I somehow managed to survive Blizzcon ‘08 without my feet exploding from standing in lines for 3 days straight. I’ll say this for Blizzard - they put on one hell of a convention for their fans! The tickets were $100 each, but I think they we got half that back in the goody bag alone. A starter pack of the WoW collectible card game, an account authenticator, three different keychains, and a 4-foot-long inflatable sword among other things. Oh, and a minature bottle of hand-sanitizer. Precious, precious hand-sanitizer.
I’d normally think using hand-sanitizer when you’re not a health-care professional would be a little extreme. I didn’t think that after I sat down at one of the communal Diablo 3 PCs. This is not a joke, or an exaggeration: One of the people who sat at or near that terminal before me smelt like a backed-up toilet. When buying a few shirts from the store, I stood behind a man who smelled like stale urine.
Probably the highlight of the show was the closing ceremony. Patton Oswalt did infact appear to do a show, and I hope some of it appears in his CD coming out next year. The in-house Blizzard band, Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftan played 4 or 5 songs. For those of you not familiar with them, L70etc is a heavy-metal band made up of Blizzard employees, including the Art Director on vocals and the president of the company on Bass. Closing out the night was Videogames Live playing selections from various Blizzard games.
Unfortunately, I missed most of the section on Friday night hosted by Jay Mohr. I’d really liked to have seen the costume contest. Check out the winner. That turtle is not a dude in a costume.
I did get to see the Dance contest, though. Here’s the winner of that:
I’m off to Blizzard’s Blizzcon tomorrow. Tomorrow…. very… very early. So early, I might not even legally be allowed to call it early. Early showed up and me leaving for Blizzcon was like “What took you so long? I’ve been here for ages.” Yeah. In fact, I have to get up in 6 hours. And I’m not writing this in bed, or while asleep, so it’s going to be pretty rough.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibits and going to some of the panels. Maybe I’ll see some of my old World of Warcraft guildmates around. Comedian Patton Oswalt is going to be there… apparently? I don’t see any mention of it on his website. Hope I don’t buy too much stupid shit while I’m there!
Last weekend, a bunch of friends and I drove up to Montreal for a Bachelor party. It was my first time there, and I could see why my friend’s would want to drive 5 hours to go there.
The celebrations themselves were very tame, which was good. The last Bachelor party I went to, we all went to play a variation of bumpercar lacrosse. This time, it was just straight up go karting at Kart-O-Mania. That was a lot of fun, even if every single one of us walked out with a massive welt along the ribs from slamming sideways into the walls.
Anyway, I’m just bringing the trip up as an excuse to talk about how awesome Sirius’s satellite radio is. The variety and quality of channels is pretty great. Also, the feature where you can set up your tuner to alert you whenever an artist you like is playing is amazing. What it needs is the opposite of that, so that if an artist you hate comes up, the radio will automatically switch.
The first thing I would use it for is to make sure I never heard Kid Rock’s All Summer Long ever again. Let me get this straight. You wrote a song about listening to another song? Well, “wrote” is a strong word when you use that as an excuse to sample that song. Writing music is hard, guys!
On my way home from work today, I noticed the lady behind me driving somewhat erratically. I assume this was because she was eating an ice cream cone at the time. It’s really the perfect food to eat while driving - it has a high potential for falling on your lap, it requires the full use of one hand until it’s finished, and if you’re licking it like a child, your head is tilted at 45 degrees to the road.
I can only assume this was the reason for her poor driving. It could have been anything. For example: extensive brain damage.
The latest P05 bios update for my new motherboard seems to have improved the stability dramatically! Unfortunately, I can’t use my newly-stable PC to connect to the Internet on account of my cable getting fried during the previous week of thunder storms.
I’m using the brief periods where I can connect to write and post this update. In a way it’s a good thing, because it lets me focus on the recently released Metal Gear Solid 4 for the PS3. I’m a pretty huge fan of MGS1 and 2 (and Twin Snakes, of course) but sadly never got around to MGS3. It’ll definitely be hard to try at this point, since 4 is so good and fixes a lot of things that people consider “broken” about the series.
I also picked up Coldplay’s latest album, Viva La Vida and Tiesto’s newest entry in the “In Search of Sunrise” series, “In Search of Sunrise 7: Asia.” I always enjoy a lot of Coldplay’s songs, but this latest album is fantastic throughout, especially in the last half. “Life in Technicolor” reminds me of something that Bloc Party would do (although I suspect it has more to do with producer Brian Eno), and you can definitely hear the influences of Blur in “Yes.”
In Search of Sunrise is also good, although I don’t think it has any standout tracks like the Gabriel & Dresden remix of Way Out West’s “Mindcircus” from In Search of Sunrise 3: Panama. At least it plays like an actual trance CD, unlike Armin Van Buuren’s Imagine. If you haven’t seen the video for “Going Wrong” yet, I highly recommend it! It answers the question “What if you tried to make a boy band video with one boy, no budget and a blue screen?” The funny thing is that they’re blue-screening the streets of some Mediterranean city. You guys are European. You couldn’t fly to Ibiza for a weekend? The whole thing looks like it was cut together on a Sega Saturn.
In case you haven’t been keeping up, Too Human has a release date now: August 19th, sirs! Which explains why I have been incommunicado for the past five weeks. We’ve been very busy putting the finishing touches on the game to get it ready for release.
And now that we’re winding down I have time to upgrade this blog to 2.5.1 and change the theme a bit.
The final piece to the PC crashing puzzle lies not in faulty memory, or Windows Vista, or bad drivers, but in an overly complex PC case. That’s right, several important pieces of the computer were being shifted out of place because the case has a hinge with too much give. Now that all the cards are seated properly, everything looks good and Bioshock doesn’t crash every 5 minutes.
I’ve spent the better part of a week assembling a new PC and trying to get the stupid thing stable enough to use. I was originally going to title this post “fuck Vista” but it’s not Vista’s fault. It’s the fault of every manufacturer who still doesn’t have stable drivers out for Vista more than a year later. And there’s a lot of them - the only thing that’s worked out of the box has been the sound card.
I can’t get any game to run for more than 20 minutes under Vista, so forget it. I’m nuking the HDs and going back to XP. I may write another post later about the process of shopping for PC parts, and putting them together, but it might depress me.
Not only is it my birthday tomorrow, but it’s also the day the movie Doomsday opens. And it just so happens that Doomsday is the handle I used to use back when I played LAN games of Descent with my friends.
Entries (RSS)