Month: April 2009

Telly’s been behaving itself today 🙂 Which means a little bit longer before I go hunting for HD tellys …

Yep – me got a heap of books that aren’t getting read while they’re in the heap …

Hey Pete, sounds to me like you need a new telly – and less computer-playing!

Mourning my lack of re-enactment this weekend, so visiting Tanya to make up for it 🙂

cq

The game that currently has me caught is called Mass Effect, where the hero (you!) is going for that long used staple of sci-fi stories, they’re out to save the galaxy 🙂

It’s by Bioware, people who are extremely strong on Role Play, so there’s a lot of story and side quests alongside the main event of saving the galaxy from the machines. And with Role Play comes voice acting, which brings me to what I was noticing earlier … Some voices stand apart and in this case, it’s the female version of Commander Shepard, the heroine of Mass Effect. I should really have recognised the voice, as I listened to it all the way through another of Bioware’s games.

The voice behind the game belongs to one Jennifer Hale and my surprise at the voice being shared shows how good she is at her job. Games are sometimes criticized for the poor quality of their voice acting, often because Hollywood actors/actresses are used to provide the voices. Star Trek’s Marina Sirtis also turns up in a cameo in Mass Effect. Not quite sure what the difference is between the Bastila character in the second game and Shepard in Mass Effect but the Commander personality exudes the confidence, professionalism and authority you’d expect from a tough soldier of the 22nd century. And it’s different enough that I only recognised it when seeing the page on the Mass Effect wiki (linked above)

There’s another common factor between the two games, they’re both space scifi games. Doh – I never said what the other game is. Jennifer Hale’s previous credits include Bastila, a character from the Star Wars universe set 4000 years before the movies. Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic was a classic too, played that one to death a few years ago 🙂 (bugs mean I don’t touch it now)

I have a few games but it seems like it’s the space sci-fi games I go back to most often. I have a couple of others fairly new in the collection that haven’t seen so much attention, which are both swords & axes games. I was wondering why that was and I figure, I must have a hankering to live more in the sci-fi world than the medieval world. Definitely more interest in living other places than the 21st century …

I guess that’s why I go for the games so much and the sci-fi movies. Even the swords & axe type books I read tend to have a sci-fi flavour to them occasionally, even if the sci-fi is magic. Both forms of storytelling allow one to escape the world we live in right now, to jump into one that has action, adventure, romance (yep – it’s programmed in!) and that little bit of magic. They allow us to do things we couldn’t imagine doing for real, like all those people who play Soldier on the online games or who have an alter-ego in Warcraft. And there’s no consequences too, the “save” button lets you reverse decisions and it takes away the risk that real soldiers have to cope with.

Currently taking a rest from the virtual world, if you could call watching Die Hard 4.0 escaping 🙂 And later, I’ll be back to listening to some more of those wonderful voices.

New artist alert ! This one’s Natasha Khan, centrepiece of Bat For Lashes. Amazing voice here and another album on the list to grab 🙂

It’s not a bad system when it works, iPodFM – but you’d have thought that the car radio makers would have added in 3.5mm headphone jacks years ago. Even before the iPod arrived, people had CD walkmans that they wanted to plug in to their radios …

In my ideal world, cars will all have audio-in jacks so we’ll never have to use those God-awful FM transmitters again.

… And then a decent period away from work to rest, recharge and repair 🙂

I’ve been feeling the strain lately, which usually manifests in me seesawing between hyperactive and hypoactive states. I’ll lose track of precisely which day of the week it is too, as the days blur into each other. Of course, it also doesn’t help that I’ve been more into the computer games lately, which leads to not getting quite as much sleep as I should be getting 🙂

Heh heh heh – self inflicted wounds …

There’s good sides and bad sides to being away from work – I won’t miss being able to lock the duties in the drawer with the rest of the papers but I always miss the people. There’s some very special people who I have the pleasure of interacting with at work. I guess that’s another reason I keep coming back to the online games too, there’s good people in those too. But nattering over text isn’t nearly the same as being able to lean over the Snow Queen’s or The Boss’s desks and make them laugh.

Yep – hearing a lady laugh (and seeing the smile) is far better than just reading “lol” in text.

So I’m looking forward to chilling out for a solid week but I’ll definitely miss a few of the personalities at work. People like the Snow Queen, The Boss, WT and Ms Sunshine (who is almost as jumpy as me with people walking up the floorplate!) who make working on my project a lot more fun. Also Ms Cantina and her friends who are constantly trying to outguess me on what sandwiches I’m going to have for lunch 🙂

Right – time to get back to the finale of Star Trek Voyager, it ends soon which will allow me to turn the telly off. It’s started to develop a high pitched “singing”, which is probably why neighbourhood dogs are howling …

Addon time – Peeking round the web, I found this story from the Register – Bacon Sarnies Cure Hangovers … Official !

I like to jump on my trampoline while singing “I’m on a Mexican Radio.” A Netchick signpost led me here.

Still in the Jetta ?

Think my best loved car is still the Astra I had – that was an ’82 car. But I know it would not have survived for long when I started working …

Don’t see many new cars round here either and dealerships are either merging or closing

I’m still driving a 95! Oy!!

After earning a little streetcred this morning with the results of a little miracle working last night, I was heading up and down the motorway again today.

As well as iPodFM, I’m usually hunting for something to keep my brain active and fully awake while driving. When you’re going on Britain’s motorways, it pays to maintain a very sharp level of attention to keep an eye on the Nutters in the other cars. Unbelieveable people like the one in the service station who waits, waits … waits even more – and then pulls out in front of me at a time when I have to then slam the brakes on.

Yep – there was the predictable Bluetooth telephone headset in her ear.

So what was the Entertainment Of Choice for today’s drive ? I was curious … And started looking at the registration plates whizzing past. The question on my mind was – “ok, it’s 3 months into the new registration plate, how many new cars out there ?”

The answer, sadly, is not many … I saw a few “08” and “58” cars out there but only one “09” car. Over in Britain we now mark our cars with numbers for when they were made, so my Focus is a “52” car, which means it was registered in the second half of 2002. My last car was an “S” registration, which takes a little more working out … (it was registered in 1999).

So that’s my observation of the day – connecting a lack of new cars out there with signs of Recession. Of course it could be because I was travelling at 10.30 to 1.30 and 16.00 to 19.00, so I probably missed all the RepMobiles (Sales Reps get a bad reputation on our roads for a Devil-May-Care attitude) and the hire cars.

Trips out aren’t too much of a hardship, as they allow me to indulge my biggest addiction (for now), which is listening to music 🙂 However, IpodFM isn’t as clear as it could be due to increasing pollution of the airwaves by commercial stations. At least the music doesn’t seem to be the cause of the lag I’m suffering on Warcraft, as I still had the lag even though no music was playing earlier. Think I have a little more to do with my network setup to get better gaming performance.

Right ! Time to get updated with what’s been going on in the world while indulging that music addiction. Current track is “Think About You Now” by Gloria Estefan. Thinking about a few people at the moment. There’s the Rose with her illness, Snow Queen with her bugs, the gaming people and whether they got bitten by the food poisoning that got me on Monday, Miss AB who I’ve sadly not spotted since she left our project and Ms Cantina who will probably be wondering why I wasn’t hunting sandwiches today 🙂