As a result, this will (not including my LastFM blog) be my last blog entry – maybe forever, maybe for a while.

Back in the day, I used to blog about all sorts of shit; most of it not really appropriate for publication, but vomited onto the web anyway. Now, being generally contented and less eager to impress perfect strangers with my ability to creatively swear and describe pus, I just can’t be bothered anymore.

Blogging has introduced me to some fantastic folks (Lady Barkalot, Livee, I’m looking at you), helped me meet one girlfriend – we broke up long ago – and got me on talking terms with some of my favourite music artists. I’ve loved it, and am not saying this is going to be it forever…

…But.

At present, I no longer have the desire to blog. I don’t have anything that interesting to say, and in truth, my profession rather makes me nervous to fly into the nasty rants I used to…and let’s be honest, half the fun of my old blog entries was me getting really angry about something and going berserk.

So, whilst I may start a photoblog for my nature photos, and will be maintaining my music blog over at LastFM, and whilst my old blogs shall remain – possibly pending resurrection at some point – this is it for me.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for commenting. Last one out, turn off the lights please

- Sefton AKA Sheol, Sefotron

Anyway, THIS article caught my mind, and all I could think was, “If they had been words from the bible, would anyone have given a fuck?”

No, of course not.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; Religion – Just Say NO!

I’ll admit, I have a sort of love-hate relationship with it myself. It irritates the fuck out of me (and as you shall see, has now exceeded itself), yet I find myself always hovering near enough to hear what’s going on, so I can shout rude comments and take the piss (this irritates and amuses Sian in equal measure).

My biggest gripes in past episodes were;

1) Why do they bother to illuminate all the boxes that they keep old bones in? Surely, that is a grotesque waste of electricity, and those rigid boxes are not very space economic. I’ve seen real bone storage type places, and they tend to be big, dusty vaults, with rows and rows of shelving, packed with brown bags and cardboard boxes, each bearing a label or a number scribbled on in pen.Do bones get afraid of the dark or something? Are they scared about bone thieves?

2) Corpses Smell Bad – Have you ever smelt decaying human flesh? I have, and it’s a fucking horrible stench. There is also the accompanying risk of serious diseases associated with unprotected contact with the dead; Hepatitis B and C, Septicemia, to name but a few…and the saprophytes…man! Flies, Wasps and many other bugs quickly arrive when you pop your clogs, to begin a combined eat-out and orgy within your remains, their young quickly reducing much of you to a mushy, frothy liquid. So, in Bones, where do they examine the cadavers? In a huge, open plan office, surrounded by colleagues without any kind of protective gear, doing their paperwork and generally getting on with things. No one flinches. No one pukes. It’s just silly…and deeply unhygenic. There are never any larvae or flies…all the corpses are nice, skeletony things with brown goo on them – no bloated cadavers ripe with morbid gasses, poised to rupture and disgorge rot swelled entrails, no dripping masses of marbled, clay like adipocere on waterlogged remains…just nice, neat, odourless (apparently) corpses…

…Oh and burned corpses tend to assume what is known as a Pugilistic Attitude…please get it right!

3) The Hologram Machine – Apparently the forensics team in Bones have access to futuristic technology too, as demonstrated by the super advanced hologram generator table thingy they use. WTF? If they have technology that advanced, why can’t they just suck the final thoughts and experiences from their victims heads a la Strange Days…but better? Huh? HUH?

And those are my main objections. Yeah, I know, it’s a fantasy show, but Jesus…

Anyway, the newest series has begun and managed to present the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. Apart from the fact that it featured sentences like “the bone has ossified”; which, given that ossification is the process of becoming bone-like or producing bone is pretty fucking obvious, it was set in England…

…Actually, it was set in some bizarre England inhabited by painful stereotypes, and filled to the brim with the worst ever cliches. Let me, as a Englishman, explain.

1) We Do Not All Speak With Clipped English Accents: Indeed, most of us are naturally distrustful of anyone that does, because as a general rule, they are the kind of folks who think sport involves chasing down foxes with a million dogs and horses, and that anyone earning less than 200K is an oik. Okay, that’s an unfair over generalisation as well, but Jesus, most of us don’t talk like that. Indeed, most people in London don’t talk like that, Jesus.

2) The Classes: According to those episodes, England is still some kind of feudal realm, with Lords and Ladies in positions of power, and the rest of us scrabbling in the dirt to bring the harvest in in time for the autumn feast. I’m sorry to tell you that though we do have a certain rich, dissociated level of society that deludes itself into thinking it has some kind of position, as a whole, the rest of us feel the “upper classes” to be amusingly / annoyingly out of touch with reality, and actually extremely naff and embarrassing. Think Paris Hilton over your way, and you get the idea. Our “nobles”, are a bunch of pig-ignorant Paris Hiltons…

3) Bad Teeth – This depends on whether you feel good teeth are arrow straight and so white they glow in the dark. I have straight, naturally white teeth, and so does almost everyone I know. Ricky fucking Gervaise is not a flagship for Britain…he does have wonky teeth, but so what? Your current president has a lump of fecal matter for a brain; does that mean all Americans do? No? Well shut up then.

4) Bad Food – Yeah, because the states have given us such classics as the Big Mac, Kentucky Shit Chicken, and The Whopper. British food has it’s piles of excrement, and some gorgeous food too. It’s easy to overgeneralise. For example; “You’re all gun toting idiots”. See? Not nice is it! Well stop it then.

5) We all drink Tea – No we don’t. I rarely touch the foul stuff. You all drink tea. Yeah, you!

6) Our Coffee is Crap – Actually….fair cop.

So, there you go, Bones became a pretty insulting look at England, in all it’s “quaintness”. It even had a bit where Angel the Vampire was trying to make one of the Queen’s Guard react (try dousing him in lighter fuel and setting him in fire; that tends to get a reaction…and you shot of course*); a scene right out of the Beano. Can we please get past all these tired old stereotypes (and that includes cheerful cockneys, dancing street thieves / chimney sweeps, everyone living in castles, and everyone caring about / knowing the royal pissing family). Please?

Ah, and whilst I am on the subject of the Royal Pointless Ones, Your Majesty the Queen, it is pretty fucking out of order to be claiming poverty, when you and your parasitic line devour endless sums of cash coughed up by us peons each year, at a time when many are losing their jobs, their homes, and come winter, their lives, due to financial dire straits. You don’t know the bloody meaning of being hard up, and your dim witted, pointless, grotesque spawn have even less idea. If you want to raise some cash, sell some of your empty, over-staffed estates, sell your sons for biological experiments, or get a fucking real job, but don’t try and suggest that we owe you more, because I’m telling you your majesty, you owe us…an apology if nothing else!

Booh!

* Obviously, don’t try this, it would be bad…bad for everyone…seriously…don’t

Possibly the most surreal shift I have ever done, and I thank the immortals that another qualified member of staff was on to do the stuff that required brains, because mine had slithered off to die shortly after arriving home in the afternoon.

By 03:00, 21 hours awake, I was starting to actually hurt with tiredness. My hair ached, my limbs throbbed, and my eyes! Jesus! my eyes felt (and continue to feel) like someome had come along and loving placed crumbs of broken glass along the lower lid, making them a constant source of blurry irritation.

By handover I was entering that weird state of euphoria that sleep deprivation instills; a kind of helpless, broken state of giddy dissociation, in which everything is seen through a faded blue filter of blur-edged detatchment.

Thank the Gods I got a lift home.

And so, having been up for over 25 hours, I got in, lay on the sofa and slept…for about 4 hours…

Yep, maybe it’s my brain wanting me to make the most of my “days off” (though I have had to mop the kitchen and do some other housework), but as soon as 11:00 rolled round, I was awake, blinking with groggy disbelief at the time, and wondering how I could have slept for so little time. Apart from the odd doze, I have stayed awake too; though at this exact moment I am once more tired enough (okay, exhausted) to feel genuinely unwell with it.

I have a game of D&D tonight though, so I need to wake the fuck up!

Time for some coffee, and lots of sugar…or sleep…nice, silky, sleep….

Ugh.

I’ll be honest, after all the security crap and the piss poor reviews, any enthusiasm I felt for Spore rotted away like a mushroom in a sauna. However, I have been following the furious folks who quite rightly felt entirely insulted and infurated by the “3 installations and you’re out” bullshit that was worked into the game, and so feel more than a little joy to discover that EA have had a Class Action Lawsuit filed against them!

The following links were found at Amazon.com HERE.

Here is the Lawsuit itself

And a nice little bit about it at Penny Arcade

I hope EA get taken the cleaners…and produce some games that don’t suck. Do you remember when they were good? No? You are probably not 20 years old then.

*sigh*

As a massive H.P. Lovecraft fan, and servitor of the formless ones, this upsets me…I mean it’s got Tori Spelling in it for fucks’ sake!

I can only prey that the blasphemous powers turn their ineffable attention towards this thing, and obliterate all trace of it with their eldritch and uncanny powers.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Ia Ia IA!

Anyway, I gets in, I does, and I sleeps. I sleep like biilio, and after all that sleepin’, I feels right as rain again…apart from a smidge of cockneyitis that be.

*cough* *cough*

So yeah, I’ve been poorly, and been off work with a high temperature, shivers and all the other hallmarks of a nasty little virus. Luckily though sleep and lemsip seem to have prevailed and all is well…for now.

So, Sian and I are having a Halloween party this year. To me Halloween actually has some significance; certainly a lot more than Christmas does. Samhain is a truly ancient celebration, and even without all the stuff about ghouls and witches, marks the height of my favourite season, and resonates with the misty, dark power of a year in decline. It’s a night when one can, with the right mindset, almost feel like the shades and lemures of the underworld are truly trying to make their presence felt in this world; and of course, it’s a great excuse for a party and to buy some cool toys.

And the toys purchased so far include a skeleton in a cage that howls and gibbers and begs to be set free when disturbed, a rather lovely human skeleton with hanging limbs, and skull goblets. More will follow, trust me.

So, the new desktop is, as expected, a monster, and I have been able to play Medieval Total War II and its expansion at full graphics without any problems, which rocks, as I loved Rome Total War, and was gutted that my old PC got in a real tiz every time I tried to play it with more than three men on the field. I’ve also been playing more Battle March on the Xbox 360, and maintain my stance; faaaar from perfect, but okay.

Despite the paper versions not being available yet, I bought the PDF versions of Adventurer’s Vault and Forgotten Realms Players Guide from RPGNow, and had a good read through them last night. The former is very cool, though I am gutted that they have not expanded the mundane armours at all, and that there are no firearms (it’s a good job I am good at doing my own stats is it not). Lots of nice alchemical items, and a mass of other magical items; some cool, others a bit pants…and many, pretty damn powerful!

The latter is quite nice. The new class (Swordmage) looks pretty funky, though as it is not a core class, I’m wondering how much support it will get, and the Genasai have been given a very cool face lift; now being grumpy, scarred beings with Emo-esque turmoil imprinted on their very doomed souls. There are a mass of new feats, paragon paths and powers, which so far, I have not looked at, and for those of you playing in the Boring..I mean Forgotten Realms (why? I mean, I use a homebrewed world, but why would you play realms, when Eberron was actually good), there is a ton of fluff so you can really get into your character.

And that’s about it. Jantherak (as in my World of Warcraft warlock, not the ancient 2nd Age Necromancer) is now 42nd level (and spent a frustrating hour killing endless tigers in Stranglethorn Vale last night, fruitlessly waiting for a Pristine Fang to drop), and Sian, Scott and I have a band of dwarves currently residing in Iron Forge. Get in touch if you fancy partying up with us!

I assume it’s because I am a sucker for the Warhammer world (I love the darkness of it, and I would be lying if I tried to make out that my own venerable D&D world isn’t at least partly influenced by it), and because I assumed that in the two years since I wept blood trying (trying so very hard) to find something I liked about the PC version, someone at Deep Silver would have read the fury filled message boards, taken on some of the wailing and puking nails on there about the bugs, and made sure they were fixed for any future versions!!!!

Buuuuut no.

We still have choppy graphics, models that become lost against the background, and linear, unimaginative quests that make you want to open your belly and play with your stinking guts, for something interesting to do. The sound on the Xbox 360 version is fucking bugged to bits (constantly dropping out, or stuttering like Max Headroom on speed), and at times you just cannot get the camera to do anything useful.

However…

Despite all this – and the super complex control system, counter intuitive layout of utility buttons and the severe agonies of being defeated halfway through a mission without being able to save up to that point…oh, and the lack of assistance in many missions, where you are informed of a goal, but not actually given any helpful information as to…oh, you know, FIND THE FUCKING PLACE / THING YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE USING…I have – a bit – enjoyed myself playing it. Admittedly, I have nearly thrown my controller at the TV a few times (especially when the faux English narrator was bellowing on about “finding the blackpowder” to create a distraction, whilst failing to reveal where, on the murky play area the things were lurking), and have cursed the designers for not fixing anything from the original, but, I have derived quite a bit of enjoyment out of it….so far.

So yeah, not as bad as the PC version, but unless you are a die hard fan, avoid like the plague (or Nurgle).

Speaking of Warhammer, have you seen THIS. Holy crap, do that look good?

Shame the actual game looks a bit bland! Booh!

Anyway, I need to get to bed. I will tell you about my new game concept (ASDA Assassins Creed), and much more soon. Enjoy the movie. Night!

Holy crap! I mean, Holy Crap! I would say she was the anti-christ, but all signs point to the end-bringer subtly winning the nations over; I mean, what the fuck?

What. The. Fuck?

Can I be blunt; the absolutely last thing this world needs is another gung-ho religious fanatic, who fails to see that guns = bad and feels that bringing endless streams of additional human units into this world anywhere near a position of power. This “hockey mum”, is purest evil – ask the bear sprawled pitifully on the back of her sofa if you don’t believe me.

I can only pray that the American people engage their brains when they vote. Please folks, your current president has single-handedly made the world a far darker and less safe place with his flawed, aggressive and deceitful policies. For the love of the immortals, show the world you have a brain and vote in the other guy!

Pleeeeeeeease!

Still, at least you have a clear choice; here in Britain all the parties are as useless, ineffective and shite as each other. We have the choice of Labour (aka, red conservatives), the Conservatives (aka, upper class twat society: motto “but they’re poor”), and the other party…forget what they are called…Lib something something?

Pathetic.

Anyway, Mrs Palin, to anyone outside the states looking in, is a grotesque caricature of the stereotyped American. From her fixed rictus grin to her gun toting joy of conservative religion, she is a nightmare of epic proportions. Women; she aint a role model. Men, think with the big head not the little one. Don’t let her or her ageing lead anywhere near the ultimate position of power. Demonstrate your brains. Please.