Straight edge 3.0 announcement

Posted on January 17, 2011 by InV4d3r

The X-mas season is over, the snow’s disappearing and it’s getting warmer outside and this yellow circle, simply called sun, appears on the sky again. With all these things in mind and due to the fact that I have to get rid of some, let us say, winter energy resources, I decided to announce the cutoff for the “Straight edge 3.0 project”. It’s going to be January 30th where the healthier way of living continues once again, and once the again the rules will be changed in some ways. I’m not going to make such tough restrictions and the gym and sports plan won’t be that time intense. With the new rules I’ll try to find a good balance between the shaping body aspect and the simply have some fun factor on the other side. The last two projects were good in some kind of way, but the intensity was too strong and room for other activities was pretty narrow or barely not existing. One thing that will last for sure is the non-smoking rule, because smoking kills the stamina and every cardio will be blown to dust (anyone, dust? no?), some changes will be made to the alcohol rule. There will be restrictions but it’s no longer completely forbidden. Actually, alcohol is no longer that temptation that it was before the whole project thing, nowadays do I not have a single problem with going to a party and not drink. Alcohol disgusts me in some ways.

Anyhow, keep January 30th in mind and the new set of rules for “Straight edge project 3.0” will be announced here as soon as possible. This whole project will last for six month and June 30th is going to be the last day for the time being. If you want to join me, or if you want to do something similiar, feel free to contact me via this blog, registration is opened again, here on bloodreaver.com

Game of the week #1/2011 – Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light

Posted on January 7, 2011 by InV4d3r

So now, Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time for the very first “Game of the week” post and it starts with a really tough decision that I had to make, a neck and neck if you want. If I want I could have done three games in one single post, but there’s only per week and after a strong battle with me, myself and I the winner is “Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light”

As you may know, the Tomb Raider franchise is at its end for years now and it was a tough job for every game developing studio to create a new Tomb Raider that the gamer will find attractive. For me personally the last three games “Anniversary”, “Legend” and “Underworld” are good games, but that’s it, good and nothing special. Something nice to entertain but nothing remarkable at all though. The Lara Croft franchise is different, the whole gameplay is different, you play in isometric viewpoint instead of third-person for example. The whole presentation is up to date and does not feel like a three years behind game like the Tomb Raider franchise, where the presentation was okay but nothing that gave a total blast. The basic idea of “The Guardian of Light” is pretty much the same to “Tomb Raider”, you walk through some ancient ruins, capture some artifacts, fight some evil guys and solve riddles with levers and buttons. “The Guardian of Light” puts more attention and love for detail into the riddles, there’s also a fine usage of realistic physics in the game which makes the game up-to-date and the riddles itself more fun.

The game has one j0ker card that kicks it directly in the front row of the game with the highest fun factor – the co-op mode. When you play the single player mode you start the game in front of a temple, and a Maya warrior named Totec tells you about the dangers inside, gives you his weapon and the adventure starts without him. In co-op mode another player can play Totec and both, Lara and Totec, have to work together to get through the very well designed levels. Totec mainly uses his shield for blocking attacks or pushing Lara to higher located levels and Lara has got a grappling hook to swing around or Totec can use a tightrope to reach some places that are barely reachable. I only played the local co-op with a friend of mine by using the Xbox controller for Windows and I can say nothing about the online mode, but I would say that it’s necessary to have direct voice communication when you play the game in co-op for the first time, because some riddles demand it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onOM10Of1vE[/youtube]

The game itself is very well balanced, the riddles need some brainpower but they never get frustating. The ingame fights are claiming but not too tough, the dodge ability will soon become your best friend if there’s enough room to dodge off some range attacks. There are a lot of challenges and achievements to unlock in the game that will give a long time motivation to play the game or even to replay it for several times. “Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light” for PC is only available on Steam and costs around 14,99EUR. That’s a fair price for a game that is able to catch you for a long time. For more information about the story just follow the links the below.

Links:

Official Website

Wikipedia entry

UPDATE

Today’s morning did I find out, that there’s a new DLC for “Lara Croft and The Guardian Light” available. You can join the game with Kane & Lynch of the same titled game. This DLC is for free, you can also buy another one with figures from “The Legacy of Kain” games.

What was and what will be

Posted on January 3, 2011 by InV4d3r

A year’s gone and a new decades arrived. So what’s my resume for the decade that has just passed in the 21st century on this ball called Earth (“How peaceful it looks…”)? Great Scott, I don’t know and it’s barely possible to capture a whole decade in one single blog entry so I simply don’t resume the past decade. But what are my plans for the next decade? Guess what, I just don’t know but I can tell you some of my plans for this year. 2011 will hopefully be the year were I’ll go back to more creative oriented activities. I’ll definately do some more photography and will try to switch to some portrait shots or let us say, I’ll switch from landscape photography to something more human related because for me is the portrait photography something that looks like hard to handle and I want this challenge, because challenges simply makes you better and let you improve yourself.

One thing that’s still unfinished and I simply haven’t found the time for, were the bunch of music plans I had for 2010. I missed to remaster Narcosis’ “Super Satan Terror Demon 665.5” mini CD and to upload it. I also missed to get the original tracks for the CDs so I have to do some more complex re-editing to tracks that I got. It’s such a pain in the ass that the studio were we once recorded this master piece of modern black- and death-metal is no more (/irony off).

The second music project hasn’t been touched since I first announced it here in this blog because of… well… urm… issues? Some might remember, it was this electro, industrial thing called “Degraduated to be machine” which includes till now two barely finished tracks. The problem is, that I was working on the studio software several times but it turned out that my plans are much more complex than they first seemed to be. I want this whole thing to get much better than the first solo CD of mine which was more a bunch tracks mixed together, this second one follows a concept and I want this as perfect as it can be. PERIOD! I guess, it won’t be finished by the end of this year so don’t expect anything.

Something that I’m going to do pretty soon is to upgrade my PC. I decided not to buy me a new Android phone and to upgrade my PC instead. There were to many issues and failures that were bothering me that led me finally to this decision. It’s a kind of sad, because I really liked the black mainboard and the CPU watercooler with its red LEDs inside that made the whole system look so damn eeeeeviiiiiil. I’ll give some details on the upgrade in another blog entry.

Back to music and the whole life thing. I still have this plan to move to Berlin, maybe it’s going to happen this year if I can make it to find a job there. If I can make it I’ll free my guitars from the dust and try to find some guys/girls to start a new band, I still feel like a stoner band would be nice, with a girl drummer.

Some might ask, what happened to straight edge? Well, straight edge will be back as sooner as you think. It might start on January 16th, maybe later. It all depends on the big thing called time and I never have enough time for anything. It’s going to be the “Straight Edge 3.0 Project” with customized rules and a new training plan that does not only inlcude a plan for gym, it will also include some other activities. I currently drink some alcohol from time to time but only small lashings and no hard liqueur. I’m so NOT satisfied with the fact that I started with this bad habit again and it will stop because I simply can’t stand the dizzyness while drinking something.

Any traveling plans for this year? Yes, but nothing totally fixed. I was wondering if I can make it to Asia this year, countries like Japan, Indonesia and South Korea has always been in my focus, but unfortunately is it so massively expensive that I don’t know how to pay for this. For the opposite direction, well, there might be a trip to New York, I always wanted to go to New York, a huge, big, crowded, dirty city that always fascinated me. I also have to mention that I have these itchy feet for Seattle, I can’t help it but Seattle is beside Berlin a city where I can go to at any time. To make a long story short, there’ll be definately a trip to the U.S. but no exact plans for the rest of the world. Hmmm, the orient could be nice, too.

Concert plans. There’s only ONE concert by now I have a ticket for and that is the rocking, mind blowing, beloved FU MANCHU. Yes, I got a Fu Manchu ticket for Christmas again and I will see them in March. Damn it, I fucking love this band. If there’s a Misfits concert somewhere here around Germany I would go there too, no matter what it costs. Till now I am very unsure if I should go to the Roger Waters concert in Berlin and see The Wall for a second time. It would be nice to see the show in Berlin, because for me it’s something special because this very one album influenced my musical taste so much, but once again, the tickets are expensive and the seats you can get at the moment are totally crap. We will see.

Last but not least, gaming plans for this year. First of all, I’m thinking about canceling my ‘World of Warcraft’ subscription because I don’t like the new add-on. The balance between casual gaming and going back to the roots of ‘World of Warcraft’ totally failed, in my opinion. Maybe I’ll switch back to ‘Champions Online’ as soon as you can play it for free or I will give ‘DC Universe’ a try. I’m following TotalBiscuit on YouTube and he’s playing the beta at the moment and it looked nice and auspicious to me. Non-MMO games I’m definately going to play are ‘Crysis’ and ‘F.3.A.R. 3’ in March. ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ sometime by the beginning of this year and hopefully id softwares’ ‘Rage’ in September.

There will be some minor changes to this blog, too. One thing is, that there will be a “Game of the week” post every week with a kind of a review and I will do the same stuff with music, movies and photography. Anyhow, the “Game of the week” thing is for sure and the rest will come up soon and simply follows within the next weeks and month. …hmmm… longest blog post ever… yeah!!!

Am I Bastard?

Posted on November 5, 2010 by InV4d3r

…yes I am. If there’s one thing I enjoy and hate at once, it’s tormenting users and let them face with their undisputed lack of knowledge when they try to enter my realm. My realm actually consists of five separated networks that has to be controlled, sniffed, fingered and spied. While being a kind of bored at work I did some research on one of all-time favourite tales – B.O.f.H.

B.O.f.H. stands for Bastard Operator from Hell and is a collection of tales of an operator, his pimply-faced youth and the struggle they have with their boss, the users and everything else a classical operator has to face with. For me these tales are more than just funny, they are something like a brutal mirror of truth of my own every day life at work. They also remind of a time where my “operator instructor” introduced me to these tales, that was a time where I was the pimply-faced youth, and he was truely one of the operator/administrator guys who really wanted to have the users suffer. Hell, those days were fun…

I’ve finally found the collection of books on a single server and they now make my day (mainly diverting). So if any one of you out, especially the younger generation, wants to know what a REAL operator/administrator is about and what kind of might he has, read these tales, learn and keep and honour our heritage.

The official website

The german website

Runner’s sickness

Posted on October 19, 2010 by InV4d3r

After a long period without sports caused by some rigid laziness and a week of simply being sick I finally made it back to the gym and some tough and rough training sessions. I say tough and rough because this is going to last till my long awaited vacation (hell, am I excited) and it will be four weeks, to be exact and offers no room for longer rests or pauses. It’s five times a week, two hours and a half of merciless training every morning. According to the fact that I haven’t been to gym for such a long time I will stick to these conditions only for these four weeks because more of this training plan could and will cause serious injuries to me and my body. Like I said, there’s no time for longer rests except the weekends. I try to watch my nutrition more carefully with a focus on protein rich food. Hopefully I’ll loose 4-5kg in these four weeks and my overall body condition improves.

I already found one big disadvantage of this training, because I got to know the runner’s diarrhea again. Fortunately does it not affect me too hard but my digestion is definately disturbed and is not functioning very well. I can’t deny that I have an overweight of around 10-15kg which is one cause for this digestion thingy. Another cause is a loss of blood in the digestive tract because, logically, the blood is needed elsewhere when I run for like 30 minutes. The regeneration phase takes about 10-16 hours after the training and everything is fine again. I’ve also did some research on this and it is said that this kind of runner’s sickness disappears after a while, mainly when the whole circulation got more comfortable with the “act of running” and can provide the correct amount of blood everywhere. Hopefully…

A pain in the ass

Posted on August 19, 2010 by InV4d3r

…and on the eighth day God created the game industry and he saw that it was good.

…and on the ninth day God gifted the game industry with paranoia and greed and he saw that it was good…

Seriously? As you may know I am a game junkie and I love video games. I have a collection of nearly 1,400 games for different platforms and unfortunately I do not have time to play them all through. So is comes natural that I order a few games here and then like I did two days ago. I found some very cheap offers on Amazon, some games for around six bucks. One of these games was “Peter Jackson’s King Kong”. Though this game does not look nice compared to nowadays standards I really wanted to play this BUT thanks to the paranoia of the gaming industry the game was protected with my so behated copy protection called StarForce. First of all, the game got installed, then you try to start it and receive a message that you have to restart your system to apply and complete the driver installation. What the fuck?

So, ya, I restarted and something that I already expected happened. My Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit ran an automated recovery and failed. After that I decided to choose the last known good configuration and the system booted. So far, so nice. After login I noticed that I wasn’t able to connect to the internet though my network settings were correct and haven’t changed them for a couple of month. I also needed to reboot to apply some new network setting. What the fuck? Why the hell does a copy protection affect my network adapters?

I tried a few different things to fix the problem but nothing really helped. Not even a crack. After finding no solution I decided to simply uninstall the game to get my old running system configuration back. I also uninstalled to StarForce drivers manually to completely ensure that there’s nothing left of this bullshit. Well the game was able to start but it crashed right after starting the campaign. Now, after uninstalling everything my system works perfectly fine again and I wasted six bucks on a game that could have been good and enjoyable but thanks to copy protection mechanisms I wasn’t able to play it nor to enjoy any other game. Ladies and gentlemen of the game industry, do we really need such a strangulation of righteous gamers? Do we, the gamers, truely need to get such a pain in the ass by buying a game? Isn’t it enough to bugfix the game? Do you, the game industry, really need to implenent such factory default bug in your games? I don’t think so.

…and I saw, that it was bad.

And then there was darkness

Posted on August 5, 2010 by InV4d3r

There’s something like a curse on me when it comes to Linux installations because nearly every setup I have done in the nearby past was made twice by me. The same happens to my media center. As you may know I was searching for a solution with my vsync problem while watching movies and other videos. After hours of research and being pretty hopeless and without any other idea for soluting my problem I decided to uninstall the Nvidia graphics driver and rebooting the system. I guess you know what happened next – RIGHT – NOTHING. I got a simple black screen.

According to the fact that it was a kind of late and I didn’t wanted to search the root of the problem I decided to reinstall the whole system by using my old /home partition. Well, well, well, that thought was nice but Linux Mint thought differently. First of all the install routine was not able to write into the existing partitions so I had to rearrange the whole system disk with a third-party software. After that the installer told me that he still was not able to write or delete conflicting system files. The solution was to format my old home directory (d’oh). Now the installer was able to start and run the setup routine. The previous problem solving took me nearly one and a half hour. So, the setup was running until the progress bar showed me 93% and then it told me that it was unable to write GRUB into /dev/sda. Actually I don’t have a /dev/sda or a /dev/sdb neither. The solution was to delete /dev/sda and /dev/sdb before running the whole setup routine in a terminal session, the installer was then able to see the correct order and names of my hard drives. Yep, another hour wasted…

Finally I made it to get the whole system running again and the system is running a way better then it was before. nvidia-settings will be applied automatically on startup, I can use screenlets and the whole booting progress is much faster (don’t know what was wrong before). I also decided to let the system install the nvidia proprietary driver and not to install it manually with a “whatever-setting”. So vsync is now enabled by default BUT it still does not work in video playback, but it’s only a matter of time until I find a solution for that problem.

Straight edge 2.0

Posted on August 2, 2010 by InV4d3r

I am sorry that I didn’t wrote for such a long time and that I did not spread out any news considering my straight edge project and how it will continue. First things first, I was on vacation in France for the last two weaks, while being there I decided to continue living with my straight edge rules that exist till now. I don’t want to make any bigger changes because I think that the rules are good in the way they are now. Maybe I will change some things in the future and I’m still thinking about adding one or two new rules but it should not become too complex in the end.

I also have to admit that I was not following my rules as tightly as I have done it before I was on vacation. The reason for this is simple. When I am on vacation and when I have the rare opportunity to have some time on my own and with my beloved girl I don’t want to live like a monk. Well, of course I didn’t touch any alcohol or cigarettes and anything like that but when it comes to nutrition I had to try one or two desserts. But, hey dudes!!! I was in France and I had to experience the whole entired french cuisine.

But now straight edge continues for 12 month and and the weight I want to reach is now set to 90kg (198,41 lbs). Today I have something around 98kg so my weight did not increase drastically while being away. The deadline for 90kg is 1. October 2010, so there’s a lot of sports to do and to chose food wisely. There will be no exceptions in food like I mentioned them in a post a while ago. Everything will stay like it is now. Seven simple rules to follow and nothing else.

My name is Zim and my tank is full

Posted on July 13, 2010 by InV4d3r

It’s just one small step for a single, but one giant step for every dungeon group on Nathrezim and the whole entire realmpool. I reached level 79 at around 01:00am in the morning and I am now about 80 percent away from the level cap. According to the fact that I am soon will be level 80 I bought my paladin some new gear that he’ll be able to wear when he’s on maximum level. I had to buy this stuff because I don’t think that I’ll find much time for active raiding and most of my gear will be farmed in the three dungeons situated in Icecrown. The rest will be bought with ‘Emblems of triumph’. Sounds like a lot of farming though.

I was on a kind of ‘killing spree’ during the last levels but it ended yesterday in the instance ‘Halls of lightning’ because the paladin who was in the group pulled the first boss while he was loaded with energy and lightnings and after a short struggling fight I received a very unhealthy one hit and bit the grass. Anyhow, I am very satisfied with my tank abilities and the fact that I can finish nearly every Northrend instance in 20-30 minutes. Can’t wait to enter the last three Northrend instances and kick some mobs ass.

Bloodreaver.com

…and it's going to happed again and again

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