3*M's Time Travelling Manuals

Uninspired

2009-12-03T18:22:00.000-08:00

The honest truth is that since I bought a Monty Python boxset containing pretty much everything Python (except the latest documentary, "Everything but the Truth") I became completely uninterested in making humor. Even though I've never been particularly good at it, after watching the whole of Flying Circus I became convinced that I shouldn't even try it.
I'll probably only write boring stuff about IT from now on. Cheers!
Edit: And I haven't even watched everything yet!

Stuff that Sucks about Black Metal: Part 4 - LARPers

2009-09-28T20:05:00.000-07:00

Lord Rob Darken, the Uncool - Voivod of Doucheland

Let the picture above set the tone for this article.
The idiot on the picture above is Rob Darken (more like Rab Dorken, am I rite?), founding member of Polish band Graveland - as well as tons of other redundant side projects - and Internet attention whore. There isn't much to say about the picture above that isn't already there, only that Dorken's band, Graveland, is one of the most influential Black Metal bands from Eastern Europe - last time I checked. Many years ago.

Eastern European bands are noteworthy for being uneducated nazi simpletons with not as much talent for music as for theatrics and shock value. True to the region's tradition of being the World's favourite garbage dump, most of these bands don't take themselves too seriously and more often than not are unmaintained one-man-bands. Still, others are quite passionate about their - absolutely irrelevant - little musical acts, but I digress.

The only reason why I decided to pick on these albino apes is because they have a well known tradition of LARPing - the topic of this article. There are also the goth vampire LARPers, but to make this article as succinct as possible, I'll only make fun talk about the sword & sorcery types.

LARP, for you non-nerd types, stands for Live Action Role Playing, and is the aspie version of traditional pen and paper RPG's. Why adults will dress up as fantasy characters and play around with swords and shields is the subject of many boring-ass debates and flame wars, and I won't touch the subject here.

There really isn't much to say about the subject, so I'll just throw in some actual pictures of Black Metal bands for some kicks. Note that the definition of band in this context is quite broad, since most of these guys are just hopeless basement-dwellers.
Discalimer: I've searched some keywords on Metal Archives and collected the shitfest bellow, so these pictures must be at least partially legit.

I bet at least one of these dipshits plays the flute.

Braveheart Cosplay.

Beware of the nazi Grim Reaper.

Nice skirt, faggot. I'm sure Hitler would approve this.

Believe it or not, these girly shirts are very popular among Black Metal LARPers.

More like Lord Moonfag, am I right?

I am Maximus Ridiculus. Gladiator and professional asshat.

Mom forgot to pay the bills. I can't play World of Warcraft now. =(

I told you these shirts are popular.

By the powers of Grayskull, I am She-Ra!

Birdman and his sidekick Avenger during their faggoth phase. And what is it with the skirts?

"Although there are no visible signs of combat, I killed over 17 million people with my sword today. No, really." Also, note the damn shirt.

"Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person!"

These raincoats are very popular, too.

If I see that damn shirt again...

Furry Metal. How much worse can it get?

Note the Dhalsim cosplayer at the top.

Hey mom, do we look medieval enough?

It must rain a lot in Homogard.

That shirt. Again. Enough of this crap already.

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries."

See? How could I have possibly said anything to prove my point that these pictures didn't show better?
I rest my case. Until next chapter, homos!

Stuff that Sucks about Black Metal: Part 3 - Pseudointellectuals

2009-09-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

Here we see Lord Suckalot seeking inspiration for his new lyrics

Whenever I want to clarify my mind on subjects such as the meaning of life, the theory of evolution, politics, religion, post-modern philosophy or just amuse myself with literary genius, guess what I do?

Yeah, you got that one right: I listen to Black Metal.

Some time during the late 90's some Black Metal bands became dellusional, and started to fantasize about being the most influential think tanks ever to have walked this Earth. In their little fantasy world, Metal music was the single most reliable medium to spread Nietzsche's ideas - even though they got them all wrong.
Seriously. How many times have you seen the word 'nihil' or any of its derivatives being promoted by Black Metal bands as being the one concept and state of mind to demote everything else? It's really silly how these bands have purportedly incorporated the ideas of Freddy Nietzsche into their lyrics, when they hold the concept he fought the most as being commendable. The concept has many definitions outside of Nick's philosophy, but these buffoons aren't fooling anyone, since they also blatantly praise the Übermensch as if they had already achieved it.

There are also the existentialist douchebags. They're not necessarily different from the previous category, and these streams of thought often coexist peacefully within the lyrical contents of the pseudointellectual Black Metal band. The funny thing is: these guys always tend to find no motivation whatsoever to exist. Their whinning is seldom different from most goth or emo kids', if only a bit more ornate. The excessive embellishment of the dysfunctional is as present here as it is in the kind of depressive poetry frequently found on many a teenager's livejournal. Even stupid antics such as some faggot cutting himself is considered a grand form of intellectual expression; some deviant kind of body language - that serves the purpose of keeping the educated adult away from this garbage very well, I must add.

This man is the pinnacle of human enlightenment, and you should hear what he has to say.

On a rather unsurprising anecdote, Niklas Olsson Kvarforth, the attention whore pictured above, explains how his band, Shining, has opted for their name: it means "the path to enlightenment".

And if you want further proof of everything I've said on this and the previous chapters, check this out.

Stuff that sucks about Black Metal: Part 2 - Watered-down Satanism

2009-09-28T14:24:00.001-07:00

Back in the old days, Black Metal bands weren't ashamed of glorifying Satan, evil and illegal practices. Heck, the Black in Black Metal certainly isn't there to denote the bands' ethnicity, right? Well, most of the bands were true to the origins of Black Metal and instead of just borrowing its aesthetics and writing lyrics about being lonely and depressed, their themes were entirely satanic and awesome.
But then, at some point, even the bands of old gave up their original ideas and themes to favor a more 'sophisticated' approach. Instead of talking shit from out of my ass, I'll use the very popular band Mayhem and its progressive chickening-out to exemplify this idea.

Let's take a quick look at the lyrics of Mayhem's Deathcrush, one of their earliest songs:

"Demonic laughter your cremation
Your lungs gasp for air but are filled with blood
A sudden crack as I crushed your skull"

Nasty, evil and antisocial. Awesome, right?
Now, let us inspect the lyrics of one of their most popular songs, Freezing Moon:

"I Remember It Was Here I Died
By Following The Freezing Moon
It's Night Again, Night You Beautiful
I Please My Hunger, On Living Humans"

One can clearly observe that Mayhem tried to sound more poetic than chaotic and failed horribly at that. There's the "I please my hunger, on living humans" part and that's about it for evil and antisocial imagery. Also, this sounds way too vampiric, and we all know only goths dig vampires.

Euronymous used to think the Moon was pretty evil.

A few suicides and homicides later, let's forward in time to 1997, when Mayhem released their Wolf's Lair Abyss EP; now with Blasphemer handling guitar duties and that overrated faggot Maniac back on the band's line up. Here are the lyrics for the EP's second track, I am thy Labyrinth (note the pretentious use of archaic English):

"They speak...
In the garden of the prophet
Divine madness...
The order of the cosmic immoral
For what is humanity
If not forlorn
And crawling to my hands
When the moment sings
For I have read the signs
And I have solved the riddle
of eternal life
The Jinnah have spoken
For I have read the signs
And I have solved the riddle
of eternal life..."

This isn't satanic. This isn't evil. This isn't chaotic. This shit doesn't even make any fucking sense. You'd think a band called Mayhem would have pretty nasty lyrics, right? But that's how all of their lyrics have been since Maniac's return. Artsy faggotry.

It's not like you can expect much from a faggot who likes to cut himself and play cave explorer with other men. But in all honesty, what sense does it make to use a pseudonym like Maniac, play in a Black Metal band called Mayhem, throw pig heads at the audience and write lyrics that are about as offensive as a François Truffaut film?

This guy thought the lyrics for I Am thy Labyrinth were deep and inspired.

This trend has taken over most Black Metal bands, and has been pretty much the standard for most new bands - especially the Scandinavian ones. They could call themselves Art Metal, Surreal Metal or Nonsense Metal and it'd be much more accurate than calling themselves Black Metal.
I won't mention any of Mayhem's releases that followed Wolf's Lair Abyss, because quite frankly, they're even more watered-down than Wolf's was. Stuff like A Grand Declaration of War will be the subject of my next chapter: Stuff that sucks about Black Metal: Part 3: Pseudo-Intellectuals.
Until then, don't listen to anything Mayhem has put out after De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, because Satan will bitch-slap you if you do.

Stuff that sucks about Black Metal: Part 1 - Forests

2009-09-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

Hello, faggots. I'm here today to write about some of the things that suck the most about the - oh, so venerable - Black Metal.
I'll serialize this theme into a series of articles to make them shorter and easier to read. Although I shouldn't do that, and make everything harder and shittier instead.
I'm going to try to avoid the obvious, such as Immortal, Immortal's videoclips - and every other Black Metal video for that matter, nazi metalheads, poor musicianship, low production values, etc. Also, this isn't a Top 10 type of article, so don't expect the order in which my rants are listed to be of any importance.
Onto the list:

Sissy Nature-themed Black Metal

So, you and your nerd friends form a Black Metal band. You guys spend 15 minutes on the Net googling a badass name for you band, which will probably end up being the name of some ancient demon, Tolkien creature or D&D monster. You spend another 45 minutes writing 30 17-minute long songs. You take hundreds of pictures of your skinny, uninteresting personas in all your corpse-painted glory.

Naturally, the next step is to write lyrics for your dozens of new songs, because there's no such thing as instrumental Black Metal - and you guys probably suck so much at playing your instruments to even attempt to do something like that. Since you chose to play Evil, Satanic Metal, nothing could be more adequate than writing lyrics about forests, mountains, the moon or some lake. Right?

Not pictured above: Evil and Satanism

I can only think of forests being nasty and evil in two different scenarios:
1 - You rape, kill, eat and then bury people on a forest, because nobody will be there to witness the act.
2 - Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2.

Unfortunately, that's not what these pastoral Black Metal bands write about. They're gonna ramble about how the forests are dark, cold, beautiful and lots of other less-than-evil shit. If the lyrics weren't written in a ridiculously grandiloquent style, they'd fit most nature-themed hippie
songs.
Here's how you can write evil and Satanic lyrics that still have forests in them:

"I'll take your sorry ass to the nearby woods,
I'll gut you, rape you, tea-bag you
and offer your body to almighty Satan,
and set the forest on fire
Then I'll do the same thing to your mother at some other forest"

Still not pictured above: Evil and Satanism

It doesn't matter which adjectives you use and it doesn't matter whatever sort of Tolkienesque symbology you associate with forests: if you're in a Satanic Metal band, you should be talking about setting forests on fire and killing everything that lives on them, not about how you love them, you Green Peace-loving furry douchebag.

Is this field really necessary?

2009-04-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

So, it was my birthday some other day. As usual, I hadn't slept the night before, so it was pretty much like the previous day, except the hours seemed to last an unhealthy lot more. Again, as usual, I opened the window - it was about 7am - and said out loud:
"Whoa, the outside world! What a shitpile!"

Internet License

2009-04-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

It's not another piss poor atempt at humor when I say that people should have a license to use the Internet. You should prove yourself worthy of using a public IP address - at least without supervision from someone who's authorized to do it. Honestly, I'm sick of reckless users causing havok whenever they think that some mysterious stranger has compromising information regarding their lives. Seriously, what the fuck?

Everything is Nothing

2009-02-25T18:39:00.001-08:00

Nothing I've ver experienced is of any significance. A book filled with truth can have its pages torn and rewritten. There is no truth. Something is only as true as the next proof-test. No one knows jack shit about nothing. We're all wrong. There's no concrete proof to concepts we can not yet fully understand. The whole field of Mathematics is limited to our perception of the world. The whole scenario could change. And it will. Even the foundations of our knowledge could be substantially wrong. We have not yet mastered the discipline of truth. Truth is as accurate as the result of what we measure with our deliberatly error-prone systems. It might work for computers, since they have limited resources and anything a computer can represent was once an abstract idea subjected to a discrete representation thereof, and, as such a lie all and by itself. We construct ivory towers over pillars of nothing. We are just particles. Nothing we'll do will hold any significance over the major flow of the universe. We have no control. We observe as the universe unfolds. We mean nothing. WE do nothing. We are stuck in a small function of time of which there's no escape for beings such as ourselves. For us, time is finite. Space is finite. We can only conceive infinity as a concept. We can't digress over infinity. It's easy to think of it. It's trivial. But what do we know about it, being us creatures of finite use? We are nothing but ridiculous dogs trying to bite at infinity's tail. We won't ever overcome this. We'll be extinct before anything that's abstract to us can be demonstrated. We are world predators. We are Galactus.

My latest attempts at scoring some tail as explained by HTTP, Kerberos and Microsoft's 'Negotiate' extension

2009-02-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

It goes somewhat like this (note: if you're an idiot and haven't yet realized, the image below is just a thumbnail. Click on it to see the full-sized version.):

Ageless Wisdom

2009-02-17T18:12:00.001-08:00

jnhhnbgvfgbhnjumikl kjhu7mnyb uuuujki

I typed the above sentence with my dick. I had to make sure I wouldn't hit the keyboard too hard or else I'd provoke earthquakes and tsunamis and killer whales and segfaults and shit all around the world. Those are words of wisdom. Memorize them.

btw, I typed the above paragraph with my left nut. The current, with the right one.

Peace. (This was my middle nipple).

The Tale of When I Turned the Tables

2009-02-17T17:18:00.000-08:00

Pictured above, me.

It was 1972. I was in jail. Convicted for almost beating my wife to death. Don't misinterpret my last sentence. I said I almost beat my wife to death. And when I say I almost did it I don't mean I beat her so bad she almost died. I said I tried to beat her and got my ass kicked instead. I fucking hate German women.
Anyway, that's not the point. I'm here to tell you all about the story of when I turned the tables and assumed control over what happened in my life. Maybe you'll learn a thing or two.
I'm a short, skinny, feminine piece of white trash. I never knew why Bertha married me anyway. You can imagine that I was every other prisoner's delight. Anyone could kick my ass. And more importantly, anyone could abuse my ass.
I was submitted to violent buttsex every other minute. So much so that when I saw Goatse I felt pity for a man who thinks that such an unimpressive circumference is anything to write home about.
People in prison pictured me as nothing but a moving piece of rectum. Enemas weren't medical procedures anymore. I had so much different genetic material inside of me that I could clone half of the population this side of the globe. My body didn't recognize STD-related pathogens as foreign bodies anymore. I beat AIDS by killing it with smegma.
I was sick of being raped. I was sick of being diminished; abused. I was sick of not having control over the course of actions. Furthermore, I needed to take that decisive turn everyone once has to take in their lives to keep on living. I decided to turn the tables.
From may '79 on, I'd never be raped again. Never. None of my ribs would be broken again. No foot would meet the back of my throat again. No. I was done with it.
From that day on, I'd deliberatly pull their pants down and blow them. It was me who'd touch them while they slept. I'd pull my pants down and willingly sit on their faces. I'd be the one who would force them into unsolicited sex. I was the one who would take pleasure upon the quagmires of others. And so I did.
Everything changed, but most importantly I was in control. The ramming didn't stop. I still had so many dickings a day that the last 12 or so inches of my intestines were a dick-shaped tunnel. Still I won. I beat them where it hurts. I was in control.

THE WORLD WILL TREMBLE!

2009-02-03T15:57:00.000-08:00

February 29th, 2009.
The world will tremble.

See, not everyone on the tubes hates me!

2009-02-02T20:44:00.001-08:00

When I tell you that not everyone on the internet hates me, you gotta believe me.

Some tips on system and network administration by a bitter bastard

2009-02-02T18:57:00.001-08:00

Sup, nerd?
I'm an asshole. I hate my users as much as I hate whatever it is that I hate the most. As a sysadmin, presumably so do you. Actually, if you don't, you're probrably on the wrong side of the server, with the wrong kind of credentials. Also, I'm a bitter bastard that faps to snuff films.
That isn't to say though, that I haven't got any experiences to share with you, fellow sysadmins.

1 - DON'T TYPE SHIT INTO THE SHELL

First and foremost, modern shells have many features that produce tricky results for the new and the experienced user alike. If you are a bash fan, like I am, before you go about screwing up with your company's servers you should learn:

- how it contextualy expands stuff like filenames and commands;

- how to properly quote special characters, and when the text should be expanded by the shell or sent intact to some program's standard input (such as how grep shit[A|Z] files is different from grep 'shit[A|Z]' files );

- how to make better use of the history;

- some useful line editor commands and key bindings (such as assigning unused and easy-to-reach keys to history-search-backward and history-search-forward);

- learn and use extended globbing;

- read books and the manual pages, you lazy fuck.

There is a lot more stuff to be discussed on this topic but these are just some tips to get a new user started and make her experience a bit less traumatic the first few times she tries the shell.

2 - NOW THAT YOU KNOW HOW NOT TO TYPE SHIT INTO THE SHELL, TRY NOT TYPING (ALMOST) ANYTHING

If there are operations that you routinely do by hand, you can and should script them. Many a sysadmin have caused a lot of unecessary trouble because of poorly escalated privileges and poorly-typed command lines. If you're usually logged in as root, which you shouldn't, disaster can be a quote away from happening.

You should write scripts and test them on safe machines. When you're sure they're good enough for use in production, then move them from your test machine. The key to success here is to keep everything simple and streamlined. Simple operations require simple functions. Don't write scripts that do everything you need at once. Rather, rely on small, maintainable functions just like you'd do in any other programming language.

How flexible your scripts are, will mostly depend on how well you can code them (duh!), but it also depends on how many people will use your scripts. I usually don't spend much time validating input on scripts that I wrote exclusively for my use. I don't print out much stuff either after they're properly tested. But if anyone else has to use those scripts, then things change dramatically. I cannot trust that other guys will actually read the script and understand how it works. I can't keep them from trying to exploit it either, nor can I assume that their input will always be valid. There are many ways of validating and manipulating input before you send it to actual programs, and you should learn them.

Don't be lazy when writing shell scripts. I've seen countless examples of how scripts shouldn't be written and those were used in production servers. The same guidelines for writing maintainable and readable C code apply to shell scripts as well. Comments are vital, as as well as propper identation. Don't be a jerk that thinks he can't be substituted because nobody else can read his shitty scripts. There are many great Linux/*nix professionals out there, so writing shitty code won't keep you from being fired.

3 - BEWARE OF ROOT

I shouldn't even be mentioning this. The root user is for system administration purposes only. Do not start network services as root (unless you make sure their binaries are safely SETUID'd). Don't handle the root password to anyone. Don't use root for testing dangerous shell scripts unless you're absolutely sure there's no other way. Don't allow remote root logins. If you're sitting at the physical console make sure you logout after you're done. Some services require root privileges, but most don't have to listen on every possible network interface on the box. Usually, listening on the loopback interface alone will do the job. If you can work without ever directly running shit as root, just fucking do it.

4 - BEWARE OF NORMAL USER ACCOUNTS

Compromised user accounts are almost as dangerous as a compromised root account if your machine is poorly secured and users can escalate their privileges easily. Make sure no clear text passwords are sent over the network. It's trivial to sniff unencrypted traffic, even on most switched networks. Beware of directories like /tmp/ which ignore your system's umask setting.

5 - ARP IS A DUMB BITCH AND YOU CAN'T TRUST IT

The ARP protocol is vital for seamless communication between adjacent network nodes. Too bad it's a dumb bitch that is always asking to be raped. ARP poisoning attacks are trivial to deploy and are an easy fix for man in the middle attacks. Ethernet switches forward frames based on MAC addresses. A packet with a correct destination IP address and a forged destination MAC address will, under normal Ethernet operation, invariably end up at the wrong location.

Since MAC address/IP address tuples can constantly change (and often do on networks with DHCP servers running) network devices don't keep them cashed for long. Actually, as soon as they learn that one of their entries got obsolete, the dumb bitches will gladly replace it with the new information.

Hosts populate their ARP tables either by deliberately sending an ARP request or by learning through a gratuitious ARP packet. Stupid, right? What you can do to thwart this is to make sure that all your hosts have static ARP entries for your servers. Usually, traffic between workstations is not important, so the main target of ARP poisoning attacks is traffic between workstations and servers. It's trivial to write logon scripts that write static ARP entries. The only drawback to this is that whenever one of your servers gets a new network card you must rewrite that server's entry on the script. Unless, of course, you manually set the new server's MAC address to match the old one's.

6 - DON'T BE A STUPID ZEALOT IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO BACK UP YOUR ARGUMENTS

I've met a handful of people in the business that simply won't consider the idea that the technology they love so much might not be applicable in every damn scenario.

If you are a Linux enthusiast like me, then you've probrably met tons of these people. While some of them are skilled hackers that actually make some sense in between their fits of blatant fanboyism, most are beginners that need a cause to embrace. I've seen complete newbies - and I mean it in a derogatory manner - bragging about how Linux is superior to loads and loads of other technologies yet they couldn't even set up a propperly functional Linux workstation. Don't try to evangelize people. Richard Stallman might be a very clever programmer, but he's a dick. Pay more attention to the likes of Allan Cox and Linus Torvalds if you must, because they're much more ponderate and much less ideological. Listen more than you speak. Try to learn from everyone and everything. Just filter out the crap.

Which leads me to the last topic of this pointless romp:

7 - DON'T TRUST THE SHIT YOU READ ON THE INTERNET

It's great that we have tools like search engines to help us out when we're in trouble. It's great that there are many nice communities in which people discuss and troubleshoot situations similar to those we usually find ourselves in. It's nice to be able to talk to much more experienced guys that'll sometimes gladly help us out.

But as with everything on a public medium such as the Internet, there are lots of misleading comments that can confuse new users. Solutions like magic chmod's and 'you need to be root to do this' are everywhere, and while they might provide a quick and dirty solution to some problems, they present much higher threats than the original problems ever could.

When you need to fix something, first make sure you've read the official docs and that you have a good grasp of the underlying concepts before trying something someone suggested on the net. Most of the times, if you do so, you'll be able to figure out the problem by yourself and maybe write a solution of your own so you can help others.

--

Well, that's about it. Hopefully, there'll be more such articles around, so if you enjoyed this one but hated my other articles, stick around some more. Faggot.

Ano novo, caralho!

2009-02-02T15:13:00.000-08:00

Hello, faggots. Long time no see.

I was about to be convinced that life isn't all about bizarre porn and making enemies on the intertubes. Those were happy times that, albeit short in length, filled me with an unforeseen sense of happiness and joy. Too bad I decided to quit my failed attempt at quitting my computer addiction 2 long hours after I started.

2 hours away from any device connected to the Internet. I was deliberately computer-free. I even considered shaving. Time stretched. Minutes felt so long that my constant awareness of the aging process vanished and I felt young again. I considered doing things like going out for a walk; maybe even talking to my neighbors. My goal was to stay away from computers until I didn't feel like I needed them so much. I wanted to keep my self from wasting my time writing cryptic shell scripts and harassing people online. I wasn't going to engage in any kind of computer-related activity. Not a single command line. Not one harsh comment on some youtube retard's channel. No being racist/fascist/homosexual/homophobic/pedophiliac/bitterly rude/sarcastic... nothing. No posting as 'anonymous coward'. No fiddling with my firewalls for some kicks. Linux was something I would not have any kind of exposure to; save when absolutely necessary - like at work or when I needed to get something useful done.

At first, life seemed empty. Why the fuck would I want to talk to my neighbors anyway? Also, why the fuck would I go outside just for the sake of doing it? First, my neighbors are computer-illiterate people. Second, the streets are filled with computer-illiterate people that have nothing to add to any kind of interesting conversation. I had plenty of reasons to stay home, mess around with my awesome, fresh Fedora 10 install and... See? Whenever I'm not doing anything cool I fall back to sitting in front of the computer absorbing more information than I can handle. And that was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

That didn't mean, though, that I'd just greet everyone with a smile and ask them stupid shit about their trivial lives. I was trying to get away from my addiction, not to make uninteresting friends. So, my house being filled with hundreds of books, my single most atrractive alternative was to grab one and read it from cover to cover. That meant, of course, that none of my computer books were eligible and I'd have to resort to my father's classic literature. Needless to say, none such literature contained anything regarding TCP/IP, Linux, *nixes or anything relevant. I burned them all for this sacrilege. Such heresy!

I thought that getting drunk would be a good idea, so I bought a fuckton of beer and started drinking. Drinking sucks when you can't be morally abusive towards unfavoured minorities. There was no point in furthering my mind into inebriation.

I was about to turn my video game on when I remembered it had an Ethernet interface which, albeit unused at that point provided enough mechanisms to get me back online. Instead, I just turned on the TV and proceeded to look for female nudity. I did not find any, but I did find a channel that featured a fine assortment of female asses bouncing about my screen. That was when I thought that maybe living without computers wasn't that bad.

Until I recognized one of the semi-naked women on the TV from one of my porn vids. Why would I bother looking at her posing as a model of sorts when I can furiously masturbate to videos of her being anally raided? Why would I even bother to listen to whatever crap she has to say under one of her many aliases - especially the one she doesn't use in her porn career? Also, for every hot chick on TV there's about a week worth of shit music, spam and boring, fat TV hosts. Also, they're all computer-illiterate and couldn't operate a simple calculator if their lives depended on it.

So, all the books I had sucked. TV sucked even more. Beer wasn't the same thing without being able to irresponsibly attack the innocent. I couldn't even go for a walk because it was raining like Hell and I'm not too fond of my neighborhood either. My friends - real life friends, you fucking douchebags - were all online and could be easily reached through the Interbutts. None of my offline home appliances runs Linux. I look like shit and women tend to find me utterly repulsive upon 5 minutes of exposure to my superior intellect. I couldn't even masturbate because all my porn was on my hdd. I couldn't play Civilization III. My porn was not available. If I got drunk and couldn't say anything to degrade people on the net I'd die of boredom. I've beat every game I have for my console many times. Women hate me because I'm ugly and I treat them like they're inferior creatures. I'm not gay, but even if I were, I wouldn't get laid either, for the same reasons I don't get to bang most chicks. There was absolutely nobody around whose morale I could diminish and abuse. My porn laid at my encrypted partitions. My neighbors were listening to shit nigger music. Damn it, even getting robbed was out of question because it was raining so much that all the niggers were hiding in their shitholes. I couldn't show my dick to random people on the internet. I couldn't read slashdot. I couldn't log on to any of my linux boxes at work. Damn, I couldn't even log on to my own linux box. Also, my porn wasn't at all available.
...
...
... porn wasn't available...
...
... pr0n...
...
...
... niggers...
...
...
...
...
...
... because I have a small cock that I named Bruce ...
...
...
...
... they tend to be overtly verbose too...
...
...
...
... since all the porn is there...
...
...
...
...
...
... but she's a bitch anyway and I hate her...
...
...

Then I woke up from this jovial dream of mine. I grabbed me some beer and turned on the PC. Then I sat back, insulted a handful of people, wanked copiously, watched the BME Pain Olympics, wanked some more, signed on to youtube to insult more people, replied to delicious hate mail, acted like a jerk, tried some shell features I'd just heard about, wanked and fell asleep.
It was a bad day. =/

Random rant

2008-12-21T17:21:00.000-08:00

Hello, me. It's me again. Nice talking to myself.
Good news: I've finally updated this piece of shit blog. Bad news: I have nothing to share. Thankfully though, I can pull out a lot of random rants and they'll probrably sound better than my previous ones.

For starters, I'm quite disappointed with Microsoft (again), for their lack of documentation on their products (once again). I think the CEO - who's probrably not Steve Ballmer - at MS thinks everyone has homogeneous environments in which every fucking machine runs Windows. Fortunately enough, this is not true and we can all have our dignity safely maintained. On the other hand, whenever you have to integrate something that's not been coded by MS into an AD-based Kerberos realm you have to resort to every sort of hideous technical improvisations your mind might be up to. Honestly, why the fuck would you adopt a fine protocol stack such as Kerberos into your AAA infrastructure if you're not willing to follow any kind of well-stablished standard? You could at least provide decent documentation so that people more accustumed to the likes of finer OS's (read Unix-based) won't get completely lost in translation. Why the hell do you do that, MS? It won't make large companies get rid of their Unix systems. It'll probrably get them to hate your products.
Reading all the Kerberos RFC's and MIT's whitepapers is not enough for you to understand how things are tied up in Microsoft's Active Directory infrastructure. This is bullshit. I've heard they're moving away from Kerberos on their following AD releases and I'm quite happy about it. Kerberos does not deserve the bad name MS gives it.
I've read many documents - by companies such as Red Hat - and I could clearly notice that everything they wrote about on the damn papers was discovered after thorough reverse engineering. Fuck that, Microsoft. Things have changed. And, by the way, network protocols are simply the easiest things to reverse-engineer. Stop being such possessive bitches about your piece of shit application layer code. It's fucking worthless.

So, the other day I was talking about music with my friends. Dammit. I never knew music was such a serious biznez. Fuck you all, faggots. I don't give a shit about artistic merit. I like awesome music. Morbid Angel rules all. Oh, and art sucks.
Seriously. I've seen every kind of dipshit on the internet posting self-shot pictures of themselves all over and saying it's art. Same goes for music. Hey, faggots, listen: I don't give a shit about your stupid attitude. I don't care about your stupid pictures. I don't care about your ideas. If you have so many great ideas, why the fuck don't you write a book? I listen to awesome music. I don't listen to gay poetry. Fuck this sentimental crap. The only way I'll pay attention to your lyrics in a positive light is if they're about bombing fucking Iran. Now, keep your sentimental chichat for emo girls on the internet. Also, this "Hard Rock-meets -Fabio" shit has gone way too far already. We need more cars and less trees. We need more frag grenades and less iPods. We need more hackers and less faggots. Worthless fags.

The other day I was waiting for my bus. I do it every day, so it's no big deal for me. Only this day was a bit different. It had rained for about 4 days straight; mercilessly. But at that particular moment it wasn't raining at all. Not a single drop of water. If I drooled for about 5 minutes I'd probrably get a higher pluviometric rating than that piece of shit excuse of a storm that was going on. Still, a hideously gigantic, fat, enormously ugly bitch had her umbrella held straight up in its battle position. Fuck. No one else could see the busses coming because she was about 192cm tall, fat, ugly and completely oblivious to the fact that it wasn't fucking raining. Needless to say, folks at that bus stop were only able to see what the fuck was going on once the bitch left. And when she did leave, I honestly thought to myself:"I hope this bus fucking explodes."

That's about it.
This blog sucks. Bye.

Brazilians are selfish bastards

2008-05-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

Picking up somewhat where my previous post left, I'll now rant about how I'd much rather have to go through hundreds of pages of geeks trying to prove how their e-penises are larger than the next guy's than to have no user feedback at all. Even though sites like IMDB and Amazon do tend to have a bunch of annoying users that'll pretty much make a fuzz of epic proportions out of things as simple as reviewing a damn music CD, it is indeed useful - all things considered - to read other people's opinions about stuff that you're interested in buying or downloading - or eating, or shoving up your ass... what the fuck ever.

Take Black Sabbath as an example. Black Sabbath has some quite easily-distinguishable cathegories of fans. There are the purists who will pretty much bash anything from 1980-onwards. There are the classic Dio fans. Damn, there are even Tony Martin fanboys. And there are other, weirder fans as well. Each of these will review records from different periods in Black Sabbath's history according to their own crooked and biased point of view on what consists the ideal Sabbath sound. It is therefore relatively simple to understand what exactly is being praised or criticized, provided you can figure to which kind of loony the reviewer belongs. Even all the bitching and all the whining are helpful for anyone with half a brain and some interest on the subject, because they at least give you some insight about the product.

That being said, consider a large, succesful Brazilian e-commerce website named after a watercraft used to sneak up on others (and bomb 'em too) beneath sea level. They have an immense variety of products, decent customer service, a well designed website - I hate me for having to say that, really - and all users have the option to comment on the stuff they buy as well. But this is rarely used. Unless the product is alarmingly bad - in which case it's probrably obvious right from the looks of it - no one will bother to comment on average or good products. And that sucks a lot of balls. I mean, I don't need my goddamn socks to be a super modern product that runs a modified version of the Linux 2.6 kernel to keep my bodly odours at stake -and that has built-in support for IEEE-compliant peripherals and runs native CPS-3 code. It's okay if they're average, and it would be nice if anyone who has already bought a particular brand of said socks told me just how average they really are. Naturally, you wouldn't buy something just because some anonymous jerk on the internet told you to do so. If you're that kind of dipshit, your house is probrably filled with Apple appliances and you should just fucking quit the internet.

It's called cooperation. Our government already rapes us everyday all with the fucking abusive taxes and obvious apathy. If we, as a people, as a minimally uniform cultural cell, don't help each other out, we're most certainly doomed to keep being raped by politicians and marketing executives alike. For as long as we exist.

That's why p2p doesn't work here quite as well as it works on civilized nations. People here just want to leech. The only case in which they won't leech off of a bittorrent tracker is if said tracker is private and requires a minimum upload/download ratio. But that is considered a hassle by selfish Brazilian users who have no idea how costly and complex it is to maintain a bittorrent tracker or indexing service. The least you can do is share the shit you download, motherfucker. It's not like people are stealing from you, since you've only been able to download it in the first place because someone shared it. That's why I preffer downloading anything from bittorrent than HTTP servers, even if there are just a couple of seeders. I feel bad about abusing a webserver's bandwidth while contributing with absolutely nothing. Unless of course the people running the server insist on raping me with all kinds of abusive ads, in which case I actually download tons of crap that I don't care about, just so they have their ad revenues get tighter.

People here often forget - or have never been aware of - that the only thing that makes the internet good is that we can - and should - share stuff for free. It's a collaborative effort. The only remotely similar effort we have here are those hideous, disgraceful email crap everyone ubiquitously receives every damn minute. Stop that already. It adds nothing to the medium nor to us; and it only fucks up mail servers and users' mailboxes alike. If that's as close as you can get to really sharing interesting content over the web, jump headfirst into the first fire you see and make sure you don't come out alive.

If you're not willing to be a polite, civilized internet user then just get the fuck out. Please.

Top 5 websites you're better off without

2008-05-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

Ever since the dawn of times the Internet's been filled with ridiculous quantities of dreadful material like child porn, bomb recipes, racist Doom wad files and whatnot. Back in the days of the good ol' BBS's, one could easily become a domestic terrorist by downloading a fuckton of poorly written txt files that rigorously depicted how you could blow your neighbor's mailbox, rape his 5 yo daughter, obtain his credit card number and buy weapons with it, lockpick your way into his car and proceed to Mc Donald's, where you would then vandalize the restroom, eat for free and then quietly go back home to download some Doom mod in which instead of shooting alien monsters from Hell, your sole objective wass to rid the world of every minority other than D&D nerds and goths - all the while using the poor bastard's phone line to dial to some guy's modem somewhere in Latvia. Those were the days. You could also learn about stack overrides and heap overflows, many flavours of Assembly language, C++, Lisp, Unix, TCP/IP, cooking, homebrewing and combat airplanes. But even though mastering those subjects could eventually raise your status among your nerd friends to some sort of 1337 superhero, it would hardly put your face on the frontline of every news network broadcast worldwide and make you the über boss of the nerd community.
Newsgroups weren't any different. Actually, by being centralized repositories of hazardous material, they actually made it quite easy for anyone to find whatever manifestation of evil he or she desired to indulge his or herself with. The World Wide Web didn't make any efforts towards thwarting the creation of the Antichrist that the modern Internet would later become either. What it did was actually providing an even easier, more user-friendly and cost-effective way for people to access the worst shit the world has produced. And it has indeed lived up to its blasphemous fame. If there's anyone to blame for how much the Internet (generally) sucks, it's the people involved in the development of HTTP.
I compiled the following list with the intention of putting up what I find to be the most hideous, awful examples of how technology and (sometimes) anonimity combined can produce weapons so deadly that the UN would demand the Internet to be shut down - had only they'd known how teh intrabuttz is serious biznez lulz. Feel free to contribute if so you wish. Onto the list:

#5: IMDB's discussion boards.
IMBD stands for Internet Movie Database and it's actually a great website if you're looking for very specific information about movie titles and it has a huge, active community that often contributes to the site; including movie industry insiders. The idea is awesome and their database is quite large, which makes up for a very handy tool when deciding what will be your next DVD acquisition.
All is fine until you register and start reading some of the discussions found on each and every page. They provide a dedicated discussion board for every title and even though they're quite well moderated the stuff you're to find there is certainly the work of the Antichrist manifesting itself through the intrawebz.

The rants range from geeks raging on each other because of obscure details that any non-name your movie franchise here - geek wouldn't even notice in most cases, to outrageously pointless flame wars in which users accuse each other of racism, sexism, pedophilia and whatnot.

While the first case is certainly more harmless than the latter, it makes asking about trivial information about movies a real pain. Suppose you just watched, say, a Star Wars film and you didn't quite grasp some of the stuff. So, you log in to IMDB, go the respective title's page and start a friendly and polite thread asking, for example: "Hello guys. I've just watched The Return of the Jedi, and since I'm new to Star Wars there were some things I didn't get. First, why is it called the Return of the Jedi? Where were the Jedi before they returned? Who are they? etc etc etc". You'll certainly find followups such as "WAT? UR NU 2 STAR WURZ?? LIEK 30 YERS AFTRE?? LOL GTFO". These are okay, as long as you ignore them. The problem really arises when someone actually tries to answer your questions. He or she will start a whole new thread within yours, because it won't take long until legions upon legions of Star War geeks will try to debunk each other's arguments, providing lots of references to obscure Expanded Universe material and pseudo-scientific statements to justify whatever science-defiling question some other geek will inevitably bring up to the brawl. And the thread grows to span over more than 200 pages of passionate fanboy digressions, all the while you're left clueless as the answers to your otherwise simple questions are not delivered and the whole point of the thread is lost between geek wars. To exemplify this, I went to IMDB's entry for that poor excuse of a movie called Waterworld for some laughs. The first thread on the board was something like "100 stupid things about Waterworld". Then, about 9 thousand pages after, some people were still discussing the importance of paper in Waterworld's (lame) dystopian future. I shit you not.

The second type of discussion though, is certain to cause even Satan himself to feel uncomfortable. These discussions are more likely to spawn in the boards of controversial flicks such as Brokeback Mountain or American History X and they tend to have no clear purpose right from the start. They'll mostly start with something among the lines of "WTF THIS MOVIE IS PURE *beep*" or "FOR ALL U HATERS: GO DIE IN A FIRE OF AIDS YOU *beep*S" and are usually followed up by 400 or so similarly constructed one-liners until everyone is offended, outraged, and threatening to beat the crap out of each other in real life. Because their opinions on a movie differ. Seriously. Not to mention that often some guy will ressurect a thread that's been dead for years because he feels the urge to make his point clear without even reading the whole thing.

So, while IMDB is a great source of information - which of couse, like anything else on the nets (or any other media for that matter) should always be taken with a grain of salt - its discussion boards should be avoided at all costs. Except if you intend to be marvelled at how movie geeks seem to take their shit too seriously.

http://www.imdb.com/

#4: CTRL + ALT + DEL

Ctrl+Alt+Del is a terribly unfunny webcomic about gaming and internet-related shit. While these are subjects that I, being such an enormous geek, certainly appreciate, those comics are rather lame. I also like some webcomics quite a lot but CTRL+ALT+DEL's utter lack of creativity fails to get me every time. I swear I approached the comics without any sort of bias, but heck, this creative trainwreck is just painfully awful. And, as if his bland attempts at humor weren't bad enough, Mr. Tim Buckley decided he should have a full-featured forum dedicated entirely to his piece of shit art. And there are lots and lots of fanboys who gather on the forums to blow Tim's e-penis every time he releases a new comic, in a clear display that the Internet People are indeed lame.

While some tasteless idiots might argue that the comics are not that bad, the forums alone qualify Tim's narcisistic and egocentric website to feature in this list.

Unless you're in for an unfunny critique of gaming and internet-related culture, Ctrl+Alt+Del has nothing to offer.

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/

#3: Encyclopedia Dramatica

ED has its share of great articles and images and it serves an interesting cause (teh lulz). I have actually read a great number of articles there and have laughed compulsively as well. But if you spend enough time on the site you'll soon notice the huge amount articles about the most irrelevant livejournal users which adds nothing besides useless bullshit to an otherwise great website. I won't go as far as ranting about ED's users' tendency to warrant themselves more importance than they deserve, specially on IRC, because that doesn't fuck up the wiki more than the pointless articles I've mentioned.

Also, if you're not interested in Internet culture, nonsensical humor and tasteless articles bordering the absurd, chances are reading anything from ED will cause you to choke to death.

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/

#2: 4chan

Dubbed by Fox News as the Internet Hate Machine (seriously), 4chan embodies almost everything bad about the Internet. For the unadvised visitor, it might seem like it aggregates every kind of racist fuck, terrorist wannabe, hacker, political extremist and whatnot, but it's actually a haven for frustrated teenagers, which provides amounts of escapism many orders of magnitude greater than any video game ever has. Because its main board, /b/ (the random board), forces posts to be anonymous, a myth regarding the figure of anonymous has evolved into that of some kind of Internet vigilante gang in what can be considered the lamest phenomenom ever to have been spewed by the web. And I won't even do more than just mention those ridiculous protests against a wacky Hollywood yuppie cult, becuase it's just embarassing to think that I know about them and where they came from.

The quality of posts in /b/ varies greatly, but all of them will inevitably contain copious amounts of old shit that is repeated over and over to the point that anyone not in need of appearing all cool and hype to depressed nerdy teenagers would be repelled off of the board upon immediate contact.

There are other boards at 4chan, but nobody really gives a shit about them. So if communicating to a gang of lame teenagers - who, for some reason, seem to be utterly fascinated with Japanese crap - is not exactly your thing, you should just avoid 4chan and pretend it doesn't exist.

http://www.4chan.org/

#1: Every youtube celebrity's youtube channel

If there's one thing that keeps 4chan (or any other chan for that matter, anonib included) from being the king amongst the most ridiculous Internet communities, is that at least those kids mostly remain anonymous - and actually enjoy being so. Youtube superstars, on the other hand, not only rape our brains with their names, personal websites and other assorted shit, but they also rape our eyes and ears with video footage of themselves ranting about serious shit like how the media should forget about Britney Spears.
The Internet provides you a fair amount of anonimity, which is great. Web forums that require registration inflict a small penalty on that anonimity by requiring some degree of identification before you can post your useless shit for others to see. But you can hide behind your alias and provide as little information about yourself as you wish. That will keep you from being harassed in real life by people who think internet discussion boards are serious business. This is how the internet works. Even though your machine has a unique public IP address, there's no way anyone can tell who you are by that address alone. Of course your ISP has billing information that can indeed trace your ass back from your IP, but they aren't likely to deliver that shit to some random guy claiming to be a cop.
Now, eat lots of potatoes, eggs and bacon. Wait some hours. Then shit on your left hand and smear the shit all over the great infrastructure that provides you anonimity on the Internet, while you shove your right hand down your throat. Not only that, record some video of yourself describing the experience and put it on the web.
I fucking rest my case.

http://www.youtube.com/

Vote me for President in 2010

2008-04-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

I have this huge need; this enormous necessity; this suffocating urge to be Brazil's next President. Everybody knows I'm the best bet in terms of candidates, since I'm simply the coolest, smartest, most talented individual ever to have been born in this shithole of a nation, and that I told God himself to take a seat and shut the fuck up because he was a gigantic newbie at all things divine - of which I'm naturally an expert, given my godly nature.

Secondly, you must not think of voting for me as a favour you'd be doing to me; I'm the one who's doing you a favour by agreeing to represent your lazy nigger butts. Seriously. I hate having to teach you how to do it right every fucking time.

Also, I'm not a member of any party. I am my own party, called the 1337est Coolest Most Awesome Kickass Metal Übermensch Party of One Which Consists Only of Myself Which is More Than Enough Because I Kick So Much Ass, or The 1CMAKMÜPOWCOMWMTEBIKSMA for short - notice the awesome Metal Umlaut in my party's name; it has to be the most elite of 'em all. That means I don't have to deal with greedy partisans and that I make the rules and follow them whenever I see fit. That alone should convince you that I'm the best candidate ever to exist and that my party owns every other in existence. My party actually makes any other party look like a mere congregation of clueless monkeys looking at IEEE papers.

I also have many important things to do as a President. Many people would assume that I'm some sort of separatist asshole, which is not only untrue, but completely antagonic to my ideas and beliefs. The first thing I'll do as a President will be to claim the whole South American territory for our great nation, except for the French Guiana (aka. AIDS Hell), which, by being France's shit repository, is infected with and spreads all sorts of AIDS and faggotry; and we don't need that shit here. I would also annex Poland to our territory, just to keep things historically accurate.

After I fix myself the biggest country in the World second only to that piece of shit hellhole named Russia, I will then make some substancial modifications to our laws and regulations. The first thing I'll do will be to exempt every citizen from taxes - except the niggers, jews, native indians, women, rednecks, argentines (who are actually niggers in disguise), children, old people, dogs, Uruguayans (who are an even nastier kind of argentines), Chileans (see native indians), muslims, sand niggers, anyone who has ever wore a Corinthians shirt, vegetables, Nintendo Wii owners, wiggers, wapanese, homosexuals, Poles, christians and /b/tards, who will have to give away everything they earn. That's a lot of money, considering these groups of individuals will have to work 20 hours per day and would spend the other four procreating so that we never run out of cheap labour - and I will be a billionaire in a month's worth of caring and loving rulership.

Bolivians, Venezuelans and Peruans will be executed, because they can't do anything besides blaming their own fucktarded problems on ourselves. Also, there will be too many people in my great nation already, and these guys would make the place look and smell bad. Paraguayans would be enslaved and forced to produce hashish and marijuana throughout their entire existences - a short period of time, if you ask me, because I, being the liberal leader that I am, will make those substances legal for anyone not pretaining to the aforementioned groups, so the poor bastards will have to work really hard. Also, it will be mandatory to consume the booze of your choice every other day, and failing to rape sexy lolis will get you canned.

Fuck that 'shoot first ask later' bullshit. My police will shoot first and laugh later. If you go out on the streets you will be shot. You'll live where you work at, and even protruding your ugly faces out of the windows will result in being banned from real life.

Accessing Orkut and MSN will be crimes punishable with death. Actually, people won't be allowed to access any other site besides this very blog. And I'll personally charge my laz0rz and toast the shit out of them if they visit this marvelous website and don't bother to comment. Mobile and fixed telephony will be prohibited as well, since most calls are just piece of shit attempts at selling junk or shitty and unimportant personal chitchat.

Also, porn will be free and highly available to everyone and will be a mandatory discipline in every school since the first grade. Individuals who fail at pr0n classes will be thrown in a pit and forced to eat my cat's shit - consider this a blessing, given the infamity of the offense.

Last but not least, my Minister of All the Stuff I Don't Waste My Time With will be Monica Mattos, the smartest woman in Brazil - quite hot too, if you don't mind the anal fisting and zoophilia films she's done. Every TV station will be forced to broadcast her lesbian movies for at least 90% of their time on air. The other 10% of air time will consist of educational videos showing the role of women in a highly civilized and socially evolved nation such as mine.

lol sparkling wiggles

2008-04-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

Get a job, sparkling wiggles. No really, they drive me nuts.
(in case you didn't notice, the first sentence contains a link, stupid newfag).
If you post this video on Youtube, you will not only be insta-perma-banned, but you'll also be spanked by two million angry niggers and gangraped afterwards. You'll also instantly generate a fuckton of comments about how much of a sparkling racist motherfucker you are and that you should either die or be canned. Seriously. Lawl.

n00bs

2008-04-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

Sup, bitches.
I'm living in a small town now, as all of you must know by the time being. I'm also working at my father's school. They teach basic computing 5k1llz here and, needless to say, every single student is an über n00b. You don't have to be a 1337 h4x0r to not be a n00b, but heck, these guys are even worse than the n00bness of 4chan's /b/ combined - moot included. I think I should even write the word students under quotation marks, since all these dipshits do is rub their collective e-butts against each other while they browse shit like Orkut and the such.

Some of the n00bs are children. One would often excuse their n00bness for that particular reason. I won't. That's because they're not only computer n00bs; they are also n00bs in real life, which automatically puts them about a bazillion steps bellow me in the food chain - fuck; I'd eat them if I could. They aren't very inclined towards learning either - I bet most haven't ever read a fucking book - and aren't willing to take anything seriously. While I do understand that someone who takes a MS Office course at such an early age is preparing herself to live the rest of her days typing memos for people that occasionally think, paying for studying a subject and chatting on msn instead sounds like a shitty idea to me - even considering the audiences my father targets with these piece of shit courses.

Serious Sam

2008-04-23T14:29:00.001-07:00

Ok, motherfuckers. I know I'm about 7 years late. I know I missed a lot by not playing it. I know I'm a douche. The truth is that by the time of its release, Serious Sam sounded too silly a game for my evil, satanist tastes. When I first heard the game's title I thought to myself: "whoa, what a piece of shit name. I fancy a game titled as such can't be anything but utter crap." I thought Duke Nukem was a kickass name, but Serious Sam was so bad it was derogatory. "Since Duke Nukem Forever is still a vague and distant dream"- I thought - "I'll give Serious Sam a try; and I hope it doesn't kill me with AIDS." That was about a month ago. And so, I once again put on my Internet Superhero costume, summoned the bit torrents of darkness and onwards to the dangerous land of illegal content I proudly marched. It didn't take me long - being the piece of shit virtual buccaneer that I am - to find Serious Sam readilly available for download. I got myself a copy of both The First and The Second Encounter. I installed them on my notebook as soon as I'd finished my looting, and readily started playing the first title.

Holy fucking Christ. I didn't have any positive expectations for the series, despite having read tons of positive reviews and I also knew I shouldn't expect state-of-the-art graphics. What I didn't know was that I would have to face hundreds of enemies all at once; some of them armed with rocket launchers, homing missles and what the fuck not. The combat is so good in the first two Serious Sam games, that you'll remember some of the fights long after you beat the them. You always know when you're about to face a tough fight against a massive number of nasties because you'll inevitably come across a room full of ammo, armor and health power-ups. Then, when you're fully recharged, you take a step further and chaos ensues. There are so many memorable moments that they alone make playing the games a second time worthwhile. One can't simply forget having fought over 30 wild bulls at once, all the while goat-like skeletons from hell attack you with their claws and suicide bombers charge at you from all sides. That's no exaggeration. And it gets worse. Some stages have more than 800 nasties on the normal difficulty setting. Talk about serious.

No, Serious Sam never takes itself too seriously, and while that might have put me off at the time of its release, the game's light-hearted humor was definitely something good. I didn't rofl, or lol'd once, but I certainly chuckled some times. It's not a funny game; it just doesn't take it self as seriously as say, Half Life, Quake 2 or other grandiloquent FPS's out there - ironically enough, given the series' name. That's how they manage to put you in huge scenarios filled with lots of funny but deadly foes. And that's just great.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter and its direct sequel run under a proprietary engine developed by Croteam. This engine is able to render huge rooms filled with literally hundreds of enemies without slowing even considerably old machines to a crawl. That alone makes playing the game worth the time.

The only bad thing about the Serious Sam series is Serious Sam 2. No, really.

English

2008-04-08T07:25:00.001-07:00

I post in English because I want to keep unadverted Brazilian users from reaching this website. Brazilian Internet users are usually lame assholes who'll either beg for stuff like warez and mp3's or will just bash everything they see because they lack any sense of humor. There are some places on the web where civilized Brazilian users gather to actually discuss things and share stuff, and I'm a member of a few Brazilian BB's out there. But the average Jao Da Silva which might hit this page because of some misleading google search results will most likely ruin whatever little determination I have to keep this shit up.
Sorry.

PC games that kick ass

2008-04-08T05:16:00.000-07:00

Most PC games - and video games in general - blow. Amongst the myriad of titles released every year, only a few stand out as a really worthy experience, and some of these are really great pieces of software that combine good graphics, a decent storyline and fluid gameplay. I don't usually give too much of a shit about the storyline of my games, and I can even tolerate dated graphics. As long as they let me kick serious ass and wreak havoc without being canned in real life, I'm ok with a lack of plot or ugly visuals. Of course, I don't want to spend eight hours trying to figure out how to do the most trivial stuff, or dying all the time because I have to perform two million consecutive 3 mile-long jumps across tiny platforms. It also helps if the computer-controlled characters in my party don't get killed all the time because they're stuck in corners. With these highly refined standards in mind, I'll list some of the most awesome PC games ever released.

No serious gamer in existence has lived without playing at least one title of the Quake franchise. While the second and the fourth installments in the series might feel somewhat slow compared to the others, they're still good in their own right. The frantic multiplayer experience of Quake III Arena is one of the most brutal ever released and it certainly deserves a highlight.
Everything about Q3 Arena is great. It's got a fast pace, and it looks and sounds astonishing. There's hardly any plot - as one isn't needed for a game that is 100% multiplayer-oriented - which isn't really a flaw. Every weapon has great sound effects, and they sound as mean as they look. And that's saying a lot, considering the great weapon design in the game.
Even though the graphics may look blocky for today's standards, the character models are such badasses and their taunts are very fun to watch.
Gamespot's review of Q3 Arena for the PC

If you ever wanted a game in which you could shoot both armed and unarmed civilians, raging terrorists, angry protestors, cops, game developers, dogs, cats, elephants, Gary Coleman and whatnot, then Postal 2 is the game for you. Not only does it deliver this level of awesomeness from a first-person perspective, it adds a lot more to the mix. You can piss on people - and on doughnuts that you can then offer to the boys in blue - until they puke, use cats as shotgun silencers, get rabid dogs to befriend you and attack anyone hostile to you, decapitate people and get said dogs to play catch with the severed heads and a lot more. And you get to do all of that with an arsenal of weapons that ranges from the standard FPS guns - the highlight here is the kickass Desert Eagle - to a chemical weapon - appropriately named Weapon of Mass Destruction, which you steal from Osama Bin Laden himself - that shoots an anthrax-spreading bomb, to a diseased cow head that makes people puke blood when they come in contact with the mad cow's disease-infested cloud it emanates, to your penis. Just make sure you play the 1337 version (download the patch) or you'll get severely pissed off at the annoyingly long loading times.
Gamespot's review of Postal² - Share the Pain. (Share the Pain adds MP and some fixes).

Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne are two of the greatest works of art ever produced. The original Max Payne took a little too long to be released, but every second the development team delayed was well worth the wait. It's one of the most well polished games out there. Everything in it seems just so right. And, except for the better graphics and the awesome Havok physics engine, Max Payne 2 feels and plays almost entirely like the original. It is also a direct sequel to the first game, and follows its peculiar - and awesome - sense of aesthetics, including the graphic novel-like and in-engine cutscenes.
For those unfamiliar with the series - you shouldn't be unfamiliar with Max Payne, faggot!! - this is a third person shooter in which you get to kill hundreds of goons with lots of kickass weapons and also perform some really cool stunts. The bullet-time feature - no, seriously, you've never played this game?? - is not only effective, but also looks and sounds great.
The voice acting is everything you would expect from a good film noir-like production. Max sounds just right for the bitter badass that he is and the goons have hilarious conversations. I won't even go on rambling about these two games any longer, since if you don't know them already - which is just wrong - anything I say will just spoil the experience.
Gamespot's review of the original Max Payne.
Gamespot's review of Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

more to come...