World Of Warcraft, Books, and some exciting Christmas cheer!

I'm currently in the process of downloading World Of Warcraft again, and this time I have a tonne of time to spend on it, so maybe I'll get somewhere.

We meet again, download client..

Incidentally, I've almost finished reading Mogworld, by Yahtzee Croshaw. 

In a world full to bursting with would-be heroes, Jim couldn't be less interested in saving the day. His fireballs fizzle. He's awfully grumpy. Plus, he's been dead for about sixty years. When a renegade necromancer wrenches him from eternal slumber and into a world gone terribly, bizarrely wrong, all Jim wants is to find a way to die properly, once and for all.
On his side, he's got a few shambling corpses, an inept thief, and a powerful death wish. But he's up against tough odds: angry mobs of adventurers, a body falling apart at the seams and a team of programmers racing a deadline to hammer out the last few bugs in their AI.

It's been an awesome read so far, and the ending is looking promising. The story unfolds really well, with believable characters, and great humour. I've never laughed this loud at a book before, ever. I really suggest giving this one a read, it's awesome.


But, back to World Of Warcraft! I'm not sure what type of character I'm going to roll yet, but I'm getting sick of being the support class in every RPG I've ever touched, so I'm going to try something a bit more on the "I'm going to tear out your spine and hit you to death with it' end of the spectrum.
Considering the expansions are super cheap now, it's looking tempting to actually play WoW properly. It might end up getting pushed to the side by EVE, though, which I plan on playing a lot of after Christmas.

So if you play either, and you want to play them with me (remembering that my character's going to be sparkling and new in WoW, and I haven't played EVE in a bit) drop me a message!

I can win this!

I just thought someone might want to see this.

Simply because.

Anyways, I have something I actually wanna mention.

A while ago I got some private message on Youtube, from a band (it happens a lot, you guys probably notice it a lot), and they simply titled it "<3 from italy".

They're actually insanely bad ass. Check them out:

Here's a link to their channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/readysetfallchannel

I'm going to actually finish recording a song during the Summer holidays, by the way.

A new video and Google+!

Howdy!

I went camping over the weekend, just for one night, and I filmed the first day plus video of my family leaving! Here's the product of about 50 minutes of editing:

I Went Camping!

We went to a little private camping spot in Oberon, that some friends own! Overall it was pretty enjoyable.

But anywho, in other news, I'm now on Google+! I've been giving out some invites to some friends, so if anyone wants one, you can go ahead and comment and you might get lucky. I'm enjoying it so far, and I really like the idea of the circles, it gives it a more personalized feel and sharing things with people is a lot better, when you know which circle will appreciate it more (for example: grandma won't enjoy that picture of you making out with a dog while drunk, as much as your drinking buddies might).

That's all for now, sorry for the lack of writing, I'm kind of tired.

Back.

Sorry for that long pause, guys (I don't know who I'm talking to at this point).

I got a little caught up on things to blog about, seeing as my Linux life was boring. Windows is running again and things are back to normal. I've gotten back to work on my Gmod gamemode, and right now I'm just making some basic framework.

Two teams, loadouts, and a few menus. From there, I'll move onto the more complex stuff, like setting up the different classes and maybe an in-game jukebox.

Mmm! Painstakingly slow UI creation!

In other news, my band is progressing nicely. I do believe we should be able to record very soon! That should mean at least a single shall be released. Look out for that, because I am amazing and you know you want to hear my sweet, sweet music.

Until next time, dudes!

Nostalgia... Mm...

So I'm currently playing some Warcraft 3! One of the few games that runs with ease on Linux at the moment, I'm going to try some others later... I'm sticking to some of the classics, because they're more likely to run.

Gooey nostalgia!

I'm going to try and pull an all nighter, without caffeine... Or I'll make some tea, who knows?

Amazingly, I don't mind playing some of these old games, it's really started to remind me of how much games have changed over the years. It's especially reminded me of how many carbon copies there are out there! I think next I'm going to go for something a little newer. The old WH40K maybe? After that, I'm going to try and get Battlefield 2 to run! Tonight should be fun!

EDIT (9:58 PM): So it seems that Battlefield bugs out, because of the graphics. I'm working on finding a fix, should have it working soon, if not I'll find another game.

A quick update on my gamemode:

I've hit a bump in the road, with my Windows partition breaking. I can't test it, and all my friends that own Gmod are lazy/not in the same timezone. Really sucky, but I'll get around it somehow! If anyone would like to help with simple tests, just to see if the UI and such works, please let me know.

I'm still alive!

THANKS FOR NOTHING, JESUS!

The End Is Nigh!

So yeah, I'm waiting until 12:01 AM, in order to survive the end of the world.

Judgement day is apparently at hand, and I intend to greet Jesus (and his sword mouth) with a cold glass of water.

Expect two videos on my channel. One for 12:01 AM and another later in the day, when I'm celebrating either the apocalypse or the other thing... Y'know. The not apocalypse thing...

Bring it on, Jesus!

I'm just now deciding the soundtrack for judgement day; I believe at 10 to 12, I'll play something amazing.

Happy Judgement Day, 2011 guys!

Portal Videos

Earlier in the day, I recorded some Portal, and made two videos. I used the super basic, super vanilla, super regular video editor that comes with Linux; which has basically no editing capabilities.

Here they are!

I'm going to do one for all the challenges; should be dandy, just gotta get my technique down.

That'll be all!

Game Mode! Whaaaaaaaa~t?!

I'm starting work on a Garry's Mod game mode. I'm just tossing some ideas around now! This would be my first project, and so far, it's mostly for practice. I'm going to try and encompass what I've learnt since I've started learning Lua.

I'll be making making Derma for it, and setting those up with their own personal hotkeys; hopefully I can make some SWEPs specific to teams/classes; I've got an idea about abilities that you can use, to help your team; and then I've got an idea about custom maps. It should be fun!
There might even be a few Easter Eggs for you to find in the game mode, so if I ever actually release this to the public, maybe you should check it out.

The basic idea is a team death match, with 4 main classes:

• The main combat oriented class; a warrior/fighter/soldier type of thing.
• The support/combat class, that uses ranged 'magical' powers, if you will.
• The main ranged class, which sits back and picks off enemies.
• And a healing class, to y'know... Heal stuff.

I'll make updates about it until it's done, so stay tuned for those!

Aside from the stuff I'm doing on the PC, I'm starting work on a film. I'm still wondering whether it should be a web series, or feature length, but I'm leaning more towards a web series. The idea is too hard to drag out for an hour and have a final ending, but as a web series I wouldn't have to make a definite ending after an hour or so of footage.

I'm also going to make a new video, because I haven't made a good one in a long while; I'll link that on here when it's done.

That's all for now! Thanks for reading.

Linux; again.

So, it only took me a few days to set up a dual boot. What can I say? I'm weak willed!

After setting up the dual boot, I found that I really only used Windows for games in the first place; Linux is far better for everything else.

If you don't think this is cool, you're probably ugly/lame.

I've set up Gnome3, which works swimmingly with my desktop. Everything about Linux makes me happy, except the gaming. So I've got a practically vanilla copy of Windows, which I play games on. The only things (other than Steam, which had to be installed for me to play games) I have installed are Chrome and iTunes.
I've noticed the difference in loading times, and I have to say that Windows takes a long time, in comparison to Linux. This, coupled with the fact that Linux writes to the harddrive faster, makes it really user friendly.

So yeah! Linux is great!

And in other news, I got Portal 2... And finished it on the same day. I've been waiting for someone I know to get it, so I can play some more of the co-op! It's pretty hard, trying to think with four portals and all. The animations and commands help quite a lot, though.

Hit me up on Steam if you wanna play some games, or something; you can add me with The_Cheeseman

Linux!

I'm currently on Linux.

I, an avid gamer, have switched to Linux. Ubuntu 10.10, to be exact. I'm loving it, so far! I'm currently working around the gaming thing, until Steam for Linux is released (though I'm not holding my breath). I'd like to see how long I can go, before setting up a dual boot.

I'm going to try a program called Play On Linux. It's a specialized version of Wine, which is designed to run Games. I'm using it mostly because it has special installers to run exclusively with Steam, which makes it so much easier. I'm going to try HL2 first; so we'll see how it goes!

TROLL!

Today's vlog is about something rather simple; Youtube, people who troll Youtube, and people who scream "TROLL" at the first sign of someone disagreeing with anything featured in the video, or comments.

I clicked the wrong video in my subscriptions, and was annoyed to find this:

And then I scrolled down to the comments, because something caught my eye.

Yeah, right. 1,000 people clicked dislike, just to annoy everyone. They couldn't have possible disliked everything about the video.

So basically, I replied with:


@TACOJ8893 Because disliking something instantly means you're trying to piss someone off. It couldn't possible be that they didn't like it! No, no; it's far more likely that they loved the video's bad voice acting, horrible transitions, unfitting music, terrible jokes, or the general lack of anything entertaining and instead wanted to annoy someone in place of saying, "I like this."


Troll gets thrown around on the internet so much today, that it pretty much applies to anyone that disagrees. Even if you make a valid argument against anything, or apply logic to something, you're labeled a troll, and told to move on.
It's simple an easy way to escape losing an argument, or having to live with the fact that someone doesn't like what you like.

"All I'm saying, is that I don't like Call of Duty!"

"What... did you just say?"

It's Cold; Also, Dragon Age!

It's been raining for most of the day, where I live. Hasn't been the best for outings, so I stayed inside and played Garry's Mod all day. Nothing really eventful, but right now I'm about to play some Dragon Age: Origins!

Quick! Go for the shins!

Dragon Age is one of my favorite RPGs, along with Mass Effect, and The Elder Scrolls games. I find that the way it pulls off morality is great, and it's entirely up to the player how they should react. Instead of giving you a good/bad answer or choice, it simply makes it a grey area; sometimes the ends justify the means... Or sometimes it's just easier to kill someone, rather than saving them with a long ass quest!

It really makes it more about the player's thought process, rather than just clicking whatever dialogue choice sounds nice/evil.
It also pulls off party-based combat amazingly, with the 'tactics' menu, in which you can assign certain abilities to certain events. It certainly makes managing your party easier, but it also makes it easier to avoid grinding to get past a difficult enemy.

I quite often find myself setting up traps, for the Darkspawn on the other side of a door, and setting up my party, so my ranged members aren't in the thick of things right away.

Back on character development, the characters almost feel real, in the way they react, and interact. The dialogue is always great, and the way a conversation can swing from one topic, to another, is very engaging. You have to be careful not to say the wrong thing.
The characters all have interesting origin stories, which you can follow up after a bit of talking, and your own character's origin story influences the story greatly.

The only problem, is there are a few major quests, which tend to drag on (Hah! Get it? Drag-on? Dragon?! Hah... Yeah... Sorry...).
For instance, you run into a 'Sloth Demon', which to anyone who hasn't played the game, is a demon that essentially makes you feel okay with being lazy. They make you fall asleep, and then consume all your energy, until you die. The quest starts out interesting, but it's a road block that only ends up as an annoyance. The quest isn't exactly needed, but it does also help unlock the people in your party's backstories a bit more... Even if it does drag on.

I guess that really justifies the long, boring adventure through The Fade.

I haven't played Dragon Age II, but some of the things I'm hearing about it are discouraging me. Repetitive maps, non-customizable main character (besides class, and gender I believe), and a bad story/ending? I suppose this is where Bioware did it more for the money, than for the playerbase. Though, I did see a lot of people complaining about it taking too long for a sequel.

"I'm so edgy, look at me..."

"It's not even a fad, okay?! This is who I am!"

Okay, I'll stop picking on Hawke, guys... Sorry.

Are we really that impatient? I think the development time of a game should be as long as it needs to be, to make sure that the game is as good as it should be; but at the same time, they need to have a deadline, to make sure the game comes out while they're still motivated.
It's like a double-edged sword (Hawke has the right idea), on one hand, the game might not be as good as it could be if the development time is cut short. On the other, it may be better motivated, and the devs would be less lazy/better workers, if they have a deadline.

But, whatever. Dragon Age time!

Oh my... This has gotten terribly out of hand!

I loaded up Gmod earlier, on a map I downloaded quite a while ago; zs_swimming_pool_v2.

I was just going to screw around; build a boat or something to float around in the pool with. But then I decided I wanted to have a shoot out! I must say, it got amazingly large, by the end.

Here's the aftermath:

It was fun!

This isn't the actual blog post for today, I just thought I'd share this.

Console Controllers and your PC: Best Friends?

AWWWW SHEEEEE~IT!

Super Meat Boy was released earlier last year, and after buying it, I really only played the first few levels. About last week, I decided I was going to play it again, but I was going to use my Xbox 360 controller instead.

I have to say, I rage quit a lot less with the controller, than I did with the keyboard. It's a lot more comfortable using the thumbstick and it feels a lot more natural, although sometimes the controller can feel unresponsive. Obviously Microsoft's fault, not Team Meat's.

I did, however, find a way around Microsoft's cruddy support!

It's called Pinnicle Game Profiler and it works quite well, other than the occasional bug. I've used it to map the 360 controller to Half-Life 2, Garry's Mod, Portal, and Left 4 Dead, even though I can't see myself using the controller regularly for those games.
You can get a free trial of Pinncicle Game Profiler on their website; it only lasts 30 days, but I recommend you try it.

So many commands, so little buttons!

Some games have key mappings which are automatically downloaded every time you click a little update button. If you point Pinnicle to the .exe for a game, it also works as a launcher, when you open that game profile!

Everything is fairly straight forward, so I won't waste time explaining the interface.

On a completely unrelated topic, I'm still waiting for Manchester Orchestra's new album Simple Math. May 10th is too far away!

Come on, you sunnuvabitch!

So, yeah. I'll definitely be buying that album! I have all of Manchester Orchestra's other albums, and there isn't one song that I haven't loved.

That's all, for now. I dunno if I'll end up with a schedule for blogging, but so far, it looks like it's daily.

                                                                               -- The Jukebox

Oh, hello!

I'm a freakin' genius!


Those were my literal first words, when I picked up my first video camera. Sure, it was crappy, and sure, the video I made did later make me regret ever touching the thing, but I sure did feel a sense of accomplishment when I uploaded it on Youtube!

The video was pretty simple. In fact, it was more of a huge, inside joke. My friend and I had found a bag of Spider-Man toys in the spare room, and we dropped them on the carpet. Then we just started improvising.

The jokes were terrible, the video quality was worse, and we didn't even actually make skits/a story. It was just us screwing around.

My next project was a little more complicated. It was improvisation, but with a main character. It was the same morning as the previous video, so I still had that "what the hell" attitude going on.
I made a stupid voice, and moved the mouth of a Lizard Man figurine.

And thus, Retarded-Lizard-Man-Coat-Thing is forever burned into my memory.

Now I have higher quality equipment, and a better understanding of how to actually make a movie (with real story progression), my next objective is to tackle a short-film. I find myself looking back at that incredibly shitty film, and wondering if I'll have the same attitude towards a proper film, as I did Retarded-Lizard-Man-Coat-Thing (sorry, I just love typing it).

Oh, and yeah. This is my blog. Hi!

I'm Joshua! I go by The Jukebox online, and yeah. I'll be making blog posts about my life, and stuff. Basically like a journal, only not as personal, and not as retarded.

From here, you can catch all my Youtube videos, stuff about my band, and sometimes graphics I make. I might accidentally review a game here and there, or critique an album. Who knows? We'll see where I fit!