Rick's b.log - entry 2012/05/13

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FYI! Last read at 13:37 on 2025/04/05.

Vide grenier - whoo-hoo!

Regular readers will know that we "do" vide greniers, a lot. Today was no exception. A chilly start to a lovely sunny day in amidst rain and gloom. So many people turned up to sell their tat, it was quite a surprise to see fewer people than expected attending as buyers. Perhaps people don't have confidence in Mr. Hollande and don't want to spend spare cash they might need?

First, before my finds, here's a picture of mom's haul. She goes for books and interesting fabric. On the chair, a lot of reading material (all in French, I should add!). On the drying thingy, a variety of fabric. On the left, little girl's dresses. Usually small quantities of nice fabric that is intended to be repurposed into clothes for Colette, the bunny in the middle. The problem here is a lot of these outfits are too cute to hack to pieces. I guess I'll just have to find myself a nice Japanese girl and sort out a daughter.....

Now for a shared purchase (€2 me, €3 mom). A rather nice tea set, but no saucers (is England the only place to put saucers under a tea cup?!).

Here is an animé series. The box says "5" quite clearly. I handed over my fiver and got three euros back. Um...

Don't know what it is about. It's in Japanese and French. Because animé tends to be done by outfits local to a country ("Kaze" in France, "Manga Entertainment UK" in the UK) so cross-subtitling like on movies is rare. A local supermarket offers the entire Ghibli collection, Haruhi (series and movie), Ergo Proxy, Elfen Lied... I could drop some serious coin in there. The thing is that it is subtitled in French, and once in a while Dutch. Not a bit of English. Now, I know my French isn't up to following Haruhi when she's on a roll. Hell, it's hard enough to keep up with English subs when she gets going.
So... I'll watch the first episode or two in French. If I like the series, I'll go download it in a language I understand...

It's a lamp. I thought it looked nice, and for a mere three euros...

I wanted an electric hedge trimmer, but mom freaked. I'm not sure what she thought would happen first - that I'd cut through the electric cord and electrocute myself, or chop my leg off. I guess mom has never seen horror movies - you don't get hedgetrimmer-weilding maniacs because... while you can inflict damage with one, they don't rank high on the scary or the dangerous scales. The tool of preference for crazies is the chainsaw. It's a lot more menacing.
Either way, no trimmer, so I'll not bother to do much to the rampant brambles.

I was pleased to find the Ghost In The Shell game (and for a bit of background to the whole GitS thing, read this interesting review). It cost me €3.

A little later, I went back and picked up three other games. The guy wanted a tenner (which would work out more than the previous game!). I said I only had a five (more accurate would be to say I was only holding a five). He said was I serious? I put the games down. He took the fiver from my hands and placed the games in them. Well, I wasn't going to complain! ☺

Now the find of the year.

I remembered the memory module in my eeePC was a "SODIMM DDR2". I asked a man with some old motherboards and tat if he had any. Yes. Two gigabytes? Yes. How much? Ten euros. Would you accept eight?
He said no, and said they were much more expensive to buy. That might be true (seem to be around €25-€60 on Amazon.fr) but if I bought them from a supplier, I'd have some recourse. A guy at a boot sale? This is firmly into caveat emptor territory. But since I'd gotten a few good deals already, I handed over my tenner. As I was leaving, the man said "we'll compromise!" and gave me a euro. What the hell? I'd already paid for the thing! Well, I won't complain about that either.

I opened the flap on my eeePC and popped out the original 1GiB module (pictured above) and it was the same size as the one I bought. I fitted the 2GiB module and booted into system setup. It reported 2048 MiB. Good. I rebooted, and XP started up without a hiccup. This is awesome! I mean, as the eeePC 901 uses SSDs, it does not run with a swapfile. What this means is that when memory fills up, it is full. I find Firefox is a disgraceful memory hog and it was damned near impossible to run Firefox with anything else. Well, I recently had Firefox and Thunderbird running side by side. Got Firefox and numerous tabs, my photo editor, Metapad, WinAMP for nano.RIPE and so on. My memory is currently 44% utilised (2039MiB total, 897MiB used, 1141MiB free). Awesome!

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Controlling The Major, you have to hack, solve puzzles, and deal out liberal quantities of kick-ass. If ever there was a game in need of an invulnerability cheat, this'd be it.
Will I ever get to being a Tachikoma?

I could also bemoan the lack of save points. It will restart at a not-too-terrible point should you buy it (and given how well armed the mooks are, it is all too easy), you can't come back at a later time unless you've made it to the next level.

You can watch a pro doing this on YouTube (note - some might consider this relentlessly violent). The airplane at 4-ish is pretty cool. There's so much visual stuff in this game. It is hard, but as a GitS fan (yes, I have an original GitS poster on my wall!), it is enjoyable and I'm going to look forward to getting pasted. Like I said, if ever invincibility was needed...

Bomberman Hardball

Fairly cute, very idiotic, and with a music track that is a loop of about twenty seconds long, designed to do your head in! [example video]

...but I'm about as good at this as I am at playing these games in real life. Something of a waste of money given that my ass was handed to me on a plate and this was supposed to be the easy setting!

Eden

We start with the girl dropping her teddy bear. Then follows a set of truly epic journey as the teddy falls into the pits of hell (or something). I guess it is a city built above the skanks. Something of a cliché, but what a way to introduce it! [watch it here!]

Only one picture. The game starts with a briefing by the boss to set the scene. Credits appear on-screen, movie style. I think that's the feel they're aiming for. Sorry, I didn't have time to invest in that right now.
At least it had a nice selection of cheats so you can make your guys invincible and go punch up the mooks.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

This is a control-the-guy style game. Watch a promo with all-real game footage.

I think this'll be slow, but interesting. In a similar line to the Max Payne game I'm currently playing. The only downside is it is entirely in French (no language option).

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mom, 15th May 2012, 18:05

Look Rick, if you are going to insult your mother about the hedge-trimmer, at least learn to spell "wielding" correctly. Love, Your Mom

Rick, 16th May 2012, 07:05

Pffft! <blows raspberry> (^_^)

Rob, 16th May 2012, 13:56

+1 Like, for mum :-)

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