Dentist Fun and Frolics [vagga]

Its no secret that people from these parts of the world are no great fans of going to the dentist. In fact I know more people that never go than I know people that go, no real reason behind it bar laziness I suppose. With that in mind my lazy arse has not been to a dentist in rather a long time, about 15 years in fact! I remember my last visit very clearly, I ate lots of sweets like most kids, I never brushed my teeth like lots of kids and my brothers and sisters seemed to be coming and going from dentists the whole time! So it was with much glee that I received the news from the dentist that I had perfect teeth and I should keep up the good work looking after them! I felt like a man who had just beaten a lie detector test! It was with that in mind that I resolved never to go to the dentist nor brush my teeth ever again!
Now, we all know life is not that easy. Eventually you realise that other people donÂ’t like you when you have breath that smells like a public portaloo late on Sunday at a 3-day music festival for people who like Guinness and curry! So I had no other choice but to start a simple teeth-cleaning regime that I have stuck to with the fierce determination that I stick to every fad that crosses my mind! What IÂ’m trying to say is that while I do clean my teeth, and wash with mouthwash I donÂ’t do it twice a day IÂ’m happy to just do it in the evening before I go to bed and I have been guilty down the years of missing the odd night, or even week in some cases! While I always knew it was a recipe for disaster, and that it would come back and haunt me in the end laziness won out.
Now this becomes even more bizarre by the fact that I work (literally) across the road from a fantastic, modern dental clinic (right beside where your brother works Karen!). I have walked by said modern clinic pretty much every day for something like the 2 years itÂ’s been open. I always look into the window to see whatÂ’s going on, and when IÂ’m on my mobile or thinking about something I stand at the window at my office and stare down at it. Yet I was never inside there, until this morning that is!
I had a late night last night, playing planeside for 4 hours, and then watching a few Series 2 Soprano episodes (swapped my West Wing boxes with one of the lads hereÂ’s Soprano boxes for a while!). So it was not till something like 11am when I got my arse into work, and on the spur of the moment I went onto the dental clinic and asked about making an appointment for a check-up. Now it turns out you donÂ’t even need to make an appointment for a check-up, which makes the last few years of inaction even worse. So I thought I better get into work and show my face and I can venture back there after lunch.
So I venture over there at 2pm this very afternoon. After filling out a pile of forms and paying the “your lazy dole/lazy student scum, therefore were taking advantage of you” charge of £35! Sit about for almost an hour and then the time comes. I really had no idea what to expect. Would I have to get 400,000 fillings? Would the dentist laugh at me and then get his dentist mates in to look at the paddy’s shit teeth!
So I get called into the dentist, and low and behold the dentist is the foxy chick from foxyville. I felt like Wayne from Wanes World when he sees that chick and “Foxy lady” starts playing in the background! She has a German accient, so when I’m down on the dentists chair, she’s like, “vou kun reeelaxxx” and I’m waiting for her to say, “vee ave vays of making vou talk” (Im thinking of the foxy chicks wearing leather and the cool guns in RtCW here) but I’m silly like that and maybe I’ve seen one to many world war 2 movies, and played a world war 2 game too many!
She asks me when I was last at the dentist, and who it was so she could get my records from him, and I tell her that I don’t actually have one and that in-fact I have never been to a dentist before (so I lied, I thought if I’m going have fun poked at me, I might as well make the most of it!). I swear she swayed on her 7” Stilettos for a second when I said that :)
So she started poking around inside my gob, and calling stuff out to her assistant. “Bottom left 1, left 2, left 3..” and I’m thinking “fuck, I don’t need work on every single one of my teeth do I?” Alas no, she was just confirming that I indeed had those teeth! So we get an X-Ray of my mouth and we return and she pokes about some more. You will all know I’m missing two teeth at the roof at the front; I was kind of interested if I could get something sorted out there, and after that I want a proper dentists “boxing” gum shield. They cost a bit, but protect your teeth and gums, and since I’ve been kicked I the mouth twice playing rugby this season, I don’t want to take a chance with the shitty cheap ones I have been using.
But then she says the words I really did not expect to hear. “vour teet are good” Now I’m the one swaying on my feet. She says my teeth are perfect and that I all she would say is that maybe I could get them bleached, and I said fuck that. She can give them a simple clean, I’m not paying £400 so people can see me coming from 2 miles away due to the bright teeth :)
I also have the tough choice between a free (NHS) bridge to fill the two gaps, that would need to be replaced every two years or a fake tooth that would be screwed into the roof of my mouth that would last forever at £2,000 per tooth. I um’d and aww’d and agonised over that one for all of 1 pico second :)
So thatÂ’s it right there, the lesson behind successful teeth is to totally ignore them! Thinking about it everyone I know who does the whole floss, brush, wash twice a day has shit teeth, and all the lazy people who ignore them have great teeth. I think there is a message there somewhere :)

Teh future of telly [slim]

So I have sky+ now, and it rocks. Wifes just started watching the episode of changing rooms she recorded, before it finished recording. And I fast forwarded the adverts in corrie, at 32x! Lord above!
Rewinding is also something that didn't occur to me. You know when the wife farts through that really important bit? No problem, just wizz it back a few mins and watch teh fucker again. Seems its constantly recording everything you watch. It must be magic!
Anyway, they're sneaky fuckers, sky. What they don't tell you until the day the smelly scouse installers arrive is that you don't only need a duel lnb on your dish, you also need to run an additional cable back to your telly from the fucker. So it's a bit unsighlty if you've got those wall mounted or anything.
Still, its teh future!

Fantasy must read shortlist [slim]

The sci fi must read shortlist is prolly my fave blog of all time, I'm still working through the books featured in it, and have enjoyed most of them immensely. So I want to give some back. Here's my fantasy must read shortlist for those who like sweaty barbarians in leather as much as shiney space ships and lasers...

• Lord Of the Rings - Naturally, a fantasy list wouldn't be complete without this, although I could probalby just leave it off and assume folks who like fantasy have read it. Better just include the Hobbit and Silmarilion here too please, ta.
• Magician - Fiests Magician is simply awsome. Damn shame that he kind of lost it later on, you'd be excused for just reading Magician and nothing else. I gave up after the third riftwar book, are any of the later ones worth picking up on?
• Elric - Morecock rocks. He also wrote fairly skinny books, so it's fab that the publisher released em all in huge omnibus editions featuring a whole series of books. Elric is by far Morecocks best, a dark and brooding anti-hero that genuinely surprises and shocks. Buy the Elric 'eternal champ' tome and be lost for weeks.
• Discworld - Again, I'm cheating. There's too many to list, and they're too different to pick a fave. The earlier ones concentrate more on the world, the later ones on the characters. If you're going to start, start at the beginning with 'Colour of Magic'. There's not a stinker amoung em though, they're top.
• chronicles of Thomas Covenant - A bit like magician where the first three books are classics, but the rest get a bit stinky. This is dark, self depreciating stuff but a good read all the same.
• Dragonriders of Pern - The Pern books are some of my fave fantasy, and I love the way they have a smattering of Sci-Fi in there too, which comes as a bit of a surprise if you're not expecting it. A must if you're into dragons naturally. Quite tricky to read these in order though, as (like Fiest) she's written some pre-history later in the series.
• Shinara - Yet again, a superb and classic first trilogy of books starting with 'Sword of Shinara' that decends into generic pap with the fourth and subsequent books. The first three are brilliant though, must read for epic quest lovers.

I'm sure I've missed some, I'll add more as I think of them. I'm also thinking my list is a bit mainstream, anyone got any more reccomendations?

UT2004 EED semi-Voltfest 0wnage! [beej]

This is how it's done, ladies

10 of us on AHM, I have teh proofs!

Eat lightning-railgun-death you slut!

Leviathan kicking the shit out of my node... time to ambush the scum from behind

If you've not seen an airstrike before, look up and look out when you hear the warning

Athena Sword [beej]

Okay, so I've had the game a week and installed it but not played it. Shows how good UT04 is init. But anyway, the blog.
You need to patch AS right, so you find your 'Athena Sword (UK) 1.0 -> 1.01' patch. You run it, and it tells you that you've gotta patch RS first. Oookay. So you dig up that patch, which fucking obviously is 'Raven Shield (UK) 1.54 -> 1.56'. Got that? So two days later, AS is patched again... so you find the UK-only patch (not the others! get it right!) to patch the game you've just bought, but you also need to patch RS again. That's a whole different file and another download.
So Ubi.com, our brave Gallic cousins, are making us find and leech two seperate downloads to patch two games! It's a fucking mod of RS - not a standalone game - but it has its own patches!
Un-believable.
The French and their ilk just shouldn't be allowed to make games. That should be the law.

Mobile phones [billox]

For the last 16 months I've been using the superb Nokia 6310i, a tough, no frills handset with a 7 day standby time on it's standard battery with normal usage.
The problem was that I fucked the case up. Fag burns, impact damage and scratches didn't do it any favours. So I got an el cheapo case off of ebay and it turned out to be a turkey.
So I've been on the market for a new handset for a few months now. It seemed that everything on the market was a new fangled colour screen with polyphonic ringtone rubbish. The smartphones were too big, too expensive, bugged and lacked functionality they should have had. Even the Sony Ericsson T610 was underwhelming, they were all phones that did what my old phone did, but they weighed more, had colour screens and the batteries ran flat in a few days. Fuck that.
Then I found this.... www.nokia.com - the Nokia 6600. It's basically an N-Gage in a decent case.
It has 10 days standby time, comes with a 32MB MMC card, support for up to 256MB ones and the Symbian series 60 OS. Good start.
Nice large 65,536 colour TFT screen, low weight and snappy performance.
The real killer application of this phone is the N-Gage games. Yup, almost 100% compatibility. They are about 8 megs each. Bluetooth and IR unfortunatly only support writing to the 6 megs of onboard memory by default, but there is a way round this. Fortunatly mine came with a free Belkin MMC card reader so I can directly shuffle games onto the card, install them and they come up as an icon in the main menu, no pulling the battery out to change games ala the N-Gage. W00t!
The keypad isn't designed for playing games like the N-Gage, but the keypad will take multiple simultaneous keypresses, and the specs that count... CPU, screen size and resolution are all identical.
And of course it has all the Java goodies like Opera, XHTML rendering, support for various email clients, MP3 players, Realplayer and all the normal Java games.
Currently looking at getting a GBA emulator working on it, at this point I'm not really sure weather or not its possible, but there is a thriving community so it will happen eventually.
A damn good buy, if you're in the market for a new phone go get, now!

The 19th of March [lurks]

And what is so special about the 19th of March? Something that I just noticed as I was compiling the release dates list for PC games in my magazine. On the 19th of March, the following PC games are out;

• Raven Shield Athena Sword
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Battlefield: Vietnam

For fuck sake! Why do they do this? Three of the big five multiplayer games of 2005 out on the same fucking day!