Round Up again.

Eastenders has been fucking weird of late, they have a big storyline about Lucy Beale being killed by her little brother Bobby that is dull as fuck.  But on the other hand they have resurrected Kathy Beale from the dead for some weird reason.  Possibly getting Gillian Taylforth back was seen as a coup but like everything else with E.E. its been done before.  They bought back Dirty Den, Lazarus stylee, only for him to die again thanks to off screen shenanigans, but for full on body horror there's a strange cross dressing sub plot. 

Its all a bit Twin Peaks as the guy runs the funeral parlour and must be 60 at least, they've teased the secret that he's a lumberjack Tranny for a while but now we see the full body horror of it.  A monster in a blonde fright wig and make up, kinda like a hippy take on Julian Clary, or his taller blonder sister. 

I suppose its a big issue thing with them, complete with poxy phone line if you've been affected with this storyline cock and bull. Me I kept singing the Lumberjack song all the way through and laughing my ass off.

Oblivion.

Been revisiting Tamriel this past few days and found that my saves have been deleted, so decided to start all over again, will probably disable the water textures as its a known problem for it crashing the game. I have an onboard graphics card and can't be arsed to upgrade as I don't have time to game anymore (I know there's steam now but PC gaming used to be all FPS and stuff not what I was into).  Had Sean Bean (brother Martin) as an escort which was nice as well.

Scan of the week Returns.

Crazy times.

 Found this while raking through an old copy of Dragon magazine.  I'm pretty sure the dog is MacRuff a badly drawn cartoon Bloodhound, seriously he doesn't have any eyes in that pic.  We never had anything like this in the UK and its only Simpsons references and other stuff that I sorta know who he is.  Closest we got were stickers say I've met the Met, whenever the cops would come to school to talk about stranger danger and the like.  Incidentally looking on Wikipedia it seems that Mac Ruffs voice actor was arrested for drugs and firearms offences?.

Playbubblun.

We have a few bits and pieces that are strangely connected to each other in this round up so without further ado I'll begin.

Bubble Bobble Stuff.

If you've been browsing the front page we've added a link to Kimimi's Site that should hopefully work.  Forgot all about Kimimi's work on obscure games and this takes the cake for great new stuff.  Epoch are releasing some old coin ops in LCD game format and some of the first games are Fantasy Zone from Sega and Bubble Bobble from Taito.  Not quite sure how this is going to work in reality but the link above will let you see a brief clip with the iconic music and some gameplay which is cool.

Even better is a strange cheat mode that was uncovered in the X68000 version that will let you play a super tough version of the game but reskinned to look like odd shoot 'em up Syvalion.  Haven't actually got this to work in X68K highspeed yet (and there isn't really any updated X68000 emulators apart from MESS / MAME). Which is a shame as I always considered it to be Japans answer to the Amiga.

More info on the X68000 here. 

Playbore

I'm not kidding its fucking tedious.

If you haven't already heard, Playboy (the worlds dullest sex mag) is cutting out the nudes as, I quote, the world and his dog can see nudity and more online for free. The current owners want to turn it into a joyless version of Maxim but with "quality writing".

When growing up this was the one magazine that you didn't want to find under the hedge shredded up, as it was 95% article and very little tit and bum, and what you did see tended to be a lot blonde and very much silicone packed.  Can remember one especially grim issue with Sandra Bernhard from Hudson Hawk posing nude.

A shame as I always wanted to see a magazine like Loaded, do a Playboy and go the other way and show full nudity, especially if its 90's Loaded with Howard Hughes and the original prototype TV go home from Charlie Brooker.  They had some great writing then and some funny cartoons from Modern toss, Playboy never made me laugh.  Ever.

Put it this way if Playboy was a:
*game magazine they'd be the modern incarnation of Edge.
* rock 'n Roll they'd be Coldplay.
* sitcom they'd be Miranda.
* DJ they would be David Guetta
*football team they would be West brom.
*food it would be brown bread.

You get the idea.

As you've already had the glamour shots (see picture) I'll leave you with some quality articles to read.

The rise of anti Semitism in the left.
Van Nuys porn capital of the world.

Robot life.

Brief update before the main show, I went out to Wem ber ley {Wembley}for a look around the town and that, they have a charity shop dedicated to the local library which was cool and a not very visible tube / train station which took ages to find (clue its next to T am Pax (TK Maxx)).
 Apart from some old Private Eye flexidiscs (shurely shome mistake) and an old copy of Dragon Magazine, that's about it for purchases. 

Antivaxxers: or as I call them disease carriers

Robot Life

Don't normally go into depth about me in posts, but I've been meaning to make a few "autism awareness" posters for quite sometime.  There is a small bit in today's Liz Jones column about how I feel (the PS bit at the end not the bit about renting), she's deaf and has some OCD issues and is a weirdo vegan but here is spot on about disability and that.  To paraphrase a lot of people in Autism group think autism and related Aspergers Spectrum Disorders are some sort of wonderful things and that their lives under autism are all roses and that if they are cured they will have nothing to live for.  I don't think like that.  Far from it. 

I can barely talk and think most days, that's why I call it my robot life, this time of year I find the light to bright and certain sounds like storms and motorbikes are far too loud, but generally I am not one of those people who meltdown at the drop of a hat.  I do however crave routine both offline and on.  So far I'm a typical "aspie" though the word to me is facile and stupid, its a word made up for us.  Autist is far better for me or even sperg which is at least honest and isn't offensive to me, maybe some could reclaim it Icespergers anyone.

Aspergers to me its an everyday slap in the face on how I'm not like regular folk.  I wont celebrate this, I wont celebrate Neurodiversity either or any of the other positivm shit the others put out. If you have a problem you get it fixed, though god knows what it would take to get a cure. 

Put it bluntly, your brain on Aspergers is like one of those pirate products from china.  Badly manufactured and a shoddy knock off a regular products, with bits routed here and there.  Nothing much works and what does is often a lot strange.  The only positives for me I can think of is Hyperlexia, that is being able to read at a stupidly young age and that isn't saying much.  

Blarrgh.

 Its horrible posters like this one that make me shiver.  Its differences that make us targets, alienate us and indeed make life a bit more unbearable.  Of course we don't know how to play by the rules, no one tells us but to be honest, thats how life is, and there's no real getting away from that.  If your smart enough to know how bad it can be (and yes there are downsides to it) then this is more of an accurate poster.

But only sometimes.

Update stuff.

Been an odd couple of days really.  First of all the virus I thought my PC had turned out to be a false positive brought on by misidentifying some Delphi programs.  Its all moot now as its been quarantined.

Secondly those rogues at Applian are still in business and still pumping out freecorder updates. Of course like every rogue trader its not called freecorder now but Replay Media Catcher Oh and its also paid for software now instead of free costing £30 (about $50 us or 40 Useless for Europeans).  As a side note I noted something called flvsrvc.exe in process hacker while browsing my start up directory, its not malicious but would definitely be classed as a PUP as its virtually impossible to remove. Guess what its leftovers from Freecorder.

Judging by the smug responses here, it seems that they know all about it and yes I would call it a virus or worse, in fact a lot of people would say that if you are going to drop £30 on shite to record stuff (especially audio) on the web then do us a favour and get an external soundcard and audacity and look for a guide to set up stereo mix options as they often nerf the channels on internal cards.

Also as a side note we have a couple of cool programs for Android (also ios for Apple wankers).

First up is NHK clock which really should be your standard Android system clock, is a nice looking version of an onscreen clock that used to be on NHK.  Browsing through there are versions for Vista and Mac as well as an actual wall clock for １０，５８４円 (£60 plus shipping) in light blue and wood grain.  The app is free and has a (loud) time signal on the hour.

Finally Terra Battle has updated to finally let me register and play and its a really nice strategy rpg. Done by Hironobu Sakaguchi's Mistwalker studios its like a board game, in execution, you move pieces once per turn and if they flank an enemy then they battle doing damage. You'll need a wifi connection as its one of those server based free to play buggers, but its not to heavy on the microtransactions and is of a real nice quality.

Get I Player notes.

This is just a few lines here about using Get iPlayer. More as an aide memoire than anything else, if anyone else finds it useful then good for you, if not then this one from squarepenguin is good, also you can grab the program from their home page.

For those of you who don't know what get iPlayer is, its a BBC iPlayer programme recorder, for the mighty, blighty only TV catch up service from the BBC.  Iplayer lets you watch pitch shifted programming from the main BBC networks along with radio programmes (say if you want to nab a comedy show from Radio  4 or some bollocks from 1Xtra).  You can download them for a month and then they vanish, but due to insane copy restrictions (and it being a flash file and that) its never really playable in any program other than Windows Media Player. Get iPlayer lets you permanently keep them. 

Previously I've used their web PVR program to snag various bits and pieces for various Youtube bits such as YTP and spoofs, but previously its been a bit flaky so I've had to do it the old fashioned way in Get iPlayer itself.

I mean old fashioned too, its command line only, Linux bastards are of course right at home here (where everyday is 1992) but for the rest of us who DOS is a foreign country then this is a bit weird.

1. When it starts you'll see a stream of stuff pop up before it stops.  We are going to use Eastenders here as our bait and what you'll need to do is search for stuff so in the prompt, hit space and put.

 get_iplayer "EastEnders"
you'll see a bunch of matches with a number next to them what you will need to do now is type this number into get iplayer in form of the below command.  In this case we'll download Monday's episode which is 518 which will look like this.

get_iplayer --get 518

It will then download it to a folder on your desktop for keeps and stuff.

There are a load of other ways to do this according to squarepenguins guide but this I find is the easiest way of doing it.