Yeah, I've been totally out out out of it, neglecting the site, messing around with this unnerving end-of-semester bullshit. Let's see how fast I can whip through this update. [Not fast enough, apparently, this ended up being a two-hour entry.]
Anime: Blood: The Last Vampire: good, short and to the point; interesting CG (but not CG-heavy approach; mixes English and Japanese.
Movies: Toy Soldiers: good, early 90s-style terrorist fun; has that guy who played Wesley Crusher on "Star Trek: The Next Generation".
Fahrenheit 451: seen it before, good stuff, François Truffaut is the shit (Oskar Werner is good, but incomprehensible); pro: stylistically very dramatic and socially, politically and historically relevant; con: not 50s-American enough; the reading of the credits was sheer genius; also, they're making a new version now, but we'll have to see about that.
True Romance: further proof that Tarantino can write, but he just goes insane when directing his own stuff; I just had the feeling that if they let him finish the film, he'd make some sort of fucked-up profundity that he'd try to pass for his ineptitude; all-star cast (Slater and Arquette lead; Hopper, Kilmer, Oldman, Pitt, Walken, Pinchot, Jackson, Rapaport and Gandolfini support) - I'll give Tarantino that: he can attract talent.
Gothika: an inexplicably stupid, clicé and formulaic movie - neither scary nor interesting.
Freddy vs. Jason: well, the 80s and 90s are over; too bad; though I've gotta say, if after two decades Freddy Krueger horror-cum-humour films never got old, there's something to them; I wish there would be more of those Freddy-jokes, though.
Microshaft: Hilarious hoax (I fell for it). These days no lawsuit or headline seems to be too ridiculous - case in point is this little doozie. Take it or leave it.
Media players: Man, things are finally coming together in the media player market. I mean, sure, the latest and greatest Winamp plays video, but old habits die hard and I couldn't be happier when I found out this week that gabest's Media Player Classic can now replace any standalone .SWF player, in addition to QuickTime and RealOne players, with the help of RealAlternative and Real Alternative. Needless to say, MPC can play all forms of audio, DVD (as well as Smacker/Bink media, DVD2AVI files, .AC3, .DTS and a whole bunch of other stuff).
Since it lets the user adjust aspect ratios (not at easily as in BSPlayer - but it is possible to set custom values) and snap screencaps, it's only a matter of time before I dump PowerDVD and BSPlayer for good. My only beefs with MPC so far (and it's not really its fault) are that other than for the RealMedia and QuickTime files, the icons associated with common media formats will be gone (if the original program is uninstalled); also, MPC doesn't seem to be obeying my demands to brighten the video overlay via my NVidia control panel (I run my monitor at 25% brightness and 100% contrast, so video has to be turned up to 139% brightness) - but that could be a problem on my end.
Conversatron hilarity: here and here.
Blog hilarity: here and here. Great navbar, heh. Man, I love this guy or girl's attitude. "Fucking unstable people." That should be my anthem.
Life: Me and my dad bought the Sharp CU27S5 27 inch TV and 1-Disc DVD Player Package for my mother's upcoming birthday (she's almost as crazy as me, what with watching all the DVDs in her spare time - only I rip them, too, heh).
Good TV, crappy little DVD player, but then again, that makes you wonder - what makes a good DVD player (or any appliance or device, for that matter) these days? It plays DVD, VCD, CD, CD-R/W, MP3 CDs and Kodak PhotoCDs; it's got DTS, DD, multiangles and frame-by-frame. So I just don't know. The player was free ($99 value - a valiant marketeering effort - now I gotta figure out what was wrong with the TV...it was built in February 2004, if you can believe it). At any rate, a brand name would cost two or three times more. Interesting.
Computer stuff: The health of my computer is my health. And this week I came damn close to doing this installation in. The way it's going, I might last to 2006 and glorious, glorious Longhorn, heh (for about fifteen minutes, I'm sure ;) *knocks on wood*. Basically, C: is a 10GB partition (D: is 40 GB and E: is 120 GB). I never figured I'd run out of space on C:, though, because I've learned to install all my big games, on E:.
But anyway, it began last week: First, explorer starts restarting on reboot. Then, 0 bytes free on C:. I was, like, WTF, shit. I can't afford to run PartitionMagic as it were, what with my always-on computer needs, ongoing DVD ripping and encoding, warezing and other fine things. And it's not so bad, thought I, the pagefile is on D: anyway. Well, I thought wrong. Winblows still needs space on C:, because new conventions or not, older installers and programs don't give a damn where my pagefile is, they want space on C:. So I started deleting things, indiscriminately. I mean, it was bad.
First, I deleted all the Adobe and macromedia apps I wasn't using. Then, I deleted all the smaller apps I wasn't using. Then, I went into the holiest of holies and deleted the hotfix uninstaller directories (I got burned doing that once, so this already was a dangerous thing to do - let's me just say Microshaft patches aren't always gifts from heaven). Then, I deleted all the uninstaller info. And then I discovered that ZoneAlarm had created over a gig worth of logs, conveniently placed in the windows directory. Gah.
By that time, of course, I got shit on every front: having deleted all those files to free up space on C:, half of winblows started working funny, freezing windows and webpages. Of course, I couldn't even think of properly uninstalling anything (let alone McAfee, which started conflicting with SpywareGuard, as it turned out). So I went into msconfig, noted all the start up items (duplicated in two places in the registry, for some reason), manually made shortcuts to those programs, and wiped them from the registry.
After yesterday and today's battling with drive C:'s 0-byte game, I finally had a breakthrough with the logs (so now, inexplicably, C: has 2.78 GB free), got rid of McAfee (great manual uninstallation guides here and here), cleaned windows of all the crap I've picked up in the meanwhile with (increasingly inefficient Norton WinDoctor), AdAware Pro, the improved SpyBot - Search & Destroy! and the latest and (truly) greatest Spyware Blaster.
Finally, to fix what WinDoctor could not, I used the most unlikely program - PC Bug Doctor - yes, I know, garish interface (with a terrible, realistic crawling bug and a website with an interface drawn by a five year-old, but it worked! PBD found a number of registry problems NWD did not. From then on it was just a matter of slowly adding back startup items to see that the
To do the system in completely, I set out to look for a good replacement for McAfee 7.0 (8.0 was out of the question, what with its autonomous hijinks and inability to provide scanning exclusion). AVG seemed nice, but I couldn't find a crack. ;) Sophos looked like it was coded by ancient dinosaurs, and it didn't work all that well. What turned me to Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal Pro was the stupid, plainly ineffective antivirus comparison chart on the Bullguard Antivirus website.
I mean, come on, what kind of marketeer writes "we have a simple name, a simple website and a simple product - easy for anyone to understand and use"?! Repeat after me: "'Simple' means 'shitty' in the business world." Gah. But what was even more hilarious was that their chart shows that not only is their antivirus more expensive than three of the antiviruses on the chart, but that Kaspersky greatly outdoes it, for a small price difference! So off I went to Kaspersky's website, and, as they say, the rest is history. Beautiful interface (despite the fact it's Russian-made software, and, as we all know, modern Russians have no sense of style whatsoever), lots of options (but none too bewildering), elegant operation.
Also, I met a really cool dude named Patrick. But I'd have to find more aout him to tell you about it. In conclusion, here's a picture of a man being executed by crushing by elephant. Lovely. At any rate. I gotta go post my latest poem now. [Here it is.] Verse has been coming with some difficulty as of late - but it's a seasonal thing, I suspect. Gute Nacht.