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Random

For the posts that make you stop and say to yourself "Wait what?", where else would you rather go?

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AvCon 2010

I went to AvCon with Brittany for the whole weekend. While we didn’t do much, we met some cool cosplayers and saw a couple of great “events”, including Aliyaki’s lolita parade. We spoke to some of the artists there, and I ended up with a fist full of new comic books.
While I could bore you with silly details of the walking around we did, here are the few photos I took of a few cosplayers and such. I didn’t think of taking out the iPhone much, because I was more focussed on looking around, and hanging with Britt.

In order: Iron Man, the Team Fortress 2 Medic with an Aperture Science employee, some guy called Harris, Silent Hill nurses, a little Airbender, I do not even know what this is, a four player match of Bomberman at the Retro Gaming panel, a Team Fortress 2 Heavy, Steam Punkers, and a nope.avi engineer.

Does this need a title?

I’ve noticed this blog is changing in regards to what I write, and how I write it. It is with that in mind that I retire the How To Fail At Girls category, and turn those posts to the Personal section. This is just an attempt to organize myself a bit more and clean up the site a little. Also, it’s hard to talk about how much I fail at the opposite sex when I’m in a good relationship. Why take up that space in the navigation bar if I’m never going to update it?

In other news, I got my first pair of converse shoes. I was always a bit apprehensive, since I didn’t want to fork out so much money for a pair of shoes, but decided to try them out. They are so comfortable. Seriously, why didn’t anyone force me to buy a pair sooner?

I know not many people read this, what with my slightly less than interesting articles on gaming and the like, but I have a few more posts I’m slowly working on (mainly in my head), it’s just a case of finishing them so that I like them enough to post. While the majority of my writings take all of an hour to write, some others (including my Nightmare On Elm Street review) take significantly longer to make. So while I’m sure you guys aren’t exactly caring, I will have a new post out soon. Whether it will be interesting to you will be another thing.

Also, here’s an obligatory photo of a cute girl.

Why is there always an ugly guy ruining my photos?

Infinite Fortune

Today a new table game comes out at Adelaide Casino called Infinite Fortune. The game is extremely simple to learn and play, so I thought I’d share it with you, and teach you how to play this relatively simple game.

Infinite Fortune is dealt like Casino War, in that each player receives one card only. The dealer however does not, as the aim of the game is to guess what your card is going to be. There are three things you can bet on:

• High – Wins when your card is between 9 and Ace (In this game, Ace is high only).
• Low – Wins when your card is card between 2 and 7.
• Dragon 8 – Wins when you get an 8.

It’s that simple; you aren’t playing against anyone else, there are no side bets, nothing. High and Low bets will pay even money, while Dragon 8 pays 11 to 1.

Infinite Fortune is good if you’re new to Casinos and gambling, but otherwise there is more enjoyment to be had in games like Blackjack or Roulette.

Brittany is awesome.

Oh hi there!

I’ve been awfully busy doing pointless things that don’t really have a purpose; mainly gaming. I thought I’d bring you up to date with that guy we all adore and worship; me.

With the recent sale on Steam, my gaming is obviously going to have a negative effect on my bank account. I’ve recently been playing a lot more Fallout 3 than usual, as a certain person has effectively been playing so much that she has completely finished the main quest before I’d even made it out of Megaton.
Along with that, I’ve recently bought Red Dead Redemption for my Xbox 360. That game has brought me back into console gaming; there’s nothing like the promise of a GTA type sandbox game to get me holding a controller again. The game handles wonderfully, and there’s so much to it that I can spend an hour without ever doing a proper quest. There are side quests which occur randomly, which you could do, or ignore and ride away. Those sort of encounters would of made the Grand Theft Auto series a more engrossing set of games to play.
The new episode of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse came out around a week ago, so I played through and finished that. Not to spoil anything for those of you who may own or be playing it, but at the end you screw someone’s brain out. Hot.
Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 have also had some playtime, but not as much as others.

While I haven’t been posting on here, that’s not to say I haven’t been blogging. I recently decided to give my Tumblog an actual use. Presenting Zombie M&Ms; the place for my thoughts when I don’t have access to my computer. I’ll be posting random things there when I have something to say, but only my phone handy, as well as the usual reblogged crap spewed out by Tumblr. To make it official, I bought a premium Tumblr Theme for $9 that I liked
I’ve also started another tumblog about the game We Rule. I love playing it and decided to see if I could tackle writing casually about it whenever I had something to say or there was an update. I already do this on here for Team Fortress 2, and don’t want to make you put up with too many posts of that nature. If you play We Rule and enjoy my writing style, you might want to check it out, otherwise fuck off. Instead of paying for a theme for this, I’ve instead started using the Novephel Theme; partly because I like the look of it, and partly to test it out for a friend.

So that’s the grunt of the things I’ve been doing that I find vaguely interesting. What have you been doing with yourself?

Skill a month

Well today while surfing the YouTubes, I found a new video in my subscriptions by a little known video blogger called CharlieIsSoCoolLike. The video was part of his Challenge Charlie series where viewers can challenge him to do different often zany things¹; in this case he was challenged to learn and successfully juggle. He does it in just over a week, and at the end of the video suggests others learn how to juggle. Sitting here with nothing better to do with my life other than play Pokémon and apparently watch silly YouTube videos, I said HELLS YEAH.

Following the instructions in this video, I’ve started learning how to juggle, starting with one ball (uniball). This will probably take a little while to get to three balls (gifted), but I’m expecting to have this valuable life skill by the end of the month.

This has of course, gotten me looking at other things I could “learn”, and think about things I’ve put on the backburner, including jump style², Spanish, and keyboard. This has got me thinking that maybe I should try to push myself a bit more to be more productive, but have fun with it at the same time. How could I do that? By turning it into a game!

So each month starting with the current, I will aim to learn a new skill however minor, starting with the juggling. It could be something that takes ten minutes to learn, or something that takes the whole month (possible more). I’ll post the goal and results so you as the reader, and myself can see the results, however bad or amazing as they would be.

1. In the past he’s done things like paint himself purple, eat fish custard and put as many marshmallows in his mouth as possible.
2. A type of dance.

The secret to winning EVERYTHING FOREVER

Pointed in the direction of this supposedly newsworthy article¹, I decided that I too could write an insightful post detailing how you could win in a game of chance. I’ve decided to tackle Roulette, though I guess this could apply to any game.

For those who don’t know, Roulette is a game in which you guess what number on a spinning wheel that a small ball will land in. It’s an interesting often busy game, and has lots of different bets you can make, from guessing the specific number, to guessing if it will be an odd or even number.

We’re going to focus on the bets for black and red numbers. The odds for the game’s various bets are easy to work out; there are 18 black numbers, 18 red numbers, and zero (which isn’t either colour). Because zero isn’t either colour, this means there isn’t a 50/50 chance to pick the right one, as many people tend to believe. Instead, the odds of successfully picking red or black is 48.65%.
I also want to throw out there for anyone who does play the game and keeps track of what numbers come up because “17 hasn’t come up in ages”, or “there’s been 10 black numbers, surely the next one has to be red!”, that all spins are independent of each other. It could be red 69 times in a row, but on the 70th spin, there is still exactly a 48.65% chance of it coming up either colour.

Enough, how do I win already?

Oh yes! I did tell you that I was going to tell you how to guarantee winning in this and effectively any other game of chance, didn’t I? Well, listen close I’m not going to repeat this:

Bet on the winning colour.

Ingenious right? If you bet on the correct colour, you’re guaranteed to win. Sure you might need some sort of psychic power, or a ton of luck, but it’s guaranteed that you’ll win if you place it on the winning spot. The same goes for Big Wheel, Baccarat, Sic Bo, and even craps. Put the bet in the correct place and there is no end to how much you can win. There are people who would try to have this post taken down as the information is too good to let the general public know about. However, I feel that I need to get this information out to all nine of my readers² so that you can take advantage of this strategy.

You can thank me later³

1. Nicko236, accidently providing content for this blog since 2009…I think
2. number according to Google Reader. God I’m popular.
3. actually, thank me NOW. Do it in the form of a comment. Did I mention I love you?

Not News – MP supposedly charged $10,000 for download iPhone applications.

I’m not an expert, but an article in yesterday’s Sunday Mail had me a bit confused. According to Brad Crouch’s “exclusive” Russell Wortley, an Upper House MP whom I have never heard of, was charged with a $10,500 phone bill from Telstra.

Faced with such an amount, the man does what anyone would naturally do and blame his offspring, claiming that his son downloaded over $7000 worth of “supposedly free phone applications”.

I want to attack this from two sides; first about the man and his son, then I want to briefly touch on how Brad Crouch retarded an already stupid piece of shit news.
First up, we’ll see how many applications his son would of had to download using Mr. Wortley’s phone for such a bill. Apparently it is suspected that the iPhone doesn’t have a data package bundled with the plan, which is what allows for cheaper downloads via 3G internet. The article has Craig Middleton, a spokesperson from Telstra, say “If you don’t have a data pack you’ll be paying $2 a megabyte”. This is news to me, but I’ve always had a data package because I know internet on 3G can get expensive.
So we have the rate of two dollars a megabyte. Now, iPhone’s have a feature which prevents you from downloading any application 10 megabytes or greater unless you’re connected to wireless internet, or downloading via iTunes. So for the sake of this post we’ll assume every single application was exactly ten megabytes, though it’s almost certain that many of them would of been one to five. The article has Wortley claim the two biggest “downloads in a short period” were $4000 and $3000. So we’ll assume that this is all that his son is accused of spending. So with some simple maths:

You remember my epic MS Paint skills, right?

For those who aren’t quite with it, I divided the total sum of money by the total cost of a single 10MB application ($2 for every megabyte makes it 20), to reveal his son would of had to download 350 applications. Now, an iPhone 3G has a maximum of 9 pages for applications. Each page displays 16 applications, and there are 4 on the floating dock at the bottom. This means an iPhone can only hold 148 applications, including those shipped with the phone (Messages, Weather, Settings, etc). This means if I went on a download spree I could only download 133 applications before the iPhone would stop me. After that I’d have to delete other applications before I could keep going. Why didn’t he monitor his son’s use of the phone, and did he actually use his phone during any of that month? The fact that Wortley didn’t notice that his phone suddenly had hundreds of extra applications displays just how irresponsible he is with his mobile phone.
Wortley says “I don’t think parents or children would be aware that what appear to be free applications can cost a fortune in downloading where you get hit with thousands of dollars in bills over an hour.”. This shows his complete naivety in how things work. For thousands of dollars to be incurred in downloading applications, the “child” at fault would need to download hundreds of applications without trying any, and deleting them all as they went. If they did that, then I’d be suspicious as to whether or not they weren’t just getting back at their parents for not letting them go out that day. “Can’t see my friends? Then I’ll rape my phone bill with a metaphorical rake handle.”
In any case, it is unlikely that the costs were the result of just application downloads. It was more likely a combination of that, phone calls and internet browsing. I find that excessive use of YouTube can eat through my data rather quickly. If Wortley knew how to actually use an iPhone, he might also gain the ability to go into Settings and disable the Application Store, YouTube, and even the internet browser. Case solved. Wortley, you’re an idiot.

 Also, you probably used up your downloads watching YouTube videos).

Now, I want to talk about Brad Crouch. His article, which was made to look like an article about Russel Wortley’s lack of responsibility, instead points the finger in a more generalized direction. The article uses sentences like “has revealed a phone fiasco where unsuspecting users can be charged more than $4000 an hour for so called free phone applications” and uses Wortley’s case as an example.
The article is deliberately written to make the companies (which in this case I guess would make it both Apple and Telstra) look like evil overlords who specifically designed the phone and subsequent services to rip off as many people as they can. Now sure, they’re here to make money, but by no means are they trying to trick you. At the time of the sale, Telstra are legally obliged to explain things including how 3G and their data plans work. Therefore, unless there was a problem and Telstra ACCIDENTLY charged them too much¹, it really is due to the irresponsible person rather than the sinister corporations.

In short, Mr. Wortley should of been more careful, and probably should have monitored what his child was doing with his government phone.

 Hello, is this Mr. Atkinson? You are a poo head (Photo by Nieve44/La Luz)

I remain perplexed as to how he believes he can blame it all on application downloads and still claim to be unaware, given the evidence². What do you think of the situation?

1. Wortley confessing they made the downloads, even though I still doubt it was through application downloads, means this is more than likely not the case
2. evidence I explained rather messily, but explained regardless

Craig and alternate universes

I’ve decided that because I had to work yesterday on my birthday, that today is also the 19th. It shall hereby spread over 48 hours, with the 20th being dropped off the calender. So it’s still my birthday.

However, in some weird alternate universe where the 20th still exists, I believe it’s the birthday of a certain friend of mine. Unfortunately for him he’s stuck at Uni today, but I’m sure everyone’s giving him blowjobs and the like.

So man, if it WAS the 20th (which it isn’t, like I said), then happy birthday.

You can annoy the fuck out of this guy by visiting his blog, or talking to him on twitter.

Thankoooo

In 10 minutes, at 10:25pm, I’ll officially be 21. I got a lot more happy birthday’s than I expected, and thank you to everyone. There were so many on Facebook, and lets face it, going through them all will take awhile (I am slow), so instead, I thought I’d list you all here (minus family, of course), and call you faggots.

On Facebook:
Shani,  Maddie, Kirsty, Brendan, Zebby, Bettina, Melanie, Kayla, Paul, KASE, Denai, Vicki (I think?), Rachel, Dan, Britt’s Mum, Charlie, Ali, Brenton, Swapnil, Dinny, Darren, Derek, Craig.

On Twitter:
Aly, Monnie, Tim, Cassandra, Omegatron, Shaun, Ryan, CrazySpeak

Via SMS:
Mel (again), Charlie (again), Craig (again), Mark, Haleigh, Denai, Steph

Update- It seems I scored a blog post by Josh Nunn over at The Geekorium too

As well as Brittany and Courtney who were awesome enough to CALL me, and as of a few minutes ago Josh Nunn who actually made a dollar donation via the coke can in the corner. Thanks for the shout man.

You’re all Faggots.
(Thank you so much)

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