*forces himself to break off and write a blog post*

Oblivion... is amazing! It is everything anyone has ever hoped for, in my opinion, and just... far beyond what I'd expected. It's a huge time sink... you just can't get bored with it (yet). If you get bored doing one set of quests, you just... go do another! ...or even just plain explore! Unlike Morrowind, you can barely walk outside of a city without finding some ancient ruins or cave system that'd been infested with pirates. Not only that, but the compass actually does point out nearby areas of interest... so you're wandering around and 'ooh! ruins icon!' and you change course and investigate. Some may not think it's realistic, but you can't ask NPCs about nearby ruins, so the compass kind of makes up for that.

I've been playing for... about 3 days straight. I got it at 4pm on the 21st. Been playing it ever since. Took a small break a couple days ago to get online and see what's goin' on in the world. In that time, I've progressed to about level 12, I think... advanced to Expert in Sneaking and a Journeyman in Security (breaking into locked doors) and Journeyman in Marksmanship. The really awesome thing I've seen they changed about the character statistics is that Longswords, Shortsword and Dagger proficiency is all governed by a single stat this time: Blades. So say you use a dagger your whole life, then you could wield a Shortsword and "know" how to use it well enough. (Morrowind had all three blade types as a different statistic. Very painful to advance, heheh.)

I've also become Guildmaster of the Thieves' Guild for the first time in my history of playing Elder Scrolls. I was rather disappointed, since there isn't anything uber-spectacular about being Guildmaster... you just get some kick-butt headgear. Although the final mission was AWESOME. Ask me about it if you don't mind spoilers!

I've also joined the Dark Brotherhood, but I haven't progressed very far, and I'm thinking now that I shouldn't have joined at all... killing random people just isn't my thing. I'm really more a Thieves' Guild person at heart (at least my character... not in-real-life), I'll take what I need but I won't kill anyone for it... but I usually just buy what I really, really have to have. Like arrows. Lots of arrows.

I bought a house, too!! In a cool high society town called Anvil. (Sounds dumpy, but it ain't, lemme tell ya'.) It's very centrally located for all the people I see regularly, and I'm very well known in the area now. The house I bought was haunted, but it was extremely cheap, so I had to exorcise the evil necromancer who lived in the basement, but now it's all good! It's the biggest house in the town, too!

I haven't really progressed through the main quest very far... and, to tell ya' the truth, I'm kind of stumped. My next step is to locate an amulet... I know where it is and who has it, but to get to him, I have to join a cult... and I was all for it! ...Until they stripped me of all my inventory to give me some stupid cloth robes! That's where I went "YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING!" So then I tried a flat out assault...................... yeah, sure. One little Khajiit (cat race... pronounced "kuh-jeet" according to the many NPCs who audibly say "hail, khajiit!" whenever I pass) who specialized in Stealthy Assassinations against more enemies than I've found spread out over a single plane of Oblivion. That didn't work. So I'm stuck. I've been thinking about just walked in there in my underwear and saying 'hey! I wanna join!' but I'm wondering if that's kind of cheating... since I went ahead to see what happened, but then I restored, so now I know what's going to happen and how to prepare for it. I don't know... I'm sure I'll just do that eventually.

My poor laptop can't handle a full-graphics setting at all. I even disabled the grass! (Which seemed to be the biggest problem. I disabled that and everything ran sooooo much faster, that I was able to turn some things back on.) High Dynamic Range lighting is a huge tax on my system... always has been. So I had to disable that, too... But it still looks incredible! ...and Radiant AI never ceases to amaze me, though I've already found ways to steal things using the game mechanics to my advantage, heheh. As an example, I assassinated a pirate captain (part of the Dark Brotherhood quests) and then, the next day, I overheard someone talking (not text... voice... audio... sound!) about how a ship's captain at the docks had been killed and nobody knows who did it, how or why. I LOVE THAT.

Anyway... off to play more!
...and do some eBay work. Need to do that first, woo.

Bye!

Email from EBGames says it's shipped! AAH!!!!!

Goodness... I don't think I've ever been so hyped about a game. o.O

Oh, and weird question... how to do read "ZOMG"? Like... I see "zoh my gosh". ...and I guess Urban Dictionary says that, too, so I was right, yey. Just some random thought I've been thinking. Yeah... I'm not entirely myself right now... as you can see from the 12,000 posts today.

Oblivion is hitting store shelves today after all! If I could justify to my parents that going into town for just a single computer game (but when they hear "computer game" their minds instant translate it to "expensive waste of time") I'd be going in this very moment and driving all over to find it.

As it is... I'll just have to sit here and wait for EBGames to send me a shipping notice.

I'm going to go insane... literally... I've been bouncing off the walls, and refreshing the official forums and watching the threads scroll down and off the page. Sooo much new activity and screenshots coming in.

Maybe I'll play Half Life 2.
...or install Morrowind!

Yeah, I think I'll play Morrowind. Finish the second expansion pack.

Aww... isn't that sweet. Juno sent me a birthday present!
Seems I get 2 whole free months of dialup!
Wow. Best birthday week ever.

Dear Juno Member,

Happy Birthday! In celebration of your birthday, Juno would like to give you your first 2 MONTHS of Juno Platinum ABSOLUTELY FREE*...on us! Simply visit
http://www.juno.com/deal to upgrade and get your 2 FREE months today!

You'll get all the benefits of your existing service PLUS:

·   UNLIMITED Web surfing - No 10-hour limit!
·   NO banner ads - Fewer distractions
·   MORE screen space - 10% additional viewable area
·   1 GB of e-mail storage
·   EXCLUSIVE Platinum member benefits!

All for only $9.95 per month* and your first TWO MONTHS FREE will be free.

This is a limited time special birthday offer so start enjoying Juno Platinum today!

Visit http://www.juno.com/deal and cash in on your birthday gift now!

Sincerely,

Juno Member Services

I cut out the disclaimers... same ol' phone charges may apply, customer support charges may apply, yadda-yadda. ...and for those of you who are wondering, yes, I use Juno. SOMETIMES. Mostly when my DSL is offline and I absolutely HAVE to check on something. But my DSL is like... never down. So I haven't used Juno in months. (I only use Juno! Never NetZero... ever again. Never.)

Here's a little chart on how other processors compare with a standard Hyperthreaded Pentium 4. I found it on (can you guess?) the Elder Scrolls forums in a thread that describes how to make absolutely sure your computer can run this thing.

...you may be a little confused if your processor is not a Pentium 4; they only list "Pentium 4 2.0/3.0 GHz or equivalent." To attempt to alleviate confusion, here is a little guide. Just take out your calculator, and multiply either your AMD processor's "plus" rating, or the speed of your Intel processor in MHz, by the following numbers. The result would be what you should compare to the official system specs.

• Celeron - 0.50
• Celeron D - 0.80
• Sempron - 0.85
• Pentium 4 (no hyper-threading) - 0.90
• AthlonXP - 0.95
• Pentium 4 (with hyper-threading) - 1.00
• Pentium 4 Extreme Edition - 1.10
• Athlon64 - 1.15
• Celerom M - 1.75
• Pentium M - 1.85
• Intel Core Solo - 1.85
• Opteron – 1.85
• Athlon64 FX - 1.85 (clock speed, see below for exact numbers)
  FX-51: ~4.0GHz (equal to an AMD 3700+, actually runs at 2.2GHz like the 3700+ San Diego)
  FX-53: ~4.4GHz (equal to an AMD 4000+, actually runs at 2.4GHz like the San Diego 4000+)
  FX-55: ~4.8GHz (equal to an AMD 4200+, actually runs at 2.6GHz)
  FX-57: ~5.2GHz (equal to an AMD 4500+, actually runs at 2.8GHz)
  FX-60: Varies (equal to a pair of FX-55s together)
• Pentium D - Special, as much as ~1.80
• AthlonX2 - Special, as much as ~1.80
• Intel Core Duo - Special, as much as ~3.35

Really interesting, actually. Look at that Core Duo. Edrick's gonna have a super system, dang. Freakin' computer progression. A year after I get my laptop, they triple the speed a laptop can handle with minimal heat increase. Pssh. Not jealous, nope..........................

Oblivion is being shipped to stores today!!! Yey! Hopefully EBGames is also shipping my copy out today... so if it's anything like last time, UPS will deliver it overnight. Bwahaha. Though I ordered 3-day shipping, so I can't get mad if it's not, hah.

So I've been reading the webboards and I found a website that tests your computer against recent, popular games. (Myst 5 is, shockingly, included in the list.) Using IE or Firefox (wow) it'll either download ActiveX or Java Applet (respectively) and make a quick scan of your computer components.

This is what I scored with my laptop on Oblivion:

Not as well as I'd hoped. But the killer was that my Pentium M is only 2ghz. (Hey. That was fastest at the time!) ...and due to personal testing, which compliments what I've heard, but really isn't official, Pentium Ms are faster and more efficient for their announced clockspeed compared to Pentium 4s. I rendered a hi-res scene. Same settings, same resolution... on both laptop and desktop.

Desktop is Pentium 4 3.0ghz with Hyperthreading, and laptop is Pentium M 2.0ghz. They both rendered at the exact same speed... laptop just a hair faster. But, like I said, it was one render and I'm sure the different system environments had something to do with it. Like a severe lack of RAM on the desktop. (It only has 512 compared to laptop's 2048, bwahaha.)

But I ran this same Oblivion performance test on the desktop just now, too, and it registers the same rating. Which is mostly in reference to my RAM, of course... But it sees my processor as two, and rates 2 Pentium 4s as LOWER than 1 Pentium M. Video card on laptop passed with flying colors, desktop video card isn't so hot.

Both OSes are XP, one is Pro, one is Home... they both don't register passing as 100%. All "Windows is never 100%" jokes aside, that's odd... because there's nothing more qualified to run Oblivion than XP. It did raise a matter to my attention that I haven't thought about since Uru Live was actually being officially updated so long ago... videocard and soundcard drivers. It's yelling at me to update them. So update them I shall while I toil through this day and feverishly watch for when EBGames ships.

Concrete Post Crashes Into Packed Metro Car

Workers erecting a new billboard above a metro tunnel in northern Moscow drove a concrete post onto a speeding train carrying about 500 passengers on Sunday afternoon. A car burst into flames, but no one was injured.

The concrete post fell through the ceiling of the tunnel at 2:34 p.m. and crumpled the roof of a car packed with about 70 people...

What are the odds of that? o.O

Heheh, and then the construction workers tried to run...
Crazy Russians... Wonder if there's something more to this than an accident, hmm.
How could it "accidentally" drop into a subway tunnel?

Yey, conspiracy theorist talking.