The awesomeness that is the Sonic Screwdriver I got for Jen. I’m sorely tempted to get one for myself, but if I do it will likely be the eleventh Doctor’s screwdriver.

Desire for a birthday pie instead of cake was granted with tasty little thing.
(taken on my wife’s phone)

Random photo from a series I took at the Greyhound track back in England.

In celebration of the finale of Lost, my wife found these Dharma beans sitting on her desk.

I tell you, Dharma-Mart needs a closer location than that blasted island, took me forever to get there, all for some damned beans too ;)

Born from the utmost depths of the Fissure, comes the Celestial Steed, or something like that.

Blizzard has been adding micro-payment items to their store lately, little things like in game pets, and their latest offering was the Steed mount, this little item netted Blizzard around half a million dollars within the first hour of it being up, later there were some 140,000 people queuing for the item, which equaled around $3.5 million in sales, and that was apparently just in the US just in one afternoon, crazy.

My main problem with the items they have is the price, I feel they are a little expensive for what they are, $10 for an in-game pet seems a little much, it’s a virtual item, which you’ll probably loose when the game closes (whenever that happens), I would think $5 would be more likely, but that’s me.

Blizzard can sell for those prices and people will buy them….like us >.>

Normally I wouldn’t have gone for it but my wife called it an early birthday present (along with a copy of Garry’s Mod), however there were 2 things I like about it which made it feel a little (note I say little) better about it (price wise).

1. It’s account bound, which means any characters I have in WoW will get it, and any new ones I create will get it.
2. It scales with riding skill. WoW has 4 riding styles, Mounts, Epic Mounts, Flying Mounts and Epic Flying Mounts. Each of these are learned at a different level and for different amounts of gold (plus extra gold for the actual mounts). With the Steed scaling it means when my Level 20 Mage learns riding, he can ride the Steed for a 60% speed increase. When he hits 40 and learns epic riding, the mount will automatically go 100% faster instead, the same applies for the flying too.

Just one of the many nicknames I had for one of our cats, Isis. Along with chatterbox, vampire kitty and puddles (he liked to pee everywhere and liked to talk).

Isis actually joined us before myself and Jennifer were together, she was in a previous marriage at the time and was given the cat by her now ex-husband. Thinking Isis was a female she asked me to name him, so I called him Isis thinking it was a girl, turns out it wasn’t.

Perhaps this being called a female name later gave way to the personality disorder the cat developed, we called him “Lil Bastard” for a reason, because he was, quite frankly, a little bastard.
All loving one moment, and full of attitude the next, his mood swings could give a person whiplash.

When Jen moved away from her ex, Isis of course went with her, and I used to spend a lot of time with him during my visits, and unlike our other cat (I’m looking at you Katara) he actually remembered me when I returned (course in Katara’s instance I think she was just pissed that I vanished on her).

Unfortunately when Jen and I moved into our new house, we weren’t able to bring the two with us, so they ended up staying with Jen’s mum (who has about 8 other cats anyway), yet we’d see them when we went over there, Isis would wander up and say hi to me, then promptly ignore Jen, until about an hour later when he’d pad up and go “pet me!”.

Told you, dude had a personality disorder.

It was a weird love hate relationship, his attitude and peeing tendencies would piss us off, but we still loved him, and I know he’ll be missed, unfortunately the kids aren’t taking it too well, especially Matthew.

So I figured, given that I recently created a fourth poster to go with the series I would repost them for folks.

Given the confusion I should point out that these posters are not a dig at the current Guild of Maintainers, they are more of a social commentary regarding the Myst community, based on Big Brother like propaganda, they follow the Guild of Maintainer theme because the Maintainers were more or less the police in D’ni, what they said goes.

[update] I’ve added a couple of new posters to the mix, and decided to rename the post from Guild of Maintainer Posters to general Propaganda posers.

I’ve been continuing my experiments with “retro” design, scrapping my past Iris work which I felt was a distinct failure. Started off making something for Jen, which instantly means purple related, and had an idea for a grungy kind of rose made of ink, and it kinda took off from there, experimenting with lines and textures, took a while for me to get a composition that I felt comfortable with.

A more successful attempt this time I think, could still use improvement and the composition is still slightly right-side heavy but I feel more confident on continuing with similar ideas.

I may have to make it into a wallpaper for my iPod at some point I think.

So the excellent Wandering Nomad is once again doing his Cyan Chat Radio show for Valentines Day (or V*lent*nes D*y).

When the 14th rolls around you can tune into it via the CCR site.

Anyway the Llama asked a bunch of us to make some posters for the event which we have done so and you can check out on his blog.

Pleased as I was without my poster turned out, I decided to make it into a iPhone/iPod Touch wallpaper and thus I present to those of you who may want it yourselves.

In the past I’ve never been one for FPS’s it was not my cup of tea, sure I could happily run around games like Grand Theft Auto sniping people and stuff, but I find that’s a far cry from a FPS.
Then Portal came along and the path of me becoming a traitor (as my wife called me when I started playing Half Life 2) was set before me. Portal allowed for me to test the waters with a FPS environment, whilst you’re not actively running around killing things, you do have a gun that shoots portals (not getting into the semantics of what makes a FPS a FPS). This was then combined with the quirky puzzles and storyline that appealed to the Myst fan in me.

I purchased the Orange Box for Portal mostly, but with the desire of perhaps modding Half Life 2 to use the Portal Gun as I had seen in several youtube videos.
I played Portal, I beat it, I enjoyed it thoroughly and the Orange Box was pretty much untouched for a long time.

Until late 2009.

I’m not sure what set me to trying the other games out, the guys in CyanChat had frequently talked about Team Fortress 2 and Half Life 2 (and its 2 episodes), and I thought to myself countless times ‘I really need to try that out’.

Eventually I took the plunge, Half Life 2 loaded up and I find myself sat on a train pulling into a station. Right away I was met with an overbearing environment of being monitored and bullied into subservience. I’m a big fan of books like 1984 and Brave New World, so the atmosphere of the game instantly hit with me, as I progressed through worried that any moment the Combine guards were going to pick a fight I end up walking through a block of flats, where a room is being raided, before the entire building it locked down due to my presence.

It’s been a while since a game elicited an emotional response from me, the last time I remember feeling anything from a game was a; when Uru Live was made known to us and the subsequent playing of it, and b; the playing of Myst 3 and constantly feeling like Saavedro was going to jump out of the bushes and bean me.

But I quickly found myself worried about Combine jumping out at me, or the frantic panic as I am being mobbed and am trying to get the hang of handling a FPS and shoot them in the head. Or the eerie wtfness of Ravenholm (and kind of being grossed out then highly entertained with the prospect of cutting zombies in half with a saw blade and gravity gun).

After quickly running through HL2 I loaded up Episode 1 and began working my way through that too and finally Episode 2, which I admit I have yet to finish, I’m wanting to draw it out a little so I’m not left waiting for Episode 3 which probably won’t be around before I’m 70 anyway.

So Half Life 2 introduced me properly to FPS’s, and I think as FPS’s go that was probably the best one to draw me in, the combination of nicely crafted environments, interesting storyline and atmosphere served up a great first impression.