Jun 29

Last Thursday, I went to a Documentary Drama preformed by the Year 9/10 Drama class. The docu-drama was entitled “The Cult of Celebrity”, and it investigated how celebrities affect our lives today.

Besides featuring a song by Britney Spears herself (to their credit, it was well choreographed – thank goodness), it was actually very entertaining and though-provoking. For those of you that weren’t there, (“It’s too cold”, “It’s raining”, “I have homework to do” – slackers, all of you) there was a scene where a couple of guys were doing a court session, where they argued the for and against points of having celebrities influencing popular culture. What they said was largely lost on me, but the ‘court case’ was eventually dismissed. We like our celebrities just as they are, thank you.

Anyways, the main storyline revolved around the preview that the class showed in assembly earlier that day – a “My child’s a star” contest between two child stars (forget their screen names, apologies), Megan Hopper and Emily Jansen. Emily won with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and the rest of the story revolves around from there…they meet years later in a bar (with a hilarious bouncer), their friends comment on them behind their backs, while meanwhile fan-sites get a straight-A student seeing a shrink because she just isn’t coping…

If you weren’t there, you missed out. Luckily for you, there’s another Drama presentation on this Thursday 3rd July – this time, it’s a comedy by the Student Theatre Company, the excellent Drama class that runs after-hours. It should be excellent – please make an effort to be there!

On the freshbytes news front, you can now post comments in pages. Apologies this took so long to implement – I never realised it was so simple! So, if you’ve been wanting to comment on The Merchant of Venice, the Virtual Game, or even the funky Garageband tunes, you now can! In fact, I encourage you to do so.

One last thing – Radi8 on the weekend was awesome as usual, with an upsized Radi8. I am a little disappointed that the Radi8 website is now a MySpace page, but I do understand why it was done that way. Don’t worry, dear reader, freshbytes will remain WordPress powered for a good period of time – we will reach our target audience eventually :D

Anyway, in lieu of the Radi8 static-to-myspace downgrade, I’ve got a video for you all… The Radi8 Digital Scavenger Hunt videos from November 2007! This video is Tim’s team which included Tim P, Gemma V, Brendan J, Billy T and Callum M, but fear not – I’ll be posting the other videos each week, so if this isn’t your team – one of these weeks, it will be!

A little background: similar to the Wild Animal Safari held a fortnight ago, we were sent out in teams to do crazy things in Kingston/Hobart – things that included having your whole team in a tree, kissing chickens, singing YMCA with a whole bunch of strangers, getting strangers to spell weird words, walking out of an elevator backwards… the list went on forever. Enough from me, I’m dead tired from the Physics practical write-up, so I’ll shut up and let you watch the video. Comments below, as usual :P

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 22

Hello and welcome to another freshbytes post, where you, dear reader, will be catapulted into a world of total and utter chaos :D

We’ve had some changes (again) to the website, the most notable being that if you click on an image, you get this cool javascript effect – a little old, but still a cool effect nonetheless! Try it out with any post on here that has a picture and you’ll know what I mean.

You could even try it out on the new -=(NoSpoon)=- page here. This page is constantly updated with all the latest and greatest NoSpoon information, including where to find us on Friday nights, who to contact if you want to be a part of a LAN, and pretty much anything on gaming in CZ. You can check out the page with the photos from DEETS 07 (the LAN before NoSpoon) at Calvin here – why not try out the cool javascript effect there, its as good a place as any to have a go!

One last thing – The Radi8 Report. Since Radi8 (my Youth group, every Friday night [before the weekly NoSpoon LAN]) is a pretty Calvin-related (but not exclusively so), it’ll also by definition get a lot of attention on freshbytes.

So – Wild Animal Safari was a huge heap of fun – for those of you that weren’t there, imagine some people getting dressed in animal suits and running amok in Kingston. Youth in teams of about 5 or 6 then run around, trying to ‘catch’ them and earning a heap of points everytime they do. That’s the Wild Animal Safari in 25 words or less, and man, it was AWESOME!

I was a little disappointed at the teams (you can probably guess why) but pfft – they go broken up anyway. The team I had was still really good – Paul C, Emily L, Daniel P, Nathan dH, Neil O (you guys rock!) and as a result of our excellent intuition and superior animal-tracking skills (it’s called a phone, guys) we managed to take out the 6th Radi8tion Cup, not in a row, but still… I’ve now been on the team that has pretty much won the Radi8tion Cup everytime – even if it’s not with the same people… Lets see…

  1. Radi8tion One – “Tribal Wars” – Black Team won.
  2. Radi8tion Two – Unknown – No idea what this one was about, but I’m pretty sure we won :P
  3. Radi8tion Three – “Academy Awards” – Yep, we won again.
  4. Radi8tion Four – “Beach Olympics” – This one went to either the Blue or Yellow team, unfortunately.
  5. Radi8tion Five – “Messive” – No idea who won. It was messy.
  6. Radi8tion Six – “Wild Animal Safari” – Blue Team. Ooh yeah!

I’m sure that there have been some others as well – “GamesMania” was where yes, Black Team won, but we played this game that involved basketballs and milk crates, it was one of the Radi8s that started straight after school, before the school holidays. Thank goodness for freshbytes – you can read about GamesMania here. Yeah – Black Team won, I was right!

I think that’s about it for tonight – I’ll catch you all tomorrow. As usual, comments below. Benny, out.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , ,

Jun 15

Well, as the holidays draw to a close, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on everything that the holidays are…

The most recent event was the inagural -=(NoSpoon)=- LAN, where sleeping was optional, and pwning n00bs on CS:CZ was not. We didn’t get any sleep, but we did manage to clock up an awful lot of CZ hours… At this time, a special mention of the following people are in order:
((NS)) invASIAN: the one who was completely dead at around 10am the following morning. UT:GOTY now works on his machine, though! Stoked!
((NS)) Roarchas: managed to go home and sleep, was straight back into it the following morning.. Good work!
((NS)) Eudorus: had clocked up so many CS:CZ hours beforehand that it didn’t matter how well he went in games, just how log he could be seen “in-game” for… :D
((NS)) weedman: because you go to LANs to watch TV. Rabbit ears FTW!
((NS)) noobjuice: the newcomer to the -=(NoSpoon)=- LANs, he made a gallant effort in all games. His computer seemed so impressed it BSOD’d on command!
All in all, a good afternoon/night/morning had. Because, at the end of the day, it’s not about how much you won or lost – all that matters is that you played the game! YEAH!
Anyway, here are the totals for hours clocked up (most of us managed to hit a 10 – EAGLES SCREAM! Steam rating on Steam – bear in mind that some CS:S hours were clocked by other members… I blame Nick Jones for the amount of Half-Life 2 hours. Far out, Nick!
We also managed to chew through about 750MB of data, for those interested :D

-=(NoSpoon)=- Steam Rating

Anyway, there are other things to life besides gaming, they are outlined below:

Still waiting on my shipment of games from the US. For those of you that don’t know, PriceUSA is a great place to buy goods in the USA – basically, they buy the goods for you then ship the goods to your Australian address – handy for buying things online that don’t offer shipping to Australia. Really good stuff!

In terms of other social stuff from my social scene, there wasn’t much – I didn’t manage to go to many of my youth groups events, nor did I get much homework done. No, for me, these holidays were mostly about relaxing after the first term of year 12 – truly nerve-racking stuff!

On to the main topic, and it is the OC! In the holidays, one of the things I did manage to do was finish off Season Four of the OC. For those that don’t know, I actually purchase all four seasons of the OC on DVD at the start of this year in Adelaide… It cost me a bit, but boy, was it worth it!

Simply put, The OC is the best teen drama every made. Forget Home and Away, Neighbours, Degrassi, Dawon’s Creek, or any of those teen dramas you’ve seen, because The OC blows them all away. Search “teen drama” in google, and boom – The OC is second in the list. It practically defines teen drama!

Season 4 of The OC is awesome. It’s the culmination of the entire series, the spot where all the storylines are brought together and made so that you get to know what happens at the end. Does Summer marry Seth? Does Ryan go back to his old life? In a sense, the final scene of The OC brings the whole series back to the start – I won’t reveal any of the details here, but I will say that it’s really an apt finish to a great series – as was this post to the holidays.

Ooh – segue. See ya’ll tomorrow, comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , , ,

Jun 08

So I’ve been playing CS:Source a lot lately, and one of the best quotes ever went a little like this:

[CT One] “Don’t flash the tunnels!”
[CT Two] “Why not?”
[CT One] “Because I’ll be in there.”

Gold! Which is fair enough, if you’re going to be trying to kill people in the tunnels you DO NOT want to be team-flashed.

CS:Source is great, it really, really is. The Magnum sniper is so powerful it’s not actually funny, check this out:

443 damage in 1 hit

That’s 443 damage in one hit – enough to kill 4 people with one round.

I’m suffering from a complete lack of news at the moment, so I’ll leave it at that for now. My sincerest apologies if you were expecting more.

PS. Two sleeps till the Australian release of the 3G iPhone!

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: , , , ,

Jun 01

I don’t know about anyone else ’round here, but i’m pumped for the IPL final tomorrow morning. You want to know why I’m pumped? I am cause I saw some great cricket in the matches played in the Home and Away season. Simple as that.

Some might complain about the timings of the matches. Why should you care? Late friday night and Saturday night matches are OK for most ppl, even during work/school periods. And for those who (like me) are on holidays for some reason, they have no excuse for not watching at least ONE match. That match should be the one on tonight/morning. The Final.

Who doesn’t want to see present and former Australian players among past & present players from other countries? Seriously, come on. Who doesn’t want to see Shane Warne bowl again? Who doesn’t want to see Murali & Dhoni? Unfortunatly, there wasn’t much in the way of competition during the Semi-finals. A 9-wicket win for Chennai (Dhoni’s team) and a 100+ run win to Rajasthan (Warne’s team). At least the final should be good at this rate.

Why complain at all, when you get the chance to see young up-and-coming Indian players shine against good opposition. Guys like Tanvir, who got the most wickets for the H&A season, are worth watching especially in the finals. It is these guys that I feel have made the IPL a success.

Only time will tell if the IPL is a success or failure. But at this rate, it will succeed. It beats watching motor racing or soccer. It is fast-paced. It is exciting. It is interesting. And it is the future of cricket as we know it.

Join me, if you will, in watching tonights/this mornings match. Scheduled start of 0:15 (according to the TV guide) on TDT (direct feed of Ten from Melbourne). And like all the other matches I have watched over the past week, i’ll be having a Woodstock during the match.

Weed out.

written by Chris Jacques \\ tags: , ,