Charity Shops are the Tits

That sums up what the majority of this post will encompass.

Had to wake up at 8am today (when you've fallen into the habit of sleeping between 6am and 2pm that's a kick to the nuts) to go with my mum to Diss (closest town to here) to withdraw money to pay bills and stuff. Anyway, Diss is a small town, but it has a huge amount of charity shops. Quite a few people no doubt look at charity shops and die a little inside. I know a couple of my friends that won't buy anything unless it's new. I consider myself more sensible, though.

Charity shops, to me, are the key to legally downloading near-free films. Put it this way - I can walk into a charity shop, and pick up five old VHS films for £1. That's 20p each. I then have the license to the films, so regardless of the quality of the VHS, I can download their .avi files legally. Easy peasy. Of course, they're not all 20p - it just depends on the charity shop.

So today, I bought the following from charity shops:

Little Britain Live on DVD, wrapped, for £3
Two Mr Bean videos, comprising two episodes each, 29p each
Indiana Jones trilogy (not the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull shit), £2 - later discovered all three videos are wrapped
Billy Connolly live show VHS, 20p
Titanic VHS, 20p
Independence Day VHS, 20p
Harry Enfield and Friends, three episodes VHS, 20p
Being John Malkovich VHS, 20p

The last one, Being John Malkovich, I'd been wanting to watch for a while. I did so earlier today - all I can say is "wow". If you haven't seen this film, next time you see it I'd advise you to buy it. It's stunning.

I'm up to 11 levels in The Inverse Man, but apart from that, no new game making progress to report.

Another story. About ten days ago I went with my dad to a car boot sale. I love these for a similar reason to charity shops, though with a car boot sale you can get ANYTHING cheap. I have a first edition PlayStation 3, aka a backward compatible one. I gave my dad my PS2 when I bought it since I didn't need it any more - I didn't consider errors in running PS2 games on a PS3 because I'd not experienced any problems five years prior when upgrading my PS1 to a PS2. Anyway, turns out there WERE a fair few problematic games:

Ape Escape (PS1): "Press Start" won't recognise the pressing of start
Canis Canem Edit: Occasionally freezes
Metal Gear Solid 3: Frequently freezes
Ratchet & Clank 2-3: Runs at about 15FPS
SSX3: Works for five minutes in-game then freezes

I'd wanted to play all of those for a while now, so when I went to the car boot sale I decided to scout out a PS2.

Got one with two controllers for £4. Works perfectly. I also bought a memory card for it, which amazingly cost £6. Sweet imbalance.

I also got DRIV3R for £4, Ratchet & Clank 1 for £4, the first two then-WWF Smackdown games on PS1 for £1 each, and two live Al Murray stand up shows.

That's pretty much it for this blog. I'll try to balance the game making and life sides of blog entries in the future, though, at times like this, when one is being more dominant than the other, something like this one will appear.

Goodbye for now!

~NAL