact and some characters experience good futures that they don’t want to mess up, some experience horrible futures that they will try and circumvent and some seem to have no future at all and fear they will wind up dead.

It’s going to be a fantastic show, so get ready to Flash Forward at 9pm tonight, Channel 5!

Blinkered Season Two Preview

2009-09-26T23:00:00.003+01:00

In case you missed the season one review there it was. Now, some trailers have come out on YouTube and I have been asked to give my opinions.

The comical Jimbo abuse continues (that’s him on the floor by the way) and Big Al seems to have a bit more of a central role. Some characters looks (such as Dennis) have changed a bit between seasons and I know for one scene Joshua Knight (who plays Jimbo) needed his hair as shaggy as possible for some reason. No sign of Richard in the trailers alas, but in that vein one of my issues with characters was addressed;

Yes, the Blinkered office is no longer a sausage fest! There’s at least one (currently unnamed) female character and the trailers promise “new characters" so hopefully we can expect some more.

Actually the character above is named Wendy Joelseph played by Lauren Knust.

Whether this is a prop choice, or simply Apple’s brilliance showing through everything, it seems that most of the Blinkered office (the company name hasn’t been mentioned from what I recall) have iPhones save Jimbo, who picks up his 90’s-esque phone when Big Al is attempting to find him.

It prompted some good laughs from me, especially in the initial trailer: New Shirt. It’s going to be great, and it’s going to be coming to http://www.nudia.tv come October 7th, but for now, watch all the trailers below.

Hopefully Joel (Dennis) or Joshua (Jimbo) will slide me an early episode one so I can have a review ready for the day it goes up to the public, and I hope you’re all watching. It’s genius.

Blinkered Season One Review

2009-09-24T19:01:00.000+01:00

Watch it here

Blinkered is advertised by it’s creators @comeuppence & @joshuaknight as “The Office” meets “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”. Now I really dislike The (US) Office, but do like what little I’ve seen of It’s Always Sunny so was apprehensive towards it at first, but I ended up really liking it. Five sections scored out 10 for an overall 100% score here.

Characters/Cast

Blinkered only has a small cast of characters, consisting of Big Al, Brian (frequently called Jimbo on and off set), Dennis (who manages the hapless lot), Kyle Laws (whose character name I can’t recall) and Richard (as seen above)

There is also a great recurring guest character named Billy Lightfoot who is constantly mocked by the rest of the cast and I’d love to see him become a series regular for season two.

Character with the least character development? Got to be Big Al, the cocky self-know-it-all and self proclaimed best buddy to everyone.this season seemed to focus on Jimbo being the audience proxy, as odd as it seems in an Office-y show.

Sets

Nice and easy set up for a show based in an office (though I don’t think it was stated what they did) it relates to people who spend a lot of their time in their own cubicles and get pissed off with co-workers. I can only relate to the latter, but still find the set for it to be very good. It’s what I imagine having your own little self-depressing world stuffed in to a cube would be.

However, there’s also this large mostly unused area which seems like it would be great for an office chair race for a promotion or something. It was used later on in the season, but still not a whole lot.

Comedy

Richard for me was the run away funny man of the series between stalking Big Al and appearing naked at his house and his dog, it’s very comical.

Lots of comedic value in taunting Jimbo too, especially by Dennis (whereas these are the two creators of the show and are good friends in the real world) and situations that you would never imagine in a work place (Big Al cutting off Dennis’ pony tail for example) akin to The Office.

Soundtrack

Unfortunately this is where Blinkered falls flat on it’s face. The intro song is…bland to say the least and there’s not much of a soundtrack within the show, despite Dennis never removing his ear buds. It might be a good idea for season two if we could faintly hear what he was listening to when he was in a scene to provide a base soundtrack.

Plot

Though it is in it mostly for the comedy, Blinkered does feature some well thought out storylines such as Jimbo’s fake family and Richard’s nigh-on homosexual obsession with Big Al, which he simply sees as normal. I’m not sure where the overall show is going, but I think the next step would be to introduce a female character in to the show, and use her to disrupt the work place. Blinkered has been an interesting watch and I hope they keep up the quality.

Characters/Cast: 7.3/10
Sets: 7/10
Comedy: 8.4/10
Soundtrack: 4/10
Plot: 8/10

69.40%

0 – 19% Unwatchable - why the hell did I even watch this?
20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the show hold it back
50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
70 – 84% Good – This is what you’ll be talking about with people in the office the next day.
85 – 89% Excellent – This is what you’ll be talking about for the next month.
90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – This is the best TV show ever, therefore going by Josh Whedon logic, it will soon be cancelled.

Thanks to Joel for providing all the Blinkered images used within this review. Cheers man.

Dungeons & Discourse – Character Creation:Report

2009-09-24T14:44:00.000+01:00

So, as you may know, this was the first D&D session that I’ve run (I have played in the past, but never DMed, and had also never played fourth edition prior to this), but I don’t intend it to be the last. I’m going to do these “reports” after each one so I can try and dispense advice to anyone else doing the same and anyone that’s got advice to give, please do so.

Some background first of all. This game was actually the one that’s in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Manual and is 4th Edition, meant to introduce the players and the DM to the game and is called “Kobold Hall”.

I’d drawn some maps on graph paper, had miniatures ready, had snacks, drinks and pizza menu at the ready and sorted out whatever chairs I had for people to sit on.

ArrivalsPeople started arriving around an hour prior to the start of the game. Eventually when everyone was there we had: myself, Ben, Callum, Chris, Keith Tom & Will which made for quite a good campaign. They started off making characters and Will had brought a variety of good information with him.

Character Creation

Ah yes, this is where it started to go askew. I know the old character creation way of roll six lots of six sided dice four times, (known as 4d6 in the game) take away the lowest number from a set of four, add the other three together and that’s a stat. Turns out people were confused and I only had one Player’s Handbook to pass around when people wanted to see abilities and the like. Will & Callum had pre-generated characters whereas everyone else carried on with the misshapen things they had created including a Dragonborn named Tits McGee.

Hook & Adventuring

So I had taken the base adventure of Kobold Hall from the DM’s Guide to get myself used to DMing and the players used to playing. The guide provided a few great hooks, but somehow it was decided (by my players) that the group had gone off on a stag do, and had drunkenly stumbled in to the cave and decided upon genocide of the Kobolds within.

One player got bored and intentionally fell in to the slime pit (later discovered to be Kobold leavings) and was disbanded for the rest of the game. The players triggered a few traps as they eventually sobered up on their travel in to the large hall. A few odd things happened that I wasn’t ready for before the players accomplished the mission.

A drake killed more than one player due to some natural 20s on my side, but I let it slide for the first game
The party decided it would be a good idea to capture and interrogate a Kobold, which I was very unprepared for, but managed to fumble through and convince them (in-character) to release him. What a mistake guys…
A player came up with a novel idea to trap an annoying drake in the newly acquired bag of holding and leave it in there until it died…
They ran away from the dragon initially, then chose to drag down a Kobold corpse for it to eat…

The dragon was of course, the main boss of this mini-adventure, and though it had some devastating attacks the players knocked it down quickly and then one player gutted it for all it was worth. Tail, heart, teeth, lungs, scales, everything.

The campaign ended there, and next up we have: Nurion’s Treasure.

Letters from America

2009-09-23T01:35:00.000+01:00

So, this is actually the third blog I’ve had, with the others run by my immature self. Whilst maintaining the first I went away to America and decided to write a letter to my friends back in the UK when I was there. Here’s the letter, in it’s horrible unedited glory so you can see what I got up to there briefly before a big blog post about it. Notes about it will be written in italics as I’m sure there’s some things I need to explain within this originally handwritten letter.

Heylo Benjoelpaul (smooshed their names together, how clever of me),

How are things over thar? I mentioned in my last email to Ben that I might write/type up a letter along with Christmas presents to be sent. Everything here is going well; still going to the gym pretty much every day (except for the days I don’t wake up in time) so my gut is slowly receding which is all well and good.

Managed to bust my dragon ring whilst I was working, so that’s a job for the guy in the Berber shop. Abbelina (someone at work) was talking to me about how much she misses her home in Mexico, and I agreed and remembered quite a few things that I miss (one of them being you guys of course), so that made me a little depressed until Ina started barking orders at me and then I realised I was at work.

I have quite a good set-up here, I have my own room (Tennyson has to share with Sam now, so I feel a little guilty sometimes) and it’s great to look straight outside when it snows. I have to take another opportunity to mention how great having a British accent is over here.

Well, as I’m writing this letter over the course of a few days, I’ve now come back. Busy day yesterday at work. 267 people in one room and I was working on an open bar…(made $115 in tips though, and cashed my first pay check for two weeks of $345) met Brian’s cousin, Rickie (who is female before you laugh) and she’s quite nice. Also met Robyn whose brother decided to hang himself in the early hours of this morning, which isn’t exactly going to make her Christmas great.

Erm…I’m 131 Pokémon away from completing my Pokédex, which is rather good. On a Poké-related note, I had a strange dream where Diamond & Pearl had come out and all of us were already trading starters around at a house unfamiliar to me, maybe our future flat, oh well only a dream. Need to go into Wal-Mart tomorrow to pick up your presents; you should get them before Christmas. Saw CivIV yesterday whilst we were at Best Buy but decided against getting it, if I do eventually get it somewhere I’ll get it at GAME. I should come back over there with a good amount of money.

I’m on $588 (made a little Excel spreadsheet to keep track) at the moment and December has only just begun. Just to let you know as well, I have decided not to fly back out here, I think three months will be enough and it’s been a great experience but I will need to get a job sorted as soon as I get back.

I think I’ll try the usual thing of apply everywhere I want to work and if no-one new wants to hire me, I suppose I could always re-apply at Somerfield, someone will have been 86ed by the time I return. Oh yeah, if someone is 86ed, it means fired. Restaurant lingo. We (Cliff, Matt, Crystal, Cody, Emily and myself) stayed at the restaurant after it had closed until 5am. We normally close at 11pm. So, I managed to cram quite a few JD & Pepsi’s down my gullet before we went and I left feeling light-headed but not much else. I don’t think I’m in work today, weekdays are very slow, and we only usually get about 80 people in. A good day is at least 180. When I had to work with UB (stands for Ultimate Bitch apparently, she doesn’t like people to know her real name.) at the bar, she entrusted me with keys to the beer/wine/hard liquor storage room. My god is that small room magical. 6 bottles of Jack Daniels, 12 cases of every (important) beer I can think of (except Stella Artois) so yes it was awesome. If you guys are still thinking about coming over, then call me up about it, or I’ll call you guys when I get a chance.

Found some more awesome gaming things to sell on eBay. Cliff has a strange attitude to video games, he doesn’t like people to play them, and doesn’t know much about them (for example he asked me a few days ago after hearing the word on the radio what Tetris was.) but at the same time, he doesn’t mind me playing them as long as I still help him out when he needs help and do the washing/ironing/drying/wood-bringing-in and such. I’ve also been able to read through the whole Harry Potter series so far and all of the Discworld books that Cliff has (about 18). There are so many Mexicans here; it’s astonishing. I know four at work, and the whole kitchen (minus Ronnie & Jerry) is all Latinos. I may have seen like three in my whole life before now.

I discovered something else, which is related to Pokémon Emerald, Juan’s name should be pronounced wan, not Jew-wan, as a Mexican guy I work with is called Juan. We went sledding the other day down a place called Johnson’s Mound. Massive, steep hill. It was so much fun, admittedly my hands are full of cuts and a few of my bones ache because of crashes and the fact I wasn’t wearing any gloves. We were there for about three hours, having occasional races (2 of which I managed to win) and then just having a laugh. Received my presents from my Mum & Den yesterday and impressed the US postman because it was sent via Royal Mail.

I’ve had little time for TV; so don’t expect me to tell you what will happen in Lost or anything like that. I still have plenty of apprentices to send back to you though, as I’m sure you do to me. Matt was discussing with me the other day that he really wants to come to England, so I’ve said that when we have a flat or whatever sorted we’ll be more than happy to let him stay with us for a week or two of drinking and such. Speaking of Latinos, I now know how to start learning Spanish, and Abbey, Juan & Roaul have said they’ll help me too. [Common sienta se en Espanol]?

Which means, “What is this in Spanish?” and then I should be able to learn a few things. Also, I learnt the Spanish word for thingamajig/ doodad/ whatchamacallit, it’s “Chingilairas” so I’ll be incorporating that word into our conversations. Okay, I’m going now, got to take Cappuccino and Frangelico for a walk. Well, that was certainly cold, my hands are slowly warming up, Nan is getting some work things sorted, she’s now a Deli manager at a supermarket so she has a lot to do and she got a little stressed out the other day. So we all pitched in to tidy the house, cook a nice beef tail stew and rented War Of The Worlds.

Matt and then later Cliff said that during January they’d take me into the city so I can see everything so that’ll be quite good. I’d have to say I’ve adjusted quite well to a completely different place, but I have taken a lot of home with me, such as my laptop, my DS, my clothes from home and my laptop bag. So it’s sort of like it’s just a different town. A few things I want/need/require when I return though: a Chinese takeaway/all you can eat, Pokémon XD, Lasagne, white bread toast with some lame butter substitute and the love of a good young Asian girl…there’s none here. I get 0% chance to be, well me, in the presence of Asian girls. It sucks. Oh and fish and chips, the chip shop still there? So not an extensive list, I’ll probably crave more things when I return.

Have I missed out on much on EWB? I haven’t been able to read CAD, Nuklear Power or anything recently. I suppose I’ll catch up when I get back. I had a quick look at Serebii the other day to see if any new Diamond/Pearl information had cropped up, but alas nay. When I come back I will spend the day back (January 25/26^th) with family and then we can go cinema or whatever on Thursday and Friday and I’ll apply for jobs in Leicester & Loughborough. That’s something I am missing for sure, is going to the cinema or even just around town with you guys, I hope the cinema staff have asked where your other friend is.

Tell Jim at GAME (I miss GAME too) that I say “Merry Christmas” and that I’ll spend plenty to make up for their three months of no money due to me being gone. I also expect a Mario Party session when I return too (ooh and I’m going to have to buy some Jacob’s crackers as well). Well, I know I’m giving one of you guys this letter after Christmas and after the new year, I’m thoroughly looking forward to coming home as I type this up though.

Learnt a few more Spanish words and some of the language rules, it’s similar to French because you say the word first, such as ‘bason’ which is glass and then describe it afterwards, but both languages are derived from Latin, so it’s not that surprising, also plural words are similar to ours, usually it’s just adding an s on the end. So I’m slowly getting to grips with Spanish, just like people at work are getting used to all the English type things that I say, like cheers for thanks and pinch for steal, which apparently don’t get used over here. Had a mini-disaster the other day when I thought the touch screen on my DS was broken. It wouldn’t function at all and I assumed that someone had pressed down too hard on it and I would need to get a new one, but it seemed to be as right as rain in the morning so I thought no more of it.

Grabbed a Dilbert calendar for mine self a while ago, I never seem to have a calendar when I need one. Started to read books by a banned author (over here anyway) named Tom Sharpe, good book so far, different to what I would normally read but it is still good. Got into some trouble at work, because Cher mentioned to Cliff that I’m a bad busser, so I don’t know how much longer I will be able to stay at the restaurant, I need to talk to Cher and get things between us sorted so I can find out what I am doing wrong and correct it.

Well, hopefully I can still maintain my job at the restaurant, if not I’ll have to find things to do around the house and hope that Nan & Cliff pay me a little money that way. I’m up to about $900, which is quite good, managed to bust my wallet though because of all the notes. If I do keep working, I might leave with about $1,800 that would be good. Anyways, enough about me working or not working, it’s depressing me a little.

Mountain Dew is awesome as one of you said; it’s almost like Dr. Pepper. I keep getting little bouts of homesickness, nothing to break down and cry about even when I think an eight-hour flight separates me from my country, and all the people I know. Well, 16 days left and I have some more news, I am going out with a 20 year old very hot girl on Wednesday to see the Blue Man Group and see Navy Pier and go out for dinner and such and damn, by the time we get finished it’ll be too late to get home so we’ll just have to stay overnight at a hotel. We went to a Chinese restaurant the other day to eat, my god I love all that Asians do, and we even had a nice looking Asian girl come into work, to eat and I was bussing the table, so that was great. Hey, about me mentioning Jack Daniels earlier, I might try and come back with a full bottle for each of you. As Cliff says he’s got too much of it anyway. There is a whole box that he got for free but I won’t be able to fit that into my suitcase, so never mind. Well, hopefully I’ll be up at about 6am tomorrow, being able to sort everything out with Ashley for Wednesday (It’s Sunday now). She rang a few hours ago, but we were out, I guess she wanted to ring before she fell asleep so I’ll try her again in the morning anyways. Then I should also try and get something sorted out with Erin & Jackie too.

Well, I must admit that I worked terribly the other day because I spent a large majority of my time thinking about Ashley, and Robin (her mother) said she trusted me with her timid daughter. She knows not of my plans, you should ask Mark about it as I do have the time, but can’t be bothered so. My past week has been going well, with the next week bringing only greater things. I think it was all inspired by my fortune cookie at East China Inn, which said I’d be successful through innovation and determination.

I also seem to have built up more confidence, so much so that I was plotting how to take over Neville’s (my old boss) job. I figure I could do it in a year, maybe two, as a 19-year-old running a shop might make the company apprehensive to give me the position. If I don’t get that, then I am going to aim for some kind of management, just so that when we open the store, we have at least some experience. A relief moment for me today was advising my apprentice with the phrase:

WROAAAARR! LET’S TAKE IT OUTSIDE BROTHER

He was a guitarist and it just made me laugh after I thought of it. A disconcerting apprentice phrase for a Gentleman that I did was:

I WILL POUND MY SECRET PLACE

Which was also a great phrase I thought, but with getting everything sorted out with Ashley & Erin, I’ve had little time for everything else. I went on MSN the other day and Ben, you were on, but didn’t respond, but Mark was on and I had possibly the best talk to him I’ve ever had. So that was grand, oh yeah, I’ve been providing a few people with my e-mail, to keep in contact when I leave. We have to come back here when we’re 21, and can drink.

I was thinking that if Matt comes over we should take two weeks off and go up to London and everything, which is actually what I might want to do for my 19^th birthday, either Monopoly pub walk, or just trying our luck in bars and getting hotel rooms. Although, we don’t want them for $7/£7, Cliff was telling me a little story about cockroaches being on his face when he stayed in a hotel at that price. So I shall decide closer to the time what I actually want to do, but with

As you may have noticed, I’ve finally decided to properly take my jackass of a father’s name from my name, if he doesn’t want anything to do with me, then same here and that includes my name. I do want four names still, but I may make Robert my third, and have something else for my second, I don’t know, but I think I need to go and officially get it done. Then I shall write a final letter of contact to my dad, expressing everything and telling him that I am henceforth ceasing all contact with him. I’m tired of having him there in the back of my head thinking that I should send him a Christmas/birthday card, but fuck it.

That’s part of my three-year plan, and my reward at the end is a two-week vacation to America. Of course, I may, depending on my progress grant myself the privilege of a short trip to Japan too. My three-year plan may extend into a five-year plan, or it may fuck up utterly. If it fucks up, then I’ll make a new plan, but for now it is fine. I should probably get to sleep, but I’m in such a writing mood, and I only need to be up in 5 hours which is plenty of sleep, especially as I didn’t work today and yet I find myself yawning. Hopefully I haven’t missed anything interesting or intriguing, I haven’t heard much about what you’ve been up to Paul, but I’ve had e-mails from Ben & Joel saying how much they all miss me and Den was telling me that not much had changed.

You know what, I never got before when people would call their stepfather or someone similar by their first name and not call them Dad, but now I understand, Den is Den. He’s not my father. Now it may be awkward for the others if they still have contact with Dad, when it gets to things like Father’s Day, but as far as I’m concerned the only thing I have to be appreciative to my Dad about is for helping to get me into this world, but otherwise Den has done a lot more parenting, and a lot more effective parenting than my Dad ever did.

Sorry if this letter gets boring at some points, it just helps if I get everything written down that I’m feeling and you guys just happen to be my remorseful audience. Another advantage to me cutting out my Dad’s name is that it will be a later date thing to mention, as if I won’t have enough from America to discuss for a while. Weight and gym business now I think, I have still been going to the gym as much as I can, Cliff & I skipped a day last week because we both overslept due to a busy day at work. Now, however I’m 220lbs which is about 15 and ½ stone, but more of it is muscle because I’ve gone from a size 36 waist to a size 30 which is awesome really. I might be able to get it down to size 26/28 by the time I get back, which shall be tremendous. My belt on my 36 size jeans has to almost eat me to fit. Well, I actually think that’s all for now. I will come back and edit after my date with Ashley.

Well, my date with Ashley was great. It’s 1am and we met up at 4pm so I’d say it was good. We went to see Blue Man Group, which was excellent. Ashley and me talked an awful lot about everything, weird English/American things and we stopped off for something to eat, I paid for everything gentlemanly and it was a great night, definitely going to ring her tomorrow and get something else sorted out.

Great for my first blind date. She was saying that she doesn’t date much and isn’t usually very social, which is great news for me.

Well, as I’m sure Benji hath mentioned to ye, I just called him up and spoke to him, which was good, good to hear that everyone is still alive, and in good health. What are the plans for my return then? Well, I’m going to wrap this up and send it off when next we go to the post office, see you guys in a few days I guess.

This letter was written back in the winter of 2006 over the course of a week when I first went to America, and though I haven’t been back since I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ll fill in all the little details in longer blog posts as I think on them.

Dream a little dream of me

2009-09-22T08:17:00.000+01:00

So, the following is an odd dream I had recently, which I thought might make for a quick blog post.

"I work at an office wearing a suit and all, where there is a large desk at the head that I share with a few co-workers. We get on well, so have a few chats.

Some days pass and I have a holiday coming up, or I'm off geocaching or something. I open up the large desk and remember there is a spare drawer, and I slip some geeky things like a Rhydon sticker and dice in there and set off wherever I was going.

I get back and my co-workers are smirking and avoiding me. A new member of staff had apparently taken over the drawer my geeky things were in and someone hands them back to me, trying to avoid laughing. I stash them in my pocket and make my way back to my desk."

Yes, yes I realise that it means I should probably be more up front about the geek that I am, and was feeling bad about not being so. Perhaps this is also influenced by the little Bonsly sticker I stuck up on my current workplace's lockers, that's been there for ages.

The whole Pokémon thing seems rather foolish to people who don't play, hence why I don't include it in my introductions. If you know I play and I know you in the real world, I try and use me telling you that to say that I now trust you more than anything. I'm a rather closed off person at times, and you know as much about me as I want you to know usually.

This was a lot longer than originally intended. Never mind.
-- Posted from my iPhone

"Bump" iPhone App Review

2009-09-20T11:25:00.000+01:00

You've probably seen Bump advertised on the iPhone ads as a way of sharing contact information, which it is certainly good for.

However it can also be used to pass along photos and other things with a single simultaneous shake or "bump" of the iPhones. I got a chance to test it with my friend's iPhone, as he deleted his own contact information, and wanted it back.

However he had to send me something too, a photo I think. There was no option of leaving one side to do an empty bump as might be required at times.

There's certainly some good ideas and it's an ambitious app but it'll take a little time and a few updates to become a neccessity for all iPhone users.

PRICE: Free
RATING: 3.7/5

Autographs & Apologies

2009-09-18T11:20:00.001+01:00

Sorry I've not been around for about a month, but I've had no real Internet access for about that long. Instead of saying I'm sorry etc. I'll give you a few samples of what's to come but alas without the aid of rich text it's back to basics.

BLINKERED

In case you don't know, I dislike The Office, so when one of my Twitter followers asked me to watch his YouTube show resembling The Office I was skeptical, but it's been great. A full review will come soon.

FUTURAMA

I've been watching the Futurama films for the first time too so I'll be reviewing them in due course.

iPhone REVIEWS

Have been downloading a ton of new apps which need to be reviewed too.

Other things at a glance: Fanpop, sprained ankles, work sucks I know, Japan, Wiiwork and more stuff.

Should be in to proper blog writing again soon.

Blog Post #100?

2009-08-15T09:31:00.000+01:00

Really? I’ve reached 100 blog posts on my own blog? That’s pretty good. I assume some general poking fun at myself and former posts is needed here.

My first post is only 169 characters long, just a little shorter and that’s the kind of thing that I’d tweet these days rather than blogging about. My blog also used to have a darker colour scheme, which didn’t bode well for visitors, so I switched to a much more calming green and took away the Penny Arcade image which once served as the banner.

It was moderately funny, but I think it demonstrated the angry young man I once was, and could still be, rather than the calm and collected person I now consider myself to be.

I later blogged about Pushing Daisies and got linked to another blog, which I assume brought in a bunch of readers. I broke my iPhone, reminisced on my childhood dog and then finally finished reviewing Brawl and got around to doing other reviews which are now coming together nicely.

I’ve also shared a few personal details, such as not being able to ride a bike, passing out from a currently unknown medical condition and I’m sure I’ll share more as time goes on.

Just felt like I needed to say thanks for reading all the crap I write, and if you ever want to write a guest post, feel free to e-mail me and ask. So, yes, cheers once again and cheers in advance to future blog readers who see this post later on.

Neurological update – Mid-August

2009-08-14T08:59:00.000+01:00

So, I know it’s not long since the last one, but I got results back and:

I’m perfectly fine

According to the two tests they did, I didn’t show any abnormalities or such things. I still have the appointment in November to attend when they will hopefully run a few more tests and may even try to do a psychoanalysis thing to ensure I’m not just crazy instead.
Which I assure you I am not. I’ll let you know more when I know.

Feelings are boring. Kissing is awesome

2009-08-13T18:33:00.000+01:00

Not this has anything to do with what’s going on with me or anything. If the above is true, I guess that makes back and forth flirting kind of okay.

I’d love to have a girl I could just share my days and interests with, I’m not interested in “playing the game” and hopping from one woman to the next. Fun, yes, but not what I want to do.

I’d like one girl to have by my side, and at my aid and vice versa for a long time, but I fail miserably at starting relationships and then keeping them going if they do start.

I mention it, because of a girl that I know, of whom I’m often asked if there’s “anything going on between us”, but there isn’t. I wouldn’t mind there being something going on, but she’s dating someone anyways.

When I saw another couple I know meet earlier and they were playing around, it reminded me of her and myself, but then someone else is getting all the good stuff, whilst I do plenty of flirting and funny things (I think) with no pay off besides her being in a happier mood when she goes home to see her boyfriend, which doesn’t help me.

I just don’t know. I’m sure something good will happen for me soon.

Sorry to get all lovey-dovey, touchy feely on this, but as stated feelings are boring.

Kissing however, is awesome.

Why do I draw?

2009-08-08T09:09:00.000+01:00

So, why do I draw or sketch? I was awful at drawing as a child and continued to be poor at high school, but still did draw occasionally and then got more in to the writing aspect of things offering up short fiction or doing game based “diaries” on EWB.

Then around October/September I went in to town on a whim, and remembered I had this goal on my 43 Things about doing a web comic. I went to WHSmith’s and picked up a sketchpad and a few pencils.

Now of last count, I have 70 pencils of varying lengths and thicknesses etc. and sketchpads going from A2 to A5 and regularly draw for fun.

I am trying to work up to getting a web comic off the ground, but it’s taking more time than I thought. Crazy ideas like the “angry love monster” and the “monktupus” are heavily rooted in now.

Who knows what the web comic will be like when I finally get it started?

So why do I draw? Because I enjoy unleashing my creativity in to the world.

It’s just like riding a bike

2009-08-07T20:12:00.000+01:00

That phrase doesn’t aid or bolster me at all really, due to the fact that;

I don’t know how to ride a bike.

I never learnt back when I was a kid despite my father’s angry insistence that I must learn, and when we got to the cycling proficiency test, or something along those lines, in Year Six I skipped it along with another person who had never learned presumably.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t try to learn. My sense of balance just left a little something to be desired back when I was a child, but now seems to have smoothed itself out

Yes, I’d always planned to practice in open fields and whatnot, but I never got around to it, or had the confidence in myself to do it. Man, I was a really nervous kid, but with good reason I guess.

So now it’s about twelve years since I last tried to ride a bike, and I have little interest in trying to do so. I might try and get it when I know I can do it somewhere secluded, but for now, I’m fine to drive (soon) and walk anywhere I would like to go.

These blog posts seem to be getting ever more personal as I go on. Sorry for being boring, some more reviews soon.

Neurological update - August

2009-08-06T13:42:00.000+01:00

Following my MRI scan a few months back I also had an EEG around the same time, during which a load of lights are flickered at you to try and trigger epilepsy, which is about as fun as it sounds. Nothing major happened to me physically, but maybe something in my brain waves went, we’ll see.

Besides that I have a hospital appointment for November the 19th I think with a neurologist and that’s all I know.

The “attacks” have managed to stave off mostly, with minor ones here and there, though I did manage to keep headache and nausea for about a week and a half when I’d had a particularly bad one.

I just wish they’d give me a name for what this thing is…then some medication for it.

Nine year old poetry

2009-08-05T12:42:00.000+01:00

Not, as you may suspect poetry written in the year 2000, but poetry written when I was nine years old. You see, as a school we did a book called “Orchard Days” which I suspect is long out of print. I will however show you mine, from when I was in Year 5 I think. You have some Year 7 poetry and sketches to come yet at some point too. You could choose a few categories, and I chose “Our School”. It is entitled “At Our School”.

If you come to our school,
You will have fun,
Some people will be a fool,
And their work won’t be done

When you are at our school,
Obey this rule,
Stay cool!
And at home be a fool!

Looking back on it, it’s not bad for still being in single digits. However, I’d heavily criticize myself for starting sentences with the word “and”. I recall that being an aggravation to most of my early English teachers, and I know I’ve since tried to outgrow the habit.

Solipsist Syndrome

2009-08-04T13:31:00.000+01:00

So late night, a few days ago I sent Will another pitch, (first one linked to here), which was semi-based on me thinking about the above show and then my own sketches of weird shit like Monktupuses and the aptly named “Angry Love Monster”.

Late night pitch idea. Artist suffer delusions making them believe the things they've drawn are real...but maybe they are.

He cranked out a nice introduction with some cool things, and a world I’d love to see revisited. It’s up here.

Speaking of @fragmad he’s going to comprise these flash fiction/#600words pitches in to a print on demand book with any luck, which I shall be spending some monies on. Read through the rest of his stuff and see what you think.

The secret of the box man

2009-08-03T11:18:00.000+01:00

Hello yourself, box man.

An employee left work recently and had the idea to make a face on a box and leave early on his last day. He had already labelled up the walkie talkies as Mr. T, Saddam and Gilbert which no-one has noticed, but that’s only a small thing. However, the box he made a face on, he couldn’t decide where to put it so that it was noticeable to those who knew it was there, but not to people he didn’t want to see it.

Me: “How about on top of the lock-up?” (The lock-up is a big locked cage where we keep alcohol)

So, he got the ladders and put it up there, which looked slightly humorous, but still not good enough.

Me: “I know, take a pole from these things, then jam it in that box of wine carriers, and it’ll hold up there.”

And it did…

I’m such a fucking awesome manger.

It’s –us Gloop!

2009-08-02T19:54:00.001+01:00

So, that was my attempt at being witty, and if you still don’t get it, what’s wrong with you?

July has come to a close and all the ~~sunny~~ ~~sunny-ish~~ ~~not~~ ~~too~~ ~~bad~~ rain and thunderstorms type weather has been hammering us throughout in the UK. As I usually do, I look ahead to the month and let you know what I have planned for it.

Moving all about

If you follow me on Twitter, you would have seen that I had to kick out an non-contributing (didn’t pay rent or anything) flatmate who also happened to be a family member. At first I was concerned, but after finding out she owed over £1,500 within the last year for late rent payment, I wasn’t bothered. She went back to live with her parents, and it’s now mostly resolved.

However, this now means that my best mate, @benjirino will be moving in, which makes a whole ton of sense really as we spend a vast amount of time together playing games and watching DVDs and obsessing over Lost.

Duck soup! Duck what?

I’ve also been playing Final Fantasy X-2 a lot, trying to get 100% on the first run through. I’ve accomplished it before, but have had to use New Game Plus to do so. I’m just trying to beat Shinra at Sphere Break at the moment.

It’s not Final Fantasy!

Let me level with you. Final Fantasy XII. It’s not a Final Fantasy game, none of the right elements are there and the story bores me to death.

I’ve tried multiple times to play, but as soon as Ben is moved in we’re going to try a simultaneous play through of Final Fantasy XII when we both have some time off to at least try and finish it. It will not be easy.

Dungeons and Discourse

Dungeons & Dragons will be occurring round my place some time this month. Got a group of four/five people interested. It will be a basic character creating session, with the first few bits of an adventure I have planned out. It’ll be fun.

That’s all I really have planned for this month, a nice easy month.

Animal Crossing: Wild World Review - DS

2009-07-29T17:41:00.000+01:00

Animal Crossing: Wild World is a life simulation game for the DS, and the second Animal Crossing in the series released in Europe, being on GameCube before now, and eventually having the third iteration released on the Wii. It was released in 2005, but I forget when I purchased it.

StoryMan, this is hard. Animal Crossing’s story is very limited, what with it being a life simulation game. You could either see that it has a continual story, evolving as your village goes on, or that the story essentially ends once you’ve finished paying off the loan on your house. I choose to view it as the latter. Once you move in to the town and create a character you are given a house, which you have to pay off and expand as the game goes on.

Gameplay

The controls are absolutely sound for a DS game, but the gameplay element depends on what game you want to play. I use it as a “collection game” as there’s tons of stuff to collect ranging from fossils to t-shirts and there’s also great rare items that may take you years to amass as well as bugs and fish that appear and change monthly. You can also visit other people’s towns to trade villagers and things, which is always good fun to do.

Graphics

I can’t knock the graphics, they’re very similar to the GameCube version but I suppose they could have made certain elements better.

Soundtrack

There’s not much of a soundtrack to speak of. You decide the town tune, and there’s little stings of music here and there, but the main attraction is K.K Slider, who performs many songs on a Sunday night at the town’s coffee shop. You get to keep these songs and play them on your CD Player/cassette box/stereo in your home provided you’ve purchased one.

Replayability

Let’s see, it’s 2009 and I’m still playing this in spots. The community behind it is great and collecting all of the items takes a damn long time, it just depends on whether you can bothered to play at least every other day for a bit to keep your town in good shape.

Story: 3.2/10
Gameplay: 6.3/10
Graphics: 5.5/10
Soundtrack: 7/10
Replayability: 8.7/10

61.40%

0 – 19% Unplayable - why the hell did I even buy this?
20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the game hold it back
50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
70 – 84% Good – A nice franchise or single game, that just misses out on being great because of a few flaws.
85 – 89% Excellent – You could play this for ages and be happy
90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – You should have this game and play it every single day.

Want me to review a game? Comment and let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Twitter Categories

2009-07-27T04:15:00.000+01:00

I’ve written about Twitter a few times and consider myself a pretty prominent user of the service having used four separate apps for it on my iPhone (partially my reason for getting one) and a few desktop apps as well as text updates when I began. I was musing on the people I follow and thought that I might be able to categorize a few of them.

Real World

People that I know in the real world, such as @benjirino and @fragmad (above). I follow these people because I’ve known them for a number of years, and don’t always have time to see what they’ve been doing much like people on facebook.

“Losties”

People that I follow because of a mutual ~~interest~~ obsession with the TV show Lost, which is now entering it’s final season. Some such as @TheODI I follow for Lost news, others such as @Dreyesbo (above) I follow simply to have a chat about Lost with occasionally and see them live their everyday lives.

Celebrities

Yes, like anyone on Twitter, I follow some celebrities. Ranging from @lancearmstrong who is well known to most of the world to @NatalieAbrams who is one of my pseudo-celebrities I follow, who I’d also class along web comic artists and things.

Social Networking

I know Twitter is a social network anyways but I also follow my other social networking contacts such as @Claireakabob from Fanpop and various EWBers.

Locals

The locals such as @CannonGod are nuts as evidenced by the above photo. I just follow them so I can see what’s going on in the area around me, such as the Leicester Twesta events which I haven’t yet been able to attend. :(

I follow loads of other people as well, and have long since forgotten the reasons, such as @chunkyrican and @geekandahalf as well as @austenw but I still love following and interacting with them all.

Lexi & Rodney

2009-07-26T23:07:00.001+01:00

Many of you have read the blog post about my dog which still makes me sad to read and think about. The dog above, from The 10th Kingdom, does remind me of him a little, but Toby was more of a mixture than a pure breed, so was more rugged than that.

Recently, fellow blogger Rodney (better known as moog) lost his dog within the last week, and wrote about it here and it resonated with me and made me sad.

I don’t want to go out of my way to make you, blog reader extraordinaire sad, but rather just to highlight how painful it really is to lose a pet.

I was also recently informed that a cat almost as old as I am is on his last legs, and I fear that will break the owner when he dies, as he’s now 17 years old and I’ve known the own for at least 20 years, and know how much happiness having that cat has given her and how much it will tear her apart and that saddens me too.

Sorry, no laughs or social commentary or reviews today. Leave a comment for Rod on his site if you’ve had to go through a similar thing, and let him know he’ll be fine. Cheers.

“The clock was broken, so no one knew what time it was”

2009-07-25T19:05:00.001+01:00

This is my story for the Fanpop Writer’s Group, based on the above prompt. Let me know what you think.

Broken Time

The clock was broken, so no one knew what time it was.

We coughed and spluttered still, that clock hadn't worked since the second time we reconstructed the thing. We all made sure to incorporate William's little syncing batteries in to our watches though.

I wonder what had gone wrong this time around. Time for the usual check up. I was in charge of that for his this mission.

"Will?" I asked, getting to my feet. "Yeah, I'm here...whatever *cough*" I pulled my device from my pocket and checked him off, as well as myself. "Juliet?"

Nothing. "Juliet?" Will shouted out too. "JULIET?"

Nothing.

"JULI-"

"Yeah, I'm here, shut up."

I felt a strange wrenching in my stomach and disposed of my stomach contents from my mouth. That happened often with this, I remember Will yammering on about temporal displacement or something along those lines.

We met up by the machine, as we usually did. I asked Will what had gone wrong, and he muttered something about me inputting the wrong trajectory details. Which, I may have done, his algorithms and things are sometimes hard to track and remember. Juliet set about on maintenance to fix it.

We were within the machine’s cloak, so no-one could see what we were doing. I recalled a close call back when Maya was still around when the cloak had been disabled by a fault and I had a lot of explaining to do.

Juliet emerged a moment later with her little machine that fixed the bigger one and informed us it was now working just fine. Will was the only one who didn’t always carry a little device on him, he somehow kept it all in his head.

With the absence of Maya, I’d taken lead of the “team”, so prepared for my second ever “leadership” speech ever.

“Right guys. We’re currently in…" I glanced at my watch “1950. Everyone has their vital information?”

They both nodded. We had information stored within our heads or devices in order to know who was prime minister, king or other certain important things of the time we were in.

“This is where Maya travelled to in the old machine, we’ve beaten her here, so should see her appear moments later to save her from dying within this timeline.”

“But won’t-“ Juliet spoke up.

“Yes, Juliet I know. The whole paradox thing. We wouldn’t have come back if she hadn’t been killed, so we wouldn’t have come here to save her, thus causing a paradox. I know. I know", but we have to hope it works.”

As I walked to the road to await Maya’s known arrival, I saw a brilliant flash of light, and another machine that looked far superior to ours arrived close by. Two men in identical blue outfits grabbed Will and Juliet, and I gave chase. One withdrew a weapon, and fired it at me. It’s odd shaped bullet sailed by me, and hit in to the chest of a woman behind me.

“…Maya?”

I turned to see her there, as she slumped to the ground. Juliet and Will shouted out, as the blue men’s machine went off where it came from. I knew this would happen, but it still shocked me.

I quickly withdrew the antidote needle from my jacket, and injected Maya as I had practiced, and her eyes sprung open.

“Maya, no time to explain. Take my hand, we have to save those two.”

Maya got up, staggering and we clambered back in to the machine and I set the controls for February 20th 2070. This is what I had known was coming and had been practicing for for many years. We’d save the whole team, and take him down.

I breathed in and then pressed the button as we began our descent in to madness.

Torchwood: Children Of Earth Review

2009-07-13T22:41:00.001+01:00

A review of a TV series? Not sure how I will do this, but let’s give it a quick go. First of all, a brief introduction to this:

Torchwood is a series occurring in the same universe as Doctor Who (oft called the Whoniverse) with a company of people attempting to combat alien invasions and so forth. Based in Cardiff in Wales, where there’s a small rift in time and space enabling many curious or violent aliens to wander through. There’s been two series previously, and a few members of the Torchwood team have died since the new team was established.

StoryI feel that this story probably resonated more for those with children, whereas to myself it made The 456 seem like a race of paedophiles, when they requested 10% of the children of earth. The eventual decision by the Prime Minister seemed like a likely solution to a problem like this, should it arise. The story was pretty okay and fit the schedule well.

Character DevelopmentJohn Frobisher (Peter Capaldi) made this mini-series fantastic. The whole Ianto/Jack thing would have been good were it not for his permanent death, which means we’re now to down to just Jack from the team we saw in the first episode. Another great character was Denise Riley (who hopefully becomes PM).

Gwen being pregnant was kind of expected, but with a child I suspect that will eventually knock her out of the Torchwood team too. Clem was alright, but they never explained how he smelt odd things did they?

Jack’s daughter was good, his grandson and his death, not so much. Lois Habiba turned out great as well and I hope she becomes part of the team. It was all about the supporting cast this time around.

Soundtrack

Urgh. I’m very half and half on the soundtrack. Some tracks were great, whilst others felt very, very out of place.

Pace & Flow

Putting the show on a weekly schedule seemed to work pretty well, but it seemed that certain events didn’t have enough time spent on them, such as Jack and his daughter and Rhys always deserves more time.

Setting & Location

Obviously we’re in Cardiff again, but placing us on a council estate before realising that these children will be the ones offered on a platter was nice work. Not much more I can think of on that actually. Kind of new to TV reviews.

67.3%

Story: 8.3/10
Character Development: 7.1/10
Soundtrack: 4.9/10
Pace & Flow: 6.2/10
Setting & Location: 7/10

0 – 19% Unwatchable - why the hell did I even watch this?
20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the show hold it back
50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
70 – 84% Good – This is what you’ll be talking about with people in the office the next day.
85 – 89% Excellent – This is what you’ll be talking about for the next month.
90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – This is the best TV show ever, therefore going by Josh Whedon logic, it will soon be cancelled.

There you have it, my first TV series review. It’s not quite right yet though.

Long Live The King

2009-07-12T10:42:00.002+01:00

@fragmad (otherwise known as Will) sent out requests for some flash fiction (short stories based on pitches), so I sent along this:

a king passes in fantasy-medieval times, and the sons find a way to name the rightful heir...with weapons of course.

I like fantasy stories, and stories that deal with monarchs in the times that we used to settle things with swords and spears, so this was simple. Anyways, read it on Will’s blog of Quick Tales and see what you think.

I certainly enjoyed it, Will’s been a good writer since I’ve known him. He might be up for a few more pitches in the future. @ him on Twitter, or comment on his blog and see.

Oh yeah, that is Henry VII by the way, just thought he’d do well at representing kings in general.

MRI-Ai, Ai, Ai, Ai

2009-07-11T11:05:00.001+01:00

I was thinking of the word MRI and it reminded me of the gay robot from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I am a geek, as the blog mentions so you can see how my train of thought went.

So anyways I had an upcoming Magnetic Resonance Imaging appointment at the hospital, but was called up earlier to come in to the hospital that day.

This meant that I had to leave all metallic things elsewhere whilst going in to the giant death machine. It’s the longest time I’ve ever been away from my iPhone since getting it.

These things are bloody freaky.

Anyways, I was told to lie down, and given some music to listen to (heart.fm blech) but it did little to block out the monstrous sounds of the magnets.

I had to wear a strange thing around my head, and when I went in the machine I was staring at a blue line, and was told not to move and was pretty sure I couldn’t anyway.

Some magnets went off, and then later the doctor tapped on the outside, which was rather loud, and then that amount of magnets went off (i.e. he tapped four times, four magnet bursts went off).

I was taken out of the machine, and told I was done. I won’t know any results or anything for a while, but of course I will blog about it when I do.

Sketchy on the details

2009-07-07T22:37:00.001+01:00

@tompl who I follow on Twitter for initial reasons that I have long since forgotten, but now for his wicked tweets and things, sent out a tweet asking people to describe a character for him to sketch, so I sent out this pitch:

James Wolfsbane – Thief with a fondness with wolf-skin tunics & gold coins. Unkempt appearance, but posh boots, regularly stolen.

I think this was an amalgamation of an old D&D character, a thief character that I made for something and spur of the moment creation. Anyways, he became this:

Which is great, I plan to use the character a fair bit and Tom did an awesome job.

Podcast Mention #4

2009-07-06T20:45:00.001+01:00

No, no, not the FullSignull podcast. I was instead mentioned for “rising from my grave” in Episode 83 of the 2P START! LIVE podcast.

2P START! is a great video games web comic which updates every week, and has a weekly podcast which might actually be funnier than the comic. Give ‘em both a try.

More than half the year gone, the rest yet to come

2009-07-01T10:59:00.001+01:00

So last month I did an “It’s June” post, to signify what was contained within my month, so now we’ll have an “It’s July” one, only with a less spontaneous title. Let’s see what I know July has in store.

More Reviews
I’ve been really enjoying writing my reviews for this blog, and do want to branch out in to movies, books and more things to review.

Writing

I like creative writing, almost as much as the next subject on the list and have put up one example and had a guest post on the subject so far but plan to keep doing more. I write whenever the mood takes me, or am given a good prompt.

D&D

Fine blog readers, I admit it. Ever since I started reading Darths & Droids (a Star Wars/D&D comic) and chatting to @austenw & @DurgisFlak who have been running games in the real world and on forums, I’ve been thinking about “rolling the dice” again, especially with 4th edition being out.

So I’ve picked up and read all through the Player’s Handbook, and will soon buy the Monster Manual, DM’s Guide and a campaign. It may be the geekiest thing that I do, but I don’t care.

If you know me personally, and want to get in on the first game, contact me. It won’t be until August though to give me time to read rules, do tests and so on.

Drawing

Okay, maybe you do not know, but I have a DeviantArt page where any stuff that I’ve drawn gets scanned in. I can see that my drawing has improved from the poor scraps that I did a year or so ago, but I’m still not quite happy with it yet. I’ll get there though.

Guest posts?

I keep pimping this out, to say that if people want to do guest blog posts all they need do is contact me, and it’ll go up on the site. Based on last month, I should get about 300 visits this month, which is nice.

Hopefully I manage to keep blogging too, though I thought it not worth mentioning. Oh look at that. Oh well.

Final Fantasy VII Review – PSN Store

2009-06-30T17:53:00.001+01:00

Yes, this game is now 12 years old, a decade younger than myself. Yet with it’s recent port on to the PSN store, and the ability to play it on my Final Fantasy VII PSP is great for me. I will try and make this review as unbiased as I can, but I’m making no guarantees.

Story

The story starts off with you being Cloud, an ex First Class SOLDIER *cough* with some sevre memory and head problems. Eventually the plot to take down an evil company along with a bunch of misfits, turns in to an epic task to save the planet. Aerith’s death scene is very memorable to any gamer, and was a shocking and saddening moment when first seen. The story starts a mite slow, but advances quickly and starts getting complex. Getting the two secret characters helps to add to more story plot, as does finding out all about Zack (which is all optional by the way).

Gameplay

Being the first Final Fantasy game, and indeed first RPG I’d played, this may be where bias plays in. The ATB system was used in this game for battles, and worked very well. The Limit system would lay the ground work for greater improvements, such as in Final Fantasy X, where one could change how Limits were built up, rather than just by being hit. The world map wandering is good in either landscape or top-down view.

Graphics

Reviewing this 12 years down the line means that the graphics take a serious knock. Back then, it was all state-of-the-art, “more real than real” stuff, yet now they’re blocky, things are slightly off. I’m adding a score in brackets for this one for if I had reviewed it 12 years ago, but at my current intelligence.

Soundtrack

The music however remains undeterred by a gap of more than ten years. I still listen to it these days and enjoy the memories it brings forth.

Replayability

Hmmm…this is difficult. On the one hand, I could play this endlessly. On the other hand, I have already played this enough to get all I ever could out of it. Yet I come back and play it each time. This wouldn’t be the same for everyone though. If you haven’t done ALL the optional stuff, replay it and get it. If you have, replay it for fun. See what happens when the train crashes, or play along with Don Corneo. You can’t not replay it.

Story: 8/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Graphics: 6.2 (8)/10
Soundtrack: 8.3/10
Replayability: 7.4/10

74.80% (79.40%)

0 – 19% Unplayable - why the hell did I even buy this?
20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the game hold it back
50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
70 – 84% Good – A nice franchise or single game, that just misses out on being great because of a few flaws.
85 – 89% Excellent – You could play this for ages and be happy
90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – You should have this game and play it every single day.

Want me to review a game? Comment and let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

You want to do what?

2009-06-29T17:02:00.000+01:00

I’m not sure how any DM ever put up with me. So, same wizard character that I discussed here but this happened before that.

Usual quest thing, going in to an enemy hideout from the top. Meaning we had to take a large amount of make shift stairs down, but we had a large pit in the way, so with my wizard and his gigantic staff, I thought it would be a good idea to pole vault across the gap.

“Can I do that?” I had asked the DM, it being my second game ever.
”What?”
”Pole vault across the gap?”
”So, you want to stick your staff down the hole, then kind of swing across?”
”Sure.”

”Okay” said the DM. “You go to stick your 20 foot staff down the hole to vault across, but the hole is 30 feet deep. You fall and lose half your hit points.”
Crap.
”Ow” (I like to empathize with my characters in D&D)

”’Ow’ indeed.”

The other players eventually helped me up, and I instead chucked the pole to our nimble thief and he put the pole across the gap, and had everyone walk along.

Comic strip script

2009-06-28T17:31:00.001+01:00

For anyone who doesn’t know, I’m trying to start off a web comic with my meagre drawing skills and I had an idea earlier, which I can’t put to paper at the moment, so here’s the script for now.

PANEL 1
[Blank panel two voices, one on left, one on right]
<Loud Explosion>
Voice 1: What was that?
Voice 2: Wasn’t me.

PANEL 2
Voice 1: Well, if the explosion wasn’t you then…
Voice 2: Oh shit. Daddy!

PANEL 3
[Burnt out, exploded Electrode in the middle]
[Male Voltorb on left, female on right, both teary eyed, female crying.]

Yeah, sounds kind of rubbish, but I’ll see when I’ve drawn it.

Twilight – A Look At A Book

2009-06-27T21:46:00.001+01:00

I might make this a new simply titled segment, as it were, and for the first one, let’s go for the worst book I’ve ever read, and the only one I’ve never finished.

Okay, this blog post is being finished off elsewhere now.

What do I need to write? – By fragmad

2009-06-26T10:16:00.000+01:00

This a guest blog post by fragmad/Ginja/Will. He runs about three blogs, but I prefer his short fiction blog, so I’ll link to that. It’s called Quick Tales.

I’ve known him for a while, and he writes some damn good stuff, so take a look and read some of it. Especially his Moon Station story, which starts here.

If you want to do a guest blog post, just e-mail it to me, at pkmntrainerj@gmail.com and it’ll go up. There’s some conditions if you want to do a review, but apart from that, it’s all fair game.

I spend a lot of time giving issues like this a lot of thought. It saves me from thinking about important and worthy subjects like getting a job, or finding a stable relationship, or the really important questions in life like what is good and evil? This kind of thinking is the shallow end of worthy subjects, but it's good stuff to nail down. I'm sure what I'm talking about can be taken across to other disciplines such as drawing, or anything remotely creative, but I'll stick to my own thing. That's putting words in readable order one and another that entertain other people.

Now I'm hesitant to say that I need anything as banal as inspiration in order to write anything. I don't need inspiration to cook a fucking fantastic meal, or even to get out of bed. Indeed I strongly suspect that anyone who claims they are waiting for inspiration in order to write anything really doesn't want to write anything. They just want to enjoy the mystery and the glamour (what?) of writing without putting the effort in.

Fuck them!

No what I need to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard (apart from food, shelter, support), is purpose. I have to be writing for a reason. Sure, that reason can be practice, it could be to convey a message, or just the sheer bloody entertainment of it. There has to be a reason though.

I feel like Will’s described when I draw too, there has to be a reason for it. Whether it's just to entertain myself, or because it's in my head aching to get out.

There is one reason that I will never again use to write something. I'm never going to write something to impress anyone. Especially if it means that they never see what you write because you are too shamed by the results. But that's me and my own damage.
I slowly came to the realisation that purpose was a central need for me when writing anything by reading a book on writing plays called 'The Art of Dramatic Writing'.

It's a good book, and if you want to know how to write a good play you can do no worse than reading that book. The first chapter was a small revelation for for me.

That first chapter poses that most successful plays have a premise. "True love conquerors even death," for Romeo and Juliet for example. And that these successful plays are always driving towards demonstrating that premise.

For me it really is no different. Everything I write, and to be honest everything I do with gusto has a purpose. I don't do things senselessly and at random despite appearances of often doing exactly that.

What's the point of this? Just sharing an idea.

Hope you liked fragmad’s post. If you want to do a post, then send me an e-mail and it’ll go up, and I’ll link to your blog/site.

“When I first met her, it hit me.”

2009-06-24T20:20:00.000+01:00

This was my post for the Fanpop Writer's Group, which is a fiction piece based on the prompt above. I feel that my writing doesn’t get in to a good flow right away, but this only took me a few minutes. Hopefully you all like it. I also tried to not use any spoken word in this, and think it worked okay.

When I first met her, it hit me. The sudden realisation that I loved her. There and then, even before knowing her name or anything about her, I knew that I loved her. No-one else in the room seemed to matter, and people's voices were muffled background noise to me.

She walked over to me and started to nervously speak, but I grabbed her hand before she could and simply held it. A large gruff man sidled alongside her and said something I didn't hear.

I enquired as to what he had said, and he uttered a series of coarse and curse words against me and then strolled off with her, showing his ownership, as though something this precious could be possessed like a necklace.

I gave chase, and encountered them kissing in the icy wintered parking lot. Overcome with emotions of love, anger towards the gruff man and a small adrenaline rush, I swung my fist around at the guy who seemed a lot taller close up.

He crushed my hand in his much larger one as I let out a yelp of pain. I attempted to push my head in to his chest to knock him back, and though he stumbled slightly, it didn't have much effect.

As he shoved me back he laughed to himself, and spoke some words to the woman I loved. I saw a chance to run at him, and try to disrupt his balance and took it. Mid-run, I slipped on some ice, but continued to go, sliding in to the man with both of us heading for a larger patch of ice.

On reflection, I should have realised that the patch of ice was covering a lake. We both slid on, myself being flung further down and then scrambling to get out before it gave way.

The gruff man did not seem so lucky. The woman I loved was screaming and shouting his name, though I do not recall it. She exclaimed that he was unable to swim, as his large body sank beneath the splinters of ice.

I could only watch in horror as bubbles began to float to the surface, and then couldn't move as they ceased to come up any more.
I looked at the woman I loved from the other side of the lake, and she simply shook her head through tears. She may have been the woman I loved, but I had just killed the man that she loved.

I tried to shake away the tears too, and started to flee as others piled outside and the police sirens began. I've not stopped running since.

Happy Father’s Day Den

2009-06-21T11:11:00.000+01:00

Hey, Den. Doubt very much you read my blog, but Happy Father’s Day, if I didn’t say so with a card and gift already. Hope you enjoy the gift that I got for you. At the time of writing, I’ve no idea what it is.

facebook vanity

2009-06-20T20:33:00.000+01:00

You may be aware that facebook now offers up usernames for users, or vanity URLs as they have been called a lot. I thought I’d check and see if certain famous characters have been claimed by anybody as often happens when usernames first become available. If you do claim one, or know of one that’s gone, let me know. Let’s see, well know characters first.

Batman – Nope, nothing
Superman – No-one’s got this one either
Wonder Woman – Nope, no luck with superheroes.

I’ll try some Pokémon now.

Pikachu – Really, no-one has Pikachu?
Magikarp – For some reason this directs me back to the homepage. One last try.
Ditto – No luck here either. Maybe one more.
Oddish – Finally, A HIT! I expected a friend of mine to have this, but he wasn’t as lucky.

Kingdom Hearts folks. Hmmm…Organization XIII?

Roxas – Got one first try!
Marluxia – That’s been claimed too.
Luxord – That’s been claimed as well.
I’m sure all the Kingdom Hearts characters names that can be claimed have been done.

That’s all I can be bothered to do. What’s your vanity URL, anything good? Seen any decent ones? Let me know.

38¢

2009-06-19T18:31:00.000+01:00

38 cents. What the heck can you even get for that? To me, it actually works out as about 23p, so what could I get for that?

I could buy a Cadbury’s Fudge, and have a small amount of change left and probably not much else. Why am I going on about 38 cents? That’s because it’s what I got from last month’s advertising, which you see plastered about the site. I also get a small portion when people visit my blog, so if you keep visiting, I’ll accumulate a small amount of cash. Not that I’m getting a large amount of money, or am encouraging further visits. I guess this post was a way of letting you know that you’re doing some good by reading all the rubbish I write, and thanks a bunch for it.

Hopefully, in three years or so when I accumulate the $100 needed to get it in my bank account, I can offer up an incentive sketch, or something cool.

I mastered neurology, and big bang theology

2009-06-18T07:16:00.001+01:00

Yes, yes, I know. It’s numerology in the song. However, I had used a quote from Lost before to discuss my head problems, and now we’ll go with Linkin Park.

I did a previous post on this, just to kind of inform people of what had happened, but now I have an appointment scheduled at a hospital to check out what’s truly wrong with me.

I’ve been discussing it with people and the general feeling is that it’s some kind of epilepsy, these people aren’t medical professionals, but I still value their opinion.

But, yeah, I’m off to see a neurologist today and I shall see what they say.

Bags of holding are not nice places

2009-06-17T13:27:00.000+01:00

If you’re following me on Twitter you probably saw me make note of this recently.

I’m a big geek, there’s no denying that, and back in my teens I did play some Dungeons & Dragons with a few mates, which was actually Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2.0 I think.

Either way, I had a wizard chap, whose name is lost to me and I’d acquired a bag of holding a few games back, which I was constantly using to store all of the loot we found.

A few games later, when we had all (four – six of us playing) obtained steeds and rode in to a new town for a quest, we were directed to a deep dungeon cave, and told to saddle up our horses.

“Oh! I’ve got an idea. Can I just put my horse in my bag of holding?”
I’m sure I rolled for something, but can’t recall.
”Yes,” replied the DM, “but remember to take it out later.”

So, horse in my backpack along with all other trinkets and so forth and we went plodding about the dungeon taking down enemies. Then our gaming session came to a close as nightfall fell back in the real world.

A few weeks later, we got back in to it, and came across a large lake, wherein we needed to swim underwater and get under a small cavern to retrieve the item we’d been hired to get. We had a quick scrabble of ideas, and then the thought crossed my mind.

“Hey, what about my horse?” (I had named it, but I forget what)
”Fine, check your bag of holding.” spoke the DM with an evil undertone.
”Your horse is dead. After being left in the bag for the week or so you’ve spent in the cave, it starved and is now beginning to have it’s flesh fall off.”
”Oh…” I pondered a moment longer. “Could I use it to swim across, as a kind of floatation device?”
”I suppose you could…”
”No wait. Better idea. If I shove my head in to it’s mouth,and then swim underwater using it’s lungs for air?”
”I…what?”

I drew a crude sketch at this point, demonstrating my ludicrous plan and spoke of it further, while the rest of the group laughed and gave me odd stares.

”Okay,” the DM noted. “You can do it.”
”No rolling?”
”Nope, no rolling.”

So, I swam across and under and got whatever magical thing it was we needed. It triggered a boss fight on land, and my horse’s corpse was incinerated by the boss (I think the DM didn’t want me to reuse it) and I snagged some experience points by using magic missile whilst coming back to land.

That was a fun time. I’m such a big bloody geek. And I love it.

What to expect if you follow me on Twitter

2009-06-16T02:52:00.000+01:00

@wilw (Wil Wheaton) made a post a while back, on what to expect if you follow him on Twitter so I thought I’d try and emulate him and make a similar list, because it’s 2:45AM and I’m veeeery tired but want to blog.

I send out a lot of Tweets, frequently about stupid stuff that's just amusing to me. From time to time I will send out several in just a few minutes. You probably shouldn't follow me on your phone, because it's going to get annoying. I have friends who are so prolific, I don't follow them on my phone, and they're my friends! I have friends who don't follow me, because I tweet way too much for them. It's cool, I know text message charges can be expensive, and I wouldn't follow me, because I use Twitter a LOT. I don't plan to change that, either. It's fun and I like it.

That one hasn’t been change from Wil Wheaton’s original post, because I feel it holds true for myself. Yet I know a few people that follow me on their phones. Man, I feel sorry for you all.
I will sometimes tweet about stuff that people tend not to give a crap about like Pokémon or Kingdom Hearts, or even utter nonsense and song lyrics.
I try as hard as I can not to tweet any spoilers for TV shows and video games that I “become aware of” but may slip up occasionally, so if you like the TV show Lost, for example, and don’t see it until Sunday, it may be wise to unfollow me for a day or two. I won’t be offended.
I’ll sometimes have mass conversations with people, which you won’t see unless you follow them, so sometimes it’s worth checking my actual Twitter page.
If you’re trying to engage me in conversation about something, please make sure you know what you’re on about first of all.

I think that’s about it, and if you don’t follow me on Twitter, click hither, wandering traveller.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days – Xion spoilers

2009-06-15T11:57:00.000+01:00

So I couldn’t wait and ended up reading about Xion and a bit of the 358/2 Days storyline. So, as it says at the top, there’s spoilers in this.

So, Xion is a puppet created from Sora’s leaking memories by Xemnas. She resembles Kairi because of Sora’s strong memories of her. Then when Roxas defeats her, he absorbs her and is thus able to dual wield keyblades. Thus being why Sora can dual wield when Roxas is willingly absorbed by him.

Just…no. It sounds very stupid. However, were I describing that Roxas is the body & soul of Sora, born when he lost his heart to the darkness by choice. Or that Naminé is born of a blend of Sora & Kairi’s body and soul when Kairi’s pure heart restored Sora and is able to mess around with the memories of Sora and those close to him (i.e. party members, Riku, Kairi). These things do sound foolish in practice, but when you’ve played through, they do make sense.

Then, I learned that at some point, Xion (being created of memories and taking on many different forms) appears as Ventus from Birth By Sleep, which always seemed like the more interesting game to me. So now I’m pondering on how Sora, Xion, Kairi or Xigbar (who sees her/him as Ven) is/are related to a Keyblade Master of ten years past before any half of them even existed (Sora & Kairi were just kids, with Kairi still being at Hollow Bastion).

If you’re not confused, congratulations, you know your Kingdom Hearts stuff.

So I fainted…again

2009-06-14T23:25:00.000+01:00

Perhaps if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you saw this post about when I passed out back in April.

I ended up having two more of my things a few days ago, and passed out both times within the two hours. Went to the walk in centre and got some medicine to last me a few days.

But I have a hospital appointment upcoming, it just means that now I need a risk assessment at work, and have to explain it all to everyone.

I hate explaining it, because it all sounds so stupid and not real.

Pronunciation is the aspiration of this dictation

2009-06-13T01:17:00.001+01:00

I always find pronunciation and slang really fascinating, as well as the origin of words. Do you know what a jitty is, or a snicket? Do you say right the way instead of right away?

Even take my own user name “PkmnTrainerJ”. How the heck do you pronounce the first four letters? Apparently even the Fanpop staff have debated it too.

Apparently papa pronounces it as “Pikmin”, whereas Dave corrects him and tells him it’s actually “Pokémon”, but said quickly. So kind of like “Puhk-mun” if you want to get it right.

Do you know any slang words that are much more local to you, or variations on usual words? I don’t know why I’m like this with words, I just am.

Brawl Snapshots

2009-06-12T00:07:00.000+01:00

I’m not sure if this comes under social networking sites really, but it’s been a while since I did the first one. On Brawl Snapshots, a Game Cults site, users upload stages and photos of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and if you like them, you +1 them.

Good photos are featured and there’s contests too. You can also download any stages you see on there to use on your Wii, which is wicked cool.

My profile & gallery are here and I’ve made a few stages like the Pixl (allies from the game Super Paper Mario) ones, which I particularly like. Thoreau is my favourite design and one to battle on, so please let me know what you think of that.

A chain of memories

2009-06-07T01:46:00.000+01:00

When you remember one thing, that leads to remembering another and then another and then another. Our memories are connected. Many pieces are linked together like they’re in a chain that makes up each of us. I don’t actually erase any memories -just take apart the links and rearrange them. You still have all your memories.

Okay, I took that from Kingdom Hearts: Re: Chain Of Memories, but thought it would be quite apt.

My cousin and I were discussing memories and childhood, and somehow ended up on earliest memories. She told me that hers was when it was either my fourth birthday, or her fourth birthday and her memory is of me showing her how to paint the number four.

Now this sounds fine, and a nice memory, until she mentioned that I had actually managed to draw it backwards when painting, akin to the one below.

However, we were alerted to the mistake and corrected it, so it probably looked kind of like this in the end.

What the fuck, four year old me? Get out. We landed back on my earliest memory, and I guess that’s what the point of this post is apart from mocking my artistic skill back then, which I doubt has improved much.

So, my earliest memory, is being a small baby on the bus with my mother, and apparently going off to my grandmother’s. I whack my head as we drive round a corner, and that’s about all I remember majorly until starting school. I recall being given lots of books about something that was happening in the family, but I don’t remember any content of them.

Anyways, it would be cool to hear some early memories from peeps.

Guest reviews/posts

2009-06-03T04:09:00.000+01:00

I know what I’m doing now when it comes to reviewing games and after a good month of blogging, I realised it can be irritating to crank out a few good blog posts, so here’s my plan for being lazy. E-mail any reviews or posts to pkmntrainerj@gmail.com and I’ll get it up here on the blog. According to SiteMeter, I should average around 300 visits a month, and 295 page views if that influences you in any way.

Reviews

You can review whatever you like, so long as you stick to the 2009 review style that’s on the blog. Include pictures in the e-mail if you like, but if not I’ll find pictures and the like. If you’re reviewing something I haven’t yet (such as books/movies) please replace the five video game categories with appropriate things. As long as there are five percentages, the overall rating works.

Regular Posts

Regular posts can be about anything and everything, send them along to the same e-mail.

Disclaimer: I reserve the right to change blog posts as I see fit for whatever reason I choose. You will receive an e-mail to tell you when your blog post will go up and a link will be given to your blog/website for visitors.

Square Enix E3 Predictions

2009-06-02T15:38:00.000+01:00

Square Enix mentioned that the company will reveal three previously unannounced titles at E3 2009. Rumour reported that two of the which will be sequels to their bigger franchises.

That’s from the website The Magic Box and you’ve probably seen it in various places. A few days after this blog goes up, we might know more, but I’m going to offer up a few predictions, let me know what you think.

Kingdom Hearts III

KH Insider had their April Fool’s joke be that there was a Kingdom Hearts III announced, and it would have been a good joke, but it was spoilt. Nonetheless, the slew of spin-off Kingdom Hearts games for DS, PSP & mobile phones will all have been released soon, and fans are waiting for another ‘main’ game so announcing it at E3 and seeing some cool video for the next Kingdom Hearts game would be good.

Chrono Series Game/Mana Series Game

Though I’ve never played the Chrono series, it’s DS rerelease seemed to go well and I know people that have got enjoyment out of it, and Europe had never really seen it before this release so it gave European users a new experience. To not carry on with the series would be foolish.

The Mana series could also do with a new game as well, perhaps something on the PSP rather than sticking to Nintendo’s console to mix it up.

Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy fans have wanted a remake of the game for some time, and were taunted by the technical demo above to show off the PS3’s power, and then taunted by an updated opening after the end of Crisis Core, and it would be a cash cow for Square Enix. I will be shocked if this isn’t announced. The other two are more wishes than predictions. What do you think?

It’s June!

2009-06-01T02:29:00.000+01:00

It’s June now, so let’s run through all the good things that come with June. I don’t know if I’ll do this at the start of each blog month. We’ll see.

Sims 3 The third numbered game in the “The Sims” series is due out this month, with all new great stuff, and much more flexibility than the last game. I’ll certainly be playing this to death.

iPhone 3.0
3.0 beta is already out to those with jail broken phones or app developers, but for the rest of the iPhone users, 3.0 and all the wonderful bits that come with it.

Week Off
These are rare to me now that I have to do management work, so weeks off are much more appreciated now. I’m going to kick back and do bugger all.

Driving
More driving lessons will surely come in this month, and now I feel I’m really moving along with them. Driving instructor is a great laugh too and finally…

Blogging
I’m amazed that I’ve managed to keep this blog going properly for a good month or so now, so you can expect more reviews, more generic crap about my life and maybe a few guest reviews.

Polling Station

2009-05-29T22:04:00.000+01:00

So, I’ve decided to run a little poll, much like mooog35 does with his blog in order to identify what weirdo's are actually taking their time to visit my site. The poll is off to the right, so I’d appreciate your votes.

The choices are all search terms that people have used to find my site, as monitored by SiteMeter. Just vote on the funniest or silliest one. I only track the last 100 visitors, so I’ll do a quick poll like this every so often.

Captain Falcon iPhone app
fucking a horse jockey
DHARMA Initiative jelly
last ned Pokémon silver

They’re not that funny, but it might be worth a laugh.

I need a holiday

2009-05-28T20:33:00.000+01:00

Why are the banks still having these damn holidays in these tough economic times? Surely they need to be working harder, not kicking back.

Bank holidays have never really affected me though, as Mondays have been my regular day off since I started work at 16. However, if you work in retail like I do, bank holidays mean nothing but stress and sweating.

Bank holiday weekends are no different, as most stupid customers (interpreted in retail as “all customers”) assume you’re shut for the Monday, and proceed to do an entire week’s shopping as though the world will end because you’re shut, even though our store is open every day, including Christmas Day. And yes, whilst it’s nice taking a few more grand than we do, I don’t earn any extra money nor recognition for it, so it doesn’t bother how busy we are, though I must pretend I give a crap when the boss is about.

I was working this most recent bank holiday on Saturday and Sunday for about six hours each day, with of course, minimal staff. So the days were pretty fucking manic and we took an extra £5,000 or so from each day, and everyone was pretty stressed out by the end of it. Thanks to all the staff I did work with. You made it a hell of a lot less stressful for myself. Well done, if I didn’t say so already. I’m never working a bank holiday weekend again though, you can stick it up your arse as Bernard Black would say.

I’ve been driving in my car

2009-05-27T19:36:00.000+01:00

Well, not really my car, someone else’s car. Let me just clarify, I don’t know a whole lot about cars. Adding extra sub woofers or lowering your car so that you can’t pass over speed bumps without scratching it makes very little sense to me. Nonetheless, I still need to learn how to drive.

So that kind of explains whilst I’ve been driving another person’s car. Before this recent new slew of driving lessons, it had been about 6 months since I last drove. So, I managed to stall the car a total of four times while driving for an hour.

My second lesson was slightly better, managed to bay park it, swung around a difficult bend perfectly and my gear changes were excellent apparently. Just got to remember my POM (preparation, observation, movement-ation, easier to remember for me) and MSM (mirrors, signal, movement) for my lessons and start getting through some highway code learnings. My teacher is pretty sound, and I’ll be playing poker with him in a few weeks, which will be good. I’ll let you know how Friday’s lesson goes.

Mortal Kombat: Deception Review – Multiplatform

2009-05-25T22:22:00.000+01:00

This is a review of the sixth Mortal Kombat game in the series, which was released on various consoles in 2004/5. The version I’m using for this review was the PlayStation 2 PAL version.

Story

The Mortal Kombat story has always been the best of the main fighting games to me (Street Fighter, Tekken etc.) and the characters remain interesting. The Konquest mode in which you control Shujinko and play along an interesting storyline to save all of the realms, and interact with a large amount of characters and learn their attacks and special moves is the best aspect of the game to me.

Gameplay

Gameplay doesn’t differ much from previous Mortal Kombat games, save for in the Konquest mode, which I’ll state once more is the gem of this game. Your basic kick, punch, combo breaker style of play, with blood and gore mixed in.

Graphics

Graphics here obviously vary a lot depending on what console you’re actually playing this on, but for the PS2 version, the graphics are certainly up to scratch, but I can’t help but feel that certain things could be smoother, such as entering buildings, and juggling.

Soundtrack

There’s no official soundtrack for the game as far as I know, but the soundtrack’s solid, and certainly aids the flow of battle. With Konquest, the music’s a little lacking, but it’s where you get most of the soundtrack from.

Replayability

This is where, like with most fighting games, Deception falls flat on it’s face. Yes, the multiplayer is fun, and Konquest is long, but you could never really redo Konquest and enjoy it fully again. It’s fun, but won’t keep you occupied for long after you’re done.

Story: 7.4/10
Gameplay: 7.1/10
Graphics: 7/10
Soundtrack: 6.2/10
Replayability: 5/10

65.40%

0 – 19% Unplayable - why the hell did I even buy this?
20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the game hold it back
50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
70 – 84% Good – A nice franchise or single game, that just misses out on being great because of a few flaws.
85 – 89% Excellent – You could play this for ages and be happy
90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – You should have this game and play it every single day.

Want me to review a game? Comment and let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Crisis Core –Final Fantasy VII- Review - PSP

2009-05-24T10:33:00.000+01:00

Crisis Core –Final Fantasy VII- is the PSP prequel to Final Fantasy for the PS1, where you take control of the rarely seen but often discussed Zack Fair as a starting 2nd Class SOLDIER, and see where it all started to go wrong.

Story

A new enemy in the form of Genesis is introduced at the start of the game, as Sephiroth has yet to begin his descent in to madness, and it deals well with setting him as a questionable villain and uses the play, LOVELESS, seen briefly in Final Fantasy VII well. Familiar faces such as Cloud & Yuffie are seen and new faces such as Cissnei are blended in well. By the end of the game, you don’t care about Cloud anymore in Final Fantasy VII and wish that he had died instead of Zack. Great story, even knowing the ending already.

Gameplay

That’s an example of a battle above, there are random encounters as usual and then battle flows by choosing your next attack from the materia you have equipped. Crisis Core allows you to break all the usual Damage & HP Limits, meaning you can deal 99,999 in a single hit later in the game with the right materia (Costly Punch). Outside of battle, you are usually wandering an area with a certain objective, there is no free-roaming world as you’re shipped off to certain locations by ShinRa. The DMW Limit system is great. The more people you meet in game, or items you collect, the more faces fill up. The reels roll each time and if three match up Zack unleashes a limit related to that character.

Graphics

The summons kick up some astounding FMV, even though the first time you see them, you know some great pain is coming your way. The other cutscenes are up to PSP-specs, but I don’t think it uses anywhere near all of the PSP’s power, which would have been nice to see, but I’m always harsh on graphics.

Soundtrack

The Crisis Core soundtrack has some great tunes and uses some variants of Final Fantasy VII tunes, which is in no means a bad thing as I think VII has a good soundtrack, and even has a theme song named “Why”. The best thing to do though, is make a playlist of all songs titled “Theme Of Crisis Core” and listen to them all.

Replayability

The “missions” section allows you to play about 300 missions of varying difficulties. Very Hard in these missions means, if you don’t have Phoenix Downs and Costly Punch, you will die. Crisis Core keeps up the Final Fantasy tradition of having a superboss, in this case, Minerva who has 10,000,000 HP on Normal mode and 20,000,000 on Hard. New Game Plus is also an option, where you will keep all items obtained, and also your level, if the missions were too tough for you the first time through.

Story: 9/10
Gameplay: 8.5/10
Graphics: 8.5/10
Soundtrack: 8.7/10
Replayability: 6.7/10

84.5%

0 – 19% Unplayable - why the hell did I even buy this?
20 – 49% Poor – Certain elements of the game hold it back
50 – 69% Average – More good than bad, but you might need to be a fan to really get in to it.
70 – 84% Good – A nice franchise or single game, that just misses out on being great because of a few flaws.
85 – 89% Excellent – You could play this for ages and be happy
90 – 100% Fucking Excellent – You should have this game and play it every single day.

Want me to review a game? Comment and let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Poker in the ace with the nuts

2009-05-23T16:18:00.000+01:00

I found the title witty, screw you. So, you may not know but my parents both play poker, and even teach it to new players, but I’ve never quite got on board with it. This is Texas No-Hold ‘Em Poker by the way, because what else would you play?

However, I was invited to my stepfather’s usual play at a place called “Dusk ‘Til Dawn” so thought I’d better get some practice in. I’ve been practicing on the following site:

I started off with about $1,000 of Play Money, and am now down to $400 after nearly losing it all on an all-in. Hopefully, this is my bad luck getting out of the way before I play tonight.

If you use that site, I’m “PkmnTrainerJ” and my avatar is a panda, because that was perhaps the best thing.

PSP Go?

2009-05-22T12:22:00.000+01:00

I don’t keep up with PSP news, even though I do already have one, but only have three games for it, one of which came with the console. However, I’d seen that Sony are thinking of releasing a new console.

Could Sony just stop stealing ideas from Nintendo? These are just a mock-up, but it’s rumoured that it will have a sliding screen, and no UMD port. Yes, no UMD port. So your old PSP games wouldn’t work on it.

Rumours are that you download games via the PlayStation Store and put them on your memory stick, and play them off there. This takes away from shopping in game stores, which I really like doing, but maybe it’s dying out. We’ll see at E3.

Podcast Mention #3

2009-05-21T12:11:00.000+01:00

Okay, I get a shout out in the FullSignull podcast almost every time, a tech/geek/gaming podcast hosted by Trevor Smith & Andrew Cyr, two American buddies, who take topics via Twitter or e-mail on Tuesdays prior to recording the podcast and cover other news. If you’re not listening to it still, after my previous two mentions, at least give it a try, if it’s not for you, feel free to ignore it.

Superman & Ms. Pacman

2009-05-20T21:17:00.000+01:00

Some of you may be aware of the fact that I draw, and am trying to draw well enough to start a few projects. I often find myself drawing my dreams if they’re interesting enough and I had a particularly strange one about a month back that it took me a little time to put to paper.

Yes, it’s Superman getting oral from Ms. Pacman. Yes, I do not dream of normal things. I have come to accept that. However, all in all I was happy with the drawing and thought I’d add my latest batch to my DeviantArt page and flag it as mature content, just in case.

But, no, it got flagged due to:

“Prohibited Content”.

A member of staff has reviewed this deviation and has determined that this content is unacceptable for submission here.

I’m not sure what rules I broke, but apparently I did. Are you shocked by the drawing above? Like it? Let me know,

I suck at DIY

2009-05-19T11:34:00.000+01:00

I got a free futon about two weeks ago and decided on Friday that I would finally construct it. I had some allen keys, some spanners and some screws from when it was dismantled to fit it in the car. Here’s the frame to show you how I began.

I worked out where some bits went, had the thing start collapsing on me, and not quite fit, and working out which keys went in to what screws. After about a half hour, I was at this point.

So I basically had the two parts connected, and had a third part to go, so that it could be all well and good. However, once it was all together it didn’t look quite right.

It may not look too bad, but if you look closely you can see that it’s actually the wrong way around, with the “headboard” being used as the legs and vice versa. It still stands pretty well, and is usable, but yeah, I suck at DIY.

Brawl Review – Part IV

2009-05-18T20:23:00.000+01:00

Let’s try and get this review of characters finally finished off, this has been hanging on for about a year now.

Wolf

Wolf seems much better than Fox or Falco, but do we really need three characters that have the exact same move set and the same Final Smash?

Toon Link

Much better than Link in every way to me, and I prefer Toon Link’s adventures (Spirit Tracks, Minish Cap etc.) to the main adventures. He’s pretty quick and has a decent Final Smash.

R.O.B

I know ROB is hated by many fans, and seen as a waste of roster space, but at least he is not another clone. His Final Smash is the worst aside from Peach, but his laser (B) is great. Play against him with Kirby and nab his laser. BEEEP!

Sonic

I remember how excited people were when he was first announced, we saw gameplay, he looked great, but then…he was terrible in actual gameplay. Very hard to control final smash, almost no killing moves. What a waste.

Snake

Our other guest character is the complete opposite. Good killing moves, very useful and powerful. His Final Smash is fun during 4 player matches, but a bit annoying in one on one.

Lucario Give me back Mewtwo. Lucario isn’t bad, but when he plays so similar to Mewtwo, it just makes me want him back on the roster.

NessBlech. Go and use his much better clone of Lucas instead.

Start eating healthily

2009-05-17T06:55:00.000+01:00

I get an e-mail that says this almost every week from my past self via the Amazon owned site, 43 Things to try and remind myself to start eating really healthily. However, I constantly find it difficult to do, even though I enjoy healthy foods like salads, celery and other greens and smoothies and such.

Alas, there’s usually another green that stops me from eating as well as I could. It’s that little thing called money.

Unfortunately, especially with the current recession, the price of all the healthy foods seem to escalating. I thought they were pretty bad before, but when it’s costing more than £1.20 for an iceberg lettuce, it’s a step in the wrong direction. When I can walk up the road and get some chips from the chip shop for £1 instead and make some kind of meal out of that.

Of course this may just be a ‘get-out clause’ for myself to not start losing weight or anything, but I have always felt that the things that are greasy and fatty are cheap, the items that are healthy and slimming are more expensive. Surely, this is the wrong way round and probably partly to blame for the obesity “crisis” but I know that it won’t change.

I’m still going to keep getting these e-mails and try to turn around to healthier eating, but it might take me some time.

Brawl Review Part III

2009-05-16T19:24:00.000+01:00

Part I & Part II of this character review were posted a year ago (with part 1 posted a year ago), when I had full intent of finishing them, so now is that time. Now where the hell was I? Ah yes, secret characters, let’s knock that out of the park.

Captain Falcon
Falcon is a very mismatch character for me, I usually die via Falcon Kick, and his Final Smash can be a bit tricky to hit. His throws are pretty good as I recall though.

FalcoFalco isn’t a character I use a whole lot. He’s not bad and has some nice quick combos, but I still prefer using Fox, though he ranks above Wolf.

Ganondorf

See Falcon, replace Falcon with Ganon.

Jigglypuff

I mean really, who uses Jigglypuff? One useful move of Rollout. It can float about, but so can Kirby and he’s the superior choice in pink balloon things in Brawl.

Luigi

Always in his brother’s shadow and rightly so. Luigi’s Final Smash is perhaps his saving grace because he can then Up + B everyone to death,

Marth

Use Ike instead. Better moves, better Final Smash and he doesn’t look like a woman.

Ness

Use Lucas instead. Read previous Marth statement, replace woman with something else.

Mr Game & Watch

Mr Game & Watch is a bit of weird one. Odd Final Smash and no heavy hitting attack besides his 9-Judge Hammer which is usually a KO.

Aaaand…I’m bored of writing about Brawl. Hopefully Part IV will be up by the 16th, then I can finally stop writing about this.

Lost in time…

2009-05-15T16:23:00.000+01:00

So, maybe you don’t know, but I also run a Lost blog for my thoughts and the like about the TV show Lost, of which I am a big fan. I haven’t updated it for a long time, but now that I can write blog posts offline in a nice looking interface, I will try to keep it up to date again.

Click the logo to view my Lost blog!

I also run another blog, but it’s one that I can’t keep updated any more and may even be deleted by the time this blog post makes it to the internets. I may eventually split up the reviews on here in to a separate blog, but that’s something that’s only recently come to mind.

@austenw Hey man, how goes?

2009-05-13T09:33:00.001+01:00

If I’d made that a tweet a few days ago, everyone would have been able to see it if you’d got the setting turned on to see all the @replies that users send and maybe you’d see an interesting conversation unfold, even if you didn’t follow me, or @austenw.

However, as I’m sure every Twitter user has seen, some changes have been made. Changes that users were not consulted upon, or given an option to change back.

Now if I made that same tweet today, you’d only see it if you were following the person mentioned in the tweet, and then if they replied to me, and you follow them, you wouldn’t see their tweet to me either, unless you were also following me, but you wouldn’t know about me via the tweeting, because you’d be blinkered to it. Confusing? Yes, but it wasn’t before.

We've updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we've learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it's a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

That’s Twitter’s official wording on the situation. Some people have suggested that they use an option similarly to facebook’s privacy settings, where you can control how much certain users see, so if you don’t want someone to see all your @’s you could switch them off that, or if you would prefer not to see any tweets with the hashtag “#lost” in over fears of spoilers for the finalé. I’m sure Twitter will cave and revert back in a few days, but to help with that, people have made the #fixreplies hashtag, which is currently #1 trending topic on Twitter, and there’s a Get Satisfaction thread (which Twitter uses for problems and such if you didn’t know).

Another headache this is causing for users who don’t want all @ replies, is that people are retweeting their replies, so that everyone can see them (as if it’s prefaced by text then everyone sees the tweet).

Hopefully twitter fixes it promptly.

Joe’s CD II

2009-05-13T08:17:00.001+01:00

So, earlier today I found a CD marked “Joe’s CD II”, which is how I used to mark my CD’s of music. This would mean that it was the 2nd CD I ever burned on a computer.

~~Despite some tracks not working I’ll start off a post about them~~
(Ha, ha, screw you CD. I’ll make them work)

This CD was a bit of a goldmine for myself. Here’s the track listing.

This track didn’t want to work and would “crash” any CD program, and make the rest of the tracks silent, so I kind of skipped this one.

Okay, by process of elimination, this song must be:
Andrew WK – We Want Fun, as it’s marked on the front of the CD, and it’s the only Andrew WK song that comes to mind.

He’s a bit of a twat really isn’t he.
blink-182 – What’s My Age Again
Holy crap. When I first listened to this song, 23 seemed an age that was far from me, and now I’ll be 23 next year. In 2010. :-( Oh well, at least I never act my age.
David Bowie – Magic Dance
Okay, it’s no secret to the people that know me that Labyrinth is perhaps my favourite film, with David Bowie and a young Jennifer Connelly in a magical world where can you go wrong? Now that I know David Bowie makes all the baby noises, it makes the song even more funny to me.
Dragonball GT Japanese Theme Song
What? I remember being interested in Dragonball Z, then fading out in GT, so why in the heck is there the Japanese song on here?
Evanescence – Bring Me To Life
Obviously I’m going to have their big hit on here if the CD states Evanescence on it. I do really like this song and it’s Amy Lee too. She looks better in the My Immortal video though. I wonder if this version has the bloke who’s name I can’t recall at the moment singing the extra bits of it.

Okay, it’s at this point in our story that iTunes decided it didn’t want to finish ripping the previous song, and just crashed instead. It was going so well. Let’s try again. Nope. Eject. No. Eject. Oh, there we go.
Faye Wong – Eyes On Me
Makes sense. Final Fantasy VIII was a pretty good game for me and I’m a sucker for an asian girl with a good singing voice. Not as good as Ms. Hikaru, but she’s still good.
The Rembrandts – I’ll Be There For You
Friends theme song, first getting in to downloading music and stuff, I guess I downloaded a few theme songs I recognized.
Good Charlotte – Emotionaless
I remember being quite acquainted with this song, because I think it was around the time of my parents break up. Not that I really care these days, but I think I did back then.
Good Charlotte – Girls & Boys
I seem to remember that I had this song because I really laughed at the old woman Avril Lavigne in the music video (which now seems to be missing whenever I see it on TV)
Good Charlotte – The Motivation Proclamation
Why so much Good Charlotte? I don’t even like this song very much.
???? – ????
midomi doesn’t know what it is, so no help there. It starts off “I was raised…to believe…” but I have no idea.
Good Charlotte – Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous
More Good Charlotte? Go away! It’s a good song, but I really don’t remember being that in to them.
Jimmy Eat World – The Middle
Hey, don’t write yourself off yet. I do like Jimmy Eat World and The Middle is almost my favourite song by them (it’s Work by the way) but this song is certainly very good and I remember listening to this song a lot back in my youth.
Linkin Park – Somewhere I Belong
This song must have recently come out. I didn’t really “dig” Meteora, the album this was on but have since come to like it a little more. I’ll still always like Hybrid Theory/Reanimation more though.
Linkin Park – Step Up
I’m sure when I downloaded this it was marked as “secret unreleased song” and I was glad to have it to rub in people’s faces as a kid. “Have you heard Linkin Park’s Step Up?” “No?” *scoffs* Actually I’m not sure I scoffed a lot then. This is still a good song to me now, and perhaps the gem of this ancient CD.
Powerman 5000 – When Worlds Collide
I’m thinking this was influenced by Little Nicky, when the surviving brother starts to rise up on the throne of Hell to Earth. That image certainly comes to the forefront of my mind when I’m listening to the song.

Actually, this was on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 as well. I feel I had the soundtrack at some point.
Simple Plan – I’d Do Anything
How Simple Plan have grown up. Looking at this song they seem like kids, but when listening to their latest single When I’m Gone or hearing them at Download 2008 they seem to have matured in to better musicians.
Tatu – All The Things She Said
Underage lesbian schoolgirls kissing in the rain anyone? I’m sure they were fifteen when they filmed the music video for this, which was the shocking video to old people, the video you had to see as a kid and the video that parents gasped at, at the time. In regards to the song, eh, it’s not bad. I can’t remember whether it’s “taTu” instead though.
The Androids – I Wanna Do It With Madonna
My brother and @AimlessAmy get props for remembering this funny novelty song that I thought was long forgotten. I wonder if The Androids actually made any more songs, or were just a one-hit wonder? This song does make me laugh a lot.
The Calling – Wherever You Will Go
Now, why do I have this song? Oh yes, the girl I had the hots for really liked The Calling, so I was trying to get in to them in order to try and break the ice. As I can’t even remember her name, so I’m going to call that one a critical failure. The Calling…they’re not good really.
Dub Pistols – Cyclone
I know exactly why this is on here. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. It was on the soundtrack and eventually became the only song I had on when I skated about busting mad 360 Ollie twists. I couldn’t remember the artist for this song at all, but midomi provided it.
Violent Delight – I Wish I Was A Girl
There’d be certain advantages, and guys are lying if they said they haven’t thought about and it’s certainly another funny song. I wonder if Violent Delight (oxymoronic, I get it!) are still together.

Hope you enjoyed a glance in to ghosts of music past with me. If I ever manage to find “Joe’s CD”, I’m pretty sure it’ll just be full of porn.

Jelly, jelly in my belly, belly

2009-05-12T17:09:00.000+01:00

I just made some jelly. Some jelly that’s probably been sat in my fridge since January.

It is nowhere near as good as that.

I found my scissors and cut up the jelly bits, inhaling their delicious smell of pure orangeyness and chucked them in the salad/fruit bowl. What’s next?

Boiling water, okay, whatever amount was in the kettle went in and dissolved the little blocks to make a very warm orange soup.

Then I’m sure you add cold water or ice cubes to it. I have both, but went for some regular water, but not too much. I like a firm jelly.

Right now, it’s in the fridge, steaming up everything else in there, ready to be eaten by me in a few hours. I really want to eat it now. Knew I should have made a pre-jelly jelly, but then I’d need a pre-pre-jelly jelly.

I can smell it from here, even though the fridge door is closed. Let me have it!

I assume jelly is one of those things that’s impossible to balls up, but you never know, I once sliced my finger in half with a potato peeler. That’s a story for another day.

Oh, some whiskey and wine may have fallen in the mixture when I passed it by.

Erm…but…hmmm…well, look here’s the thing

2009-05-11T00:01:00.000+01:00

I’m sure we’ve all been in a situation wherein you want to tell your friends or even some stranger something but you feel held back by what their reaction might be to this shocking change of events, before it suddenly bursts out.

One of my friends recently had to confess something to me that I think had been bugging him for some time, and I think he expected more of a reaction that a simple “Okay”. I’m not going to tell you what it was, or who it was as apparently I was the first one he’d mentioned it to and he doesn’t really want to tell people yet. It doesn’t really affect anyone but him, and it’s not like I’ll suddenly shun my friends because of these things that make them the people they are.

After he’d told me, I realised how strange it is to think that the people we know and trust would be so objectionable to change. I always feel I should be able to tell my friends anything and vice versa, and I know there’s people that aren’t that lucky or accepting of flaws or differences. Am I saying I don’t give a shit, as long as there’s some companionship and support with the weirdoes I know? Perhaps.

I’m eternally grateful for all the friends I have, and know I wouldn’t want to distance myself from any of them. There are certainly people that I’d like to get to know better, including those I’ve met on social networking sites where 90% of you will have come from. I know there’s people out there with no-one to fall back on, and that does make me a little sad.

I guess that’s all for this post, I just wanted to get it off my chest to make sure I didn’t leak this secret out in the real world. You owe me one man.

Benji won’t shut up about Resident Evil 5

2009-05-10T16:08:00.000+01:00

That is all. Go about your lives as normal.

Pokémon remakes confirmed

2009-05-09T14:05:00.001+01:00

Everyone knew it was coming since FireRed & LeafGreen were out, but now remakes of Pokémon Gold & Silver are officially announced, named Pokémon Heart Gold & Pokémon Soul Silver respectively.

People that use ROMs and emulators have had the above game, known as Pokémon Shiny Gold, to keep their Johto hopes up, but as the new official games will be on DS, it will allow for much more, and finally allow people to catch ‘em all this generation, as it’s currently a pain to get all of the starters and legendaries without GBA games.

Some features I’d like to see in the new games are:

Wi-Fi Bug Catching Contest
Expanded Kanto (it was severely cut down to fit on the original cart)
I’d like the PokéGear to stay. I prefer that to any other system introduced later.
Ranch & Battle Revolution compatibility

The fansite Bulbapedia have their speculation about the release date for the games.

HeartGold and SoulSilver will be released in Japan this fall, possibly on or near Nov. 21, the 10th anniversary of the original release of their namesakes. International releases will likely come in mid-2010.

Let’s hope they’re correct in their assumption and that we see the releases soon.

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