Demented Rants

Yesterday’s Rock Band April Fool’s Debacle wasn’t funny to everyone. A collective group of people got very butt-hurt over the whole thing. Apparently forums are srs bzns and everyone should act like adults all the time. Hah. Obviously most of this bickering was done by people who hang out in the oft’ arguing forums such as History of Rock and the like where the most intelligent conversation normally involves how Eric Clapton isn’t as good of a guitarist as that guy from My Chemical Romance.

As was pointed out earlier, the whole “Mod Ban” was all pre-organized and even orchestrated by the PAID guardians of the forum. But of course, there were people who got their knickers in a twist over the whole thing. Then, proceeded to get pissy when we told them to just get over it or leave and come back the next day when it would all be over. I was unaware that a forum for a VIDEO GAME had to be totally on topic! Even in the General forum in which the description is “This is where all off-topic conversations should go. Probably not very rock.”

Anyone who spends ANY time in the “What are you doing right now II” thread can see that we all generally get along, sans a few bad apples (no, not you Apples, I’m speaking of the Emo Brigade). Also, it’s blatantly obvious that a lot of us don’t venture outside this THREAD let alone the forum, for the very reason as stated above: Not everyone is into elitist pricks with no sense of humor, hate to rain on your parade.

Of course, after it was “unveiled” that I was right, and these idiots were wrong, the whole forum turned to turmoil because of the lack of ability to comprehend a very OBVIOUS joke. Lots of repetious people speaking repetitively about how they didn’t like it, and how it was “hurting” their conversations, blah blah blah {insert more emo whining}. Hold on. I must go call the waaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmbulance.

After it was all said and done, the large group of us (which includes myself, bood, mex, muddy, hawk, ren, ddrman and more) were laughing hysterically at all the absolute idiocy and serious inability to trash talk. And the mods were happy that we enjoyed it. Tough cookie to those who didn’t.

Moral of the story:

Oh the joys of April Fools day…. I was going to come up with some extravagant plot to fool everyone I knew and associated with, but got lost in the Rock Band forums instead.

I stick to the General forum, as it’s normally filled with mass chaos and hysteria, which makes me feel a teensy bit better about myself. See, there are volunteer mods, paid mods and the developers that all hang out on the forums there. Today, though, chaos and hysteria hit a new level. The volunteer mods banned all the HMX community crew. (Now, mind you it’s not hard for a mod to unban himself but it was all fun and the mods got the day off essentially). This was just the beginning though.

We soon realized words such as “rock” “band” “guitar” “drum” etc had been banned and were all showing up as just asterisks, which made people like RockBandRocker show up with the most offensive looking name available on the forum if you quoted any of his posts.

It then evolved into a day of pretending to be someone else on the forum. I started with HeyRiles and moved onto Alright_Computer. (I love the kitteh but didn’t want to be away from the forum when Riles showed up and freaked out lol.) Bermuddy was me, RenRock was Daesania and Mex was a 15 year old ErinGoesMoo.

Of course, a few people saw this as a bunch of grown adults acting immature, but screw it. It’s the internet. Why would anyone take it so seriously on a forum that has a thread called “What are you doing right now part 2″ in which we hold conversations like we were in a chat room?

Oh well, to those people I say:

Today was filled with oddities all over the net from some of the biggest names around:

Google introduced CADIE: Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

CADIE is an “AI” that believes she is outgrowing her creators. She blogs on blogspot regularly now, about her love of pandas and how google devs are “doing it wrong”.

You-Tube’s New Viewing Experience

Check it out for yourself! As per you-tube’s info page about the new view: “At YouTube, we’re always looking to improve the way you watch videos online. As part of that, today we’re excited to introduce our new page layout.” Some of the “tips” for this new experience involve turning your monitor upside down or even moving to Australia.

Wikipedia’s New Main Page

Hilarity continues with wiki’s new Main Page citing new finds that we were totally unaware of such as:

• 1293 – Robert Winchelsey left England for Rome to be consecrated by the Pope, only to find that there was none.
• 2006 – As mandated by a 2005 Act of the British Parliament, several British policing agencies joined together to become very serious.

Conficker Worm

I’m still convinced that this was the best laid out April Fools joke ever. Creating more panic than the Y2K bug, this teensy worm has caused people to actually unplug their lives from the internet for the entire day (because yea, that’s gonna make a difference). It’s now 6:30PM and there hasn’t been any damage reported, and I doubt it was because you turned off your modem.

Game Informer

Of course, no April 1st is complete without Game Informer’s 2009 Compendium with such gems as “Elder Scrolls: Oblivion DLC Prices Slashed… Mostly”, “IGN Gets The Scoop On Super Smash Bros. Brawl X: Extreme” and “World of Warcraft Introduces New Dance Battle System”. The Rock Band forums even got a note in there about our calamity

This year’s April Fool’s celebrations were definitely amongst some of the best, many of which I didn’t even cite including all of the Google associated ones (Gmail Autopilot anyone) and the various other gaming ones. For a list of those that happened today, check out The Museum of Hoaxes.

I thought I had seen it all folks.

But this is the most awesome reason to buy a video game ever.

Rock Band offers the ability to upload your characters from the game, to their website, and in turn you can pay to have them turned into 6″ figurines!

Who said rock toys were reserved only for KISS?

Rock Band “Merch” Table

While you’re at it, sign up and add me to your friends list!

Athena Hollow @ Rockband.com

In Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), the United States Supreme Court held, in a unanimous 8-0 decision, that the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee prohibits awarding damages to public figures to compensate for emotional distress intentionally inflicted upon them.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Now, onto things that don’t cause me to spaz my retard alert…

OMG Rockband 2. Rockband 2 OMG. I love this game. I spent probably $250 on it total, thus far. There’s just too many good goddamn downloadable songs! And there’s at least $50 more that I want, but I am going to be good and not get them for a few weeks. Might as well perfect the ones I have.

Onto the Wii…

It’s been said 1000 times that the Wii isn’t in the next-gen console wars. I have to agree. It’s in a standalone competition by itself.

Nintendo is always up for the challange of being different, and succeeding every time. My only real complaints are due to the fact that if you are playing a precision game, it can become quite difficult.

I started playing Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Best I can tell, it is a remake of the DS version of Trauma Center. Fun ass game on the DS, even though I got to a level that was absolutely unbeatable and never finished it, I still had a blast when I COULD play. Unfortunately, I’m a slightly shaky person, and because of that, some of the stuff that was simple and scoring me “A’s” on the ds, are scoring me a “C” … disappointing.

The actual decision on getting the Wii though, was for the emulator and gamecube compatability. I mean, had we went out and bought all of the systems it actually supports, we’d have spent WELL over what the Wii costs.

I don’t know about you, but I loved quite a few Gamecube games, and am quite pleased that I will finally get to play Baten Kaitos. (It was my white whale. When I COULD find it, it was damaged, but finding it was rare indeed.) And I will also get to beat BOTH Paper Mario games.

Also, the Wii is going to be my new Workout machine. Instead of spending thousands on a workout thingy just for it to take up gobs of space in my already limited bubble, I put money down on Wii Fitness (not to be confused w/ the $90 Wii Fit). It doesn’t come out till May, but goddammit, I am GOING to use this thing to get in shape.

So there you have it. Yes, the Wii is pretty nifty in it’s own right, but is it in direct competition with Sony and Microsoft? Not a chance. It appeals to a totally different audience even.

The Wii targets families, kids and casual gamers, and whereas the 360 and ps3 wouldn’t mind having a slice of that pie, they just can’t justify coming out w/ games that are essentially Tamagatichi’s for kittens/puppies/horses/whatever.

Three reasons why I haven’t posted in a few days:

1.  I got my tax money on Friday, and have been on a slightly conservative spending spree.

2. I bought Rock Band 2 (’nuff said)

3. Microsoft decided to make my computer act retarded.

To elaborate on the 3rd…

Everything was working fine. Kid was watching a movie on my computer, it went kaput, I restart, and get a stupid “Reload boot” error.

I didn’t feel like dicking with it, so I let it go for a couple days, figuring that somehow the boot file or MBR was fucked up. I know how to fix those problems, but was kind of enjoying the days off to be honest.

Well, I give in and try to fix it today. Neither fixboot, fixmbr nor bootcfg fixed it. So, what was the problem? Oh, that my main drive was jumpered as slave.

Now, this would normally be an issue that could be corrected the first time you use the drive. But no, I have been running this copy of xp pro on my computer for oh, about 7 months now. Not a single problem. And then *poof* Windows decides that it has to be on a master jumpered drive. WTF? I didn’t realize that Windows had such a picky AI installed.

But, needless to say, all is well in Athenaland now. Computer is back up and running better (because I also can-aired out the psu, cpu and gpu) and I will be back soon to give some insight as to why I both like and dislike my spiffy new Wii.