Black March 2012

This event will take part all throughout March 2012.
While SOPA and PIPA got shelved, there are some new acts coming to invade our privacy. ACTA and PCIPA are on their ways.
I’m sick of this. Entertainment industry wants more money, even though they get millions doing nothing, while us, regular people have to work hard to get anything. What these bills will do is not help original content creators, but it will help the big heads in charge, the ones that have millions/billions. And what they fail to understand is that you have to fight piracy with value for money, and not law.
So I say, fuck you Entertainment Industry! I’m in full support of Black March 2012, and I encourage you to support it too. This is getting out of hand.

With the continuing campaigns for Internet-censoring litigation such as SOPA and PIPA, and the closure of sites such as Megaupload under allegations of ‘piracy’ and ‘conspiracy’, the time has come to take a stand against music, film and media companies’ lobbyists.

The only way to hit them where it truly hurts… Their profit margins.

Do not buy a single record. Do not download a single song, legally or illegally. Do not go to see a single film in cinemas, or download a copy. Do not buy a DVD in the stores. Do not buy a videogame. Do not buy a single book or magazine.

Wait the 4 weeks to buy them in April, see the film later, etc. Holding out for just 4 weeks will lave a gaping hole in the media and entertainment companies’ profits for the 1st quarter. An economic hit which will in turn be observed by governments worldwide as stocks and shares will blip from a large enough loss of incomes.

This action can give astatement of intent:

“We will not tolerate the Media Industries’ lobbying for legislation which will censor the internet.”

Say no to the New World Order, controlled by Entertainment Industry.

http://black-march.com/

ACTA:

ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an agreement secretly negotiated by a small “club” of like-minded countries (39 countries, including the 27 of the European Union, the United States, Japan, etc). Negotiated instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries.

ACTA would impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online and creates legal uncertainty for Internet companies. In the name of trademarks and patents, it would also hamper access to generic medicines in poor countries.

Say no to ACTA, sign this:
https://www.accessnow.org/page/s/just-say-no-to-acta
http://www.avaaz.org/en/eu_save_the_internet/?fp

Here’s something about PCIPA:

under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you’ve been assigned.
Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American.” Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

Remember – you have the power, not them.

Settled and ready to go

Hello everyone!
Now most of you probably heard that I was moving to UK, and on 26th I did so.
Thanks to Wizzair delaying my flight by 2 hours, I arrived at Swansea at 11:30 PM. Thankfully, people here are nice, and the Landlords son came to meet me and show me the house and do the paperwork.
Anyways, I’ve been ill all this time. Either ill or got food poisoning.. or just acclimatization stuff happened. So I didn’t feel good, and was not up to do anything, but still had to deal with enrolling into the university, buying some food etc. Everything is fine now.. for the most part, I’m still not feeling all 100%.
So tomorrow (Monday) will be my first serious day in the University (and we’ll have a welcome party), so I’m excited for that. However I still need to find a part-time job, to pay for all the expenses, but I’ll be doing that once I get the schedule 100% worked out. That means that so far I don’t know how often will I be able to film anything, but I’ll try. I still have stuff that just needs editing (stuff I filmed before I left Latvia) so expect that. I want to do a Vlog thingy, and show you a bit of the city, talk about my adventure and stuff, so I hope I’ll be able to do that.
Anyways, thanks for sticking with me, watching my show, reading this post, and I hope I can do more of something you’d like soon. So I’ll talk to you again soon, Cheers.

Oh hold on, I can’t leave you without a picture, and I haven’t shown any (and really made many) pictures to anyone, so you’re the first one! You’re special!

The Magical steps of me making a Lets Play

Ever wonder what goes in into the making of my lets plays? Well it has gotten quite ridiculous, so ridiculous I want to share all the main steps from the start to the finish. (note: while I’m writing this I am on the step 7, and it’s the third time I’m on this step today, having to go back to step 6)

1. Record footage (game’s video+audio) with fraps.
2. At the same time, record my voice with Audacity.
3. Compress my fraps footage (recently added, so I would avoid blackouts in the video after rendering).
4. Remove noise(not voice) from my voice audio.
5. Edit the video, synchronize voice with games footage.
6. Render the video.
7. Fully watch the video.
8. Convert the video from .mp4 to .flv (flash video) format.
9. Skip through the .flv video.
10. Upload the video to blip.tv .
11. Create a Thumbnail for the video (and also upload it to blip.tv).
12. Fully watch the video through blip.tv (for any error/cut out that might have occurred during the upload process, or the processing process).
13. Post the video on my website, later on tgwtg.com blogs.
14. Go back to step 5, add the “watermark” (so that QuizGroupMovies don’t claim it as theirs production and put their ads on it) but now render the video in two parts (sometimes more), so it will fit youtube’s 15min restriction on a single video.
15. Fully watch those videos.
16. Upload the videos.
17. Add videos to my Youtube playlist, make some other minor adjustments (like changing the thumbnail, adding links to my website as alternative links to the video etc.).
18. Post Youtube videos on Blistered Thumbs blogs.
19. Aaaaaaand DONE! (void if found an error somewhere). Now you can be lazy for a while, or move on to the next video.

I hope you like my list of steps xD. At the end I still love doing it, so it’s worth it, I’m not planing on stopping.
Also, don’t let this discourage you from making Lets Plays, it’s just how I need to do it, some will need less steps.

Game releases and patches.

This one is inspired by this blog, but I’ve been thinking about this before, and wanted to write a blog about it.. and I haven’t done it in awhile, so lets begin.

There have to be changes in the gaming industry. Games need to come out when they are “bug free” and ready, not when they are dated to be released, and that usually doesn’t happen. We see games being pushed out, with many annoying bugs in them, that are “being” fixed, although it takes them quite a while to fix anything. I don’t know what’s going on in the game companies, I don’t know when do they just stop doing anything and celebrate that they have finished the game, but I know that it’s too early. You got to be ready to work hard on fixing bugs at least first two months. You might think that you fixed every bug you could find, and maybe you did, but when the game is released and people start playing it, in no-time you’ll find yourself with loads of bug reports, and requests to fix them ASAP, especially on the PC platform. You can never test enough to find all the bugs that people will get on the various systems they have. So I guess, just get more people on fixing bugs in the after release time.

Now I know they should do that before they release the game, and they should not use us as their “testers”, but as I mentioned before, they can’t  find all the bugs with the testing they do, its not enough.

Now lets talk about the patches. Developers tend to release patches that fixes a lot bugs at once, which usually  takes them a while to produce a patch for. But what I’m asking for is regular updates. You fix few minor bugs, UPDATE THE GAME through the game. We would appreciate, if you fix any bugs that might interfere with our gameplay, which might annoy us. But all you do is collect bunch of bugfixes, wait for a while, then release. And then you find yourself with more bug reports, because something that you might have fixed, broke something different. So be ready to work hard after releases to satisfy your costumers. And don’t force us to update the game, make it optional, some people just want to get into the game as fast as they cant and not wait on the update process. Just don’t forget to remind them to download it after a while. Forcing patches for online play is OK, I understand that, there might be some complications, false bugs otherwise, but if player just wants to play the Offline portion of the game, he should be able without you forcing him to update the game.

And here I got to mention the team I still like for bringing a great sports game series – NBA 2k, and the team of course 2k Sports. Sports games tend to have many bugs, just because they have only a year for a game to be released. Now they don’t make a new engine, or even a new game all the time, they just kind of update the engine, add some new features, update the existing features and release the game. And since EA’s NBA series decided to rebuild their game from ground up, NBA Elite wasn’t released last year, they just had too many bugs, and they (surprisingly for EA Sports) didn’t want to release a “not-even-close-to-finishing” game. Now back to NBA 2k. NBA 2k10 and NBA 2k11 had some annoying bugs, which we asked for the dev team to fix, and they did – in few (more than 3) months they released a patched, which did fix a lot of bugs, but also left out some obvious ones. By that time, I’m sure many players stopped playing your game, for many reasons, one of them probably being that you don’t seem to give a shit about fixing your game. Also this year it was even worse for PC, the patch was ready, but they said that they have to sync the release of the patch with every Digital Distributor. Well who the fuck gives about them? I know Steam is ready at anytime. Fuck others if they can’t do it that early, I want the patch now,  maybe it’s going to teach their costumers a proper lesson on where to buy their games. You can also add an alternative method for Digital version to be updated – like a simple installation (like for the retail version). And I heard that EA Sports has a similar issue.

If I buy a game after a month or two, I expect it to be all patched up and “bug free”.

Also a major problem for some patches, in their latest update, they block the possibility of people harmlessly moding (not like in cracking, but adding your own textures, models and stuff) the game. You loose a port of community doing that, some people get enjoyment from that, I know I like moding San Andreas downloading some high quality textures, or NBA 2k11, where I download some Cyberfaces, updated Jerseys or courts. But that’s a topic for another day.

I hope that with time the current system will change, and we get some stress free gaming experience.

Customer Service EP2? Play.com

Oh man, is this just funny or annoying?
Well you tell me.
So the story here is, I was looking for cheap games and SavyGamer(on Twitter) linked to a cheap game on Play.com .
So I checked it out. Discovered that they don’t ship to Latvia.
So I decided to ask them if they will be shipping some stuff to Latvia in the near future.
After 10min after searching for their e-mail. And I searched really hard. Not to say FAQ didn’t help me at all.
So I found technical support email – well that should help.
So lets start off.

Herbis:

Hello,
I didn’t find any information or email where I can ask questions.
So I guess I will ask it here. I noticed that you don’t ship items to Latvia and I was wondering if you are planing to start shipping to Latvia in the near future?
Thanks!
-Herberts

Play.com:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for your recent enquiry.

Export countries we deliver to are listed on our site. Please visit this link http://www.play.com/Help.html?page=del#jump-ec.

Kind Regards,

Customer Care Team
Play.com

Ahh… are you kidding me? Ok, reply

Herbis:

Yes, I know, I’m not brain-dead.
I was asking if you are planing to start shipping to Latvia in the near future?

-Herberts

Oh yay, I got a new massage.

Play.com

Dear Customer,

Thank you for your email.

We currently have no information regarding Latvia, however it may be that we are able to provide this product in the future.

New items will be added to our website as soon as release dates are confirmed by our suppliers so it is worth checking the site periodically.

If you have any further queries please consult the FAQ section of our Help pages. Alternatively you can contact our Customer Support Team on 0845 800 1020 (UK only) or +44 (0)1534 877 595 (outside UK). Our opening hours are 9am – 8pm Monday to Friday and 9am – 5pm Saturday and Sunday.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank you for your patience and valued custom.

Kind Regards,

Customer Support Team
Play.com

Do I really have to comment it? Lets continue!

Herbis:

Ok, I’m sorry
But ARE YOU FU*KING KIDDING ME? I know I’m fighting with a bot here, but I WILL WIN THIS BATTLE NO MATTER WHAT!
Latvia is a country and since you’re an UK site I expect you to know that, since, well you’re supposed to be educated and you should at least know all the Countries in Europe!

And You can’t add Latvia to your website as soon as it’s release date is confirmed, since it’s not occupied or something. And who would fu*king buy it?

I’ll ask you till you finally answer me –
Are you planing to start shipping items to Latvia(a country in Europe, to the right of you(UK)) any time soon in the future?

Kind Regards,
Herbis

P.S. I now use my short name since I have lost that much respect for you.

Well lets see, what will they tell me now. I’ll just update this post.

When will you start to think EA?

EA really thinks that there are so many stupid people?
I mean cmon, think EA think.

EA considering charging for ‘very long game demos’ – Analyst

(Now imagine me giving a facepalm)

EA would release what he called “a very long game demo, along the lines of 2009’s Battlefield 1943” through Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network for $10 to $15.

Tell me what’s the point of buying a demo? It doesn’t matter how long it is, it’s still a demo. And why would you want to buy a fucking demo? Demos are made so you would consider buying the game, so why would you buy a demo so you could consider buying the game? It makes no sense. Well maybe if you’re a big fanboy…

“A full-blown packaged game would follow shortly after the release of the PDLC, bearing a full retail price,” Pachter said.

Hey Pachter, now tell me, how doesn’t THAT sound retarded? Who can’t fucking wait some time, to get the full game, and if you can’t, download the short and free Demo. If you know you’re going to buy this game, why would you buy a fucking demo, that costs 1/4 of the game?
EA, come up with some good marketing ideas for once. A five-year-old could do a better job than you.
Also, if you buy a CD, you can sell it to someone, or give it to your fiends, or just break it and be satisfied. But that “very long demo” is worth nothing! You can’t give it to your friends, you can’t complete the game or use all the features and you can’t sell it, and if you could, none would buy it, because they could just buy the full game by that time.
Conclusions:
WAIT, download a free demo, buy a full game, fuck EA.

That is bullshit Sony!

Someone told me today, that GTA IV Episodes from Liberty city have been delayed till April for both PC and PS3.
So I thought that there was a critical bug found in both versions..but I was wrong.
I went to gamestop.com and found some news about this..and the title..the title makes me mad.

Rockstar Games says last-minute request by Sony Europe has pushed Grand Theft Auto IV expansions’ non-360 release to April 13

last-minute request by Sony.. WHAT THE FUCK? what does PC has to do with PS3? And why the fuck would Rockstar agree to do that FOR BOTH SYSTEMS.

So here’s more info about that:

For Grand Theft Auto IV fans, March was set to go out like a lion with the release of Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City. Previously exclusive to the Xbox 360, the two add-ons to the top-rated game-

Rockstar gave the following explanation: “Due to a last minute game submission request from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe to edit some of the in-game Liberty City radio station, television, and internet content, we are forced to delay the worldwide release of Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City for both PlayStation 3 and PC for an extra two weeks.”

I’ll say it again, what the fuck PC has to do with Sony?
Did Microsoft ask you to do the same for PC? No!
We, PC gamers, always get screwed in this situation.
But I have to say, Rockstar’s marketing works, but it’s still – bullshit.

Also the change wasn’t requested by Sony Computer Entertainment America, so America gets screwed even more.

Fail of the year [in gaming industry]

God, when I first played CoD MW2, I thought it was fantastic, then I played multi-player and spec-ops – “OMG”. Though I have to say that I didn’t like CoD MW (aka CoD 4) multi-player mode, so this was truly the game of the year for me, I had respect for Activision and Infinity Ward (though I still didn’t like the crappy match-making).
Near the release of BF: BC2 I didn’t understand what was all the fuss about, I mean, I didn’t like BF2, so I thought that I wouldn’t like this either…and I was wrong. The game is great..as far as I could enjoy it.. but I can’t say much about it because of my crappy Videocard.
What Activision and Infinity Ward (if it still exists) are doing is just stupid. I mean I don’t get it, your marketing is bullshit. I still don’t get why the fuck you can’t lower prices for CoD 4, it’s an old game now, so it must be cheaper by now, but no it isn’t. But thats not the fail of the year. Let me quote gametrailers for it.

So up to this point all we knew about the new Modern Warfare 2 Map Pack was, well…the maps. We knew that the pack includes 2 reworked classic COD4 maps, Crash and Overgrown, along with the 3 new maps Bailout, Storm and Salvage. What we didn’t know was the price…and now that we know most of us probably wish we didn’t.

So ok, we get 5 maps, that’s nothing unusual.

The voice of MW2, Robert Bowling, recently made a quick stop onto Major Nelson’s podcast to share some information about the Stimulus Map Pack which is coming to the Xbox 360 on March 30th. Apart from telling us what we already knew he finally dropped the officially price point of 1200 Microsoft Points…or $15 for those of you without a MP/Real Money converter. So, let’s see…that’s 25% of the entire game price and more/equal to the price of some XBL/PSN games.

What? 15$ for 5 maps? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you think it’s raining money outside? Well maybe for you but cmon, you can’t be serious. So wait, we have to pay for 2 converted maps, that’s probably not even so hard to do, and 3 new maps.. So mainly you want us to pay 15$ for 3 maps you made? Do you know how much Borderlands DLCs cost? 10$, and they include new missions, new areas, new storyline, new modes and other cool shit. And you fucking want 15$ for 3 new maps? I don’t have to say that I won’t buy it. And here comes the best part. You know your closest competitors? Well they just fucked you in the arse, if you didn’t feel it yet.

Interesting.

Indeed.

So there you have it, the Mapathy battlefield has been set. In one corner you have MW2 with its 5 maps for $15 and in the other corner you have BC2 with 2 maps for $0 (and an obvious love for showcasing this fact). Now, the ultimate question isn’t which one you’ll choose (who WOULDN’T download the free one?), but rather if MW2 players will fork over a relatively large amount of money to pick up the Stimulus Map Pack. Is it worth it? Is it not? Is this the gamer’s chance to speak with their wallets or a fairly priced bit of DLC that will truly enhance the core experience???

So basically I can pay nothing for something I know that has been hardly worked on, or play 15$ for a piece of shit 3 new maps and 2 converted. Hmm.. what to do, what to do.. Hell here’s my 15$, coz  I’M RICH, BITCH!

When even GameTrailers.com are talking this bad about you, you have to know that shit has gone extremely wrong.

No but seriously, I want to see the idiot (and I’m sure that there will be many) who actually buys that mappack. I’m with Dice. Just got to get my PC fixed up.

Btw.. soon we will see MoH, so hopefully it will replace MW, and be much better at it. It uses the same game engine as BF: BC2 , so physically it will be good.

Contacting Support [Updated 14/03]

Did you know that it’s pointless to contact any kind of support?
Lets see how contracting Rockstar support works out for me:

Herbis:

Hi, I have problems running gta iv. I just got new Parts for pc, so I had to set up Windows 7 x64. I changed my Motherboard, CPU, RAM and PSU, my video card stayed the same. The problem is so called “Stuttering”. I didn’t have this issue running the game on my old Pentium 4. Stuttering in my case is not lagging at a period of time, it’s more like getting a bit slower. Its like this: Normal speed for 2 sec. then slower but with no lag for about 0.5sec. then again normal speed for 2 sec, and slow motion for 0.5 sec. It’s really annoying. I hope you can help me fix this problem . P.S. I added DxDiag.txt. Thank you!
—- Herbis

Support:

Support:
Dear .,

What? You didn’t even bother to copy/paste my name?

To further assist you with your problem we require you to send us a DXDIAG report from your computer:

Windows XP
– Press the “R” and “Windows” key on you keyboard.
– Click the Run icon .
– Type the word “dxdiag” (without the “) into the text box and press OK.
– In the bottom right hand side of the screen, click the “Save All Information” button.
– Save the dxdiag.txt file to your desktop.
– Attach the file to your reply to this email.

Windows Vista:

– Press the “R” and “Windows” key on you keyboard.
– Click the Run icon .
– Type the word “dxdiag” (without the “) into the text box and press OK.
– In the bottom right hand side of the screen, click the “Save All Information” button.
– Save the dxdiag.txt file to your desktop.
– Attach the file to your reply to this email

Note that I wrote in my ticket that I have Windows 7 x64 installed

With the information contained within the DXDIAG report we will be able to investigate your problem further.

Kind regards,
Zaim

Technical Support

Herbis:

I’m sorry, but i recommend you read what people write in their tickets and what files they add. Otherwise with your
pasting the same thing to every email won’t work out so good and you’ll get sewed just like EA.
Oh and if you going to paste same thing to every email, could you please at least do it faster, I submitted my ticket
a week ago, and it says that in 72 hours I will get contacted. Anyways DxDiag added, again.

Support:

Dear .,

Still no name?

Thank you for your email could you please try and reduce the graphics options for the game in the menu and test using the benchmarking tool to see if there is any improvement. If not contact us again and we will do our best to help

YOU COMPLETELY IGNORED WHAT I SAID.

Kind regards,
Jack

Fuck you Jack, I will call you “;”

TV Shows/Series I Watch [Updated 18/07/2010]

TV Shows/Series I Watch/used to watch:

From best to least best:

1. House MD
2. The Big Bang Theory
3. My Name is Earl
4. How I Met Your Mother
5. Family Guy
6. Supernatural
7. One Tree Hill
8. Better Off Ted
9.The IT Crowd
10. Lucky Louie
11. Cougar Town
12. How Not To Live Your Life
13. Southpark
14. Australias Got Talent
15. Britains Got Talent
16. Americas Got Talent
17. Two and a half men
18.The Cleveland Show
19.American Dad
20. Scrubs
21. Friends
22. Nip/Tuck
23. Are We There Yet?
24. The Daily Show