Archive for the 'General News' Category

General monthly update

Posted in Books, Games, General News on 20:10, November 19th, 2007

200px-ironcouncil.jpgNothing changed in my dark realm for the last month. The weather became cold and snowy, no leaves on the trees anymore, it’s proper russian winter now. I had some connection problems with W0W during one week, so my gaming attention turned to other games, such as Team Fortress 2 where I continued to have immense fun and I also tried Neverwinter Nights 2. NwN2 turned to be a game with slow pace. One must be real solo RPG fan to continue playing it. It has a nice story development and cool gfx though. It’s real gem for the lovers of this style. Maybe I’ll return to it when my WoW connect will break again ;) Surprisingly, there’s no music updates this month, nothing new interested me and I haven’t ordered a single CD, i’m collecting moneys for the next wave of music though.В  I’ve started next book by China Mieville – “Iron Council”. The beginning is quite hard at the moment, but it’s promising. Will see how it develops. Monsieur Bal says the book is worthy, I believe him.

Back from the Asia

Posted in Books, General News on 13:08, September 7th, 2007

Sadly, but my vacation is over and I’m back to biz. I loved Thailand despite it being hot. The warm Indian ocean, wide Bang Tao bay, nice Laguna Beach resort, palm trees, smily thai people. Bangkok was completely different experience from the beaches. Contrast of the poor and rich blocks of the city is astonishing. We lived on the 51th floor of the 84 floor Baiyoke Sky Hotel and nearby the building there was chinese market with sham jeans and other shit like boiled corn, etc. The city reminded me Bladerunner movie very much. All those japanese type trainways, alot of little shops, heat, steam, crowds of people – asia as it is. Overall it was very pleasant experience to be in Thailand. It was my first visit abroad and it was pretty successful. My host is being silly and won’t give me more than 400 megabytes of the disk space, so I have no space for my Thailand picture gallery at the moment. Maybe there will be ways to store my gallery on the friendly host of Paul, we shall see.

Started reading next Alastair Reynolds book “Redemption Ark”. It’s immersive proper sci-fi from my fave author set in the Revelation Space universe featuring some characters from the other books. So far I’m enjoying it greatly and I hope the trend will contunue through all the 600 pages of it.

Rare update about things

Posted in General News, Software on 11:53, June 14th, 2007

Well, I felt like dropping a line here. I’m so lazy to prepare new photos for the site I hate myself. From the other side I don’t like them much, so I’d rather keep em on my hard drive till I get the new better ones.

From the other news I was lucky enough (orly?) to get original Windows Vista Ultimate straight off MS and decided to play with it. Well, since I have 64-bit Athlon I decided to install 64-bit version first and see what it is like. The interface is cute, though it looks like desperate attempt to catch Mac design. The GUI devours memory like hell. In idle state Vista ate 800Mb of RAM. Good thing I’ve upgraded my memory to 2Gb recently, so my computer didn’t choke. As for the gaming, well it was very bad. WoW was like 10-20FPS all the time comparing to 30-60FPS in the old WinXP. WTF? I tolerated this shit for like a week then decided to try 32-bit version. The performance is still poor but alot better. WoW fps is now 20-30 which is kinda acceptable but still not enough. What’s the point of releasing such slow OS? So much years of developing and instead of progress we’re getting regress? Or should I go and upgrade my computer installing quadro CPU with SLI gfx cards? Was that the intention of MS to pull the last moneys off us with their new pretty OS? And I don’t see any rumours about improving its performance in the games in near future… At least latest NVidia drivers helped a bit but that’s not sufficient…

As for the interface, well, it looks good and all, but… You probably seen that side panel screenshots with cute clock and all that shit? Now imagine my surprise when playing WoW I’ve discovered it drops its framerate every second. Like everything is smooth, but there’s that little jerk every second… I thought that this is some kind of WoW problem or my videocard. But when I turned off the goddamn clock on the side panel the jerking have gone! WTF is that? Clock that significantly reduces the performance of the game! And MS claims this OS is for gaming! Go improve the performance of your bloatware, MS!

Something New?

Posted in General News on 13:36, January 26th, 2007

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So, I wonder, my dear two readers, if it’d be interesting for you to read what happened in my life since the year 2007 fell on us… Well, as you might have guessed nothing interesting and I was like in some mental collapse. Partly due to half of the brain was loaded with WoW, and another part was fighting various kinds of reallife paranoias and phobias. So, I was like surviving through this snowless winter. There are good moments of course, I’m still alive and kicking, playing games, hangin with gf, etc. Speaking of games, the TBC hooked me rather seriously. My interest in WoW have revived and I’m now submerged in this goddamn virtual universe of eternal fight. I’m still pumping my main character fullpower, I was interested to look at two other new races also. I’ve created Blood Elf female mage and played with her a bit. Being a mage is rather funny, I like that ranged spells and all the other fancy stuff. As for the Outland itself, it’s very cool looking continent with funny quests, the game holds you with even more deadly grasp. Hopefully I’ll feel a bit better (i.e. free) when I reach lvl70, now I’m like some drug addict trying to get to this level maniacally. No other games being played though, everything is abandoned for the sake of WoW. No new music either, not because I’m not interested in it, just because I’m still waiting for the big order to arrive. All in all, life still goes on, the winter finally became itself after some nice frostdemonstorms, and I’m going out of the city this weekend. If lucky, I’ll be able to get some frosty pictures, I’m afraid to freeze my camera though. Will see… PS. I feel that my site is rather dull now, no new pics, no new levels, just my useless rambles. Things needs to be changed in a good way though!

WordPress 2.1

Posted in General News on 20:15, January 24th, 2007

I just upgraded WordPress to 2.1 here and there’s now some weird behaviour. All the links on the sidebar got messed. I.e. looks like wp confused their categories. I have no time to fix this now, I’ll do that later, I hope no cats will be hurt during this perioud. At least main links on the site kinda work, except there are no links in the levels page, but i don’ think anyone will decide to browse my dusty levels till I fix everything.

Update: I’ve fixed sidebar, yay!

Entering the New Year

Posted in General News on 4:45, January 8th, 2007

Well, following the trend of changing the site’ look I decided to alter color scheme to something even more dull. Hope people won’t persuade me to change it back. Also I decided to use caps again. And that’s about it regarding the site news.

As for me, well I did nothing during my winter holidays. Nothing I say! There was funny event 27th December though: the concert of Deutsch Nepal. As expected, Lina was even more drunk this time. The show turned to be some alco-eroto funfest (considering the program is titled Erotikon). Where Lina abandoned the scene several times to get some beer or just relax in the WC. Still the new program is interesting in terms of music, Deutsch Nepal still develops further and doesn’t stagnate which is good, the only worrying thing is Lina’s health ;)

No new games been played, there was just hard instancing in WoW. Speaking of evil, there gonna be addon released soon, I’m afraid my mind might get dissolved there… I keep faith I’ll pull through it though.

Concluding the update, some words about the weather: I’ve never seen such boring winter in my life here in Moscow! There was so little snow and the temperature was constantly around zero and most of the time it was above zero! WTF? Is it Russia or what? Seems like the planet goes offline soo,n I tell ya!

Pre-xmas joy

Posted in General News on 14:31, December 11th, 2006

tok002_l3.jpgWell, things started to be material here. First, I’ve ordered this watches from Japan out of sudden. Got them week after I clicked on ‘checkout’ and now feel like I’m ‘Moon Base Commander from 60’s sci-fi classic’. They’re really fun and make people around wondering what the heck is the device I’m wearing on my wrist. Some of them think I’m mad and developing some conspiracy against them using some weird electronic devices.

Next, I went and bought Syncmaster 215TW 21″ LCD monitor and now enjoying games at 1600x1050px resolution. Nice monitor in all aspects: colors, brightness and performance. I’ve read a lot of reviews before buying this one and I’m not disappointed by the final decision ;)

And the last bit was that 2K Games and 3D Realms were the people of the word and I’ve got my box of Prey after all the hassle with Triton and Steam. It’s good to have the game on Steam for fast updates and I was pretty satisfied by the Steam version. But now I’m oversatisfied and very happy after receiving boxed version of the game. The actions of 2K and 3Drealms are exemplary. Their user support is what it should be everywhere by default!

Further down the autumn

Posted in General News on 17:08, October 10th, 2006

Well, alot of time have passed since the last update and I have nothing to do at work at the moment so here’s an update. From the last major news there’s this one: I’ve sold my old camera and now sitting without one looking as the awesome looking rusty October passes by. This is unbearable. I cannot get a new one just because Canon are too slow and didn’t fill the stores yet. I’m afraid to miss yellow/red trees pics this year completely. From the other not so important news is that I’m still playing WoW and enjoying it, but afraid not! I’m not its slave and have proper real life. It’s just that I don’t play other games for the time being and concentrated on leveling. I’m starting to hate some design aspects there, but it’s still the same addictive madness. Also, google seems taken the planet over and now have user photo album here. I decided to fill it with hi res screens of some of my levels so far, just for the testing purposes. I tell you, this is very fast and comfortable way to store pics online. Maybe not for your main album but for some silly fast pics you never know where to upload every time you want to show them to someone. So that’s it, hopefully next time I update this site I’ll have some new pics I made with my new camera :)

The rest was too short

Posted in Games, General News on 21:27, August 13th, 2006

Yea, two weeks of my vacation have passed like one second, but I feel refreshed and ready to make goddamned games again. During the vac I’ve finished Locoroco game which turned to be quite simple but brains relaxing and Metal Gear Acid 2 which impressed me beyond reality. What a well designed game! Everything from the graphics to little gamedesign elements is well thought of and works like a charm. Gameplay is balanced and yet unpredicted due to the card system there. You have to use your brains to reach the goals. The possibilities of gameplay situations are vast and it forces you to replay this game. Speaking of replay value the game has giant potential here. As you finish the stage you can replay it with 4-6 new tasks not connected with the story. And the story is plain awesome, japanese knows their business and made unpredicted and immersive story with interesting bosses, unexpected ending and all. I strongly recomend you this game if you own PSP and want to wrestle your head messing with cards and tactic situations. Now I’m thinking about getting MGA1 ;)
And as a little bonus I have some images for you. Proceed to the gallery and enjoy them.

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Some new pics

Posted in General News on 21:48, July 24th, 2006

I’ve just added new pics to the gallery. They’re nothing special, just ones I took during this summer so far. There’s not much, shame on me and my laziness.

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