Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Vigilante's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, June 25th, 2009
12:12 am	I just made this and YOU can't have any context. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
10:57 pm	More Monkey Island goodness ( Here's a little embedded thing that has, among other stuff, a great "Making Of" video for the upcoming remake of MI1 and an insult swordfighting minigame ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
8:14 pm	You (may have) heard it here first - The Voodoo Lady was right! I'm pretty sure this is one of the signs of the impending apocalypse...but a new Monkey Island game has just been announced! It's being done by Telltale Games, developers of the new Sam n' Max episodes, and will also be episodic in format. The first one (of five) will be out on July 7th! Platforms will be PC and Wii. Ron Gilbert has been sitting on this for a while, and although he isn't writing this one, he has sat down with the team (which includes longterm Lucasarts veteran Dave Grossman as director) to give them some ideas. Other big names include Steve Purcell as cover artist (yes!) Michael Land as composer (double yes!), and Dom Armato once again as the voice of Guybrush (oh hell yes!) Here, have a trailer: Lucasarts are also remaking the Secret of Monkey Island with full voiceover and other goodies, and this will apparently be released later this summer! Despite the fact that the last Monkey Island game was not up to par with the first three (note to self: play it someday) I am still very excited. It's been nine years since we last saw Guybrush! Monkey Island, even more so than any other title of my most beloved gaming genre, has always been very special to me - when I first started using the internet a lot and discovered Usenet, back in 2000, I came across alt.games.lucas-arts.monkey-island and made lots of online friends there and in related communities. That led to the creation of this LJ and many of those friends are reading this today! Thanks, guys and gals - my internet experience would have been much poorer without you all. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
2:06 am	I'm not sure whether to find this sad or hilarious Word on the 'nets is that 3D Realms has been shut down. You know, those guys that have been working on Duke Nukem Forever for the past 13 years? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
10:13 pm	RAF Ibsley airfield and station RAF Ibsley was one of twelve airfields that were built in the New Forest area during WW2. Finished in 1941, the airfield was home to many RAF and USAF squadrons, as well as groups from Australia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Aircraft such as Hurricanes, Spitfires, Mustangs and P38 Lightnings flew from here on missions over France, including preparation and support for the D-Day landings. Much of the requisitioned area was originally farmland, and many buildings in the vicinity were also taken over and added to the base of operations. The airfield today is completely unrecognisable, as after the war it was turned into quarries which have now become landscaped lakes. The control tower is still standing, and there are still some bunkers scattered around the area which I sadly didn't find this time round. ( maps, pictures etc under cut ) At the end of the war, the land was given back to the original owner. In the 1950s the site became a race track, and in the 60s it was sold to a roadstone company who dug up pretty much everything that was left of the airfield. At some point I will go back and attempt to find the underground bunkers. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
8:17 pm	First walk of the year - Hampshire countryside and the Solent I live just outside the border of the New Forest, an area of pasture, woodland and heathland (as well as human habitation) in southeast England that has been recently granted National Park status. One of the things I intend to do this year and beyond is to make a thorough exploration of the area, and as previously mentioned I went for my first major walk yesterday. The New Forest as a boundaried entity was the creation of William the Conqueror, who set the area aside as a royal deer hunting ground. The original boundary has expanded several times over the centuries, and technically Lymington is outside of the current boundary, although the majority of this walk lies within. ( map, pics + writeup under the cut ) Next up: an abandoned Royal Air Force control tower from WW2. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 13th, 2009
9:28 pm	monthly regurgitation post etc As mentioned last post (over five weeks ago, shit) I did indeed go to Bath and see Watchmen. Quick spoiler-free summary of my feelings: ( It is April 2009. You are reading this post. ) So what's next on the comic book movie front, is it Wolverine? Right, next on the agenda: I have decided that seeing as I probably can't afford to book a big overseas holiday anywhere this summer, I am instead going to have a bit of a road trip. Now obviously this depends on me passing my test (which I'm hoping I'll be able to do by August or so, or else I'll start running out of good weather!) but assuming I can pull that off in the next four months, I will take a couple of weeks off work and just drive. I'm hoping to explore some places I haven't been, reconnect with old friends and perhaps visit some that I haven't got around to meeting yet. I'm not sure yet how far north, east or west I'll actually go, but I imagine I'll definitely be going as far as Birmingham (to see my grandad), Luton (Nick & Katie), Cambridge (old times' sakes). On the other axis, Canterbury/Kent and Bristol/Bath/the West Country are possibilities too as I'd like to go see more of what's out there. So if you'd like to see me, put your name down here! And speaking of adventuring, today we finally got our promised Easter weekend sunshine and I ventured out for the first exploration mission of the year. Pics coming once I get them off the camera. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
10:14 pm	On Monday, for the first time in my life, I walked into a real boxing gym - complete with heavy bags, a ring and Rocky soundtrack on the stereo (yes!) The combative skill of boxing - I often hesitate to use the term "martial art" as this has frequently been co-opted by Japanophiles and people who say idiotic things like "martial arts aren't for fighting" - is something that I have long thought should be one of the cornerstones of my personal self-defense system. I am very glad to be in a position to study it properly, and to make things even better, the gym is less than ten minutes' walk away and costs £2 a session! I can see straight away that the fitness aspects are going to be extremely beneficial. We did the standard running around the hall warmup, then several rounds of skipping, then several rounds of shadowboxing, then partner drills. And finally, *after* all that, a hellish conditioning session with various high-intensity bursts of such things as swinging a medicine ball back and forth and running while dragging a tyre full of bits of concrete. I was glad to see that eveyone in the group was exhausted and not just me! Tonight's session was somewhat easier as it was a "do your own thing" sort of affair, so I mostly worked jab-cross combos on the heavybag. After tomorrow I will have trained four times this week (grappling on Wednesday and kickboxing/weapons on Friday) which is a first for me. I am aiming to make it the default. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 26th, 2009
12:08 am	GIP Havn't done one of these in a while. Why yes, that is Aquaman punching out a couple of narwhals. BTW, Danielle, if you're not already watching this show, you really should be, you would love it. Their version of Aquaman is sort of like a cross between Hank Scorpio (without the evil bits) and Zapp Brannigan. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 12th, 2009
1:43 am	Up Periscope! Hello chaps, it's resurfacing time. Hope you all had an excellent holiday season - although I haven't been writing, I've still been reading, and I hope to be more prolific this year. Since I took almost no time off last year and the company doesn't allow vacation days to roll over, I had more than three weeks off over Christmas. My friend Sarah, who is from the US but currently spending a year studying in Japan, came to stay with me, and we had a great time running around the New Forest, among other things. Just a quick post for now to kick off with, then - one fun little thing we did was to create a big Playmobil diorama on the kitchen table. Some of you may remember the one I had on my coffee table in my flat in Southampton - this one is even better! ( 20ish pics - might take a while to download if you're on dialup ) p.s. pre-emptive "yes I know all those animals don't actually occur together in the same environment" (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
11:24 pm	holy shit It's about bloody time I was immortalised in plastic form! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, September 29th, 2008
12:52 am	The Jurassic Coast goddamn I am really quite shite at this interweblogging thing aren't I? Mostly because there hasn't been a lot to write about. But! Today I went places. As my compatriots may have noticed, we here on the island were essentially cheated out of our summer this year. So, when I noticed that this weekend we were actually due for some sunshine, I suggested to my housemates that we take a day trip to Kimmeridge Bay, in Dorset. ( Ghetto BBQ and lovely coastlines under the cut ) I'm glad I got to do *something* fun and outdoorsy this year before winter sets in! I do like living in this part of the country - I have always wanted to. Next summer I will be driving and should be able to explore even more. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
6:52 pm	wait what Apparently the guy who wrote Artemis Fowl has been commissioned to write a sixth Hitchhiker's book, with the blessing of Douglas Adams' widow. All I have to say about this is "why?" I haven't read Artemis Fowl, no doubt some of you folks have so please enlighten me with your thoughts on this. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
8:59 pm	Quote of the Day "We got a bunch of different women and jumped on them and they had to get us off...er, as it were." -My workmate/training buddy, telling me about a women's self-defense video he helped our instructor produce. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
11:10 pm	Hell yes there's going to be a new Wolfenstein game. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 16th, 2008
11:46 pm	I went up onto the roof at work today to be airlifted to safety install a wind sensor. At first my thoughts were "oh boy rickety ladder + tiny hatch + pigeon shit = good times". But when I got up there it was actually really nice. It was another perfect sunny day, and I could see for a couple of miles around - country houses and the harbour with its hundreds of masts rising up against the backdrop of the glittering water. A group of swallows flew around and around the building. It would have been quite nice to take a deckchair and have my lunch up there! It's probably the most fun thing I've done since I started - I'm obviously not supposed to be an engineer :P (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
9:44 pm	I have just returned from a much needed weekend away in Bath, courtesy of my dear friend alexwatson. I have always liked Bath ever since I first went there five or six years ago to visit the university, and I often wonder how things might be different if I'd chosen to go there instead of Southampton. The centre of the city is at the bottom of a valley, and houses interspersed with farmland spread up the slopes. Some of these people living there have absolutely spectacular views from their back gardens. Sometimes, when coming down one of the more secluded roads leading down from where Alex lives to the city centre, I might see a hawk or some other bird of prey. On Friday night I didn't get there til almost 10pm, so Alex and I spent a few hours as we usually do talking about old times (mostly old times on the internet), during which I discovered that a very old, very obscure and very random injoke from the IRC channel of alt.games.lucas-arts.monkey-island has somehow resurfaced on the xkcd wiki. Since the weather was supposed to be good, we decided on Saturday that we would go on a long walk somewhere, and settled on following the River Avon in the direction of Bristol. We walked alongside the river on the way up, as far as Saltford, and then followed the Bristol & Bath Railway Path cycle track back. The total distance was around ten miles or so. The weather was in fact perfect for a long hike - just the right amount of sunshine and breeze. At one point I remarked on how much the countryside reminded me of typical English landscape paintings, and then the next heritage trail notice we came across mentioned that one of the famous landscape painters actually did paint out there. I enjoyed pointing out all the different wildlife we came across; the glittering blue damselflies, the metallic green and red soldier beetles, the mayflies living on borrowed time. Playing at amateur naturalist is something I get to do all too rarely these days. We stopped for lunch at a riverside pub, the name of which escapes me now. The word BRAINS was prominently emblazoned on their table-umbrellas, though. The bar staff did not resemble extras from a Romero movie, and I am pretty sure my haddock and chips was in fact haddock and chips, so I guess this shall remain a mystery. Am I getting soft, if I was exhausted by the time we got back? It *was* ten miles in the sun... In the evening we watched the latest Doctor Who two-parter, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, which was rather creepy and well-written. I haven't been keeping up with Doctor Who at all, but I might have to seek out the rest of the series. Back to work tomorrow, sniff. Oh well, the week tends to go fairly quickly. My friend from Florida is flying over next week (yet another person I have met who is coming to study at Cambridge) and I think we are going to Stonehenge or something on the weekend. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
8:45 pm	I was sent a link to this very interesting article about Hitler's Forgotten Library by a friend of mine who likes to Godwin me. ("You know who else had a weird library? THAT'S RIGHT") 16,000 is a lot of books. Funny that in among all the religious, military and occult books, der Führer was also a fan of cheap pulp western stories. (Comment on this)
Friday, April 4th, 2008
11:44 pm	Too much packing will give you a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack Yes, it is the eve of my great departure! I'm leaving tomorrow morning - I've nearly got all my stuff together, although I can't exactly take much since I don't have a lot of space! My room in the house will have enough space for a desk and a bookshelf, but not much more. Since I had a free retake I thought I'd attempt the last exam of my MCSA qualification for the third time. Unfortunately today I also failed it for the third time! I guess Microsoft aren't kidding when they say you should have a year's experience using the software in a commercial setting before starting the exam process. Oh well, I don't even need it since I'm not going into IT any more. So, Exchange Server 2003 can go shove a big fat Maverick up its highway to the danger zone. help what have i forgotten to pack (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
8:14 pm	I'm moving this weekend! Last Saturday my dad and I went down to look at properties. There are something like three furnished one-bed flats available at any one time within a five-mile radius of Lymington - properties seem to get snapped up very quickly. The couple that we looked at were really nice, but in the end I decided that I can't really afford to be paying £575 a month rent + £100 council tax + another £100 bills + £50 travel. It all starts adding up very quickly and the amount I have left at the end of each month is cutting it a bit fine, especially later on when it comes to getting a car and insurance and all the rest. Americans take note - you think your economy's bad, here a graduate electronic engineer can't even afford his own place! So, I'm going to revert to living like a student again for at least a little while. I've taken a 6-month contract in a shared house with 4 other people, which is going to save me a whole ton of money. I sure hope my housemates are nice - they weren't in when the agent showed us the place. They are at least people with jobs and not students, which limits the chances of them being horrible a little bit. On the plus side the house is literally a one minute walk from work, so I can get up at 8 and be home at 4:30 if I want (the company lets you work 9 to 5 or 8:30 to 4:30). I also got to see a bit more of the town - Lymington is a really nice upmarket place, not even a McDonalds or Starbucks! The high street has all the useful stuff like Tescos, post office, bank etc but also loads of quirky little antique shops and seaside souvenir places and stuff like that. One last thing - I'm not going to have room for a TV, so I want to hook my consoles up to my PC (flatscreen) monitor. I'm sure some of you have done this - what kind of cables and adapters and stuff do I need? I'm going to have a Dreamcast, Gamecube and PS2. (4 Comments |Comment on this)