After trying a few of my posts in this analyzer, the most frequent author that came back was -
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
My apologies for the delays. I have a Split/Second review in the pipe, I promise, but between experiencing a home invasion (with some stuff stolen) and a family reunion... it's going to have to wait a little longer.
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So I haven't written a review in quite some times. The ZP updates are stacking up. Here's why -
First and foremost, I'm still having too much fun in Warhammer Online to stop to play something else.
Second, ZP keeps beating me to the punch >_<
Thirdly, it's the holiday season and between travel and sickness my free time's gotten pretty... not free.
Seriously, I actually have managed to take a look at the odd other game (such as Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: World at War), but somehow the spirit just doesn't move when it's time to put pen to metaphorical paper. I have other games stacked up ready to go for review, but as I mentioned my ability to churn through them is a little choked right now.
But I do intend to do something about it. At some point.
Been playing AOC for a couple months now, and I think my time in it is about over. Apparently I'm not the only one deciding that. I've witnessed entire guilds disintegrate or vanish entirely as their members flee back to WoW or get into the Warhammer beta. Even my guild is bleeding level 80 members faster than we can level them, and in the last 2 weeks we've had 4 officers and the GM quit the game. Raids we previously had no problem filling the 24 person limit before are now struggling to come up with 12 and more than one healer. Some of our allied or rival guilds have vanished entirely. That's some serious attrition.
Funcom claimed they sold something like 800,000 units... then last week, they claimed they had 400,000 active subscribers (which I actually think is high, given that this would mean there's 6000 players per server, and I can tell you there isn't). But even if that estimate weren't high, that means half the people who bought the game didn't stick with it past the included 30 days. That's bad for funcom.
Why is all this happening? Probably because the game, as I quite frankly said in my review of it, was not ready for retail launch. I would say that is still the case. I'm still crashing from memory leaks, half the content is still bugged to hell (especially the endgame), and Funcom takes as many steps backwards in fixing things as they do forwards. For instance, in a patch today, to address a current imbalance in an unintended ability to stack the benefits of player crafted equipment to ridiculous proportions, their answer is to make a "temporary" change that absolutely destroys any point to making or using player-crafted equipment. Rather than simply place stat caps on the trouble areas, they reduced the benefit of all "gems" (which are the things that give player crafted weapons and armor their stat benefits) to less than 10% of their previous amount.
Think about that in terms of your current MMO... if your equipment started giving you 90% LESS of a boost to your resists, damage, etc.. would you still be able to tank that raid mob that is already hitting for nearly half your max HP *with* the "overpowered" resists? There is much consternation going around that this "fix" will not only destroy crafting, but put a halt to endgame raiding. So if you can't make your own gear, and you can't raid for purple gear, you're left sitting in your quest rewards and blue drops, dying quickly in PvP (oh, and Massive PvP keep sieges are still bugged and broken) and not having much else to do other than roll an alt or quit.
And a lot of people are quitting. It's too bad, too, because combat in this game is a blast, I love cutting off heads, and in group PvP I haven't seen balance this good since DAOC, abarring 1 or 2 issues... at least until this patch turned everyone's gear into garbage.
My headset died the other night. I really liked it, it was a big HP headset with boom mic and bass boost vibration. Not only did stuff sound really good through it, the microphone was top notch. Anyway, a few too many yanks of the cord and now it's got a short in it, so I went to Office Depot to get a new headset.
Unfortunately my HP headset was discontinued (I got it on clearance), and looking at the choices I could get something that looked similar for $50, or I could get the cyber-acoustics standard model for 20 bucks. The miser in me did the math and I grabbed the 20 dollar headphones.
Ugh, these things are awful. They're uncomfortable, they feel flimsy, and they even make my voice sound tinny (and I'm annoyed by tinny voices on Ventrilo, so I am sure not going to become one).
I've gone through this song and dance twice before I think... you would think I would remember, but somehow it's never until I get the thing home and plug it in, and experience the RAGE that I remember, oh yeah, Cyber Acoustics is shit, why did I buy this?!
So night before last, we had a bad thunderstorm. I wasn't worried, though, because all my computer equipment, even the speakers, the router, the modems (yes, plural) are all on surge protected battery backups... specifically, APC UPSes.
But there was a way in. I guess there's always a way in. My DSL modem was plugged directly into the phone jack. I guess I did this because I was worried about latency or signal degradation from going through the little "phone cord" surge protector sockets in the UPS... besides, how often does that happen?
Well, I've learned my lesson. 2 nights ago I had a surge come in through the phone line and cause me over $100 dollars of damage with probably more to follow later. Allow me to explain.
Regard the image below -
This is a quick scribble of the affected portion of my home network. The power spike came in through the phone jack, frying the DSL modem, frying both on-board gigabit ethernet adapters on the motherboard of my new gaming rig, continuing on to fry my wireless router, and through that frying the NIC in my fileserver and frying the cable modem feeding the wireless router. All dead. Thank goodness Verizon and the Cable company provided me with replacements in short order (next day, basically). I also had to go to the store and buy replacement network cards and a new router. I'm thinking I'm going to want to buy a new motherboard for my gaming rig as well, because even aside from the ethernet adapters who knows what else got fried on the motherboard that I don't know about yet and is just waiting to asplode? Sigh. Well, my DSL data cord is going through a surge protector now, I'll tell ya! Learned my lesson, I did.
Work's kicking my butt so updates are gonna be scarce (as obviously they have been for the last week) for a while.
But on the plus side, I did get to meet Johnny Solinger, the lead singer of Skid Row, today.
Logo in the background blurred to better preserve my precious anonymity. Click for full size.
Remember, I told you these guys weren't messing around. But I didn't think it would happen to me. Particularly since I haven't played WoW since September 06. More...
I must say I was rather astonished at every step of revelation in this sordid affair.
One day out of the blue, I got an e-mail telling me I had successfully changed my WoW password. That, naturally made me suspicious because I obviously had done no such thing. It didn't particularly worry me, seeing as how I've been WoW-free for months. But still, the thought of somebody mucking around in my account had a few uncomfortable and noteworthy problems to it... for instance, did this mean they had access to my credit card info?
I run a clean computer, using Trend Micro Internet Security as well as Lavasoft Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and Javacoolsoft's SpywareBlaster. So I was pretty darn sure I didn't have a trojan or anything that was monitoring my keystrokes. Plus, the fact that the account invasion came so many months after I stopped playing made me think more in line with some kind of exploitation of Blizzard's web site than anything on my end. As the level of urgency on my part was fairly low, I considered it enough to go to Blizzard's account management page and reclaim my account by changing the password. In what would turn out to be a key misstep, I changed my password back to what it was originally, because I believed a flaw in blizzard's account management software had allowed somebody to set a new password for my account without actually knowing or entering the current one.
A week later, I came home to a couple more blizzard auto-generated e-mails. My password had not been changed again, oh no. The first said "your paid character transfer has been scheduled," the second one said it was completed. The character was my highest level and bestest geared dwarf paladin. I logged back into my account on the website, and found that indeed, my Venture Co. Paladin had been moved... and not only that, a few days after the password shuffle, somebody had ponied up their own visa to reactivate my account. Now, I don't even have a visa card (only MasterCard). So, I changed my password to something new, started patching 6 months of patches (might as well have a look inside at the damage, since whoever it was was paying), and got on the phone to blizzard billing support.
They were not very helpful. I explained the situation and tendered that while I was not actually subscribing at the moment it was not as if I hadn't quit and come back before, and such a return would be far less likely if my characters had been scattered, stripped and left picked clean. The guy's major contribution was to send me an e-mail to various support articles which basically were "computer safety for dummies," as well as a webform to initiate an inquiry and request a repair of the damage. Not that he could put in that request or anything, being a blizzard employee. That 300 meg patch was still coming, so I went ahead and did that.
By the time the patch was done, "Account Management" had locked my account and scrambled my password, due to "character interaction with another account known to be in use by someone intending to exploit WoW's systems." If I wanted my account back, I could fill out yet another form and fax it to them to start the process. By this point, my supply of give-a-shit had run out. I'm content to let it just stay locked forever. It certainly seems blizzard is content as well, and with over 10 million paying junkies, it's entirely understandable (though not laudable) that they've become complacent and apathetic toward each individual subscriber. They don't need you, they have 9.999 million more just like you.
I had looked around at some other places where people who had experienced account hacking against themselves had posted about it. Word on the street was that the passwords were being harvested by a keylogger imbedded in the advertising and UI mods on Allakhazam and Curse Gaming, two sites which I frequented often (and I got most of my interface mods from Curse).
So, there you go. I'm just glad these guys waited until I had long since cancelled my account. I'm moderately perturbed still, but not the foaming ball of fury I would have been had this happened when I still had an interest in the game.
So... all you WoW addicts out there... might want to scrutinize your system for suspicious looking processes, double check you have the real versions of all of your interface mods, and not be browsing allakhazam, thottbot or curse gaming on the same computer while you play. And change your password from time to time just to be sure, I suppose.
I spent most of the remaining time before I had to return home laid up in bed, though I did get to have a few fun forays out... all in all, it was not a good trip.
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I don't know what the hell I did to deserve this kind of karmic payback, but I tell you I must have had some kind of blacked-out psychotic episode and murdered countless orphans for me to deserve what I've been through today... (click read full article)
As I write this, the time is 11:39 central. PM. I've been either in airports or on planes for the last 12 hours, all for a trip that was supposed to take around 5.
I'm headed for vegas, for two nights of fun with my old man and his youngest brother, and their wives. The schedule went thusly - Wake up at 8:30am central, to be ready to go by 9:30, to get to the airport by 10:15 for check in and security, for a plane that departs at 11:15, which connects through houston to get me to Las Vegas at 4:30pm mountain time. Have dinner and see a show with the others, maybe gamble a little, and get a good night's rest.
Well, first thing that happens is I oversleep. Of all the days to oversleep. I even set my alarm. I guess my body just doesn't like being out of bed before 10 on a weekend. But, even though I woke up at 9:30 I still got to the airport by 10:45 and skipped the line by using the automated check-in booth.
11:15 rolls around and my plane still hasn't even arrived yet.
I head up there to find out what the deal is, are we delayed? If so, shouldn't be too much of a problem, I've got a 2 hour layover in Houston, so...
The board flips to "Cancelled."
Ok. We're calm, we can handle this. I talk to the nice people at Continental and they see what they can do for me. The next flight to houston? Oooooh sorry, that just filled up. The one after that? Sure, here you go. Now, that'll make you miss your connection, so we'll book you on the flight AFTER that to vegas, and you should be arriving around 5:30. Ok, not too bad. I glance at the ticket and see "2:40pm".
It doesn't even click in my head, the math I mean. I decide to go get something to eat, cause Breakfast was one of the things I had to skip to get to the airport in time for my cancelled flight. I have a pleasant lunch, and arrive back at the airport at 2 for a leisurely boarding process. I head to security, the TSA agent looks at my boarding pass and says "sir, this flight left 5 minutes ago." What? That can't be, it leaves at 2:40. "No, sir, it ARRIVES at 2:40. It departed at 1:55."
I look at the ticket again.
Well, Son of a bitch.
I'd be mad, but I can't. Because I look like an idiot. Let me tell you something, loyal readers (yes, both of you), the Gas Bandit does not often look like a moron. This is the first time I missed a flight, ever.
Ok, we're calm. We go back to the ticket counter. We explain what a dips%@# we are. We ask if there's anything that can be done.
Of course there is... the next one leaves... at 4:50pm. My groaning at that being 20 minutes later than I was supposed to be IN vegas is stifled by me remembering I've just been the world's least competent traveller for 2 hours. Ok, wonderful. I'll take it. This should get me into Vegas at 7:30. That's not too bad, only 3 hours late. A small bit of penance for being such a dumbass.
Not wanting to chance my own dumbassery again, I stay in the airport this time. 2 and a half hours fly by with free wireless. I get on the plane, we fly, I'm in houston. Ok! Back on track!
I take the shuttle from Concourse A to Concourse C, and find my gate. Something's wrong, it still says "Austin" on it. I turn around to find the big board. The plane that is supposed to depart at 6... now says departing at 7. Oooh, ouch. Well, this is why I have a laptop.
This is where I discover that Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport is the only airport I've ever been in that charges for wireless. 10 freakin bucks a day. No way. I've bent over for a lot today, but I'm not taking a 10 dollar wireless suppository. I can kill an extra hour without the internet. No, my fingers aren't shaking.
Fortunately, I brought my wireless guitar controller, and the laptop of course has a fully loaded copy of the RF-Modded Frets On Fire, with all 4 guitar hero games plus more. I whip the axe out, and am the subject of airport patron scrutiny for an hour. I look up at the board. "6:00pm to Vegas ---DELAYED--- 8:00pm." Son of a....
"weather," the guy next to me explains. Figures.
More guitar hero. Now the big board says "9:00pm departure." You have got to be kidding me. A lady in the row behind me calls somebody she knows in vegas. Vegas person says the weather is beautiful. Wuh... tuh... fuh?
Well, fortunately I guess that imaginary thunderstorm over the Las Vegas desert clears up and they board us at 9pm. I'm not even bothering to calculate arrival times any more. I've had a sinus infection recently, the sudafed is wearing off, and for a sunday night flight to vegas this plane is looking packed. I try to call my father, but his cell phone has the worst reception since Martians ate Beagle-1. I think he understands that I'm just now boarding in houston.
So here it is, approaching midnight (or 11pm Vegas time), and it feels like we're descending. Thank goodness my ears are popping. I guess lady karma finally took pity on me and didn't want me to rupture an eardrum today.
Soon we'll be on the ground, and it'll obviously take a good half hour to get off the plane because it's so jam packed. I don't know if I have the energy. I'm tired and a little dizzy and sniffling and trying not to cough.
Oh, and the in-flight movie was that "Rock" vehicle where the football player discovers he has an 8 year old daughter. And I didn't bring any of my media DVDs, because who needs movies on a laptop in vegas, right?
The walk through the las vegas airport is half stampede, half acid trip because I'm tired and starting to feel really light headed and dizzy. I don't even bother to stop and see if there's wireless, as it's almost midnight. Somehow I find the right shuttle bus, and get a ride to Bally's.
Bally's is staffed by a bunch of penguins. They didn't know my father's name, or my name. I find a payphone and find out to call a non-local cell phone costs four and a half bucks. F@#$ that noise. Fortunately a nearby machine vends phone cards. I buy a ten dollar one... try to call my father. No dice. I try to call my Uncle. No dice. Not only no dice but money is sure as hell disappearing from the card faster than the advertised 12.5 cents a minute. I read the teeny tiny fine print on the back of the card, and find out there's a 99 cent fee for using a payphone, and a 69 cent "connection fee" right on top of that. How freaking dishonest is that? And for that matter, who the hell buys a phone card for use anywhere OTHER than a payphone? Kind of negates the whole point.
So I decide, well, I'm on my own. So I go back to the front desk and just try to get a room, ignoring my father's reservation. They tell me the hotel is full. A full hotel on a sunday night. Wow. Somebody out there is punishing me big time.
I'm getting less and less steady on my feet. it's now 1:30 am, I try another call to my uncle, and father (half the 10 dollar card is now used up), and then I head back to sit in the lobby. I just need to rest a minute before I head outside and try to find somewhere, anywhere, with a bed and a roof to sleep. 5 minutes later karma cuts me a break and my uncle walks in. It takes me a minute to realize it isn't a fever dream.
Anyway, Unca Bandit fills me in on the story. I'm not the only one who had airplane troubles. Seems bad weather also grounded my Dad's plane in new mexico somewhere (how that happened, with New Mexico being not very on the way from colorado to nevada, I do not know yet), and they are having to drive. They are still on the road as I type this.
So Unca Bandit knows the score with the rooms. They're under my stepmother's name (which is different from my father's because they're both doctors and they need to differentiate on mail and phone calls). He has the super sekrit skwirrel code to get me one of the rooms, but as Dad hasn't arrived yet I'll foot the bill myself.
At this point all I want to do is check my e-mail, turn on the TV and pass out for 12 hours and pray I don't wake up with a fever. But I get to my room, and guess what... neither the TV, nor the Ethernet Jack work. I think Bally's must be the only hotel on the strip without wireless.
Convinced that ONE THING is going to get resolved tonight, I call down to the desk and they say they'll send up an engineer. He just now figured out the problem, a bad power strip mounted under the table that feeds all the electronics in my room. He bypasses it, and goes off to find a new power strip.
I get the juice going on the ol' 10-base-T RJ45... and am staring at a ELEVEN NINETY FIVE PER DAY useage charge.
Oy. Hopefully tomorrow will be enough awesome to make up for this. If I can get out of bed.
Worst. Vacation. Ever.
Gas Bandit's goin' to Lost Wages today. I'll be back Wednesday night, with updates to resume thursday. Watch out now!
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Ok, Vacation's over, and now I'm 4 wisdom teeth lighter as well. Updates should start trickling back to normalcy here, gradually.
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Work's picking up, and I'm going to be on the road as well, so count on updates being few and far between until the new year. Happy feast of alvis, nine nights of krebula, shikradon, or whatever it is you heretics celebrate these days.
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I feel bad for this guy.
One of the things that spurred me to create this site was the de facto standard that all the "big" game review sites are too conflicted with their advertising business model to be able to honestly review a poor game that is also advertising on the site. After all, it is rather hard to articulate a negative review when your mouth is full of reproductive organ. So along comes this poor guy who loses his job at Gamespot (but gains some street cred) when he says Kane and Lynch ain't all that great.
The usuals around the entarr-webb are sounding off on this occurrance, and of course one's first natural reaction might be "how did Gamespot think they'd get away from this with their reputation intact?" Well, my cynical reminder to you is that Gamespot doesn't have a modicum of credibility to begin with, for exactly this sort of reason. They know where their bread is buttered, and it's in the advertising. Their mission is to get money from advertisers. Not to tell you the truth. Any content that is there is only there for the sole purpose of greater revenue generation. Obviously, pissing off one's advertisers by not fellating them with glowing reviews is not a good way to generate revenue. So the firing was business. The poor schmuck made a mistake in thinking he was hired to review games, when his true job was to shepherd unthinking sheeple into Gamespot's site and then on to the advertisements clustering around the "content" like the disreputable-looking men clustered around the moderately attractive if slightly skanky girl in a bukkake video.
What does this mean for the folks who just want honest reviews to inform them about which games are worth their time and possibly money? Well, I may flatter myself a bit to point out that you're looking at a small part of the solution right now. Small-time obscure punditry from fellas whose paychecks are not at stake from whether or not their reviews are the "happy ending massage" for the games they are talking about. They do it because they like games, have opinions, and are afflicted by a personality disorder that makes them rant into the void. Just point your browser over to a link list, such as Blue's News, and watch the reviews go by on a daily basis, and disregard any links that come from Gamespot, IGN/Gamespy, or anything with the word "Planet" in it. Or pretty much anybody on the first page of results when you google for "Video Game Reviews." Is there some sour grapes in that sentence, maybe? Yeah, probably. But it doesn't change the fact that it is true.
So I'm sure my readers (yes, both of you) will recall me getting my new box shipped to me. Well, it's been a little adventure getting that going. Allow me to explain.
My new box was basically the September '07 Techreport "Sweet Spot" build, with only one major modification - the 8800 GTX video card. The lineup sounded great, with a motherboard that was an overclocker's dream (and even had an external "reset CMOS" switch), a quad core processor that has allegedly gone as high as 3.4ghz with the proper settings and cooling, and a case utilizing a compartmentalized scheme that keeps the power supply and processor far apart so as to aid with said cooling and even has two gigantic case fans pulling air across the CPU to help even more. Even the RAM, which came with SPD clock timings of 5-5-5-18 had reportedly been trimmed up to 4-4-4-12, so long as you boosted voltage from 1.8 to 2.1.
So it's the week before Thanksgiving week, and my box arrives Thursday morning. Woo! Plenty of time to get it built up for the weekend. As I put together part after part my anticipation builds, but so does my unease. This is going too well. The motherboard seats easily into the case, the processor effortlessly snaps into place, a little difficulty mounting the heat sink to the board (but nothing too bad)...
Finally I've got all the components mounted in the case, and I start running the power cables, all the while getting more edgy. Will a part be bad? Will I have to RMA it and wait over the weekend to play with my new toy? Will the RAM be shot? Processor? Did I ESD something and not realize it? Everything was too easy thus far...
And then I got to the 4 pin 12 volt CPU power cables. There were 2 of them, and I found two seemingly appropriately configured ports up by the CPU, banked together side by side.
They were too short.
It wasn't even close. Even taking out every single thing other than the power supply and the motherboard, it was 2 inches too short. Add in the cards (particularly the massive 8800 GTX which is so big it forced me to move a hard drive to a different bay) and it was easily 6 inches too short.
So, I thought to myself, "If this is all that goes wrong, I'll be lucky." I checked around at a half dozen local merchants and repair houses, but no luck. However, it was simple enough to go back to the website, find the extension I need, and order it (and jot a quick warning to others about the cable length on the Tech Report forums). It's a 3 dollar part, and I really want to play that weekend, so I pay 22 bucks for overnight shipping.
I go through the rest of the day unperturbed, confident that this setback will be easily rectified as soon as the part arrives the following morning.
Then it hits me as I drive home at 6 that night... that part. Part. Singular. I only ordered ONE. There are TWO cables and TWO sockets. /FACEPALM!
I get home, and I am a very grumpy, even by my own standards. I need another one. Since I put rush processing on the order, it's already out the door and I can't just have them throw another one in the box. But the idea of paying ANOTHER 25 dollars for another 3 dollar part makes my toes curl up all the way to my heel.
I manage to justify the purchase (in my head) by ordering three more. That makes me paying 30 dollars for 3 instead of 25 dollars for 1, this time. That I can stomach a little better (and I don't think about it too hard because I know it won't stand up to scrutiny). I figure I can give the other two to my friend PPMcBiggs, because I am pretty sure the new build he's working on also features the upside-down Antec case. So, I cross my fingers and hope for saturday delivery.
Doesn't happen, unfortunately. The three parts arrive monday. I missed the weekend with a 1500 dollar computer sitting on the floor in my living room, wanting only for a 3 dollar part to make it work.
So finally, that night after work I open the case back up, snap the extenders onto the 12 volt 4 pin CPU power cables, and go to plug them in. One goes in... but the other's pin configuration doesn't match the other port. I start to feel that tingle in the back of my head. Taking the computer into the "computer room" and hooking it up, I confirm that feeling's intuition (can a feeling have a hunch?)...
I didn't need two all along. It powers up just fine with only the one. It must be that the power socket is configured in such a way to accommodate some other 8-pin jobber that I don't have. I had the part I needed on friday, I could have had it going over the weekend... /FACEPALM!
So, anyway, the next couple nights are spent formatting the drive (a 500 gig drive takes a while to format, even SATA), installing the OS (XP Pro SP2 for now, Vista to come soon no doubt), and starting to install my software. Fortunately the rest goes off without a hitch.
Until I start trying to tweak my RAM timings. I know, I probably should have left well enough alone, but all those postings about people who made their Corsair 6400 RAM faster made me think, well why not me? Never mind that I had no idea what 4-4-4-12 meant or where I was supposed to set it. The last time I had overclocked anything, it was my Celeron 333a, taking it to a whopping 500mhz. Back then all you had to worry about on the RAM was CAS latency. But I was confident I could figure it out.
So I find a spot in the bios for RAM timings, but there's more than 8 or so... not just 4. I take a stab at just changing the first four and leaving the others on Auto. Then I have to boost the voltage to 2.125 volts to get the thing to boot at 4-4-4-12. But boot it does. I'm getting pretty happy with things now, so I boot up Call of Duty 4... and the thing freezes on me.
So I lower the voltage and reduce the RAM timings to 5-5-5-12, which is what Newegg said they were rated for (even though the SPD says 5-5-5-18). Long story short, Crysis still locks up after a few minutes... so it's back to 5-5-5-18.. but hey, it's still 800 mhz DDR2 ram, so it's still fast.
So, anyway, be prepared for a barrage of reviews of latest gen PC games in the coming week, because I took my new box with me when I went to visit for Thanksgiving.
I took a week off for Thanksgiving. Not only did I take the vacation days off, I also couldn't get the time to update the 3 days previous because I had so much to do at work before the very long weekend. But I'm back, my new box is working, and boy do I have stories to tell. Stay tuned, this should be a good week if you like listening to my curmudgeonly gurgles.
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Whee! The long-awaited, much alluded "new box" is finally ordered. Should be here this week.
| Subtotal: | $1,510.92 | |
 Tax: | $0.00 | |
| Shipping: | $30.58 | |
| Rush Order Fee: | $2.99 | |
| Total: | $1,544.49 | |
So you hosers seen this new place called Anywhere.FM? It's pretty interesting. You can pretty much upload all your MP3s, and then listen to them on any computer that has internet and flash.
"But Gas!" you say, "What about piracy and digital rights and the RIAA and all that rigamarole?"
Not to worry, says I. Apparently these guys pay ASCAP/BMI fees just like a radio station, so the ball is entirely out of your court on this one, and they cover it all from their end. I'm not entirely sure where the money is coming from since right now (in a so-called "beta" state) it is free. I'm guessing some kind of ad-supported or membership-fee based business model will come into the picture once it is out of "beta," but for the time being there doesn't seem to be any strings attached.
So far the only two gripes I have about it is (one) that though you can get "radio-like" streams from other users' libraries, you can only play songs "on demand" from your own stash and when you're logged in, and (two) that their flash-based uploading doesn't retry failed/broken uploads, and gives very little feedback that an upload didn't work... so, say, if you queue up 400 files to upload and two of them don't succeed, you have no idea which two they were other than by going through the whole online list and checking it against your music folder. But other than that, I kinda like it
So yeah, I've got about 400 songs up there you can "radio stream" if you want... my profile is at http://anywhere.fm/gasbandit . You can listen to my "top 50" here. And I've got a couple custom playlists under my profile, too.
It's pretty snazzy. I recommend it if you're like me and like to have music playing, and need a centralized and simple way to access the same music library from multiple locations.
I administrate the Video Game Babes Wiki, another part of the GasBanditry.com conglomerate. I'm trying (ok, perhaps trying is a generous description of the amount of effort I've put in lately, but...) to build a visual catalogue of every attractive female in video gaming, ever. I think I've made a pretty good effort thus far, but the reason I made it a Wiki instead of just another page was so that anybody could contribute. Because, of course, there's way too much for one man to do, 'specially when there's video games that need playing.
So anyway, if you want to see what I've got so far, and maybe think you could contribute, just head on over. You'll need to register a login to contribute (which is a fast process, anyway), but not to view what's already there.
If you have any questions about anything there, such as how it works, the method by which it is organized, or just want to spout off at me, my E-mail address is listed at the top-right of this page. Feel free to use it.
