So the second season of Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has finally aired. Well, one episode to be exact. I have two things to say about it:
1) Better than I expected.
2) WHY FUCKING TIME TRAVEL?

OkOk, I haven’t read the novels, so I don’t know how close this keeps to the original, but judging from the horrible fanbase this anime has, everyone involved in the production probably worked as close to the original as possible, as to not piss some raging otaku off and get shot down on the streets. But is keeping this time travel shit really necessary? Why not simply forget about it and lets pretend it never happened? Every time someone gives an explanation to how time travel works, ten more questions pop up which then inevitably spawn even more questions. It’s a nightmare of paradoxes, and noone has ever been able to pull it off correctly. Allright allright, Wells did a nice job in “The Time Traveler”, but he used time travel to set the scene; He didn’t really go back and forth twenty times, and i see a more time traveling coming up when plot holes need to be addressed once more.
But then again, Mikuru did take an important device from herself, so right now there’s only one more person who is able to bend time and space to her will. Two people, now that i think about it.
However, having raged on like this, I’m still looking forward to the next episodes. Haruhi was, as expected, a delight. Not only does she break the wave of moe so common in anime these days, she even brought life to Tanabata, which has been sucked dry by every anime ever produced, so that is quite a feat.

And Mikuru cried:

Call me a sadist, but i really like to see her suffer – moe just got a beatdown, ahahahahahahahaha!!!! HAHAH AHA HA AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Oh yeah: one more thing: The ED is worthless. Seriously, I really don’t know what they were thinking putting such an uninspired tripe at the end.

I’ve been pretty nostalgic lately; I keep remembering the “good ol’ days”, back when the grass was greener, women were still in the kitchen, and the Internet was a place void of Wikipedia, but still filled to the brim with porn.

I remember a 28.8k modem beeping and blurting (over the phone-line) and being driven insane.I remember a 56k modem chipping away at my patience and at my wallet due to 100Megabyte-traffic restrictions. I remember having to write an essay about Sweden, searching via metacrawler (does that thing still exist?) to inform myself about this fabled country of lore and finding nothing but porn, porn and even more porn. Swedish porn as far as the query results could see. Wasn’t a laughing matter either — I was close to tears, and not because of the explicit images, but because I didn’t find anything useful for days and days while time was ticking away. In the end I didn’t find anything worth anything and got an F (thanks Internet).

Everything was much more complicated too. If you had asked me 10 years ago if the Internet would expand like this and everyone would eventually know of its existence, I’d have laughed in your face and said: Everyone already knows, but no one is interested. Why would anyone go there? Maybe I am fooling myself. I was probably sick and tired of it. Sick and tired of all the problems. Sick and tired of all the shit you had to put up with in the world wide web. But like an abused spouse i kept coming back. Being in the net wasn’t something everybody was….

But then I remember my youth… stuffing my pillow under the door to keep light of late-night television from escaping through the door… watching bad comedy from even worse comedians, hearing the same lines about Clinton or Bush or some B-class celebrity I didn’t know squat about over and over…. still happily wasting my time away on video-games, playing the same level over and over and over, putting up with bad controls, not enough save-slots, enormous load times, inferior graphics, too expensive…

When I sum it up i somehow see the negatives in dominant position. In contrast the future is looking bright: Obama got elected, the world still isn’t going to end anytime soon, not even with flying pigs, and the Internet has left such deep marks in society, so that it will be a long time till a dictatorial regime locks me up for some stupid trifle.

I guess I’m just getting old. I’m not at the edge anymore. I’m not hip, nor 1337, nor pimp, dope, leckerschmecker, ipod, fabulous – I’m not even cool anymore. It’s really depressing. There’s nothing left except a shallow resentment against the good prospects of the future. There was nothing of worth in the past, but i still love it. I love thinking about it. The present is should be a happier place but I can’t make myself believe it. Obama may be right and things can change, but I haven’t yet. What was the word describing fear of change? Old-man syndrome? Progressivephobia?

Is there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this? Is it that even if you don’t like your world now, at least you’ll like it thinking back on it later? I think it’s rather that fate has dealt me an unlucky hand. All the problems i had to endure back then are gone in the new generation. It’s a matter of fairplay, they should have to suffer like me. Sure, the comedians may still have no good jokes to tell, the Internet may still be useless as a source even with wikipedia around, and games may be still the same shit as 10 years ago. But it’s dressed up nicer.

I have recently acquired a sparkling new computer-rig made of pure electric-current asskickery, so of course I looked around to buy some equally kickass games, and saw that GTA4 came out (for the PC) recently. I hurried to Amazon (Yes, i know, I’m a cooperate whore), raised my finger to click and buy, but then, just as my finger was on the verge of sending the signal to Amazon, 3rd party corporations, and probably the government for good measure, I glimpsed at the 1.5 star rating. GTA3, being something which probably cost me my soul, sanity, and prospects of a good career, demanded of my fanboy-self, that I flame and, if possible, wreak terrible vengeance on the infidels who unjustly voted on the (arguably) fourth coming of my lord. When I actually saw the complaints of the 1star-raters however, my rage was quickly extinguished and turned into the opposite: Pure frustration about the current state of PC-gaming, combined with disdain and loathing of Rockstar.

I knew that Rockstar would probably violate both my computer and my sense of self-worth with some sort of evil copy-protection scheme, but this time I was prepared to throw my ideals overboard like some stranded guy roasting his best friend on a pike, while furiously masturbating to memories of him having his way with his friend’s wife.

Despite my moral downfall, one thing I still cannot bring myself to do is to accept Windows Live. Just like Steam I reject this sort of monolithic paternalism in its entirety. I do NOT want to connect to the internet to save my game. Period. I have 1 Terabyte of storage on my PC, I can save MILLIONS of GTA4 savefiles, I want to have it on my local harddrive, end of story. After activation I want to have the game on my PC, still activated, till the day the music dies, and I want to play the game even without being connected to the internet. Why do I want this? Because I actually care about my privacy. Yes, remember that word? Privacy? You’ve heard of it, right? I will not give anyone the right to know what I am doing in the privacy of my own 4 walls, noone has the right to know when I play GTA4, for how long, and how much I suck at it. Neither Rockstar nor Microsoft is entitled to this information. They are entitled to my money, afterwards they are entitled to going away to disappear into the meadows of obscurity. And maybe come out once in a while to deliver some patches, which, reading the reviews, I think they are going to need. Wow.

Windows-Live is just another travesty like Windows Vista, which is a clunky piece of unnavigable trash. Vistas menu-structure is simply horrendous, and the control panel, no words for the control panel – I mean did their designers purposely decide to force me through 10 minutes of searching till I actually find anything? Can menu-names be any more uninformative? I don’t even want to find out. And now they expect me to welcome Live into my PC? No. Matchmaking and playing online were NEVER a problem EXCEPT in the rare occasions in which companies decided that selling out to companies, like the one behind Gamespy, was somehow reasonable business practice.

Another problem is this Rockstar “Social Club”-hogwash. Does anyone in their right mind actually give a shit about “sharing user profiles” with other people, running around virtually killing people and blowing up cars/buildings/playgrounds? What the hell is wrong with these people?

I know I could be potentially be shooting myself in the foot, since this is wordpress after all, and lets face it, it’s a platform for sexually unsatisfied losers to talk about how much Rockstar is pissing them off, but there has to be a difference! And there is of course, because I actually write here on my own free will, while this social club nonsense is imposed upon me, if I want to play the game. You simply know that a service is going to suck if they actually require you to use it, and not give it to you as an option. But of course they do force it, because if they wouldn’t, then noone would give a damn.

Rockstar, I’ve been a loyal customer since GTA1 – but there is always a time to say goodbye. I can’t say that you’ve always treated me nicely, because most of the time you’ve been a bug riddled hassle, but we all have our faults. But this time your constant bitching and jealous hand-holding was simply too much for me to bear. I really hope you learn your lesson, and if not, well then go to hell.

By the way, I tried to include some pictures to make this wall of text more appealing, but ill be damned if I have to load another one of these fucking flash animations on their homepage – HTML simply isn’t good enough anymore it seems.

Since the release of the latest x264 versions (in my case 20081012-2245), there have been some problems compiling MPlayer with x264 support. These problems express themselves in these error messages:

libx264.c: In function ‘X264_init’:
libx264.c:165: error: ‘x264_param_t’ has no member named ‘b_bframe_adaptive’
libx264.c:228: error: ’struct <anonymous>’ has no member named ‘b_bidir_me’
libx264.c:229: error: ’struct <anonymous>’ has no member named ‘b_bframe_rdo’
libx264.c:254: error: ’struct <anonymous>’ has no member named ‘psz_rc_eq’
make[1]: *** [libx264.o] Error 1

These problems stem from the latest versions having some members of a struct renamed. There is a thread on mplayer-devel concerning exactly this problem, but sadly the patch doesn’t seem to go far enough since I still get some compiler errors even after applying the patch (the first error goes away, the others stay – figures). Therefore I scurried around the interwebs a bit and found this thread on gentoo bugzilla, which supplies a working patch.

At this point some of you may actually be wondering how to apply one of these patch files – Simply place the patch file in your mplayer root folder (where the configure script is and so on), open your console, change to the mplayer root directory, and type in:

patch -p0 < patchname

So if your patch file is named “ff.patch”, type in:

patch -p0 < ff.patch

Now if you have used the second patch you may have noticed that the patch program says that it cant find the file to patch. This is normal since patch assumes the file is in another directory altogether, which you can see by looking at the patch file with a normal text editor. When asked which file to patch type in:

libavcodec/libx264.c

After that you can simply resume by running make again. Happy compiling.

So the debate is finally over and everything is calming down again. In any case, the debate on the 26th was, and I hope most will agree with this sentiment, pretty goddamn boring. Not so much boring as in the “well I never knew that before, hahaha”-kind of way, but more in the “my god stop loafing around and just start debating already”-alley. I was expecting both parties to really try and knock the other one out in an epic matchup, but what I got instead was Obama trying to be the nice afro-american from across the street, and McCain on drugs and therefore looking down on his shoes half the time like someone with compulsory vertigo, preventing any funnies to be had there either. McCain did get a bit pissy in the end, and I hoped that this would spark some much needed confrontation, but Obama didn’t retaliate at all, even seemed a bit intimidated, which I find somewhat ironic, since his opponent didn’t even have the guts to look him straight in the eyes during the whole ordeal.

It was all in all a very unnecessary debate, and I do blame the host for this poor performance somewhat – He did try a little to spark some sort of meager fire, but he never really wanted to burn his hands in the process, probably because of not wanting to be seen as “biased”, oh no, not that! But then again, maybe he was just caught off guard by expecting the two candidates to finally graduate from kindergarten, and start delivering some blows like in middle school. Is that is too much to ask of the next president of the USA? Sadly enough it seems to be so.

This has got to be one of the most vile pieces of propaganda I have ever seen. Göbbels would be proud. Equating war with NASCAR has got to be another low for the USA. No actual fighting in the video, no soldier yelling “MOTHERFUCKERRRR!!!!” while shooting his MG mounted on top his jeep at anything which moves, no soldiers infiltrating a mosque and killing people on the ground, no soldiers going batshit crazy from severe mental trauma. No, of course not. Here the soldiers rummage around in a house and find *GASP* weapons on the first crate they see. Here the soldiers are mentally well prepared for a kid running after his soccer ball on the middle of the street. In here the everyone is a soldier, firefighters too. The cheering masses of the NASCAR stadium are willing to fight… well… wave for their hero! Isn’t that cute? Any good person is a warrior inside, right?

I wouldn’t even be so fazed if the people actually were aware that this is indeed propaganda, but most are actually defending this piece of shit. Just look at the goddamn text people:

So don’t tell me who’s wrong and right

Don’t tell me who’s wrong or right? Did I hear this correctly? it doesn’t matter if  the war was justified, needed, or even simply adequate, now all those liberal pussies are supposed to forget everything that’s gone wrong and simply get their nuts blown off anyway, because it doesn’t really matter? How can anyone in their right mind not object to this?

When liberty starts slipping away

Oh yes “liberty”. You mean the liberty to invade other countries, ransack their oil, and then lose thousands of troops and civilians in a bloody guerrilla war? Liberty means the freedom of the individual, not the freedom of the state.

And if you ain’t gonna fight
Get out of the way

That’s right, we’ll just do whatever we want, regardless of what you liberal pussies think. FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! Uargh!!!!!

‘Cause freedom ain’t so free
When you breathe red, white and blue

Freedom isn’t so free when America’s involved? Is this supposed to be satire after all?

I’m giving all of myself
How ’bout you?

YOU DIDN’T EVEN SERVE, SHUT THE HELL UP ASSHOLE! Seriously, how condescending can you get?

And they call me warrior

Yep, because you’re not there to spread peace, you aren’t there to help, you are there to FIGHT and kick some infidels in their nuts. USA USA!

They call me loyalty

Who needs to think when other people already do it for you, right kid? I like how they refrained from using “patriot”, maybe that card’s been played out too much even by their standards, and that’s really saying something.

I will never accept defeat

You know what they call people like you? Zealot.

I’m a Soldier in war
Civilian in peace

According to Bush Americas’ war against terrorism will last 100+ years. Anyone see a connection?

These are just some of the lyrics in this song. How can anyone not think this is propaganda? I just don’t get it. Are people really this stupid? But then again, I don’t think they were going after the intellectual elite when they put this crap together, and those pesky Orwellian proles are just the right people to form into cannon fodder err… I mean WARRIORS ARGHH!.

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.

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.

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!

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