..and unable to sleep.

Oh, hi. Hello there little corner on the interwebs that’s apparently some kind of Maki-like property thingamagig.

So yeah.. since last post I moved from Kubuntu to Gentoo. The Ubuntu projects have a bit of an odd way of making updates available and with the choice between Kubuntu’s .deb and Gentoo’s sourcebuilds, Gentoo looked a lot better to me.
That, and Locke is using it.. so.. ^-^;;;

I did some other things… skipped around the net on a jetpowered moped and got myself an XBox360. (Boo, hiss, evil!)
Reasons? Wii sucks as both a brandname as well as the gimmick console it has become. PS3 USED TO HAVE backwards compatibility until Sony decided they wanted it gone one week before I could’ve bought me a shiny new backwards compatible PS3 with a big-ass HDD in it.. and then subsequently decided to stop production on said “big-ass HDD” as well. Or maybe they are selling them again.. I dunno. Stopped keeping tabs on it.
The XBox360 has always been a M$ product, and therefore by its very existence part of the Dark Lord Darth Gates’ evil masterplan to remove free choice from this world, so I know I’m getting assraped. It’s not a surprise. But goshdarned, I’m going to enjoy getting anally raped for as long as I use that darned console! -_-;

So random stuff..
Bioshock rules.
Dixons, holding my pre-ordered copy of Bioshock 2 hostage, sucks.
Disney’s Pure has got the worst kind of language menu: None. (Hearing the same five voices who dub all the Nickelodeon and DisneyXD and other cartoons in Dutch while playing an off-road motorsport game makes Maki want to murder whomever came up with the idea.)
My television is too small (15″) for IL2: Sturmovik. Or it was badly designed. Or both. But it’s not too bad a game.
Co-Op Gears of War on Hardcore mode is fun. Co-Op Terminator: Salvation on Easy mode is hell. o.o;

Game devs:
Someone make a game where I don’t have to fight to finish the game if I don’t want to. A game where I can open a shop, run said shop and grow old without having ever had to handle a weapon. (I’ll gladly pay the local mob to keep me safe if all I have to do is put furniture together through a minigame or two…)

That’s what I liked about SWG before SOE fucked it up with the CU: You could actually be an Image Designer and socialize while the rest of the universe was at war with one another. Or be a Tailor and make clothes for people. Or be a Master Tailor / Master Image Designer and give people a full makeover.
Now THAT was fun. Cause you could just hang out, relax, talk with your friends and watch the people in Theed or Mos Espa or wherever walk about.
Of course, SOE got scared when WoW drew away the crowd of stupid and left the intellectuals to try and stop their plans for the CU… and thus a good game became the current Iconic Profession bullshit.

Fable II has a couple of minigames where you can, like, be a blacksmith. I like that. I’ve been blacksmithing my way up to level 4.. just a couple of thousand G to go and I’ve maxed my level. Of course, since my copy of Fable II was in the same order as my pre-order of Bioshock 2, it’s still lying around Dixons’ storage facility… gotta wait until they both are finally shipped over to me.

…so my pre-order is probably going to be on back order.. ..anyone else see the irony?

I gotta sleep.

EDIT: Also; I’m spamming last.fm with my entire music collection in the hopes SOMETHING STICKS! Goshdarned! It’s one thing having a widget on my site, it’d be another thing altogether if it actually WORKED! @_@

It’s not that I haven’t wanted to post here, but more that I haven’t been able to figure out what to post about.

Also, I had my Last.fm plugin disabled for some reason. Just turned it back on again.

Er… yeah.. waiting for Karmic Koala to come out this week. Kubuntu Linux 9.10 with KDE 4.3.2 as far as I understand it.
Going to be upgrading my testbed first, tinker with it a bit.
Perhaps buy a new HD if I can get the money from someonewhere, so I can transfer stuff from my main PCs before upgrading them.
I really need to get with the times and upgrade. @_@;

I’m hoping Karmic Koala behaves on my P3s tho.

Happy Halloween to all I don’t see before that time.

If only I knew how to do it, I would make it so that I could visit my friends’ secret hideouts in Pokemon Platinum over the Nintendo Wi-Fi rather than local….

From ;

TorrentFreak reports that Ukrainian-based BitTorrent tracker Demonoid is facing some huge hardware problems that will certainly result in some downtime for its users. Demonoid admins have admitted to having serious problems with a lot of components ranging from system memory, hard-drives and power circuits.

It seems that a little problem has escalated into a serious damage since just days before, the tracker was working just fine. After an unresolved initial hardware problem, the damage extended to some other components inside its data center.

“We are experiencing power outages that have caused some ram and hard drive issues. We might have to shut down everything to fix and prevent further damage,” said a Demonoid statement, “days maybe, until we can change the power circuit.”

This comes as the tracker is struggling to stay alive after some serious legal disputes in recent years that forced Demonoid owners to move camp up to three times until now.

Initially, the tracker started out in Holland, but after the BREIN anti-piracy group launched several legal attacks, Demonoid quickly moved to a calmer environment in Canada. That didn’t last any longer after the local CRIA anti-piracy group forced Demonoid to shut down its operations there too.

The site made a triumphant return in 2008, after six months of blackout, relocating in the Ukraine, a safer environment for piracy prone activities. Recently, to obey local laws that forbids any piracy activity for Ukrainian (and Russian) citizens, Demonoid has blocked all those users coming from these countries and operates in legal peace from its new location.

Demonoid is still under scrutiny from major recording and entertainment companies around the Globe for its lite policy against copyrighted material, a scrutiny that it has managed to fend off until now with greater success than other rivals like Mininova, Pirate Bay or IsoHunt.

WHAAAAUGH!!! WHOOOOO! wHAAAUSUGHASDB;ASBVSDVAD;HASIDFAS!!!!!! AND SO ON!

LOUDNESS! SCREAM! LOTS OF NOISE! BANG! KABOOM! CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER! MASS HYSTERIA!

…this post makes no sense whatsoever. No refunds.

In reply to ;

Unfortunately, while many seem to claim that the new website works, it does not for me. The new dashboard is horrid and looks like it has an overabundance of flash-like content, none of which want to load for me. Then there’s the loss of the clean-feel of the XHTML pages used before. No longer can I find the information I could easily browse to in the previous incarnation of the site, but now I need to wait for most of the flash-like content to load to such a point where I finally regain control of my Firefox instance to be able to click on something that I hope leads to where I can find the information I seek, only to land on yet another page that does not wish me to do anything else in Firefox rather than load the flash-like content. Which doesn’t happen. After a few minutes of browsing like this, I still don’t know where I can find my transaction history or where I can get back to the formerly clean account summary.

If this change is to make things easier, I’m sorry to say it’s not.

The dark page with the only little lighter text is making it very hard to read the contents of the site unless I were to put my monitor’s contrast up to max, and even the slightest shine of sunlight in my room makes it impossible to read the site properly. What’s wrong with clean black on white?

So no, I’m not impressed. Something that I also relayed in the survey.

I really wish LL would look at the performance issues before pulling out the shinies. We need the shinies less than we need a stable performance of SL’s website, servers and client. None of which function as they should right now.

Call me a whiner, if you must, but this website change is putting me off on this whole “SL experience” thing. The adult verification and content segregation was enough to make me ditch my Premium Account(s), but if LL continues to go in this way, I might leave completely, like some highly valued content creators have already.

But that’s my ten cents. I know no-one in LL gives a damn.

I just ordered an Italian Americana pizza. So I basically ordered a Capone. ;)

Cross-posted open letter from a comment made to Linden Lab’s blog (Link found at the bottom.);

EDIT: Tagged on the replies to my comment. Don’t say I report one-sidedly.

“I’d love to see a workaround for the age verification process, adult content restriction, (rumors of) the teen grid being merged with the adult grid and general business sense of a rotten tomato that LL shows their clients (We, the SL residents. We who have payed monthly, quarterly, yearly fees for our accounts on top of land rental prices on top of prices to upload things to make content, or content itself. We, who have been here for one, two, three, four, five or even the whole six years of SL’s public history.) by forcing upon us content (restrictions), a constant stream of viewers that force us to upgrade our hardware and software in sometimes ridiculous ways and recently with drivers that weren’t ready for the majority of the people who were forced to install them in order to use the new SL viewer, forcing upon us things that we can’t stomach.

You’re losing paying customers, for what?

Make a stand. Bring out the big guns. Tell us once and for all, in clearly defined words, what it is we can expect from you in the coming year.

What is your business plan? What are you going to do to the world we spent hundreds, thousand, uncountable amounts of our local currency on to shape it into this world you market to your investors?

I want to see a workaround around this secrecy. This “we’re going to do what we want when we want to do it with as little information as we can give the public before we thrust it upon them” mentality is COSTING YOU MONEY.

Many of us are leaving the grid (indefinitely) because of your tactics.

Be the men and women you say you are; get your plan out in the open so we can converse about it as adults and come up with these workarounds to the problems YOU DON’T SEE YET because you’re focused on a goal that’s so blurry that your support staff doesn’t even know how to describe it.

Own up to your commitment to SL. Speak up and let the bughunting begin before we end up with a grid that’s falling apart at the seams and people blinking in confusion and wondering where it went wrong.

Seriously. I’m trying my best here to keep the tone civil. You’ve hurt me and many of my friends deeply by your recent actions. It’s starting to look not quite unlike what Sony Online Entertainment did to their Star Wars Galaxies MMO when World of Warcraft came out. The Combat Upgrade they thrust upon their userbase did more harm to their gameworld than World of Warcraft alone could’ve done.

Don’t make that mistake.

Stop what you’re doing and talk with your userbase. Come clean with your plans. Let us help you make Second Life a virtual environment that can last for years to come.

If not for us, do it because you’re going bankrupt if you continue in this way.”

Hi guys… reporting back with a lame arm and no voice and with feet that feel like a truck ran over them.. but otherwise pretty healthy. XD

So for those of you not in the know; I went to Sonisphere in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, yesterday June 20th, 2009.

Expected were
The Sword (Cancelled due to extreme fatigue from their tour)
Mastodon (Cancelled last-minute due to logistical reasons. I.e. wouldn’t arrive in time.)
Pendulum (12:20 – 13:00)
Kamelot (13:25 – 14:15)
Lamb of God (14:45 – 15:35)
Down (16:00 – 17:00)
KoRn (17:30 – 18:30)
Slipknot (19:00 – 20:15)
MetallicA (20:45 – 22:45)

Pendulum surprised me as I had never heard of them before. Their mix of Electronic and Metal reminded me a bit of Linkin Park but without the Emo and with more “oomph” behind it. I’m going to see about getting one of their albums once I figure out which has the songs I like best. (Downloading is justified when using it to scout for music you might want to buy. Not when doing it just to get free music from artists who haven’t given their music away for free. I will hold this up in court if necessary.)

I’m not much of a fan of Kamelot, Lamb of God and Down, and mostly walked around wearing my cameo-style full-body zentai suit underneath my MetallicA shirt and black jeans.I’m hoping to attend Sonisphere again next year. ^-^

Oh, P.S. If anyone who made a picture of someone wearing a full-body covering suit at this event is reading this.. could you contact me please? I’d love a copy… ^-^; Forgot to make a photograph of myself…

Fatigue, it plagues me

from darkness, source unknown

my eyes have seen the darkness now

no-one cares if you sigh your last
no-one says goodbye

now is when you die.