http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7695470.stm

“The president of the National Black Police Association has called for positive discrimination to boost the number of black and Asian officers.”

Positive discrimination = racism.

How about hiring the BEST officers for the job, not purely because they are black, white, brown, slightly yellow, slanty, mildly stained etc…

Hiring more black / asian police officers will surely not automatically curb the racist values of indiduals in the force, that comes down to re-education and ultimately some people will not be changed. The bad thing about this though is this is perfectly racist against the majority. No one should be hired purely because they are black or asian in the same way that no one should be hired over anyone else for being white. You can’t have things both ways, it is RACIST to suggest that more of any colour of skin should be hired for any particular job to balance numbers out.

It might be true that black/asian/whatever officers other than white people have a hard time in the forces and I have no doubt that there are a lot of racist bigotted wankers throughout the force making life a misery for a lot of people. This is clearly wrong, however the behaviour that this guy is suggesting is very much of the same ilk, forcing an institution or business to actively go out of its way to hire not the best people for the job, just the ones that aren’t white.

As soon as all this race bullshit fucks off I’ll be so much happier, people are people, respect is earnt, no one is perfect and positive discrimination is no better than racism in the opposite direction.

These things are a pathetic waste of my time. I was in work the other day and wanted to setup a new payee online to stick a few pounds into. Got to the end of the process and was prompted for my “security card reader” which I did not have on me. Strange that I wouldn’t take such a device around with me in my pocket and seeing as I’m not homosexual I don’t happen to have a man bag.

So that was the end of that idea, no online banking for me if I’m not sat at my own home computer and haven’t happened to lose the card reader device. However, one call to the “actionline” for the respective bank in question and a few checks later that are easier to guess at and less secure than the steps on the internet, I’m in, they’ve created the payee for me and I’ve made the payment.

So er… what use is the internet for banking in a roaming fashion anymore? The grand sum of fuck all that’s what. On the net I’m required to enter my online ID number (10 chars), 3 characters from a 4 character pin and 3 characters from a 8 letter password. Previously when you logged in you’d be prompted for 2 more characters from your password for the extra functionality of creating payees and such, this has been replaced by the card reader.

When I rang up the bank I was asked for my account number and sort code, both on the card, my date of birth, freely available on Facebook or any other site and a couple of letters from my password. End of. I fail to see the point in tightening the security any more online when you’re already asked for 3 enter unique pieces of information that are not printed anywhere, as opposed to the 3 checks on the phone where 2 items are freely available and the other check is just a couple of characters from the same password used online.

Nice one banks, restrict internet banking over SSL even more than it already was but leave the phone lines completely open to abuse. Next time I need to do anything online I’ll just ring up and have it done in the time it’d take me to login in a much less secure fashion. Hell I might even give my details to my partner so she can do it for me; just to test if the voice ringing up isn’t male actually makes a difference.

Losers.

Fucking hell can they not get shit all right?

After reinstalling my entire OS today I’m having the same trouble listed in another article about the HDTV display just plain not working at all.

I’ve gone to their forums in a longshot attempt to get someone’s help on this, so I get there and sign up. No conformation email arrives but I am able to login anyway, ok great. So I look around to start a forum thread and realise it’s logged me out somehow.

I hit the login button, I’m taken away to their main support portal. I login, it dumps me back to the main support portal. Ok I’m logged in. I navigate back to the link for the forums. I click it and it opens another tab on my browser for the forums. On which I’M NOT FUCKING LOGGED IN, AGAIN. There seems to be absolutely no way around this at all, its completely fucked in Firefox, IE and Chrome. So it’s not just me being unlucky with a browser.

The whole cycle is a retarded fucking loop which puts you completely back to where you started from, without being logged in. They’re the biggest bunch of unhelpful, USELESS PRICKS I’ve had to deal with in a LONG LONG TIME. FUCK YOU ATI/AMD YOU CUNTS.

Just a small edit here: I’m not going mad, it does the same thing for Rag. Check out this video of my troubles: Video

Are a bunch of theiving cunts.

I recently bought some items from the US.  I knew delivery would take a while and I also knew that I would most likely get stung by a customs charge. Nothing you can do, just deal with it, I can live with that.

Anyhow a month later, one bloody month later, I get a note from Royal Fail saying that they have a parcel with a charge (£15.17) which has to be paid before delivery.  Fucking finally, it’s arrived! Charge seems a bit steep but what the hey.

One short trip to the sorting office later I check the parcel and the sticky tags inform me that 1) the customs charge was £7.17p 2) The parcel actually arrived at the sorting office nearly 2 weeks ago and 3) Royal Mail charged me an £8 ‘International Handling Fee’.

Fuck. Off. Cunts.

You robbing little shits. You held my parcel for almost 2 weeks and then charged me fucking MORE than the actual customs charge itself.  Well fuck you. Next time I’ll be using UPS and my £8 will be put to good use getting my goods to me more quickly whilst helping put you out of business at the same time.

The game is apparently set in time at a period before the first Stalker game, Shadow of Chenobyl. I quite liked the first game but this instantly feels like a bit of a rip off. The terrain/levels and to some extent the actual tasks within the game are similar, if not identical and you are still required to run around in a lonely fashion covering massive distances across the map.

The stamina bar is kinda realistic in the fact that you sprint a distance and you end up standing there, just lingering around doing nothing at all whilst the bar recharges itself. Kinda pointless really… if the only point of the bar at all is to make you stand still for long periods of time I’d suggest a bit of a rethink on the principal. Its not as if they can argue walking extremely long distances across parched and sparse terrain are hardly the focal point of a good game anyway, it just adds a whole new level of boring to an already awkward control system.

The menus are unresponsive, opening up the inventory is fine, but you’ll often have to click up to 5 times on an item to get it to do what you want. Say right clicking a gun and unloading it can take a few attemps at hammering the menu just for it to respond at all, pretty pathetic. The method you have to follow to find artifacts is bollocks too, you have to use a “detector” which can be upgraded to different models in order to find the artifacts. Problem is you can’t have a weapon out at the same time as the detector (at least a main weapon) and the artifacts sometimes spawn in unreachable places.

Yesterday I found a “battery” artifact whilst on a mission that constantly spawned under a shelf of collapsed concrete. There was no way to get it out, no way to duck low enough to get the artifact when close enough to pick it up. Extremely frustrating, extremely pointless.

The major fall down though, this game is ridiculously hard even on novice setting.

After getting you to do various random tasks for the first stage of the game with plenty of obstacles that instantly kill you the game chucks you into the next stage. You’re still not really sure what you’re doing all this pointless running around for in the first place, but hey it’s a game. For some reason all the hard work and efforts of the first stage are reversed and everyone ceases to be your mate.  As as result all the services you are used to in the last level disappear and your once friends start charging you shit loads of cash to transport yourself around the map. Cash you do not have at this point of the game unless you’ve done every little fucking stupid side quest that often ends up costing you more money than you receive.

Further to this, the second stage you get dumped into puts you face to face with an enemy machine gunner. There is no choice on this path primarily, this is the way you are forced to go, this is the stage the game loads. No warning at all, no chance of avoiding the gunner, you either have to run for it and hope for the best but 99% of the time you’ll get mowed down within seconds. Even through solid objects like trees and rocks. Great programming.

In this case, of course, the correct path of action is to backpedal straight back to where you’ve come from, traverse the entire map and enter the 2nd area from a different route. This isn’t really going to be people’s logical choice of play, once you’ve completed a task and been forcefully moved on to a new point in a game most people will think that there must be some sort of “catch” to why you’re being shot up constantly. It seems strange to me that a player is tricked into dead end situation that will frustrate as they try and work out why they’re dying continously. It’s as if you’re being mocked for bothering to play the game and taking it seriously.

Needless to say it is frustrating at best trying to find a route past this obstacle in a logical fashion because it’s not actually that viable at all. No you’re not missing anything, this is by design and unless you have about 10 health packs, run for it and hammer the first aid button constantly, you’re gonna die every single time and not understand what you’re doing wrong. Also before the most current patch came out, loading times between stages for me were over a minute so the idea of “skipping” between stages were not something you’d willingly do a lot of.

The game goes one step further in the same stage. Where normally you have to basically avoid every single anomaly you come across, failing to do so on the pain of death, you are actually required to locate one that looks only slightly different and willingfully fling yourself off the top of a broken bridge into it.  This is with, of course, no prior knowledge that it will teleport you anywhere, no hint, no tips, just a weird leap of faith moment that makes no sense at all. It is a neat idea for a twist in the game, an anomaly that teleports instead of one that kills you, however, with utterly no reasoning or hinting at it’s existence it makes you wonder how smart or suicidal you have to be play this game. There is obviously no guarantee that the anomaly will not just rip you to bits like every other one, so why volunteer yourself to be flung into it?

The enemies are ridiculously good shots, even on novice, and the AI that are meant to help you are of course, total shit. If you are in range of an enemy they will shoot with 100% precision and basically take you out at the craziest of angles. As long as there is 1 pixel of you visible to the enemy’s line of sight, you will take a hit. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game wasn’t so intent on realism that nigh on every shot you take will cause you to bleed. I’ve been in situations where I’ve saved my game after a fight, not had any money or resources to buy any bandages and literally bled to death over the course of 5 entire minutes of play. The answer to this sadly is replay the current save game (assuming you save a lot) until you can pass that section without taking a hit, get lucky in other words. Sad

I don’t want excessive REALISM in a game to the point where it makes the game utterly pointless and boring to play, especially when such realism isn’t inflicted on the enemy. There is utterly no way in hell you could shoot up an enemy player such as a bandit, then sit there and wait for them to just drop dead like you do. It seems that all enemies in the game apparently must have have infinite bandages, a neat idea to inflict bleeding on the player if done sensibly, absolutely insane that it does not apply to enemies.

Some of my saved games have been reduced to literally having to play suicidally to get to the next checkpoint or repeatedly attempt to kill someone who may have some bandages just so I don’t die from bleeding to death. Its a load / die / load / die / load / die process that goes on and on until you find some way of staying alive, or if you’ve only used a quicksave and have no other relevant saved games for quite some time, consider uninstalling the game as it has just wasted a good few hours of your life.

This leads me on nicely to the strength of the enemies too, even on novice its a complete fucking joke. The number of times I’ve experimented by running point blank up to someone, letting off 7 rounds from a SPAS combat shotgun in their face only for nothing to come of it, then been taken out by a burst of 6 or so direct shots into me is literally dumbfounding. You see, when you are trying to hit enemies from a small distance from cover and the gun continually misses due to “realism” you tend to get a bit fucked off when the same realism doesn’t apply one iota to the enemy.

After being repeatedly shot by “zombies” with automatic weapons on one stage and bleeding to death for my troubles, I got so pissed off with the inaccuracy of my gun I just literally ran full pelt at them as a test to see if I would stand a better chance. You see even though I was crouched, or prone with a silenced military grade automatic carbine rifle and a scope, I couldn’t hit the fucking creatures at all because the gun would continually just shoot around the cross-hair. However for the zombie walking at me 50 foot away with an AK-47 style gun, shuddering from side to side whilst firing and walking at the same time, it was apparently utterly realistic for them to be able to hit me dead on with nearly every shot. Great stuff, I know I would have designed it like that, makes perfect fucking sense.

It is then you experience the insane situation of putting said 7 rounds into the face of the zombie with a weapon classed as having the highest damage factor in the game, for it to do NOTHING AT ALL. This was not a one off either, I tried the same technique about 5 times in a row and sure enough 5 times in a row the zombie just absorbed the shot and killed me in a few normal rounds. The end result is already known, frustration sets in. Strangely enough the same zombies can be killed by 3 knife strikes to the body (if they actually connect, that’s bugged too) through full armour, yet 7 shotgun shots to the body/face don’t do the trick. Sigh.

From Wikipedia: “Reception for Clear Sky has been generally positive. PC Zone UK and Games Master UK have both given Clear Sky a score of 88 out of 100, while Edge Magazine gave 7/10 saying the game “turns the best and worse of PC gaming into something extraordinary”. GamesTM gave the game 90/100 saying “Clear Sky chiefly succeeds because it transforms grim fantasy into a startlingly real-world experience”. PCGamer UK however, awarded the game 68% saying it is “The disappointment of the year”, particularly criticizing the increased difficulty and that the atmosphere of the zone was not as well delivered as the original.”

Unbelievable, these people are fucked out of their tiny minds if they think this game scores any more than 70%. It’s shoddily put together, pathetically designed and the distance between realism for you and what is inflicted on the enemy is enough to drive someone mad. The learning curve is exceptionally shallow (a steep learning curve is the opposite to what is commonly understood by the term) and expectations of being intuitive on how to play the game are simply inhuman. Thank god PC Gamer marked it down, evidently the only people not to get paid off?

Another thing to keep in the forefront of your mind here is my experience of the game has been one completely free of technical issues. Sure its slows down a bit here and there, it fucks up more than a little bit royally if you set the sound mode to creative sound blaster mode (I have a Creative Xtreme gamer card) but it’s never crashed on me or reset my machine. So my views are based on the experience of the game, spare a thought for the poor cunts out there that spent ages trying to get this thing to work without it crashing and rebooting their entire machine only to potentially fix it with a patch and find out how bad the game actually is.

So why am I playing this piece of shit?
Probably at the moment just from the fact that I’m glad I’ve not paid for it and the more I play it the more I feel I am hopefully fucking over the lame ass company that dared create this rubbish. The first Stalker game was actually really good, I don’t see how they could take such drastic steps back with design/implementation and AI.

Don’t buy this game, it’s pathetic.
Steal it and see for yourself.

* just a little update here

The game never fails to amaze me, I’ve just got to mention this bug I’ve run into. Certain areas of the game are locked down so you can only enter them via a pre-determined route. That is, if you go through the motions of starting a mission, areas become accessible that if you entered via other means, will kill you. How that works in the first place I don’t really know, just poor design yet again, but it gets better. If you’re on a mission and save the game at a certain place, then die and reload it, the information about being on a mission is clearly not stored in the save game file.

The result? The second you reload the game the engine does not recognise that you’re on a mission and all it knows is you’re in one of these high risk, restricted areas. So firstly for a while it inflicts you with the disabilities of said area, your hearing/sight goes a bit numb, you can’t hear your team mates, you can’t see very well, eerie sound effects, you grunt as if taking damage from the nasty zone. At a random interval down the line the engine will turn around and suddenly decide that it is going to start punishing you for being in said zone and 20 seconds later you collapse on the ground and die, helpless.

So that’s another save game utterly fucked with no recourse for correction, simply inexcusable really.

Quite frankly, if you’re this stupid then you aren’t doing the world much of an injustice by ending it all. This is of course the story that I missed first time around but I’ve been pointed to only today (thanks Wes), of the girl that decided to kill herself because she feared for the end of the world due to the new supercollider that was being built. Black holes abound she decided that life wasn’t worth living anymore and in something that can only be described as a frenzy of foolishness and despair ended it all by poisoning herself.

So firstly a good game shout-out goes to the media that hyped this bullshit up to be something that it clearly wasn’t, the fact that the machine has been in the switch on process since the start of the year didn’t stop them from reporting that it was being “switched on” for the first time on a date that suited their reporting needs.

I won’t go as far as saying if you’re that stupid to kill yourself due to this “threat” you deserve to die anyway, or anything like that (which is a surprise for me), I just think that if you’re that dumb to end your life over media speculation on a topic you clearly know very little about in the first instance then you won’t really offer the world much in the way of academia anyway. Sad but true. I mean lets face it, what would be a better end, a potential uncontrolled trip into a black hole where your existence will end in a painless flash, or being burnt from the inside out over the period of a couple of hours by poisoning yourself.

Another amusing factor within all this hype was the facebook groups that popped up overnight, of which I received numerous invitations, from people who were scared shitless for the end of the world and their apparent right to protest against this experiment. As if a facebook group was going to somehow lean on the authorities at hand to shut down the billion pound experiment that had been in preparation for years. To me it was akin to what I imagine the first reaction of other cavemen when they first saw someone else make fire, or perhaps the first time someone saw an aeroplane take the skies and no doubt blamed it on the devil and/or some form of witchcraft.

The most amusing thing was their medium in which they complained, via the use of microprocessors that have been gaining power hand over fist for the last decade and only 100 years ago would have been considered an alien form of technology that would no doubt be feared and initially rejected. If the media started a story explaining how hardware and software were getting so powerful at an exponential rate that they might become self aware and try and destroy us all, I wonder how long it would take for a facebook group to pop up demanding that the research into microprocessors etc be halted. Twats.

I don’t know if the experiment will eventually end the world. I have no real information or evidence in which to provide an answer of opinion. I don’t think I can justify living each day in mortal fear of the creation of a blank hole which will end it all though, in all likeness it’ll either fail or do us the world of good in technological advancement and perhaps open up a whole new understanding of why we’re here in the first place. Anything that goes that one step further to kick out the infectious mental illness that is religion can’t be a bad thing in my book.

So God bless the stupid girl who decided to take her own life, if she is religious. I hope she was, for the only reason that it’s mostly likely that committing suicide almost guarantees you a one way trip to the fire pit inferno that is hell. So all’s well that ends well then.

Facebook.  Love it or hate it, it looks like it’s going to be around for some time.  And to be fair, it is pretty useful and nicely put together (I’m quite glad someone was able to put their foot firmly up MySpace’s ass).

Anyway, ‘Facebook Etiquette’.  I’ve never heard of such a thing, so I just invented it I guess.  Whatever you want to call it, some people just lack anything of the kind.  I went out last night, took some pretty good pictures, and now I’m up and out of bed, breakfasted and chilled, I think to myself that I’ll upload my photos.  So I go right ahead and do that.  Then it’s time to go through the ritual of tagging everyone you know in the pictures.  A laborious task at times but you get used to it and can get it done fairly quickly after you’ve done it a lot.

But then what’s this? You’re 1/3 of the way through when you get a flood of notifications popping up telling you some spazwad is tagging them and their mates in your pictures before you can.

I ONLY UPLOADED THESE THINGS A FUCKING PICOSECOND AGO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME???

Massive rage, I ask them to stop and they KEEP ON DOING IT??  More rage.

I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill but you rabid motherfuckers just give me at least a few seconds to sort this shit out myself surely?

What is it with these stupidly fucking lame Tv shows popping up left right and centre that no one can possibly relate to? Hollyoaks is bad enough (quite an understatement) but it is possible to turn the audio off and look at the girls, if you’re into rank faced, makeup caked chav sluts that is. Which I am, filthy bitches.

Are these TV bosses so fucking far removed from real life that they think shows like “Coming of age” will be watched by anyone at all? The clip of the show I’ve seen strikes me as so far removed from real life and innofensively bland that the only people who could *possibly* relate to it would be old people. The same old people that have no interest in a tv show filled to the brim with young people where the men resemble women from their generation and the woman either fall into the catagory of “grim” or “hooker”. Full in colour but bland in content. 

In the clip I saw showed a young queer looking chap admit that he’d got off with his grandma earlier on in life, his only sexual experience. When asked by his slightly less homosexual looking mate what the grna had to said about the whole affair the queer looking guy retorts by trying to talk through a french kiss style poke-my-tongue-out moment. Hilarious, fucking hilarious seriously, I don’t know who comes up with this genius!

Actually lets look it up:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007lr6h

It seems the writer/author has chosen to hide their information on this failed piece of shit that thankfully, never was. Obviously not quite as stupid as the show suggets in that case, hopefully now working at a local burger joint or has gone back to university where they can live off loans and dream about moving to america to make it big.

I guess the problem is the bosses of TV would actually refuse to broadcast “real life” as it would clearly offend all of us out there living it.