One aspect about owning reptiles that is not so great is live feeding. Hugo's diet consists mostly of insects and you can't really expect a wild animal to wait for his prey to die of old age after they had a long, happy life. And I guess you could say it's not a big deal, because they're just bugs, anyway.
But, weird as some of you are probably going to find this, we're still trying to be nice to the "food". Which is something they're not going to appreciate, because by the end of the day they're still gonna get dusted with yummy, healthy vitamins and calcium and thrown in the reptile tank, but at least we're feeding them until their time is up. And we respect the tough fighters. :D
You see, every once in a while a locust will manage to escape. They'll make it out of the tank, possibly even survive the attacks of our cats and suddenly you find yourself with a scared, battered and beaten up bug in front of you, which has absolutely nowhere to go. And then you can pick it up and say, "you've made it this far, now you're gonna be someone's dinner."
I think that's pretty horrible. Yes, they're only bugs and the only reason they were born was to become food at some point in life, but the little guy didn't ask to be eaten, he didn't sign up for it, he made his way out of the tank, battled our cats and then you want me to punish him with death?
Nah.
For as much as I'd love to spare every single one of our bugs, I can't exactly tell our lizards to stop eating. But if one of them manages to get away, then we usually give them their freedom. It's getting cold outside and throwing them out right now would just be another death sentence, but if nothing else, we can keep this little guy and feed him and he can live his life in his little box. It's not exactly a great life, he'll never find a mate and one day he'll die of old age long before spring comes around. but at least he'll have plenty to eat and nobody will kill him, so there's that.
There's a brand new microphone coming my way, because I'm making video reviews for work now. People keep telling me to use my voice to make money, so that's totally a thing now. I might use it for some of my youtube videos, as well, if I'm feeling confident enough. We live in a day and age where "constructive criticism" has shifted from, "I think you could improve this by doing this and that" to "plz kill yourself". 90% of my paid work is online these days and comes with a comments section and you can only be told to kill yourself so many times until you stop giving a fuck, but I'll admit it was pretty difficult to deal with for a while.
Here's a fun fact for ya: while it's a comforting thought that most people who spam comments sections with their garbage are kids who don't know any better, it turns out that age doesn't really matter. Just do a Google search on DreamHack and their former CEO, who was laid off last week. And how he is wishing death and disease upon everyone. And yes, they're kindly asking him to kill himself and live-stream it.
2014 went by in a flash. It's almost November now. My birthday is coming up. So, if you wanna email me some topless pictures of yourselves, go ahead. Tits say more than a thousand words and should be part of every heartfelt birthday message. If you're male, money, beer, bacon or any combination of those are equally acceptable.
Spoiler warning: They're quoting me up there. I like it.
It's been 32 years since the return of Voyager - or 13 in tv years - and people still want to bone Seven of Nine. Actually, I wanted to bone Kes before they turned her into a whiny bitch, but I'm just special like that. Ahem...
So, Tuvok is getting the band back together and most of the old crew is back, with some exceptions such as Captain Janeway, who is now in prison. Well, more or less, since she's part of Orange is the new Black. She's mentioned once as "Admiral Janeway", so I guess that whole thing about her becoming the new borg queen and/or dying (in the novels) is no longer part of the canon. Because everything happening on Star Trek Online is considered soft canon, meaning it's "official" and part of the Trek story, but they may undo and change details in possible future tv shows and movies.
Nobody had the guts to make Jeri Ryan look older.
More than three decades after the events of the tv show, both Tuvok and Harry Kim look older, they have grey(ish) hair when you encounter them ingame, the doctor looks more or less the same, what with him being a hologram and even Neelix has a few more wrinkles here and there and looks a bit more chubby around the edges. Then there's Seven of Nine, who looks exactly the way she did on tv and not a day older. I assume the good people at Cryptic didn't want to offend her and nobody wanted to make her look old. Or maybe they wanted to be sure she's just as young and hot as people remember her in order to attract players. Whatever the reason, it turns out that assimilation is good for your health and makes you immortal.
For those familiar with the show, the expansion also arranges a few surprise meetings with side characters you might remember from Voyager or shows like TNG.
I see what Hugh did there.
What really impresses me about Delta Rising is how it gets me interested in the Delta Quadrant - something that Voyager never managed to pull off. To me, Voyager had this huge, annoying flaw that you see all over sci-fi and fantasy. All the exotic races, aliens, species, dwarves, elves, kazon, malon, what the fuck ever - they're walking stereotypes of themselves.
It's so fucking lame, dull, boring and predictable. Klingons are always angry and they're crazy about honour. They're basically space orcs. Dwarves are always bearded and they like gold, booze and fighting. All vulcans are dicks. And the delta quadrant is exactly like that. The kazon are lame-ass klingon ripoffs, who are chaotic and angry and pissed off, because reasons. The malon dump their toxic garbage wherever the fuck they want and this is the one and only trait, which defines them as a species. The Hierarchy are a bunch of potato-headed space accountants.
But human characters can be anything. Heroes, villains, anything in between, they experience character growth, they have demons and inner conflicts, they're unpredictable. 99 percent of the kazon are evil, you'll never meet a member of the hierarchy with no financial interest, who wants to be a rockstar or a badass warrior and there are no gay, pacifist, vegetarian dwarves with an allergy to beer.
And then there's this race of sentient fish people, who are delicious with chips.
The problem with the story in Star Trek Online is how it has always simplified things even further, painted everything in black and white. In the early years, most of the story was "federation good, klingon empire/romulans/remans/borg/[insert random faction] bad". The bad guys would show up and nuke earth spacedock - seriously, the fucking thing has been destroyed so many times since the end of the closed beta, I don't know why they even bother rebuild it all the time.
You know, they show up, they do something bad, their motivation is to be evil, then you show up and kick ass. And that's okay for an action game, it works for Star Wars, but not in a Trek game. There's no sense of morale, no negative consequences for your actions, no tough decisions. You go in and save the day. People die, but they're just nameless redshirts or random klingons, they all look the same, anyway. Fuck it, it's all XP.
Sorry, Harry. You're worth 25 XP and I just can't let you live.
Delta Rising changes things up a bit. It's not exactly Mass Effect, but for the first time whilst playing STO I cared about the characters and the lore. And sometimes I paused for a moment and thought about certain decisions instead of blindly clicking my way through walls of text.
On the one side of the expansion's major conflict you have the kobali, a species, which is technically a bunch of zombies. They don't reproduce by shagging each other. Instead, they use the corpses of various deceased humanoid species and bring them back to life as a kobali. This only works once, so they can't just resurrect each other over and over again. And then they lucked out when they tripped upon a cryo-chamber full of vaadwaur, whose corpses make awesome new Kobali.
Naturally, the vaadwaur aren't too keen on having their dearly departed brought back to life as freaky aliens without their consent. There is no black or white here, no clearly good or evil party. The kobali don't want to go extinct and they consider the resurrection of dead guys into fresh kobali the highest honour. On the other hand, would you like it if somebody started digging up all your dead friends and relatives to bring them back to life without asking you? Mind you, they turn into something completely different and remember nothing about who or what they used to be.
Since STO is an MMO, there's no branching storyline with multiple endings where you decide to help one or the other side. They tried things like that in Elder Scrolls Online and people hated it, because the game and each quest had been instanced to bits. So, you won't get the same possiblilities and levels of choice you may get in a singleplayer RPG, but the story draws you in, it's exciting, there is no obvious good vs evil here. I like it!
Some talaxians die, but fuck those guys.
Delta Rising also takes power away from you in certain situations. There is one mission where you are supposed to save a bunch of helpless civilians from their attackers, but there isn't enough time to save everyone. Saving one group dooms the other and vice versa. There is no right decision here, it's impossible to save everyone and you don't get any special tokens or rewards for saving the right bunch of guys. You have to act, help some of them and watch others die.
This is pretty dark for Star Trek, but it makes things more believable. You're no longer the superhero, who rushes in, guns blazing, saving everyone's day. You can only do so much. You can't prevent bad things from happening just by showing up and being awesome. It's good storytelling.
Delta Rising can be very dark and creepy at times.
One of my biggest concerns with the expansion was that they could have just used the names, voices and appearances of the voyager crew to get some attention and leave it at that. But they've captured the characters' personalities incredibly well. They act and talk exactly the way you'd expect them to, all the way up to surprise side characters you may remember from the tv shows. I recognized Hugh from TNG before he even introduced himself and it made my day, because that was one of my all time favourite episodes.
Most importantly, they're not just mindless drones, who only speak to you when they want you to know you're awesome and all your decisions are fantastic and you're the coolest kid around. They'll let you know exactly how they feel about the conflict and about your decisions. And there's one instance in particular, in the final mission, where poor choices can make winning a lot more difficult.
Voyager's bridge is absolutely spot-on.
It's a bit annoying how the new content is stretched with relatively boring patrol missions. And even if you play absolutely every last bit of new content, you will be forced to re-play some old missions or join some pve queues and other activities (read: grind) in order to keep leveling up to qualify for each of the new missions. It would have been great if Cryptic had managed to present the entire story without the need to grind, possibly by making it a little more difficult to unite most of the species of the delta quadrant against a common threat.
Because that's the one weakness in the new expansion's plot. You're gathering allies against one overwhelmingly powerful enemy (coughcoughMassEffectcoughcough) and while you have to face some initial difficulty, it all gets wrapped up way too quickly and easily in the end. I would have liked to dive into some of these alien cultures some more, get to know them, win them over. Again, like in fucking Mass Effect. If that's where you're getting your inspiration from, at least go all the way and don't cut the story short after an admittedly amazing build up.
Pictured: Most things I hate about Voyager.
Delta Rising also adds some entertaining content on the side. For instance, there's this shuttle race track in the middle of nowhere, which lets you compete against Tom Paris' lap times. Which I've totally eradicated, of course, but I'll admit it took me a few runs to get the hang of it and it was a really cool idea to add it in the first place.
There are new traits, specializations and upgrades for competitive players to get even better performance out of their ships than ever before. New ship types and bridge officer abilities allow for more play styles than before and most of the new T6 ships are surprisingly fun to use. Of course, if you're into hardcore pvp or you're absolutely desperate to win at every last bit of competitive content, then you can also sink an infinite amount of money into upgrade tech and power-ups. None of this is required to see every last bit of the new story, of course. But I'll admit it's pretty fun to utterly destroy the competition in a beefed-up vessel.
You will never kick as much ass on STO as I do.
Delta Rising adds a ton of great new content to the game, there are more ways to play and customize your ships than before and the new story made me care about the Voyager universe for the first time since... no, no since. For the first time. I never liked Voyager.
It's my fifth year here in the UK and my time back in Germany feels like little more than a bad dream now. Okay, I may have to explain that one. I don't hate Germany or anything. In fact, seeing Germany on tv, having been there for the funeral, seeing the roadsigns, the shops, I can get a little emotional. I've spent most of my life over there and you don't just leave all of that behind and completely forget about everything like it never happened. But my old job, my shabby little apartment, my entire situation, the whole thing was a real nightmare and it's pretty much gone now and that's good.
With that said, I don't think it has all fully settled in, yet, even after nearly a half decade. Most nights I dream about visiting my family with Claire, seeing how they're doing, catching up, talking, normal family stuff. You know, just sitting at the dinner table with my parents, things normal people do. Sometimes I dream about my parents coming over to visit us in the UK. Stuff which is never going to happen. The Germany I left behind does no longer exist. My family has mostly broken apart, my father is no longer among the living and my stepmother, who was oh so eager to catch up after the funeral has answered my lengthy email with a quick "I don't have the time right now, I'll get back to you." That was in early August.
Stuff like that doesn't make me super depressed. That's just my family for ya. But every now and then I just wish I could have one of those boring, normal, shitty sitcom families. Just sit, eat, talk, share, no hard feelings, no drama, nobody shouting at anyone, nobody cheating on anyone, no real life soap opera crap. That'd be nice. We do maintain a certain level of harmony in our cozy little home, but that's mostly because cats and reptiles don't talk back. Claire and I had our seventh anniversary the other day.
It doesn't feel like seven years at all. And I have learned a few things about maintaining a relationship over the years. We gave up on holding grudges and try to resolve arguments and drama as quickly as possible. At the end of the day, it usually comes down to one question: do we really want to spend the time we're sharing being pissed off at each other? We could be having fun right now. I'm working all day, every day of the week. And weekends. Claire works most of the time. We don't get to spend as much time with each other as we'd like to. And when we do, we try to get the most fun out of it. Even if that means making some sacrifices.
For instance, Claire is rather curious about Warlords of Draenor. And there is no way in hell I'd go back to World of Warcraft. If she went back there, she'd be playing it all the time, hunting after rare pets, mounts and achievements and I'd be left out. She respects that and we play other games, instead. Together. And I don't watch Mythbusters and QI marathons when she's at home. We're doing stuff together instead of just living next to each other.
I know this may sound a bit over the top, but we don't just want to sit in the same room and do things all by ourselves. At least not all the time. Sometimes we just do "nothing." Sit in market square, watch the people, watch the clouds, just talk. No facebook, no smartphones, no gaming devices, just us.
Three of my family members died within just a few months of each other. Claire and I might have another fifty years together. One of us might die tomorrow. We don't know. But I don't want to waste any time holding a grudge or withholding sex over whose turn it was to take out the trash and I don't want to spend day after day just peacefully coexisting until we realize it no longer makes any difference whether the other one is still there or not. We had a nice night out for our anniversary. I have never seen a woman eradicate a steak so quickly before.
In other news, our royal python has a dick. Well, technically, they kinda have two dicks, but that's beside the point. That snake was sold as a female and it turns out she's really a boy. It's funny how that works with reptiles. I guess snakes would look retarded if they had tits or nuts.
Meanwhile, our monitor lizard is turning into some kind of perfect example for good reptile care. He's getting bigger than most other people's Bosc (or Savannah for you Americans) monitors, he's active, curious, friendly and not one bit overweight. And I'd love to brag about how we're putting oh so much time and effort into making sure he's alright, but he's really one of the easiest pets I ever had.
Alright, the taming process was a nightmare. He used to be a hissing, shitting, biting, tail-whipping bag of fangs and claws. And when we tell people about how we had to spend several hours each day to tame him, they usually lose interest in buying their own minitor lizard. But now that he's tamed and housebroken, he's not any more trouble than any old housecat. You have to feed him the right stuff in proper amounts, just like with any other pet and you have to watch his temperature and humidity. But seriously, that may sound super complicated, when in reality it means pushing one or two buttons to regulate his heater where necessary and spraying him with a bit of water now and then. And sometimes you'll have to play with him like you would with your cat:
And then you get people dropping off their unwanted monitor lizards at the shop, who are paranoid, downright impossible to handle, who can't walk straight and who just sit around all day practicing the thousand yard stare, because they're too dull and lethargic to do anything else. And their lizards aren't much better.
All pets require a certain minimum amount of love and care. It's not difficult. It's not a lot of work. But some people just don't have what it takes. Live creatures don't make a good impulse purchase.
I've played through all the new content in Star Trek: Delta Rising. I want to write about that, but assuming most people are getting a bit tired of that old subject, I'm gonna put my thoughts in a new entry. If you're curious about the pros and cons of STO's new expansion, go find the latest post in this blog. Or come back in an hour if it's not showing up, yet.
Yay! They're quoting me on the official German Star Trek Online website, because I'm important 'n' shit. Seriously though, I wrote a magazine preview for their new expansion, now there's a fun little quote and I'm happy. And about said expansion, well...
Duuuuuuuude. This stuff is so good, there's a whole lot of new quality content in there, tons upon tons of new upgrades and enhancements if you don't mind the grind (I don't, actually. YAAAAAAAAAAAYGRIND!1) and this stuff is actually making me want to watch Voyager. Which, of course, I'll regret 2-3 episodes later, but that's Voyager for ya. And there's so much cool stuff to see!
Alien walk-in vaginas
Action on the ground
Action in space
Fucking cats stealing goddamn chairs
Unrealistically beautiful spaaaace
Open world clusterfuckage
In other news, the Dolphin Emulator finally runs F Zero GX in full, glorious 1080p with all necessary bells and whistles attached and at a stable 60 FPS, so... yeah. I had this retarded idea where Claire and I create vehicles and race each other for the fastest lap times on time trials. We'd take turns at beating each other's records. I'd set a record, she'd go ahead and set a faster record, then it'd be my turn again and so forth. We'd beat each other by whole seconds at first and it would never take longer than maybe three or four attempts. By now, my longest session took about 14 consecutive hours and I beat the current record by about .002 seconds.
I think we've reached the point where you cannot possibly go any faster (Mute City Twist Road in under 60 seconds without snaking O_O) and those ghosts are becoming a major bitch to beat. It doesn't help that all those paranoid boost pads love to jump out of the way and all the walls are trying so hard to high-five you. And if you've clutched a controller for several hours, mashing that boost button like a madman, you'll know what it feels to be a 14 year old boy again. By the pain in your lower right arm.
Which is a popular, overused and kind of a weird joke. Do people really stop masturbating as excessively when they grow out of their teens? Did you? I don't think I did. I'm doing it all the time. Heck, I'm doing it right now. Didn't even notice. Maybe I'm still a teenager at heart.
Also, Final Fantasy 6 (3 to some of you). If you don't remember this tune, you are a maggot and nobody likes you:
The intro to this game is about five minutes in length and full of all that lengthy, confusing, slightly stupid RPG-babble you get in Final Fantasy games. I don't care how much you love Final Fantasy - you just can't deny that the writing is usually just one step away from being Matrix-levels of retarded. But then they played that tune and I was immediately drawn in. I was sold. You won't understand this if you're one of those cunts who started "gaming" with a Playstation 2 and obviously, I'm a lot better than you. Not just as a gamer, but as a person. As a human being. Or cow, where applicable.
And, as is the case with every popular game tune ever, there is an arseton of god-awful remixes on Youtube. And then I found this:
The retarded husky hat is an affront to god and all of his creations, but come on. Holy fuck. How good is this? There are so many shitty game music remixes out there, which score tons of likes from utter morons, who don't know any better. This tune is the tits. Absofuckinglutely amazing.
I woke up to a weird question on the radio this morning. "Is rape too serious to be entertaining?" Huh. I'd fucking well hope so.
Apparently, the context was the episode of a soap opera, where a character got raped, the whole thing aired at 8pm and the whole thing was a bit more graphic than what you usually see in a family program at that hour. And now that I think about it, soap operas in the UK can be pretty dark.
I don't really care much for soap operas, but Claire has made me watch Coronation Street for about four years now. Last night's upsetting rape episode was on a different show, but during my four years of watching Coronation Street, one character got raped, as well. Twice. The rapist later got murdered by his own mother. Another girl had her skull crushed with a lead pipe just a few weeks ago. Before that, a lady had been trapped in a basement, which had then been set on fire by her captor. A firefighter died trying to rescue her and basement lady actually survived the fire, but then they offed her in hospital. There were also a few fun domestic violence episodes, where a woman regularly beat the everloving shit out of her boyfriend. What a pussy!
Some woman with Alzheimer's offed herself with a toaster. One of the regulars on the show had been in prison for murder. I didn't watch the show when she killed the guy, but they bring it up every now and then. Another character murdered someone and assumed his identity, up to a point where he met his victim's parents and eventually locked them in the basement, along with some other characters of the show. He got chased by the police, fell from a rooftop, had a car accident and eventually died in hospital. One of the first ever episodes I had to watch featured a tram crashing into a building, killing several characters:
Coronation Street isn't set somewhere in a dystopian, post-nuclear future (I'd totally watch that, though!), but in the fictional town of Weatherfield, showing the miserable everyday lives of a bunch of middle class average joes, all of which are exceptionally stupid, lose their shit at the first sign of a crisis and most of them happen to be scum. Because there wouldn't be much drama or conflict if the show was realistic. All of the characters have fucked one another at some point, both physically and metaphorically.
Now, don't get the wrong idea here. I'm not shocked or offended by any of this stuff. I just find it amusing. They brutally rape and murder people on tv every evening on what they call family tv. Those who survive usually end up losing their jobs, their relationships, they get betrayed and bullied and cheated on, everyone is hilariously miserable and now they're stopping for a moment, going, "Hmmm... might rape not be entertaining after all?" And they don't feel even a little weird or stupid.
Speaking of the pain and suffering of others for the sake of entertainment: Call of Duty. Yes. Again. I'm not buying Advanced Warfare. I've bought most CoD titles, played them for hundreds of hours online, but after all the empty promises, performance issues, cheats, hacks and other bullshit that came with CoD: Ghosts, I'm just not gonna fall for any more day 1 special edition preorder nonsense.
Ironically, Claire and I are still crazy about Ghosts, even though it's probalby the worst CoD yet. Apparently, they're finally starting to ban cheaters. Well, they all claim to be perfectly innocent, of course, except maybe this guy. Suddenly, players in most lobbies have an average K/D of .9 or worse, with the best players rarely showing anything above 1.5. In other words, they all suck, which makes fighting them a lot of fun.
And since most players, like us, were stupid enough to purchase the special edition, season pass and everything included, all the new maps are being played fairly often, which is good, as most of them are fantastic. Not only do they look great, but they come with fun features, such as random care packages, which can turn you into the Predator:
I like the character customization in Ghosts, both visually and in terms of perks, guns and killstreaks. The weapons are extremely deadly in this game and people aren't bullet sponges like they were in Black Ops 2. And if you're one of those people who keep on whining about how awful the Graphics in Ghosts are - go fuck yourself! No, it doesn't look as good as Battlefield. But its visuals are still the best in any CoD yet. Go compare the PC version of Ghosts on ultra quality settings to the maxed-out PC version of Black Ops 2 and keep telling me Black Ops looks better. Moron.
~3000 players on the PC version during prime time, no dedicated servers, performance issues, crashes... sometimes you just fall in love with a game, which is pretty shit. So, whatever you do, if you've avoided Ghosts so far, or maybe you've tried and hated it like most sane people did, don't come back. It's not as hack-infested as it used to be and some of the new maps are so much better than the awful, unplayable maps this game launched with. But if you hate this game, then a bunch of new maps and fair play won't do much to change things for you.
You wouldn't like it.
Meanwhile, we're thinking about buying a pair of PS Vitas, so we can play Call of Duty against each other on the go. You know, sit on the bus or near market square in town and shout at each other. "Stop knifing me in the dick, you cunt!" I can't wait.
And now I'm running out of time, because we gotta buy groceries and shit. Bleh.
If you've managed to find this blog, then by now you'll already know they're turning Tetris into a movie. Because, as you are all aware, Tetris is hugely popular for its dramatic and moving plot, its lovable characters and its rich universe and deep, fascinating lore. And if this sounds like a load of horseshit to you, then you'll love how Henk Rogers of The Tetris Company said he can't wait to re-imagine the Tetris universe on the big screen and tell its epic sci-fi story.
So, what's next? Connect Four? Tic-Tac-Toe: The Movie? Man, I hope they'll make a Backgammon movie, so I'll finally understand how this stupid game works. I have a theory regarding the Tetris movie's plot - the "Tetris" will be some kind of alien species or killer robots or some shit, who gain their power through their symbiotic relationship with one another. That is, until the hero (a clever scientist, biologist, hacker or pizza delivery guy) has the crazy idea to connect the evil aliens in just the right way to disable them and make them go away. Wanna bet?
They'll probably make a lot of money just because people will watch it "for the lols" and because "A Tetris movie? How the fuck is that supposed to work? Let's have a look at this shit". Watch it ironically or whatever.
Speaking of reasons to avoid going to the cinema - they're chasing after everyone who pirated The Expendables 3. The movie had been leaked on the 'net before it was even out in cinemas and they're not just chasing after websites hosting torrents for this stuff, but everyone who downloaded and shared the respective files, as well.
Look, piracy is bad. I'm not for it. But it pisses me off when I read bullshit statements like: "If everyone who downloaded The Expendables 3 in the US alone had watched the film in cinemas instead of downloading it, it would have generated another 4 million dollars." Yes - and if all of them had watched the film twice, it would have generated a whopping 8 million, which is just as much of a stupid and pointless observation.
First of all - how can you possibly assume that absolutely everyone who downloaded the movie would have paid to watch it, had it not been leaked? That's bullshit. And while we're at it - how do you know that absolutely no one paid to watch the movie on the big screen prior to or after downloading it? Some people probably liked it and decided to go watch it in a movie theatre. Others might have downloaded it after watching it there, because they wanted to have it at home. You can't just go and pull some made-up statistic out of your ass, saying absolutely everyone who downloaded the film didn't also pay to watch it or absolutely, inevitably would have paid to watch it, had it not been for the leak.
The last time Claire and I went to the movies, we paid 30 Quid. 30 fucking Pounds for two damn movie tickets, a coke and some nachos. And we easily could have paid 50, had we opted for pointless, headache-inducing, nauseating 3D.
Dear Lionsgate - if more and more people are stealing your shit these days, could it be possible, if ever so remotely, that some folks simply can't afford going to the movies anymore? Or they're just a bit tired of getting ripped off like that? Again, piracy is bad, but having to choose between eating for an entire week and watching a stupid 2 hour movie with a loved one is a bit of a no-brainer. That doesn't make downloading stuff right, but I can understand why it's happening.
Of course, anyone running a movie theatre will tell you they have to make shit so ridiculously expensive, because nobody goes to the cinema anymore.
If you get caught downloading the Expendables 3 in Germany, they'll make you pay a fine of 800 Euros. That's roughly 100 times as much as watching the fucking thing at the cinema (minus snacks and 3D, obviously). Because hey, not only are you downloading that stuff through torrent sites, but you're also sharing your download with other potential pirates. Which are also getting fined 800 Euros each, so the reasoning behind this massively overblown fee is a bit fucked up. You're probably better off being a white South African celebrity, who happened to murder his girlfriend in cold blood.
I'm not even a huge Trekkie, I just love the gameplay.
I've cobbled together a kickass preview for the upcoming Star Trek Online expansion, Delta Rising. It's a nice little two-pager in buffed magazine, which comes with a kickass item code, which... well, I'd probably get in trouble for revealing it before you can order the next issue, so let's just say I would have killed to get these items for free when I started playing the game. It's great stuff and Perfect World were fucking awesome to let us have these codes. The devs at Cryptic took the time to answer all of my questions about the game and the new expansion and I really love my job when things go so well. They're a lot more fun to work with than most publishers' PR departments, which are usually run by Satan himself.
I'm amazed how certain publishers can just force magazines to only use footage and screenshots, created or approved by their own PR guys. Look, I get it - big companies pay magazines to feature and review their games. Which is fucked up, it's wrong and it simply should not happen that way, because you cannot possibly fucking tell me that you're writing fair, unbiased reviews if you're getting a lot of money prior to testing the fucking game - which you're also getting for free, alongside free lifetime membership codes, epic press preview events and other fun shit like that.
Of course that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, because the guys behind STO gave me item codes to offer to our readers. Difference being, I really like the game and I absolutely wanted to write that article, codes or not, because it's how I pay my bills. You know, testing or previewing games. They don't approach me waving goodies in my face like a vagina on a stick (you can't really lure me with carrots), telling me I can have it if I'm willing to write about their stuff. I approached them, because I'm hyped about the expansion and I really wanted to write about it. Most of all, I refuse to work with publishers, who tell me what screenshots to use or what I can or cannot say in an article. I did that once with a publisher that rhymes with Zquare-Penix and that was annoying enough to make me appreciate F2P-titles and their publishers a lot more.
Months late to the party, as usual.
In other news, I'm being a reverse hipster by playing Hearthstone long after it was cool. It's the most annoying, infuriating, frustrating, stupidly luck-based pile of shit of a game that I've ever been addicted to. Brutally stomp a bunch of players without losing any HP whatsoever one minute, get skullfucked one moment after. Add to that a bunch of fucking idiots, who need about five goddamn minutes to make a turn when all they have is 2 points of mana and a single card on their hands and this stupid game doesn't even deserve a spot on my hard drive.
But... I dunno, the music is pretty fucking awesome, I like clicking all those fun little objects at the edge of the screen and HOLY FUCKING SHIT when did it turn 5am? Yeah...
I'll be listening to this stuff long after my final ragequit.
The new Forza game on Xbox One is absolutely amazing and I must have it. Dragon Age: Inquisition is just around the corner. Originally, I was only hoping to clone myself so I could give myself a blowjob, but right now having the possibility would actually allow me to play (and fucking finish) all these awesome games. I've been working my new online job for about 3 whole months now and I could seriously use a break. Or just one day where I can sleep until I feel like I'm done. You know, as opposed to the alarm clock telling me I've had enough.
In other news, I've cooked for my woman and a mediocre picture can make the most amazing meal look shit.
You gotta work with me here - I know it doesn't look like much on these pictures, but look at the meat. It's brown and crispy on the outside and pink and oh so soft and tender on the inside. Resting on creamy sauce Bernaise with a bit of creme fraiche and white wine in it. I've fried some garlic and chili and added that to the sauce, we also had fresh mushrooms, asparagus and pasta. Also, coke in glass bottles, because FUCK YEAH, COKE IN GLASS BOTTLES!
