For those playing along at home, knarrnia.com is still pointed here but for whatever stupid reason godaddy updated my nameservers when I renewed and disabled forwarding to this blog. It’ll be fixed shortly.

OK maybe KITTEH DOES NOT HEART SNOW but it looks like someone had a snowball fight by the screened in portion of the deck.

I love Mille Bornes. I was tickled pink when there was a port of it in the BSD-console games package.

Problem is there’s a bug where you sometimes need a go card and sometimes do not need a go card. When don’t you need a go card? When you get hit with a hazard like out of gas, and immediately play the remedy (gas), the game will let you play a distance card like nothing happened.

Normally this would be a funny oversight, but the computer abuses it too.

You know your game is well written when the computer abuses the bugs too.

It was the Right Thing to do in buying Modern Warfare 2. You get real good at a loadout and then the game changes it up. Either something unlocked (a game mode, an attachment, etc) or the game gives you something in terms of perks or ranks.

The sad part is there’s some semi-annoying glitches out there. The original was the javelin missile glitch where a player could hit themselves with the missile and walk around with the unspawned missile attached to them. If you kill this player you get blown up. While it does nothing for their K/D ratio, it was really annoying to have someone suicide bomb your defense. They patched this with the last update, and it’s now hilarious to spectate someone trying to do it. The other patch fixes the care package – it no longer kills you if it falls on you and can’t be used as a bridge anymore.

The newest problem pissing me off is the Public Private Match. You choose a game mode, you go to enter with friends and you end up sucked into someone elses game mode where it’s totally different. Also it’s FFA rules despite being a “team game” and you gain XP killing teammates. The upside is when you’re sucked in, you can choose “END MATCH” and kick everyone out which I find hilarious since it’s fairly tempramental to start these things. If you select END MATCH and you’re on the winning team, you gain a ton of XP. If you’re on the losing team, you still gain some XP, but either way you’ve gotten the XP playing for all of two seconds.

For you conspiracy theory buffs, the KGB finally came out and admitted that they buried Hitler once by the bunker, reburied him again on a Soviet base, then finally burned his remains. The only parts of him left – his skullcap and jawbone – are in the Soviet Archives.

If you remember, I used to be in love with this show. The first and second seasons were probably honest. I say that because maybe every third episode had something to show, and the rest were snorefests wandering around. I think the pressure put on the actors was immense – not just from scifi but also from the viewers. Lets be smart for a moment and think about how many people probably DVRed the show after figuring out that two thirds of them were people bumping around in the dark for an hour?

Scifake became the prinicipal site to discuss this stuff after scifi decided to delete posts off their forums. Now scifake is up for sale and it make you wonder exactly how much of the muckraking was just to piss off people with money. Like the pirate bay and other sources of inconvenient truths, was the intent the entire time to piss off people with money so they could put their silence up for sale?

God only knows. Scifi killed their forums. Grant seems to have the most “on tape” paranormal experiences. Jason (who is an actor) claims nothing is faked – but he may also not be breaking role because he’s also a man who has to provide for his family. Several of the GHI team and other employees are flat on their asses broke and living with theit parents. And now Scifi is trying to spin the whole thing off into a new, heavilly promoted series called “ghost hunters academy”. Just when it looked like the trainwreck couldn’t get any deeper, Jason responds outside of the safe harbors of pilgrim films and scifi forums on scifake.com. It’s gotten so nuts that there’s death threats. Finally it seems every paranormal group in the nation is pissing on the Ghost Hunters.

At least with Paranormal State there was no doubt about it being faked. Penn State had issued a statement to that effect. With Ghost Adventures, it’s funny and it’s supposed to be funny. With Extreme Paranormal and Ghost Lab, they’re so pathetic and fat that they can’t conduct a proper investigation because they can’t walk from one side of the room to the other without weezing all over the EVPs. But Ghost Hunters, the original, still persists.

Not sure if I can repost this so here’s a direct link. Via spinner, The Smashing Pumpkins released A Song for a Son. I know everyone is like “Billy Corgan didn’t kill himself yet?” but it’s actually a decent song. It’s somewhere between ZWAN and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. MCatIS opened up entirely new genres of music for me, and probably was the gateway album to TOOL. It doesn’t have the depth of the rock on Siamese Dream (“if one guitar is good, 10 are better”) but then again the new Smashing Pumpkins are lacking James Iha who was responcible for most of the guitar. Does it sound like Zeitgeist? Thankfully no. Zeitgeist is the louder-is-better production style of music which was pioneered by Green Day and frankly I’ll never forgive them for it.

The new album is called Teargarden by Kaleidyscope and has the same sort of bright artwork ZWAN had but in watercolor. The wanna-be punk image from Zeitgeist is gone (thank god – if there was ever a genre of music even more ironic than rap by it’s very existence – it’s “punk”) and instead it’s replaced by a music which is just as much about the artwork (watercolor) as it is the production method. So says Corgan:

[I] don’t think I’m going to make albums in the old-fashioned way, meaning 12-15 songs, etc. in one small package. My desire at this point would be to release one song at a time, over a period of 2-3 years, with it all adding up to a box set/album of sorts that would also include an art movie of the album… My thinking is that if I focus on one song at a time I would approach them as beautiful, distinct paintings that would each require the attention they deserve. This would also mean I would choose what I am recording quite carefully as there would be tremendous internal pressure to get it just right, and that is the kind of pressure I like, which is to make the most beautiful thing possible. I’ve gotten lost many times during the long haul of making a record and have overlooked some great songs because of that. The new standard for an SP song would that it be excellent and fantastic and most importantly essential or it’s not coming out. I will do my best to meet that intention fully.

Frankly it sounds like a win to me. If there’s ever a style which is going to make it in the New Music market of ipods and droid and imaginary property, it’s an artist who understands that every song needs to be a single.

I thought it was just me at first, but then I tried some of my all grain lager bock and realized it wasn’t.

Commercial beers are getting chewier, and it’s not just the styles you think should be chewier this time of year. Sure, your BMC beer (bud, miller, coors) is the same recipe, but the beers like Lord Chesterfield from Yuengling? They’re actually chewier (heavier on the pallete) than they are in the summertime. Save a bottle of your favorite beer this winter and drink it during the hot days of summer after having one “regular” version of it and compare.

That being said, my Local Homebrew Store has jacked up prices so badly it’s worth ordering from Northern Brewer. If I had the money to brew anyway.

Unfortunately it was far too quiet and all the deer lived.

First, it was Sam Adams with their special pint glass. While it claims to help you better taste their beer, I suspect the real reason for it is to try to please the Sir Chugsalot crowd. There are some people, myself included on occaision, who simply drink beer too quickly. For something like Sam Adams which has enough taste to stand up to careful drinking and enjoyment, this might be something they think people miss. On the other hand, Sam Adams is Sam Adams. It’s not going to change – looking at you Yeungling – so I don’t feel guilty when I drink one quickly. For the crowd that always drinks one quickly, they might be interested in this glass, it might do something for them. On the other hand, glassware does change how a beer presents, and that’s part of the fun. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind having one for the sake of having Option 4 when it comes to glassware. For those wondering what the beer glasses are – the standard pint, the pilsner flute and the snifter are the “standard” glass styles. Little variation exists, although I usually just use a wine glass instead of a snifter. Having some kind of weird combination glass might get more mileage out of a pint, I suppose.

New Belgum decided they wanted to get on the failwagon with their own glassware. This is fine except it’s a snifter. There’s nothing really custom about it. The fact they pitch it as the same thing as the Sam Adams glass is an affront to common sense.