Am not, you are.
People seem to think I'm dead. This is a common misconception. I'm not dead. I'm undead.
It's true. Last week I was chillin' with the boys when all of a sudden this pale seductress cat-walks her way up to me and starts nibbling on my neck. Not that I blame her either. If you've seen my neck, you'd probably want to nibble on it too, it's drop dead sexy. Regardless, I'm sure you've figured out by now that she was indeed a Vampire, and I have become her prodigy.
Being a child of the night isn't much different from what I was used to. I always liked the night more than day. The heat, tans, loose clothing, and all that, over-rated. I always felt more alive during the night, and now even more-so. Pity some of my friends aren't the same way. Maybe I should turn them. No, that would be selfish of me. But damnit, I'm going to outlive them anyway. Oh what's the point of living. Excuse me while I go jump off a cliff.
Some time later
Okay, so that didn't work. Not only am I undead, I apparently have a high resistance to gravity-enforced-velocity. Curse you cruel Night Mother! Curse you!
Speaking of the Night Mother. I've been very impressed with Oblivion so far. I've had it for just under two weeks.
It has some amazing scenery. Like this, a half-submerged Ayleid ruin. The ruins are probably my favourite things to find in Oblivion.
I was one of the first to express my disbelief in the Horse Armour Modification for Oblivion. I understood why they would charge for official modifications, but for Horse Amour? No dice. Or so I thought. In-Game it makes your horse look so freakin' cool.
It also fixed a glitch I was experiencing too. My horse was constantly sticking to my arse everytime I moved anywhere. It would run straight behind me. I amoured him up and now he doesn't do that, which is excellent.
The physics can be a little outrageous some times, but most of the times it's just plain hilarious. Take this guy for instance. The guard found out (my doing) that the guy is loco, so he decided to lay the smack down on the mentally ill.
Ignore the purply haze around people, that's my constant Life-Detect Magic. It shows people miles away as little purple hazes through buildings and such. Very handy when I'm out hunting.
But by far the coolest feature of Oblivion, in terms of gameplay, is this.
You can retreive your freakin' arrows. From corpses, walls, barrels etc. If you shoot a brick wall though, the arrow will bounce off and sometimes be pretty hard to find, but they will be there, laying on the ground. Now that's what I call immersion, baby. Granted, sometimes not all the arrows are there. For example, fire 20 arrows in to a goblin and when he dies, he'll probably only have 10 or 12 arrows in him. Clearly this is for game-balancing. Immersion wise, I figure this is because some of the arrows break and fall to the ground. *shifty eyes*
I've purchased a house in Skingrad. It took a long time to consider where I should lay my hat, but once I had staked out Skingrad I knew that was where I belonged. Not only is it all upper-class mansions and shit, but the Count of Skingrad is a freakin' Vampire. How freakin' cool is that? Yep, Skingrad is definately where I'd want to call home.
Stay pale, night brothers and sisters.
PS. I forgot (again) to post up my second 3D Assignment. I posted it on the Phorum like a month or so ago, but I keep forgetting to put it up here. Well here it is in all it's glory. I was going to change the Security Camera shot (where "red" slides toward the camera and the camera follows him past) to have like a fuzzy black and white effect, similar to Matthew's avatar on the Phorum, but unfortunately I ran out of time.
Foo_Toast Config: dBaines!
Here's something I made last week sometime and just now realized someone might actually benefit from it's supreme excellency.
It's a config/skin for the Foobar2000 plugin "foo_toast". Foo_Toast is the winAMP toaster equivelent for Foobz, that hovers a little box up on yo grill that be all like, Dawg, dis da shit dat be playin' rite, with the album art and whatever else.
I think I had a point somewhere... Oh yeah, the toaster config can be downloaded below, I've named it... dBaines.
Foo_Toast dBaines config/skin (17KB)
What an original name, I know! I was thinking about calling it something hardcore like a name of a greek god or an obscure religious or game reference, but then I looked at the little guy and thought, nah, he's Baines to the max. Especially with my logo sitting right there. Maybe the next one I'll make I'll do something original (for me).
Note: It shows the time progressed just before the overall time ("0:45 / 3:00" for example), it infrequently works on my machine, which is why the preview doesn't show it, but if it decides not to work it degrades absolutely beautifully.
I haven't released it anywhere else yet, I tried to post up on the Foobz forums but they require an ISP e-mail, and embarassingly, I don't have one handy at the moment. I've only just switch ISPs and I'm still trying to get out of the habbit of writing baines@bigpond.net.au, because it doesn't work anymore, let alone making a new one for the 'node. And I'm in no shape to make one now.
Maybe tomorrow.
Update: Released on the Foobar forum.
Enjoy,
B.
Edit: Also, while I'm here I might aswell mention that dbaines.com will go down on the 29th if I haven't renewed it by then, yeah it's been a year already. Time flies and all that. If it does go down, it'll only be for a day, two at the most. Depends on how biz-AYE I get.
I think there was something else I was supposed to do, but god knows. Be good to your mother and don't steal candy from children. That'll do.
ISP and 3D
Recently (yesterday) I finalized what we as a family have been planning for a few months now. Switching from Hellstra Bigpong to a decent ISP, the absolutly adored Internode.
I've gone from a 10GB monthly limit to 40GB, which is so much better. And the ammount of things I can have running simultainously is crazy. With Bigpond, if I had say a torrent going at anything over 30kbps it would all but kill the rest of the internet, pages would load slow and such. With Internode, I have Digitally Imported radio going (streaming free data directly from internode), 3 torrents (~140kbps overall), and pages are loading like fire. Fire loads pretty quick.
Enough of my high-on-a-happy-cloudness, on to more pressing matters, like Tafe work.
Instead of repeating everything I've made in an already existing forum post, I'll just leave you with a link and a teaser image.
Link
XP VS
It's getting rediculous, the ammount of Visual Style releases for XP are either the latest Apple Tiger/Puma/Lion/Meercat/Wildebeast/Superman or some Windows Vista hackup (NOW WITH SUPER VISTA-STARTBAR WOW!).
It's getting so silly that people are releasing exactly the same fucking visual style.
Just take a look around various skinning sites and you'll see that almost every second one is either an apple os or vista. The only thing now is for people to release mashups of vista and osx. That would probably get the highest ammount of downloads too because all xp users are stupid in the face.
Seriously though, I can't believe they are so popular. It's as bad as someone ripping a website. Someone's been hard at work (in this case, apple and microsoft) to make a clean, nice gui, and some retard with no inspiration comes along, takes a screenshot, rips or reproduces each little image and pieces it back together and slaps their name on it. Get some fucking originality people. I'm really suprised that this type of stuff isn't frowned upon in the design community.
It doesn't stop with Apple or Vista either, there are a fair share of various linux distro guis floating around, but let's face it - they're way too slick to be popular.
It's been way too long since I've seen a really nice visual style that wasn't ripped or "inspired" from someone else's work.
Mass kickage
I was playing Counter-Strike: Source earlier and the funniest thing happened.
The whole server started lagging really bad.
I play on GameArena, and they have an Australian-Only policy, so they figure if your ping is higher than 300ms, you ain't from around here.
We were all promptly kicked.
Just after snapping this print-screen I was kicked.
Pesky GameArena admins and their annoying need to download hordes of pr0n while I shoot some angry terrorists with big guns.