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2007-01-15

Watership Down

Filed under: General — 19day @ 23:11:42

I just watched this again, I caught it years ago. I’m referring to the 80’s movie version of it. It’s a story of rabbits and their adventures through what I’m told is analogies to various political systems. Regardless, it’s a decent movie, that is also pretty graphic. It’s also kind of sad as you see how bad humans are in it, from the rabbit’s point of view. But a few times a human stopped a cat, so it’s all good.

I think the part I liked the most was the concept of the rabbit having their own creation fable, and the style in which it was done is really nice.

As usual, Youtube has it.

I suggest watching the movie if you can.

My first embedded movie, joy.

2007-01-14

Nostalgia just isn’t what it Used to Be

Filed under: General — 19day @ 22:29:05

My friends and I finally exchanged christmas gifts. It was delayed by going home for christmas and not having a chance to meet up beforehand, and then by the plague I contracted and other general delays. But the exchange was made, and I got some very nostalgic gifts. I also got a watch, which is very nice, too nice for me, heh, but I need to take it to a jeweler to shrink the band a bit. But that’s not the nostalgic bit.

I got the Space Quest Collection (the latest one, I read there was another created by that name years ago), containing the 6 games, for the PC. And I also got the Activision Anthology, 45 Atari 2600 games, for the PS2. Lots of nostalgia. Oh, also, the title is just a joke, in and of itself, but it’s not meant to imply I don’t like the nostalgia I go into detail here.

I played Space Quest I today, I was a little dissapointed to see that the version provided was the VGA version. See, Space Quest I was originally an EGA game, and that was the version I knew and loved. They remade it a few years later, redoing all the graphics and changing it from a text parser game to a mouse-action game like some of the later creations. Still, I had never played that version, and I managed to beat it today, being a relatively short game when you know what to do (and I still know most of the puzzle elements by heart). But it was funny to be stuck on the little differences made to the VGA version, most frustratingly being the copy-protection they introduced. Most of their games have that kind of crap, and you have to refer to the manual, which they provided… as a PDF. They also recommend printing out the PDF as well. Heh, no thanks. But as all the games run in a licensed version of DOSBox, it’s easy to ALT-Tab out. I already had a version of the original EGA version of the game as well from a couple years back, so no matter.

Space Quest I EGA

Space Quest I, the EGA version

Space Quest I VGA

Space Quest I, the VGA version

I had played Space Quest 2 and I think 3 in the past, so I’ll play them again here, plus I’ll have 4, 5 and 6 from this collection, so it’s pretty kickass. The real selling point is that it’s all supposed to work flawlessly in Windows XP. Well, they cheated and used DOSBox, but still, presumably they tested it. I did discover a weird bug in Space Quest 2 during the save screen, it sort of screws up and leaves a bit of the screen on the game screen, which gets refreshed as you change it (like walk over the corrupted area, or just leave the screen and reenter). I hope in the damn police guys in the arcade (vaguely remember it from one of the Space Quests) are managable, as running it directly on a fast computer tended to make it impossible.

The Activision Anthology is actually kind of interesting. You pick from the 45 games from a rack, and play them on a TV (by which time it goes fullscreen). There are a lot of good classics on there which work as well as I remember them, like Plaque Attack, Crackpots, Dolphin, Oink, and my personal favorite, StarMaster. Those are some of the ones I used to have way back as cartridges. They also included some decent ones like Kabobbler and Pitfall, and some trash as well, heh.

StarMaster

StarMaster – The Great

Plaque Attack

Plaque Attack – The Good
Demon Attack

Demon Attack – The WTF

It includes a set of 80’s songs that play in the background of everything, which repeat just a little too often, but still add a lot to the nostalgia factor (though ironically most of them are songs I liked much later in life, not in the 80’s). They also offer some interesting things to unlock, like commercials for some of the games, and patches (which I assume are graphical renderings of the real patches you could win by submitting proof of score to activision for certain games). The lamest attempt of value added crap to the collection are different viewing modes, like playing games where the game screen is textured on a rotating cube, or rotates slowly or zooms in and out. These games are meant to be pretty damn hard because there’s no ending for most of them.. you play until you die. I can’t imagine why you’d want clouds or stars interfering with your Dolphin run. But fine, they are there.. and they are turned off, heh.

The thing is with most of the early Space Quest games, and with all of the atari games, I doubt most people could just sit and play them and enjoy them. They are archaic, the atari games especially, playing for points, most of the time no ending, graphics quite startling at times… even I look at some of them and go “wow” because I remember them being so much better, but I’m sure that’s just because back when they were new, anything was amazing. The nostalgia power is high, I can still enjoy such games. Can you?

2007-01-01

Happy Date-When-I-Screw-Up-My-Cheques-For-The-Next-Two-Months

Filed under: General — 19day @ 01:26:50

So it’s 2007, hurrah *waves flag*

Resolutions, the same as they have always been, lose mass and/or alternately find partner who isn’t concerned with my mass. Both are equally improbable as in 2006.

As I wrote in my holidaymas entry, I’m still sick. Under the advisement of my mother, I struggled into the walk-in clinic that’s relatively close to me. I as yet haven’t obtained a local doctor.

It was mostly an excersize in futility as I was waiting there for 2 hours, sucking up all the other ailments around me, and then got invited into to an office which doubles as another waiting room. I’d just call it a Personal Waiting Room rather than a doctors office, because when you wait in there 20 minutes, but the doctor only looks at you for 5, then I think the majority function should rule when deciding it’s name.

And of course, as it’s been for the last couple of times where I had a terrible strep-throat feeling, they say they can see nothing wrong at all. So of course the constant pain I’m in and having been unable to sleep for 3-4 days at this point (can no longer remember how long I’ve been awake at this junction) must just be in my head or something… like my gall-bladder pain was until someone spotted the real problem.

He was unwilling to just give me a general antibody prescription, and so I asked for something to manage the pain. I got a gargle which works maybe slightly better than the Chloraseptic spray I’ve been using, but at least I don’t swollow the gargle. That spray really upsets one’s stomach when you end up having to go 5000% over the daily limited dosage. I also got some pain killer drug called Tramacet which I’m allowed to take 1-2 pills every 8 hours. It’s not that I’m adverse to pain medication, I wanted it, but I also wanted something to deal with the root of the problem since I’m not sure this will go away on it’s own.

So I took 2 pills, gargled, had something to drink, and eventually did finally fall asleep. I woke up about 6 hours later. My throat was a bit sore, so I got up and opted to just gargle again so I could more quickly sleep. Now I don’t know if my body just wanted me to sleep at this point, or if I was having an adverse reaction to the pills, but I felt *awful* when I got to the bathroom. I felt incredibly lightheaded, dizzy, and was afraid I was going to throw up. But I managed to quickly gargle and stumbled back to the bed, and realized I was covered in sweat and the bed was soaked (er… from sweat) but I just decided to sleep again.

Now I’m awake again. It’s been 12 hours since the first time I fell asleep, so that’s not bad, I still have to catch up through I think, after missing so much sleep. I decided to just take a single pill now that it’s past the 8 hour dosage period, just in case it is the pills causing the side-effects. I don’t care ultimately, just as long as I can sleep. Unfortunately, this will be useless for work tomorrow, since being dizzy and nauseous won’t really help my productivity, unless we manufacture vomit.

One thing that might suggest I don’t have a strep throat after all is that when I woke up now and went to the bathroom, my throat was actually pretty sore again, but then I started coughing. I tend to check the colour of my phlegm… sensitive people/sana’a may wish to stop reading at this point…. anyway, earlier on in my sickness it was pretty much white and bloody, which is how it always goes with me. During the past couple of days, I didn’t really have much phlegm but I coughed up little bits of it regularly and whenever I looked it just looked whitish. But now that I’ve been able to sleep, a lot built up, so I coughed, with apologies, a large amount up. And the colour is sort of in-between the ones to look out for. It’s sort of a yellowy-greenish, but much darker than I would have expected, I don’t understand that. As it’s more yellowy than green, I will assume my body is fighting the infection. Which still could be strep, but from the first statement in this paragraph, it’s because my throat hurt less after I coughed all that crap up. I don’t recall having that effect with strep, so maybe I just have a really really really bad cold.

In any case, it’s been the suckiest week of my life (in recent memory)

I guess I’ll try to avoid a repeat in 2007. I’m dizzy again, back to bed I guess.

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