Quake III LAN party

Quake III LAN party

I spent most of yesterday in Nicosia, playing Quake III with a few guys.  It’s been a few years since the last time I attended a LAN party, so it was nice to see some familiar faces after all these years of playing online.

I was a bit surprised by the fact that more people turned up for the Quake 3 party than they did the last time.  I thought maybe with more games being released each year, Quake 3 community is getting smaller and weaker.  I was glad to see that it is not the case.  The game is still popular and there are plenty of both seasoned players and fresh meat.

After a few hours of Quaking we had some pizza and then, shortly, moved to a bar for a couple of pints, where we met some more people.  Overall we managed to have some really good fun and enjoyed ourselves.  As we always say, we should do it more often…

P.S.: Thanks to all who helped with the trip and the party.  In particular, my brother, who was driving, and snoop, who was hosting the event.

P.P.S.: If you haven’t yet clicked on the picture above, here are some more photos.

Doomsday

Doomsday

With all the movies coming out of the Hollywood these days, one needs some set of mental filters (aka stereotypes) to pick good films and avoid all the rest.  But, as with any other area of human life, stereotypes can heal and harm.  According to the set of movie stereotypes in my head, I was totally going to avoid the movie “Doomsday“.  I’ve heard that it was about some virus outbreak, sealed contaminated area, and a bunch of people going in to find the cure.  That’s all I knew, and that sounded a lot like something along the lines of “28 Days Later“, “Resident Evil“, and many other movies.  Those movies, they aren’t bad, but I’ve seen enough of them.

Luckily, my friend and colleague Igor likes this type of movies a lot.  So he managed to persuade me to go and see “Doomsday”.  And I’m glad he did.

The story of the film was very much like I expected it.  But, we weren’t there for the story, were we?  It’s how one tells the story.  And in this type of films, it’s all about how you show infected people, their mutations, human flash, body parts, horror, black humor, and the rest of the visual effects.  “Doomsday” was pretty good in this regard.  I’d say it was a little bit more bloodier than it needed, but no serious complains in this department.

All that is not very important however.  Because “Doomsday” has something that so many other movies don’t.  It has the spirit.  The atmosphere, if you will.  And it suits it very well.  It is a very rock-n-roll movie.  So much rock-n-roll, that it is much closer to punk rock in its spirit (and literary, most of the characters appear to be some serious fans of punk rock music).

Doomsday scream

There are a few places in the movie, which are either boring or a little bit too far fetched, but, gladly, they are very few and very short.  In most of it, the film provides excellent entertainment and positive energy boost.  It is mostly funny, and hilarious at places.  It has excellent special effects and strong characters in it.  There are a few memorable quotes, including some very peculiar ways of using an F* word (the film is very British in its nature).

So, if you like uncensored punk rock with lots of fun, if you are not easily destabilized by motion pictures, if you don’t truly belief that people in the movie suffer in pain or die in pieces, if you welcome the creativity of the creator even if it is a little bit out of your bounds sometimes, if you enjoyed “Mad Max” trilogy and darker (non-romantic) side of “Waterworld” than I strongly recommend to watch this movie.  You won’t regret it.

7 out of 10.

Destroying LiveJournal

Back in December of the last year, when the Russian company SUP bought LiveJournal, I wrote this post, in which, among other things, I said that it wasn’t a very good thing for LiveJournal.  A few things happened since then, which confirmed my worries.  But the biggest of them is unfolding right now.

SUP removed basic (free) accounts from the registration form.  They have also introduced plenty of annoying advertising to existing free accounts.  Lots and lots of people got really annoyed with that.  In fact, there even was a boycott with some users not updating their diaries for 24 hours, while others going as far as deleting their diaries (no worries yet, since there is a way to restore the diary).

If you missed this whole story, here is a CNews article in English and here is a Lenta.ru article in Russian which cover the basic story.  For more, check numerous posts on the blogosphere.

Most of the people I know, saw it coming.  And this is surely not the last incident in this story.

Compromised!

It appears that this blog has been recently compromised.  Big thanks to one of the readers for bringing it up and letting me know.  Especially, since the compromise was hard to notice – one of the recent posts was modified with a blog of hidden markup that contained some SPAM links.

I am still looking into when and how this happened.  The blog is powered by the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), but a few plugins were outdated (it’s been a month or so since the last update).  I have edited the post to remove the SPAM links and I’ve upgraded all plugins to their latest versions.  I’ll also limit access to administration interface by IP (yes, I know it’s easy to go around, but I think it’ll keep most of the bots out).

If you have any other suggestions on what and how to do, please let me know via comments or directly.

Mr. Brooks

Mr. Brooks

A random pick off the shelf this time – “Mr. Brooks“.  Once again, I’ve been proven to miss lots and lots of nice movies that were released in the last two or three years.  Gladly, I am catching up.

This film features some of those actors, who I know very well, appreciate, but will try to avoid.  I don’t know why I am not a bigger fan of either Kevin Costner or Demi Moore.  They are both very talented and all, but somehow I find myself trying to skip a movie if it has one of them in it.

Since I took a random movie of the shelf, I wasn’t checking the cast or the pictures at all.  I have to say that I should do it more often, since I tend to end up with better movies than those that I pick after careful consideration.

Acting, story, and photography are the strong sides of this film.  7 out of 10 (or 7.5 if you like fractions)