Jernlov

I find it easy now, but learning it was a huge pain. It's mostly because I learned in an academically "bad" way - mostly by reading Japanese web sites and simple books, and by doing that, you don't encounter katakana very often. It has a lot of benefits though. Reading sentence structure, tense and how verbs conjugate early on has been a very big help. 日本語はくだくだしい、でも時々随分実りある。

Hiragana is the easy one. Katakana however...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0OBIAgdyFc If I ever make a TF2 fragvideo, I will be setting it to this. It will be the greatest fragvideo.

Slowdive - Machine Gun Suicide, or getting high? Who knows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybGOT4d2Hs8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNqJx_TKHbs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVn8PFkrzxk

Sydney Sleeper encourages camping. Sniper isn't fun if you spend an entire game camping. No headshots mean you can't effectively take out classes up close (and fwiw, anyone who can play sniper well does that) and well, you're just an easy target when someone gets within 6ft of you. If you have the rifle, you can instantly kill scouts (biggest threat up close) and do significant amounts of damage to soldiers and demomen. It's imperative to hit those close-range headshots on soldiers because they lose their retreat mechanism. Camp sniper is a boring mechanic. You don't "support" your team no matter what the Sydney Sleeper deludes people into thinking. It slows you down and restricts your options - ever thought about using the element of surprise as a sniper? You can't do that without the rifle. Even the Huntsman works moderately okay as a surprise weapon (yeah, Huntsman is actually pretty useful on certain maps) but nothing really beats the possibilities of the default. My point is - why let your team-mates finish someone off when you can just take them out quickly yourself? That's a true support sniper. Creativity is key to being good at that class. It's actually one of the easier classes in the game because if you play it for a few days, you pick it up really fast. It doesn't have anything particularly unique to master. It's also the easiest to get out of practice with, except for maybe scout, but that's a completely different playstyle. I always suggest taking up soldier to new players. Apart from medic, it's the best way to learn maps since you're constantly moving around. All of the unlocks are quite solid (especially the Direct Hit - one of my most favourite weapons) and it's very difficult to really do anything wrong. It also has plenty of advanced mechanics to learn and it's quite interchangeable with demoman as well, although that never really worked out for me. I have good pipebomb aim but I'm more useful jumping through the air, shooting things in the air, filling people full of lead and making them eat pickaxe. I've played this class competitively and in pub games and it's so balanced and rewarding. It's not hard to get good rocket and shotgun aim either. I don't even play anymore and I can write this much about it. Heh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybGOT4d2Hs8 Hell yeah, man.

Still baffled by the need to hate middle-of-the-road music when there's enough offensive s**te in the world.

And now for something completely different: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p855qUdOFNI Now I'm going to be listening to grindcore all night.

Just threw up everywhere.

Or maybe you should practice with the actual rifle. Ask me anything.

A Tribe Called Quest - Push It Along All I've listened to today is hip-hop...

Coffee, cigarettes, music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5dIzY7yvRA Yeah, this is Australia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn4CfkATBAs Thread needs more Dilla.

If you're going to be doing graphics work then why not waste less on stuff like CPU and get yourself a decent monitor instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9S2vmYWLE0 Pretty much would get a ballin' stereo and blast this.

Shing02 - S02-2102

It's really not the same after you've stopped. I'd say you'd manage two weeks at best. Fifteen year olds trying to be hardcore just have a new outlet. What else is new? It's better to just deal w/ this kinda s***, man.

Too many to list. Probably the biggest mistake I've made though is not learning how to be decisive and have my own opinions. I've only acquired this trait in the past year.

Contrast is always, always good.

Nujabes - The Sign (feat. Pase Rock)

Wonderful idea. -- -- -- -- I've been a happy owner of Audio-Technica's ATH-AD700 headphones for the past six months. They are, in my opinion, the headphones with the best price/performance ratio sub-£200. There are quite a few "inbetween" models from £100-£200, but in terms of precision and comfort without needing external amplification, you can't do a lot better than these. -- First Impressions -- I had to wait about three weeks for these to arrive. My old Sennheiser HD205 headphones were quite literally falling apart, and there was some problem with the order of my new cans. I was fairly worried that I would be without headphones for a while and would have to resort to my old Logitech 2.0 computer speakers. However, I got my order sorted out and they eventually came before the second-promised timeframe. The first thing I noticed was how nice the packaging and presentation was. The box is white and the headphones are nicely set in the middle. For some reason, and I don't know if it was my box or if they are generally like this, it had a lot of Japanese text on it, to the point where it took precedent over the English. I thought that was a nice novelty. Upon opening them and trying them on, they were a lot bigger than I thought. They were also a lot more comfortable than I could have ever imagined as well. So, first impressions were very strong. Believe it or not, it gets better... -- More In-Depth -- Logically, the next step was to test out a few choice tunes. I picked some well-produced pop-rock, some black metal and some minimal techno. What immediately became apparent is the stark difference between "basic" audio equipment and "real" audio equipment. Basic stuff does the job just fine, but you're only really getting half, no, a quarter of the experience. With these, it feels like I'm getting the full experience. Drums are sharp and clear, airy, sparkly trebles, full mids and light but not insignificant bass were what met my ears as I played through these tracks. Everything is handled evenly and beautifully, with no breaks in clarity and smoothness when dynamics change. I noticed that even compared to my old headphones which had a rather high max volume, these were significantly louder at the same level. I wasn't especially surprised considering they have good resistance, but that fact remains. They are open-back, however, so the loudness doesn't ever feel oppressive. I would still advise quiet listening with these, seeing as the open nature does cause them to leak a great deal of sound. I would best describe the overall sound of these headphones as "hearing an actual recording played live in your room". They have that open-air feel without any expense in quality. Style-wise they're quite good. Satin gold and purple might not appeal to some and neither will the wing system, but it is all done to save weight and promote a natural listening experience. The AD700s deliver this perfectly. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to take a step into the world of hi-fi. A definite 5/5. Well, I hope I helped someone choose their next pair of headphones!

Envy - Last Hours of Eternity

You could just get a 3 GHz dual core, and you can run TF2 fine. If you do some serious modding, you could probably get this game to run on an Intel "graphics" chipset. I've done it, and it runs at like 20FPS in most areas on my laptop. Yeah, but the game looks like Quake 3. Not a bad thing. My TF2 hitsound was the one from Quake 3 as well. Also soldier is the greatest.