Wednesday, May 31, 2006

50 Policemen Raided ThePirateBay

ThePirateBay.org Raided - Servers Seized

In their native Sweden, ThePirateBay.org enjoyed a level of immunity from copyright prosecution rarely seen in the file-sharing world. Often defiant in the face of those wishing to enforce their intellectual property rights, ThePirateBay.org would go on to become one of the premier BitTorrent indexing and tracking sites.

As one of the largest trackers, ThePirateBay.org largely replaced the search engine SuprNova.org. SuprNova.org met its demise in late 2004, when it was under pressure from the entertainment industry to shut it operation down. Conversely, such pressure has been ineffective against ThePiratebay.org.

When such political pressure fails, the use of force is typically the next course of action. In a move that many thought would never come, Slyck.com learned this morning that ThePirateBay.org was raided by Swedish police.

“…The police right now is taking all of our servers, to check if there is a crime there or not (they are actually not sure),” ThePirateBay.org spokesperson “brokep” told Slyck.com.

The seizure of ThePirateBay.org’s entire server farm will guarantee this BitTorrent tracker will remain offline until the police complete their investigation. The uncertainty on the part of the police may stem from the fact ThePirateBay.org's servers only host .torrent files, not actual copyrighted material. As a tracker, ThePirateBay.org's function is to index .torrent files and to direct BitTorrent traffic and maintain the swarm (uploads and downloads.) The downloaded .torrent file contains all the necessary information to locate and download the queried file. The legality of indirectly linking to copyrighted material has yet to be tested by Swedish courts.

Whether this will keep ThePirateBay.org offline indefinitely is another matter.

“We are not sure when it will return, but we are moving it to another country if necessary,” brokep said.

According to The Pirate Party, a Swedish copyright reform organization, the raid also seized Piratbyrån's (the Pirate Bureau) servers. Piratbyrån is a educational and quasi-political organization which performs a public servic role similar to The Pirate Party. In addition, The Pirate Party reports "...the servers where located in a protected area, to which the police had no legal right to enter..." Approximately 50 police participated in the raid, which placed into custody two PirateBay.org personnel.

The premature departure of ThePirateBay.org marks a significant turning point in the BitTorrent community. Although it's not currently known what, if any, entertainment entity is behind this raid, failure to secure ThePirateBay.org's permanent removal will only bolster this tracker’s position of defiance.
-Thomas Mennecke, May 31, 2006

50 different policemen was in the raid against ThePirateBay, of those 50, I wonder how many of them that hadn't visited the site atleast once. The movie/music industry tend to think that every single movie/album downloaded is a 100% loss in revenues, that the people who downloaded them would've bougth it if they weren't able to download it.

The industry should strife for making it easier to buy the merchandise than downloading it through P2P. Do it like the swedish reseller Webhallen, and allow pay for download. Do it like Steam, or even iTunes. Filesharing generates a huge promotional hype for the products that are streamed through several networks, and even increases sales of the popular brands.

Damn money grabbers, shape up or step down.

Webhallen Downloads
Slyck - File sharing news and info

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Man, I'm a fucking action hero!

So here's the story; I've been working all day with my schoolwork (that I can't be talking about) and thougth it would be nice to take a quick leak before I went home, or so I thougth. As the situation turned out, the door had jammed shut on me (my usual luck as always) so I called up Rikard to fetch a janitor or something.

So I sit there, idle in the bathroom waiting for backup, but to no avail. Apperantly all of them had gone home for the day. Iwona was nice enough to make several phone calls until it got settled for securitas to handle the situation.

While I wait for their arrival, I sit in there, locked in the bathroom playing Tetris on my mobilehpone until Rafael ruins by calling to the phone. "Hahaha, dude, I heard you got stuck in the bathroom. Haha man this is soo funny...", how he find out about it beats me, but it was nice talking with him until the securitas arrived.

"Hello? I'll try to get you out of there", the man on the otherside said. Alot of banging, squeaking and pulling in the door later, they've relized that they couldn't even get the door open with a crowbar. Our bathroom doors at school are probably the most secure ones on the entire island. Then the moment came that I've had been hoping for; the security dude said akwardly "Ehh, could you try and kick it?". What happened next will be very hard for me to describe in words, but I'll try.

With a huge grin on my face I take a step back and makes sure that no one is currently standing close to the door, before I make the most awsome kickass rambo kick and brutalizes the door which instantly flings open, with splints and dust flying everywhere, and I just stand there, with a huge grin on my face. On the door, a perfect imprint from my shoe could be seen, just above the handle and beside the lock.

It was totally worth being stuck for almost a hour in the bathroom to be able to kick your way out, ninja style. Had to leave my name and security number of course, so they could report who and why we had to break a door ;)

Later that evening, Rikard joined me for dinner with Rüsti and Tex-Mex burgers. Samir also came over, and along with William, the four of us saw "Running Scared" together. I must say that I was really suprised by how good that movie was (not just because of the nudity). It's about this mob dude who have to dispose of some guns that was just used to kill a cop, when one of the guns goes missing.

Really cool video and camera effects, with a very very dark story. This is not just recommended but a must watch, you won't see many films better than this one this year.

While I'm posting, I can post this lovely diploma I found at Johans home when we where there partying last Saturday.
"Intelligent cynicism that illustrates the difference of who we are and who we want to be. With a carrying through that is frightening close to reality."
Running Scared
Promqueen

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Prey demo to be released June 22nd

"We're also still working on the PC demo. Nearly everything is together for it, we're working on the intro and exit screens for the demo. Once we have everything together, all the text in the demo has to be sent out for translation, and the demo itself has to go through QA."

"And, let me say, it's a pretty big demo. It's not exactly like the shareware days of old -- we aren't giving away a third of the game, but there's still a ton of content there. I estimate it should take the average person an hour or two to get through it."
-Joe Siegler, May 26, 2006

This is a nice initiative by the good guys at 3D Realms, where todays demos mostly are really brief, they're nice enough to give away up to two hour playtime. This made me think a little... why not make a come back of the shareware from the good ol' days, now when episodic content is becoming mainstream in the buisness? Give away the first episode for free, and buy the second one if you want to continue :)

Prey Weekly Update #20

Super Smash Bros: Behind the Scenes

Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai has a weekly column for Famitsu called "Masahiro Sakurai's Thoughts About Games". His latest column was about his involvement in the Super Smash Bros. series, a column that has now been translated to english for everyones enjoyment.

Smash Bros. Dojo

Friday, May 26, 2006

Warsow v0.1 Released

Featuring :
  • BattlEye anti cheat support ;
  • New Armorshield system ;
  • All weapons set relooked, tweaked, enhanced with new FX, completed by the brand new dual fire mode Lasergun ;
  • Midair mode fixed and tweaked including now 3 dedicated maps ;
  • Capture The Flag mode, including funny new ruleset and Wctf1 (ctf-Russus by Cervix) ;
  • New version of Wdm1, including a Lasergun, few layout and item changes ;
  • New version of wtest4 (only needs few details before being renamed to wdm4) ;
  • New maps like WDM5 (Viciious's Lair by Blx) ;
  • Voices ingame messages, voices announcer messages from DJWheat of Radio-ITG himself ;
  • Brand new HUD, icons, UI including a background movie made by the Big Pez, server browser, voice ingame messages, player models skins, etc. ;
  • Autodownload, new callvotable cvars, stats, physics enhanced, hundreds of other fixes, adds, changes.
Download Warsow
War§ow Trix movie by Pez
War§ow frag movie by NealZ
Warsow - Free Fast-paced Full of Trix FPS

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Ageia PhysX Retail

Ageia PhysX is now available as retail for the price of $289.99 or 2795 SEK. That's the price of mid-segment graphics card, and is indeed a bit steep considering that there's no games (maybe one) that's available for it today. There's plenty of titles announced for 2006 though, and hopefully more of them should be released after this summer and the price somewhat lowered.

BFG Ageia PhysX 128mb PCI

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Ehmm... Cooking Skill ??

Well, I was about to post a picture of todays food, as usual, but alas, I didn't want to turn this into a cooking blog, so I'll just post two semi-random pictures instead ;)

Monday, May 22, 2006

The Black Market of Game Collectors

In one of The Escapist "Best of The Escapist" articles, they were writing about the more unknown side of the gaming community, the game collectors. Often using not completly legal methods to gain hold of their unique prototype cartridges or unreleased hardware, like devkits, these collectors are exclusive and yet romantic.

The story about how games that can't be bougth for all of the money in the world, but is traded for other similiar rarities, or found on the black market, sold by Indonesian sea pirates, is thrilling to say the least. I suggest that anyone for just the slightest passion of gaming culture/history should read through the article, and enjoy it as much as I did.
"I'm just through the looking glass. Just how far does the rabbit hole go?"
Obscurity Below the Radar
Nintendo World Championship
Sonic X-Treme

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Saturday, May 20, 2006

F for Food, Cooking Skill +1

Flintastek with macaroni stew, three different colored paprikas, some white onion and cucumber

FASA Studios "You're dead to me"

"I was never a particular fan of the original Shadowrun pen-and-paper RPG. I preferred the more hardcore Cyberpunk 2020. I played Shadowrun maybe three, four times, tops.

What's sad is that I'm apparently a bigger fan of the setting than Mitch Gitelman, studio manager of FASA, creators of the upcoming Shadowrun for the XBox 360. Mitch recently wrote in his blog, "When we decided to do Shadowrun we realized there was a ton of baggage that came with it... there are magic spells, and shamanic spirit magic, and cybertech, and metahumans like elves, and dwarves and such, and astral space, and the Matrix..."

Gee, I always thought those things were the defining elements of Shadowrun. I didn't realize they were just "baggage." I suppose you're traveling light since you decided to ditch shamanic magic, orks, astral space, the Matrix, riggers, decking, Seattle, the year 2050, and just about everything else that would distinguish Shadowrun from every other run-of-the-mill generic fantasy/cyberpunk hybrid that's been written since Gibson held hands with Tolkien.

Mr. Gitelman, I have to know: Are you the man who put midichlorians in the Phantom Menace? I'm thinking you are. At the very least, you're the man Max Steele was thinking about when he wrote "when a studio executive gets his hands on a game, he's getting a product that seems like it has little respect for verisimilitude. That makes it's quite easy for him to just blow the whole thing off - canon, backstory, characters - and just use the name..."

Which is what's happened here. FASA thinks it'll be OK. Gitelman writes that "they figured that if people got addicted to the game, they would forgive our trespasses."

Forgiveness? You aren't even going to get acknowledgment. As far as I'm concerned, there is no Shadowrun game for the XBox 360. You're dead to me."

-Alexander Macris, May 18, 2006

Shadowrun is going to be released for Xbox 360
There is no Shadowrun game for the XBox 360
How to screw up a perfectly good game company...

Best of The Escapist

"E3 sure leaves a lot less time to get your regular work done, so we're giving our staff a bit of a breather this week. In the meantime, join us for our favorite articles from issues past in this week's issue of The Escapist: Best of the Escapist."
I would especially recommend reading through "OMG Girlz Don't Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1" (which was probably the first Escapist article I read) and "The Conquest of Origin", which is the story about EA buying up Origin and closing it down piece by piece.

Issue 45: Best of The Escapist

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Who are ripping off who?

"For instance, is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It's a question of what you can do with that game machine. If you can have an amazing experience, we believe price is not a problem."
-Ken Kutaragi, President and CEO of
Sony Computer Entertainment

I'm quite sure that future customers appreciate that comment. This is a real insult to anyone who doesn't have larger wallets than pockets. Too bad though, that it's only going to be internet-savvy gamers that get to read comments like this and relize just how much Sony are looking down on people. Besides, doesn't Ken Kutaragi ever make his own dinner at home?
"Sony has created the Playstation 3 (PS3), not as a game machine, but as a vessel to float the company into new lands. They are burdening the system with a new movie format (BluRay) unheard of levels of digital rights management for music and video, Memory Sticks and more.

The results are already starting to show. A year ago, Sony promised to launch the PS3 in Spring 2006. Instead, they waited till Spring 2006 to announce that they won’t be launching the system until November 2006, in Japan, with other regions perhaps as soon as Spring 2007. Why? Digital Rights Management issues with the upcoming BluRay format.

The other divisions of Sony are dragging the PS3 down. The Playstation Portable (PSP) suffers from the same illness; too many hands in the basket. The PSP was designed around a slow-loading UMD format for distribution of movies which makes the machine less than ideal for game playing. Compared to ROM cartridges, UMDs are too slow loading and consume too much battery time.
They make the machine more fragile and introduce problems with additional moving parts. In short, they are a sacrifice to the movie industry arm of Sony; giving up on the optimal game experience for the opportunity to sell you movies you probably already own on DVD. Sony hopes that the PS3 will carry their formats of movie and music distribution will become the de-facto standard by attaching them to the PS3."
-Kamalot blog post, Sony's PS3 Ark

Sometimes, you come across blog gems like this, which speculate the movie industry's influence over Sony. They havn't only persuaded Sony lately, but even influenced politics into creating laws that turns millions of people into criminals.

Recently, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) got an update that allows FBI to wiretap suspected pirates and sentance them to prison up to ten years. I'm quite sure pirates is a bigger danger to sociaty than rapists, paedophiles and assaulters.
"For example assaulting a police officer will get you five years, downloading child porn will get you seven years, assaulting without a weapon will get you ten years and aggravated assault six years.

So in other words if you copy a Disney CD and sell it you will be in the same league as a paedophile who is distributing pictures of sexual attacks on children.

If you copy Craig David's CD you get ten years, but if you punch him in the face and pummel him into a seven day coma you will only get six. You are more likely to get the respect of the prison population with your six year sentence as well."
-Nick Farrell, The Inquirer, April 26th

Although, this law only aplies to Americans (where the movie industry got the biggest influence), it's a preview of what corporate future will hold. I'm for one is against restrictions like Digital Rights Management and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and it's not only because I'm a pirate myself, but because I want to be free to control and handle software in whatever way I want.

Today was a FPS day

Today I've slaughtered people in these games:
  • Unreal Tournament
  • Quakeworld
  • Counter-Strike 1.6

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Penumbra

Penumbra is a game developed by four students from my university, and got nominated for best game concept at Swedish Game Awards this year. So I thougth I should check it out...


Penumbra
Penumbra.zip (200mb)

Games, E3 and Life

So what's been going on lately? There's not been alot of updates here for a few days, don't know why actually. My day rythm have been pretty messed up since we stayed up in the middle of the night to watch E3 Press Conferances live, and it seems like I finally got it right again, somwhat...

Here's some birds scaveging garbage outside my window. Seems like birds like peanuts. I've been working in school on the stuff I can't be talking about, and at home I've been working on the Secret Project, which I can't talk about either.

Sony's revealing of their "new" controller only made them look more like the bad guys in the buisness, something that most of the internet is agreeing on. Although, Sony is a good brand for the common man, who will eventually purchase most consoles anyway. Yet again, their pricing of 599$ versus Nintendos which is speculated to be really low (200$?) isn't particularly in their favour.
"Tell me why you would buy a $600 PS3? People are going to buy two (machines.) They're going to buy an Xbox and they're going to buy a Wii ... for the price of one PS3."
-Peter Moore, Microsoft Vice President


It's no question about whether Nintendo dominated E3 or not, as this video clearly shows. As the doors opened to E3 on Friday morning, a stampede towards Nintendos booth aroused. People ran straigth through Sonys booth, just so they could get in line to Nintendos. It's especially funny to watch the frustrated Sony PR dude at the end of the clip.


One feature that didn't get particularly much attention on other websites, was the virtual console. This video shows a short prototype of the virtual console, along with a special Wii controller for retro gaming.


Another highlight from E3 that wasn't about the console wars, but the future of PC gaming, Spore. Will Wright showcase Spore and at the end Robin Williams shows how easy the creature creation interface actually is. Seems like we'll see alot of games featuring procedural content from now on.

Lately I've been thinking more about video compositioning and started watching Combustion 4 tutorials and such. Also I've had trouble finding new music lately, and neither Bittorrent nor Direct Connect can satisfy my needs. Atleast I've discovered a new (for me it is) promising site which got alot of great music that's available for free.

CTG Music Community
E3 2006 Press Conferances

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Shadowrun is going to be released for Xbox 360

So earlier today, I saw Microsoft press conferance, they showed a trailer for a game which might be fun to play but didn't looked graphicly good at all. At the end of the trailer they announced the name as, Shadowrun. "Where have I heard that name before?", I thougth for a split-second before my neural center horribly relized what was going on.

Shadowrun [for Xbox 360] is a team-based fantasy CTF FPS, featuring magic and technology. Four different races to choose from, Human, Elf, Dwarf, Troll, all with their own abilities and weaknesses. You'll be able to enhance yourself with things like cybernetic implants to boost your speed, or with "enhanced vision", that allows you to see through walls.

Judging from what I've seen from it, it's round based like Counter-Strike, where you each round can buy yourself new equipment, like the glider pictured above, or the "enhanced vision" pictured below.

So how do the fans of the previous games and the RPG react to this kind of path?
"All the high hopes and expectations the incredibly large Shadowrun community all around the world had set into an even remotely adequate video game adaptation of the brilliant Pen & Paper RPG have not only been destroyed but simply annihilated onto utter desolation."
And how does the devs respond to this outcry from disappointed fans?

"Now take a look at where we started with Shadowrun.

  1. there are magic spells
  2. and shamanic spirit magic
  3. and cybertech
  4. and metahumans like elves, and dwarves and such
  5. and astral space
  6. and the Matrix
  7. and megacorporations with the powers of sovereign nations
  8. and a dystopian future where America has fractured into around a dozen countries
  9. oh, and a Native American uprising
  10. and 15+ years of sourcebooks
  11. and there’s the individual storylines in the novels
  12. and the console games
So what should we do? Satisfy fans of the paper and pencil game? The novels? The SNES and Genesis games? It wasn’t a long debate, really. We decided to restart the Shadowrun timeline and grow the fiction over a series of games, allowing the world we loved to unfold over time."
This response is just madness... how can you even respond in this manner towards the people who will eventually buy the game they are making?

This is horrible, because I was hoping for a adoption of the license to create a dystopian fantasy cyberpunk game with Blade Runner influences, something along the lines with Deus Ex but with magic. I'm still looking forward to this game, because I'm a multiplayer FPS fan, but I wouldn't call this Shadowrun.

Check out their website and read the forums for more information.

Shadowrun for Xbox 360
Shadowrun E3 Trailer
Shadowrunners of all countries, unite!
What did you do to my game world, dude?

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Sony Press Conferance

In short, Sony's press conferance was about sport and racing games, not much of anything else. We saw some gameplay from Heavenly Sword which looked really interesting. Sing Star will feature a new online mode where you can share your karaoke videos with others (like google video but in the living room).

Some new card game with a Gizmondo concept, where you lay out the cards with symbols on them, infront of the camera, and the game recognizes the symbols and creates the model for it on the screen. Didn't seem to do much than just render them, but they'll probably implement a battle system later.


One of the highlights of the conferance was procedural animation for the next NBA game. Also, there was something called ucap or something, that was used as some advanced motion capture for facial expressions if I'm not mistaken. They demonstrated it with Tiger Woods, and it really looked awsome.

Well, all in all, I find the conferance to be somewhat of a let down. Too much sport/racing games, and too little innovations...

Sonyn intend on winning console wars

This, my friends, is the "new" design on the Playstation 3 controller, thougth out by Sonys Marketing Department. This wiire-less controller also have a (as Sony themself put it) revolutionary new lateral detection for pitch and yaw.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Return Episode 2 Trailer

I usually don't write about WoW movies (except from my own, of course), but this one deserves a special mentioning. Return, Episode 2 by Rufus Cubed Productions, is the sequal to the Golden Llama Award winner Return (suprise!).

If my editing skills is on pair or slightly better than Return these days, then Return Episode 2 will make me feel like I'm yet far away in competition. This will probably be the best WoW movie of this year...

The movie will be released next month and will be around a half-hour in length.

Return 2 Trailer at Warcraftmovies

Thursday, May 04, 2006

ESRB Rates Oblivion Mature

"NEW YORK – The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has changed the rating assigned to the game The Elder Scrolls® IV: Oblivion™ from T (Teen 13+) to M (Mature 17+). The content causing the ESRB to change the rating involves more detailed depictions of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating, as well as tpresence of a locked-out art file or “skin” that, if accessed through a thirdparty modification to the PC version of the game, allows the user to play with topless versions of female characters."
“Parents across the country depend on ESRB ratings every day to make sensible choices about the games they bring home for their families,” said ESRB president Patricia Vance. “Rating changes are extraordinarily rare, but if ever one does occur, ESRB recognizes that parents must be made aware of the change as quickly as possible so they are certain to have the most current and accurate information.”

"The game will retain its current content descriptors for Violence, Blood and Gore, Sexual Themes, Language, and Use of Alcohol, and the PC version will carry an additional content descriptor for Nudity until it can be re-mastered and released with the topless skin removed."
So Oblivion have been changed from Teen to Mature by ESRB, apperantly because of the "hidden nudity" in the game. The topless mod that revealed this "hidden nudity", have been circulating on the internet since around the time Oblivion was released. Originally the mod description contained this:
"Please note, this is a realistic nudity mod, not a pornographic one. The file included removes the bra welded to the skin of females of all races, showing things as most people know they are in the real world after removing upper body clothing. It will not show every female in the game as topless. I do this because I hate government/society/whatever forcing companies to 'protect our innocent population from seeing those evil dirty things 50% of them posess personally anyways' not because I'm trying to turn it into a porn game."

Bethesda themself responded to the rating change:
"There is no nudity in Oblivion without a third party modification. In the PC version of the game only – this doesn’t apply to the Xbox 360 version – some modders have used a third party tool to hack into and modify an art archive file to make it possible to create a mesh for a partially nude (topless) female that they add into the game. Bethesda didn’t create a game with nudity and does not intend that nudity appear in Oblivion. There is no nude female character in a section of the game that can be “unlocked.” Bethesda can not control tampering with Oblivion by third parties. Bethesda is taking steps to ensure that modders can not continue to hack into Oblivion’s art archives to create partially nude figures."
These are the four races of Oblivion that contains nipples (and Dremora, but that didn't really look close to human). So, how hard would it be to find these textures you ask?
  1. The textures (the "nude skins") is located inside "Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa"
  2. You'll need a program that extract bsa files to be able to get hold of the textures. Bethesda haven't released any program/tool that allows extracting from these files.
  3. Download the user made TES4BSA command-line program
  4. Once downloaded, you'll need to place the program and "Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa" at the same place (no proper documentation given, and command-line experience is required) and then open up the windows command-line (cmd) to enter:
    tes4bsa unpack "Oblivion - Textures - compressed.bsa"
  5. After awhile, all the 18 044 textures (1,92gb) should be extracted
  6. Scroll through the folders and find the file "textures\characters\imperial\female\upperbodyfemale.dds"
  7. The DirectDraw Surface (.dds) file format is used to store textures, and no conventional program is able to open up these files, so you'll need to download a DDS plug-in for Photoshop (and get ahold of Photoshop for that matter to...)
  8. After getting hold of both Photoshop (wort $649) and the plug-in, you're able to finally visiualize this cartoonish and smeered nipples on decapitated human like textures
Another way to view these textures is by going through a similiar process, which is basicly modding away the underwear model from the game and creating a Topless Mod. You'll still need file extractors that isn't available from Bethesda, and the anatomy detail is at the same level as a nude Barbie (the dolls that very young children plays around with, should they be rated Mature?).

So basicly, by "hacking" the game in ways Bethesda didn't intend to, you can see cartoonish and pixelated nipples inside the game. As far as I know, this kind of nudity is PG-13 and would be allowded for teens to view in other media.

Would this really ruin the mind of young people if they got a peek of a nipple ingame? Am I turning teenagers into the scum of society by making this post? Why, why does the game need to be re-rated to Mature for something like this, and why would it be needed for both the PC and Xbox 360 version, when modding the game is only available on the PC?

Oblivion Topless Mod Video
Bethesda Response to the ESRB Rating Change
ESRB Parent Advisory Regarding Rating Change

EDIT:
I added the normal map for the nude female upper body

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Text MMO

Letterz!

European GM Interview

Haha, a Game Master from World of Warcraft was interviewed over at somethingawful.com, and they had me as a example in one of the questions ;)

What is your feelings about people such as "dopefish" who look to get into any place their not supposed to? (IE: Hyjal)

To me if the devs really didnt want people to see the content they could block it off more, Hyjal is dead easy to get into. The game is ment to be explored (IMO) so I see no problem with it.
(Just some screens of WoW Edit)

Ask me about working as a GM

The Personal Diary of Dopefish

Alright, so I'm back on the island again (the right one, not Öland), and I've been at my parents and my sister during the weekend that just passed. The movies I've seen on my boat trips is; A Bittersweet Life, 23 and Wonderful Days.

A Bittersweet Life was a awsome korean movie about this mob/gang member who has a job gone wrong and is nearly killed as a punishment. Escaping death, he sets out to get his revenge on the people who tried to kill him.

23 is based on the true story about a german hacker who sold information to KGB. The movie was ok to watch, but generally boring with too little actual hacking in it. A fun fact was that they showed the news about the murder of Olof Palme in this german low budget movie.

Wonderful Days was this beautiful animated movie, which mixed 3D rendered backgrounds, with handdrawn characters. It's full of beautiful scenes and a intriguing story, but rather slow paced and the action scenes seems somewhat cut down. Definetly worth a watch though.

On the saturday, I was on a party at my sisters home, and one of my friends had another cute friend she wanted to introduce me to at the night club. So later that evening we all went to Palace in Kalmar, and I met this really cute girl she was talking about.

It was really hard trying to say anything, to anyone at that place. She hit her hand on sometehing, so I brougth her ice for it, but she just looked puzzled and I had to tell her it was for the hand. She appreciated it, but the ice didn't last long, it was playfully put inside the clothing of her friends instead... sigh...

Unfortunately, she prefered the completly drunk and obnoxious type. The one who got his hand sat places where it's rather inappropiate for them to be at. Anyway, that kind of girl that accept that and like those kind of guys, isn't my cup of tea.

I spent the sunday at my sisters appartment, where we ate gyros pizza (similiar to kebab, but better) and watch Scary Movie 4 on the laptop. Enough for a laugh, but not much more than that.

Other stuff I had to do in the weekend was to talk with a obsessive fan (hey, if you're reading this) who once totally social engineered me with smooth talk about being a former Team-17 employee. Feels really uncomfortable to be fed with lies for like a month of time, before he finally went way over his head, claiming to be a Blizzard employee and shit like that.

So I did a check up on him with a couple of tracerts and IP numbers and finds out he's just a teenager in Austria who arranges LAN events on his spare time. I posted the standard stuff about his name/nicks, where he was living, his internet provider and stuff like that to scare him off, then I blocked him.

Well anyhow, he were back now on IRC talking about how his girl friend recently left him, and how he was sorry for what he had done to me and had lost the urge to live. Me, who isn't farsighted forgave him ofc. but you can't ask someone to forget. Also, he asked me if I could be his friend.

For me, it's not normal to ask people through the internet if they wish to be their friends. Friendship is something that's developed over time and isn't as easy as just being friends, or not being friends. Strangers spontanously asking you to be their friends, is rather creepy.

I had to spend a hour or two discussing with him that's he's probably seeing life to simplistic as either black or white, good or bad. Everything is imperfect, and strifing for the perfect life is a strife towards nothing. Well hopefully he feels better now, even with the knowledge of me not becoming his friend through the internet relay chat.

It feels strange to write about having fans, and I don't really like that kind of extreme attention. Many of them considers me being some sort of game god, others hates me. I don't want people looking up towards me, or looking down at me, why can't they just see that I'm their equal.

It puts a strain on yourself to have to talk with people for hours that you don't want to talk with. Also, you'll get questions about everything about heaven and earth every single day. Often they're about asking me for spoon feeding them with information on how to do something or get somewhere in WoW, other questions could be everything from how to install a program, to why their movie is 2gbs big and in bad quality.

But it's not always bad. Once in a while you'll get a message like this:
"I would like to represent the Wallwalkers of Earthen Ring (USA) in thanking you for what you have done for the Wallwalker Community, your final movie has inspired me to continue the dream that perhaps one day we will be accepted as an equal vote in the choices made by MMOs and for making it clear to those of us who had almost lost hope after patch 1.9s removal of the ability to Wallwalk that Blizzard can clip our wings but we will never forget what it feels like to fly."
I never made any of my movies to became famous in the WoW community, I just made them simply because I like making movies and thougth I had something worthy to show others. I wouldn't even have made any movie if it weren't for Jet once said "You should really make a movie about that".

Speaking about communities, Nogg-aholic forum members is up to a total of 1526 people today, and there's constantly joining new ones everyday.

For some reason, Nogg-aholic the Movie has recieved some new attention lately, and alot of new comments, some of them claiming this half year old movie was done entirely on a emulated server. It's now up to 66728 downloads, according to Warcraftmovies, and recently got recommendation from the same site.

Last Wallwalk the Movie has now been downloaded 35656 times, and there's been some discussion about what the point with the movie is. Some people cries when they see it, others fall asleep, it's all depends on if the people ever wallwalked as a passion or just see a bunch of gnomes running around on the video.

Oh, about when I got him last night. My room mate have had his mother on a visit, and apperantly she's been sleeping in my room. So when I got home in the middle of the night, and both my door and his door was closed, I didn't know if she were still sleeping there or not. I couldn't knock on Azurites door and ask him, because she might be sleeping there (and I don't want to wake her up), and I couldn't just barge into my room if she might be sleeping there.

It ended up with me spending the night at Andrei, eating fish sticks, watching Big Brother and sleeping on a madrass on the floor.

Mothers sometimes got strange behaviours. Williams mom felt the need to clean my room because she were staying there, so I bougth Gott & Blandat to her as a thank you. Was kind of strange seeing every piece of furniture in your room moved 10 inches away from the wall.

On Thursday this week, it's this years Swedish Game Awards at KTH. I'll see if I'll be able to travel to Stockholm and attend to it, but I really don't want to travel there all alone, so hopefully I'll get someone else to come along with me.

So now I'm back in school, sitting here in the sofa on E4, and about to get back to work, something I've been looking forward to since last friday. I've had plenty of time to think about last weeks feedback during the weekend.

Hej svejs, lever pastej!