Previously in Nick’s life:
- Mal bought Halo 3, and I finished it on his 360, scoring myself some achievements in the process. I’m pretty happy with my current gamerscore, since I don’t have a 360.
- I bought the Orange Box on Steam. I love steam. I get the games I would have bought anyway at FANTASTIC prices, thanks to the currently-great Aussie dollar, and also the warm feeling of having purchased software where most of the money went to the creators.
- Portal was the best game I’ve played in YEARS.
- I paid around AUD$15 for Vampire: Bloodlines on Steam as well. Great deal.
HL2 Episode 2 has been great, but I really, really hate the Hunters. Especially in the last big fight, there’s heaps of other stuff going on, and they’re taking away 1/3 of your health and armour in one salvo. And they are difficult to kill with your standard weapons… It seems you basically have to run them over with your car to kill them quickly. Unfortunately, my machine struggles with rendering car + everything else going on…
In a completely unrelated note, presented for your edification, intro sequences for the same cartoon.
Firstly, one you may be familiar with:
And next, one you probably haven’t seen before – the Japanese intro for the same show.
It seems to me that the Japanese one contains a much higher awesome quotient than the Western one. Plus, they somehow manage to make Jubilee look bad-ass. I wouldn’t have thought it was even possible.
Let’s all give a big hoorah to John Howard for collectively bumfucking us as communications consumers. This whole Telstra thing is just a joke. Good old PM John has had it in his head the entire time he’s been in office that we don’t need State-owned utilities, and that competition and deregulation will give us a sleeker, competitive communications system.
What we have in practice is Telstra doing exactly the things you would expect a good capitalist company to do when it procures a monopoly – fight for it tooth and nail, then screw over the low-value, high-maintenance customers in favour of the high value ones. I honestly cannot see how regulation is supposed to ensure that Telstra, as a private company, wastes its shareholder’s money in supporting a non-profit activity.
I think that’s really what this comes down to. John Howard seems to be of the opinion that he can regulate Telstra to be altruistic and maintain universal service in spite of the fact that it goes against the basic nature of a private, for profit company. If you want to guarantee something universally to every citizen, whatever it is should be paid for jointly by every citizen.
This is one of the major reasons for having a government in the first place. By arguing for the privatisation of all public utilities, John Howard is basically arguing that Government should be replaced by the courts and legal system, maybe with a small group making new laws, chosen by whoever can pay the most. And so there shall be consumer goods for all, until such time as we fuck up the environment and run out of resources and civilisation degenerates into a post-apocalyptic mess where we kill politicians and eat them for their valuable fat content.
So, much has happened since I posted last. I’ve discovered I’m not getting as much tax back as I thought, so no new PC. Which is bad. But, Trang and I took my niece Phoebe to the Disney on Ice Princesses thing, which was good.
I’ve booked Trang and I a weekend away soon – which should be great! It’ll be nice to spend some time away.
About the London thing – it was really interesting to see the difference between England and America’s reactions to terrorism. Although 9/11 was on a much larger scale, it seems that England’s long experience with terrorism has prepared them well.
It’s funny how the word ‘terrorism’ has been so subverted by the events of the last few years. The association of the word with the Middle East is so very strong now. I have noticed with amusement how all of the acts of terrorism in Iraq have always been committed by ‘insurgents’. Never ‘terrorists’ or, heaven forbid, ‘rebels’. A good example of language being very carefully chosen, I would guess by someone in the US government or Army.
Went to see Jared Diamond speak on the weekend as part of the Sydney Writer’s Festival. Kind of wish I hadn’t already started reading his new book, as a lot of the material he covered is also in the book. That said, it was still a great lecture – he has quite a good speaking style. I’d highly recommend reading his book if you can.
