tempest in a teacup

A couple of hours ago, after a pretty great Team Fortress 2 session and the ensuing post-game analysis between PenPen and I, I looked at the clock and decided it was time for me to go to bed. I signed off IRC, put my PC in standby mode, got myself a glass of water, stepped into my bedroom…

…and heard my pager go off.

I just got off the conference call a couple of minutes ago, after a good two hours of bleary-eyed log analysis and graph comparision.

I’ve only been working here for ten months, but I don’t recall ever being paged this often during my previous weeks on call…

I installed a couple of new plugins over the last couple of days:

• WP-Cache - this caches all the HTML generated by the PHP in Wordpress, so that it doesn’t have to generate it every time someone visits the page. It’s a great way to improve your page latency, so I highly recommend it.
• Wordpress Thread Comment - this basically allows for comment threading, so that I (or anyone else for that matter) can reply to comments as opposed to having to leave comments under other people’s comments. If you leave your email address in the comment you’ll be notified if someone replies to it. There’s a limit to how deep threads can go, though, and the default settings for messages will probably need some, uh, cleaning up. Other than that it seems to work pretty nicely.

And now to go and re-post all my other replies as threads.

Right Stuf International has picked up the first season of ARIA! The box set with 13 episodes ships on September 30th, and ARIA the Natural as well as the OVA will follow thereafter.

This series was arguably one of the best I’ve seen in the fast few years…I’m picking up the DVDs for sure.

I’ve also been buying the manga, and it’s good stuff. It was pretty interesting to find out that some episodes of the anime actually took material from the ‘prequel’ manga Aqua. The background artwork isn’t quite as nice as that in the anime, but the character artwork is top-notch.

I should probably review those too, at some point.

One thing the first-person shooter genre has been tending towards in the last few years is an emphasis on gritty, realistic (or at least semi-realistic) gunplay. This is not a universally-loved proposition. Take a look at two screenshots from two different shooters, and chances are that if you aren’t already an avid fan of the genre, you will not be able to tell them apart. The status quo is rather displeasing - but who better to shake it up than Valve Software, who have already revitalized the genre twice with the 1998 hit Half-Life and its 2004 sequel? Their effort to this end is Team Fortress 2, and what a terrific game it is.

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I’m a PC gamer. Sure, I’ve owned consoles, and I still do, and I didn’t really have a gaming-ready PC for about 3 years, but it’s always been my platform of choice when it comes to playing the newest games.

That said, keeping up with PC news is getting harder and harder for me. This isn’t because it’s being drowned out or neglected (although one might be able to make such a case) but because almost every single article contains some throwaway line about how the PC gaming market is dying or already dead.

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