I have bought a lot of games ever since highschool and I have always tried to convince others to buy at least a few of their favorite games instead of ripping them or downloading them.
Same goes for movies and cds.
I noticed though that now that my sister finally earns a bit of extra money she has stopped downloading and is actually buying the music she likes. So I really get the impression that she just didn’t have the money before to buy that stuff. I only started gaming for real when I had enough money to buy those games and some goes for most people.
Those who have enough money often do not have the time for either shopping or even gaming and therefore they are probably not buying as much as the industry would like. I think the real trouble is again: you either have money or time but rarely both.
I won’t talk about the music industry because just take a look at the charts and then ask about my playlist. I am just not into charts music. The quality … the remakes…. the girlies …. live music? Yeah sure whatever.
DVDs is a whole new market anyway because nobody can convince me that video tapes sold that well. I know a lot of people who own dozens or even hundreds of DVDs. I buy as many DVDs as I buy CDs (which isn’t a lot) but I never ever bought a video tape.
Of course I know a few select people who believe that they should not spend the money on something they could just as well download, even if they have the money to buy it. I can understand in part because to most people it looks and to me as well, as though the hollywood industry and the music industry are rich and making a lot of money. The prices for cds and many dvds are simply outrageous: I paid 30 Euros for a DVD and 17 for a CD …(not to mention 47,- for a terrible computer game)
Actually I wanted to write about the computer games I own and which are good and which are not … well so it turned out different….
I finally got Neverwinter Nights to run on my debian system.A posting at The Linux Game Tome helped a lot:
If it crashes on you, you’ll have to do this:
* cp miles/* /usr/local/lib/
* cd /usr/local/lib
* rm libmss.so.6 libmss.so
* ln -s libmss.so.6.5.2 libmss.so.6
* ln -s libmss.so.6 libmss.so
* ldconfig
or some other method of making it realize the miles libraries are there.
I had noticed before ldd nwmain that indeed the missing libmss was the problem and the instructions above fixed that problem. Though if you copy the lib to /usr/local/lib you should run the command ldconfig /usr/local/lib because that directory is not one of the defaults.
The game was still crashing but then I noticed that I was missing the most current patch:
1.32 Linux Patch
Now it is working. A bit slow but that might be because I was trying to run with 64MB textures and a huge screen resolution and some of the openGL environment variables at maximum setting.
Addendum 03-12-23: I later learned what I should really have done – add the miles/ directory to the file /etc/ld.so.conf, (see man ldconfig). This file contains directories that ldconfig includes in the library cache besides the two default directories (/lib/ and /usr/lib/).
Don’t you hate it when you find out something worked all along? I do.
I spent at least 8 hours figuring out how to get the sound on my re-installed linux system to work. I did everything as advised and finally I quit trying. There was always some error message I even downloaded the current drivers and all. I re-compiled the kernel multiple times. I tried again with 2.6 and then ….
After each new attempt I started xmms to test whether by chance sound was now working. All I saw how xmms was cycling through the playlist at random. No sound.
This morning I was going to give it a last shot.
Then I remembered: to save them from being deleted I had moved the mp3s to my home directory. I started xmms and edited the playlist.
I hit the play button and my ears were graced by DAMN LOUD NOISE. On windows I have entirely different mixer settings and had so turned the speaker volume way up.
Ouch! Ouch!
The first for my ears the second for my stupidity.
But I have sound now. And therefore this is not in the ‘Mishaps’ category :-)
It’s week-end. I forgot to shop for groceries. Well I didn’t forget, I just ignored the fact that it was week-end. But somehow at around 7:30p.m. I felt like fancy cooking. For actual shopping it was too late. I took a look at our fridge and decided I would make a menu from whatever was there.
Continue reading ‘Make Food Out of Air’
Yesterday I encountered one of the ‘darker’ sides of losing weight :-) After three of those 0.33 beers I was rather tipsy. I used to be able to drink more without noticing much. But the reason might have been as well that I didn’t eat a lot all day.
What I am winning while losing? Self-esteem. My mother was surprised to notice: you are not the same person weighing 20 pounds more or less. It’s not so much the actual weight-loss but to know I can do it. I have the discipline. Not always but if necessary: yes.
Note: not that I am proud of drinking a lot … I just noticed a difference. Though I am still embarrassed at having to explain why I left the company christmas party after nearly half a dozen caipirhinas rather than say “No!” to the next that Stefan was just fetching from the bar. Well it was late. But the party was fun and if everything is so much fun it’s harder to quit drinking and stay and than quit partying and go home.
I usually don’t drink a lot and not very often. At parties or gatherings. But there are a few older stories still making rounds. So most of my colleagues seem to believe me a perpetual drunk (well not quite) …..
If you thought KotD was way over the table take a good look at this entry at Toren’s Absolute Blog.
Via Revland where John Tynes also posted a comment about Lotr which I can only agree with what he says about Rohan: More Rings. I love the Rohan theme music even more than the theme of the Fellowship. But I loved Rohan in the books already.
I don’t really have an opinion yet as to which of the three movies I like best, I have only seen Return of the King once so far. But it’s different from the Two Towers where everyone was like ‘Naaah liked the Fellowship better’ when they first saw the movie and in the end everyone preferred the Two Towers.
I am sure to be writing more about it later.
The other day I decided I needed to buy another computer game and since it looked good and I had heard some praise and there was talk of innovative gameplay, I decided to buy Spellforce.
I had to re-install windows on my linux machine and because I messed up had to reinstall linux as well.
Disclaimer: I own the German copy of the game therefore some of my translations may not be accurate. I have played the game only for a few hours (~8), so I might be wrong on some points.
Continue reading ‘Review: Spellforce’
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