The Standard Model

Tomorrow I’m moving out of my current student house to go stay with my parents over the summer as I usually do. I have just finished my third year at university, of which I am doing a 4 year course. Most people though do a regular Bsc which is a 3 year course meaning most of the people I know in my year are now finished with school. They have to go out into the real world, they arn’t on a summer vacation anymore they are simply unemployed or working. That is a very bizarre thought for me. I didn’t take a gap year between school and uni, I have gone from year to year as long as I can remember with term-time and school holidays spread throughout the year.
Always knowing that even though this year is over and I have a long break, in a few months I’ll be back learning again. It’s pretty safe. Granted there has been the possibility of failing and having to redo exams or even years but I’ve never really been in that position. So I’ve just got a year delay on this impending doom? Well no, I hope to do a PhD after I finish my degree.. which means another few years studying. So if all goes to plan the earliest I will be thrust out into the real world will be 4 years from now, so I’m not really worried about it at the moment.

I don’t really think this has much of a point to it or anything yet.. So I’ll just say good luck to anyone who is graduating this year and I hope you all manage to get interesting jobs!

So at the moment the Electronic Entertainment Expo is going on or as the cool kids call it, E3. Where tonnes of games get announced and we get nice videos of unreleased games being played by developers so we can prepare our stockpile of cash for the mass releases in the latter half of the year.
There have been a few that I’m interested in, Modern Warfare 2, Assassins Creed 2, Aliens vs Predator etc. The main announcement that I’ve been thinking about though is by VALVe, who are my favourite games developer due to their games always being great fun and very well polished. Then there is the fact that although Team Fortress 2 is quite old it is still receiving large content updates for free and regular patches for fixes and what-not.
They announced that in November this year they will be releasing a sequel to the very successful and fun game, Left 4 Dead. If it were any other developer this would be fantastic news, everyone would be excited about the new game and everyone would probably buy it for full price of a regular title. Valve have, however shot themselves in the foot with TF2.
A member of Valve stated that they would be giving L4D the same treatment. Content patches, movies about the characters, new levels etc. Now it seems most of that is just being boxed up as the sequel instead of being given it in an update. I actually heard about L4D2 about a week before the announcement, and dismissed it as fake because ‘Valve would never do that..’ and many people did the same, but we were proved wrong.
So now everyone is saying that Valve have joined the likes of EA, releasing games every year that are very similar to the previous in order to get a quick buck. I admit that initially I felt a similar thought, it felt very odd for it to be happening this way. But then I realised that this is still the same company, they have delivered every time previously. So if they believe this is the right way to do it, then they will probably be proved right. Doug Lombardi said in an article on rockpapershotgun.com

I think the short answer is: trust us a little bit. We’ve been pretty good over the years, even with L4D going back just a few months, about supporting games post-launch. Gabe’s always talking about providing entertainment as a service – it’s not about making a game any more. That’s one point of it.

So we will have to wait and see, but ultimately it comes down to: This is a Valve game, I will be buying it and pre-ordering on steam if possible, even if it is overpriced. That is because Valve games always give me the most fun and I play them longer than any other games. The people complaining and saying that they feel betrayed, well, you don’t have to buy their game if you don’t want to. The first L4D isn’t going anywhere, and they have said that they still have plans to release updates solely for the original sometime soon. So you can still have fun with that, although personally I’m looking forward to taking out some southern American zombies with a fire axe.

Well we failed. I failed. The only person I failed is myself however, and I’m a pretty forgiving guy. We watched all of the season 1 episodes, which took us from Monday afternoon to today, Wednesday afternoon with a couple of sleep breaks. After spending that long at it, the prospect of another 6 films each about 2 hours made us want to kill ourselves, partly due boredom I guess but mainly I expect it was sleep deprivation. If only there was some way to turn myself into an atomic monster that never sleeps… Anyway we had already watched all the Star Trek films including TNG cast ones in the past Christmas holiday so we felt it okay to not repeat them so soon.

So after sitting down and watching TV for two days straight we did what any regular people would have done… We went to the cinema for more sitting and watching! It’s release day of Terminator: Salvation here in the UK and we were eager to see it, so we did.
I thought it was a pretty good movie. Proper reviewers can comment on the plot strength of how well the actors did, what I came out of the cinema talking about was the Arnie appearance. It was fantastic, they didn’t rub it in your face who he was, if you hadn’t seen T1 or T2 (T3 is not ever valid) you wouldn’t have known it was special, but for every cool person on the planet who has seen those films, it was awesome.

Now I must drudge through all the posts I missed in the past few days. What the hell, Left 4 Dead 2? God dammit, that’ll require its own separate post…

You don’t realise how much of something there really is untill you try and watch it all in one go. I’m currently at a friends house and our mission is to go through all of the first season of Star Trek TOS, due to it being out on bluray with nifty redone effects. After the 25ish episodes (each about 1 hour long) we then have the remastered TOS cast films of which there are 6. In amongst all of this there are also special features which we are watching aswell. In total I expect to be at this for about 3 days including small stops for some sleep.

Well hello there! Every year during the summer I get an itch to start up a website to entertain me on the long boring summer days before the game servers get busy in the late afternoon, and this year is no exception!
This time however I did not have a hosted web server already at my disposal, or any of my own web space on a domain that I would want to use any more. I did/do however have a dedicated linux server in the Netherlands that I bought in order to host game servers on, initially for Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. So I figured I would install Apache on it and use that! Of course after I do that with nothing going wrong I realise I have actually done it wrong and needed to set an option so I could install php as a module afterwards. Several super fun hours later I get both working properly and hey here it is! I hope everything works okay. There is a weird issue with my address bar not changing when I go to different files/pages but I can’t really find a way to stop that.. but it doesn’t really break anything it just means you have to take a second to make sure you are linking to whatever you want instead of the index of this blog.

Oh my I’m rambling, a little about me just to finish this initial post off. I’m an astrophysics student with 3 years out of 4 done of my Masters and if you couldn’t tell I love Futurama to bits. Over on the side there you can see my recent tweets, feel free to follow me and what-not. Under that there is a spiffy gadget that lets you spin some of my photos around from a picasa web album. See how many times you can get it to go round…