
Achmed the Dead Terrorist!
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
May offend, if you don’t have a sense of humor. :D
May offend, if you don’t have a sense of humor. :D

May offend, if you don’t have a sense of humor. :D

and because my Adium refuses to connect: here’s the zombie article I was telling Puppy about this afternoon - 5 Scientific Reasons A Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen.

One day zombies will take over the world!


I am now playing Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune!
It’s all the fault of comicker Tim I-don’t-know-what-his-last-name is, of webcomic Ctrl-Alt-Del fame (ah, poor PC users, when wilt thou see the light of day? Verily, the greatness of Jobs shines forth, kneel and accept enlightenment in your lives). Now that I have easy access to a PS3 console *beams brightly at Puppy* and since I have purchased and bribed my way into using said console with a new DualShock controller and two games, any news posts on worthy PS3 games quite quickly catch my eye.
And so when Tim posted this gushing game review about Uncharted, I promptly went and salivated on Puppy and said we have got to get this game oh please oh please oh yes *spasm* yes! And being the warm, loving gamer boyfriend that he is, he gamely (see what I did there? See the pun? The Pan!) paid for half of the game (thereby purchasing and bribing his way into attempting to beat me at said game as well. I say attempt. He may well have a different story, but surely you will dismiss his laughable claims that he’s actually better at the game than I am. Pffft. ‘Girl gamer’, my ass).

Uncharted is an amazing game. I’ve never played Tomb Raider, but I’m pretty sure Uncharted (even though it lacks abnormally distended mammaries, or perhaps because of this lack) beats it pants hands down. I’ll unwillingly admit that it took me awhile to get used to the platforming and controls but it’ll likely be instinctive for most people familiar with the console. Having played mostly Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy and Katamari Damacy on the PlayStation, I’m used to the leisure and slow pace of turn-based combat. Which meant that when I got into my first gunfight in Uncharted, I screamed a lot like a girl and died countless times shot wildly in the air for awhile before learning to breathe slowly while kicking Puppy in the leg for laughing at me. Hmph. The real-time combat is bloody addictive. After getting used to the fast pace, I’ve actually started to enjoy the adrenaline rush. How good it feels to take a pixelled enemy out with a carefully placed head shot!
The storyline is captivating - hook, line and sinker, which is the key for ensuring that I stick with a game. Nate Drake, the protagonist in the game, is also rather dashing, with a close resemblance to Harry Kewell; the girly heroine, Elena, is real kickass, and I bet Puppy wouldn’t dare call her a girl gamer to her face. Double Hmph. You only get to control Drake though. He’s a real monkey, what with ropes to climb and ledges to dangle from and vines to swing across. His snarky “You gotta be kidding me!” emerges often as wave after wave of faceless shooters swarm out to attack - it gets me every time, because I’m often screaming the same thing, exhausted after countless rounds of careful shooting are wasted at the last minute by some idiot with an Uzi.
The most fun bit so far has been an energetic car chase. Elena drives a jeep hectically through a jungle, narrowly avoiding bits of cliff along the way, while you operate a mounted turret out the backseat to bomb jeeps and bikes racing after you. The graphics are amazing - the rendered water glistens and reflects back at you, palm fronds wave in the breeze. The voice acting is spot on and realistic as hell, with everything shot with motion capture.
The only gripe I have so far is that the SixAxis controllers don’t seem to be utilized for their full value. The whole point of the SixAxis motion sensor feature is the ability to sense both rotational orientation and translational acceleration along all three dimensional axes. However (maybe due to Sony’s late announcement of the inclusion of this feature in their controllers) this isn’t really integrated into the game, except for once where you open a wheel-lock door by rotating the controller, and to maintain balance when you walk across logs. Too arbitrary, like they put those in at the last minute, trying to find places in the game they could actually use the feature, but didn’t really care too much about doing so.
Anyhoo, that’s an issue I have with Lego Star Wars too, so it’s not really a problem; just that I feel it could be integrated more into the game for a fuller experience.
For PS3 owners (aren’t we just so cool?) who might be interested, here’s the opening clip of the game (no spoilers, I assure you; however please don’t go read the Uncharted Wiki page like I accidentally did :( Much spoiler action, waily waily waily!). Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Fine. I admit it. I am a Girl Gamer. Puppy is obviously much better at the game than I am. And he also got me through some of the shoot-em-up parts that I just couldn’t bring myself to slog through for the fifth time. :D

On other news, Liverpool thrashed Luton Town 5-0 (hat-trick from Stevie G, one each from Babel and Hyppia), as they should have from the beginning (sell Voroninny!) with Carra wearing the captain’s armband on account of it being his 500th appearance. Curiosity strikes. How do the players themselves know how many appearances they have racked up? Does a dwarf with a clipboard rush into the dressing room every game and bark out their numbers?
“Gerrard, 302. Looking good. Carra, 280. Not gonna catch up with Stevie if you don’t break his metatarsal and lay him off for a month or so. Here, borrow Rooney’s boots, that’ll do the trick. Works for Ronaldo.”
Or maybe they do the whole five stroke counting thing on the inside of their locker doors. Possibly inspired by Robinson Crusoe. They cover the inside of the locker door, outside of the locker door, they get a new locker and a pay raise.
“500 appearances! Yeah baby! Gimme that captain’s armband, bitch, I get to celebrate in style.”
“Yeah well. Race you to a hat trick. Winner gets to be captain forever.”
*after the game*
“Hand it over…bitch.”
“Aw, damn, Stevie.”
Don’t sack Benitez!

Macworld debuted with Steve Jobs delivering much of the expected at Keynote (though without the ‘one last thing’ that has reduced many an Apple geek to wriggly paroxysms of delight over the years).
The biggest things that I’m really excited about are online movie rentals, Time Capsule, and of course, the MacBook Air.
Movie Rentals
“What’s the deal? Here’s the deal. Launch with over 1000 films by the end of February. 30 days after DVD release (that, I guarantee, was the barganing chip with the studios). Watch them anywhere: Macs, PCs, iPods and iPhone. You can watch in less than 30 seconds once rented (if you have a modern connection). 30 days to start watching it, and after you start, you have 24 hours to finish watching it. You can actually transfer to another device in the middle of watching, transfer it to your iPod before the flight (that’s going to be pretty killer for users). Renting a library title costs $2.99, new release is $3.99. Pretty reasonable: on par with the kind of stuff you’ll see from traditional rentals.”
This gets to impact us even though Singapore doesn’t work with the iTunes Music Store *shakes fist* because Joel gets codes from our well-placed friend in the USA. Woo!
Time Capsule
“Jobs talks about Time Machine: You wish you didn’t need that wire for connecting your Time Machine drive. And today we’ve got one— Time Capsule, a backup appliance. It’s a full AirPort Extreme base station and a hard drive. 802.11n networking and a server grade hard drive. All the ports of an APE. So now you can backup your notebook, or all the Macs in your house, wirelessly to one Time Capsule. “Really wonderful.” It’s going to sell in two versions: 500GB drive (whoops, he said “megabyte”) and one with 1TB. 500GB model goes for $299 and 1TB goes for $499. “Very aggressive prices. We want people backing up their content.” It’s going to ship in February, the “perfect companion product to Time Machine.””
This is awesome. I hated that I couldn’t utilize my Time Machine because 1) haven’t got the wherewithal to splash out on a portable hard drive and 2) don’t really want to have to plug one in all the bloody time anyway. Puppy says the hourly updates are a tad annoying and slow down things a bit; and my USB ports are way too in demand already anyway. And now yay! Wireless backup! On an Apple router! *wriggles in a paroxysm of delight*
MacBook Air
“It is crazy thin, and silver. It’s got a camera in there too, I notice. Fullsize keyboard in black, fullsize display. Time to explore in more detail. Edges are more rounded, reminiscent the old iBook display. Fullsize, 13.3” widescreen display. “Gorgeous.” LED-backlit display saves power, gives bright display, instant-on the minute you open it. There’s a built-in iSight camera, and a fullsize MacBook-style black keyboard. “Perhaps the best notebook keyboard we’ve ever shipped.” And it’s got a backlit keyboard with an ambient light sensor (previously a MacBook Pro-only feature). Multi-touch gesture support on the trackpad.”
I love the design, not too excited about the name, and less excited about the guts of the MacBook Air. What gives? It’s slower than my brand new MacBook. I’d be paying for something prettier, but not much better. Then again half the battle’s won with the eye on aesthetics; I know I’m usually the one who goes “Who cares? It’s PRETTY!” when explaining my electronics choices to others. But I suppose the novelty factor of pulling your laptop out of a manila envelope won’t soon wear off.
I can imagine Daddy throwing himself across the MacBook Air sobbing loudly and drooling, while giggling maniacally and stroking it and saying “MINE, MINE!”
Teehee.
Anyhow, what gives with The Straits Times’ Digital Life mini-newspaper? It comes out on Tuesday mornings, poised at the perfect timing for some Macworld speculation. With excitement I flip through Digital Life expecting, at the very least, a column of enthusiastic bubbling about The Mac Event Of The Year.
Nothing.
Nothing? I can’t quite believe it. I flip through once more. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
Friggin’ Digital Life. I honestly cannot understand how they decided that Macworld was of no interest to their consumers. What is this? Bloody PC Magazine?
-quotes taken from Macworld live update

Oh please oh please give us a 3G iPhone :( though unlikely. I guess Jobs wouldn’t announce it if they hadn’t already had them ready to ship. Which just sucks. Remember us? Asia? We NEED iPhones.
Like now.
Wireless Time Machine would be nice too!

I made the chocolate ice cream today after my hands got to itching for some cookin’!
The banana turned out to be a biiiiit too much - I could probably have gotten away with using just half a banana or maybe two-thirds - but the sweetness of the banana nicely balances out the bittersweetness of the chocolate (I used fondue chocolate rather than cooking chocolate because that was what I had in my freezer, and substituted cognac for dark rum) and I actually do like the crazy amount of banana in it. The amount of ice cream this recipe makes isn’t much, not enough for a party of chocolate lovers, but enough for two people, or maybe one person without self-control.
It tastes pretty darn good! And really simple to make! Although it melts pretty darn fast, too. All the better reason to gulp and swallow fast :D

Another on the list of things to make, right after I recreate my workplace’s famous mushroom melba toasties… :)
INGREDIENTS
* 1 1/2 pounds ground beef
* 1 egg, lightly beaten
* 1 cup quick cooking oats
* 6 1/2 ounces evaporated milk
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon pepper
* 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
* 1 tablespoon chili powder
* 1/2 cup chopped onion
*
* 1 cup ketchup
* 1/4 teaspoon minced garlic
* 1 cup brown sugar
* 1/4 cup chopped onion
* 1 tablespoon liquid smoke flavoring
DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a medium baking dish.
2. In a bowl, mix beef, egg, oats, evaporated milk, salt, pepper, garlic powder, chili powder, and 1/2 cup onion. Form into 1 1/2 inch balls and arrange in a single layer in the baking dish.
3. In a separate bowl, mix ketchup, garlic, sugar, 1/4 cup onion, and liquid smoke. Pour evenly over the meatballs.
4. Bake uncovered 1 hour in the preheated oven, until the minimum internal temperature of a meatball reaches 160 degrees F (72 degrees C).

There’s an increasing sense of lethargy going on today. Still feeling a tad nauseous and headachey and just can’t get up the verve to haul ass to and from school. :(
Life’s getting a bit topsy-turvy at the moment; a bunch of unpleasantries to deal with. Pray God for strength and help to get through these tough days and to smooth out the road ahead. Am really thankful though that so far things have been pretty smooth-sailing and that it hasn’t been so difficult to transit into the new phase of things. Hoping very much for this to continue and that the past can be wrapped up quickly and easily so that we can continue enjoying the present :)
I know I’m being a bit cryptic but I suppose those who matter will understand.
Getting increasingly nervous over my attachment as well. It’s only a matter of weeks. Right now I’m just looking forward to Chinese New Year but once that’s over, it’s headlong into attachment and the stress of being placed into a new environment (and being assessed on my teaching skills, boohoo)! I just hate being the lone newbie in any situation; I hope I get other coursemates with me in my new school.

has reopened.
Mew :(