Evil Clown

Hehe, cool.

From here.

Russian MP3s

Something to do with the law in another country makes them be able to sell music, o'er t'internet, really cheap. I think it works out at about a couple to a few quid for an album (depending on track length and file size). You just pay by the MB. But I'm so scared. You do it. Then tell me if it was good and then maybe I'll think about it some more. They do have albums there, that I want, and I find it difficult to find elsewhere, let alone find on the cheap. OooOoOooh!

Dry Hypocrisy

I didn't wake up until 17:15 today. Damn late, later than I was expecting myself, I went to bed at 05:00. When I got downstairs I found out why I got up so late, it was something divine deep in my unconscious that was trying to protect me from the Phil Collins triple CD box set and repeats of Eastenders. After criticising people for watching episodes of Eastenders that they had watched only a few days earlier because 'there's nothing else on' I'd best make good use of myself now to avoid a spot of hypocrisy.

My New Favourite Website

TOKYOPLASTIC

At the time of posting it was tokyoplastic v.2

I stumbled across it while looking at -- naive -- also a very nice site.

Comedy Speed

Tsunami Aid comedy thing was on tonight. I would have thoroughly enjoyed it. I like comedy, you know, I'm a HAPPY HAPPY PERSON. If only people hadn't talked through Eddie Izzard and Dylan Moran. This they did to any act they either "Can't stand" or who they were unfamiliar with. I'm fine though, I can handle people's opinions affecting my viewing experience, I love people's opinions, I think it's great that people have their opinions. I would prefer it if they were my mindless drones but they just don't want to be when you swear at them all the time.
My copy of Broken Sword came today. Fortunately the music on the CD for Broken Sword (1) is in .wav form. This meant I could work with it in nice GUI applications. I used something called Ogg Drop. Which allowed me to compress about 230MB of in game music to about 25MB. Quite impressive no? That was admittedly at the quality setting of zero but it sounded fine to me. It's was only background atmosphere music after all. This allowed me to then be able to fit the entire game (cut down for SCUMMVM use) onto a single CD including a Mac and a PC copy of SCUMMVM-0.7.0 and the cut-scenes that you have to downloaded from SCUMMVM.org Whoa! Somehow I managed to delete my copy of Broken Sword 2 from my hard drive while fiddling about, so I realised when I reached a cut scene in the game (after reinstalling) that I needed to re-download the cut-scenes (I was watching a black screen with only voice over). The thing I want to mention here is that the cut-scenes took, by my reckoning less than four seconds to download. That's about a 30MB .zip file. IN UNDER FOUR SECONDS. Internet like that is luxurious, it must peak at about five in the morning. The ideal time for a person that would get so excited about such luxury.

Terminal Pain

I haven't posted for quite a while so there's a lot of things I have missed. I'm going to see if I can remember them now.
I have bought a few new things. I bought a CD. Headstrong. I'm not too sure why. It cost me £2.99 inc. shipping. So it was cheap, and it's quite good. I bough more CDs; 100. I needed more blanks so I bough 100 80min CD-Rs and a CD carry case that holds 240. That cost me about £18-£19 for the CDs and wallet. Although I didn't receive a direct reply, I have now received a dispatch notice on Broken Sword. A happy stab in my initial pessimism.

What else? I got weighed. I came out at 53kg. Which puts me in the -57 weight category, that's the one before the bottom one which is -49. This is for the competition I mentioned in a previous post.

Last night I stupidly stayed up until about five trying to compress the sound files in my copy off Broken Sword 2. I downloaded 'scummvm-tools-0.7.0' and I was using 'sword2mp3' correctly as far as I can tell. But it comes up with an error.

This is how it say's to use it:
Usage: /Users/scud/Desktop/scummvm-tools-0.7.0/sword2mp3 file.clu

Params:
--mp3 encode to MP3 format (default)
--vorbis encode to Vorbis format
--flac encode to Flac format
(If one of these is specified, it must be the first parameter.)

MP3 mode params:
-b is the target bitrate(ABR)/minimal bitrate(VBR) (default:24)
-B is the maximum VBR/ABR bitrate (default:64)
--vbr LAME uses the VBR mode (default)
--abr LAME uses the ABR mode
-V specifies the value (0 - 9) of VBR quality (0=best) (default:4)
-q specifies the MPEG algorithm quality (0-9; 0=best) (default:2)
--silent the output of LAME is hidden (default:disabled)

Vorbis mode params:
-b is the nominal bitrate (default:unset)
-m is the minimum bitrate (default:unset)
-M is the maximum bitrate (default:unset)
-q specifies the value (0 - 10) of VBR quality (10=best) (default:3)
--silent the output of oggenc is hidden (default:disabled)

Flac mode params:
[params] optional arguments passed directly to the encoder
recommended is: --best -b 1152

--help this help message


If a parameter is not given the default value is used
If using VBR mode for MP3 -b and -B must be multiples of 8; the maximum is 160!

I get:
SCUDs-Computer:~ scud$ /Users/scud/Desktop/scummvm-tools-0.7.0/sword2mp3 --mp3 /Users/scud/Desktop/scummvm-tools-0.7.0/Music1.clu
sh: line 1: lame: command not found
Got error from encoder. (check your parameters)
Encoder Commandline: lame -t -m m --vbr-new -b 24 -q 2 -V 4 -B 64 tempfile.wav tempfile.mp3

It doesn't matter which type of encoding I select it always comes up with a similar error. I think it might be something to do with me not having the encoders. I looked up the individual encoders it mentions. I downloaded some stuff too, but I don't understand any of it, it's all technical lines of code and stuff and talks about compiling things.

There is a utility for the PC. That looks like it makes it really easy to convert the monster.sou files of LucasArts SCUMM games. But there's two problems I have with this, 1. I don't have a PC and 2. It's *.clu not *.sou file I want to convert.

Brick

Had a great guest lecture this morning. It was taken by Nathan Johnson. Not a lecture really, this guy's a musician, not an academic so it as just him talking to us about his experiences with Brick.
There you can see him.
Yeah. Brick seems like a great film, I'm anticipating it's release now. Nathan said that at the moment companies are squabbling over who gets it in this country. So it should definitely be here.
The great thing about the lecture was that this guy was talking about the sound track for this film that he had made and it was good, and the film looks really good, and it's low budget and one of the instruments he sowed us a picture of was a cheese grater he bought from TESCO.
The film was written and directed by Rian Johnson. This is the fun bit. The end part of the lecture was made up of a video conference with Rian in LA. Eh? Eh? I know your impressed.

"This morning I had a great lecture, well, it wasn't really a lecture it was more a video conference with a sundance winning director in LA."

- Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision.

So there was a director of this film that looks really good, and how did I follow this up on the internet. Well, of course I went to look at the band that he was wearing a t-shirt of. They Might Be Giants. Their website is very nice and I'm currently listening to their 'Clock Radio'. 'I've Got A Fang' is the thing that I've heard on there that I like the most. Music aside I'm quite simply impressed by this nice flash stuff.

It's snowing again.

Working, I Swear..

An absence of posts in recent times. My apologies. (No one cares, why am I being sorry?)
I have been posting some stuff. You may have just not seen it. I'm quite busy now, trying to abuse my current enthusiasm for Director to get some of the project work done. In order to help me write my production analysis afterward I had the idea to keep a blog of project type stuff that goes on.
Sapphire 2 Director Project

If you have OSX and or a newish version of Director (either platform I think) then I suggest you check it out. You can see some of the stuff I have been doing for yourself.

For those of you who don't have either of those I intend to get some .dcr (Shockwave) files on t'internet at some point so you can have a look.

In other news...

I'm waiting for my bloody foot to heal, mat burns. I need them because I'm going to a Taekwondo competition on the 6th March. You might be able to look at the details in a .pdf here.

Some other interesting stuff has happened I'm sure, I just can't remember. Wish I'd written about it at the time.
Christine has a friend visiting at the moment. Janne. But I have to call her Yannea.

The Breakfast Club Lingo

Some how I expected Broken Sword to be "out of stock". Being delivered to me is only Broken Sword 2. I sent an email requesting for an estimate of when Broken Sword will be in stock, if ever, but I'm doubtful as to whether I'll receive a reply (or the game for that matter).
So today, or Tuesday as it was, we had a Director tutorial. We covered if statements and global variables in lingo. That stuff seems good. I had, and still have, grand plans to use this, and see how far I can take things with the simple power of, "true" or "false". I was going to do that this (or Tuesday) evening but.. I.. Er.. had a couple of glasses of wine and ended up trying to watch "The Breakfast Club" as others drunkenly stumbled around me. I refused to drink shots in their drinking game you see. They were very drunk, I was not so drunk.
I'm really interested in the idea of morality as an element of gameplay. That was what I wanted to try tonight, to just throw something together to see if I could write the code. I also want to see if I can use these small bits of code I have learnt to make a simple point and click type of .. thing. I really think it would be nice, if there was even just a section of old school point and click fun in our project. I must get this stuff done then before Thursday because we have a proper scheduled production meeting at 13:30 in D2 on Thursday and I must have something to show for myself, so it's to stop me looking like a dick and to get the project moving.
I'm intending to use me enthusiasm and regularity of this blog thing to help me with my project. I have made another blog where I intend to keep a record of project related 'stuff' that I do. Hopefully then this will help me when I come to write my project analysis as I'll have lots of content to refer to.
I was quite impressed by The Breakfast Club.

Sparring Pain

Sunday, three till five was the first sparring class I have ever been to. My feet hurt lots. I think the most of the pain is caused in one foot by Aaron kneeling on it and the other foot, well I reckon most of that pain from where I kicked someone in the leg.

I love Data Rescue X.

More South Park Clips

Dead Friend Sketch
Remastered

The dead friend sketch had me in tears at the end.

I can also recommend the Princess Episodes. I think it's a great shame there isn't more of these.

Aristocrat Joke.

SouthPark Clip

Some showbiz joke or something, that's not important, the important thing is that you see the SouthPark version of it above.
I should probably mention that some may find it incredibly offensive also.

"No violence. None. If there is absolutely no way to avoid expressing your emotional pain in a physical display, it is perfectly acceptable to collapse on on the floor and cry. In close-knit gaming circles nobody will think less of you for it. When you are finished simply pick up your controler and carry on. Easy see?"

Broken Swords and Fancy Moves

Well hopefully this SCUMM mania of mine should come to an end, I have now bought the Broken Sword games from MX2 for what seemed quite a fair price. I hope it is, I may be deluded.

Here's a link to a nice animation on Donnie Yen's website.

Donnie Yen seems like a great poser when you look at that site of his. Still admire him though.

Below is a picture of what I witnessed someone doing in Taekwondo on Wednesday. It was quite impressive to see. The picture will link you to the site I got it from. It's quite impressive itself, a big list of capoeira moves.

That move is listed as Suicídio on the page.
"-Suicídio: A high kick that brings both legs up, aka forward toe-touch."

ONG BAK and Lomography

ONG BAK
The link above is to an article about a film I have been waiting for, for... um .. must be about a year now maybe. The point is I have been very excited about this film for a long time. I haven't seen it. I'm waiting for the film to released in this country before I see it, because I have the belief that it will be in the cinemas at some point and I would very much like to see it there first, failing that I'm going to pre-order the Premier Asia release as soon as I can. What you can get to from the IGN article is some nice clips of Tony Jaa showing off basically. There is a clip of a chase sequence that I downloaded also but I'm not going to watch that because I've already furiously viewed as many trailers as possible and I don't want to see any more of the film before I get the chance to watch the film as a film.

So anyway Taekwondo was fun this evening (or Wednesday evening as some time has past). I got to wear my new shoes. They certainly kept my bare feet away from the floor.

Ooh! My mother has a lomography thing. I suggest to you check it out. Fancy pictures with a fancy camera.

My mothers lomography pictures.

See, looks quite snappy don't it? That's our cat in the picture. Chow. Yes named after the legend, Chow Yun Fat. Our cat's full name is Chow Yun Cat.

Fat Women and Little Boys

20:30
How Clean Is Your House?
[subtitles]

Kim Woodburn and Aggie Mackenzie are preparing to flex their cleaning muscles on 36-year-old artist, musician and laidback lad Freddy Schultz's filthy flat. He's a free spirit but his flat is full of junk and engulfed in grime. Can Kim and Aggie convince him that you can stand out but still be santitary?


21:00
Brat Camp
[subtitles]

Brat Camp is back, with a new draft of seven terrible teenagers whose bad behaviour is wrecking their families' lives. They are sent to Turn-About, a behavioural modification camp in the wilds of Utah, USA, where the harsh regime of discipline and hard work represents a last-ditch attempt for them to change their behaviour.


22:00
Shameless
[subtitles] [audio described]

Lip is sleeping with Mandy while she pretends to be Ian's girlfriend to hide the fact that he's gay. The arrangement is foolproof until Mandy falls pregnant with Lip's baby...


23:05
Fat Girls and Feeders
[repeat] [subtitles]

For many men big has always meant beautiful, but a bizarre sub-culture is taking things to dangerous extremes. These so-called 'Feeders' aren't satisfied with a merely big partner, but encourage and even coerce them to gain weight to the point where the women become immobile and risk their lives.

00:00
Michael Jackson's Boys
[repeat]

On the eve of his current court case, an hour long documentary about Michael Jackson, the world's most famous pop artist who is under the spotlight because of his controversial relationships with children.



After watching all that television you'll understand why I have a headache and excuse me if I wake up in the night screaming. I really don't want to have dreams about fat women and little boys.

Deliveries and Software

Ah. I now have my fancy new shoes and games.

Image taken from the eBay listing.
It was a busy morning for deliveries, Gaz's computer came, I had my shoes and games as I mentioned and I also received an Easter egg from Mum and Pete.
The other night I went a little bit crazy and downloaded loads of software. Allow me to list all the rubbish I got so you can see exactly how stupid I am.
Ecto - A blogger type thing, can use it with this kind of blog.
Fire - Multi chat system thing.
Burn It Again Sam - Reuse CD-Rs in a sensible fashion.
DVD Database X - What you would expect.
DVDpedia - As above but better.
OIDS.X - Little shooty spacey game.
Cunning Fox - Manage CPU usage.
arp2600v - A music type thing I don't know how to use.
DropDMG - As you would expect.
YemuZip - Free Zipper.
RedPill - Matrixesk scrensaver.
BitTorrent OSX - Not sure exactly what it is, no idea what to do with it.
DeskDoodle - Fun for about 30seconds, but still worth it.
Elements - Interactive Periodic Table
getTunes - Acquire shared music through iTunes

If you've tried to get some of these things and have become frustrated at your failure it's probably because you are stupid and failed to realise that I'm a Mac user and many of the applications listed are exclusively operable in Mac OSX

Mugs, Eggs and Uri Geller

I've missed a bit here. It was Saturday night when Christine broke one of my mugs and then Sunday morning when I received a replacement mug with chocolate egg and a box set containing Maltesers egg and tubes of Maltesers combo from her.
This morning my stuff didn't come. Tomorrow morning I have to get up to sign for Gaz's computer that's being delivered.

There's been some interesting things that I've seen on the internet but I don't have tmime to link to them now as I need to get to sleep as soon as possible for getting up in the morning.

Here however is one thing that I just watched nowish. It's a .wmv and it's about 36MB so be warned. It's quite good though, about Uri Geller and people that say they have special powers and how they're just tricks. Download Link

Correction

I was wrong about my suit, it's not Lecaf as I thought, it actually says Skyam on it. Look that on on the internet and you don't get much useful back. It was my white belt that was Lecaf. Not that you really care, I just thought I should correct myself.
I forgot to mention a major event in my life. So there I was, standing at the top of this hill. There were guys all around me, cheering me on. Although they were cheering I knew they didn't really think I could do it. I step up slowly, wrap my hands around it as tight as I can and pulled damn hard. Finally the sword came unstuck from the stone. God damn it was a relief, I'd spent ages channelling all my exp points into upgrading my physical attributes. Now I had that damn fancy sword to fight with in the arena. Oh, yeah, this was on Fable.

Welsh sporting victory

O.K. Daily topical reference. I watched rugby today. Wales against England. Wales won. It's sort of significant and relevant as I am Welsh, I suppose, legally in some way, and er... well I wasn't expecting them to win and they did. 11-9. Well, there you go.
More importantly I received an email today telling me that my Simon the Sorcerers have been posted. Yay! These means I'm expecting both my shoes and games to arrive around Monday / Tuesday-ish.
I woke up at 4pm today. So it has come to midnight and I'm beginning to feel like I should do something today, because all I've been doing is sitting around. Only there's now only two minutes to make the most of the day. Ah well, guess I'll be up late again. Doing more 'bugger all'.

SCUMM gone bad

O.K. The SCUMM thing is getting a little out of hand now. I'm desperately trying to collect as many games for my SCUMMVM as possible and what's worst is I still haven't played any of them yet.
Currently the list of games I have acquired in English looks like this:-

Beneath a Steel Sky
Day Of The Tentacle
Flight of the Amazon Queen
Full Throttle
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Loom
Loom (CD version)
Maniac Mansion
Monkey Island 1
Monkey Island 2
Sam and Max
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (FM-Towns)

So now I'm waiting on my delivery of Simon the Sorcerer I & II and also looking for The Dig and the Broken Sword games.
I said earlier, "in English" because I have also come across other games frustratingly in other languages.

New Shoes

I seem to be spending a lot of money of late. I have just purchased some shoes off t'internet. I needed them because my feet are falling apart. These new Lecaf shoes will match my suit which probably not coincidentally (probably cheapest) is also Lecaf.

I just received an email from the place I bought the shoes from and for that warm customer response I'm going to recommend them.

Martial Sport Supplies Limited

Nova Rabbit

You remember that Japanese Flash I posted here. Well. I found the music from it I'm sure you'll be glad to read. Furthermore if you check out where I got the music from there's a pile of crazy remixes and stuff, I didn't thoroughly investigate. My mother however did do a little bit of investigating and sent me some links to do with the origins of the flash. I can't be bothered to put them all up here, so here is just two of them: one and two.

The ad I belive they discuss in the article I linked to as two.

Simon and Suicide

I got the Simon the Sorcerer games for £6.50 in the end. Not too bad. I'm just waiting for them to be sent to me now.

I had a some nice dreaming this morning. In one part of the dream I remember being chased through some estate by some guy and I got his gun off him. Nice light coloured metal fancy designed gun it was. I remember flicking the bullets from the clip onto the floor, the bullets were really nicely designed as well, very shinny and pointy. There was someone then that reminded me that I shouldn't be flicking the bullets onto the floor, that they were better placed in my pocket, so I started to ... Oh! This must have been after I shot the guy in the foot, because I remember this happening very close to him an it being really tense and stuff. O.K. So I started to pick up the bullets and put them in my pocket. This gave the guy enough time to recover a bit and begin chasing me again. I ran back the way I was chased and then ... This is the other part of the dream I can remember now ... I was at a house, however I had been at this house before, at this time before, not like 3 O'clock or something, I mean the exact time, I had gone back in time. So anyway what was happening at this time in this house was that people were the people of the house were discovering that one of them a daughter or something had hung them-self in a room. So I had seen this situation before and new that people got freaked out and someone died of a heart attack, due to some people causing aggro. So I'm there trying to control the situation keep people calm, and it's not easy because they know I don't belong there and they're all getting weirded out by the fact that I know their names and stuff. I do however manage to stop whoever it was having the heart attack and I specifically remember a big guy called Bob coming down the stairs who was going to be of particular bother, and I sorted him somehow. It wasn't like Quantum Leap at all, like I was there on some mission to sort things out, it was a lot more dark and chaotic than that, it just happened that ... er ... well I should have written about this when I woke up. It's all a bit degraded now.

Even MORE SCUMM Fun

So I got a little excited and now my SCUMMVM looks like this.

What you can't see on there is Beneath a Steel Sky at the top and that Indiana is just a demo. I have also put a bid on for Simon The Sorcerer I & II.
Now I just have to get 'round to playing the games.

More SCUMM Fun

Just got back from Taekwondo and my toe is now even worse.
However I am now well chuffed because I found out that not only how to use SCUMMVM but that I can only play PC versions on it. So that means I can now play Full Throttle and the PC copy of Day Of The Tentacle I had lying around and I found Sam & Max Hit The Road. I did have the first two Monkey Island games as well but they are on my currently not working hard drive and it seem that Macintosh Garden is having problems as a can't download them from them again.

So what I was doing was writing a post here before I got distracted for quite a while talking to my mother on Skype and discovering that I'm a SCUMM idiot.
I was working my way through the day, yes, right. Back to the beginning. eBay item. Which reminds me I must leave feedback for that item and then proceed to buy all the other Old LucasArts games that I know they released on the Mac but I have had to jealously sit by and watch my friends play on the PC.
Yes then I had a fun five and a half hour stretch in uni, no break. Well, no timetabled break anyway, we did however manage to catch ten minutes here and there where lectures, seminars and workshops finished early. There was something in the lecture today though that inspired me. It was something to do with variables and creating elements of gameplay. It just showed me how much possibility there is to create nice little game elements with just 0s and 1s. It reminded me about Inform. You can check it out yourself if you like. I started going through the tutorial before and then stopped but I was really enjoying it and I have a dream to create a masterpiece with it. To add to that The Guide was mentioned in a lecture on adaptation later in the afternoon. He made reference to the Infocom game and that it can be played on t'internet nowadays. There's a fancy updated version on the BBC site. I first played the text adventure when a friend of mine found an old box full of Infocom floppies and realising they were Mac disks let me borrow them. Of course it was then a struggle to get them of the floppies because we had to get the old dusty beige machine out of the wardrobe and then fiddle around with odd disks to get them onto my computer.
So I came here with the intention of learning some Director lingo but have done no work.

Idiot

I just worked out how to get my game to work in SCUMMVM. You see what I was doing wrong was trying to select the file. When the selection dialogue box wasn't there for me to select the file (hence it was ghosted and making me cry). I was supposed to be selecting the folder that contained the game file you see. I would feel stupid but I'm just too happy because I know I can play the game now.

Got me eBay delivery this morning. Full Throttle. That's £1.99 I spent just to satisfy my curiosity. I now know that my computer can't handle running the game in Classic and that either I can't get it to work with SCUMMVM or it just won't work with SCUMMVM. This post has now taken me nearly an hour to write as I stopped to try and get Full Throttle to work. I did not succeed.

Japanese Flash

Allow me to share with you something that my mother shared with me this morning.



Or you can view it the correct size where I first saw it.

A new.

O.K. First post. Let's see how long this lasts for.
Here is an interesting .gif I came across recently. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.


So you want to know how I came across this tidy little animation. Well, I'll tell you. You might even be able to trace the steps yourself. Enter "cheese stabbing chocolate" into Google. It was the first site on the list. It was on the post stamped 01-03-2005, 11:18 AM