System protections, or are they system restrictions.

Jan17

So years back, 20 or so, gaming was a different beast entirely.
CDs were a new thing and people still used 5.25 inch floppy disks.

Back then the closest you got to copy protection was referencing the manual on the spot.
They were the good old days.

Of course then with the advent of CD burners piracy became viable to perform at the home level.

Companies decided they had to do something to make it harder for us to copy their products.
So they started an elaborate chain of events.

Physical method were devised, and shortly after defeated.

Keys were created, but shortly after generated.

Reliance on CDs was made pointless with disc emulation.

Eventually it shifted to a system where our game keys were tied to online user accounts, the media only used for installation.

Of course with people spending so much time and effort on games like World of Warcraft it became worth the time to gain access to these attacks.
Characters end up stripped of gear and money.

People complain and companies add even more strict measures to protect account access.

So we end up with external authentication by generator or mobile phone.

The problem is when password recovery becomes a serious struggle.

Tonight I have that struggle.
Tried logging in to diablo 3 for the first time in my new place.
I discovered I changed my password at some point, so after a couple of different attempts I get locked out.

Recovery of course requires me to either answer a secret question which I have no clue about due to different frame of mind, or inputting a key from a physical copy of a game.

Can’t locate my war3 or war3x cases as I moved recently, no idea where my diablo 2 keys could be, but I did find my copy of StarCraft 2.
The system denies that key is attached to my account.
Thus I am screwed.

Can’t play my games, can’t remember the answer to an obscure question from years ago, and when the next StarCraft 2 part is released I won’t be able to play it for this reason..

Guess who’s dissatisfied with Blizzard right now.

New years, new friends, new place, new everything.

Dec31

So I’m sitting here at a party thrown by some good friends and thought I might muse over the last year.

Some long awaited games came out and I bought many of them.

I bought a new PC from pccasegear.

Soundwave where I got to see half the bands I wanted because I got fried in the sun.

Spent a lot of time with my new first legion guildies who followed me over to guild wars 2.
Crash, Palamax, Nhorn, Warjay, Blazorax, Tara and many more that slip my mind, you’re all awesome people.

I met the most awesome person ever, Nikki I shall miss you.

And I will not get a haircut.

I shall post more later after some drinking.

Your armor, I do not think it works like you think it works.

Nov30

So anyway, our culture over the years have been influenced by the military of different time periods, from the distant past of history, to the far future of science-fiction/space fantasy.
And one thing I can’t get away from with all these designs is “how the fuck is that supposed to work?”

I’ll jump straight to Warhammer 40k, for no other reason than it’s a prime offender in this whole WTF syndrome.
So, supposedly your archetypal space-marine is of extraordinarily enhanced physique.
They’re essentially taller, wider, with more mass etc etc etc.
This means they should be covered in muscles, and well muscles need to move, contract and what have you.
This means they need space to do all this.

There is no way in hell in all the depictions shown, and with the various scale miniatures released, that they could possibly have space in their for their muscles. And moving them? no way in hell.

This of course is really great if you don’t intend to do anything except stand there.

Of course people will say “look, they have ribbed joints, they can move.”
Take a strip of some cloth, tie it around your upper arm while it’s straight, then bend it.
Pretty tight eh?

Now you can manage it because material can move, it can contort, it can deform.

Now picture that material made from some really really hard metal composite that doesn’t exist.
It’s meant to be able to resist bullets, explosions, lawn-chairs, what have you.
The stuff is really hard, the stuff can not deform and still accomplish it’s job.

There is no way in hell that’s feasible unless you provide maximum internal space for movement and expansion.
Look at depictions of space-marine arms, nope, they don’t have that sort of room available.

That’s just the arm, I’m not even going to start on things like the legs with greater muscle bulk.

So let’s move on to something else, this is best demonstrated by Khârn the Betrayer.
It’s also shown by various other classic khorne figures.
He has a bare arm, it’s totally bare, covered in all those muscles touched on above.
Now, based on the wonderful design of the breast and back plates (which are seemingly one thing, even though it’s nuts) the whole through which the arm goes is more or less perpendicular to the ground.

The reason this is bad is because it quite dramatically limits the motion of his arms to back and forwards with minimal sidewards movement.
This style of course is prevalent in a lot of cases.

That’s just the shoulders, and well when you’re swinging swords and axes around the place is makes sense to be able to swing them all around the place.

So, to put my money where my mouth is I’ve been planning out a redesign of the space-marine armour concept, up-scaled beyond heroic 28mm to demonstrate how I really believe it should be.

Of course I got totally side-tracked with 1:1 scale guildwars 2 vigil armour for potential cosplay.
I do think the two could work well together in terms of investigating the biomechanics underlying the issues.

I’m not even going to start on the ridiculous nature of terminator armour completely deforming the human skeleton in to something an ape wouldn’t recognise.

So, for my plans I’m going to aim for something like a 1/12th size sculpt.
Not the most efficient use of my time, but I should learn a lot about working with hard edges.

First step, sketches to create an armature.
Second step, to create the armature.
?????
Profit.

Off to break out the pencils and paper and start researching.

Heat, no, no, stahp!

Nov29

So, it’s just past 4pm on the 29th of november, I am sitting here in boxer shorts.

I actually managed to locate a somewhat working pedestal fan in the hallway. There was another one, but for some reason it was missing the plug.

It is 38 degrees!

Now before you start thinking that’s actually pretty cold, I’m in Australia, we use Celsius/centigrade.
This is basically human body temperature heat.

I have no idea how hot my systems are running today, but I’m trusting that I did my job well enough and they’ll hold up.

Angelique is of course just using old fashioned air-cooling, I’m not planning to do anything too intensive with her.

Stitch of course has a closed loop radiator/waterblock setup as well as all the air-cooling so I’m pretty sure she should be fine.
Might need to clean one of her filters near the PSU though.

Australian Summers are just not fun.
It’s still spring.

To upgrade my OS or not to upgrade my OS, that is the question.

Nov27

So, as many people will not know, I run two desktops at home. (I also run my SGSIII, Nexus 7, and a WDTV Live, but they’re not relevant to this.)

There’s my old system which I was using up to this year, it’s a core2quad 8200, 8 gig machine with a GF9800GTX+.
When I upgraded I left all my productivity software and stuff on it, because quite frankly I didn’t want to have to install it all over again if I didn’t need to.
Of course it’s OS drive is a puny 200gig SATA drive, it’s a bit fully currently, but it’s still functional.
This is Angelique.

My new system is one I built at the start of this year, with the plan to upgrade as I go, multiple PCI-E 16x slots and so on.
I play all my games on this one, I’ve avoided installing productivity software on it, it’s purely for entertainment.
This is Stitch.

So I remote desktop from Stitch in to Angelique quite commonly.
It works.

Anyway one of my big issues with Angelique is that I really need to do something about the OS drive.
So I’m thinking I’m going to pick up a 128+gig SSD, because quite simply it’s amazingly fast with load times.

Then I think to myself, hey wait, I can pick up Win8pro for $39.99~, would it be worth upgrading from Win7 Ultimate at the time I shift to the new drive?

It’s a legit license. In fact 7 is the first windows OS that I personally have owned a license for since 95a.
I own two legit licenses for that matter. I considered it worth the money.

So it comes to the fact that I need to consider if it’s worth shifting my productivity machine over to win8pro or not.
I intend to have Angelique displaying movies and such in the lounge-room, and have no idea of the media capabilities of win8.
I’m only considering it as it’s dirt cheap.

Any thoughts on this scenario?
Comment away if you do.

Pure White, purely offended by technical issues.

Nov10

So I was hanging out in Lion’s Arch yesterday afternoon and I received a whisper from a character named Mz Pure.

I was asked if I’d be interested in joining a casual/hardcore World Vs World guild that did regular runs based in Australia.
So I agreed to do so.

I mean their definition of hardcore was 3 nights a week at 4 hours each. Pretty easy for a guy who’s generally home in the 6-10pm timeslot on most days of the week.
I mean I have no issues with doing that, especially since the monthly award requires a bunch of WvW kills as well as granting loot and money.

So I ended up as a trial soldier.
I managed an entire run with them yesterday (this being a friday evening) that appeared to have no issues.
No technical issues though I think my drivers flaked momentarily at one point.
No negative comments or feedback.
In fact my only feedback was to go to various locations to capture points and collect supplies as a group.
I did it all.

So today I log in around an hour later than intended, but still well within the required timeslot.
I changed my colours to white (or close enough, it was pretty damn white) even though there were others in the guild in WvW who were not in white or even any near approximation.
I fire up Vent apologise for lateness and ask if they were on Sanctum of Rall, to which I received a yes.
This was all I sent during that half an hour to my knowledge.

Then out of nowhere I got disconnected from Vent, but my game was still functioning, I was still running and fighting and everything.
I mentioned it in Guild Chat and someone else mentioned they were having trouble.
I switched over to vent to discover that I’d been banned from the server.

Switched back to GW2 to query what was up, and found I was no longer registering as being in Pure White.
As there have been issues in the past with the guild back-end I checked with one of the others, named Muka.
At the time he (I say He, as I’ve heard his voice and that would be a pretty manly girl) was advertising and asked what was up.

It seems that as soon as I joined the vent channel I “fukken blasted everyone’s headsets” while they were defending an area.
Nobody said anything on vent at the time, nothing about my audio stream being too loud or anything.
If they had of said something I could have just flicked a switch on my headset muting me.

But no, instead they wait half an hour and boot me and ban me without so much as a word about anything relating to it or why.

So to Muka and Mz Pure, I would like to give you a collective Fuck You.

And to anyone else on Sea of Sorrows looking for a guild, if you’re after one that does pure world vs world with no tolerance for technical issues with no social aspects whatsoever, then give Pure White a shot.
If you’re looking for people to have fun with, who can take a joke and will actually talk to you about problems that they might have with you and your play-style, then I suggest looking elsewhere.
You can even join me in The First Legion, it’s been pretty quiet since Crashes left us to get back to his real life.

AmK.

New tech new worlds.

Sep1

So been awhile since last post.

What’s been happening?
Well I have new technology in my life.

My HTC Wildfire started having battery issues so I decided it was time to replace it.

So now I have a Samsung Galaxy SIII.

Quite honestly my best phone yet.
It just feels so good and intuitive.

Around the same time I chose to pick up a tablet for my portable computing needs.
So I chose the Google Nexus 7.

Of course I’m in to a new gaming habit, Guild wars 2.
So I haven’t been seen in a week.

Until next time.

Bye.

Another Year, Another Time.

Jun9

So it occurs to me I should start posting stuff here more often.
I’ve been slack about using this for anything.

So it’s been a week since my birthday and what have I got to show for it? A rather bitching battlemaster sniper rifle.

I’ve been working up to full columi level equipment on my agent for a few weeks now and today when I checked I noticed that it’s not all better than equivalent PvE gear.

In fact when it comes to rifles the battlemaster is superior in all but 2 stats.
Those stats are only a minor improvement so not sure why I’d bother with it.

At least my new guild appreciate my sniping to the point they invite me specifically for things.

Mar20

Old tech can be used for new and wonderful things.
I feel jealous of the skill and talent of some people in the world when they manage to use it for such win.