Zero Credibility

Status update: I’ve finished Dead Air and greatly enjoyed it. It turned that this book about the honesty and amounts of lie people say to each other. Mostly about the lie and all kinds of it. Very bright and passionate book, especially in the end which is a trademark of Banks. Highly recommended. Since I didn’t find anything appropriate to read I decided to blow the dust off the Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray book I’ve bought ages ago and gonna read it for a while.

From the gaming news I’d spot the opening of the Quakeexpo which promises to be rather interesting. And I’m still in the middle of the Prey playing through it rather slowly due to lack of time (constant parties, bbqs, river swimming, etc.). Well it’s summer afterall, the time which should be spent far from the computer, right?

Here was quite rare event: the concert of In Gowan Ring band. I got to listen to this project about 10 years ago first time. This is quite natural sounding folk. I liked the performance very much because it was somewhat light and calm and reminded me of the woods. Not the usual type of music I usually listen to, but I need to relax sometimes :) From the other things that happened since the last update is that I watched Omen 666 movie which was rather dull. I’m still enjoying HL2 EP1 replaying it and admiring its beautiful gfx. At last, my company presented me the game I worked on last year or so. Now I feel proud and happy and all that. And of course I’m hanging out of the city when I can, escaping deadly hot summer, hence such rare updates.

Watched Silent Hill this weekend. Very impressive and graphically solid picture. There’s proper atmosphere of impending evil especially when you hear the siren on the church and darkness is getting thicker. All the hell characters are dark and sinister, especially The Red Pyramid and his bugs. There are some game elemets, like main heroine finds so much needed flashlight or tries to remember the way in the labyrinth on the map. But this is not your general game based shitty movie (Doom anyone?) it’s standalone and solid film. Highly recommended.

Just returned from the theater where I watched this nice movie. I was told by many of my friends that movie is quite worthy to watch and it turned to be the truth. I liked the plot, it’s quite rebellish and correlates with modern times. I liked that there’s old Britain anarchist idea behind it. I like how they show modern politics in their true light and that humanity must not forget the true values of life. The play of Natalie Portman is quite good, I didn’t expect her to play that good after the Star Wars though :) Well, I’m obliged to get the comics now ;)

I was out of the city last weekend and took some images of surrounding nature. Winter pictures are rather rare in my gallery because I’m too lazy to take my camera when it’s -25C outside. But this time I won the battle with my laziness and here we are. It’s rather hard to take pics when it’s snowy or cold. When it’s snowy you get camera lens plastered with snowlakes that just plain make image unusable and when it’s sunny but cold it’s better to keep camera under your coat otherwise you rist to freeze it and break it. Anyway, enough of idle talks, enjoy the cold of the russian woods!

Paul (I hate you) started this evilness which forced me to learn about all this tagging shit and trackback urls and what forth. Sigh, these blog games…. Since it’s saturday morning and I have nothing to do as well as the rest of our small circle of bloggers, I decided to join this madness:

Four Jobs I’ve Had

• kid
• student
• engineer
• game developer

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

• fear and loathing in las vegas
• alien: resurrection
• human traffic
• monty python and the holy grail

Four TV Shows / Events I Love to Watch

• uhm i don’t watch tv, sorry

Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation

• dark woods
• karelia
• dark woods
• karelia

Four Favourite Dishes

• macaronis with cheese
• bbq
• chicken in any form (except raw)
• mutton in any form (except raw)

Four Websites I Visit Daily

• func_msgboard
• astronomy picture of the day
• google
• only four? you joking?

Four Places I’d Rather Be

• Iceland
• Norway
• Germany
• UK

Four Bloggers I’m Tagging

• they’re all tagged with this plague already ;)

Pauk, I hate you! I had to create special category for this bollox even! ARGH!

Watched this movie the other day. Rather nice fantasy. Well at least they call it fantasy and it lays in the fantasy department in the store. But there’s no tolkienist stuff at all. This movie reminded me of Alice in Wonderland story somehow. Maybe because of the english humor there or weird creatures that Helena meets on her path. It’s like a fairy tale where reality is mixed with a dream. The plot is rather simple, the girl gets into her dream and fights the evil queen to save the white queen. The core of the story is about the dark and light sides of the soul and how human’s nature can change depending on the circumstances. The visual part is good too, 90% of the decorations is pure CG which is done very nice, as well as the creature design. Recommended for the people who still sees weird dreams ;)

Software bit: Messing with PSP I decided to convert some movies to it and see how it works. A bit of google search and I fished out PSP Movie Creator. The program is very simple, takes you 2 clicks before starting to convert the movie straight from the DVD. The quality selection is just a slider, you move it and the program shows how much the movie will take space when compressed.

The time has come to clean up my site disk and upgrade WordPress. I’m now using WP 2.0 and pretty happy with it, I’m enjoying Admin panel so far, didn’t notice anything drastically new in the mechanics but I will soon I’m sure. Also I’ve done what I wanted to do long ago: to clean my Photo Gallery. I’ve removed entire Tank Museum album due to its vainness, removed old albums that had bad image quality because they were compressed badly and albums that were generally boring and really dusty. I’m sure noone will be dissapointed because of that. If they will, well, you have to have strength to get rid of the old shit ;) Anyway, I managed to delete about 80 megs of dust and I’m happy with that.

Software bit: messing with WordPress 2 and making new theme for MPQ required webserver and database and php installed on my machine. But since I’m total noob in all these complex matters I used my trustworthy XAMPP distribution. This is the package of all necessary things to build your own fully functional server in a matter of minutes. Using it, you can tune your future site, theme, whatever you want to the state of perfection on your local machine saving time on filetransfer. Highly recommended for those who have their sites hosted remotely.

Well, nothing really new here since the last update. The only thing that’s worth mentioning that I’ve experienced real nasty frosts here last week (-30CЛљ). Actually such frosts isn’t somehting really special for Russia, but they’re quite rare last times. All the ppl here went mad discussing it. Also, there were some stirings on the webbies of my friends: Paul and GomJabbar managed to switch to WordPress too and they now have new and shiny blogs. As you can see they update them almost daily, I wonder how long it’ll last :) I’ve sold my mpio mp3 player recently and aiming for the ipod (yeah I’m fucking sellout here, couldn’t resist), but I plan buying it not tomorrow but closer to the spring when I’ll be able to walk in the headphones. I’ve replayed Doom3 and ROE once again (on the proper hardware now), and I’d say that d3 rocks and it’s true hardcore fps game. I’d consider it’s better than Quake4 even! So, to sum the above jabber up, life goes on day by day here and nothing extraordinary happens during these long winter nights.

Well, the New Year holidays have passed inevitably and I’ve returned to my common duties, such as making and playing games, hunting for the new music and such. As for the making games, well we gonna release our bastard child soon, so those of you who’s interested, can waste some hard earned dollars on this cr.. masterpiece ;) As for the playing games, well, these holidays were full of gaming. First of all I tried to replay Warcraft 3. Since I still didn’t finish it (wha?) I decided to do that this time. I’m carefully reading all the cutscenes and objectives, immersing myself into the properly made storyline. Another game which attracted and pleased me was Dungeon Siege 2. I’m in the beginning of it and it seems to be endless. There is vast and beautiful world. The weird part is that its RPG-ness doesn’t scare me. I’m always afraid of the rpg games because of their complexity and alot of numbers and items. But DS2 is made for casuals like me so I feel fine and relaxed there. Add here good atmosphere and relaxing gameplay and you’ll get rather addicting product.
Having alot of free time I browsed through the many of gaming sites, and found this one. As I found it i realised how I miss proper adventure games! Reading random games reviews I’ve found the Ankh game which attracted me by its warm looking screenies and high scores of the review. I’ve got the demo and was pleased by the good quality of the image and puzzles and funny characters there. I’m looking forward playing full game and hunting for more good adventure games I missed.