MasterDex

Personally, I'll choose the subs of an anime, Japanese games and for any foreign movie before I'll watch the dub. I'm not going to go play The Witcher 2 in Polish any time soon however. I don't mind dubs, some are great (Fullmetal Alchemist and Cowboy Bebop for example) but some are horrible. I think that, especially in Asian titles, things get lost in the translation. It could be a badly translated script or actors that can't capture the essence of the characters but things get lost in the process. That's why I love the fansub scene. Some groups are awful but there are others who strive for good quality translations and do really well on the script side - leaving the original VA's to do the rest of the work through intonation, etc. I don't think it's an either/or situation for me. I'll favour the subs but I may end up preferring the dub, as is the case with Cowboy Bebop, which I'll show below to help explain why. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TbpaIOEZH4

Good choices! I was just thinking less than an hour ago that I should pick up Drive on BluRay. Great movie.

Mario Rosenstock doing an impression of our last Taoiseach, Brian Cowen:

https://en.wikipedia...iki/Brown_sauce The brown sauce in question there is HP sauce. I don't like the stuff myself but I hear it's delish!

I enjoyed that. It really showed some of the potential of SFM. I found this while looking at his other videos. I like it.

Facebook gets a lot of flak but if it wasn't for it, I wouldn't have found this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/can-you-make-it-through-this-post-with-having-your

Sounds like a lawsuit in the making. I know the game-show it's based on. It can be funny...if you're stoned.

About time! I'm hoping this encourages Valve to get a move on with Half Life 3. The Source 2 references is something I could see coming for a while. I may have mentioned it here already but I'm thinking that they held E3 back to throw it onto Source 2, which they first needed to build, and make it just Half Life 3 - It explains the length of time for me.

I'm about to cook a good ol' traditional fry. Rashers, sausage, pudding and an egg. Oh yeah, and tea. and brown soda bread.

Similar to myself then. If it's a cheap whiskey I'll probably add a bit of water or ice but if it's any way decent, I'll drink it straight.

Have any of you tried Middleton Very Rare? It's a once a year release and you can see the starting price. I like my pure pot whiskeys, and Irish whiskeys in general. I find when you're concerned about price, they offer the best quality in the lower bracket but even when you go to the expensive bottles, the taste is still better than other types. Cheap scotch can be a horrible thing, as can cheap bourbon but some nice examples of how to do it right in both camps out there - Glenfiddich and Macallan for Scotch and I can't remember the names of any good bourbons but that's because I rarely drink them. How do ye drink your whiskey?

I think I'm actually looking forward to the tough stuff. It's been so long since I really challenged myself mentally and technically that it holds a strange allure over me now. My only fear for this year is that the fact that much of it is old hat may give me a false sense of confidence and make me slip up.

I'm heading back into a software development course. I had previously made it through most of the first year before outside reasons made me leave. I like the electrical side of things but only have a basic working knowledge of that area, at least so far. I don't want to mess around in that field too much and want to stick to the software side more although I wouldn't mind dabbling a bit deeper either. I received my timetables for the year yesterday. They look pretty nice. There's plenty of open space with Wednesday, Thursday and Monday ending at 3pm while Friday ends at 3.30. It's a common first year for computer science and I think I've got a very strong advantage going into it. How I'll get on in subsequent years remains to be seen but with my love of the subject and the fact that 90% of my knowledge is self-taught, I think I stand a good chance of getting out the other side. So yeah, I'm in positive fresher mode right now.

I've considered this before but I've always had the image I saw on that day fresh in my mind and when I saw the old photo, it was instant recognition. Not too long ago actually, my cousin was telling me he saw 'Black Nan' as a child too. We were out drinking and got to talking and I mentioned my ghost story and, no word of a lie, he looked incredulously at me, then at his girlfriend, then back at me and said "You're joking, right? Where'd ya hear about that?" before excitedly telling me he had had his own experience in that house and thought I was just bullshitting to make him tell the story that he thought I heard from my mother. I'm not sure I believe what he said, he could have just been feeding me lines but the expressions on his face did look pretty genuine. All that said, mad theories out in the world, I still have trouble reconciling my experience with reality. I'm a rational and logical man but that day is constantly niggling at the back of my mind. But hey! madness runs in the family so it could be just that.

I'm positive that I had never seen a picture until years later. Remember too that this was a shared experience so both myself and my brother would have had to have seen the picture beforehand. I doubt it was infrasound because, I'd imagine, that it would affect different people in different ways but that wasn't the case. The current pseudo-scientific reasoning I have for it and other apparitions is that a strong emotional event occurs and imprints an image of the surrounding matter into the environment that lasts over the years, fading as time goes by - akin to how an axe striking stone will leave a mark but will eventually weather away. This could also go towards explaining why battlefields are often cited as prime areas to see ghosts and why things like fog are often associated with ghastly images - taking the role of something similar to a projection screen. It's for that same reason that I believe that the light shafts are an integral part to the puzzle of my experience. If it is...matter distortion?...it may also explain why apparent sightings by children are more common - their visual cortex is still growing and learning how to process the information it receives from the world around it so while an adult's visual cortex has learned to filter out that which isn't important, the child's one hasn't yet reached that point and as a result sees more of the world we inhabit - Visual Acuity may also play a role with children's eyes having a greater possibility of having peak acuity when compared to an adult's. I should clarify, lest I get the crazy hat thrown on me, that I don't believe what I saw was any sort of spirit or intelligence, merely an image stamped in space-time.

Tribes has been taking up so much of my gaming time lately - 42 hours in the past 2 weeks alone, 143 total. I've only been playing about a month or so. It's. Just. So. Addictive. It probably helps that I am the greatest. Just to try to explain why it's so addictive, here's a nice montage:

You'll mock them for John Edward and those ghost hunting shows or for believing in ghosts in general? I'm right there with ya for the former, they're scams to take money from gullible people, though I don't think mocking people who believe in them is the right thing to do. You have to remember that, at least in the case of John Edward, the audience are people who have lost someone, whether years ago or just recently and as such, they open themselves up to the man because they want to believe they can communicate with a lost one. On the topic of ghosts in general, I can only give my own experience. When I was around 5 or 6...maybe 7, myself and my brother were in the abandoned house next door. It was the middle of the day. As young lads do, we were being a bit destructive. With our father's sledgehammers in hand, we were banging old stone out of the wall of what I presume was at one point a woodshed. Deciding we'd be a bit more destructive, we entered the house to break the plaster off the inside walls. We stepped into the house from the back door that would have led to the kitchen. the door faced a wide window and shafts of sunlight penetrated through the dusty glass. There was something else there in the light as well however. It was the image of an old woman dressed in black, standing around the midway point of the room, facing us. My brother and I both saw her. The first thought that crossed my young mind was that this was some neighbour that had caught us in the act and we were going to be in trouble. We both ran, but not before we realised that the woman, while we could make out the details of her dark dress and curly hair, could be seen through and the window was visible, the shafts of light going through her. When we returned home, we ran to our father and told him what happened. The conversation went something like this. "We saw someone in the old house" "Yeah, we could see through her!" "We saw a ghost, daddy!" "You're imagining things, it was probably just a trick of the light." For a few years, I went on believing that and my brother, still to this day, dismisses it as such. However, when I was older, maybe about 10 or 11, I found some old photo albums in the closet and began going through them. I saw wedding photos, photos of my father looking quite stoned, from the 70's, poking his head out of a tent and giving the peace sign and then I saw this older, small, black and white picture of a woman in a black dress with dark curly hair. It was the same woman I had seen on that day and when I showed the picture to my mother and asked her who she was, my mother said "That's black nan, your great grandmother.". It had been her house we were destroying that day. Since then, I've believed in ghosts, not quite in the way others do, but I cannot not believe now. The belief, and the lack of quality scientific evidence to back it up, flies in direct contrast to most of what I believe and I've tried many, many times to unite those contrasting views to no avail. That truly annoys me. Take it for what you will and mock me if you like but that event was burned into my mind and I doubt I'll ever discount it as "just a trick of the light."

I can come on pretty strong on the topic of religion, whether I want to or not, as an atheist. I've come to consider that how I, myself, broach and discuss the subject can often be taken as proselytizing when more than anything, I'm usually just interested in hearing the opinions of someone that has differing opinions to my own, so I can broaden my horizons and understand better why religious people are religious or choose to be so. I've also often received a cold reception to when approaching the topic and I believe the perception that many atheists are so vehement regarding their opinions is that for many religious people, religion just isn't something they're willing to discuss because it can be so personal to them - politics is much the same. The problem is that for atheists, at least those like myself, the topic isn't at all sacred. I'm not dismissing the fact that there are people out there who identify as atheists and are complete zealots about it but they're no different to any other religious zealot.

Yes, it's the free-speaking, free-thinking people that are misguided. It's certainly not the religious zealots, oh no. Saying so could hurt their feelings. On a related note, Egyptians should really begin to consider what they choose to protest over. It's great that they have the freedom to protest now but it'll all be for naught if they protest everything.

That looks and sounds promising. Now, to tear myself away from Tribes long enough to get it and play it.

If you're the only user and your confident enough that you know what you're doing at a PC, turn UAC off, it'll just be a pain

I haven't touched BF3 since getting absorbed into Tribes: Ascend. I may pick up BF Premium and check out Armoured Kill though, it's the one I was looking forward to the most. How are the maps? Are they really big but the play area is only a tiny part like the other "big" maps or are they the genuine article?