Earth Hour
This is just fucking hilarious. Earth Hour. Come on, what the hell?
Here we are, on the planet Earth. A rare and precious jewel in the infinite void of the Universe. The only place we know of capable of sustaining human life, and the only place we know for certain to have life in any capacity in the first place. If Earth wasn’t here, or it was just a little bit warmer or colder or the whole balance of it was just off a little bit, we would never have evolved the way we are now.
And in return, we turn off a few lights for an hour.
It is so absurd and ridiculous that it’s just really funny.
Not to mention this quote from YouTube: “Earth Hour – One person has the power to make change.”
Havn’t had a laugh that good in some time.
Dragon Age 2
I’ve been busy a little bit. Dragon Age 2 came out recently.
Unfortunately, as hard as I try, it just doesn’t compare to Origins. I should note that I havn’t completed Dragon Age 2 yet, but the storyline… It takes a very long time getting up to speed. For what I suppose is roughly the first half of the game, it remains entirely unclear what the big picture is. Sure, there’s a guy, he fled from Ferelden during the Blight and tries to get by in Kirkwall, and that’s a great starting point, but the big picture is completely absent. Even after a while, you’ve suddenly become the Champion of Kirkwall, and eh, great, now what? The whole sense of purpose and being part of this epic adventure that you have in Origins is entirely absent (and besides, after defeating an archdemon in Origins, Dragon Age 2 will have to do a hell of a job to match in that area).
The thing that has been bothering me endlessly is the environment. Origins has a huge world, there are tons of different places to explore, different cities, you name it, but Dragon Age 2 is just Kirkwall and a few minor areas just outside of it. The city feels more like a fortress than like a group of buildings which happen to form a city – even in the less expensive regions – and it quickly becomes boring having to walk through it. The endless and highly obvious re-use of areas (there are a high number of buildings that only vary in which NPCs are roaming in them and which doors you can open) is a major disappointment compared to Origins, and tears down the immersion factor, which is so crucial to a good RPG.
Quests (and individual tasks within them) are way too often ‘walk to person X on the other end of the city, talk for 30 seconds, and come back’, which quite frankly is not encouraging to do a lot of sidequests. I also miss the interaction with your companions that you have in Origins. In Origins, you can just start a conversation with any of your companions at pretty much any time, and really get a chance to explore their backstories and get a sense of bonding with them. Aside from a few pre-arranged conversations at fixed moments, this is entirely absent in DA2, which I think is a shame.
In terms of combat, it’s a shame that spells like Tempest aren’t nearly as impressive as they were in Origins. Complete lack of friendly fire turns spellcasting more into mindless targeting rather than actually having to be strategic about it – it really doesn’t matter if your entire party is within the target area of a Fireball. Combat is pretty easy anyway, most of the enemies go down quickly and hardly pose a challenge (with some exceptions, like the Qunari leader dude, whose difficulty really seems out of proportion to the rest of the game when you duel him). The times at which you’ll get attacked are easily predictable, and very often you’ll run into guys that just storm you on sight for no explainable reason.
Even though I can understand their absence, the different origin stories on DA:O were fun and I’d like to have seen something like that return in DA2.
I am still going to complete the game, and will probably play DA2′s sequel as well, but I’m sad to say it’s nowhere near as good as Dragon Age: Origins is, and I’ll be looking forward to Bethesda’s new toy, Skyrim.
Houdini
Well, okay, maybe not Houdini. But I did perform the Great Swapping Trick(tm) today.
Here’s the deal. My parents have a laptop (which is mainly used by my father) and a desktop PC (which is mainly used by my mother). The latter one suffered from a failing hard drive. Not entirely broken yet, but performance declined rapidly and bad sectors were popping up. Those are no good signs, and I’ve seen failing hard drives more than enough times to recognize the symptoms.
The old drive was a 80 GB. Not too big, sure, but since usage of the system is mostly limited to on-line Flash games and e-mail, it’s no big deal. Only a few gigabytes were actually in use, and most of that for the operating system.
So, I ordered a new drive and picked it up yesterday. A nice new 500 GB drive (can’t seem to get ‘em much smaller anymore – they had smaller drives, but those were more expensive, so screw you, small harddrives) arrived here in it’s shiny anti-static packaging.
It also happens that my main PC is suffering from a serious lack of hard-drive space. There is about 100 GB free on one of the storage drives (and filling up rapidly) and the rest of the free space is a bit of headroom on the operating system drive (which I’d like to keep that way). Since the OS drive is 160 GB (and by far the smallest drive in the system), and 500 GB is obviously more than that, I figured, why not do the Great Swapping Trick(tm)?
I plugged the new 500 GB disk into the system (borrowing the optical drive’s SATA cable, for lack of free ports on the motherboard), found a utility that copies hard-drives sector-by-sector, and let that run. Next up was shutting down, phyiscally replacing the 160 GB OS drive with the new 500 GB drive (which contains exactly the same data as the ‘old’ OS drive), and booting up again.
And voíla, 316 GB of additional storage space, and it didn’t cost me anything except for 10 minutes of work and watching two episodes of The Office to fill the time it took to clone the drive.
My mother’s PC will get what used to be my OS drive. It’s smaller than the drive she thinks she’s getting, but still twice as big as the one she had (and she hardly used that one), so no one will ever know.
And as an added bonus, I got to see Windows come up with a ‘Found new hardware’ message about the hard drive that it was installed on, which was interesting too.