User Blogs

Books:

I started on a paper book, so I didn't end up getting it finished before the end of the month.

Games:

16. Rochard. Interesting puzzle platformer, held back by its insistence on shooting areas.

17. Ys Seven. Great action RPG. Reminds me a lot of Amalur.

18. Breath of Death 7. This is the sort of RPG I would probably make if I made one. It's not really BAD, but it's also not really good. It has massive amounts of subtle and overt references to the genre in it.

Platinumed: Hotshots Golf, Gravity Rush.

I actually finished Uncharted: Golden Abyss too, but that was 2 hours into August...

Videos:

62. Doctor Who: The Awakening. The civil war reenactors really took it too far...

63. The Pentagon Wars. Epic, it's not meant to be a comedy, but it becomes that though the absurdity of the Pentagon's weapons testing program.

64. The Blues Brothers. I can now say that I get far more references that I hear on music radio bumpers. The whole show was an exercise in saying "Oh, so that's where that reference came from."

65. Doctor Who: Frontios. The end of time, the last few survivors of humanity...

66. Doctor Who: Resurrection of the Daleks. More Davros... *shrug*

67. Man bites dog. Stupid violent, and not even in the good way that A Clockwork Orange was stupid violent.

68. Doctor Who: Planet of Fire. This didn't make an impression on me at all, but it is just setting it up for the end of the 5th doctor and introducing the 6th doctor's companion.

69. Stargate SG1 Season 4. Interesting. Not sure what to say other than that.

70. Sleeper. It's a rather clever show. Keystone cops in the dystopian future.

71. Stargate SG1 Season 5. The whole thing starts to pick up, and looks a bit bleak...

72. Ghost Hound. Reminds me a little of Lain, and Kamichu.

73. Doctor Who: Caves of the Androzani. The doctor sacrifices himself for his new companion, giving us the very odd 6th doctor.

74. Doctor Who: The Twin Dilemma. Buffoonery from the 6th doctor.

75. Lupin the 3rd, Castle of Cagliostro. Actually a really amusing movie. I've been holding off on it for ages.

76. Strait Jacket. What a depressing show.

Books.

6. Moon Flower. Just like the other Hogan book I've read recently, he takes the US society and makes it into a straw-man dystopia so that he can show how much better his other society he's showing is. Not a whole lot of action in the book, but it is decent.

Games.

12. Resistance: Burning Skies. Mercifully short. Got the platinum and traded it in.

13. Asura's Wrath. Also pretty short, but decent. Unusual at the same time.

14. Muramasa: The Demon Blade. I've had this on my game shelf for 3 years and just managed to get back to it. Only about 20 hours of game here, but it's fun. Only problem is that it seems to give me repetitive strain injuries to play it... Though, not as bad as Asura's Wrath on that count.

15. Gravity Rush. Aside from the annoying targeting and touch screen controls, it's pretty good. Really rather short, but a new interesting idea in gaming with a fun story and very interesting world.

Videos:

47. Monk Final Season. It improves, but unfortunately it still has lots of embarrassing Monk Being Monkish episodes that should have been greatly reduced for this last season. The last two episodes were interesting, but annoying at the same time for what they said about the character...

48. House, Final Season. Interesting, but probably the worst season of the show despite two of the best new characters.

49. Stargate SG1 Season 3. Decent enough, Finally get to see what has the Asgard so scared.

50. Shaun the Sheep Season 2. Good. Not much to say other than that.

51. The Secret of Kells. A very good show about vikings, and their raids on christian abbeys and monasteries. Also, about irish folklore and the tying into the making of the Book of Kells.

52. Angel Beats. An unexpectedly good anime. I suppose that's because I resorted my list and put the higher rated shows towards the top, but from the premise I was expecting something completely different.

53. Devil hunter Yohko. This anime, by contrast, was even worse than expected.

54. Doctor Who: The Mawdryn Dead. Mediocre.

55. Doctor Who: Terminus. Interesting, but not really great.

56. Solaris. Meh.

57. Doctor Who: Enlightenment. Meh.

58. Doctor Who: The King's Demons. Interesting. Another Master episode.

59. Blue Seed: Beyond. Meh.

60. Doctor Who: Warriors of the Deep. At this point, I'm watching the series out of morbid curiosity about how far off the rails it's going to go.

61. Magical Witch Punie-Chan. Amusing thing about veggies peeling themselves, but the whole show is just dark under a cutesy facade. Intentionally dark too. The title sequence has cities on fire, plagues, wars, and gladiator arenas in the intro with the main character dancing and skipping happily through them.

I just watched a movie called the Secret of Kells. Quite good, though what made me laugh was the name of one of the production companies involved.

"Tax Shelter Ing Invest of Tax Shelter Productions"

Who names their company that? Are they trying to draw the attention of their local taxing agency?

Books:

2. Books of Skyrim. Argh, did this ever take a long time to finish... It's just so... boring in sections.

3. Mission of Honor. More and more threads finally coming together in the Honor Harrington series.

4. Much Fall of Blood. The new characters in this are even more entertaining than the old ones. more interesting than the last one, "This Rough Magic"

5. Lost at Sea. Meandering and lost for about 2/3rds of the book, then it finally comes into focus and gets good. I think that's intentional.

Games. 11. Kingdoms of Amalur. Very good. Combat was great at the start, great at the end, the enemies started to become damage sinks a bit too much in the middle, but it got better. Great lore and world. Too bad the company fell apart.

Videos:

36. Haibane Renmei. Pretty interesting, but very slow, while simultaneously being quite short.

37. Big Bang Theory Season 1. Interesting, but it mostly ends up laughing at nerds rather than with them.

38. Baldr Force EXE. Rather gruesome...

39. Doctor who: Time Flight. Kinda meh.

40. Familiar of Zero. They call it a harem anime, but that part seemed to be less important than the plot.

41. Doctor Who: Arc of Infinity. At this point, I'm not sure why I keep watching the series.

42. Dune Miniseries. I've never sat through the whole dune book in any form before.

43. Megamind. Mildly entertaining.

44. Children of Men. *shrug* dooom dooooom dooom war people being mean to illegal immigrants tyranny doooooom.

45. Doctor Who: Snakedance. Ok, so this one was a little better than the last two.

46. Negima?! A bit absurd, and definitely too harem-ish for me. The plot was a bit flat.

Amalur is even more ridiculous than Skyrim when it comes to titles you earn during the game. I'm currently...

• The Fateless One (you start with this)
• The King of the House of Ballads,
• Truesworn of the Warsworn
• The Hero of Mel Senshir (And Siegebreaker)
• Last of the House of Sorrows
• Archmage of the Scholia Arcana

And others... this doesn't even count all the tiny ones like the master of Gravehal and such.

I'm also right on the doorstep of the house of Vengeance, so I'm probably getting close to done with the game... Going to try finishing it today.

I'm beginning to think Settlers of Catan is a cursed game. First in 2011, Game Republic, the makers of Catan for PS3, folded up and closed shop.

Now that 38 studios has collapsed, Big Huge Games is also out of business. They were the developers of the Xbox360 version of Catan...

Most of the blogs I've seen on Tumblr are weird and low-content, with lots of noisy, loud images and pointlessness. Especially the ones who ended up following me when I started posting a bunch of things over from my Livejournal.

The most recent blog that followed me is of a very different sort. It's shockingly content heavy with at least a dozen posts in one day, but I think it counts as more sociopathic and insane rather than weird. First I thought it was an Atheist attacking Christians, but looking at it further it seems to be some sort of proto-theism that tries to absorb the god of Judaism then say that everyone else currently following him is wrong, then decides to toss in nonsense about communism and anarchy. There's even some bizarre references to transhumanist anti-homosexuality rhetoric to top it off. It's the most ridiculously over the top thing I've ever seen.

I don't even think I'm going to post a link unless someone really wants it. I'm not sure if I want that person to get any more publicity...

Books:

Someday... SOMEDAY I'll finish Books of Skyrim.

Games:

10. Hotshots Golf: International. Quite fun. I'm stuck at about 460th in the world so far...

Videos:

25. Twelve Kingdoms. Quite an interesting series. A bit libertarian by the end, even though it can be a slog towards the beginning.

26. True Tears. Good, but annoying at the same time.

27. Doctor Who: Black Orchid. Cricket, and old time british explorers.

28. Doctor Who: Earthshock. They were trying to be all edgy and dramatic by killing off a character in this, but it was kind of flat.

29. The Black Cauldron. Interesting. Went really fast, about like watching the Dragons Lair 2 game.

30. Doctor Who: The Visitation. I don't remember much about it...

31. Sherlock Series 1. Pretty good, up until the end of the last episode. That was terr-i-ble.

32. Strike Witches. Urgh. I hate shows that lean on lack of clothes like this one.

33. This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. Meh. Pseudoscientific nonsense.

34. Witchblade. Really interesting actually.

35. A place promised in our early days. Interesting. Alternate worlds.

Books:

I still haven't worked my way through the Skyrim book, but I'm about 7/10ths of the way through.

Games:

8. Journey. Worth getting. Really. Go buy it now.

9. Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack. Excellent game, a side scroller like Rayman Origins, mashed up with Katamari Damacy.

Videos:

14. Stargate SG1 Season 2. Pretty good.

15. Vexille. Quite interesting. Like Ghost in the Shell, but less optimistic...

16. Gunslinger Girl Season 2. Still as creepy a concept as ever. Focuses even more on the villians.

17. Doctor Who: The Visitation. Aliens attacking humans. Interesting twist ending. Just like the later one where Doctor Who visits right before vesuvius.

18. Sherlock Season 1. Very good, aside from the ending of the 3rd episode.

19. Gunbuster. Another one of those ever expanding scale mecha shows, very rapid and short, but not really that great.

20. The Road to El Dorado. Pretty good. Plot holes you can drive a semi through.

21. Doctor Who: Four to Doomsday. I think I mentioned this one before.

22. Dragons Lair 2. I watched this instead of playing it. After watching it, I don't know how anyone could finish the darn thing. too fast and chaotic.

23. Blackjack. I went in expecting medical puzzles, and instead got mysticism, radical environmentalism, and lots of supporting the small country dictator.

24. Doctor Who: Kinda. Meh.

I've had Telekill on my PSN friends list since the early days of Gamesey.com (Now Gameslurp.com.) I apparently never looked closely at his profile though...

Today I was looking through my Near charts and clicked on one of the people with the little orange friend circle, and noticed it said Telekill... Odd, I only knew him through Gamesey, and he hadn't posted there since 2007.

I was about to accuse Near of being inaccurate, then I went and looked up Telekill's profile here... And it said that he lived in the same area of the world that I did.

The Doctor Who episode is rather amusing. They talk about these tiny chips about the size of an arm cell phone chip that "has more connections than the synapses in the brain"

Then they claim the junctions are 100nm in size...

And here we're starting to make 22nm chips and they aren't anywhere near as powerful as the ones described in the show.

I've been using a Zacate board for several months now. Zacate Asus

For a $120 system where I borrowed ram from another system to get it running, it's been solid as a linux system. I mostly just used nfs to mount my /home drive and ran the system off a small partition on the hard drive. It's decent, but it wasn't great.

I recently installed Windows 8 preview on it using up more of the huge hard drive I had in the system. What a difference solid drivers make. Youtube stuttered and dragged under linux. It ran solid full screen under win8. Most web pages work better under chrome on windows than linux.

Maybe it's also because linux does poorly with CPU scaling and was sitting at 800mhz the whole time, but it's actually a solid system that could be used as someone's main system as long as you don't want to play really intensive 3d games.

These motherboards are as cheap as $75 now with processor...

I recently bought a new Wii to replace a broken one...

I have 11 Wii games, several of which I really want to finish.

So why is it that I've not played it since I bought it, and I'm just playing Vita Golf, Assassin's Creed 1, and Mass Effect 2 instead?

I really didn't get much done this month... Other than work. Maybe the Vita is partially to blame. ;)

Books:

None, not quite done with "Books of Skyrim"

Games:

6. Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. Pretty standard layton game, but the twist at the end was really good.

7. Final Fantasy 13-2. Great game, but I hate cliffhanger endings... Still a bit to do on this one.

Videos:

9. We are the Strange. Terrible. 3 minutes of coherent story jam packed in a 60+ minute film with liberal use of surreality and Sinistar audio tracks.

10. Doctor Who: Logopolis. Oh look, the doctor visits a place that is theoretically holding the universe together, and the master ends up popping in and nearly destroys the universe...

11. Doctor Who: Castrovalva. Against my better judgement, I started on the 5th doctor's stuff. The master again. Meh.

12. Futurama, 6th series. Pretty good for themost part.

13. Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Schitzophrenic. A different art style and a parody of a new type of fiction every episode. Somewhat entertaining.

While looking at the intellectual property notices of my Vita, I saw some interesting tidbits.

Netfront from Access Co in japan is apparently still the web browser for this thing, Access Co is the company that owns the PalmOS operating system and the Graffiti text entry method.

It uses Skyhook for location services.

Open source components it uses? Blist, CyrusSASL, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Freetype, Giflib, libEtPan!, libjpeg, liftiff, MD5, squish, strlcpy.

For the web browser, it uses cairo, dtoa, expat, Freetype2, hash.c, ICU, libjpeg, libpixman, libxml2, list.c, PCRE, trio, Webkit.

Other software? FLANN, OpenCV.

It's interesting that the Vita has such a WebOS style interface, when PalmOS's developers apparently did some of the development on the system...

Also, the blog may be up and down here, it seems to have run out of memory, and I'm noticing that there was a rootkit on it at one point. I'm going to be replacing this VM with something new as soon as I can.

Books:

Just one,

1. Kaspar's Box. Yet another Chalker book I'm highly disappointed in. At first it felt like I was reading a very interesting book in the vein of The Wizard of Karres. By the end though, the whole thing just fizzles out and crashes into a complete and dull non-ending.

Games.

Ridiculous numbers of them.

1. Rage. Took a break from Skyrim to plow through this one, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

2. Solatorobo. I've been working on this one for months, it really works well as a bite-sized game where you can do 15-20 minutes here and there.

3. Skyrim. Terrible, but so broad and tapping into those MMO-esque addictive quest acquisition urge.

4. FF3. Knocked this out in a few days after I finished half of it years ago.

5. Mecho Wars. Almost doesn't count as it's a PSN Mini title... but it's really quite good.

Videos:

1. Bubblegum Crisis. I hate going back to old anime like this, it seems so lousy even if it was good at the time.

2. Kimagure Orange Road. Cheesy old japanese sitcom anime. Nice to see the rest of a series I watched a decade and a half ago. Or most of the rest, netflix doesn't have the first 3 dvds...

3. Doctor Who: The E-Space Trilogy. Not terrible.

4. Doctor Who: Keeper of Traken. Eh? It's ok.

5. Futurama series 5/6: mostly OK.

6. Doctor Who: The Leisure Hive. Another forgettable old Doctor Who episode.

7. Stargate SG1 Season 1: Pretty good...

8. Kick-ass. A decent movie, better than expected.

It's already been an incredibly productive month for games.

Rage was the first game I finished a few weeks ago. I was frustrated at Skyrim for being so buggy, so I took a break and plowed through this one. Just about 17 hours from start to finish.

The second was Solatorobo. I've been working on it for several months. It's an ideal game for bite sized gaming sessions, usually just a half hour or so before I go to sleep. Ultimately took just over 20 hours to finish both chapters, and another 2 hours for some additional content. There's actually another 2 missions and lots of optional stuff left undone though.

Finally, after 130 hours Skyrim is done. At least the main quest line. I probably put another 10-15 hours in that were lost because of crashes though... Of course, I still have quests to do... 3 of the guild quests are either unstarted, or unfinished. Still have a civil war to finish.

That puts me at 3 games for January already, more than I finished January last year...

If I'm lucky, I'll get FF3 finished before the end of the month as well.

Not going to be much of a post for december of 2011... But the year end total? 22 books, 22 games, and 96 video series/movies/etc.

Books: Nada. Half-way through Kaspar's Box though.

Games: None. Played a lot of Skyrim, solatorobo, and Bastion, but didn't finish any of them.

Videos:

90. Lost in Space. Interesting update of the original...

91. Outlaw Star. I'm not really happy with this series. I probably would have been if I watched it back when it was on TV though... I've gotten tired of some of the anime tropes it uses.

92. 12:01. A time loop like Groundhog's day. 18 hours over and over. They didn't even try for an optimal ending though, they broke the loop on quite a sub-optimal one...

93. Doctor Who: Creature from the Pit. It was OK.

94. Doctor Who: Horns of Nimon. Another OK one.

95. Doctor Who: Season 6. Quite good, interesting ending. Unexpected.

96: Doctor who: The City of Death. Multiple Mona lisa and Leonardo Dvinci...

Mostly gift cards this year, but happily $70 of the gift cards were PSN. Picked up Corpse Party for $20, Trine 2 for $15, Assassin's Creed 2 bundle for $13, and Red Dead Redemption bundle for $25. Also received a copy of Rage, which I'm sure I'll find entertaining. I ended up passing on the Assassin's Creed Brotherhood $25 bundle, and the Borderlands $15 bundle. I need to see if AC is good first, and I have Borderlands already on Steam.

The downside to getting PSN downloadable games though is how long they take to download and install. I started the process last night, and 24 hours later it still hasn't downloaded all 4 of my bits of software. RDR is 8.3 gigs and I just started installing it around 15 minutes ago, it's at 45%. Sony really needs to beef up their server network somehow. Maybe setup some CDNs.

Lastly, $75 in Best Buy cards, and a string of USB LED lights. That puts me half-way to replacing my wireless headphones that broke this year.

KEXO ran some old radio shows this year. We found them entertaining enough that I went and bought a collection of Abbot and Costello shows. $5 for 50 shows. 10 cents each for a half hour of audio. Pretty good bargain, really. Fun listening to the quaint Cigarette commercials in the middle of the shows.