Look at that little red number in the bottom right
Get excited “Oh joy! I’ve been included!!”
Open it up and….
BAM!
Add your relatives!
There are polls for you to answer!!
People claim that <insert random friend> is funnier than you! Take the quiz!!!
Or some other bullshit. We already get ads on the side of Facebook and surrounding the games we play inside Facebook are these phony notifications really necessary?
It’s a disappointment if anything because you are thinking “oh joy!” then you look at it and the reality sets it “aww shit, nobody likes me” and the downward spiral begins! That’s right, Facebook is why you’re depressed!
As a part of life, we all have to pump gas at some point to get somewhere. At least in today’s world we have gas terminals that take debit and they are great because you don’t have to face the angry person in the gas booth who is pissed you had the nerve to make them ring something in. However, there is one place that totally sucks for this in every way possible and that is Esso. Esso has the slowest and most annoying terminals of any gas station out there and to top it off some locations even make you suffer through some terrible commercials as you pump the gas
The pumps are too slow
I don’t know why they felt it was neccesary to make them so slow but have you ever noticed that it’ll be going along fine and then a dollar before the amount you pre entered it slows to a crawl and those last 100 cents take a minute! With it now being winter this is exceptionally annoying! New Sunoco and Petro Canada stations stop almost right on the amount or only 20 cents from the final tally which is way more acceptable!
The pump asks you 20 questions before you get to pump your gas
Do you have esso points? no
Do you want a carwash? no
Do you want a reciept? no
Do you want to fill up to $100? no
Then we get to the point finally….
Enter the amount you would like: 20
Account?
Pin?
Select grade
Lift nozzle
Then! 10 minutes later when it went from $19 to $20 it prints a receipt anyways even though you said no and beeps until you take it!
The commercials are awful
Ok so they have commercials playing to make money yet still charge the same amount as everyone else for gas while having crappier gas pumps then everyone else….AND THE COMMERIALS ARE TERRIBLE. You never see these super shit bottom of the budget commercials on real tv but when you use ESSO and be their customer here you go! Right where you can’t get away from them!
As we all know the FPS genre is pretty much everywhere you look these days and why not, it’s fun to blow the crap out of your friends with a shotgun right? Well I find most FPS’s of today are a bit too serious and are a little bit “function heavy” for my tastes where either half your keyboard is mapped to 100 things you need to do or on a console you have absolutely ridiculous button combos to get around.
Remember a simpler time?
My favourite shooter of all time had always been Quake/QuakeWorld it was simple and ridiculously fast paced. Quakeworld pretty much created online play we know today and the mods introduced the sub genres of class based (team fortress) , Clan Arena and Capture the flag to the world and you can find these in every FPS you look at today. Thanks id!
However getting a bunch of friends together to play an old game like this proves problematic and the people online still playing it are nuts.
There is another way and it is free…
id Software last year started a beta for a new quake game called QuakeLive. This is a totally in your browser skill match based quake game. It is based of the Quake 3 engine and is run by a plugin for your browser. It takes minutes to setup, few minutes to download the game data and bam, good to go! I started with this game a year ago in the closed beta. Back then they only supported Firefox and IE on windows so I had to play inside a virtual machine but man I was hooked. It is the same fast paced fragging I love except it doesn’t look like shit and people of today actually play it! Anyways the beta now is open and anyone can sign up AND as an added bonus it now supports linux and Mac OS X natively.
What kicks ass:
Supports all 3 major platforms, Wintendo, Linux and Mac
All the old goodies like Rocket jump and jump running are present
Skill matching so you arent totally pwned all the time (still most of the time though)
Offline mode for practice
Kick ass game modes like Clan Arena and CTF are present
Free! Just sign up and go!
All of your stats are recorded for you and trophies are awarded
So I’m sorry to say Quakeworld but I may finally have to retire you as QuakeLive offers everything you did plus more and it looks great!
Anyone catch idol last night? Well usually I do not as I don’t care for it but it happened to be on and the most hilarious thing occured when 62 year old General Larry Platt broke out into his original tune about people who wear their pants on the ground.
This song has been stuck in my head since last night and it is now all over youtube, there are a few videos of last nights broadcast that top the 50k view mark and 1 that is 100k+.
Anyways, this morning I try to share this amusing piece of now internet and tv history with my classmates at work and they all break out into labeling me a pansy for watching idol! Bastards! As punishment for their noncooperation I un muted my laptop and played it a few times in class and they now also cannot get it out of their heads.
This past month has been busy busy busy! With getting a job offer, leaving my old job, starting with VMware, the holidays, New years, Birthdays and finally seeing Avatar it has been a whirlwind of a month and I am looking forward to a little bit of winding down!
Go to work, come home, repeat. Until Valentines day next month anyways
So every Saturday I get ready for a good ol’ hockey game and get prepared to see the Leafs duke it out against some team yet yesterday I was at Daryl’s and we couldn’t help but notice something from our Announcers and commentators.
They couldnt shut up about Ovechkin!
We counted in the second period and got sick of counting by the 21st time he was mentioned in the first 10 minutes “Hmm I havent seen Ovechkin yet”
“Where’s Ovechkin” “Last period Ovechkin was Amazing I love him and want to marry him and make man babies with him he’s so great” <- last one may or may not be true…
But wait, here is the absolute best of the night
“Ovechkin is the most dangerous man on the planet”
I kid you not, apparently Osama, Â Pirates, Bowser, Dr. Robotnik, Look out for Ovechkin! He’ll fuck you up!
So ok the guy is good I get that, but when I am watching a HOME game on CBC for the Toronto Maple Leafs maybe I’d like to talk about them. They were all over Washington all damn night. I want to hear about that, I don’t want to see the Leafs all over a team then constantly hear about the other teams star player for some reason.
There was a very VERY satisfying point to end this game, Ovechkin could not keep his Team alive and we beat them in a shootout. Thanks Kessel, Thanks Hagman, Great fucking job Toskala! Put that in your Ovechkin pipe and smoke it
Has anyone else heard that commercial where the dude goes on about global warming not being real and that it has been proven to not exist?
Ok….so what? I’m trying to figure out what this guys point is.
Should we then….
Keep using all the gas we want?
Go back to regular light bulbs and blow more electricity?
Flip off the energy star system
Stop making our factories pollute less
Go back to styrofoam containers
I’m really curious to the point of the commercial. He didn’t specifically say what we was getting at he just seemed to want to “make us aware” global warming wasn’t around. Besides, I think we’re calling it “climate change” now and I doubt we’re going to stop improving ourselves cause some asshats made some commercials.
I do apologize to my true commenters but I have had to resort to Captcha on Philtopia because I am filtering out 20-30 russian spam comments a day for 4 or 5 true comments.
Captcha will appear on adding comments and registering to be a new user however Captcha is disabled if you become a registered user. I hate captcha’s but I’m getting littered with e-mails about bogus comments throughout the day so I had to add it to save my sanity!
Been awhile eh? Anyways I felt it was time to talk about something I have been involved in for almost 7 years now at this point and that is Vendetta Online.
The early years
When I first found this game it was back in January 2003 on happypenguin.org it was billeted as a 3d space combat game which is something I had been looking for since the Wing Commander franchise fell into oblivion…  Within an hour I was hooked on this game. It had everything I wanted, fighters, explosions and people. The people part is something Wing Commander didn’t even have unless you wanted to spend an afternoon tweaking Dos to run WC: Armada’s network. That old game had a CTF function where 3 nations, red blue and gold, tried to capture the flag more times than the other groups. It was great fun and it was all about making the other nations look bad.
Meltdown and release
The game received and overhaul with more ships and the universe doubled in size and the fun continued on for another 7 months. Then the game started to change into a massive universe with a level system. The company was preparing it for release to the public as quickly as they could as all attempts at financial backing had failed. Many of us who wanted to see the game live on offered monetary help but the company kept on pushing towards their release. November 2004 is what is now known as Vendetta Online came into existence. I still have my retail box from this release which is not something you can get anymore sitting on the top of my computer desk and the cd is still sealed in it. It came with a poster of the universe and a detailed backstory. This was a very shaky start, the game lacked much to do and the universe was literally 100’s of times larger than before with the same amount of people online at any time. There was CtC which was their attempt to recreate the CTF we used to play with an RP purpose but after some time it died down because it was boring and long travelled. There was a border patrol mission where you fight some enemy ships in the border system between the Serco (formerly known as red) and Itani (formerly known as blue) and there was the spy mission where you had to stop “some weirdo”. There was also a trading system which kept boring people at bay and of course there was always player vs player combat.
The boring time
There were a couple of years where “the devs” were working heavily on the behind the scenes stuff that would lead to more awesome features. My participation in the game came and went during these years. They added trading guild missions and a basic hive enemy in gray space that occasionally functioned to keep those of us around entertained to some extent. Players organized their own types of events which made the weekends pretty amusing varying from “The Deneb run” which was a race around the universe to the “Nation war” where 3 teams fought to the death. The test server also became publicly accessible during this time and you could see things that were being worked on. I remember helping momerath test the convoys when they were brand new and incredibly broken on the old Deliverator system. A basic mission editor also became available that anyone who knew the URL to could get to. It was crude and the bots barely listened but it was still cool to be able to create things. This eventually led to the creation of the PCC (player contribution corps) which was a group of volunteer players who created mission content for the game.
Kourier and beyond
Deliverator sucked balls and it took ages for Kourier to come into being and have everything run on it. One day it was magically finished and the Hive missions and convoys became less suck and more fun. I joined the PCC during this time and started playing around. I didn’t spend too much time ingame and mostly played around on the test server trying things out and seeing what I could come up with because in my opinion all VO missions were the same and boring. I wanted excitement and saw this as an opportunity to create it. I created a few missions here and there and got comfortable by testing my ways with wingman, escorts and capital ships and started to form a story for my tree.
The Other side of the universe
As I progressed beyond making basic crappy missions I started to come up with a story. There were two points to my plan. Point one was to make the player scramble to survive/win in the climax points of each story board. Â Point two was to bring traffic to dead zones of the Vendetta universe. The dead zone I intended to populate is the Jallik to Pelatus corridor where you are very unlikely to run into a player ever. I make my first 4 missions for the tree, the first 2 are simple patrols with an enemy encounter the third is an escort missions where you go retrieve a ship and bring it home with an enemy chase at the end. That chase can go easily or be quite frustrating depending on how good the AI feels that day. The fourth mission was the climax of set 1 where you face off with a Serco fleet and either save the day or run away. The first version of this you lead the ships to the battle zone, get into a fight and get chased away go back to base, a Teradon is there and you bring it back to the fight again and fight to the death. Apparently this was too epic for the game and had to be altered to avoid problems if the mission were to be popular. I modified this to where you go to a staging sector that gets attacked then you get chased away and go back to meet your Teradon as it arrives to the battle and fight to the death. This was still pretty epic and without the heal command I have on the test server can be quite difficult. I found an annoying issue where the bots only listened to one order and subsequent orders caused them to drift which seriously fucked with my mission plans. I pushed and pushed and pushed and eventually this was isolated and fixed and the mission was completed and added to game.
2009
This from my perspective has been a great year for VO. Many PCC missions have been added, The Deneb war is starting to take shape as an actual conflict and hopefully it will be fun soon. The hive are now in all nations and not just grey space and people actually seem to participate in killing them quite frequently now. Convoys have capital ships and carry riches and pay out very nicely. Radar occlusion by large objects has been added, Guild software has been advertising the game and new players have been pouring in. It’s been a fun year. I think it is also the most time I have spent in game in a long time too. My campaign is still being worked on too I have 2 more sets of missions trees created and a third under development but I am holding off releasing them until they are all finished so it can come out as a complete campaign. What I am really excited about at this point is “the devs” seem to have an interest in finally developing player conquerable content like stations which has been a dream since the early years when that comes out it should be epic.
I believe this game is starting to shape up at this point and is continuously changing for the better week after week. Currently Guild software is running a promo on mmorpg.com for a free 21 day trial, this would be a good time to check it out!
September 29th was when I released the first public version of Facebook CommentsTNG and the plugin has grown very quickly in the last month. I thank everyone for the positive feedback and bug tracking to help make the plugin better!
