wyatt1048

Took a tumble off my bike this morning, for the first time in years. The last time must have been... the Towpath Tripwire? Or was it was I snapped the pedal shaft? Certainly not while I've been in Oxford, at least unless one of those involved hitting my head really hard.

I tend to lean a lot when I'm cycling, so perhaps it was inevitable that I'd hit some black ice at some point, and today had perfect conditions. It rained all day yesterday, then cleared over night for a frosty start, finished off by a sprinkling of rain just before I went out. I didn't think it was icy at all until I started wheelspinning when I started off. I should have just given up and driven in, but apparently I'm too dumb for that.

Anyway, I came off at the corner by the church. It's got a high-ish wall, so no sun to melt the ice, but I thought it was clear when I went round. I found out it wasn't as the wheel went sideways. I slammed both feet on the ground, which had the effect of spinning me right round so that I was now going backwards, and for a second I thought I'd be able to pull it off and stay upright. Then I travelled off the ice, hit a dry path and the bike flipped the opposite way form I was bracing.

I was able to check my fall by bouncing my chin off the tarmac while the crossbar assaulted my groin and the pedal took a chunk out of my shin. Worse off was my bike, as the deralier was bent and caught a spoke of the wheel and I had to bend it back into place. Once I'd crawled off the road, of course: first time I tried to stand, I slipped and fell. And then a guy in a land rover kindly stopped to help me and fell over himself.

Anyway, I've got a pretty little patch of road rash on my chin, and a few scabs on my leg. The chin is getting quite impressively swollen: it looks like my jaw has gone out of line. At present it's just red, but I'm hoping for some more interesting colours before the week is out!

DO NOT MAKE BREAD.

Seriously. The dough adheres to knuckle hair. Hair on the back of the hand. Wrist hair. All the way up my arm (seriously, I don't know how that happened). And it will never come out.

Never.

It is part of me now.

If only I was a red head. Then I'd be a gingerbread man.

I finally finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And by 'finished', I mean 'spent hour compulsively getting every achievement and combing every nook and cranny for loot'. In conclusion, I found it a little... disappointing.

Confession time: I've never played the original Deus Ex, poor old school gamer that I am. However, after seeing all the hype, I bought the game and I think my expectations were a little high. For starters, the whole 'you can choose how to play' aspect. While it seemed every area had a number of different paths to find, they all led to the same area, and they all gave XP, so the best option was to go through all of them, getting enough XP to have all the upgrades I needed before the game was halfway through. There's a lot of talk about how choices you make affecting the game later on, but they didn't, really. A couple of characters showed up close to the end if you didn't kill / saved them, and didn't if you killed them. There's no real difference in the plot - the four endings are literally four buttons to press after the final boss.

There are also a couple of odd bugs that showed up. One was victims spontaneously dying: one of the gang members in Detroit died when I shot him with the non-lethal tranq rifle - which might have been a comment on how non lethal weaponry can kill, except he shot through the air like he taken a hit form the rocket launcher. In another case, four guards I knocked out and stuffed in an air vent, checking the vital signs twice, were dead when I came back. On a pacifist run, that was very frustrating. One character needed to complete a sidequest didn't show up on harder difficulty levels - as in, popped into view when I changed the difficulty level down, and disappeared when it went back up.

But the most annoying part of the game has to be the cutscenes. Not just the boss fights (the sudden change in pace they caused has been talked about enough in other places), but most of them required an act of gross stupidity on the part of Jensen - it's easy to see why the developers had to take control from the player, because they wouldn't be stupid enough to let an obvious member of the big bad conspiracy fob them off, or walk right up to all the heavily armed half machine man instead of sneaking around them, or get into the cryogenic suspension capsule. The plot wasn't driven by the protagonist, I got the feeling that he was just stumbling around in the dark, being spoon fed links by the bad guys, who needlessly lead him about when they could have shut him down by simply not telling all their secrets. While Jensen could take out several buildings worth of heavily augmented super soldiers, finding a clue wasn't one of his strengths.

Still, the combat is fun and entertaining. The levels are great to play around in. The exploration and alternate routes are well thought out and give a sense of satisfaction when I found them.

It's a good game, but not the best game ever. I really should play Deus Ex to compare it!

Summer is here at last! It's a beautiful day, the sun is out, the temperature is over 25, and there's a pleasant breeze. People are sunbathing in gardens, and kids are playing in the park, and everyone's been enjoying the IT'S OCTOBER WHAT ARE YOU DOING. WHERE IS THE RAIN AND MIST.

WHAT IS GOING ON.

They sell this shit OTC now! Last time I had to get a prescription! I'm gonna pour hydrogen peroxide through a hole in my skull! It's like a chemistry experiment in my head! No-one's been this excited about ear poison since Claudius!

Wow, I finally get a DF finished, and Drunk Duck isn't just down, it's giving me access to other people's comics. It's a good job I'm not evil.

That was a bad weekend. I had planned to get a little caught up, but got busy and failed. Anyway, these pages contain a death.

( Cerberus Must Die! )

I've actually got a bunch more pages ready, but I thought I'd spread them out.

( The Reveal )

And now my scanner is dead. Typical. I'll need either a fix or a new one.