Steam Summer Sales 2013 and a Valve retrospecive.

With the steam summer sales in full swing I've gotten alot of cool deals on what is my favorite platform of this generation. However I found an old page in my notebook thats basically a quick retrospective on how the valve company and steam came to be.

When Gabe Newel released half-life in the 90s. the game's "goldsrc" engine was said to be "a heavily modded quake engine". and it indeed looked like it. Eventually one of quake's most popular mods "quake: team fortress" was ported over as a stnadalone remake call "team fortress classic". Later there was also a tribute to the popular game (Quake) itself, and it was called "deathmatch classic". While using the goldsrc engine, it had most of the weapons from quake and almost the same game mechanics. THe only difference by defaut was some added half-life weapons such as the crowbar and a different move speed (depending on the server settings). Valve never tried to pretend that it wasn't heavily inspired by other games that inovated before them, and most of thier other on half-life games were based off user created mods, such as counter strike, a terrorist vs counter terrorist team/strategy based FPS, ricochet, a multiplayer tribute to the movie TRON's lightdisk battle scene. These days however there seems to be a  problem with developers that copy other games. The main problem is that while not citing your sources of inspiration is downright rude, failing to add any innovation to customize your own product and expecting the group to pay for it is downright degrading to the gamer themselves. The gamer in my opinion deserves the most respect out  of everybody, as they are the ones funding the game industry themselves. Sure there may be a new coat of paint, but the problem is its always the same old crap at the core, and no one wants to pay 60 dollars for a rehash of crap. At least not this gamer. I refuse to encourage this practice.

Crude Update time

So I should probably update this, as i didn't mean to start it up only to ignore it agian. PAX east was wonderful despite the facts that there was a few but there were a few bumps. Though overall everything was great. I re met up with my online pal Misty, and we went out to south station, which about a mile from the back bay convention center. The pizza business there was awesome and the employes was very down to earth, nice people. More to come in an edit later.

Also this next part is from a notebook I wrote in earlier this year or late last year:
So many people think its lame to visit old folks, but I disagree there foolish to miss out some of the happiest times in my life have occurred there. There is more knowledge in one nursing home then you could read or hear in a month from books check out from a library.

One Last thing, please excuse the crudeness of this journal because tab isn't letting me indent things either.

March 19th 2013:
      It's almost spring, yet a big snowstorm is going on in Derry, NH as of the time I first wrote this is my journal an hour or so ago. PAX East is mere days away and yet this two round storm is ****ing up the roads. While I'm not happy a bout it at least it didn't hit during the weekend, as that would have thrown a monkey wrench into things for convention day on Saturday. I know that i'll once again meet up with friend mistyolr and alphacanaogram. If they are not here then they are most certainly on their way via train from st Louis Missouri and little rock, Arkansas. Meanwhile a friend from Toronto has vanished into thin air, and he wont respond to my many diverse attempts to contact him. One of his closer friends doesn't even know his current number. Unless a miracle happens, I guess I wont be meeting up with him unfortunately.

   In other news Google has announced that it RSS feed service Google Reader will be being discontinued, with a three month period to transition posts to another RSS feed readers. Personally I am disappointed because I've been a user of the service for years, and me and my in real life friend erik robokun williams have used it for the random insanity series of weekly gaming podcasts. Google claims it was due to declining usage, i find this hard to believe. Also i concerned because of the trend Google seems to be doing over the last few years. Ever since Google labs was shutdown, they have been working on consolidating services or discontinuing. In 0000 Google wave was the victim, and now Google reader and god knows what else will follow that path. Thats all for now. I'll be sure to post an update after PAX east is all done with.

Later, Evan "GoldAnthro" O'Sullivan

Restoration

Its 2013 and I have and over the past 7 years i have used google online documents to write a lot of things, but there were always things that i didn't feel had a use laying around as files to merely view in the future. These are the more time sensitive posts. I should explain my interests. firstoff,I am a video game fan, furry, and anime lover. I'm also a person that refuses to take sides with the two political parties of the us of a. I try to be fair minded, though alot of times I will get out of hand and need to reel myself in. This has gotten me in some trouble in the past. I live with O.C.D, short for obsessive compulsive disorder, and sometimes the littlest thing will bother me till i freak out or panic. I've also been depressed on and off, ad my moods are bipolar alot, which means sometimes ill feel on top of the world and other times ill feel like i don't want to do anything or talk to anyone. I now have an xbox 360 console and ive enjoyed the last 3 years that I have it, however the quality of xbox live has been getting worse, with increased fees for online play and more ads on the dashboard while logged into xbox live.

I now have been playing on the steam client for PC as well as 360, since steam has alot more sales and I've been able to get games for a fraction of the cost during all those events, sometimes too many to all play at once, which I find funny. This last Christmas, the valve complete pack 2012 edition was on sale for 50 dollars, instead of the normal list price of 100 dollars. The pack included every valve game out so far, including the newly released DOTA 2 and counter strike global offensive. The only downside is that there is a lack of giftable game copies for games you already own, though it was still worth it for everything else included in it. seeing as how I've been trying to get my younger sister into gaming, it was a bummer info on what currently in the pack can be found here:
The odd thing is how many multiplayer games/apps valve has released. As most people know, there were two official versions of half life made for PC, 1 made in valves goldsrc engine, and another made in the newer source engine, with somewhat improved skyboxes and textures, as well as improved  pshycis, which is good seeing as how some of the puzzles in the game rely on physics. this remake was titled half-life:source. However alot of people didn't like the remake, and were aggravated that valve didn't put more work into making it look like the sequel game in the same engine called source, and thus there were attempts by fans to make a true source remake of the game. For about 7 years black mesa: source was in development, and just late this past year, a 75 percent complete prototype came out, bringing the game up to par with it direct sequel. ive had half life 2 for years, and on a separate steam app, hl2 deathmatch, a multiplayer arena of free for all killing with weapons from the story line, and its still populated up to today.
The game still receives bug fixes as current as this past week of this post. It also usually adds bug fixes to day of defeat source, which came out on the same version of source engine around the same time, and minor changes to crash bug in team fortress 2, leaving the rest of updates for major things to the team fortress 2 dedicated team. In addition to hl2 DM, there is also a deathmatch built in to half life 1 and all the expansions, in addition to a deathmatch app for the half life source remake, which are pretty much low populated (or in the case of hl deathmatch source) dead  due to redundancy.
My grandmother is now in a nursing home because of dementia, and it is tough to see her emotionally, but I do it out of respect for her. It also helps that the nursing home is right in my hometown of Derry. I have lived in derry, new hampshire most of my life, and its currently another month or so till spring, I cant wait to get back to the warmer weather. That is all for now

GoldAnthro (formerly goldbanjo) Signing off.

I'm Back Bloggin'

I don't know about you guys (and girls :P), but i had a good summer. I went to florida for two weeks, went to canobie lake park(twice if you count me going with a school club), and just plain got to hang out(like at a friends bday party). Well anyway I'd like to update and answer some questions. First off, anyone that knows where I live and has drove by my house has seen a horse there. Yes that is our horse. We've owned her for about 3 years and her names sunny, but just recently we got fed up with the 2nd barn we tried boarding her at, so we said enough is enough and decided to move her to our own house once we found out from the animal control officer that our land is indeed zoned for horses( who knows?, yours might too animal lovers! :D). Now when our nighbors, names of course withheld, found out we were going to be clearing out some forest in our backyard and having the horse, they decided to try to STEAL some of our land by claiming it was thiers just becuase it wasn't inside our fence. This war ended up with us winning a land survey and us putting up a tall wooden stockade fence to give ourselves privacy. Another question I commonly get after saying its zoned right is "where are you going to/do you ride the horse". Well, now is that really any of YOUR business? ^_^ Didn't think so. Its not the most exciting secret to want to know so drop it. I also right before the end of the school year had my dog die, cody, but this summer we got a puppy called taia(also a German shephar). She is very smart, and I will have a youtube video up soon of the day she came home and my other dog cleo's first reactions. Currently our dog has been having leg problems which be part of a growth deformaty. We Hope that whatever it is will get better as it seems to be starting to. Well. Sience the school year has started I figure I should list my classes
Period A:English
Period B: Animal Science
period C: ????????
period d:Spanish
Period e:Math
period f:desktop publishing
period g: half lunch/half study
period H:????????
C and H you can never mind about. Anyways I hope everyone I know had a good summer and i'll have more about my florida vaction in my next update. Comment and feel free to share your schedules here as well. BTW I'm in sophmore year now.
This is goldbanjo14 signing out......

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

I've been on my laptop all weekend updating it as it'll be getting it fixed soon. It has one blasted speaker and some of the keys off(though there still pressable), not to mention it needs a new battery and clock battery. I am here with some cool websites for people that want....well, cool websites to look at:

In the Art/computer and video games section:
Teamartail.com -This site has some cool furry/ sonic the hedgehog related art spread across an art gallery, image board, and 4 BBS boards(Practice, Normal, Theme, and Adult(18 or over only))
wiitoob.com - For gamers that have the nintendo wii system, this is a barebones, built for wii version of youtube. I believe that every video on youtube just about can be found on this site.(Note: You may of heard of an identicaly sounding wiitube.com. It s*cks. dont go to it.
Temporaryinbox.com -Hands out fake emails you can use to not get spammed when signing up at certain sites on the web.(also home of media pirate, media converter, and temporary forwarding)

In the reading section:
fanfiction.net -Has lots of reading storys made from fans of various books/movies/tv shows and based off them.

I also have a myspace which is: myspace.com/goldbanjo14
well thats it also don't forget about my upcoming miiandmyfriends.proboards61.com

I'm back

yeah im back. I have a two things to say. As a lot of my friends know I'm a multiple animal owner and have a range of many pets at my house( and one over at a barn). A couple sundays ago I had to put my dog cody to sleep. His back legs were so weak they didn't work without great pain; the way they had been for awhile. He was 11 years old and lived for a good life span for a german shephard. You can see a short page about him here:[url]

In other news I'll be going to pinkerton's faculty play(Romeo and Winifred(A (very loose) parody of Romeo and Juliet)) at the night of this post and what I think of it will be posted below as soon as i get back:
[Here]

Well thats all I can think of at the moment. Come back for the review!