Ghetto literature

For such a busy guy, today I actually had some spare time before lunch, so I gladly took the opportunity to go to the nearest mall to eat and relax a little. Next to the MacD (that's what I started calling McDonald's after watching too many Ali G Show's) is a Bertrand store, one of our biggest book sellers, and ever since I started my course on Editorial Studies I kinda got the habit of going there a lot, even if almost never buy a book (we have a very small market, so they're expensive as fuck).

So, anyway, there I was, being tempted by a 20% discount on Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (that book has been on my list ever since it came out), which would still make it 16€ (fuck, do they think I'm rich or something? I got university fees to pay), few moments away from finding a recent translation of Sun Tzu's The Art of War (which I actually bought, for 6€ it was a steal), and being annoyed to death by 16 year old's yelling and laughing like they were still 10, when I spotted this guy:


Fuck, I didn't see that coming. Not just the guy alone, but the contrast. On one side you have a bunch of school kids, good looking, well dressed, who look like they can afford all the books they want, and still are just there goofing around, I don't have the slightest clue as to why they entered a book store in the first place, since that was obviously not their place. On the other side you have this guy, probably the closest thing to a real gangsta I've ever seen, dressed like he just came straight outta da hood, and yet there he was, calmly sitting down with a book on his hands, completely focused on what he was reading.

Man, that was a real eye-opener. You definitely can't judge a book by its cover, nor a person by its appearance. Peace out, G's!

What's up?

Work. That's what's up. I'm quite literally drowning in papers, and presentations, and written reports, basically all the shit you can imagine, and sometimes just catching up with the stuff we're learning is hard enough. That's university for you.



But before all that started I was having some fun with a certain game. Can you guess it, Junlee? Yup, Kingdom Hearts! :P I'm not shitting you, I actually managed to pick up that hallowed game for the 4th time and this time take it serious (which basically involves lots of patience, walkthroughs and cheat codes). I went all the way to the little mermaid world before putting it on (hopefully) temporary hold.

Other than that I've just been messing around with my recently acquired Nintendo DS, mainly playing this:



An absolute must for every retrogamer worth its salt.

Other than that there's nothing special going on, really, and right now I should be making a draft of my report on a publisher so you'll have to excuse me. Here, have a song to make reading this post worthwhile:

You know you have friends...

...when you get this in the mail! :D What could have been a better post to inject some life into this little, almost dead, place of mediocrity? But as I was saying, yesterday, when I came back from a fucking tiring day at uni, I had a little package waiting for me. What could it be? :D At first I thought it was a couple of books I ordered last week (in case you're curious, it's Blood of Elves, by Andrzej Sapkowski, and The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie - see here), but oh boy, was I in for a surprise! I knew it was something special from the moment I read Nuno "Nebacha" Almeida in the address of the package :D

What it was is another present from our dear Father Krishna. Not only did that hallowed presence of the internest bestow upon me that most unique of games that goes by the name of Seaman, but now he also felt the need to hook me up with the most essential of accessories to play said title: the Dreamcast microphone (and not even a life-threatening heart surgery could prevent him).

Just plug that beauty onto your controller, bring your mouth close and enjoy the sheer pleasure...of looking like a jackass talking to a microphone while being verbally abused by a virtual fish with a man's face. Lol.



But that was not all, for there was also a hand-written card. Really, nice touch! And indeed it made me smile :D

But, really, there were still other things in there, namely the somewhat rare Bleemcast cd for Metal Gear Solid (I thought I'd never have one of those!) and Area 51 for the Saturn! Yeay! :D

So, yeah, by now you have given me more presents than Santa Claus in recent years. Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it :)

It Took The Night To Believe

Here's something to brighten up your day:



(yeah, just a lame excuse for an update)

Status: Returned

You may recall me talking about a book I wrote. That was hard work, but unfortunately, in the current editorial market, the actual writing is the easy part, for apparently it is much hard to get the fucking thing published, even when it's undeniably better than 90% of the shit we see nowadays at bookstores.

Yeah, by now you can tell I'm pissed. Guess why? I just got my first reply from a publisher:

"Fuck you, take your shit elsewhere, we don't want it"

It was something along those lines, only in a more articulate speech, but that was essentially the message. Shit...

Gotta try again, have another publisher in mind, the guys behind other authors more in the style of my book (unlike the previous publisher which is really into standard, run-of-the-mill, epic fucking boring fantasy). I don't know, maybe they'll be more receptive to the unique flavour of my story.

If that don't work, hell, maybe I'll sell my soul, cut out all the good and unique things about it, the swearing, the sex, the crude violence, the ambiguous morality, turn it into yet another Tolkien rip-off and maybe then I'll fucking get published!

Xbox me

Woke up at 4:30 am (after going to bed at sometime around 2 am, which gave me some good 2 hours of sleep) with my dog barking furiously at the woodpile. Turns out there was a fucking snake hidden in there, which I found out after going in armed with a flashlight, only to be greeted by a warming hiiiiissssss. Ripped the fucker's head out. Literally. It was fucking big, by the way, the biggest snake I've killed so far. Check it out -> pretty picture

But that's not why I'm writing. I've said this before on the Saturn Junkyard, but in case you don't follow that most esteemed of blogs, I got myself a new rig. A pc, that is. so, with the harddrive of my old one laying there, unused, I decided to give it another fate. Something I've been dying to try out for a while. Ever since I bought and modded my Xbox, actually.

Replacing the hard disc drive.


Nowadays changing a console's harddrive is easy. With the 360 it's basically idiot-proof, and the PS3 is just a little bit trickier. But this? This, my friends, is a man's job. What Microsoft did with the original Xbox to prevent access to the disc was a lock system, whereby the disc only gets accessible when the system's on. That way you can't just take it apart, connect it to the pc and do whatever you want with it (if you recall, that's why I had to connect the xbox to my pc to mod it. While they both were running. And then switch a cable on the fly. Living dangerously, baby!).

But for every door there's a key, and the key to this door just became available the moment I modded the system. It's the eeprom, a digital key unique to each console, that let's you lock and unlock the disc as you wish, and that's the only thing that's absolutely essential when building a new Xbox compatible HDD. You also need C and E partitions, which you can either download from the web with stock values or just backup your own, with softmod already included.


And there I had a problem, which I only found out when everything was already done (which threw me back to the very beginning). You see, the softmod that I use cleverly only lets you access a "virtual" C partition, not the real thing, just in case you fuck it all up. Unfortunately this time I really needed access to the real shit, so I had to download a little extra software for my softmod (had to download through xbins, which in itself is a rather hardcore process, you have to mirc to ftp), go nuts while figuring out exactly what the fuck did I have to do to have access to the c drive and finally ftp it to my pc.

Once that was done the fun part was about to begin. Gather all that shit, build a boot disc, burn it and get ready to actually mod the disc. Connected to my old pc (you shouldn't have any more drives connected when doing this, and I didn't feel like messing with my new pc, something I did enough already installing two dvd drives), I formatted the bitch, rebuilt it, copied all the contents from my old one from the dvd and finally locked it with my eeprom. In the end, there it was, a fully functional 80gb hdd ready to go to my Xbox. Taking it apart was a breeze and actually replacing the discs was easy. Now, after all that shit, I can say I'm a proud owner of an Xbox 1, with approximately 70gb free, ready to be filled to the brim with games, emulators and movies. Yeay! :D

Are you alive???

Optimus Alive! 09, FUCK YEAH!!!

For those of you completely oblivious to what the fuck I'm talking about, I went to the fucking best festival of the year and for the first time in my life I saw Mastodon, Machine Head, Slipknot and Metallica live! And it was fucking awesome!!! Oh my fucking god, I can't believe it, it was fucking incredible!


The Mastodon concert was awesome, although really short. They only played for 40 minutes or so, and since most songs from the new album are pretty big they took a lot of stage time from the older themes. Still, they played Blood and Thunder, which was fucking awesome!




Next came Machine Head. Ok, actually it was Lamb of God, but I didn't see it, it was 8 pm already and I was hungry, so I chose to eat something instead. But, anyway, Machine Head, once again a pretty short concert. I missed Now I Lay Thee Down and some other favourites of mine, but, whatever, it was great. Way better than I expected, actually. They have such a stage presence that, even though I didn't know most of the songs, I was headganging the whole show!


(best footage I could find...)

Next came Slipknot, and it was amazing as usual. They played most of their stuff, what they usually play live, and did it well. The crowd reaction was way better than I expected, because this band is kind of the scapegoat for "true metalheads", who consider them as being posers and a parody of what "real metal" should be. But fuck that shit! Everyone was singing along, and jumping, and screaming, and they were totally into it. Oh, and then there was the Zero Bullshit...


(watch 5-5:30m)

Finally it was Metallica time. A lot of people there went just to see them, and you could feel the excitement in the air. It was fantastic! They played a lot of songs from the newest album, which was good for me because those are some of the songs I know best, and overall it was just an amazing concert. The interaction with the fans was awesome, the pyrotechnics rocked (there were fucking fireworks! And the fire was so hot I could feel the flames on my face!) and...well, what more can I say? Really, I'm running out of adjectives here...






Finally it ended, at 1 am, but the adventure was only starting. I wandered through the precinct, had a beer with a friend and finally left at 2 am because I still had to get back to the Oriente train station to catch a train back to Aveiro. The problem was, there was supposed to be a fucking bus to take us directly to the station, but that didn't happen. So, after god knows how much time of being completely lost, I finally caught a bus to Cais do Sodré, and from there another to the station. When I finally arrived it was already 5 am and I a still had a couple of hours to spend before my train arrived at 7:30.

Waiting for the train...

Sunrise in Lisbon

Then followed a 2:30 hour trip back to Aveiro, only to be left at the station without a ride, so I had to catch another train to my little village of Oliveira do Bairro, and walk home. My feet were hurting so bad... But it was fucking awesome!!! :D

Home, finally!!! *happy face*