epic.LAN – Day 2

Late start today, funny that, but we’re all up now and we’re McD’s breakfast fuelled for fun (the Jolt Cola helps too). The story of our morning will be with you shortly, so get off the edge of your seats…

10:00
Wake time involved being hit in the head, as the ear-lugs are far too effective.

10:30 to 12:30
After hopping to my machine, still in the sleeping bag, we resolved to get Gazz on line once and for all. Owen had brought his Mac along, in place of Gazz’s now discarded machine. Cue much derision from every passing person and the supplier of said machine becoming increasingly defensive. Then we tried every Windows DVD we had so that it would take it, we got a long way with XP Media Centre Ed. then had to change discs and the Mac doesn’t have a hardware button to eject the disc (nice going there Mr Jobs, looks nice but functional it ain’t). We got there eventually though and now Editor Hayes is well on his way into the ARG, catching the leaders who had a head start due to their good performance yesterday.

With the help of Gazz’s 1.5TB external drive, I sorted out my shares and figured out how to use DC++, then I was away. Hurrahh!!
-Ado

13:00 to 14:00
Gazz is looking at videos to solve his ARG issues, I’m looking at everyone and their mother’s shares and Owen now has the side off his PC. RAM issues, it would appear, causing inopportune Blue Screen issues at random intervals. So the second member of our party has PC problems, that makes 2/3, I’m ow feeling rather lucky to have a functioning machine, but don’t want to curse it. Anyway, he seems to be running now, but reduced to 4GB RAM from his initial 6GB.

The next game I’m looking forward to is TF2 at 17:00, preceded by 1 hour of CoD:MW, which I don’t have. I have Modern Warfare 2, which we wont be playing as it doesn’t have support for Dedicated Servers at LAN events (or generally in fact), good call there Infinity Ward, you’ve managed to make people not play the latest iteration of one of the biggest gaming franchises at what is surely the fanatical level of PC gaming. Nothings says “we’ve sold-out for the casual audience” like a massive game that’s not played at LANs. Seems like terribly case of foot-shootage to me. After all, what happens at these events tends to effect things elsewhere further down the line.
-Ado

14:15:30
Well I’ve been ARGing since about 12 and am currently 11th of 50, so I still have some work to do to catch the leaders. The last puzzle was particularly taxing, involving autokeyed vignere’s, decoding video clip clues, map overlays and frantic running around the racecourse like the fillies I’m prohibited from spending on. Fun though. The next puzzle seems pretty cryptic, may need sustenance before I tackle it. Also werewolves last night was fun, there are more games due tonight so I’ll fill you all in on that later.
-Gazz

15:30-17:00
Well I finally finished the ARG, some pretty good puzzles, right up my alley. Unfortunately I don’t think I finished high enough to have won anything. TF2 will be starting shortly, and I know Mr Cooper is keen to strut his stuff in that particular forum…

epic.LAN – Day 1

Well… we’re here, we’re alive and we’re set-up… sort of. FYI; I’ve also not showered and have my PJ bottoms on as underwear… Living the dream or what??

12:00 to 13:15
My car wasn’t ready so our learned friend Mr Ashcroft kindly made his way from Manchester to Uttoxeter via Chesterfield. He arrived at 11:00 and by 12:15 we were away (“I hardly even faffed at all” – Ado exaggerated). The drive down was standard, save for the 15 mins in traffic on our Uttox approach in which our dastardly driver was heard to say “…someone better have died, else it’s not worth it”.
-Ado

13:15 to 13:45
Feeling rather famished after the morning’s efforts we stopped in at our favourite American chicken eatery. As we walked in the colonel seemed to have a rather unsettling look in his eye and we didn’t have to wait long to find out why. As we began to order we were all told, in turn, “I’m afraid we have no pieces chicken”… Yep, that’s right, KFC had NO CHICKEN… well for at least a half hour. Bemused but rendered powerless by the white-suited warriors secret special scent, we ordered our burgers and waited.
-Ado

Putting the ass back in fast food
-Gazz

14:00
Arrival at the LAN and initial set-up. Everything seemed to be going so well… until…
-Ado

15:00 to 15:45
PC break-down. The nightmare of every LANer. At approximately 15:00 Gazz changed his power configuration, simply unplugging his base and monitor from the main supply into a 4-gang splitter. Imediately tragedy hit, nothing on the monitor, no signal and no PC :o(

For the next 45 minutes we collectively tried to save her. Plugging the monitor and graphics output in to various different pieces of equipment to evaluated what the problem may be. Trying every different config we could think of but to no avail. The power was on throughout, but no-one was home with-in.

Eventually the monitor sprung to life, connected through VGA (instead of DVi) into another machine. Whilst this was good, the bad news was that the PC was at fault with the most likely suspect being the graphics card.
-Ado

16:00 to 16:30
Graphics being isolated as the possible scupper to plans of LANtertainment, Gazz struck out to resolve the issue. The guy from Kustom PC had arrived with his boxes of goodies, but upon questioning had inexplicably brought no graphics cards… One quick Google search later revealed several component shops in striking distance, a few phone calls later and we had a winner. A GeForce 9600 for £80 and just a spit away. Our chauffeur had to leave for a Motor Head gig in Manchester at 17:00 (and they call me disorganised) so Gazz and he made their way to the jalopy and sped their way to retrieve the requisite part.
-Ado

16:30 to 17:00
Upon their return the task was took in hand with speed (well, WoW Mountain Dew – Gamer Fuel/Jolt Cola (or beer for the men amongst us -Gazz)). The card inserted and the machine powered up, but still nothing. People crowded, suggested solutions, tweaked and prodded but nothing would work. Time of death was declared at 17:05
-Ado

sob
-Gazz

17:05
Our transportation master had to leave, but he would return after the gig and he promised to bring a laptop on which the increasingly unfortunate Gazz could game forth. Until that time, however, he would try his hand at the epic.LAN ARG using the machine now left vacant. That was until that all went a bit squiffey too.

17:30 to 18:30
Thought worry ye not Owen (and laugh ye not at the luckless Mr. Gazz’s plight), after a few epic.ADMIN looks at the browser and a soft reset or two later, connections were restored and displays relit. On with the gaming I say… OOONNNNNNN!!!!
-Ado

18.30-20.00
I don’t play many FPS games, quite a disadvantadge at a LAN event, however epic.LAN has a rather fiendish ARG style treasure hunt to exercise my cerebral muscles. Starting as I have, much later than my fellow gamers, I have no chance of finishing first today; in fact people finished before we arrived. However, the grand prize is won tomorrow, so all is not lost. I am currently up to a puzzle that involves locating areas shown in a video clip, presumabley for letters or clues left there. Unfortunately it is now dark and doesn’t exactly lend itself to clue hunting. I may need to return to this tomorrow.
-Gazz

20.01
Maybe it was the break and the clarity it gave but as soon as I editted this, I went back to the puzzle and it jumped straight out at me. That was the final clue too, until 12 noon tomorrow. Wish me luck :)
-Gazz

20:30
Well Gazz is happily playing a bit of Battlefield 2 on Ashcroft’s machine, and me? Me dear reader, I’m sat here waiting for the patch to be uploaded into the FTP for me to apply before I can join in. What was that? Download it you say? Ah yes, well I would but it’s a 2Gb patch from the original disc version I have. I just hope they get it there in time for me to play in the “Big Game” at 21:00. It’s one of my favourite games too, only let down by the lack of “Fritz” to fight. Now I wait in hope…
-Ado

20:40-20:45
Still waiting… and Gazz has moved on to King’s Bounty now. Much more his style I think.
Woot!! They are here, so very relieved…
-Ado

20.45-22.45
King’s Bounty was a little wordy for a LAN game, maybe when I have more time to get immersed it will be fun, just not right now. It’s ok though, the ‘big game’ of BF2 started at 9. Turns out it’s quite good fun to play as the Arabs and kill the infidels.  Right time for a bit of Champions Online to help me stop the trigger-finger-twitch
-Gazz

23:30
Ok, interesting things going on all around, but I’m not involved :o( Counter Strike Source is being played 1v1 knock-out for a trifle as main prize and there’s a group of people playing a game called “Werewolves” over at the other dies of the bar (they’re rowdy but I can’t seem to figure out why or what’s going on). A small number of folks are playing L4D2 and a growing number watching videos of one type or another. Oh and there’s a Trance DJ set on, not my thing but it’s inoffensive enough for me to ignore.

As for your intrepid Stup. Ed.s; After losing patience with the FPS style, Gazz has paid the extortionate sum of £2.99 is downloading Civ3:Complete and I’m doing an install run of Fallout 3. It was either that or Bioshock, as that’s still in it’s shrink wrap, but I was advised to finish one first before starting the other.

You see, it doesn’t matter that we’re not playing against each other, just that we’re all playing here together… ahhhh
-Ado

05:01
And now it is to bed I must go, or at least the floor about 10 yards away. I’ve watched an updated a lot of stuff in this time, prepared my shares for tomorrow and Gazz has played many games of “Werewolves”. I think it may be something you all come to know more about, I’m sure he’ll explain tomorrow. Night night…
-Ado

Tags: dead computers, epic.LAN, epic.THREE, live blog, pain

The Calm Before The epic.WEEKEND

Ah, lovely stuff…

And as you tune in, good reader, here I am happily preparing for my weekend’s entertainment. Thursday was my Friday this week, hazzah!! So, instead of working on Kinderday©, I and one other Stupor Ed (plus 20% of our readership, in our mate Owen) will be making the short journey down to a place know primarily for it’s racecourse, the sleepy market town of Uttoxeter. It is to the Racecourse we will go, however not, I hasten to add, to fritter our money away on young fillies, but to fritter our time on this earth away playing in computerised gaming constructs and basically leeching all the files we can get our grubby mitts on from the other sci-fi/fantasy/anime geeks in attendance.

epic.THREE is our destination and we plan on reporting the goings-on live directly to you, fair reader, from the trenches of PC gaming itself.

Yes, between Sappers destroying our grounded F16s with explodey jeeps, me shooting some guy’s face off with a Flak Cannon and Gazz trying to conquer all of Asia using diplomacy, we will endeavour to keep up a “Live Blog”, giving you details of what we observe happening on the front lines of the hardcore gaming community. If it helps, you can imagine it a bit like Twitter, but longer and on a web-page.

Anywho, I’m as organised as ever. I presently have no car (it’s in the garage having it’s head changed), have just installed a 1.5TB hard disc I’ve had for a fortnight (for the leeching mentioned above), am backing up my Steam games to said drive in order to repartition my old drive into one and subsequently reinstalling Windows 7 plus games. All this whilst bunged up with cold, running on a portion of chips with two “brown circles” and three quarters of a bottle of Spitfire.

I have now corrected my introductory statement. Now leave me alone… but be sure to tune in tomorrow for exciting instalments of our fumblings with “The Gamersphere”©.

Tags: epic.LAN, epic.THREE, gaming, geeks, Kinderday, LAN event, PC

Maple Breakfast Delight

What you will need for this dish:
One Kripsy Kreme glazed ring doughnut with Maple icing
Four smoked bacon medallions
A hefty knife
A frying pan
A disdain for the advice of medical practitioners

Go to Krispy Kreme and buy no less than one dozen doughnuts. If you do the maths when making your purchase you’ll find that by not getting a minimum of 12 lovely sugar filled, sugar coated sugar balls you wont save as much money as you could. However, do share them with a friend or two, or you may die an immediate diabetes related death.

Yummy Time

Take your hefty, preferably serrated, knife and saw a glazed Maple iced dough ring in two. Try not to get your fingers in either the the icing, as that will spoil the look of your creation, or in the way of your cutty piece of metal, that might ruin your digital-dexterity based superiority over all of natures other creatures.

Cloven in Twain

Now it’s time for the meat. Get your pan, warm her up and throw in the pig flesh and fry until nicely cooked through. For the Jewish or Muslim person, smoked turkey rashers can be substituted. For those perverse individuals who shun the consuming of animals, you might want to take a minutes to think seriously about what you’re doing with your life, then strap on a pair and get with the program.

Close to the meat

Time for the assembly. Place four medallions on the base and put the top half in pride of place atop the mound of meat. Again, be careful not to ruin the effect you’ll feel when viewing the completed delight by splodging your fat fingers in that maple loveliness. Once it’s all together, sit back and admire your handy work while you psych yourself for an experience of a life time (if you eat more than one your heart my instantly explode through your chest).

Plated Beautifully

And there we have it, nomage ahoy hoy, and one Stupefyingly lucky editor enjoying his Sunday breakfast. Truly the best start to a day of rest.

Nom nom nom...

Tags: bacon, breakfast, doughnuts, Krispy Kreme, recipe, screw you jamie oliver

Tagged… in the USA…

A year ago, in an uncharacteristic show of generosity, a close friend of mine loaned me his “spare” X-Box 360 indefinitely. Over looking how lucky I was to secure such a deal, this has lead to much annoyance on my part and I’ll tell you for why…

When logging on I found the American market place information, this seemed pretty cool, that was until I tried to buy anything and was given the message “not available in your current location”.

Some time later (when I couldn’t download the Duke Nukem 3D demo!?!), I decided this would no longer do. I went to the X-Box Live website to change my information and found I was able to change every detail apart from my country, which was greyed out and displayed as “United States of America”.

Brown's Broken British X-Box

Pausing for thought, I figured this may be because my Gamertag information could be linked to my MS Passport, which in turn was populated by my Hotmail account. I vaguely remembered signing up for a US Hotmail account to get the .com address rather than the .co.uk, but that was in 1998 so memories are fuzzy. Acting on this hunch I went to check it out and change the country if I needed to, which would hopefully precipitate the change I required.

After changing my address from somewhere in Puerto Rico (yeah, I know) to England I checked back but nothing had changed. I tried further times and on several different areas, but no matter what I tried the country of my X-Box Live account never changed. Reluctantly I phoned their helpline and was reassured that many other people have experienced the same problem, usually when moving from one country to another for work or university. “Excellent” I said, “there must be a solution then”. “There is”, I was told, “just start a new Gamertag but put England in it this time…”.

Yeah, and that’s it. End of conversation. No more steps. Just bin your ‘tag and don’t use it again. No transferring of achievements or memberships, no process for keeping your MS Fun-buck$ or downloaded content (although this obviously didn’t apply to me), nope just start again from scratch.

Apparently it’s “Impossible” to change that entry on the database. Being a user of MS Access I can well believe that making anything do what you want it to on a Microsoft database can be unnecessarily hard but also being an IT Professional I know that “Impossible” is almost certainly untrue. As such I have decided to continue my quest to find a way around this.

To be continued…

Tags: Duke Nukem, gamers, gamertag, games, Microsoft, Puerto Rico, wtf?, X-Box, X-Box Live

The best form of Offence…

A story came to my attention this week regarding a TV show and a comedian I rather like. The basics of the item were that Frankie Boyle had been disciplined by the BBC for a joke he made on the panel show Mock the Week. He said that Rebecca Adlington (of Olympic swimming fame) resembled “someone who’s looking at themselves in the back of a spoon”. This lead to 75 complaints and precipitated a BBC Trust meeting that decreed the comments may have caused offence to the audience. Boyle has since discontinued his involvement with the show, but the story went on, covering Miss Adlington’s agent recently stating that they thought that he’d not been sufficiently punished and that the BBC had let him off lightly.

I reacted in several ways to this article, and they were as follows:

+ I loled, finding the joke reasonably amusing and “it’s funny ‘cause it’s true”.

+ Well that’s a shame, I like that show and he’s the funniest comedian on it.

+ I’m not too keen on her any more. I thought she seemed quite nice, but if she can’t laugh at herself then she’s not as British as I supported her for being (let’s not forget she is from Mansfield after all).

+ What the hell is it coming to when a COMEDIAN can’t make a JOKE on what is quite obviously a COMEDY show.

I can’t believe that anyone could realistically think that regular viewers of Mock the Week don’t realise that some of the content may be a little cutting and would therefore be offended by it. Therefore my conclusion must be that this judgement was made as a horrible knee-jerk reaction to the personal involvement of a well known sporting personality, which is no way to run a public funded television station.

This does obviously raise larger questions about where you draw the lines in comedy and how they should be policed. There are some things we can broadly agree aren’t appropriate for people of certain ages, but that’s not what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about adults in the society we “of-age” inhabit.

Personally I’m a proponent of the Stan Marsh school of thought on this question, “Either everything’s alright or nothing is”.

You can’t start laying down rules, because everything risks offending someone somewhere in someway. Especially when it comes to comedy, as you’re laughing at something and that thing can easily be a person, a group of people or something people feel passionately about.

What exactly is the problem with causing offence anyway? A great number of things offend me. Pumping billions of pounds of tax payer money into the banking system, only to have them immediately start paying out bonuses again. The National Lottery being run by a profit making company, people actually voting for X-Factor contestants, oh, and Miss K Price being at all paid attention to by anyone ever.

However, I’m adult, so I take that offence and channel it into rants like this. I don’t start stamping my feet like a baby and tell them to stop, stop, stop. I simply take note that those people are probably idiots and move on with my life with that in mind.

It is a human right we all have to free speech, the problem I see is that few people realise that it comes with the responsibility to maturely manage any offence you might suffer as a result of someone else exercising that right.

Tags: auntie, bbc, comedy, expression, free, offence, rant, speech

I have your movies…

Hey guys and gals and none gender specific trolls (I’m lookin at you Squeil). I just came up with a lovely new game I’ve been playing with myself (please do not insert your own grammar into that sentence and that’s not new, it’s the second oldest game, just behind the game*). It involves entering a message into your mobile/cell** phone and then using the predictive text to deliberately alter the meaning to obscure your true intentions, thus rendering the recipient blissfully unaware of truth that lies beneath…

This can be done for best effect when having something horribly hateful to say but simply disguising it as an informational text or, even better, something nice and complimentary.

80s Style!!!

If you want to have a go and then wish to share that go with the world*** post your best tries in the comments section, either with the actual message you have subtly camouflaged in [square brackets] or leaving us all to hazard foolish guesses.

* not the wrestler
** delete as applicable
*** world may only extend to the three people that read this blog ever now and then

Tags: camouflage, cellphone, games, modile phone, movies, predictive text, Squeil, word

The Bleeping Bleeper

So I’m sat there in the wonderful silence of a just emptied office.

“Bleepy, bleep, bleep…” says my phone and I ignore it. It’s probably just Vodaphone telling me I’ll get free texts for an hour in February if I spend another 43p on ring tones or some such.

[Five Great British minutes pass]

“Bleepy, bleep, bleep…” erhhhh, I sigh. I’m trying to get some open-eyed sleep here. I glance to my phone and it’s glowing it’s little flashy “I have something for you” glow. “Leave me alone world”, I think out load and continue to ignore.

[A further five minutes go by]

“Bleepy, bleep, bleep…” I take a cleansing breath, sit up a little straighter and turn to the handset. The screen is progressively lighting up then darkening out as I stare. “Oh well” I think, “it could be a dirty text…”.

I take hold of the phone, closing my eyes wearily as I bring it closer, flicking the screen up with my thumb, revealing the keypad beneath and unlocking the myriad delights that lie within.

I pause for a second then open my eyes. “Low Battery” it says on the half-dark screen. The closing down animation begins and blingy-blongs at me as the phone dies.

Artist's Impression

Placing the silver now brick aside, I close my eyes and hold my head in my hands thinking about the genius that decided a cell phone’s final resources would be best spent on bleeping and flashing the technicolour death rattle I just experienced. Probably the same wonder-kint that devised the system that sent me 17 e-mails while I was on holiday, to inform me that I had too many e-mails in my inbox.

I raise my head, a solitary tear trickling down my cheek with the final realisation of why they’re actually called cell phones…

Tags: bleep, bleepy, cell, Emo, mobile

Unhappy Shopper…

This might sound like a silly question and I guess it is, but whilst sat here wondering about stuff I don’t think anyone even cares about it occurred to me that most shops are open all day, closing between 17:00 and 17:30 each night. My question is why??

After some brief musing it does seem quite illogical really. Surely the target audience for shops is those with an money and preferably an income, the white whale of these being young professionals with no dependents bring with them that awesome treasure trove the retail lords know as “disposable income”.

As the name implies, this most bountiful of quarries have jobs, usually reasonably well paying jobs that require nine to five attendance at some form of office or singular location. This very fact means that they are almost certainly not available to peruse for their next purchase during the hours the retail outlets deem they should be open. Where is the logic in this??

Game - Tuesday 11:03am

Surely it follows that the majority of people any shop would play host to during week days are those of either the unemployed or too old to be employed. The later have earned the right to spend money on whatever they want but generally have little motivation to spend and the former shouldn’t really be encouraged to spend their money on consumer goods, by having the sotres open whilst they have little to do.

I can see why shops would open during such hours on weekends, as that time slot would likely be the most preferable for those wanting to fulfil their economic responsibility as a consumer. However, even this is curtailed by Sunday trading regulations. I happen to agree with Sunday trading being restricted, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it, as it does seem to exacerbate the situation we find ourselves in.

In any case, would it not be better to simply open at 14:00 and close about 22:00 throughout the week??

Thank you. This has been my plan for saving the failing economy. I am Adrian Cooper and I am your next Prime Minister of these United Kingdoms of Great Britain…

Tags: consumer, disposable income, economic plan, logic, opening hours, retail, shopping

Gameswipe FTW

Just thought I’d post a quick FYI for all of those gamers that read this blog from time to time.

What I anticipate to be a rather interesting program airs tonight that should contribute to the on-going debate over the health and effect of computer gaming and the treatment of those gamers by society. This particular show should be of most interest to people who like their documentaries with a sarcastically honest edge, as it has been compiled by one Mr Charlie Brooker, he of Screenwipe and more recently Newswipe fame. The televisualation will air tonight at 10pm on BBC4 and will most likely be available via iPlayer soon thereafter.

For those of you who aren’t aware, this also comes as a timely riposte to an ITV “documentary” which went to screen last week. That particular piece of pseudo science, reactionary drivel followed three children over three years, in what was laughably referred to as an “experiment”, to see how these kiddies dealt with videogames in their lives and what affects they might have. Apart from proving that individuals with various social disorders should be wary of the dangers of over indulgence in the electronic arts*, it also displayed the journalistic integrity of a hobo standing an a box reading aloud from an upside down copy of The Daily Star by relating every behavioural problem they could find to avid video gaming. My personal best was 7 minutes continuous viewing, before having to pause again and take deep breathes to assuage my frustration and outright anger at some of the crazy claims and bulls**t statistics used to justify them.

I’d urge everyone to try and watch the above travesty (available here on ITV’s website for a time) in preparation for tonight’s undoubtedly superior observational piece on a phenomenon of our times.

Watch, record or iPlayer Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe or thou shalt be full of lose…

Tags: Charlie Brooker, Daily Star, documentary, gamers, games, Hobo