LASER!

Lasers, good for making coffee and blowing stuff up. Halo 3 owns, I've been playing through the campaign again and playing on live(until now, cos I dont have all the maps required -_-)

Also been playing Oblivion quite a bit as well(but that has no lasers in it...still awesome though)

Dominos and Rube Goldberg Machines(thanks wikipedia, I forgot what those things were called)

This is awesome, must have taken ages to figure out and create. Also, great song by one of my favourite bands; Nirvana. It reminded me of this-one of the greatest adverts I've seen on TV.



The Cog was a dramatic television commercial for the Honda Accord, made (almost completely) without any CGI or trick photography. It was created in 2003 by the London office of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy.

The two-minute commercial appears as a single, long camera dolly along a Rube Goldberg machine chain reaction arrangement of parts from the car but is in fact two stitched together, the join being at the moment where the muffler/exhaust box rolls across the floor (this can be seen by watching the floor pattern change). The commercial took 606 different takes to complete, and only minuscule CGI was used, simply for fixing the lighting on the final car's window. The cars featured, one disassembled for the pieces and the other on the trailer, were two of the six hand-built pre-mass production Accords.

The sequence starts with a transmission bearing rolling into a synchro hub. This sets off a cascade of movement; windscreen wipers 'walk' across the floor, valves roll down a bonnet and carefully weighted tyres roll uphill. The commercial ends when the power door locks on a complete Accord are triggered, causing the boot to close, tipping the car off a balanced trailer and into a final pose in front of the camera. The voice of US author Garrison Keillor queries "Isn't it nice... when things just... work?", while the song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang plays in the background.

The version of the advertisement that originally aired in Australia had an alternate ending that replaces the keyless-entry remote with a seatbelt retractor, which retracts toward the car and allows it to roll forward instead of the boot offsetting the balancing of the ramp. (This version of the ad began at the point where the exhaust muffler rolls across the floor.)

According to Snopes, "in May 2003, filmmakers Peter Fischli and David Weiss threatened legal action against Honda over similarities between the Cog commercial and The Way Things Go, a 30-minute film they produced in 1987 involving '100 feet of physical interactions, chemical reactions, and precisely crafted chaos worthy of Rube Goldberg or Alfred Hitchcock.'"

In 2006, Honda UK continued the crafted theme with a new advertisement for their Civic using a choir as Foley artists.

I just pasted this stuff from Wikipedia.

I love this bit from Family Guy. XD

http://www.yikers.com/video_family_guy_breakfast_machine.html

Couldnt find a way to "emb" it or whatever you call it because of copyright. Youtube and most places doesnt seem to have the links, or videos online anymore. Bit of engrish there lol, but I am tired.

American stupidity

*Sigh* Only in America....

How can people be THAT stupid?

So I was at the Black Crusade on Tuesday (Machine Head, Trivium, Dragonforce, Arch Enemy and Shadows Fall playing at the SECC in Glasgow) It was awesome.

The past few days though, I think I have been getting iller(is that a word? =/) or more ill?

I think I pulled something in my back, cos it was really sore this morning, but thats gone now. Now I "just" have a sore throat, cough, stomach and cold. Great eh?

Today was soooo boring. If there was ever proof that geology can be boring, we saw it today.

We went to the British Geological Survey's Borehole core store in Edinburgh and logged and looked at North Sea cores from boreholes all day. To make sure we didn't suffer from any delusions, the lecturer told us before we started that doing core logs is one of the most boring things in geology, that he had spent weeks in the same room and that it "quickly drives you insane" or something to that effect. Great, just the motivation we needed, especially me, cos I felt like death warmed up in the morning.

Which reminds me, its goddamn freezing at the moment.

Portal song

Awesome end to an awesome game. I just found this on youtube and followed the link to download the song. HUGE SUCCESS.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs

-go here to find a link to download the files.

Heres some of the stuff you can do in Portal;

Assassin's Creed

At first I thought this game looked like one of the Prince of Persia games from recent times, kind of linear, nice graphics and interactivity with the environment(running along walls and stuff) but not amazing. After watching a few vids and reading some reviews, I think this looks much better than I first thought. I think this could be really good if it offers freedom to the player like
GTA or Oblivion(free-roaming games)



http://uk.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/assassinscreed/index.html

http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/xbox360/data/930278.html

Its out in America now.

Streaming video on the net

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/oct/19/digitalmedia.media

Tv-links got shut down? That kinda sucks for some people, but it is progress in the war against piracy, or whatever they are trying to stop. I never liked streaming video; bad quality, buffering, constant loading of plugins and pages, with pop-ups on many of the sites, and dead links. Just buy the DVDs, it helps the industry. Anyway, I somehow doubt anyone will be able to shutdown youtube, it's google's cash-cow now. They have rigorous content control now; they perform regular checks for anything breaking rights, laws or copyright and delete the videos, which kinda sucks at times for us, the viewers. I guess they need to do it, if youtube is to 'survive'. Remember how much google paid for youtube? I think that was an insane amount of money for something that doesn't directly make money, but is apparantely worth a lot because of the advertising, and the money that is made through the huge amounts of people visiting the site.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6034577.stm

That is enough random half-rant for now.

"Super Gravity Gun"

The gravity gun...that was so fun when it got overloaded near the end of HL2 and the start of episode 1.

Xbox 360 and Halo 3

I recently got a Xbox 360(just over a week ago) because there are
tonnes of great games out for it at the moment, so I bit the bullet
and bought the Halo 3 limited edition bundle. I thought it would
have come with Halo 3, but unfortunately it didn't. Still, it was a
great buy-I got Half Life Orange Box(absolutely awesome, but
thats me getting sidetracked already), Forza Motorsport 2,
2 controllers and everything else that comes with the Halo limited
ed. 360. Check the details out here if you want

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/x/xbox360halo3console/

Which reminds me, I don't know how to get the free month
of xbox 360 live set up yet >.<>

I was going to write this about Halo 3, but as you can see
I got distracted. Nevermind, on with the show :P

Halo 3 is still quite expensive. I got mine for £32.95 or
something like that just under £33. That was pre-owned
from Gamestation on 11th November (yesterday.) Its probably 
possible to get a cheaper price somewhere, but meh. 
What I'm building up to is that it is worth the money
in my opinion, or at least it has been so far. 
I've not played the multiplayer of the release version(I tried
the xbox live beta that shipped with Crackdown) and a whole bunch of other stuff, but the campaign missions
 have got me addicted already. 
I've always liked the way that Halo games are fluid; the 
story is relayed through short and
concise cutscenes and through dialogue 
with the characters in the 1st person game. 
Everything that was good in the previous games
looks to have been continued in this one. 
The story is rich and the game keeps you interested
 with diverse missions and tasks you 
have to carry out(often single-handedly or with a
group of allies) I won't give too many spoilers, 
but there are lots of different things to do in the
story, so its in no way repetitive(another plus-point)

Next thing I wanna talk about is the graphics. I have
read quite a few reviews saying that Halo 3 doesn't
use the 360 to it's full potential. That actually makes
sense, I think there are a few games that appear to
have better graphics, however the graphics in Halo 3
are very good. The lighting is one thing that looked
really good from the start, as did the graphics for the
water. At first, I didn't like the interface because it
was too late before I realised that the bar in the top
middle of the screen was my health bar, but I got used to it. The graphics are definitely good enough though, 
I can imagine it would look amazing in HD. 
(The 2nd video below says its in HD, I think it is, 
but I'm not sure)

Here's a few videos that show you how awesome the game looks.



Halo 3 E3 trailer



Halo 3 gameplay video

With the previous 2 Halo games, I have always preferred the
multiplayer games to the single player campaign, so I'm gonna
check that out once I complete the single player game.
Hopefully it won't dissapoint. With all the positive reviews
I've heard, I doubt it will.

"Game of the decade" Like The Sun describe it?
Its a bit of a bold statement, but time will tell, perhaps.

Until next time, see ya!

Welcome

Awesome, I just set this thing up; was really easy and took like 2 mins at most. I've never had a blogspot that I kept going for long, so I'm hopefully gonna change that with this one. I'll try to post at least once a week, with current events, reviews on music, cinema, dvds, video games and anything else I find interesting.

So...I hope you enjoy my blogs.