CyberFlash

Hey wassap ponies! I hope everypony is having a great start to the weekend! Please checkout my latest PMV, inspired by the wonderful Maud Pie - an idea that came to me while watching the most recent episode - she really is so lovely, but it took me a couple of viewings to start to understand her! Since then, not been able to stop thinking about her - I think I need shooting! lol Anyways, enjoy! ^^

Yes!! yes yes! How could I not have mentioned Unreal Tournament!? WHAT a game! So many happy memories of playing this with my friends at the Universities dorms instead of working lol. Of course - it was always 'Facing Worlds' (well, mostly!) Awesome though all the other follow-up games were, the original was always my favourite. Oh yes I remember Bioshock too! Another great, though I never owned this one in particular.

Thank you Gamer Twilight! This is soo awesome - I'm such a massive fan of (a lot of games - half life too!) but particularly retro dos games. I remember back in the day! (actually much of it was spent angrily trying to make a decent boot disk that loaded the mouse and sound drivers into upper memory because the game required 580K of ram which at the time seemed unreasonably large! lol The graphics and quality of wolfenstein amazed me when it came out, and then Doom came out and raised the pie still higher! But there were some other great first person shooters that rarely get talked about from that era, so I wanted to give an honourable mention to Blake Stone - Aliens of Gold basically Wolfenstein if it were set in a spacey future killing guards and aliens with lasers ... or ... something. Crazy, but it really worked! Monkey Island / Sam and Max / Day of the Tentacle / in fact all Lucasarts game on the Scumm engine had to be among my all time favourites - wait while I'm talking Lucasarts can I also mention X-Wing and Tie Fighter? For those Warhammer 40K fans, I remember great times with Space Crusade - though I remember it also being frustratingly difficult at times! I must also mention Elite and Elite II Frontier (an older era still!) stop me if anyone remembers any of these! Such a great era, and yet at the time, annoyingly few people had a PC! It feels crazy to write this now, but I never played any multiplayers in Doom or any of these great games because I basically didn't know anyone else who had a PC. Seems crazy to write this now - and the Internet wasn't like it is today - you couldn't play games or listen to music on it or anything. It was mostly text, later images and to play someone on a multplayer you had to literally bring your PC around to their house and hook it up with either one of the serial ports or parallel ports lol flipping heck, why did we even bother? Such hard times, but also - strangely - such a golden age of games .... filled with joy and good memories! Some other memorable ones I have to mention (some of the first commercial games I bought for the PC):: Jazz Jackrabbit / One Must Fall, (in fact, I'm gonna say any Epic Megagame), Magic Carpet, Theme Park and Syndicate!

I definitely recommend Ubuntu as your first linux distro! Mint too. Historically, I've always had big problems with some of the installers on CDs/DVDs not working correctly. If you get stuck Google is your friend! half the time just googling the error will let you know what's wrong, feel free to PM me anytime if you need help. I must admit I've been a big Debian fan these last couple if years, a lot leaner also I spend more time with it on our little Raspberry PI. But you will definitely miss the games. Although there are things like WINE (if this is still going?) It's very hard to get many things to run at all. might even be best get a cheaper lower-spec (even second hand?) To use as an experimental machine that you could try this on?

One of my all time favourite mods is Small Horse for Amnesia It's an MLP based horror that is somehow also funny. Not for the faint hearted tho! (So be aware before playing!) Even though you can't take it too seriously: it is surprisingly fun. My favourite bit is the zombified Fluttershy. The Portal Gun hack for Half Life 2 adds a new bizarre dimention to the game and really confuse baddies! Also SMOD / Garrys MOD for Half Life 2 allow some silly and also amazing weapons from other games and also let you shoot actor characters in the story and killing them sometimes breaks the game lol

Jailbreaking your iPhone or rooting your Droid is perfectly legal! At the end of the day it is your toy, you bought it, you legally own it and can use it however you choose. The only issues are (obviously) voiding any warranty and that you will need to install updates manually in both cases. I have both an iPhone 3 (jailbroken) and an HTC Sensation XE (rooted) I've found Android very easy to update with Clockwork Recovery MOD. I've not attempted updating iOS so don't know the process for this (mine is so heavily hacked I suspect I would need to do a complete reinstall.). But Cydia is pretty cool, and there are some fantastic apps there. So yeah, definitely legal..however if you go to a bar with your friends after work and run nmap against an unsecured WiFi network to probe for other devices, then gain access to one of the devices using some other tools you've installed via Cydia...now *THAT* just might be illegal so don't do it. But it would definitely be worth familiarising yourself with whatever device you root/jailbreak because obviously the manufacturers are unlikely to help if you get stuck or end up with a non-bootable device etc But if all else fails www.xda-developers.com is a fantastic resource and you'll almost certainly find the answer to most questions there!

I hold two totally conflicting views on this: First I believe the law has a duty to act to protect people (particularly vulnerable people!) who are put in immediate danger by specific threats or suggestions. However, also I believe the Internet is not part of any country, but is it's own soverign entity. Therefore, I believe that no country holds the right to impose such restrictions on free speech on the web. I hold both the above statements to be true. When I was younger, I read the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow (recommended read!) which lays out this view wonderfully. It has motivated me to engage in hacktivism knowing that what I do is for the good of all Internet citizens. That any attempt by governments to meddle with Internet freedom could be considered an act of war and under international law we legally have a right to resist. They have no mandate to govern us and we did not vote for their control of the web. Any powers they have here are illegitimate. The biggest lie is that we need governing at all! Why would we need anymore law that simply the moderators of the site itself? If some free speech on a site raises problems, it should be brought to the owner or administrators attention who may then deal with it. They are the gentle shepherds looking after the flock. I consider each website it's own domain and country. Owners should be free to impose whatever rules they wish. I'm always uncomfortable with the idea of any single person - or group of people having ultimate control over all websites. That's not how the web works So I guess in a nutshell, that is the overriding argument in my mind

The saddest TV moment for me is in the great Anime film: Grave of Fireflies ("Hotaru no haka") - the movie focuses around two children's struggle for survival during WWII and the bit that always chokes me up is: So so sad hehe

Ever since I was really small I wondered this too! You know when you first start school at 4 or 5 and for the first time spend time away from your parents? My creeping fear was that mum and dad stopped existing when I wasn't around. I even started to wonder if the world behind me head continued existing at all when I wasn't looking! (how could I be sure it didn't just assemble itself quickly when I turned around or take a picture?) We each have our own reality if we define this to be the sum of what we witness and understand through our senses. In most places those 'realities' are shared but in some places will be different! How can I be sure that my 'blue' colour is the same as yours for instance? (maybe you understand a different colour the be blue - but you are still told it is blue!) I even wondered if this could account for personal taste and why it differs from person to person. The only thing you can ever know for certain is that your own mind exists because you can think and do not need anyone outside of your own mind to prove this (Cogito Ergo Sum) and I think this would continue even if ALL outside stimulus was cut off and you lost all senses. But I always take some comfort in this: even if reality doesn't exist and this is a dream or collective dillusion of some kind, we all witness the same (or largely similar) stimulus. So even if reality is not actually real, it might as well be for the value we attach to it! Perhaps this is the true nature of what 'science' really means? The studying of reality through empirical evidence and provable tests which do not rely on our own perception to be real?

Some of the oldest things I own (that still work) are: * Yamaha Keyboard that I rescued from my parents place this Christmas. They bought it for me in Xmas 1989...I took it home and hooked it up to a £5 midi USB cable I.bought on amazon last week to find it still works! one or two dodgy keys...but I think this is really dirty or corroded connections and could be cleaned! * ZX 81 I inherited when I was a kid (originally my dads, bought in 1981 or 82 I think) I may have tons of old junk here, but these were the first two i could think of!!