I mean honestly, there is nothing lower than trying to scam a person out of their money.

Monday 14th of September:
Received what I thought was a job response after posting my resume to several jobs on seek.com.au (One of Australia’s largest job search websites). I replied, of course, excited I was finally going to have work.

Tuesday 15th of September:
Filled out their little agreement form, which all seemed in order, no hidden clauses and professional enough. I also had questions, I emailed them, of course. No response until… I received a phone call from an Indian man who I could barely understand, but he seemed to have a fair grasp on the English language, it’s common with companies based in the capital cities here, he asked me to begin working the next day. Ever eager, I agreed.

Wednesday 16th of September:
Received emails detailing what I had to do, this is where I got suspicious about it. I was required to take the money they sent, take my 5% cut and send it on through Western Union. They said the company took care of the taxes, but I wasn’t sure that was how it worked, it was one of the questions I asked in my email previously; I also asked for a contact phone number.
I chatted to a couple of friends about it and they said it definitely sounded dodgy and to go to the police, so I did, I got told it was a money laundering scam and to change my account details to make sure I didn’t lose anything. As I was leaving the house, I received a phone call from the same Indian man as the day before, he asked me whether I had received the money yet and I said “No” and he said a few things I didn’t quite catch, not like I cared.
It took me an hour and a half to change my account details and it’s still not done because I had linked accounts that I’ll have to get shut down seperately… I’m glad I picked up on this before they managed to take anything as I had almost $3,000 in that linked account, when I got home, I sent a lovely email to the scammers telling them where they could stick it.

So, I definitely think I’ve learned my lesson – If it looks too good to be true, it damn well is.

UPDATE:

I called the federal police today and let them know what was going on, they can’t do anything till a crime is committed against me, but they said I’m doing everything right. I have a friend with connections in that area who is going to try get something done.

I’m going to do a couple of these. Things I really, really don’t understand about the world and people in general and there really are a lot of them. My first one is going to be about people doing drugs, I really don’t understand the draw to them.

I have had many friends go down the path of taking drugs, and ruining their lives, despite all the stuff you get taught in school and seeing other people suffer. This includes excess alcohol drinking as well. I’ve tried to talk to the people that get into them about it, but they usually don’t respond well, hiding behind excuses like “My life sucks, I’ve tried improving it”, etc.

Such a weak excuse to get drunk every day including weekdays, have a joint every few days and hit the ecstacy… and yet, no one else does anything about it, not his family who must, by now, have some idea that he has problems because he’s been drinking excessive amounts of alcohol for the 4 or 5 years or so I’ve known him. I tried to help him many times to no avail, it was the same sort of reason that I started dating my ex-boyfriend… to help him kick his alcohol addiction and yet he’s back to that, it’s nice to know that you’ve helped someone. YEAH RIGHT.

I got into that scene at one stage, I won’t deny it. I refused to even do weed, but I drank just to get drunk and I don’t understand why I did it, probably had something to do with wanting to be accepted by my ex-boyfriend and his friends… which never happened because I never quite lost all my inhibitions while drunk and never did stupid crap like playing chicken with trains. (It really happened and it upset me at the time.)

It’s just so pointless, it’s not solving any problems, it’s making them worse and the buzz doesn’t last unless they’re high 24/7 (known people like that too) and even then they’ll lead themselves to an early grave by liver damage. (Known people to get jaundice during a big night and keep drinking).
Sigh.
This is kind of depressing.
</post>

Where I am forced to appreciate a culture that has nothing to do with me because I’m not related to the bastards that tried stomping the culture out in the first place.

Why is an Aboriginal appreciation week more important than my education?

Taking me out of class to watch people sing and dance is a huge waste of time. Fucking hell. NO ONE GIVES A SHIT.
What I don’t understand is why all Australians nearly have to worship Aboriginals not matter where they’re from or what they had to do with killing the Aboriginal culture.

In other news,

• It’s now the school holidays, I hope to have more to post or be more eloquent.
• I am going to Melbourne next month and I will have a camera, so expect photoblogging, and if I have access to the internet, expect day-by-day recounts.

I figured I’d do something different with this entry and do “micro reviews” of all my PC games. (Console may follow depending on response to this). Please comment if you’d like me to do a full review on any of these!

PC GAMES (A-Z)

Assassin’s Creed -

Pros: Beautiful graphics, dynamic world, lots of exploring to do.
Cons: Linear story line with only a few side-quests.
Overall: A nice game, very nice graphics and dynamic world despite the linear story line.

Black and White 2 -

Pros: If you’ve ever had a god complex, this is the game for you. Control your civilisation and become a benevolent or belligerent god.
Cons: Some laptops can’t handle the (fairly weak) graphics.
Overall: Good for killing some time (and/or citizens).

Crysis -

Pros: Eye-gasmic graphics, dynamic world, excellent physics engine and online multiplayer mode.
Cons: Requires a pwnage computer to get any decent performance and the vehicles in multiplayer mode feel like I have glaucoma.
Overall: Worth it if your computer can run it and you can get used to the vehicle tunnel vision.

The Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion -

Pros: Good graphics, sandbox, motivation to do sidequests (unlike the GTA series for me), wide range of character options and improvements and very moddable.
Cons: Storyline is kind of boring and some creatures can be insanely overpowered.
Overall: One of my favourite games, it has a lot of depth and the possibilities are endless, not even sure if you can finish it completely (which could be a pro or a con).

Guild Wars

Pros: Very fun MMORPG with very little grinding, no monthly fees and encouragement for teamwork and map exploration.
Cons: Must purchase expansion packs to gain access to higher levelled henchmen and needing to find a path that doesn’t have obstacles can be annoying.
Overall: Does not involve any grinding, plenty of character choices and is free for life after initial purchase. Path finding can be irritating but you get used to it after a while.

Portal -

Pros: Lives up to the hype, awesome voices, humour and addictive.
Cons: Having to euthanise your companion cube, some puzzles are hard to solve.
Overall: If you’ve ever seen hype about this game, it’s all true. Greatest platform puzzler I’ve ever played.

Rollercoaster Tycooon 1 -

Pros: Great game, a true classic, written in ASM which means those developers were dedicated. Cheap!
Cons: Small range of improvements, patches to fix certain bugs are hard to come by these days.
Overall: Classic. Downfalls are only those of being an older game.

Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 (Platinum) -

Pros: Great for casual play, wide range of options, coastercam is fun to play with and it’s always interesting to build intense coasters.
Cons: You can’t kill people by dropping them in water any more. Gets boring after a while.
Overall: Good for the casual gamer and non-psychopath but not something I would play for hours on end.

The Sims 2 (Seasons) -

You knew this was coming. I’m going to talk specifically about the Seasons expansion pack though.
Pros: Adjustable season pattern, advantages for different seasons, realistic temperature gauge for Sims.
Cons: The temperature gauge can be stupidly sensitive and I never got into the gardening side of the game.
Overall: Great fun adding seasons to your game and something that probably should have been included from the start… just don’t forget to put a roof on your house! Your kids won’t study if they’re being rained on.

Spore -

Pros: Choose whether you want to be good, evil or adaptable by your actions rather than choice.
Cons: Takes a while to get to the space age and you get your ass owned if you’re a herbivore with shitty parts. Space age has confusing controls.
Overall: Meh. Summed up in one word. Is not The Sims for males, it’s not even close.

That’s about all of them that are real games, not just arcade games. Enjoy.

Have an update, dear watchers and blog stalkers.

First, some crap about me:
a) I bought and built a new computer with the following specs:

(i) Core 2 Duo, 2.8GHz
(ii) 4GB RAM
(iii) Nvidia GeForce 9600GT
(iv) P5QL PRO motherboard
(v) Microsoft LifeCam Webcam (It’s very good quality!)
(vi) 17″ LCD monitor through digital DVI cable
(vii) White Tsunami case with temperature display

Approximate cost: $851 AUD

b) Due to this purchase funded by the Australian Government (Thanks Kevin Rudd), I’ve been playing games lately… Oblivion on ultra high detail with HDR effects is BEAUTIFUL and it doesn’t lag one iota, a constant framerate of 60 FPS.

c) I finished reading a book, hooray! Lightning by Dean Koontz, it was an awesome story, I liked it very much.

d) Resulting from book reading and the paradoxes it discussed, I received one (1) free headache care of lack of glasses and not knowing where they are.

e) Not knowing where glasses are has led me to hope for some sort of psychic ability amongst people on IRC. (More likely psycho ability. ;D)

<Meta> I pose you all a question: Where are my glasses?
<gladier> teh puddy tat eated em
<gladier> or maybe it was that dog

He-ey blog stalkers, guess what?

I’ve kept you waiting long enough, I figure I’ll review something. But because I’ve had nothing bad to pick at recently, it may not be very bad. (Unless you count lemon gummy fruit Starbursts and temperamental speakers).

PLANESHIFT. An MMORPG I recently started playing… on and off. It’s open source and still in beta, bear this in mind coz although it’s quite shitty in a lot of points, it’s the community that makes me keep coming back.

Alright, PlaneShift is your typical MMORPG, you start by creating a character, choosing your race (each race has different advantages, etc.), the graphics aren’t great and there aren’t many customisation options for your character’s look… but that could still be to come. So once you’ve chosen your race and your name (first name AND last name, which must be mythical sounding, non offensive, yadda yadda.)

Then you can either choose to customise your character’s heritage (which is really complex and affects your skills to a large degree)… including who your parents were. It’s all part of creating a roleplay character. You’re then put into the tutorial world, separate from the real MMORPG world, which is the norm amongst most current MMORPGs… people don’t want to be hassled by the “n00bs”.

Anyway, what makes this MMORPG different is the tight knit community where everyone seems to know everyone else and helps out, it’s like a little country town on the internet, except that the PlaneShift world is far from small and one problem I had was finding my way to and from the main city “Hydlaa” through expanses of land which mostly looked the same… without a map.

Everyone has to act IN CHARACTER at all times and anything out of character must be put [in brackets], and it’s a rule actually well-imposed by the game moderators (GMs), which was one of my biggest surprises upon entering the game… I gladly had someone to show me the ropes after the far from exhaustive tutorial (which I only did the bare essentials of because I thought I would be able to work it out as I went… I couldn’t and ended up the “Death Realms” or DR).

It took me a total of 2-3 hours to understand how to advance my combat skills (half the battle was knowing where to go!) and the rest of the time was teaching me how to mine and do metallurgy.

All up, a good game with nice game mechanics but don’t expect it to be/do anything flash and the graphics are still being worked on, the whole thing is still in beta… why not help out? Check it out at http://planeshift.it/

\o/ Bai.

A lack of ability has manifested itself in me once again… all the things I wish I could do, I cannot. This will probably even be a short, emo blog post considering my currently sucky writing ability.

a) I tried to draw today, it failed. One thing I wish I could draw is anime, I’ve never been able to do it and probably never will be able to. I don’t get how people do it. *shrugs* Not that I watch anime, but I have a couple of favourite video games (Cough, Kingdom Hearts, cough) I would like to draw the characters out of.

b) Lack of cooking skills… cooked dinner tonight, that came out alright, mucked up the peas, they ended up dehydrated and crunchy and then I attempted making pikelets to take to school tomorrow… summed up in one word, “disaster”… which is probably even an understatement. I made pancakes with the mix… they tasted like rubber.

c) Lack of motivation. ‘Nuff said.

I’m currently selling a DS card hack thingeh on eBay… buy it, I need money and I have no use for it any more. And my careful use of words in the paragraph below:

“The EDGE card is fully functioning and is great for anyone who likes to listen to music on the go as well as have all the Nintendo DS games they own all in one handy cartridge!”

Ensures that eBay cannot get sand in their vagina over illegality… I only included the OS and it’s up to the user how they use it, awesome, no?

Other random news:

• My sister’s camera has a fetish for f/2.9, which I hate.
• I miss digital photography with a REAL camera.
• I need to develop some photos, but I have no money to go get them developed. (Will code HTML for food! )
• I have a thing for drinking plain milk at the moment. It tastes good.
• There are bananas in the house, yum yum.
• I’m getting a 4GB MemoryStick for my PSP hopefully tomorrow.
• I’m on a bit of a diet… kinda.
• I finally started playing Kingdom Hearts I after finishing Kingdom Hearts II and going on a wild search for KH1 on the internet.
• I saw KH1 in Game the other day and it made me rage coz I went on a wild search. I think the one I bought off the net was cheaper anyway.
• I kept a diary of deep thoughts for 3 days and gave up.
• I received 10 Ubuntu CDs in the mail… the only reason I ordered them was for the stickers. It’s all about the stickers.
• I found $1.85 in loose change in my room.
• I had odd dreams about working at McDonalds and putting jigsaw puzzles together and then packing them up in a certain pattern. Pretty sure the jigsaw puzzle was like a cottage in autumn-y woods or something. Y’know, normal things to be on a jigsaw puzzle.
• Lucid dreaming is fun… my dreams are very meta, I know I’m dreaming then I dream I’m dreaming and yeahhh… fun stuff.

That is all. Some day I’ll give you more of what you like. <3

P.S. Sony for the win, discuss.
(I refuse to give money to Micro$oft and Nintendo have made the tackiest white consoles that make me think that they have Apple backing them… which could be likely.)

I’ve been monkeying about with code again, I’d forgotten how to make an array in C++. *hangs head in shame* After that problem was solved, I had to then Google the rand(); function. xD I’m horribly out of practice, I really need to practice more… this program was to select a game for me to play, but now its created more problems because I can’t take it objectively and go off and play.

To the left is a screenshot of it working in my lovely themed penguin and green Xfce Debian, source code is located here: [link]

In other news, I spent about 3 hours in the car, going to and from Singleton from my house… I must say I’m rather stiff, sore and hating children due to being squished up in the back of a hard-seated ute with two girls around 6, 7, or 8 years old… repeating things over and over just in case I missed it the first time. My social awkwardness made them leave me alone eventually… and short answers. I never quite know how to take children.

We stopped at the wreckers in Singleton, our destination… I followed my dad around, snapping pictures of broken glass and stuff… mainly because I needed something to do and also because I needed to use the last of my film.

On the way home, we spotted a couple of women broken down with a rental truck so we turned the car around and decided to help them, as it turned out, there were two guys there. My dad and his friend managed to get the flat tire off and the spare on and were the good samaritans to a couple of strangers, he promised them a carton of beer and gave them $20 for their help.

Shows there are still decent people in the world. My dad is one of them, despite his flaws.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday… I’m keeping a diary of thoughts for each day, writing down something symbolic about one thing that happened that day. Today, it was about human kindness, yesterday’s was about keeping busy. Tomorrow I am going to trade in my DS for a PSP and perhaps some games if I have enough, yay!

Toodles.

I will write you another blog entry on something objective, perhaps today, let us see how long I can ramble for.

First part of my post: Personal junk (Don’t lose interest here!)

Development/Projects:

As you may/may not have noticed, my site ACTUALLY links to a sites.php page! Woohoo! Movement in the otherwise dead camp!
The site on that page is live viewable, doubly awesome.
That site does not work on IE6, but if you’re still using IE6 then gtfo my website as many would put it.
I have my freelance screenshots here: http://indoctrine.com/skorm/screens, take a geezer… not sure if I’ve posted them to my blog before.
I’ve taken up drawing and sketching again and I’m in the process of drawing emotive portraits for this song, currently only done 1 and it’s not very good. I hope to improve as I go along.
Drawing has been my main source of creativity of late since my Canon IXUS bit the dust, I’m still yet to do scans of then, for those that are looking forward to them, I’m sorry! I’ll get them scanned eventually. <3 Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not particularly feeling up to a proper post today, instead I’m going to talk about myself for a bit, like I seem to do unwittingly anyway, sorry!

Okay, so, I went back to school on the 28th of January after spending the last 6 months at TAFE last year, I returned to school… and the public system (woohoo!). I picked English, mathematics, physics, photography, visual arts and hospitality, should prove to be an interesting year; not sure what I will drop next year… photography and visual arts are proving to be my best subjects even though I did mathematics and physics last year.
Figures that I don’t know myself well enough to know my strengths.

There’s a group of about eight people I hang about with at recess and lunch times… I sit next to at least one of them in every class except for visual arts and photography (they’re the math and sciencey types, mostly). I’ve found I don’t really have much to talk to them about… curse age gaps, uncommon interests in my age group and social ineptitude!

I’ve been complimented on my art work a couple of times at school, teacher included! It does make me feel good about myself being told I can draw, something I wanted to be able to do from a young age.

Hmmm… what else?

Oh yeah, my digital camera (Canon IXUS 70) died on me, lens won’t retract even after it being pulled apart and put back together again… “Lens error, please restart camera” is what I get when I try and turn it on, so I won’t be doing much photography except with a film SLR… I strangely haven’t felt very good since my camera broke, which is incredibly lame and probably immature; yeah, maybe I was attached to it.

Speaking of photography, I used three films photographing a wedding on Saturday, it was good fun pretending to be a photographer and the photos came out well, I’m sure the couple will be pleased with them. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few major problems with the game industry, well actually, games in general.

• Not enough storyline
  

  Some games just do not have enough storyline and some games have none at all. For example, I bought God of War for the PS2 on Tuesday and my boyfriend played it for about 3-5 hours, the only thing that kept him interested was that there *might* be a plot to it rather than just mindless violence. We were sadly disappointed when no storyline developed during those 3-5 hours.

• Not enough gameplay
  

  This is the opposite problem to the previous one… some games are three-quarters cut-scene… I bought the damn game to PLAY not to WATCH. Sure, the cut scenes build the plot and develop the characters but so would some action mixed with gameplay.

• “Mario Kart syndrome”
  

  It’s way too easy to get ahead in racing games using items or shortcuts (such as in NFS:U)… come on, we’re meant to be having a “realistic” game experience (even though the cars don’t get as trashed as they should) so why the hell isn’t it as difficult on “normal” difficulty to drive, etc. I finished a lot of races on NFS:U using a manual car on hard mode and still came first. Read the rest of this entry »