Round Up Again.

A few bits and pieces before an obligatory hiatus comes this way, including a shout out to one of my favourite places to keep you going.

Crest Charity Shop. Walthamstow

I've made no bones that I quite like Walthamstow despite it being stuffed full of leftie weirdos and Christians. Its essentially a massive street market complete with shops off to the side. One of these is Crest Charity shop.  Whereas most Charity shops are resolutely corporate in their pricing and outlook this looks like a mix of junk shop and the craziest bazaar ever.  Most charity shops do no look like some mad hoarders back room filled with random piles of junk now, however this does.  Its always worth a look just in case you need to pick up a Slovenian - English dictionary or cables for obscure outlet points.

One of the most odd things I've found there is a small A5 magazine called Home and Freezer Digest from 1980, a mix of old ads, recipes and articles for women that doesn't really exist anymore. I check out Take a Break and Now! in Smiths but they seem to have an uneasy fascination for Paedos, Psychos and Celebs that Whitehouse would be proud of.  So I kinda pine for the old days of women's mags where hearth and home were always fore front and you always got a serial (story) and never a serial killer.  I know its probably sexist (everything is nowadays) but it seems more wholesome than the endless my boyfriend is Ian Brady / Chanelle Hayes loses / gains weight drama.

Face Exercises.

Really should have ponied up the pittance they wanted for this just to get a better shot / scan of the article above.  Part of a facial exercise regime featuring some weird androgynous child woman thing (that nowadays would have its own Tumblr blog complete with 6 made up personal pronouns and genders) that totally does not look like a blow up doll.   They had a good few vintage ads in there for Kotex jam rags and American Burgers as well as fridges and food ideas.

I also briefly touched on weird cables and shit above and I'm not kidding, I saw a VGA to HDMI connector last time I was there and decided to dig through the various gubbins they had spread through various baskets to see if its still there.  Lots of things for obsolete phones, quite a few PS/2 cables, Toner cartridges for Laser printers and what probably is a coup. a dock for a GP2X handheld console.  Looking like a USB hub on drugs, it packs a serial port as well as 4 USB ports for good measure into its form factor.  I'm not sure if it can be used outside of the console itself but its a strange thing to actually find seeing as the device itself is a obscure homebrew only device.

Quite strange.

Like I said its quite a place for weird and wonderful things and outdated PC hardware.  I picked up Knights of the Nine DLC expansion pack for Oblivion and have previously got a J Pop 3" CD there. If you are there come and visit as its worth a look.

Then and now. Anatomy of a Clickbait article.

Been looking at clickbait on Metro again.  I'm supposed to be reading Gamecentral but at the end of the article there are always links off that say one of three things.

Gifs that are distracting as fuck, check.

30% of Britons do not know they have PPI (which I automatically read as please fuck off and die horribly)
His bollocks fell off in the street, what happened next will leave you speechless.
15 Life hacks that are so US specific you really wonder why they're included here.

There is a fourth type though that basically boils down to, star you used to like in a show from way back now looks different now (older and stranger normally or in child star cases, merely grown up).

I normally don't bother with those preferring my clickbait to be about Twitter hissy fits over trivial issues in Television from the professionally aggrieved, and Tumblr Whales.

Pro tip, in an article, if anyone calls black people POCs you know they don't have shit worth saying. There is a difference between being polite and not being racist and just being a PC asshole.

Anyway back to the clickbait.

I've decided to put together a sort of article based on trope number four, but with a NSFW twist.

I call it  These are the girls of Charmed and this is what their tits look like.  So if you want the bloke who went on to star in Nip/Tuck or Brian Krause in the buff ladies and gentlemen you'll have to search elsewhere for that.

First up you may remember Charmed as part of  Channel 5's early evening line up when it first started.  A show about 3 witches living in an old house with boyfriend troubles and a cat if I remember rightly.  Guys only really watched it because they were hot and women because of the drama.  It weren't bad but some episodes where akin to having you cock removed and being beaten to death by feminists with it, thanks to it being skewed toward women viewers.   Also bastard Morrisey on the theme tune heaven knows I'm miserable now.

Also another thing that bugged me was White Lighters Piper's holier than thou boyfriends job.  I guess they couldn't call him an angel because of Middle America. Anyway you came for tits and tits you shall have
NSFW FROM THIS POINT ON.

Shannen Doherty

Holly Marie Combs (My Favourite)

Alyssa Milano.

Rose McGowan

Sorry for turning this into the Daily Sport, normal service will be resumed next week.

Edit typos and Rose McGowan now shows up instead of links.

Brexit. Round Up.

Here are a Round up of a few things that have been bugging me of late.

Brexit.

I'm not going into the whole leave the EU stay in the EU debate and there has been a lot of scaremongering going on about this. If you don't know, David Hameron has most graciously given us a vote on if we want to leave the European Union or not.  I personally would want to leave as I still cling to the ideals of a British (NOT Brittas) Empire ruling the world regardless of Boris Godwinning the whole thing.  The weird thing is I've yet to see a single stall saying we should get out rather than the usual stay in brigade.  What I like to do is read both sides and see what I side with before going out. Its what I did for the mayoral elections but seems that I won't be doing it in this case.

Snoopy no Otsukai Translated.

Good lord, this is actually done now can remember recommending this for translation on RHDN years back.  This is a late era Gameboy game in which Snoopy has to run errands for Charlie Brown.  Its Isometric in style and you have to place arrows to lead him into shops to get various stuff for people (hence the translated title Snoopy's Early Errands).  The patch was done by Zynk Oxhide who's done a good job on this.  Also running this in BGB it seems it had Super Gameboy support as well, as you get a nice colour border with it, which is nice.

Eurovision

The UK came second last in the latest Eurovision song contest.  We deserved to lose thanks to the weak sauce boy band bender song we put out.  I didn't watch it of course as its not my cup of tea but I did however watch Pointless Eurovision special.  Apart from Cheryl Baker I knew none of the other contestants, I'm guessing this is what an all techno episode would be like to the general public.  It was won by a plastic looking chap and a ginger lady who called themselves Scooch and runners up were an Irish couple and two blonde birds who could pass for porn stars (Fucks Bizz?).  Cheryl and Bucks Fizz went out first, (incidentally who remembers Eggs and Baker the short lived cookery programme she did) leaving me scratching my head over dinner just who the rest of them were.

Mayor Stuff.

In case you are foreign or living under a rock we have the results of London's mayoral election (and Liverpool's if I recall correctly).  Of course there are a few candidates but it mainly splits down to what Bill Hicks always called the puppet on the Left and the puppet on the Right.  The lefts puppet is called Bus Busdriverson (Sadiq Khan) and is of course blaming everything on "Tory cuts", he seems a nice enough guy even if, and this is just me, he looks a lot like an Asian Phillip Schofield.  I kinda want to Photoshop in a Gordon the Gopher to his campaign picture but cannot for the life of me get on with Photoshop.

The puppet on the right is of course Ballsac Fishpaste (Zac Goldsmith) son of Referendum Party's Jammy Fishpaste and Billionaire boy.  His campaign is about a vertical Crossrail and business but largely dirty tricks against Bus Busdriverson and his Muslim roots.  Put it this way if you ever have to result to personal attacks and that you have nothing worth saying. Ever.

The Libdem candidate Potty Pigeon (Caroline Pigeon) and the Greens Sian (Rasp) Berry were my first and second choice.  They didn't get in but their policies were more toward what I would normally vote for as I'm basically a middle of the road fence sitter liberal.

The far right and UKIP had their candidates including an actual Disco Vicar BNP bloke, an ape in UKIP's case and you archetypal knuckle dragger for Britan First.  I don't want a party that will speak for the Christian minority when I myself am not a Christian.  No one speaks up for an Atheist Minority which I can assure you there are far less of than Christians.    Finally we have the Feminazi party peddling the old 77% wage gap myth and women's rights. I'm not against women's rights at all, I've just learned to fear the word feminist due to obese 3rd wavers throwing tantrums. 

If you want to know how it all turned out Wikipaedia has the breakdown you require here.

(Edit cleared up some typos and that proof reading huh!).

Picross

I've been getting well into Picross recently.  You may know it under a load of different names but essentially it all boils down to using co ordinates to fill in a grid to make a picture. I'll explain how to do it below.

Pikachu I see you.

The numbers at the side state how many in a row or column there is to fill in so in a 10 by 10 grid if you see a 10 it means you can fill in the whole row. Numbers that are split (like 4 /5) have a space between them so you can fill in 4 spaces leave a space and fill in the rest.

Further rules come into play as if you have more than 6 spaces to fill in a row.  Instead of taking a guess on where they will be, count in the number you have from the edge and then put a cross at its furthest extent, do the same from the other side, finally fill the squares from the cross to the other cross including the squares with the crosses on.  If any of these are at an edge it will give you another chance to fill in some squares as it gives you a base to work from.  There are other better explanations for more advanced techniques out there but these are the basics and the built in tutorial is actually pretty good at explaining.

The downside of this apart from it being a freemium game and all that it entails, (limited energy for puzzling and move sets, pay for extra energy etc etc) is that what you are drawing isn't made clear, in fact I'll go as far as saying that unless you are a Pokemon and know intimately what it looks like from a blown up sprite, then you are going to be scratching your head quite a bit of the time.

It doesn't ruin it but then again it does make it bastard hard especially on the rare 20 by 15 grids.

In further news I've added a few PS3 games including Oblivion, Dark Souls 2 and the PS3 version of  Marvel V Capcom 3 which I played in HMV ages ago.  All that is moot though as I found out why its been chucked out, there are heatsink / GPU problems causing it to glitch like a bastard.  I'm of course going to get it fixed but if its not economical to do so then I won't bother.  Its the only reason why I didn't go all in last gen (that and always on internet connectivity), you can't rely on the hardware anymore.

Round up time.

After an unscheduled appearance yesterday telling you in plain English how to update your PS3's firmware for offline scum, here is a tedious round up of smaller stories.  Incidentally the first was supposed to be up last week.

Dragon's Heaven Neo Geo.

There's been quite a buzz about this early alpha fighting game.  Neo turfmasta managed  to buy some early sram dev karts on Yahoo! auctions.  Thanks to the battery still being viable in one of them he managed to extract most of what was there except for onscreen text, music and energy bars.  Those were held on the other two ram carts and as the battery died so did the data with it.   Further info surfaced (Japanese only) that it was being made by FACE and ex Techno's staff (as they had no real fighting game experience) based on the Gowcaizer engine.  As I've said before its  obviously an alpha, but the sprite work is actually quite good and there's an alignment mechanic going on reminiscent of D+D dependent on whether you are neutral, lawful and chaotic.  There's a bit more info here on the Neo Geo forums.

Romancing SaGa 2 getting an English release.

Its only for mobiles at the moment, but they are translating one of the last untranslated SaGa games into English. Japan gets a Vita port as well, but so far its only for Android and iPhone which is cool.  I really hope they do a good port of this I gave up on a free version of FF2 due to the crappy virtual pad they used and later Final Fantasy ports have been hamstrung with poor quality sprite work and rather substandard filtering added to that.  Gideon Zhi of AGTP has been working on the original Super Famicom game for a while now and reckons its an absolute bastard to work with.  So fingers crossed for a good port to phones.

Green screen PS3.

Half the problem with this I found out is using legacy bits and pieces, the TV I have is a large CRT which can support 60hz (America stuff works with it) and the SCART cable is from my old PS2 which  fits but is hardly ideal.  Remember running DVD's on PS2 where they would play in various shades of green, due to I guess, nonsense.  Will see if I have any other leads that will do it, can remember I think it came with component failing that I will have to get a flat screen and a run it through HDMI.

PS3 Official update guide.

Yeah so we managed to grab a PS3 from the bin.   The person said it didn't work and as there was a few of them that were less complete than this alongside a knacked Xbox 360, we took a punt on the off chance that we had a hard drive ( we did from a much more fucked PS3 80GB literally it was just a shell) and some leads from an old PS2.  Its got a nasty dose of the green screen, much more than the PS2 ever did and I'll need to look into ways of fixing that but it works for now, we're running a DVD I got from Hackney. 

It did give me a not compatible error and to be fair after some googling I managed to fix this. And here's how.  Note it implies that you are running this offline and grabbing all files from PC.

Step one

Grab your firmware from Sony.

Step two

While it downloads, stick a flashdrive in, it unpacks around 220MB so anything above 512MB is fine ; ).

It'll need to be formatted to FAT32 format (though most are already in this).

and your final task will be to create 2 folders, one called PS3 open this and create a folder in this called UPDATE.  Yeah they're in all caps.  It'll look like this PS3>UPDATE.

Step three.

Open the folder the update file and drag it across to the UPDATE folder.  Do NOT rename this and remove your flashdrive.  Stick it in your PS3 and press the PS button (or whatever its called on my one is called P3 but its the button between the start and select).  Follow the onscreen instructions and it'll reboot.  I reckon you could grab a SATA laptop HD and grade up like this.