WillWybrow.com

Installing XP is becoming harder and harder these days. Vista is speading its infectious gentacles and so new hardware is being laden with it at the expense of XP compatibility.

But manufacturers are doing a reasonable job of not being ignorant cock-heads. In fact, HP have made drivers for their Compaq nx7300 that work with XP. They even have the SATA drivers that XP needs to install.

The last time I tried to slipstream drivers into an XP installation disc, it fucked up horribly, so I was loathe to try it again. Swimming in the anchorless sea of uncertainty, I gave it my second ever attempt.

And I won. I managed to create a super CD that included the requisite SATA drivers for Umberto’s ex-Vista laptop. It was a tough battle, but we got there in the end, and it was as satisfying as a million ex-Christians embracing godlessness.

I’m here at St. Pancras International, the Gateway to Europe. I stand a (barely) free man after a run-in with the law. They impounded my sexy black knife and threatened me with black man rape. Wow. I think I’ve made a real differece to the lives of those with me. Namely, elevating everyone’s heart rate when the officer mentioned, in passing, the idle threat of eighteen months of prison time.

I love my life.

Ötzi, the lovable frozen mummy, is said to have been alive nearly 5500 years ago. Since that’s just after the later bound for YECs predicting creation (about six thousand years ago), Ötzi must have been one of the descendants of Seth and Cain in the Bible, right?

I mean, this page at Wikipedia puts the Jewish creation happening in 3760 BCE. That’s 5,768 years ago. Well, this page goes on to list the names and ages and years of birth from year one (the day of creation). Well, depending on which translation of the Bible you look at, Ötzi might have been friends with Cainan and Mahalaleel, or Enos. Well, where is he in the Bible? Eh? Where?

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying things, but what I’m really driving at here is that

Young Earth Creationists are stupid.

I just want to throw in a really quick little note about technocracy… again.

Two microcosmic systems of putting men of science in power over a lot of resources (both money and manpower) have been recently portrayed by Hollywood. They are of course:

• Batman
• Iron Man

And let’s not forget Spider-Man, who was a gifted scientist (granted, that didn’t play much of a part in his heroism in the films, but in the original comics, he invented his own webslingers).

Now, I’m not saying that anything like this would definitely happen, but just look at what has already been achieved without technological advancement at the forefront of the world leaders’ priorities.

Just give it a chance.

I, uh, watched this mad film just now, “Cashback.” And it’s mad. Like, really mad.

It’s about a few things really. Some prevalent themes are: artistic oggling; female nudity (and one could argue that this and the previous item are basically the same, but they aren’t); and Sainsbury’s. Aside from these, there’s a peppering of love, insomnia and then there’s a plot built on that. Apparently, not sleeping gives people the power to magically stop time.

This was such a fucking stupid film. Nothing actually happens in it at all. Some guy with a really decent life breaks up with his girlfriend and suddenly stops sleeping. It’s about the fragility of the human emotional state, but it’s horseshit. These days, everyone (especially those of the male persuasion) is really desensitised to emotion. Everything rolls off people today, and nobody gives a shit. Oh no, you broke up with your girlfriend. Big whoop, far worse stuff happens to people all the time and who cares? Nobody. But for some reason, this really talented guy with a decent life gets granted magical powers to freeze time. It’s a big whole part of the film. At first I thought it was just a metaphor or visualisation of his daydreaming, but then he starts doing stuff in his frozen moments. And he cracks his fingers to unfreeze time. What the fuck? If there ever were a “Bernard’s Watch: the Movie,” where Bernard grows into a closet homosexual starving artist trying to make it in art school, this film is it. And he works at Sainsbury’s (which is portrayed completely unrealistically). Arrgh, the stupidity of this film is elevating my blood pressure a ton.

I think it’s safe to say that I didn’t “get” the point of this film. Obviously. Why does he have magical powers? Why, with these magical powers, does he not just take stuff from the tills at his work? Fucking hell, I always wished I could freeze time and dip my fingers into the cash drawers at work. No, all he does is strip women and draw fucking pictures of them. Yeah, all well and good if you can draw, but why not take a bunch of cash as well? Jesus, it’s not more morally reprehensible to nick a few hundreds of pounds from a multi-million pound corporation than it is to undress women without their permission and draw pictures of them. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FILM TRYING TO SAY?!

I need something to reduce my blood pressure, quick…

Oh yeah, that’s right, my superfast fibre optic internet connection. I watched Iron Man today for the first time in reasonable quality since the cinema. That’s not to say I didn’t try; the telesync (should this be capitalised?) version was awful and the VHS screener was slightly better. It was amazing, but Downey Jr. looks different every time I watch the film. Good actor, though.

So, I am pushing for financial contributions to create a really sexy Linux-based server for the house. It would store the house’s shareworthy files to save four things: 1) personal space on hard drives; 2) the need to download things more than once (which would piss our ISP off, I’m sure, all the unnecessary bandwidth); 3) the transfer of files to and from PCs (requiring everyone’s computer to be on and someone there to grant access) and 4) the insecurity of personal shares on computers.

I want to write a bittorrent program that lets users submit torrent requests and it handles them automatically and fairly (queuing users according to past use, for example). But I won’t do it without a server, so in order to encourage me to program and develop my skills, any personal donations of computer equipment (quad core processors, SATA hard drives etc.) or hard cash would be appreciated incredibly.

But without a server, we’ll probably end up with a shitty network hard drive.

Nine of your Great British Pounds, every month, could be forked out for a lot of things. Maybe you could sponsor some charity? That’s great and all, but why not spend it on something a little more tangible? Regular expenditure like that could also just as easily be going into a savings account, but £9 is a little bit, well… little for that. It’s better off spent, I’d say.

City of Heroes

What if you could design your own superhero from scratch, with incredible flexibility? What if you then took your superhero around the streets and districts of Paragon City, a bustling metropolis rife with crime? What if your hero earned new powers during his or her lifetime, being able to take on more threatening villains? What if your hero could team up with other heroes on a short-term basis to take on even bigger tasks? And what if your hero was inducted into a SuperGroup, with long-term benefits and allies and a chance to build up a super base?

I’ve never played an MMORPG before. RPGs in themselves are a little daunting from the point of view of a player who is used to running in, shooting up the place and moving on, with little regard for what is the core aspect in an RPG: the character improving with experience.

I did enjoy my brief stint with Morrowind, the third Elder Scrolls installment, and Pokémon is always good fun. But this is number one on the list of MMORPGs, an otherwise untapped genre.

Well, to start with, there is a lot of negativity associated with MMOs that comes from the poor public opinion of World of Warcraft and its players (I have heard some awful, prejudiced things). It could be because of the attention drawn by the people who devote their lives to playing it, but I don’t want to discuss the merits or drawbacks of that game, I want to talk about this one.

I’m going to give a quick run-down of gameplay. If you’re a big player of this kind of game and something that I’m explaining is obvious to you because it’s in every RPG without fail, just remember what I’ve kept saying over and over: first time, here, so bear the fuck with me.

Gameplay

As a hero, you’re registered with the police force of Paragon City and thrown in. There are two things you can do after the tutorial: find some crime and stop it or proceed to your contacts to be given missions.

You get assigned missions via contacts in the city. From detectives to scientists, everybody has got something for you to take care of. The burden of responsibility is on you, but so are the rewards that hard work brings. On your travels about the city’s districts, you’ll see crime in progress, including street brawls, muggings and break-ins.

To kill the bad guys, you use the superpowers you picked at character creation, powers that come from pool sets that expand with more choices as you increase in level.

One of my favourite things about this game is the come-and-go feel of teaming up. Anyone can form a casual team of people of similar levels. What’s more is that people level up at approximately the same rate. Some will steamroller ahead, but most people will be within a range of two or three levels over a long time, meaning you will team up with them over and over. You’ll start seeing familiar characters in the way you’d see familiar people around you in real life. Teaming up in itself is fair; experience and goodies are split fairly between all participants.

People might not be the most intelligent you’ll ever meet, but they sure are friendly. The new and inexperienced are receptive to advice and the veterans are happy to dish it out. You won’t be shouted at for not knowing everything there is to know about the game, and everyone is very polite, offering congratulations and other little courtesies that you don’t often find in online communities.

This is Tom Hanks saying, if you’re going to pick an MMORPG to play, why not this one?

My new house, Fort Will, also known by some as the Will Wybrow Experience Train and Willtopia, but identified by most not by its name, but by its belief system, as Fort Atheism (or Fort Atheist), is really nice. We have an abundance of space and seating and apples.

We have a sixteen-tone doorbell and a cable line already installed. I have a gigantic ground-floor bedroom with space for a hundred people or more to sleep in it with me, and that’s just the windowsill.

There are a handful of problems. One is that a housemate’s guest broke the house on our first day. He was swatting a moth with a spatula and smashed a lightbulb… But we repaired the damage with a new, energy-saving lightbulb (with which we should fill the house). Another problem is the doorbell is right outside my room… Our microwave is a Class IV doomsday device of mass slaughter. And the final problem is that a strange man wearing a turban walked through our garden this morning. I plan to set a trap to capture and interrogate him.

We have nice new things like sofas and a fridge. We have some unusual new things like the carpet’s pattern. But most of all, we have a house, a fort, a headquarters, a nerve centre. We have a base of operations for the largest venture yet: the Year of Atheism; the progression of Warwick Atheists in the beginning of their second full year.