Peer Pressure Works!

So, this was supposed to be post number one of what I figured would probably be 3 posts going through the Battle of Angoville. And it actually was quite a battle! A third of the way through, I was up 500-228. In the end, I won 119-0. It was a HUGE turnaround from the US, who started slamming my vehicles with anti tank guns, capping grenadiers with hidden snipers and dropping frigging paratroopers seemingly anywhere that I WASN’T. Even as I was running down the final 50 that he had, one of my Panther heavy tanks was blown to kingdom come and he was introducing his first armor to the battlefield.

Yep, it was pretty cool. Too bad that attempting to share it has been such a godawful experience in utter frustration.

Now, I’ve tried including photos in Wordpress posts before without any difficulties. And it’s not like I was going totally screen shot crazy here…at the point where I just out and out gave up (though it was to the point that the alternative was quickly becoming snapping my keyboard in half) I had around 1200 words to MAYBE 13 photos. That really shouldn’t pose a problem, and it wouldn’t except for the fact that the subhuman fucktards who apparently put together Wordpress’ visual editing and formatting were of the same approximate intelligence level of a standard sheet of plywood.

It was one Fubar after another. I would have three photos then text beneath…to anyone with a single degree of reason, that would seem to indicate that the text would appear beneath the photos in the post, right? Oh no! Nope, there’s half a sentence above, a few words squeezed BETWEEN the damn screen shots, then it comes in two thirds done at the bottom. A craptastic miasma of screen shots and words that looked like something vomited forth by a picture book sprung to horrible life. So, let’s shift some photos around. Okay, I’ve 3 in a row vertically, all offset, and…okay, now they’re sort of running together. I have this huge white box around two of them for no goddamn reason. Okay, we’ll try arrnaging them another way. Now, for absolutely no explicable reason a sentence is actually running IN TO the top of the fucking picture on top.

For TWO HOURS I labored to put this goddamn thing together. Thinking that maybe there was another way, I started looking through the list of plugins for Wordpress. Oh, there’s PLENTY for photos…of course, they’re not really arranged in to any sort of sub category, and there are pages and pages for Photo AND for Photos, and not all of them appear in both! AWESOME! Page after page of fucking photo plugins…there’s sidebar widgets, there’s album tools, there’s header tools…there’s nothing to try and help with formatting at all with the main message area. This leads me to believe that it’s impossible to fix the fucktastic garbage heap that is trying to post more than a couple of photos.

Well, I’m a trooper, let’s give it another try! Let’s preview this, okay…wait…why the fuck is there a huge blank towards the end of the post? 3 photo, then half a page of blank, then some text?! I look. Nope, no space like that in the post. It won’t go away. Okay, I delete the text and retype it. OH BOY! THE FUCKING GAP IS STILL THERE! It was at this point that, after uttering several dozen F-bombs and painful suggestions for what the motherfuckers who ‘designed’ this mess (I would describe their actions more as shitting it out) could do, that I completely gave up.

And actually, THAT wasn’t even the final throw in of the towel! I actually STARTED ALL OVER AGAIN using only thumbnail images. That just came out looking ridiculous, though, and it was still all fucked up in terms of message format.

There are many things that I like about Wordpress, but there are many times when trying to do something becomes so needlessly fucking frustrating that I throw in the towel. This isn’t the first post I’ve had to crumple up and toss like I WISH, SINCERELY FUCKING WISH, I could do to the torsos of the wastes of cum who designed this shit software. And the truly infuriating, sad part of this whole mess is that I KNOW it won’t be the last time I’m forced to dump a really good idea because of the limitations of this piece of shit. THAT might piss me off more than anything else. Oh sure, I could probably go about learning how to code everything in HTML and that might help (though it sure as fuck didn’t here!), or spend an hour digging through any possibly applicable plugin to MAYBE find something that will help (quite likely, since the plugins are generally built by users stuck with the same fucked up limitations and issues that I am, as opposed to the mongoloid fucknuts who built this garbage in the first place)…but that sorta sounds like work. Work I’m flat out not being paid for.

This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be something I enjoy doing. This is supposed to be a way for me to express myself. And yes, sometimes those expressions ARE of frustrations or things that piss me off…but the MEDIUM I’m FUCKING USING to express those thoughts ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE THE BASIS FOR MY RAGE RISING IN THE FIRST PLACE.

And the kicker is, I’m PAYING for this bullshit. I’m paying for the webspace I’m using and I’m paying for the domain name. And for what? This load of shit? I mean, since it seems apparent that I’m basically limited to mostly text entries anyway, why the fuck am I using this shit over some free piece of crap like Blogger? Sure, Blogger kinda sucks…BUT I’M NOT PAYING FOR IT!

So fuck it. I’m so frustrated and pissed the fuck off with this piece of shit that I don’t give a goddamn. Fuck the blogging challenge, fuck the posts I had planned, fuck it. It ain’t worth it if it’s putting me in a mood like this. As much as I may seem to ‘enjoy’ getting all pissed off at things on here, the point of it is supposed to be that I get that shit OUT on here. It isn’t supposed to be what’s pissing me off in the first place. I’ll be back…around whatever time I stop wishing I could go back in time, find the mother of the designer of piece of shit, and convince her it really would be better for the world if she just paid a visit to good ol’ Doc Coat Hanger in his back alley ‘office’.

Hell, this isn’t even the first draft of this shit…THAT was something even I considered too mean and going a little bit too far.

For the near future, good fucking riddance.

Well, I went ahead and played the game tonight. And…absolutely and thoroughly crushed the AI. I mean, it was an outright slaughter. I didn’t lose a single VP, which is RIDICULOUS. So, thinking it might just be the British faction that was having issues, I replayed the level against the Americans. They actually dropped my VP level…from 500 to 483. Um…yeah. Another slaughter. It just doesn’t seem to ‘get’ that assaulting defenses is a good idea when your point levels are dropping, instead focusing on building up it’s own defenses. Great, you have a network of machine gun bunkers protecting your base with interlocking fields of fire. That’s awesome. Meanwhile, YOU’RE LOSING THE GAME.

So, I’m making a switch to a different map that ALWAYS produces some action, Angoville :

Behold the...diamond shape of doom...!!..?

This is a pretty simple, and much smaller,  map. One base is in the North corner, the other is in the South. The East and West corners have the +16 Munitions and Fuel sectors, making those valuable. 3 VPs, two to the right, one to the left.

This inevitably turns in to an out and out slug fest. The two areas with buildings tend to be popular battlegrounds since they control the approaches to the right hand VP spots. And the left VP’s sector control point is actually in that gigantic chunk of land right below it, so that tends to be a hot spot as well.

What I’m going to do with this one is take a screen shot of each of those areas before the battle starts. Then, some of the final shots I take will be those same areas afterwards.

Post Battle : WOW!  Things started off well, with me dominating the map and leading by over 200 VPs at one point. Then the Americans (I decided to play against them…since the Wehr and US were the original factions, they were better designed to fight one another) started pushing back AND had their Engineers running around building damn machine gun bunkers! And then…paratroopers, , Anti-tank guns and mortar squads out the ying yang…Jesus! Things got tense for awhile.

Anyway, I’ll start going through the Replay of it tomorrow. It was a grand total of about 49 minutes and change long, so I’ll get 2, probably 3, posts out of it. That lone VP over to the left ended up seeing more combat that probably any other sector on the map, so I’ll definitely snap a before and after screenie of that area.

Yes, a lawyer, not a professional wrestler as that name might suggest.

For some reason, I was remembering Liam and Sean Woods telling me about some ad they saw on late night TV for a lawyer who called himself The Hammer…decided to look it up on Youtube and found this guy. Now, unfortunately the videos won’t embed…however, go check this guy out. Hell, after watching this raving lunatic I’d definitely make his videos unembeddable if he asked me to!

Got to love a lawyer who is practically apologetic for not being able to murder people.

Okay, after messing around with a few sample battles, I have picked my map. Check out Langres :

A quaint little French town that will be blown to fuck

Click that bad boy to see it full sized. It’s a fairly large map for a 2 player map, actually (though overall, that only scores as a Medium sized map). In case it wasn’t readily apparent where the river is, I marked it with that blue squiggle. All bridges, which will be HUGE in this game, are circled in red. Those 3 narrow ones along the bottom-left are rail and foot bridges…foot soldiers can cross, MAYBE a German motorbike or a Jeep, but that’s it. My base, as the Germans, is the big blue area in the top corner (basically, the darker blue building in the very corner is my base. That lighter blue area is my ‘base build area’…the only places I can construct base structures. That blank area in the right corner is where the Brits will be.

My reasons for picking this map…it should be a good length battle, so I might be able to squeeze 3 or 4 posts from this thing. Urban combat typically results in a LOT of fun carnage, and there’s a lot of houses North of that river. Also, holding the VPs isn’t going to be easy. That one in the south is pretty much theirs…not much I can do to capture that AND defend my territory. And that central one is right on the biggest bridge on the map, meaning it’s going to be a bastard for either side to hold on to. Hell, even the one in the West, though certainly within my ‘zone’, is close to those foot bridges, and troops on the other side of the river could easily lay some pretty serious fire down on it from across the water. (continue reading…)

When this whole blogging challenge started up, one of the first ideas in my head was to record a play session of…something. It never really advanced beyond that, as I had other things to work on, and other ideas for posts. However, now it’s returned, like an itch in the back of my brain that I can’t scratch (just with a much lower likelihood of driving my stark raving mad). And Chad’s recent talk of doing the same thing for WoW kinda re-awoke the whole concept in my head, too.

So, the initial question…what to play? I briefly entertained the idea of one of my recent Paradox sale purchases, Combat Mission Shock Force, theorizing that watching the results on the virtual battlefield of an incompetent commander who barely knows what in the Hell he’s doing could be fairly entertaining (Hell, I’d probably laugh). The problem with that, though, is that while I’m fumbling to get my tanks out of harm’s way, I’m pretty damn unlikely to remember to take any screen shots or anything. That was actually a recurring issue…until I reached my conclusion.

My game of choice for this will be Company of Heroes, which I fairly recently got back in to. It looks good, it’s fun to play in a skirmish game against the AI, there are a lot of solid map choices available. And most importantly, the game automatically saves a recording as yopu’re playing, meaning I don’t have to even worry about screenshots during my game session. I can go back and watch the recorded game as many times as I want, whenever I want. That means I can watch areas of the battlefield that I wasn’t actually focused on in the game (there are frequently multiple little firefights going on all over the damn place during a session of CoH). I can also pause it and get the camera lined up perfect and generally be a picky fucker. Hell, it also means I can just focus on a part of the replay at a time!

So, that being decided, I have narrowed my map options down a bit, and also decided that I will play the role of the jackboot wearers (I’ll take the Wehrmacht faction). I’ll be playing the game with a Custom AI mod, which means the Brits aren’t completely worthless (several recent game patches have also given the limeys a DESPERATELY needed boost!)…so I might play against them. Since I’ve usually been concentrating on the Americans, who have usually given a better game, it should throw a definite bit of ‘the unknown’ in to the whole experience. Oh, the only other modification I’ll be using is purely cosmetic, the Historical Skins Mod, which just makes the units and vehicles look about a gazillion times better than the rather plain models the base game uses.

For example, in the base vanilla game, most units of the same faction look VERY similar. With this mod in use, that isn’t the case…these fuckers get this dialed down to the point of getting tiny unit insignia correct. For example, here are some US Riflemen and some US Rangers. Note the rather stark differences (you know…aside from the Rangers having Bazookas and Thompson submachine guns).

As for other software, that’s pretty basic. Fraps is pretty much the standard for screenshots and video, so I’ll use it. And I don’t really need anything insanely deep for editing them, so I’ll just use Photoscape to cover that, and to convert all the .bmp formats the free version of fraps uses in to jpegs.

So, with all that out of the way, I guess I’ll need to explain the basics of the game to you lot before I even consider diving in to this sumbitch! I ran a quick test game tonight just to snap some screenshots of the more pertinent things. (continue reading…)

So…it’s my birthday today. And…yeah.

I don’t know, I’m just not one of those people who makes a big deal about birthdays, generally speaking. I mean, are we really celebrating this on MY account? What did I do? Decided to come out of the womb. Not exactly a big day for ME…for MOM, yeah, but I really didn’t do much but shriek angrily after leaving my nice warm place of residence for  9 months. Huzzah! Way to…cry!?

And what have I been doing on my birthday? Why, moving large pieces of furniture out of the main rooms in the house as it’s prepared for the carpets to be ripped out and replaced with hardwood flooring. And really, I’m good with that. It’s not that I’m a completely unappreciative bastard who doesn’t like having something done for me, it’s just not something that I feel like I need. Give me a meal of my choosing (which will probably happen this weekend…I guess I need to come up with something I want) and some sort of cake, and I’m good. I aloso find it weird  to have my email Inbox filled with ‘Happy Birthday!’ greetings from literally dozens of sites and forums that I have registered on at one time or another, many only receiving a few visits and then being forgotten.

Call me a low maintenance birthday guy, I guess.

So, among many MANY other geekly things that I have an interest in is the whole Warhammer 40K universe. If you’d asked me what the Hell that even was even 2 years ago, my answer would probably have been something rambling on about space people and laser weapons. And my answer now? Space people, laser weapons and awesome.

I first gained an interest in this when I found the Dawn of War Platinum Collection for PC on sale for about 15 bucks. Considering it’s a game and 2 expansions, that kind of caught my eye, so I threw caution (and a few 5 dollar bills) to the wind (or, you know, the cashier) and bought it.The game is a little dated by the standards of 2009, but it was a solid little RTS game with a very minor push for base building. Actually, I got so in to the RTS game style of the developers (Relic Online) that I decided to give Company of Heroes another chance. I still cannot stand the campaigns in that game, but I’ve really enjoyed playing skirmish maps (a little bit online but mostly against the AI…using an AI mod that makes it a little vicious). That’s a story for another day, though. (continue reading…)

So, before I even get down to business…you’re welcome to everyone else who participated in the recording of this, since I’ve just given all of you the material for your next blog post. I’m good like that.

Yes indeed, ladies and germs, I have completed and uploaded the 2nd Violent Aggression podcast! I have to say that it went pretty smoothly. I did get to benefit from lessons James learned about Audacity and Levelator the first time he did one, as well as having all of the content pre-edited. So a bit of fine editing later, the segments were good to go. Really, that’s the reason I was able to get this finished this weekend (not counting fine editing time and stuff like that)…all I had to do was record the quick little welcome message, then grab some song samples, and I was ready to get started.So in a way I would like to thank everyone who helped do all the editing in the first place, because all of that halped this get done a lot quicker…except Vlad. He is never allowed to ‘edit’ unsupervised ever again. (continue reading…)

I’ve spent a good portion of today getting audio clips cleaned up in preparation for slamming them together in a way that may resemble a podcast, and lemme tell ya…it gets to be painful!

When Liam started going on about how he had grown to hate the sound of his voice, I laughed it off as Liam being his typical silly self. I understand now, though. Good lord do I understand. I have to ask…have I always had a habit of sniffing constantly like a coke fiend in conversation, or did I just save that delightful habit for when I’m being recorded? What the Hell?! And my habit of sort of launching in to a screechy kinda high pitch at times…UGH. How is it that nobody has ever slugged me? I mean, really, I kinda wanna punch myself at the moment!

Oh, and on a side note, James and I both hate you all with a passion. Okay, not ALL of you…some we merely dislike…but those of you who joined us in recording all of that audio. We hate you. Don’t take it personally, really, it’s just that after listening to you people speak again and again and again, this boiling feeling of intense dislike starts to bubble up from beneath the surface. And I hate ALL of us, DEFINITELY including myself, for some of the reprehensibly bad tangents we went off on. Seriously, editing out 2 minute long conversations about what would make for an extreme pickle (half of which was absolutely serious), meanderings going on and on about jars of fat, terrible excuses for ‘jokes’ that fall flatter than Kate Moss.

I just needed to get that off my chest. Aside from the fact I despise mankind, it’s going great!

I don’t mean this in some metaphysical “Woooaaaahhhh…like, who AM I?” way, so you don’t need to be frightened that I’ve been transformed in to some hideos hippy-ish freak who likes nothing more than obnoxious jam bands and flower headbands and stinking clothing that may as well have been dipped in patchouli.

I mean that, for the past couple of weeks I have LITERALLY possessed no identity. I had to get my license renewed by my birthday, so I figured I’d just get it done and went in a couple of weeks ago. Aaaaah, the waiting in line…how I’ve missed thee, registry office. As always, I got the new girl, the one who has been there for a week and still really doesn’t have a full grasp on what she’s doing yet. She’s being watched, but the one who’s watching her is watching 3 other people as well. This actually brings up the Mystery of the Registry Office…where the fuck do these new people GO? I am almost ALWAYS being helped by a newcomer, yet the next time I go in it’s another newcomer and the same old staff. Are the old guard actually some sort of secret cannibal society, biding their time until they can bite in to the tender flesh of the unaware, their screams of pain and horror swallowed up by the inky night? Or are the new staff only there until the first moon of the new month when they are ritualistically sacrificed to the gods of government bureaucracy? Perhaps the truth is simply too horrible to know.

ANYWAY, after many false steps and restarts, we were finally on our way. After the paperwork and the excitement of watching someone else type was over, it was in to the back for the photo for the new license. Now, I sit down and I’m expecting a warning when BAMMO, it’s photo flash time! What the…was…was that it?! I was in no way ready for that! Apparently it was, though. Now I get to stand there and wait to see if the photo came out properly. She says it does…I don’t get to look. I leave with my shitty ‘temporary license’. Nothing like having just a piece of paper that basically just says “I am allowed to drive…really. Trust me!” Yes indeed, ID through the honor system. I was SURE I’d be pulled over by some cop who would look at the little paper, look at me, then promptly issue forth a harsh tazing (you know, as opposed to a light, gentle tazing) ‘just to be sure’.

It never did happen, and lo and behold my new license is here! So I checked it out. There are a few changes to the card, but what I was drawn to was the photo. There are two options for what this picture looks like :

-A photo of a man who has been arrested after killing, dismembering and partially consuming the entire population of some remote Russian village, a village SO remote that they don’t have color photography yet. He has no remorse…he is incapable of feeling it. He’s an emotionless automaton who knows only the faintest of pleasure after committing atrocities upon others.

-The example photo of the Alpha Zombie, the one who started the entire plague of restless undead currently walking the surface of the planet.

So, I figure that NOW when that cop sees my photo ID (I exist! Lo0k!), they’re just going to grab for Mr. Glock and put a few rounds through my skull. Great. Thanks, Alberta Registries!