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Monthly Archives: August 2008

Sony, Shut The Hell Up

There are two kinds of people I dislike in the world: People who brag about achievements, which on closer examination they haven’t even achieved or which are no achievements at all; For example saying that they got second place, when in fact there were only 2 entities participating! And then there are people who lie to me; Not the type of person who likes a good joke or anything like that, but lying as in being a money grubbing prick taking advantage of every possible opening. Sony takes the gold medal in all two categories, managing to combine both types of people into one. Sony is just crapping all over itself with fake self-importance. Like a bum on the streets assaulting everyone generous enough to give them some cash, Sony tries to coerce people into giving it some change, but will only run into the next game arcade wasting its dough on one armed bandits and cheap whores, instead of getting new clothes, something to eat, or a real job. A job not consisting of lingering in the streets, hitting people, screaming that it has the BEST IDEA EVAR, and once it has enough money it’ll change, HONEST!

I sometimes read the developments in the gaming sector, and it seems to me that Sony is throwing out one verbal assault on my intelligence after the other. For example the latest escapade of Sony CEO Howard Stringer I read on gamesindustry.biz really got my knickers in a twist. In this interview he said:

“But the Wii is not succeeding at our expense – it is not hurting us.”

Are you fucking kidding me, where the hell did this guy get his business degree? Not only are more companies focused on making games fro the most sold system (read: Wii), there’s only so much money to go around. A mother will not get a PS3 for 500-600$, if the alternative is a “family” friendly console for round 250$. It’s real simple logic, but this dipshit doesn’t seem to get it. Actually, I take that back: He DOES get it, but he doesn’t want to admit it, so all the fanboys in denial stop bitching for a goddamn second.

Sony can fuck right off. The amount of whining, lies, and cheap excuses one has to bear these days is simply mind boggling. And it’s not only Sony’s CEO. Other like-minded Idiots like Michael Pachter, who was never tired of proclaiming what a “great value” the PS3 was, just fuel the fire. Why is the PS3 so great according to Pac? Because it has Blue-Ray, and back when he made the statement, it was expensive as shit, but guess what: There wasn’t anything worth watching (or playing for that matter)! What goddamn value was he talking about? Having a BlueRay-player which in two years costs maybe 50 bucks? Why should anyone care? I’ll tell you why: Because Pachter has his head up his ass, that’s why. He doesn’t see BR as a means of actually doing something like being remotely entertained, but just as a monetary value. This would be a great idea if I could play games on a dollar bill, but in fact i can’t! At least you can use the PS3 as a blunt weapon should the economy collapse at one point or the other. PS3 owners will rule the world, just like they imagined! And then they will break down from spinal cord injuries. Oh well, can’t win them all!

Bottom line: Sony, shut the fuck up already and get your shit together. Stop wasting time on spewing bullshit and actually GO WORK! Personally I doubt it. Some old animals simply won’t learn and “retire”. You can’t teach an old horse new tricks. And I don’t mean retirement as in animal communism at the beginning of Animal Farm – animals happily grazing on the field still the end of their days; I mean horse-meat like in the end.

Yummy.

Quest for Glory 2 Remake out now!

Alright kids, i know you people all like mediocrities like Halo, Ghost Sword 4, Smear of War and whatnot, but for a change try a game which is a true classic:

Quest for Glory 2: Trial by Fire.

Since you people probably cant stand 16 colors (yes, 16 colors, not 16-bit colors), the good people of Anonymous Game Developers Interactive (AGDI) have made a remake of my once so beloved classic, and it is of course free to download.

Do you want to be a hero? Well then, grease your chainmail, sharpen your sword, and get ready.

Oh, just one more thing: there are no guns in this game, i just thought I’d clarify.

Howto: Compiling DosBox with Suse 11.0

I wanted to get some good old Dos-action using Linux, specifically OpenSuse 11.0. Since Dosbox didn’t offer an RPM for my distro, I felt compelled to compile DosBox from the source, but, as always, compiling has its own share of problems. This will be a guide for people who already have the requisite basis on which to compile programs (C++ compiler + make) and know how to use a terminal. But I think this will also help more advanced users with some errors, which, if you don’t know a bit of C/C++, will cause some wonderment and probably disdain. In any case, before you download the source, you should install sdl-devel, it will be required by DosBox and was probably not installed using the normal installation settings of Suse, even with C++ dev packages installed.

Download the source, and extract it into any folder. Now open your terminal, change to the main directory of the dosbox source, and type in

./configure

You should not get any error messages yet. If you do, you probably need to install some missing libraries, just search for them using the Yast software-installation-module and install. After installing missing libraries don’t forget to run configure again, to see if everything is set!

After you ran configure and everything seems fine, type in

make

This is where the problems appear, at least for me on my system.

First of I got a “memset was not declared in this scope”-error message in gameblaster.cpp. To remedy this I simply included string.h to the header files of gameblaster.cpp, which is located in src/hardware. So simply add

#include <string.h>

to the top of the file using any program you like.

The result should look something like this:

Go back in the main DosBox directory, type in make again. After a while an error in tandysound.cpp, also in the src/hardware folder, appears, stating that this time strcmp was not defined in scope. I thought that the “str” prefix probably refers to string, so I simply added string.h to tandysound.cpp again, and you should do the same, of course! Problem solved.

Get back to the main directory and run make again. I got the last error message, saying that “atoi” was not in scope in shell_cmds.cpp, located in the src/shell directory. I didn’t really know what atoi was, but after some searching on the internets, i found out it was defined in cstdlib.

So I again appended it to the top of the file using:

#include <cstdlib>

Note that the name is cstdlib, not cstdlib.h. Afterwards I ran make again, and voila, the DosBox executable appeared in the src folder and the kingdom was saved.

Hope I helped someone, if not, well, then I’ve wasted my time! Hey, at least I admit it!

Meaning in Nothing

The difficulty is not making a popular work of art, but making a piece of art with meaning. Many believe meaning comes from the viewer themselves, and I would agree. But I would deny this already being enough to distinguish the piece of art from a normal action inside any household. Don’t believe me? Then read on:

“I took a dump today” – Unknown author

Interpretation:

“Dump”, what does it signify? Some philosophers interpret this as the life cycle of trash, waiting at the garbage dump, unwanted and unmourned, but sometimes picked up by a Mexican passerby, thus becoming used and loved again. But my interpretation strays away from this simple child’s play of these so called “philosophers”. Dump in this context means the struggle of human excrement against the inhuman capitalists, wanting to press their unwanted “human material” into the underworld (in this case the sewers)!

We must further examine the implications which come with “taking a dump”. Most toilets in the world have the bad attribute of making shit stick to the marble surface just before the shit hits the water: The author clearly wanted to portray that not all shit goes inevitably down the drain, but there is a brown area which still holds on to the aforementioned quality of truth, struggling, clumping together and forming a massive shield capable of holding along against the marauding forces of evil. Tides and tides of fluid may wash away some stray unprotected parts of the brown masses, which have succumb to darkness after all, but the core can and will not vanish so easily! Valiantly the stain of shit -core splits incoming tides in two, just like Noah in the bible, but it has even more implications than that: The core symbolizes the people’s wish to work together to create a mutual understanding of one another, and its even composition tells us that only a great force may rip this strong bond of selfless trust apart! The author, in his ingenuity, makes no comment on how the dump was actually finished nor if the greedy capitalist decided to clean up after himself. Possibly the shit could survive, resting forever peacefully in the shade of the great toilet-lid, resisting wave after wave of further liquid with impunity forevermore! But alas the nature of toilets paints a dark future for our heroes.
A white demon rises above the rebels, as the ominous toilet brush descends on them, humanity screams as it is torn apart, the wielder’s face filled by dark hatred as he swings the weapon of mass destruction (Iraq war reference).
But what about the toilet brush itself? It is a feathered monstrosity, most likely resembling the Phoenix. As the Phoenix is a fiery bird unable to live in water, its life giving properties are negated as it is dipped into the water shortly before its work is to be fulfilled, thusly transforming it into Hades. The water then symbolizes the river Styx causing humanity to cross over to the glowing depth of hell itself!

After all the work humanity was unable to hold on, the author raises profound questions:
What am I fighting for?
What is the meaning of life?
Why must my life be so abruptly ripped apart my the workings of a man just interested in a clean toilet?
No answers are given, the reader must fill in these blanks for himself.

But is this the really end of this fascinating story? Perhaps the remnants still are floating somewhere, floating to a better land where honey and waste flows… Maybe they will soon be used to fertilize lovely flowers! Tears shoot to my eyes, thinking about how the dead pay their final tribute to the living by giving new life, even after all the hardships they have been through! Their valiant efforts shine to the very end, and even beyond!!

The elegance of the piece is not only underlined by its simplicity, but also through the use of artistic design principles, for example in the most important word “dump”. d and p are both the same shape, again symbolizing humans needing and having unison deep integrated into their soul.
Only the m seems to stray away from the wanted unison, perhaps signifying the evil thread in the human heart, stemming itself with all its might against happiness, the strands direction pointing towards the way humanity will go, down…. the drain.

I want to congratulate the author for such a bold effort to bring back art into our previously gray lives.

This piece is only weakened by humans inability to grasp such a fascinating concept. Bravo! Encore!

10/10

GTA4 kills once again!

According to Reuters, the distribution of the game “Grand Theft Auto 4”, hereby denoted as GTA4,  has been pulled in Thailand by a game-distributor, due to a teenager robbing and then killing a 54-year-old taxi driver. Newspapers reported the teenager said, he did not want to kill him at first, but killed him when he met with resistance. Police Chief Veeravit Pipattanasak told Reuters how the youth just wanted to find out, if robbing a taxi in real life was as easy as robbing one in the game.

The assailant’s parents said their son was polite and diligent, and the police said he did not seem to have mental problems during questioning.

Reuters also reports about a senior official at the Culture Ministry of Thailand, stating, that this incident was “[a] wake-up call for authorities to tackle the issue of violent video games“.

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First of all: It doesn’t matter if the guy ‘seemed’ to have no mental problems. If he murdered because he wanted to find out, if robbing a cab is as easy as not getting your dick caught while zipping your fly, he is a goddamn nutcase and belongs inside a rubber cell. Furthermore, parents seem to have a misconception about making kids “polite and diligent”, and thinking that this somehow completes their parenting responsibilities. As long as kid doesn’t curse and brings out the trash, everything else is dandy. Maybe if they would have told their young kid, that robbing a cab and stabbing people aren’t good moves, instead of drinking and wasting their time watching soaps, maybe then they wouldn’t have a murderer as their son. If they would have spent some time with the kid, then the boy would have known that robbing people gets you nowhere fast.

The official talking about how this is a wakeup call also seems to have the wrong idea about what the cause of this dilemma is. No, I’m not talking about the difficulty of GTA4 carjacking being too low, I’m talking about dipshit parents and idiotic schools not teaching their kids/pupils what they need to know in life. If anything, this is a wakeup call for everyone able to discern fantasy from reality. I also bet the newspapers bitching about GTA4 will push the teenagers’ diligence and “politeness” in front of everyone’s faces, as if to say, look, a nice polite boy was ULTIMATELY CORRUPTED. At least he didn’t fly a helicopter into a building, waiting to be respawned. I hope the youth didn’t find the “get out of jail free card” beforehand, so Bubba can finally teach him something about how painful reality really is.

Jack Thompson should really take on this case: GTA4 murder simulation too easy, lack of difficulty may cause delusion and death! Rockstar must immediately patch the game, to make the player first brutally struggle and kill the taxi driver to be able to take his car, if Rockstar wants to keep selling this game.

On another note, the source is quite misleading. Thailand didn’t halt the distribution of the game, a distributor did. I’m not sure if this distributor is a monopolist in their country, but I doubt it somewhat. The news also makes no mention of any sort of ban.

Pretense

Not seeing reality as it really is, can be quite soothing. For example: Religion. Sure, it’s nice and comforting to think that life has a purpose, and that after we’ve kicked the can, we are all going to some strange magical fairyland, in which beer is cheap and angels are willing. To think of our loved ones as immortal and watchful over us, as we fondle our new sex-partner(s), is also probably very stimulating, especially for exhibitionists. But the nagging feeling of it all being a lie somehow can’t escape ones mind. Doubts manifest and influence us, most likely fueled by previous experiences, in which our lack of circumspect thinking and blindness led to serious issues, which took significant time and effort to resolve, or perhaps are not resolved at all; Facts we are reminded of every time we feel our backpain and/or cough up blood, right after we’ve lit another one.

Humans hate being lied to by other human beings, yet lying to oneself really isn’t such a big deal. Sure, I always think that eating three day old pizza will not impact me because of my superior immune-system, yet these pretenses are dispelled as early as the next time I sit on the pot. But since I’m the one at fault, and blaming myself is tiring (and due to my superiority unnecessary), I simply disregard the previous experience. Thinking about this I am always reminded of “The Simpsons”; In one episode Lisa compares her brother to a lab rat by setting a piece of food under voltage. The lab rat, after it is shocked the first time, sits in its corner, scared to death, never to touch the food again, while Lisa’s brother simply ignores the constant shocks over and over again, trying to get the food at any price. Perhaps rats are superior to humans in this regard, Pinky and Brain would surely agree.

But pretense is not only found in religion, it is also inherent in the culture we live in, our hobbies, and the products we consume. Look at the “losing” console-owners of any generation, trying to defend their pricey and yet so mediocre purchases. Sure, in some years the console may be good, it might make toast and washes laundry, yes in some years this and that might happen. But what about now, what about what we actually want? Why are people defending a console, which is objectively in the dumps, and urging others to buy a failure themselves. Simply because they are unable to admit to themselves, that they have wasted a large quantity of cash and time on a thing they don’t even enjoy. They made a mistake, but are unable to admit it. They want others to buy the aforementioned product themselves, because they want other mental-patients to join them in their assault on logic. Having a bad grade when everyone else has failed isn’t as heart-breaking after all.

Just like priests trying to justify where all the fossils came from, people making mistakes have to build up a huge house of justifications and/or relativizations, to actually skew their mistake in such a way, so that the mistake becomes just, or is even not a mistake at all – Their actions are actually “right”! Making mistakes and recognizing them as such is what keeps one from touching the food a second time, in order to avoid being shocked again. All other cases lead to a heart attack… or permanent brain damage. The latter also leads to the former.

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