Well, we cleaned up.
Here at Uni, I am living in halls - for all of you not down with the lingo, that’s accommodation provided by the University. Since we’re living in a place that the University owns, they must feel slightly responsible for our well-being (see: not wanting to be sued).
To this end, every month we have a kitchen inspection, were a member of staff will come around, check numerous boxes and say whether or not you’ve passed or failed. I, my self, have never witnessed one of these events, they always happen at un-godly hours of the day (~9AM). If you fail, they come back a couple of days later and check again, and if you fail 2/3 in a row, there’s a fine of over £100 coming your way - not cool!
Anyway, as I’m sure most students find, keeping a kitchen clean is a boring and persistent job - it’s never done, which basically means every time an inspection rolls around (they’re kind enough to give us one weeks notice) there is a night of frantic cleaning.
Which brings me to last Friday. As was normal, there was a fire alarm at 5AM, so we all trundled out side, froze for a bit, and waltzed back in to bed. It was then that I received a text from my flat mate Chris saying ‘Shit, we have a kitchen inspection today…’. Oh well we thought and just fell asleep. Needless to say, we failed that one (our first fail…).
So they decided that they would come back to check on Monday (today), which mean Sunday night there was more cleaning to be done.
Mostly it’s boring, I’m sure I don’t need to describe cleaning to you, but there was one aspect that stood out - our fridge.
The overflow at the back of our fridge has never worked very well (maybe that’s our fault, there could be something living in there for all we know), so there is always a puddle of water at the bottom of it, which is normally hastily mopped up with the rest of the filth in the kitchen. However, this time something was different, the puddle of normally clear water was tinted yellow, and as well as it’s similar colour, it has the consistency similar to that of runny egg-yoke. Not good. It was time to clean the whole fridge for the first time. The milk stained shelf from the first semester - cleaned. The months out-of-date food binned, and lastly the problem of the mysterious yellow water was dealt with.
Did we find why it was yellow? Oh yes. Imagine, if you can, what might happen to butter bought 8 months ago, if it were left on its side at the bottom of a fridge, not properly sealed and also that it went out of date a few months prior to this discovery.
I tell you, it was fluorescent. Literally, it was like someone had poured highlighter into our crisper draw.
We decided that the best way to deal with the devil-liquid was to tip the fridge forward and pour it into a bucket. This turned out to be a bad move with hind sight - the edge of the bucket had a lip and it was much easier for the liquid-hatred to seep around the edges and under the fridge.
So we pulled out the fridge, got the mop and what are they? They looked like giant peas, perhaps lima-beans which were completely grey, and obviously very old. No idea how they got there (along with a burst balloon from a Pizza Hut visit earlier in the week). Anyway, no idea how long they had been there so in the bin they went.
Our kitchen disgusts me. Same time again next month.
Feel free to leave any Uni stories you might have, or other health-violations which have been fragrantly shat upon.
New Skin, X-cetera.
What you’re looking at now is my first attempt at making a wordpress theme. If you’d like to give it, I’d love to hear your opinions on it - I’m quite happy with the way it came out, but it’s in no way the most beautiful theme in the world, and there are a fair few rough edges…
Maybe some spoilers below, you’ve been warned.
Saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine the other day with some friends.
It’s not a bad film, all things considered, not a bad story, and there were some good action scenes, although I will say there was way too many slow motion “I’m a hero!” scenes, got a bit unnecessary. I loved the opening sequence. which basically documents all of the conflicts Logan and Victor have been in together, and it reminded me very much of the brilliant Watchmen opening sequence, albeit sans cool music.
And, of course, the best part of the new film was that it finally had Gambit in it, who I’m sure most of you will agree was always one of the coolest mutants - turning anything in an explosive? Hell yes.
Here’s a major plot hole I found in the film though - once Logan has had the adamantium put into him, and he escapes, they send Agent Zero after him (who’s power seems to be he’s really good at shooting a gun…). After he fails, a miscellaneous scientist at the research station tells Stryker that the only way to do any damage to Logan, is the use adamantium bullets, and he pulls out a case with a handgun, and 6 adamantium bullets.
But wait, didn’t you guys just send the mutant who’s power was accurately shooting a gun after a guy who you knew normal bullets would have no effect against?
Oh, and I totally saw the ‘twist’ with his wife coming, although if she has the power to make people believe what she wants when she touches them, why didn’t she just make Logan believe that she had died?
Perhaps I’m looking into this too deeply, it’s a perfectly fine film (and it’s doing amazing in the box-office too, even though it got leaked a month before its release - stick that in your pipe, Hollywood).
Watchmen Ending
I wasn’t going to write a review on Watchmen - I can’t think of anything to say that hasn’t been said a million times before, and I’m still not going to write a review. What I will do, however, is talk about the ending of the film, and how it differs from the book.
Arr, below ‘ere be spoilers, if ye be wan’in to read the book, or have yet ter see the film, turn back, these waters are not fer you, land-lubber.
Before I start, I may as well just clarify that I am a huge fan of both the book and the movie. The comic was fantastic, and I fell in love with it right away, and the movie was a very good representation of it. Obviously, due to budgetary, and (mostly) time constraints, they could not film everything that was in the novel, some parts had to be left out or changed (hopefully less with the directors cut), and what they did change or cut is very understandable.
No matter how good the movie was, there were always going to be pretentious people saying how much better the novel is, and how the novel in itself is unfilmable. To a certain extent, this is true, the novel is better, there’s much more content there, but the film is, in every sense, watchmen, from start to finish, it’s the same as the book. The characters are the same, the sentiments are the same, the plot is the same…
That is, except for the ending. The ending is the largest change from the book to the film.
I guess I should quickly sum up what the two endings are.
In both the movie and the book, Ozymandias is the villain, albeit ambiguously (was what he did really good?), and both endings involve New York being destroyed.
However, in the book, good old Ozy was experimenting with genetic mutation, which he used to create a giant squid with psychic powers which activate on its death. He teleports this into the centre of New York, and it’sPsychic shockwave kills many, many people in the city. This ending works through the idea that everyone would believe this was part of an alien attack on Earth, and the two sides of the Cold War would put their differences aside in order to combat the nonexistant alien menace.
In the film, Ozymandias decides that instead of the giant mutated sea creature, the best way to save the world is to make everyone hate Dr. Manhattan. I know to people who are fans of the book, this sounds weird, but it actually works surprisingly well, as I will explain later. He detonates small psychic shock waves in cities all over the world, with the idea that if they felt that the superman hated everyone equally (and then left the planet) he may come back and do even more damage, and because of this they would have to team up. Of course, just as in the book, it works, and there is an uneasy truce between the two main super powers of the world.
Now, since the outcomes of the endings are the same, some people may just write them off as being as good as each other. However, if we take the story and for one (wonderful) minute pretend it’s real life, a couple of things stand out, at least to me. The books ending would be a little hard to accept, and I think it’s likely hood of working could be much less in a real world situation. Each side would likely accuse the other of creating the beast, or they would just flat out not accept it as a valid reason for a truce. After all, it did only hit New York, surely giving the Russians an upper hand?
The movies ending, I think, is much more likely to work. It hit several major cities in the world, so that no one country could feel singled out, and it involved a threat that they all actually knew existed, Dr. Manhattan.
You may be thinking right now that the ending in the film makes more sense (but is in no way as awesome), but that might change when you factor in the longevity of the solution. The films truce could well break down when they perhaps consider that Manhattan is no longer watching them, or they fail to pick him up on any satellite scans or anything (they did somehow work out he went to Mars, didn’t they), where as the books ending is much more likely to last - it’s a threat they had never seen before, and so would quite likely not pick up again in a hurry, which would scare us even more.
Another huge difference, is that with the squid, only one city and it’s inhabitants are wiped out, where as with the S.Q.U.I.D (a nice reference Snyder put in) many many more people were wiped out. It would appear that the Ozy’ in the book is much more efficient with his planning.
I still found the film amazing though, it really was awesome.
And to all you who didn’t at least it wasn’t like this.
Bioshock 2 details start to appear…
Probably spoilers ahead.
BioShock 2 >> via Joystiq
So there’s a gaming magazine coming out soon which has details of Bioshock 2 in it. I loved the original Bioshock game, it had a really good story, great gameplay, and great looks to boot.
It appears that in the new game, the over-arching villain, instead of being the entrepreneurial insane inventor Andrew Ryan, you will face off with a Big Sister - a female version of the infamous Big Daddy from the original game.
Early reports said that Big Daddies wouldn’t be in the game at all, however that’s been updated (as per the article above), and now is says that you will play as a Big Daddy yourself, in the quest for little sisters.
I’m not sure what I think about this. On the one hand, Big Daddies are awesome, and more of them is better than none of them, but on the other hand, I think I would rather play against them than as one of them.
Apparently, you’ll be able to use the Daddies large drill hand, as well as plasmids just like the first game. One thing that does confuse me though, is that in the first game, the Big Daddies were the loyal protectors of the Little Sisters - demonic looking girls which harvest ‘Adam’ from dead bodies. If anyone attacked a Little Sister, the Daddy would launch himself at you. Also, in the original game, your character (once the Daddy had been disposed of) had the choice to heal the little sister, or harvest her for the juicy, gooey Adam inside (and your actions had an impact on the end of the game). Now what I don’t get is in Bioshock 2, you’ll have the same choice - but you’re a Big Daddy, you’re supposed to be the one who wants to protect the little girls, I don’t quite understand the logic of you wanting to kill them all of a sudden.
I should also point out that you play as the first Big Daddy, so maybe that has some effect over it, like you’ve become bitter and twisted in your age or something.
I guess I’ll know more when the game is nearing release, but as a fan of the original, I’m hopeful that they won’t mess this up.
Make a good sequel, don’t milk the franchise 2K, kthxbi.
Latest stuff
First off, there’s a new Star Trek trailer out, which looks just awesome (Simon Pegg AND Zachary Quinto!?). In case you don’t know, it’s directed by J.J. Abrams, the same mind behind Lost (my favourite show ever), Cloverfield, Alias etc., so that instantly gives it a few marks in my book, but I think the trailers speak for themselves.
Also, the Watchmen movie is out today (although I won’t be seeing it till next week) which is something I’m very interested in. I’m a huge fan of the Graphic Novel, and I hope the film does it justice (I hear the ending has changed somehow, but apart from that it’s very faithful). So yeah, I can’t wait to see that.
Unreal Tournament 3 is free on steam this weekend, since it’s just had a major update, taking it to version 2.0. I must say, I was excited for UT3 when it was being developed, but when it came out I was fairly disappointed. Sure, the graphics were good, but much of what made the game fun was left out of the game or changed. UT was always a fairly colourful franchise, and taking that out made it lose some of the mood (take note here, Rockstar). This update, however, has made huge improvements. I never used to be able to run the game smoothly on full graphics, but with this new update, I can run it perfectly on full - which is actually an amazing change. There are a couple of new gametypes as well - an alteration of CTF in which you have to collect skulls, and another where you can gain more points by betraying your team-mates.
I also bought Halo wars - another game I’ve been looking forward to. My first impressions are good - they’ve really sorted out the controls, which is what most strategy games on consoles get wrong. I’ve not played it that much yet though, so I can’t give a full opinion.
Is is bad that I’m actually excited for the Sims 3? I’ve got back into the Sims 2 recently (bizarrely), and it’s still good fun. Say what you like, but there is an odd satisfaction in getting a woman married, pregnant, and then killing the husband because he’s a lazy bastard. I trapped him in a room and watched him suffer until he finally died. The best part? His wife wasn’t even upset.
More and more people now are using twitter (especially since Stephen Fry started talking publicly about it). I don’t just mean celebrities either (although there are a lot of them on there now), but also people I know, who always have the most interesting tweets. I think people who look at twitter and say ‘pfft’ need to have a bit of a closer look. Sure, it’s not for everyone, but the idea behind it’s cool, and if for no other reason, it makes news spread fast - especially if someone famous posts it.
You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/ymhr/ , and if you look through the internet (or even my followed list), there are plenty of other interesting people you can follow.
C Programming
We’re currently under way with our second piece of coursework which we have to program in C. Last time it was the game which had to guess 30 animals in 20 questions or less, and this time we have to create a program which will repeat lines, and other things, on command.
The main difference is that this time, we have to code it all from scratch, which unfortunately means a lot of work for us.
So far, though (until today, but I will get to that later) I’ve been pretty lucky with how it’s working out, normally being able to add features of fix bugs without adding too much extra work for my self (and of course with Josh’s help).
We have to make it so that the program can print one or a range of lines - one line is easy, a range is hard.
I’ve spent much of today trying to make this program print a range of lines, but at every step of the way I’ve been met with error after error.
Then of course there is every programmers worst nightmare - the typo.
I spent about half an hour earlier trying to work out what the cryptic error meant, when it turns out all that had happened was that I had missed out a }.
Stupid fingers, missing out }.
It’s not even like the debugger tells you that’s what’s missing, oh no, it will say something like error in function print, before else leaving you to try and work out what the fuck it means.
Also there could be over 9000 lines of code before ‘else’, could it not be any more specific!?
And why do we learn C anyway, when C++ is so much more widely used.
I suppose it’s not that bad, when things work there is quite a feeling of elation.
This post seems to have come out much more like a thought process than I’d originally intended…sorry about that.
Self-fulfilling proficy
I’m so glad I chose the fitting title for this blog. Makes my day to think about all the time I’m not updating: ‘Hey, this nothing is relevant!’.
Between revising (which is taking up most of my time) and browsing the web, I have been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead recently…an awful lot. I’m playing it right now, as a matter of fact.
I’ve got a horrible test coming up tomorrow, but I know if I keep revising I won’t remember any more, so I am taking a break.
It seems that Portsmouth have taken the viewpoint of ‘oh, we’ll tell them as much as we can now, so when we come to the advanced stuff later, they’ll already know all the basics!’.
I can tell you right now, that does not work.
For example, in one unit we’ve got 10 slide shows to revise from basically. Not so bad right? Wrong, consider 1 or 2 of those have 60 slides, and the others have no less than 30. That’s a lot of stuff to remember.
And there is another unit which is primarily ‘PBL’ or Problem Based Learning, where we had to make a data connection by wiring some components, and coding in assembler. There are three problems with that though. I can’t do electronics, I can’t code assembler, and I didn’t learn anything. I’ve basically had to teach my self the unit through revision, which is not on.
Luckily, the other units are pretty interesting and engaging, so they make up for the 3 shitty ones.
Back at university
Well, here I am, back in my flat at Portsmouth. It’s not so bad this time, since I’ve already been through it once.
I’ve got my PC with me this time, so I can finally game properly, but it does keep my room unbearably hot. Oh well, c’est la vit.
Government Internet Plans
Sorry about the re-blog, but I think you should read this article…
What kind of an idea is this? Is that really what our Government wants to do?
I wonder if anyone has enough money to set up a real Rapture… That sounds like a good idea a the moment.
Red Alert 3
It’s been quite some time since I’ve written a game review, since they always used to be fairly boring…I’ll try and make this as interesting as I can.
I was in the beta for Red Alert 3 (from here on, RA3), and I was particularly unimpressed. They’d tried to make it all stylised, which is OK in it self, things such as Team Fortress 2 have proved that can work just fine, but not in this - the engine was unoptimised, it took a while to load, and then the game it self lagged so much when you had the graphics on quite high. Because of this, I wasn’t really intending to buy the game at all.
However, the other day I went into town with my friends, and in the sales Game had it for £20. Hadley, one of my friends already had the game, and since I’m a multiplayer kind of guy, and a HUGE fan of the Red Alert series, I figured I might a swell give the game a chance.
I’m glad I did - it’s so much fun! It’s got a great sense of humour behind it, such as the description for a paradrop, “Kicks all units out of the plane. Don’t worry, they get parachutes”, and little things like that. The style works much better now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it looks ‘good’, but it’s perfectly playable, and I can actually set the graphics to ultra high and play it perfectly (a big improvement in C&C 3!).
However, the thing that really impressed me above all else, is the load times. Many modern games seem to have the problem that they’re so large that the loading screens go on forever. There are so many textures, models etc to load that you end up loading for about half the time you’re actually playing the game (I am looking at you, Dead Rising). Not in RA3, however. Seriously, you click play, a little screen flashses up for about a second, and then you’re in the game. How awesome is that? There is virtually no loading screen at all.
I was seriously wrong about this game, it’s actually a lot of fun. Obviously it’s going to suffer from the same problem that a lot of other strategy games suffer from, some people becoming too good and making them unbalanced, etc, but I am looking forward to the other things, like expansion packs and hopefully some full on gaming sessions with my friends…assuming they buy it too.
Come on, it has Tesla boats. ELECTRICITY BOATS.