News randoms

Watched Avengers Assemble tonight - this movie is awesome. (Add expletives of your choice for emphasis)

Definitely one for the pre order. And I suspect a lot of people will agree, judging by it breaking all sorts of box office records. Hell, I watched it on my own tonight but I would gladly go back to see it again if someone wanted me to drag them along to it.

(And I promise to not stare at the Black Widow's bum ... too much)

And going from one brand of awesome to something deeply, incredibly, amazingly special : Paralysed woman completes London Marathon after 16 days. Can anything top that ? Seriously ! She's using robot/bionic prosthetics to move her legs, as a spinal injury means she can't move them on her own. There's all kinds of WOW here :

We have the technology now to do this
And key - what a spirit this lady has. Inspirational. Truly inspirational.

That's the story that greeted me as I got in from Avengers and turned on Skynews.

Google have licenced their autonomous cars. Not sure whether to find this scary or not. Hopefully it'll go some way to making the roads safer by removing the Moron element. Trouble is, the remaining Morons will be the ones driving around without MoT (roadworthiness test in the UK) or insurance. We shall see. Oh, the car they're using is very similar to mine ...

Japan closes their last nuclear power station. Meh. Very meh. I'm pro nuclear power. It's clean energy, despite what the scaremongerers would say. Those same green fanatics would see us using coal or gas power which pumps CO2 into the atmosphere. Nuclear does produce its waste but that waste is controllable and containable. CO2 is not. Nuclear is also safe, despite what the green loonies will tell you about :

Fukushima - closed down safely. Will cause no deaths (the few who died at Fukushima fell from heights) and the lessons learned will prevent similar accidents from escalating out of control
Chernobyl - was self inflicted sabotage where the plant was effectively deliberately blown up.

Yep - I see the way the greenies would like to take us and think they're crazy. Don't get me started about wind turbines ! :-)

LED lightbulbs to last for ages. 23 years ! That's longer than you'd expect to live in one house. Although my parents have lived in their current place for 26 and I've lived here for 10. I'm kinda a convert to energy saving bulbs, although not for them being cheaper. The ones I use in my living room light definitely last longer before they pop. So there might be something in this LED last ages thing.

Especially as it isn't a thin tungsten filament that's designed to take enough current that it glows and sets off gas in the bulb. I dunno, when people look back in 50 years on what we use now, they will not believe it. Just as we seldom believe that 30 years ago, ATMs were unheard of and mobile phones were in their infancy. Tech marches on.

Star Wars subscribers fall. Not surprised here and I doubt whether this game will last past 1 expansion. Having played it briefly, it's a subpar WoW clone with its only distinctive feature being cutscenes. Games are supposed to be about gameplay, not cutscenes that get in the way. Mass Effect 3 had me going "Enough with the cutscene, WANNA SHOOT SOMETHING".

I'm hopeful for better from Guildwars 2, although I think the MMO set up on Grind Lots for Little Fun may have had its day. People want fun from their games, 99% of MMOs are eternal grind for 30 minutes fun. Online shooters and games like League Of Legends show us the Grind is not necessary for Fun.

And that's it for today - no game tonight. The other team didn't just turn up, they're not even in the league ! I suspect we'd have got half a game played (maybe) and then we'd have got rained on. Hopeful for something tomorrow, it's another artificial wicket so we could get away with it. I'd like to be wearing spikes for the soggy ground but - keeping ? Nah. Spikes will be banned for me.

Good night !

PS One last one : Mechwarrior online looks awesome. I grew up on Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries taking a lot of my early PC gaming time and later played Mech Commander 2 to death. If they catch the MW2M gameplay again, this could be special.