Well, as for me the month of May is certainly off to a good start. For one thing it is finally beginning to warm up in Ohio, and we are no longer dealing with the effects of the cold we had this past winter. The last couple of days it has gotten up into the 70's, is sunny, and has a fair breeze. So that in of itself is good.

My son and I went to a flea market yesterday and I purchased a guitar amp for $20. It was a decent practice amp, and I think it is something we both will enjoy as it is both small but has a number of effects on it.

I also managed to take my son to a pawn shop yesterday and replaced his Playstation 2 with a used one. So we spent a couple of hours yesterday just playing games like Nascar Thunder 2004 and Off Road Racing 2005. Both were fun although not accessible enough for me.

In other news I am working my way through Steve Berry's Cotton Malone series. I've read the books before, but not in order and one after another so it is fun reading them all in chronological order. At the moment I am now on the Emperor's Tomb which is the sixth book in the series.

As a side project I have updated one of my older laptops with 2 GB of ram, a 100 GB hard drive, and restored it to Windows XP. The main purpose behind fixing up this older laptop is to turn it into a gaming machine. As people know some games such as Eaman don't work on newer versions of Windows as well as some of my favorite IF interpreters so I am fixing up an older computer with XP to serve the purpose of playing and running older software that doesn't meat newer specifications. So far that is turning out well for my purposes.

Fortunately, a lot of the stuff I want to run doesn't need the latest and greatest hardware. Eaman is just a glorified text based roll playing game, and most of the Dos games like Piledriver, Wrestling League Manager, and Any Night Football don't need super specs either. Any machine that can run 16-bit Dos apps will do the job.

I also have the added bonus that I have some relatively modern apps like Windows Media Player 11 on there so it isn't just all gaming. I can listen to mp3s, play DVD movies, and pretty much turn that laptop into a multimedia computer and reserve office type work, programming, and the internet for a machine running a newer version of Windows or Linux.

Glad people is using this topic.

@Cae,  agreed on  Ios and net browsing,  much as I love vo and the touch screen interface for many things,  using the internet is not one of them, the way it handles even standard stuff like dropdowns and labeled images is just screwy for some reason. It's odd, the choiceofgames titles are all fairly standard html and I can play those fine, but on even comparatively normal websites like here I never find things work well, let alone crazier ones (I once attempted to play core exiles on my phone which didn't work out).

With Frozen, I can't say compared to the hype sinse as I said before all the barrage of superhero blockbusters and such has pretty much soured me on popular opinions of hollywood, especially with how most major action films these days tend to come out, get a huge wave of acclaim and then fall off the map almost entirely. Also with disney particularly I have not especially enjoyed much of their pixar cg runaround stuff anyway, and even in 2009 with The Frog Prince which was supposedly an attempt to go back to a traditionally animated disney musical the thing felt rather flat over all and more like a box ticking exercise than as if anyone really cared. that was why frozen surprised me, my expectations weren't exactly high. They weren't low either, I didn't go in expecting to hate the film (sinse generally speaking if you begin expecting to hate  something you will), I just wasn't prepared for something with the  writing quality and emotional woomf! Of course also bare in mind I am a fan of both musicals and classic style disneys anyway. For someone who isn't, I don't know how much affect it'd have.

@Tom, I've not run across Steve Berry before, what sort of thing does he do? Also I have to say I'm always impressed at anyone who can play anything with strings .

@Arq, I'm sorry to hear about your girlfriend that sounds horribly painful even if the watching films and spending time bit sounds nice.

Yesterday evening I had  one of my more random friends turn up, cook venison casserol and invite one of his friends who we both refer to as gandalf, sinse he's a doctor of divinity with a long white beerd, a liking for red wine and a definite interest and knolidge of old languages and legends. He's quite a fascinating chap, and I actually do wish I'd recorded him speaking the old welsh Legend of the giant Bran the blessed, which was completely awsome!

Also my friend did his usual amount of insanity/generosity and bought several bottles of goodness knows how expensive wine, plus port which was great he also bought me as a present about £70 worth of chocolates, which is wonderful if a bit mad (though most of them I'm saving for his next visit to share with him).

Even though I held to my usual practice and partook of the wine in sparing quantities, (I've actually never had a hang over or been too drunk to remember what I was doing sinse I always reach a distinct stopping point when i know I've had enough, the fact we were all up until two Am did mean I've been a little on the dead side today, principley continuing with the wheel of time stuff, but hay it's a Sunday and there's nothing major on the shedule, ---- well nothing accept god knows how much washing up and cleaning of my kitchin, sinse though he is a fantastic chef, my friend does have an unfortunate tendency to use every single utensil I own and turn my kitchin into a disaster areaa, still it's usually worth it.

@Dark, Steve Berry writes action thrillers. Most of them have some historical angle that has major bearing on today and involves the Magellan Billet which is supposed to be a top secret intelligence group for the U.S. Justice Department. I personally like them because they involve what I like to call speculative history, some adventure, and are just all around good books. I'd highly recommend them if you are into action and adventure type books.

@Dark, I do see where you are getting at. For the most part I agree with you that a lot of books are biased and since they are written by a person of a certain country he naturally props his or her country up as the good guys and assumes his or her readers likewise feel the same. Therefore the story specifically targets people within his or her own culture. However, there are exceptions to the rule.

For example, in Steve Berry's book, The Venetian Betrayal, while America is obviously the good guys it isn't America specifically in harm's way. In that book it is about a woman who takes over central Asia, creates a new country called the Central Asian Federation, and plans to conquer the entire middle east using biological warfare which could lead to millions upon millions dead if the biological agents were ever to be released. Tied up in that plot is the search for the last resting place of Alexander the Great who was supposedly entombed with a natural cure for many biological and viral infections. Truly an interesting book in plot and in the so-called crisis at hand.

However, I do agree that most spy thrillers are often times the same thing different book. So can't totally blame you for blowing off the genre. I have grown tired of it as a genre myself after having read just about everything I can get my paws on, and finding most of it follows a predetermined plot and similar concept as the last one I read. Steve Berry, though, is a little different in that a lot of his books involve treasure hunts for things like the Amber Room, the lost Library of Alexandria, the lost tomb of Alexander the Great, and so on which I do think are interesting and are side quests that go along with the plot against a nation or nations at hand.

As for the royal family generally speaking I don't have any particular interest in them either. Although, in the case of Princes Diana I really did like her, and she had quite a following over here in the States so  a lot of people, including me, really took her death hard. In my personal case I am a humanitarian and really admire the various work she was doing in the last years of her life promoting humanitarian causes and working with various charities. She was a very outgoing personality, someone who didn't seem stuck up or selfish, which is why she stood out from the rest of the royals.

As for your own feelings towards that event it does seem a bit insensitive, but it is hard to feel anything towards someone you don't personally know or have any connection with. I didn't know Diana either personally, but I did have an emotional connection of sorts with her through the news media. As I said I admired the work she was doing so was sorry to see her die so young with so many things left to do in the world. Although, because I didn't actually know her etc I wasn't morning or grieving over her death. Popular people die all the time and while their passing makes me feel a bit sad its not really a personal loss one way or the other. So can understand to a certain degree your own insensitivity on the matter.

Anyway, just because I am an American doesn't mean I necessarily care about plots involving the assassination of a president. Most of them I don't really personally care about so have no emotional connection with the plot or characters in the book. It is only if the president in the book happens to be a character like Jack Ryan who has been the main character in many Tom Clancy books before becoming President of the United States does any sort of assassination plot matter to me in a book. In most cases the presidents in most books are generic characters meant to imitate one U.S. president or another thus don't mean all that much to me personally.

For instance, in the Steve Berry books the president is Danny Daniels. I believe he is suppose to be loosely based on George Bush Jr. and thus isn't all that appealing to me as a character. I personally didn't like George Bush Jr. so its not surprising any fictional character based on him would equally be unappealing to me. So it is no surprise that in the Alexandria Link there is an assassination plot afoot to kill Danny Daniels and I didn't have much of an emotional investment in that part of the story. I was more interested in the quest for the lost Library of /Alexandria than the assassination plot.

Okay, appologies for the double reply but sinse I went to see Avengers age of Ultron last night and had some rather decent grubbage at Nando's I thought I'd add to this post.

Yes, I went to see an Avengers film, mostly because a couple of friends were going and hay why not? Yep, it was about what I expected, lots of big exploding things, a villain with entirely impractical plots, a mcguffin of doom, and good guys who caused maximal property damage while alternating between some genuinely funny one liners, winjings about the awfulness of being part of a small group of people who are able to cause said property damage, and big dramatic speechings on pretty much the wonderfulness of the same thing .
As I said, certainly not best film, or even good film material, and no I have not changed my view on either super heroes or the dirth of real artistic tallent inherent in hollywood (I saw a trailer for the Jurassic park remake that set me acursing, especially given the lack of John Williams).

However, two things really struck me about the Avengers and it might explain what I have against so much of this super hero malarchy. Firstly, Not one of the avengers seemed like a decent person.

All of them were either into their big duty shtick, or their team shtick, or their defeat enemy shtick, however I couldn't imagine one of them doing something I'd consider normally nice, like for example lending a friend buss fair or being willing to listen to someone with a problem, ---- indeed  any time one of them like Bruce Banner had an issue it seemed to be solved by either a lot of snarking or a monologue on the virtues of teamhood and how great being one of that particular team was.

If you asked me what the attributes of being a hero were, being able to punch through walls, gun down hoards of enemies or run as fast as a speeding bullet would be fairly low down the list, while qualities like just being there for someone, or being able to suffer real, honest to goodness trauma but carrying on with purpose regardless (and I don't mean some anxty monologue about how bad having power is, I mean something actually nasty happening to you). This would probably explain why my architype of a hero is Frodo from Lotr.

This isn't to say i don't like action sequences, action is awsome! but as the lady who is writing the wheel of time stuff does point out, crowning moments of awsome are about characters you respect doing something awsome as much as about just big showy doom.

For example, a sequence in game of thrones which is rapidly getting as big a reputation as some of the fights in starwars is the Mountain and the viper, (it's becoming a meme all of it's own).

Beware! possible spoilage for Game of thrones season 4 or A storm of Swords below.

On the one hand this involves a huge 7 foot tall brute of a knight with a gigantic sword, and a super fast, lightly armoured acrobatic knight with a spear having a major slug fest, that ends with one knight getting a spear through the guts while literally crushing the other's head with his bare hands.

However, there is more to it than that. The red Viper, Oberyn Martel, is trying to kill Gregor Kligane for what he did to his sister and her children, and during the fight he's constantly screaming accusations and trying to get kligane to admit what he did. this is even more surprising given that Martel is quite an ambiguous character in a lot of ways, (we first encounter him in a brothle enjoying the attentions of various boys and girls and complaining about northern hospitality).

The battle finishes with the Mountain, (who is not a very nice man to put it mildly), gleefully saying "Yes! I raped your sister, then I crushed her head like this!" just before he dies.

Equally, there is a huge amount riding on this combat. Tyrian is being tried at the time and this serves as his trial by combat, meaning if the REd viper loses Tyrian dies, equally if Kligane kills Martel, who is the prince of Dorn, he's pretty much guaranteeing that Dorn will seak revenge, and thus leading Dorn into serious war.

So, a cool action sequence yes, but one that serves a highly important plot function and features a majorly complex character.

A simpler example might be the Darth Mawl fight from Starwars Episode 1, which is about the only good thing in the phantom menace and I've heard some people say, the only good thing in the prequals.

yes, it's an awsome fight between two jedi and a syth with some amazing martial arts, use of the force, ---- oh and a double light sabre!  Not only does it however involve some exceptional build ups and tention making moments ever (I love that moment when the doors open and Darth Mawl is just standing there with his blade glowing, and the start of duel of the fates beginning, not to mention the awsome bit with the force fields that provides a break in the fight), but also Quigon dies! yes dies!

This is I believe one reason why the marvel films, despite their uba action are getting so quickly forgotten after each comes out, sinse iconic action sequences like the darth mawl fight, or Indiana jones and the big rolling ball in temple of doom always used pauses, extra shots, music, and breaks in the action to make sure the action had as much impact as possible, not justpiling on the damage and the quips in spade fulls.

So in conclusion, yes, hulk smash! but maybe Hulk smash better if hulk have reason to smash, and maybe hulk pause before smash sometimes to make  smash have point, otherwise Hulk boring .

Oh, and when not Hulk, maybe Bruce Banner should be a nicer person :d.

@Dark, I do agree that Bruce Banner could be a much nicer person when he is not the Hulk, but that of course would undermine the storyline. It is Bruce's anger, rage, feelings of inadequacy, etc that fuels the change from human to Hulk. Getting rid of those negative emotions which makes him a somewhat unpleasant individual would mean he wouldn't be able to change into the Hulk.

In the TV series which explores the origins of the Incredible Hulk at some depth shows his wife getting killed in a car crash and Banner being unable to save her. That sort of thing can and would cause bitterness in someone which is completely understandable. In light of how he became the Hulk it makes some sense as to why Bruce isn't the nicest person in the Avengers.

As to your points about character faults it comes back to the way Hollywood sees superhero films in general. For them its all about high action and high budget action sequences, stunning stunts, and they have no room for a more down to earth heroism like paying for someone's bus ticket or being there for a friend who needs to talk about something personal. I guess it is just too common place or mundane for the big budget action films to include that sort of thing. While that kind of common place kindness and generosity seems to be absent I try not to fault movies and TV show heroes for that because I do understand why that is the case to a certain point.

It is my conjecture that producers only have a certain amount of time to work with. They want to make a movie they think will sell, and a lot of them do not see small acts of kindness as important as action and special effects. That is why we don't see a scene with Tony Stark donating money to a charity or doing something productive with his billions of dollars, but we will se Iron Man in a long drawn out battle with a supervillain . They see it as a choice of shooting something mundane and unimportant or something that adds to the action and drama of the film.

@Ishan, to be honest I don't know if Steve Berry's books are in braille. I have never checked. I have a lot of his books in audio format from Audible , and I have also scanned quite a number of them and have them in text format. So I suppose if I were so inclined I could send them off to a braille embosser and braille them. However, brailing my own books would be pretty expensive as braille paper is pretty expensive.

Well, time for me to turn the conversation... again. I recently purchased a web site domain because me and my cousin wanted to start a business. While my cousin isn't a programmer by any sorts, he is quite techy and enjoys hangin' out with me. The original domain is http://obron.org, as a friend started Obron Multimedia with me, and then I've branched out into my cousins technology business - the one he wants to start, I mean - and the domain is http://pltechnologies.obron.org. (Do not try HTTPS!) I'm currently having some permission issues with obron.org, so pltechnologies.obron.org will be my main website residence for now.
Other than that, school's been grate. My current second semester GPA is 3.4000, my honor Roll GPA was 3.6670, and my Cumulative GPA is 3.8890. I'm not sure which is better - so if any of you know which is the overall, I'd be glad to know.

Hi Tom.

Your likely correct on the character angle and the series. i've never seen the tv series you mention, but I do recall catching a couple of episodes of the animated Hulk and Spiderman, and thinking myself I liked Bruce Banner. Indeed, I remember one story in Spiderman where for some reason Spiderman was mutating into a giant spider form occasionally, and he went to seak the help of the X men, but managed to offend  Wolvareen and most of the X men team by saying "I don't want to be a freak!" which of course they didn't take kindly, and only Beast sort of clicked that Spiderma's mutation wasn't the same as theirs.

Indeed, I will say I always thought the X men mutant plot had a huge amount of potential for really interesting conflicts in terms of discrimination, public image and all the fun things disabled people know about, although most often the films and tv series seemed to go down the easier big action route of being attacked by super beings from the dawn of time, or random aliens or something else as opposed to dealing with the real human/mutant conflic, ---- and in fact one of my favourite super hero depictions, the Anime Tiger and Bunny is all about this conflict. Marvel's tendency for less than consistant world building and tending to employ similar plot solutions, and how much worse this is in the films than the commics or tv series is another matter though.

@Ethin, good luck with the business, though what exactly is it doing? and what is a Gpa? Is this a new game, Grand pinching apples in which you are a no good country lad in the mean fields of Summerset, and go committing terrible crimes like scrumping for apples and ruthless missappropriation of cows! Not to mention showing real disrespect to any chicks you meat, ---- like cooking them or stealing their eggs .

Sorry.

Well I  am staying with my parents currently sinse we're attending another concert on saturday, last night we went for an amazing    Moroccon meal at the chef's training colige, which was good, and involved some quite unusual stuff like Lam in orange sauce and Pomegranate moose, which was good.

For other stuff, at the moment I've been trying kapi-regnum, sinse I've been looking for a none pvp city building game. The odd thing is, though kapi is certainly none pvp, I just find the hole thing a little cold. i don't really get the sense of what I'm producing, for example just putting x amount of beats with x amount of water to produce x amounts of goats, similarly just having the people as a statistic you provide a house for doesn't really give me the sense of running a medieval town with a lively population, I might as well be doing pure mathematical calculations.

In fairness the build trees are huge as is the marketing side of things, it just feels so devorced from reality. One thing I've wanted in a city building game is that definite sense of seeing my city grow and develop through my decisions an taking things from a couple of people and houses lost in the wild to a thriving metropolis, still more if I can see a bit of the lives of my population, have them have children, get married, build houses etc, but kapi-regnum doesn't give me that sense at all, it just feels completely clinical and detached.

What I do find sort of a bit scary in an interesting way, is I do wonder how much this is like actual economic thinking, that people involved in the real world iquivolents of this sort of activity, whether working for huge companies or banks or governments can get into this sort of thinking of people just as a statistic. 

I always thought A dark room on Ios was incredibly clever for this, starting you off with  building huts for refugees, and then having your villagers workassigned to produce various things, but then after you've built two huts suddenly having your villages calle slaves, an the messages about erecting new buildings as well as some of the random responses getting increasingly grimmer, apparently some people put the game down then and there, but in fairness sinse your having said people work for no pay and produce resources which you the character uses out in the world to fight battles, gain weapons etc and not bennifit them, it was a pretty accurate summation, albeit a grim one, ---- and an especially grim speculation given that today is the general election here in Britain and we get to see which cricket team is running the country, ---- or at least rather which cricket team gets to wear most coloured shirts and have the best team in all the party games that vaguely result in some sort of lore bieng passed that affect the country (really the traditions of westminster are craaaaaaazy).

Now excuse me, my synicism is showing.

I haven't actually seen the series, it is one of the few problems of not owning a tv, I miss random episodes of stuf, next t series (other than ongoing buffiness), is game of thrones season 5, well when my brother and I have finished attack on titan which  we will do this sunday.

I also have to say I still rather like the original transformers from the 80's, sinse while the plots aren't always the best written plots, one thing I do notice is that just like a lot of series from that time, the plot/action ratio is quite surprising. Indeed, I would never call the original Heman and the masters of the universe an astoundingly well written series (even when compared to thins at the time like dungeons and dragons), however when I've seen it now the ratio of actual progressive story to action sequences is quite astounding, even if the story isn't exactly eep or complex.

I know it souns like I have a downer on action, but I really don't. I can think of several sequences I still love, from the alien attack in aliens to the light saber battles in starwars, and the initial smith fight from the original matrix film, not to mention the awsome mill wheel sword fight from pirates of the carribian, and of course that is not to speak of various anime from Guran lagan to Elfen Leid, (oh god! anything! but that, sinse in Elfin the action is also pure evil!), heck I even liked some of the fights in dragon ball z (at least until they started lasting 20 episodes).

However as I said previously, action with point! Indeed, with action I often feel hollywood is going for quantity rather than quality.

@Cae, not sure about those fanfics, though i could see books doing more justice to super hero character, although to be honest lack of character is just part of my complaints with superhero fiction, random world building is another.

Well I've just come back from spending a day with my brother having an awsome meal at the brazillian bbq restaurant (dr. Atkins would've definitely approved), finishing Attack on Titan.

The series ended very well, and in terms of action, well nothing can beat two giants slugging it out with intermitant attacks by the good guys on awsome O-d-m rigs, four way grapples that let them move like spiders. My only cryticism is firstly the dub was a little over dramatic, sinse there are only so many times you can hear phrases like "This living hell" and not be rather narked. The second is that I did feel we learnt literally nothing and there were moments where the plot went rather sluggish. My brother believes titan is going to be one of the long Anime, going for 5 or 6 series, where as most of that type tend to go for a couple, so that might be why, but it was still slightly frustrating in that the ending didn't really feel conclusive, it was rather down beat.

On a total change of pace we then began watching another anime series, future diary, which couldn't be more different from attack on titan. The premise is that the ruler of the universe sets up a game where 12 people get diaries that predict the future in various interesting ways, and the one left standing at the end gets to be the next god (supposedly).

I rather like the way the hero was sucked into it, and some of the plays with future events are really quite clever, like one woman who has a clairvoiant diary that predicts specifically all the people around her personally and what they could all do, was able to capture another diary holder who was a criminal who's diary was the escape diary, which showed her her own possible future escape attempts.

Disturbingly, the main character's diary (which takes the form of texts on his phone), predicts only the basic details of events around him, sinse he only ever wrote about what he saw in his life not what he did, while the main girls' diary, worryingly called the diary of love), predicts what he! the main character does. Not anything else, just everything about him, and if your wondering if said girl is a rather creepy possessive stalker? The answer is yes!

It's a series that is both lots of fun and rather clever in terms of plots, actually it reminded me of some of the weerder bits of Doctor who and not just the time aspect, so I'll be interested to see where it goes particularly sinse it has a distinct ending (unlike Titan).

@Tom, I've not actually seen much of the original transformers cartoon for years, I've borrowed the od episode and of course the 1986 film from friends, but I've never sort of sat down and watched it end to end as an adult. I will admit though, while I did enjoy transformers, at the time it was always more my brother's thing than mine so I probably didn't pay it as much mind as something like Heman, the original Dungeons and Dragons or ghost busters, not to mention the Ninja turtles. I do remember though that transformers did have a rather good ongoing story and indeed a story that finally ended, indeed whenever we used to rent videos a favourite of mine was the last couple of episodes with the head masters and target masters which finished with Prime being resurrected, the autobots reclaiming Cybertron, and while the Decepticons weren't actually destroyed they did fly off into space in a fairly final manner. that was pretty rare for a long running cartoon series to have that sort of ending.

I have the first couple of series of Heman on dvd, I should really pick up the rest, also I've not seen She-ra for years! I did borrow thundercats from a friend recently though and noticed the same thing, the plot/action ratio was pretty good, even if the plots weren't always the most astounding, though interestingly enough the dungeons and Dragons animated series which I got recently has astoundingly! well written dialogue and characters. I can actually see why it's stood the test of time so well.

Science fantasy type settings weren't uncommon in the 80's though, as a consequence of starwars I suppose, an this is one reason I personally have always been equally happy with a fantastical setting as an ultra scientific one. One of my favourite old films, flight of Dragons (partly for the music), I love precisely for it's theme of the conflict of science and magic, (it has been a pain to find but I do now have it on v).

Another film I've always been trying to get hold of is an animated film called starchaser, legend of Orin, similar in a lot of ways to starwars but animated (and quite grim in parts). I remember it particularly well not just because of it's story, shocking bits and characters the main characters' first girl friend is literally strangle to death by the bad guy very shortly into the film after his grand father has already been laser whipped to death by a robot, it also featured robot pirates who skin humans and wear the skins. Also it was the film my brother and I happene to be watching when my mum was in hospital extremely ill, so it has that traumatic association as well.

Another thing I realized recently is that I actually always found it easier to see those 80's animated programs. I don't know whether it was because the hand drawn animation back then was far simpler than the cg sort that's going on now, but it is something I always notice when I watch things from that time, or for that matter animated disneyes from the nineties.

Btw, one amusing thing I also found out when looking up facts about Heman and She-ra online, is that She-ra herself in the series was actually a much more positive female character than the toy versions of her were. I always thought it was odd that while I had action figures of several She-ra characters such as Hordac and several of his minians like Leach, Grislor and the Hoard robots, I never had any of She-ra or pandora, after all I id have action figure versions of some of the Heman female cast like Teela and Evilin.

Apparently this was because for some od reason, mattel decided to release the She-ra female characters under their Barby doll line, rather than their masters of the universe action figure line. This meant redressing she-mra complete with hair, giving her a magic wand instead of her sword of power, and rewriting her plot to have a more sort of snow while type "who is the fairest" rivalry with Shadow Weaver, who in the doll line was presented as a wicked queen rather than Hordak's evil black magician henchwoman as she was in the series .
Oh, and as another random fact, sinse I was probably 8 and under when I first watched heman (I have clear memories of watching it at the age of four or five before I lost most of my vision, though I did also watch it after this), as my mother's name is Lynn, I always thought the character's name was evil lynn, (two words), and sometimes referd to my mum as evil lynn for a joke.