Holy shit! I have a blog...

I tend to forget things sometimes.  It's been a good while since I posted here, as I finally escaped the hole I was living in and actually found things to do other than be bitterly sarcastic...  Don't get me wrong.  I still feel the need to rant and vent, I've just found other outlets, like alcohol, firearms and construction; usually in that order...

So what's new?  Well, as mentioned I got the fuck out of dodge, and found myself the super of the building I'm living in.  Go figure.  Thankfully this enables me to build and improve whatever the fuck I want on someone elses dime, and get paid for it. 

Actually living in a town now instead of a village, so I don't have to beat the shit out of my vehicle just to go get food and fuel, though the internet still sucks and breaks the bank.

Well,  until next time, ta-ta.

GFWL

The other day I saw someone reminiscing fondly about GFWL.  When asked what the fuck he was on about he replied he "loved" Gamerscore and how it carried over to your Xbox account and visa versa. I told that silly fuck that if you want to see numbers go up as you buy and play games just take a look at your credit card bill. You could even pretend your past due notices are achievements...

GFWL is defunct for a good reason. It was incredibly restrictive and hardly ever worked the way it was intended. The only thing I ever hear people missing about it is the epeen extention it provided for people shallow enough to care about Gamerscore and achievements. 

Every now and then I run into someone online or in life that gets inexplicably offended by the use of "colorful" language.

When it comes right down to it, swearing is used for a number of reasons. Generally I find its most reasonable use as an emphasis on topics or people. I think the only time it becomes excessive is when someone has a painfully narrow vocabulary and says fuck every second word or as a replacement for nouns, verbs and adjectives. It's situations like these these that make me want to give these people a hardcover Websters dictionary, or hit them with one...

The people who get offended not just by the use of coarse language but by its very existence are the ones that irritate me the most. These are the same kind of people who coined the phrase "shut the front door" and "oh my days" because even "oh my god" seemed too uncouth to them. The thing is, these opinions are rarely developed through experience and are instead forcefully inserted into their heads at a young, impressionable age. These people are not actually offended when they hear someone swear; their parents and grandparents are. They aren't showing their discontent at the words you've used, they're showing how well their brainwashing is holding up 20 years down the road.

As with most of my musings, this one stems from interactions with "people" on the Internet. I grew up in a rather small community of around 500 or so people which dwindled instead of growing over time. As a result I could usually just avoid stubborn people that had minds so closed its a wonder they didn't asphyxiate. My arrival online really allowed me to gain a greater perspective on the diversity of people out there, or more accurately the lack thereof.  There seems to only be a few different types of people in the world. Mainly idiots, but also some people with a simple lack of knowledge. This mild revelation led me to make these observation.

There's a large difference between stupidity and lack of knowledge.  Someone with a lack of knowledge can always learn, provided they're not too stubborn to do so. Stupid people can't think for themselves. They can only regurgitate the information that's been hammered into them. They also seem incapable of actually learning, and get insanely defensive if someone tries to correct the faulty information that was forced into their narrow little minds through repetition.

Those with lack of knowledge generally have adaptive brains, whereas stupid people have static programming.  If you try to correct a stupid person their programming can't take it. They lock up and become defensive.

Religious people seem to be more akin to the latter than the former and usually come off as a more pretentious form of it. Barring some kind of traumatic life experience that forces them to convert, they are usually programmed from a very young age so as not to question the legitimacy of their forced beliefs. Upon trying to discuss existential matters with them they stop thinking and revert to their programming, spouting words like "sinner" and "blasphemy".  They are incapable of objective or critical thinking and become defensive as though looking at life from a different point of view would corrupt them or, in all actuality, free them from their brainwashing. 

There are just too many idiots on this planet and first world conditions have made it way to easy for them to continue living and breed.  Forgoing a rant about how we're doomed as a result, I'll just say that we shouldn't start caring about the murder rate until well after it's exceeded the birth rate.

On perceived racism and other bullshit.

If you spend any amount of time on a social network these days, chances are you often hear people prattling on about "racism".  In case you haven't heard, if someone is described by their physical traits it's racist.  Funny how I'm Caucasian yet I'm still called white...  The only reason such terms are deemed offensive is because people CHOOSE to be offended by them.  I'm probably not going to call black people I know niggers, but I'll sure as fuck refer to them is black because they very obviously are!  Just like overweight people are fat, and people with poor hygiene stink.  These are not insults, they're accurate observations!

Women Will Whine

Saw a new game coming out on steam today.  Went to the forums to see what the good word was.  Turns out some overly vocal bitch came to whine about how they didn't provide a strong female character to help her pretend she wasn't fat and useless.

Her "logic" was about how there's no way a large, built man could wield a war hammer, so they should provide a female character since neither would be able to do the things that are shown in the game.

Then another "person" of a similar mindset came in and said the devs were sexist?  Wow.  So basically the devs are sexist because they didn't provide a female character to placate bitching consumers like the OP?

So are they also homophobic and discriminatory because they didn't create a gay character for the homosexuals?  Or a eunuch for the castrated to play as?  Or a drag-queen for the cross dressers to play as?  Or how about a wheelchair bound character for the cripples?  Etc.

Back in the day did all the recently pubescent boys whine when there wasn't a playable male character in Tomb Raider? No, they locked their doors while playing so they could rub one out to Laura's huge 32 bit tits and blocky ass...

I find that in these modern times of entitled twats people have forgotten that companies are in no way obligated to cater to every single niche out there.

Terms like sexist, homophobe, and discrimination are thrown around way too much these days.  Most cases of these things actually aren't.  They're just being described as such by idiots who spit media buzzwords like gatling guns spit bullets:  rapidly and with little accuracy.

Just like everything else on the market, some people will buy it and some won't.  Then there's that special breed that shows up online to cry about it because everyone in their real life would either laugh at them, disown them or leave the room the second they brought it up...

Another Year Past The Alleged End Of The World

Well, it's 2014 and we still haven't been whipped off the planet.  I'm feeling safer all the time.  Well, from bogus doomsday prophecies anyway...

To be honest I nearly forgot about my little rant box again until I saw some unpublished comment notifications in my alt email box. I'd say that life being busy has attributed to this, but I think it's more on the side of terrible memory.

Life's been good...though to be fair it's also been terrible.  But to be fair that's kind of par for the course when it comes to life anyway.

Got some new toys, met some new people, but then also ended up stuck in the hospital for three fucking weeks with encephalitis, so that was horrible.  Doctors say I must have 100 lives to keep pulling through this kind of shit with little to no irreparable damage, so I should have around 94 left I guess...

Well, shit.  I'm not sure I'm bitter or articulate enough for a true rant today, just this run of the mill update.

Perhaps I'll drop by again next time I'm good and pissed and write something you can nod your equally infuriated heads to.  Till then.

Wow. It looks like it's been a while, so here's an unpopular opinion I wrote up after the Sandy Hook shooting.

You know, I really don't get why everyone in a country gets so worked up over this shit.  All I hear is how they're going through so much grief and they are in a state of perpetual sadness.  Why?  Is it because you're so fucking brainwashed that you must treat each an every injustice and wrongdoing on this planet as though it happened in your own back yard, or are you just some sort of hyper-evolved creature that has the highest level of empathy out of all the organisms on this world?  It defies logic.

Sure I can fully understand being upset if this actually effected you, but most people band together, call it a tragedy, then proceed to attack anyone who doesn't feel exactly the same. 
I only feel a couple of things about this, and only in the ways it does actually affect me.

1)Anger.  Once again video games and guns are being attacked by sensationalist organizations in an attempt to pass the buck and say it can't possibly be caused by anything besides violent media.  News flash, if violent video games can be said to be the cause of this, which they can't, then so can all violent media, not just the one you dislike.  Guns also aren't the problem.  If someone wants to eliminate a large group of people in one location I can think of at least two ways that only require a trip to the local home and garden center and gas station.  No firearms or traditional weaponry necessary.

2)Disgust.  Not just at the event in question, where someone killed a large group of innocents for seemingly no reason, but the worlds reaction as a whole to the event, and their intolerance towards anyone who didn't immediately fall to their knees in crippling depression, only to raise their fist to the sky in despair and scream "WHYYYYYYYY". 

See, I'm lucid enough to recognize that this situation only effects me in aforementioned ways: the slandering of two of my favorite pastimes, guns and games.  Everyone else seems to be locked into some absurd group hallucination in which everyone in the world is effected by this to a precisely equal degree. This event is no different than the multiple tragedies that happen on a daily basis the world over, except this one happened in the "good 'ol US of A".

My condolences do go out to the families and people who actually ARE effected by this.  To them I have no doubt that this is a tragedy, and they're probably desperately looking for answers.  The scariest and most infuriating thing to these people is there probably isn't an answer.  Some people just snap.  It could be attributed to mental illness or just an inability to cope with today's world.  If what I've heard is true, this little psychopath was denied an FFL and it was his own mother who violated the law by applying for her own FFL and then purchasing the guns for her kid.  The irony gets knees deep at this point, as she was the first one he killed.  Does this sound like a stable individual to you? All that aside,  everyone needs to take a deep breath, agree that this was in no way a good thing, and then stop harping on about it.

Skyrim Retrospective

So I started a fresh character in Skyrim today, thinking I'd name him Mr. Wonderful after Yahtzee Crowshaw's psychotic knife wielding elf from Mogworld, and I noticed a few things. First off I noticed that the framerate doesn't shit itself during the opening sequence anymore, so hooray for optimization patches. The second thing I noticed is that the writing, voice acting and overall audio engineering is all shit.

I think the cloak of suspension of disbelief and utter joy of playing this newest iteration of The Elder Scrolls has finally been removed and has revealed the hideous pockmarked flesh that always lay beneath.

When I first played the game characters would float into their scripted positions, or enact a sloppy animation 3 seconds late, but it didn't matter. I was having fun. Now though, all those niggling little details seem to have taken the spotlight, and every poorly delivered line, every abrupt animation, every crappy set piece looks so sloppy it kills the experience for me.

There's only so much 3rd party modding can do too. Sure, there are some truly astounding visual mods out there, but that's not what my eyes and ears crave. I want dialog that doesn't sound like it came out a first year junior high theatre club. I want animations that properly interact with items and other characters. I want NPCs that don't miss their audio cues by as much as 4 seconds on a regular basis. I want voice actors that don't sound like Bethesda pulled a handful of gas huffing homeless people off the street to fill the lesser NPC roles.

Call of Duty and other "realistic shooters" out there may be viewed as every thing wrong current gen gaming and may be more shallow than my thin weave carpeting, but at least they can put together decent set pieces and character interactions. And they can get made in less than 6 years too.

Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls will always excel at open ended game worlds and lengthly journeys through the beautiful worlds, but every time I get to a town and see what passes for a scripted event in this game it makes me want to grab Todd Howard by his scrawny little neck and scream "This was acceptable to you!?".

DmC

This is a review for the PC version of the game, so I have no idea if the textures were shit or the 30fps cap made your eyes fall out in the console versions.

Okay. I figured Ninja Theory was going to fuck this all up to shit, but surprisingly it's their best work yet. Of course that isn't too hard considering the two previous games in their portfolio. But we're not here to talk about their abysmal previous attempts at games, we're here to talk about their Capcom sanctioned Devil May Cry reboot. I'm going to just get the important things out of the way, and get into details after.

-The good-
Combat
Environments
Graphics

-The bad-
Music
Characters
Story

The combat in this game is quite the departure from previous entries in the series, as it doesn't rely at all on locking onto enemies. Launchers are now dedicated to a single button, so you aren't forced to lock onto an enemy in order to launch them and initiate air combat. The stinger and trillion stabs also don't rely on locking on anymore. Instead you double tap forward to do a stinger, and continue attacking to preform trillion stabs. Holding the Left and right trigger grant access to angelic and demonic weapons respectively. These weapons can be switched at will to pull off some pretty incredible combos, though it takes so getting used to compared to more traditional combo building in other games.

The environments are impressive, colourful and often span large areas which you can grapple and platform through in between enemy encounters. Unfortunately all the combat takes place in limbo, which exists along side the real world in this game, and the wacky landscapes do tend to get tiresome after a while. This could have been alleviated by allowing at least some combat in the real world, but alas we are stuck battling it out in a place that looks like a mix between hell and Peewee Herman's fun house.

The graphics are also fairly good. The characters are well detailed and the bosses are grotesque. Limbo is colourful and has lots of cool hellish effects.

I realize music being good or bad is totally subjective, but this is just shit in my opinion. It consists primarily of people with gruff voices screaming to death metal beats. I could stand the music in previous DMC games, though I wouldn't listen to it by choice, but this is several increments too far on the nonsensical screaming scale.

The characters, oh the characters. Gone is our whimsical and stylish hero Dante. Instead we must spend twelve hours with some arrogant 18 year old twat who looks like an emo twilight reject but acts like a punk who just found out he can beat up people younger than him. Instead of stylishly and nonchalantly taunting his enemies before pummelling them, he usually gets into swearing matches and then clumsily kicks their asses. Even in the cutscenes he seems like he's always staying alive by pure luck, and not skill or sheet awesomeness.

The story? It's fucking boring. You never develop any kind of fondness for the people you're fighting for, nor animosity for your enemies. The dialog is an embarrassment, and sounds more like something you'd hear in a daytime soap opera then an adrenaline fuelled rollercoster ride. There is no awesomeness in the cutscenes, it just endlessly plods along towards an all too anticlimactic ending.


All in all its combat is the only thing that kept me playing. The story is utterly forgettable unless you like reminiscing about the shittier video game stories you've been exposed to over the years. The characters made me wish Capcom had stuck with Nero's story, and if that doesn't tell you that the new Dante is shit then I don't know what will.

If you're looking for a good action game filled with insanely bombastic cutscenes, competent and challenging combat mechanics, and a story that leaves you wanting more, then preorder Metal Gear Rising, 'cause you'll only find a temporary distraction in this latest Ninja Theory digital abortion.

Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

So I've been reading the HHGttG this past week and have come to a conclusion. If Dr. Seuss were ever to write a novel his pen name would probably be Douglas Adams. Seriously, some of the words, settings and situations in this book could only be compared to a particularly acid frenzied reading of Yurtle the Turtle.

Avarice and Lies

You know one of the things that pisses me off?  Note I said one of the things, since most everything pisses me off these days.  Anyway, it's when companies claim they lost x amount of money in a given year.  Now in the traditional sense of the term, one would have to assume that that dunce Carrol down in accounting misplaced 43 million dollars on her way to the bank, or that the CEO's son took his entire graduating class on a all inclusive 6 week blow and hookers bonanza in Bannock.  But no, in actuality what they really mean is that they didn't meet projected profit.  Projected profit?  The fuck is this shit?

If anything projecting your companies profits is the very definition of counting your chickens before they hatch.  It's the kind of thing that sensible people tell idiots NOT to do. What's even more retarded is the way they calculate projected profits.  For some companies, they at least put some semblance of logic into it, usually by factoring in what projects are expected to release that year, then factoring in popularity of said project, cost of bringing the project to fruition, etc.  However some companies just take the amount that they made the previous year, add 10% on top of that and call it a day. Then when they fail to meet their utterly made up projections they put out an announcement saying they "lost" 43 million dollars.  It's even more ridiculous when a company posts "losses" when the country they reside in is in the middle of a fucking recession.  Yes, Sony, turns out people buy less over priced music from shit artists when they can barely pay the fucking rent. It's almost unfathomable that of all the kinds of people in this world, these are the ones that can successfully operate a business.

Click of Doom

Oh how I wish this were a post about a shitty B movie involving killer dolphins, but alas it is not.

So up until last week my plan had been to buy another large external HDD for backups once boxing day rolled around and the prices dropped lower than the IQ of a West Virginian PE teacher.  Unfortunately I was fucked by fate once again when I heard a loud clicking sound coming from my computer room last Sunday.  Once I determined which external was clicking I didn't even bother to see if the computer still recognized it, I just used the eject drive tool and shut it the fuck down.  This may have been a poor move on my part, because now that my 2TB replacement has arrived and I'm ready to try and transfer the data, the computer won't even recognize the fucking thing.  It starts spinning well enough, but then what I assume is the arm starts clicking, then after several seconds the drive powers itself down.

This is my first ever HDD failure, and it sure does hit you like a kick in the nuts.  In total I lost 500GB of data.  My entire porn collection including my doujinshi, all my pirated games, all my SFW pictures ( a picture for every occasion), all my manga, all my backup game saves, all my Zero Punctuation videos, all my HD game trailers, all of my music, all my cut scene rips, 90% of my passwords and account names I had in various text files, all gone.

I'll spend a little more time ruling out power issues and other possibilities before I write it off for irreparably fucked. Considering how much time I spent gathering this shit from the endless corners of the internet, and considering how many of those corners have since been shut down, or just died, I probably won't even rebuild.  I'll redownload my ZP and music collections, but then that goes without saying.  The rest I suppose I will just make a mental grave for.

Here lies 7 years of my data.  I meticulously gathered you from infinite sources, organized you by category for nigh on a decade, you were the best of the best, but it is time for you to rest.  Goodnight, my faithful 1s and 0s.

Attention Whores

Keep in mind that's "attention whores", not "attention, whores".  What a difference a comma can make.

The other day I heard an interesting theory.  Someone said that women who wear skin tight, torn denim cut offs and florescent pink tube tops with the words "fuck me" printed in big, bold letters aren't at all responsible for attracting negative attention from the drunk, horny men they dangle themselves in front of.  To that I say, well I suppose neither are the people who hose themselves down with Calvin Clein's new scent of sheep's blood cologne and go jogging in the woods only to get mauled and eaten by a cougar.

This really couldn't be any more simple.  If you don't want attention, don't draw attention to yourself.

I don't care how much of a statement you want to make with your image, or if you're doing it all to be ironic; if you wear clown shoes, a stained tu-tu and a gimp mask, someone is likely going to take notice and give you some attention, and it won't be the positive kind.  The only situation in which someone wouldn't make a unkind remark about your unusual attire is if they think that if you're damaged enough to wear that kind of shit out in public you're likely damaged enough to stab them with all your retard strength for pointing it out.

In a nutshell, the people who do these things are the same people who would do absurd and outrageous things in school to catch everyone's eye, only now they're all grown up and twice as dysfunctional.

Bateson Is Back To Voice Agent 47 In Hitman: Absolution

Holy fuck it's been a while since I posted here. The sun came out and suddenly ranting on the internet seemed less important, but now that the sky has closed up and regularly drenches the landscape in worrying amounts of water it's time to return to my bitter and sarcastic ways. Well, not really. I'm actually pretty relaxed with summer still fresh in my memory, so here's a laid back story about an upcoming game.

Since it was announced last year, it looked like the long time voice of Agent 47 wasn't coming back for Hitman: Absolution. David Bateson, who had been the VO for Agent 47 since the first game released in 2000, had been quietly dropped from the project. Bateson himself even made a statement on his website that IO Interactive were ignoring all his attempts to contact them. One of the devs even mentioned wanting to head in a new direction with the series, and insinuated that the dropping of Bateson was part of that "new direction". Well, with only 3 months left until release, it appears IO has backpeddeled their way away from the roadblock of fan rage they were heading for and have brought Bateson back to reprise his roll as Agent 47 after all. That, or the whole thing about him not being cast as 47 this time around was an elaborate troll by IO Interactive to boost talk about the game.



Details on the facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/hitman

Feed the poor, sick and hungry...to a wood chipper.

Ever notice how humans are the only species that are allowed to pass on their genetic fuckups to the next generation? Natural selection does a great job in the wild. The strong survive and the weak die out. Even with things that humans farm for food, be it plant or animal, humans go so far as to breed the most desirable genetic traits, but when it comes to our own species, we allow the weak, sick, stupid and psychotic to not only live, but breed as well.

The right to life and liberty sounds slightly retarded when you realize it also applies to those floundering on the bottom of the genepool, don't you think?

She's a Bute!

Sitting here on the verge of sleep, pondering pointless things.

Tonight's random musings involve men and how we refer to most objects a female. No, not about how we objectify most women. I don't give a flying fuck about that. I'm talking about how when I show my gun, or house, or car, or boat to someone, it's always "She's a bute, isn't she?".

I wonder if women do the same, only opposite. I wonder if two chicks that were having the kind of sleepover that only occur in my dreams, porno, or college dorms where the E flows like, well like a river of pills, would one of them say "Cindy, would you pass me Romone?", to which Cindy would reply "Who or what is Romone?" to which Amber would say "He's my vibrator"...

Uhh, yeah. 5am pondering isn't exactly the most sophisticated of internal monologues.

Indolence and Intolerance 2 BETA :

the Domain is being redirected to the new site, but this blog is *STILL* A huge part of the content portal, (Assuming FuktLogik wishes to participate) I'm looking for ideas and projects to tackle with this site, so if there's something you want to see done with that anger and intent, brought to you by Carl's Jr, then please, comment and discuss. Anything that can be done, will. In the meantime, Indolence and Intolerance is already home to : The Music of Forte 'Shankatsu, an up-and-coming rapper from the North End of the SE side of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Dubtitled : A new Radio/Video channel, intent on delivering amusing but forgotten shows, Interesting Mainstream and Indie Music, and hopefully soon a new Podcast being streamed Live on fridays. I hope to see this project succeed! and again, any comments are welcome. an Alternate URL is http://indolenceandintolerance.fapis.com In case the DNS hasn't carried over yet but you still want to check it out!

An Awesome Day

You ever have one of those days that can only be described as awesome? Awwww yeah!

Next Gen Consoles to Block Used Games

With all the talk of the next wave of game consoles not allowing the use of used games, I figured it was time to sit down and think about what this will mean to the most important part of the business model: the gamers.

If you visit gaming news sites with any regularity it's likely you've come across "insider information" brought fourth by "trusted sources" saying that both the next Xbox and the next Playstation will have systems in place to prevent the playing of used games, rentals, borrowed games and anything else that might entail.

Have you ever borrowed a game from a friend to check out for a few days after he wouldn't shut up about how great it was? Well, there will be no more of that, because "we're killing the industry" by not coughing up $69 every time we want to play a game. If it turns out to be shit, well, you're fucking stuck with it, because even if you did manage to sell it somehow, the sale would be worth as much as the disc it's printed on.

Gone would be businesses like Gamefly, Game access, and their overseas counterparts. Gone too would be shops like Gamestop, EB Games, and the uses shelf at your local video store.

Renting would be made pointless since you'd have to pay to rent the game, then pay $30 (if they even offer the option) or so to activate and bind the game to your online account, which would be utterly wasted once you send it back.

You'd also need to be online every time you activate a new game, or else you simply wouldn't be able to use what you PAYED for.

Essentially, this initiative by Sony, Microsoft, and at some point probably Nintendo are all the worst parts of steam rolled into one big shit smeared package. And you'd be delusional if you think this would make for lower prices in any way, shape or form.

The games industry isn't just shooting itself in the foot with this move, it's trying to look cool by slipping the gun into the back of its trousers and blowing its ass cheeks off.