ShadowReality

For the longest time now I have had a list of things that I have wanted to do with this site, but havn’t really had the time (nor the motivation) to do them. Back before this site was a Wordpress blog It was a very social site with my friends posting and hosting images, hence the tag “A place for stuff” and I feel I want to eventually get back to that and provide a hub for people to share thier web stuffs.

Being a web developer it’s quite important to keep up with the times, and one of the most enjoyable things for me it to be creative in my coding and one of the ways I have been doing this on this site is with the flexible plug-ins and page templates.

Last November I re-themed the site from the ground up, and since then I feel I’ve just left things up in the air. So I think the time has come to start getting this site cleaned up, and start making this place usable once again, I mean it doesn’t even have a search box at the moment! How did I overlook that?

Anyway, I started off by removing the archive box in the sidebar and now instead it has a whole page devoted to it, so please bear with me as I start to do some modifications around here for the better.

And if you have any good ideas of features, content, or anything you can imagine from a website you would like to see added or improved upon on Shadow Reality then please leave a comment to this post, I really value all the comments I get here.

- SmokestormX

Why do I love Steam so much? It’s because of free weekends. And this weekend is the DOD:S free weekend. I might play a little bit of that since I’m a fan of DOD. It’s weird. I’m a fan but I don’t have the game. Oh well. If you are planning to play some DOD, chat me up baby. We’ll play.

Wow! On Tuesday I arranged for UPS to come and collect my Xbox 360, it was shipping of to Frankfurt in Germany for it’s repair, I believe it’s something to do with repair center queues. So this morning I check the Xbox.com support area to check up on my status and it was marked as arrived, so happy with that I continued my day.

Then this evening, mostly out of boredom or longing for Call of Duty 4 I checked the support site once more only to find they had updated the status again….

I looked back on some of my other posts because apparently, my posts, “are too random”. Anyway. here is an update that I promised on Black Mesa Source, a higly anticipated HL2 mod. Although I should give you a meaningful update. I think its safe to say that Black Mesa Source is abandoned. The last update on their site was from Christmas 2007. I feel kinda bad. It looked like it was going to be a very promising mod.

P.S. How’s that for random? Booyah!!

For the 2nd time, my Xbox 360 has broken…

Having been through the repair process once already last year (I even blogged about it) I know what to expect this time, and didn’t freak out as much at all. I was enjoying some great Call of Duty 4 with some friends when all of a sudden the textures had a wierd matrix effect on them, it looked pretty cool. Then upon rebooting I got an E 74 error which I hear is often referred to as “The black screen of death”, how original.

So it’s queued up for it’s repair already and since theres not many big games out for the Xbox360 at the moment I think I’m quite lucky and should have it back soon enough. I think i might even blog about my Xbox’s second adventure to the magical repair shop.

I have found a site that lets people watch full episodes of South Park. The site includes almost every episode. The only ones they don’t have are the newest or most recent episodes. It also includes episodes from every season in a neat organized order. The best part is, the site is in no danger of shutting down because it is hosted by Comedy Central, so its not illegal. So, if you love south park as much as I do, or its your first time seeing the series, then head on over to:
http://www.southparkstudios.com

or go directly to the episodes by going to:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/

Well, I’m finally back to the computer after having some hardware corruption problems. I’ve been away from the computer for 3 whole weeks and it was pretty much gruesome to endure and I know as he’s reading this, Smokey is probably laughing at me. Even though my current computer is fixed, I’m getting a new gaming rig that will be much better to suit my needs. This computer now goes to my parents. I missed this site and pretty much every site. “Might even click on a pop-up ad just for the heck of it”. I’m glad to be back bitches!!!

As discussed on the recent Noobtoob Community Podcast I have picked up a copy of Condemned and have contributed to Jam and Locke’s fantastic videos. Seeing as Jam started in the shopping mall I decided to flesh out the beginning of the story, and after this who knows which part I shall cover next (suggestions welcome). So turn down the lights, turn up the volume and enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I’ve been wanting a capture device for quite some time to allow me to record some some games, and so I have laid my hands on this, a USB Dazzle DVC170. There are a few USB capture devices on the market, but very few can actually record 60Hz PAL properly, and even the ones that can sometimes need to be tricked into thinking thier NTSC.

So I’ve had a bit of fun recording CoD4 and GH3 from my Xbox360, I can now get a little bit more creative and might even to some video reviews like my friend James.

For the past few weeks now I’ve been co-hosting on the Noobtoob community podcast, myself and Shane (Gameshark) have been inviting guest speakers on and I’ve really been enjoying it. The past few days I’ve been working on getting the feed sorted out and today I finally got around to submitting it to iTunes, hurrah!

You can subscribe by clicking here

Next episode is due out at the weekend, until then here’s the last ep.