Damn Sky. Normally I wouldn't pay too much attention to getting rickrolled, especially considering that it's been pretty hard not to get rickrolled today (what with YouTube, gamefaqs, etc, all doing rickrolls for april fool's day). But Sky was one of the last places I'd expect to hear "Never gonna give you up".

So I went downstairs where my parents were civilly watching television. Sky Three was on, and they were showing a program called Cold Case. I casually began sipping my chocolate, when I noticed that some characters in the show were dancing to "Never gonna give you up". They had rickrolled me - through television of all things.

Damnit sky, today of all days.

I have no idea whether or not this was coincidence or someone's idea of a cruel joke, but I still found the event amusing.

So, chaps, any funny or otherwise stupid april fool's or rick astley related stories you have to share in return?

So a beta version of IE8 (the next installment of Microsoft's infamous browser) was released. You can download it here. IE7 was a much needed upgrade over IE6 but it was still far behind other popular browsers, such as having a rendering engine that failed to conform to modern standards. Being the most popular browsers, most web page designers had to build their pages around IE's rendering engine, meaning other browsers would frequently render them incorrectly. Anyway, the IE dev team said that they would be aiming towards web standards more, so I had high hopes for this beta being a welcome improvement over the last versions.Anyway, upon installing IE8 I found that it overwrote IE7. However there is an emulation mode so that it renders pages like IE7, though there are some small differences. I noticed IE8 has borrowed some features from Opera and Safari. First off, IE8 has borrowed the Crash Recovery feature from Opera. When IE8 crashes, you get a prompt next time to open the tabs you had last time. What interested me is how it also detects if something's wrong with a certain page, whereby it attempts to recover that tab and offers you to close it should it fail. Shame they've yet to have something like Opera's session restore, whereby crash or not your last tabs are opened the next time you start. You can do this, but you have to manually select it every time you close, there's no automatic option.

Safari in OS X Leopard let you drag and select a specific portion of a webpage, so it would be saved as a widget viewable from the "dashboard". For example, if you wanted to keep checking an ebay auction you could snip out a widget and use that instead of constantly re-checking the page. IE8 has a similar feature called "slices". Right now you can't just select anything, only webpages that have been designed to work with the feature. You can save something as a slice and it works like an RSS feed, you are informed when it updates. You can only view a slice from within the browser however.

There is also a new feature called "activities" where you can perform certain actions on a webpage and add your own. For example, if you highlight a block of text, an icon appears and clicking it produces a context menu, where you can blog it on windows live spaces, translate it or search it in Encarta. Presumably the browser Flock offers similar capability since it is centred around blogging and whatnot.

There's also something called a "safety filter" which expands upon IE7's phishing filter and can warn you of potentially unsafe downloads an such. One interesting thing I noticed is how the address bar highlights the page's domain name, like so:

This means that phishing sites which use numerous subdomains so they look like legitimate sites won't work so well because their real domain name is highlighted. Supposedly Firefox 3 Beta 3 has this feature too but I've yet to verify it myself.

The most important part for me was their improvements to the rendering engine. IE8 now passes the Acid2 test, however it only does so at one specific URL, not on any of the copies around the internet. This is down to some security feature in IE that handles cross-domain scripting or something. Still, it's an improvement, so hats off. There's a set of developer tools that have been added, I've yet to make use of these myself but they seem decent. Right now a lot of big websites are horrendously broken in it. GameSpot is no exception. The website yourewinner.com which I frequent is also broken much to my dismay. This is partly down to the rendering engine being a beta, and partly because that site's design was made by me. However, another forum theme I made elsewhere largely works fine so champagne all around. For a much more detailed look at the engine improvements, read this.

Overall IE8 is a nice improvement. Speed-wise it seems much faster than IE7, and there are some interesting new features. It's nice to see the new effort to conform to web standards, even if it is only a minimal one right now. Perhaps IE8 may turn out to bring IE back up to date.

For the sake of comparison I thought I'd give a look at the new Opera and Firefox betas:

Opera 9.5
Being an Opera user myself I'm more fond of this beta than IE8 and Fx3. But regardless, here are my thoughts. One of the biggest improvements here is the speed. It's much faster than the current versions of Opera and faster than IE8 and Fx3 betas (however, they're all very fast so on a good connection the difference may be negligible). There are also a number of new features, such as the address bar doubling as a history search. If you type a phrase into the address bar, it returns all websites that include that phrase in either the URL, page title, or page content. It's pretty handy because I have a habit of not bookmarking interesting pages then forgetting their URLs. The default UI is also different so it fits in with other popular browsers, so as to not alienate new users.

Something else that's new is "Opera Link", whereby if you have an account on Opera's website you can store all your bookmarks, speed-dial pages, etc. Then on another browser or computer you can synchronise these so you can keep your bookmarks etc across multiple computers, like services such as del.icio.us. Though Opera uses tabbed browsing you can still have multiple windows open, and should you close one of them you can recover that whole window, where normally all the pages would have been lost. There are many other small fixes and inclusions but I'm not going to bother listing them here.

The final big change is in the rendering engine, it handles many standards better and includes more support for CSS3. It also gets full marks on the CSS3 selectors test. Overall it's a good improvement over the previous versions of Opera and has a nice set of new features.

Firefox 3 Beta 3
There's not much I can say about this because of two major flaws:
1) It takes an astronomically long time to load - anywhere up to 10 minutes
2) It does not load any webpages whatsoever, it just will not connect.
The previous betas of Fx3 worked fine, I have no idea why this one is so horrendously broken. However I still have a good idea of what browsing is like with it so let's roll on.

Firefox 3b3 has a new icon set, including some relentlessly ugly back/forward buttons. These might be a temporary thing for the beta, however. There are a good range of new features, such as address bar history search like that in Opera 9.5 (however, firefox's only searches the URL and page title, not the page content). There is now more easily accessible information about website encryption and whatnot, and you can change settings on a site-by-site basis. None of these features excite me because they were already in Opera, but hats-off to Mozilla for including them in Fx3. Speed-wise, it's also a big improvement over it's previous version. The beta 2 version that I got rid of this morning seemed to be the slowest of the three browsers I'm testing but it was nonetheless a very fast browser. Of course I've yet to do a proper test with accurate timings and whatnot.

They've also included something called "places" or whatever. I'm not really sure how this works but it involves bookmarking in some form and it is probably appealing to people who enjoy "social browsing".

Overall Opera 9.5 is my favourite of the three, but IE8 is showing to be the much needed boost that IE needs, and Firefox 3 looks to be a worthy competitor for the two. However my main interest was towards IE8, which surprised me by being decent for once. I am aware that there is a Safari 3 beta out but the windows version is greatly lacking in useful features (it's really just a barebones browser with some eyecandy, though it is also very fast and has a competent rendering engine), and ultimately not worth my time writing about. Apple have paid more attention to the Mac OS X version of Safari.

Seems my exams are over, and it's back to normal school for me tomorrow. They were mock GCSE exams, so it's not like they mattered, just practice for the real thing. Even if the examinations themselves were boring and tedious, all the free time I had as a result is something I'll miss. Oh well.

After noticing I still had my Jeff Gerstmann decorations up a few days ago, I took them off. I'm intending to make a new profile banner instead of putting the big rigs one back up, but since there's apaprently a glitch with preferences right now, that will have to wait. I'm also level 40 now, which means I'm 40 times more awesome than you.

That aside I'm planning on buying a PS3, since I pretty much have enough money to pay for one. Problem I'm having is finding reason to justify such a purchase, I have to consider whether I'd play it often or take advantage of its other functions. So, GameSpot, convince me why I should (or shouldn't) buy a PS3, aside from showing off how BALLIN' I am, as ChadWardenn did. Failing that I'd just put it towards attempting to upgrade my PC, even though I have pretty much no knowledge in that area. I'm playing through STALKER: Shadow of chernobyl right now and while it's still an amazing game even on minimum settings, and I don't care too much for graphics, it would be nice to see if I could make it look a little better than what my ATI Radeon X300 can afford.

My obligatory Jeff blog. For a while I've prided myself on my Big Rigs-themed profile, since Big Rigs is the best game ever and having a profile devoted to it makes my profile the most awesome on Gamespot. But I've decided to dispense with the Big Rigs for now and, as you can see, show my support for good old Jeff by redecorating my profile with a new banner and blog header (the banner was a rushed job, don't rag on me for the quality). Call it overkill if you wish, I really don't care.

I'm trying to reserve most of my judgment on Jeff's firing as I do not know all the facts. They could have had a perfectly good reason for firing Jeff (I sincerely doubt it, but it's a very small possibility). But nonetheless I still have some thoughts on it. Primarily:

Unbelievable.

This is a completely ridiculous move, and the amount of uproar this has caused is blatant explanation as to why. Jeff was a key face of GameSpot, one of the first people they associate with the site. All of the hard working editors, developers, etc for GameSpot are all important to the site and if any one of them had their employment terminated it would be a big loss to the site. But given the amount of time Jeff has been with GameSpot, and the sheer volume of work he has put into it, I am amazed that the superiors in CNET did not foresee the enormous damage his termination would cause to the site.

Of course me getting worked up isn't going to resolve anything. Best I can do now is wish Jeff best of luck for his future endeavours, as well as Tim Tracy who is also allegedly leaving GameSpot following this debacle. And good luck to any remaining staff members, whether they choose to leave or stay with Gamespot.

As you can no doubt tell from my blog header, I'm a fan of Big Rigs. I've yet to have an opportunity to explain my liking for the game, so I saw fit to do it now. A fellow Rigist told me about this video by Aaron Thomas:


I found the video to be very amusing, but for me the video highlighted a lot of misunderstanding regarding Big Rigs (such as the video's comments had several people saying "You're winner!" as opposed to the correct "YOU'RE WINNER !"). So I decided to write this post to clear up any doubt about what is definitely the best game of all time, and perhaps even make some people WINNER in the process. YOU'RE WINNER !

Firstly, for those unaware, a brief description of the game itself.

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
Big Rigs (commonly referred to BROTRR for short) is a game released towards the end of 2003. It was developed by a company known as Stellar Stone, known for hiring Russian developers, and published by GameMill, who also published some of Stellar Stone's other games. Big Rigs received many shockingly inaccurate reviews, naming it the "worst game ever",including a 1.0 from GameSpot. However those reviews were anything but the truth, for Big Rigs is, in actual fact, the best game in existence.

Rigism
Rigism is a philosophy (though some consider it a religion) surrounding BROTRR. It teaches that Big Rigs is the most WINNER entity known to man, and that Rigists (followers of Rigism) must love and respect the game, as well as other WINNER games of the same level, and defend these games from the forces of LOSER. It is accompanied by the Book of Rigism, and most Rigists can be found spreading the word from various fansites, mentioned in the Rigism article.

WINNER and LOSER
Inspired by the famous screen that appears when you win a game of BROTRR, Rigism teaches that there are two powerful forces in the world. The first is WINNER, which is the good force. Something WINNER is something of incredibly good value (such as Big Rigs), often capable of blowing people's minds when they interact with it. For example, playing WINNER games like Big Rigs or Superman64. However, the simple act of playing the games is not enough to make someone WINNER. For a person to become WINNER they do not necessarily have to have played BROTRR, as long as they recognise the true greatness of it and other similar games, and show full respect to the Almighty Rig and its followers, they can be considered WINNER.

LOSER is the opposite of WINNER. Not to be confused with any of these definitions of the word "loser" (notice the difference in capitalisation, WINNER and LOSER are in upper-case to make them clearly different from any similar terms), someone who is LOSER is someone who has made it their objective to obliterate WINNERS and destroy the Almighty Rigs.

As well as WINNER and LOSER, there is another status known as "not WINNER". This is the "neutral" phase. A not WINNER person would either have a mixed judgement on Rigism and its teachings, or have never heard of Big Rigs and thus cannot judge it. Or if the high Rigists can't reach a decision as to whether something is WINNER or LOSER, it is given the status of not WINNER.

One can show a gesture of WINNERNESS to someone by presenting them with this:


Or, by saying to them "YOU'RE WINNER !". Note that capitalisation matters. "You're winner!" doesn't generally have the same effect as the upper-case version, though most WINNERS can still understand your meanings and appreciate your gesture. In addition there must be a space between "WINNER" and "!", because Big Rigs has put a space there.

Stell
Stell is the creator of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. Stell is currently the most WINNER person there is. The story of Stell says that on a journey of his through mountains in Russia, SunriseW12 (one of the 4 Almighty Rigs) appeared before him and told him he was the chosen one, that he must make the game Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. Stell founded the company Stellar Stone in his name, and mandated several WINNER people, including the very WINNER Sergey Titov to develop it according to his WINNER words.

HWSNBN
"He who shall not be named", known as HWSNBN for short, is considered by the Book of Rigism to be the most evil person to walk this earth. His very name strikes fear into the heart of all WINNERS, except for the mighty Stell himself. It is believed that his desire is to eliminate Big Rigs and its following of WINNERS, and turn as many people to the evil side of LOSER to join him in eliminating all traces of WINNER.

---

Regarding Aaron Thomas' video, I am a firm believer that the film was edited so that the players' reactions were taken out of context, and this is what I really believe happened:

Aaron Thomas' remark "I think I've learned my lesson. I'm never going to be late again" was cut short. In fact, the full sentence was "I think I've learned my lesson. I'm never going to be late again. Because I'm never going to work again, I'm staying at home to play Big Rigs. YOU'RE WINNER !"

Joseph Dodson was seen banging the keyboard on his head, and then later attempted to drive a knife into his chest before Jeff intervened. The reason he was banging his head on his keyboard is that he was in firm disbelief that he was playing a game so WINNER and thought he was in a dream. He was banging his head on the keyboard to determine whether or not this was actually real or just a dream. He was still in disbelief, having played something so unbelievably WINNER that he then attempted to drive a knife into himself, thinking it was a more effective way than banging his head to see if he was in reality or just a dream world.

Kevin VanOrd was seen at the end hiding in his jacket, rocking backwards and forwards yelling "stop!". After playing Big Rigs for so long and becoming aware of its superior laws of physics, he must have felt his surroundings to be LOSER with their restriction by gravity and was shielding himself from them. The reason he said he didn't want the job is that he wanted to instead work for Stellar Stone and make more WINNER games.

Well, that's all for now, hopefully I've cleared up any misinformation surrounding Big Rigs and Rigism. Now I leave you with some teachings of Rigism:

1. Everyone is WINNER until proven LOSER.
2. You do not need to denounce your original faith in order to become a Rigist.
3. Level 4 is to be kept secret within WINNERs.
4. Violence is not the answer, unless it is to defend all things WINNER.
5. YOU'RE WINNER!

Generic blog post giving various little updates to my fantabulous life in the world of GameSpot:

After a tough 27 day battle, I finally made it to level 35, called 'stitches' for reasons that elude me (I know it's mentioned somewhere on the site, I just can't be bothered to look for it). If levels actually meant anything here I'd be concerned about spending too much time here. But they don't, so I'm not concerned.

Secondly, a while ago I changed my avatar from a picture of cookies to the one I have now. I believe it's a taxi driver chap giving a thumbs-up.

And finally I added a load of crap to my blog header. It consists of six GIFs of Bidoofs spinning 360 degrees clockwise, followed by a picture of Shaq (accompanied with the text 'WHAT YOU SAY?!'. Next to this is a picture of some guy with a microphone headset giving a thumbs-up, with the text "A winner is you!", then the Shaq picture again. And below this is the text "YOU'RE WINNER !" in large font. Yes, I like Big Rigs. But I was very subtle about it.

Now if you'll excuse me there's a huge-leik-xbox fly buzzing around by my window, I'm off to let it outside.