Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-1496755-20180803220351

Heh, I can think of one band that seems to never change (or at least change very, very little) their style and lyrical themes over the years - Manowar. Their sub-genre is power metal. And they even have a song suitable for an Englishman like Raadec (if he could just show up a bit more often). Ironically, some people criticize them exactly because of how little they change. But I don't mind that at all.

The worst part of the whole unemployment thing is all the feelings of guilt - either self-inflicted or spawned by the blaming looks and remarks of relatives. One more reason for me to be eternally happy this period is behind me.

So your situation is like the opposite of mine - I am surrounded by older people. Only one guy younger than me, and he has actually worked here longer than I have, so he still has a seniority of sorts. Being a computer nerd, we can find many common topics of interest to talk about. But sadly, he is often too busy to stop by for a chat. And my other colleagues' computer skills boil down to the very basics. Even medium-level stuff seems like sorcery to them :P

Well, I already have an account on Discord. So we just have to create a room or maybe used your old one, if it's still around?

It seems we are not meant to get along with "normal" people. I may have a couple hundred "friends" on Facebook, but only one contacts me regularly. And guess what - it's a total weirdo... but that's fine with me, since I've been a weirdo all my life. In many ways he is like a younger and inexperienced version of me - still needing to go through a few harsh lessons in order to "grow his wings" so to speak. Just half an hour ago he was telling me about his latest visit to the police. He was caught spraying graffiti on some factory wall (because they polluted the air). I suspect he has Asperger's because he gets these periodic obsessions that disappear all of sudden, only to be replaced by others. I am actually glad he switched to this "ecological vigilantism" obsession... because his previous idea was to construct some sort of torture device and use it on himself, so that he could "pay for his old sins". So as I said - a totally weird guy. But the only one who regularly keeps in touch and bothers to say "hello" or "how are you today". Speaks volumes about the qualities of my other "friends" there.

I just got a random (and very evil) thought - I bet you've never heard any Bulgarian metal bands (most of them sing in English, but there are exceptions). It's not like we have anything significant to speak of, but I could gather a few more notable songs and share them with you, if you're interested - just for the sake of having an experiment. I'd be curious to see what you think about them.

Metallica are an institutions, even if they are long past their prime. My favorite album overall is Ride the Lightning - I remember this record we had at home (as in vynil record!) called "Hell Comes to Your House" - it was a collection of hard rock/metal songs from several bands, one of them was "Creeping Death". Instantly grabbed my attention. And hearing the whole album lived up to the expectations built up by this one song. I like St. Anger too, exactly because of all the emotional intensity. My parents consider it a joke - not surprising, since they are oldschool and St. Anger sounds like nu metal to them. Oh, since I mentioned vynil records, we used to have quite a few of them. And even more ancient tech - I remember seeing and listening to an actual tape recorder... the audio casette's forefather (we had lots of casettes too).

I learned about most of the bands I mentioned from online radios - there is this really nice one that has separate channels for all sub-genres. Spending some time on the symphonic metal stream got me introduced to Edenbridge and the others. And yes, sometimes they play Tristania, After Forever and others you've mentioned as well. Can give you a link, if you'd like to check it out.

Indeed, a journey through the Quake series is an interesting experience - the games are so diverse, and yet united by a common spirit. Quake 2, especially, will feel most like "home" since it is pretty close to the look of Quake 1 (the engine is very similar). Quake 3 is legendary for its fast and furious deathmatches (even bots put up a formidable resistance), though it has some adequate semblance of a solo mode. Quake 4 is a bit underrated but I really like the depth of its Single Player campaign. It will certainly be nice to have someone tear apart the other games the way Quake 1 is.

Contemporary young gamers lack knowledge about many things... It isn't uncommon for someone to show up on the Facebook group and ask why he is unable to run vanilla Doom under Windows 10. I'd feel an urge to explain that DOS hasn't been properly supported since Windows NT 4.0 (Win XP's grandfather), and that you can't run a 16-bit program on a 64-bit OS, but then I realize it's a futile gesture. Then someone would start talking about the "Steam version of Doom". The so-called "Steam version" is just vanilla Doom bundled with with DosBox and some pre-made settings for it. The curious thing here is that whoever prepared this bundle was probably ignorant about DOS as well because they didn't include the setup utility in the package, so one cannot redefine their controls or change sound/music card settings. The person behind this bundle probably thought the setup was just an installation program... and lots of DOS games from this period were like this. Even in Duke Nukem 3D controls could only be redefined from the setup program. And then Quake completely dumped the concept of a setup by detecting your sound card automatically (provided your sound card drivers are set up correctly) and allowing you to change controls from an in-game menu. But curiously, some considerably older games (e.g. Wolfenstein 3D) could do the same thing as well. Makes me wonder how they decided to move these functions into a separate setup utility.