Pickl Vision

I’m sure you are all very well aware of the protests that have been going on all around the world in regards to the Cult of Scientology. Myself and a few other anons were fortunate enough to make it to the last protest in New Haven, CT, Project Reconnect on April 12. The next planned protest is going to be on the 10th of May 2008.

Operation Battletoad earth as it has been named, will be taking place on the 10th of May in locations throughout the world. I’m sure myself and some other anons in the new haven area of connecticut will be there again to have many epic lulz, blast rick roll, and be genuine ass’s.  If you do decide to take part make sure you bring a mask or something to conceal your identity. Scientologists are known to take your picture and enter it into their creepy databases.

If you want more information leave a comment here and ill be sure to lead you to a plethora of information regarding the subject.

This will be the first part in the ever continuing debate about what the best outcome or strategy is in the event of a zombie apocalypse

I’m sure everyone has had this discussion. The coolest, most badass way to go out. There are tons of different scenarios:plague, meteor, nuclear war, zombie apocalypse, however most end in the same situation. Everyone is dead except you and few survivors around the world. Obviously in a plague quarantine is your best option, and it seems like a boring way to live out the rest of your life. Meteor strike is going to leave the world a lot like nuclear war in which everyone is going to die and it is going to be cold for the rest of your life, also not very fun.

Our last option is something that I have been discussing for quite some time now; it is the Zombie Apocalypse. Somewhere in a lab some kind of freak mutation happens in DNA and rather than dieing the patients turn undead. It is a recurring theme that happens in the movies all the time but there does not seem to be any definitive traits that are common throughout, besides the very basics that is.

We can look at various movies and the ‘zombies’ act differently in each one. In the Resident Evil series, the zombies are slow moving, often rotting corpses, and feast on the living. However in 28 days later, the ‘zombies’(ok I know it could be said that they aren’t zombies but i dont care) are blood frenzy, sprinting wild beasts. How they can run like that is beyond me but I consider this a “worst case scenario” scenario. Then we have the recent “I am Legend” which has a bit of everything. Once again I know that the movie doesn’t call them zombies but we all know they are. I like the infection rate in this movie, minus the part about some people being immune so for my scenario I am going to take the traits I like from each one.

• The zombies move like in 28 Days Later. None o f that Shawn of the Dead bullshit, or Resident Evil.
• They eventually will die, however their halflives are much longer like in I am Legend
• The only recurring theme is that they do not feel pain and can really only be killed through sever brain trauma.
• Mindless of course, and only react to instinct, but they are really fuckin’ hungry so go figure.

A couple weeks ago the power went out on campus. Now in my part of campus there are about 10,000 undergrads so I’m you can imagine what was going on. Immediately i looked over to my roommate in our pitch black room and we were both thinking the same thing. This was the start of the zombie apocalypse. Some retarded ass zombie chewed through the main line c

onnecting us to the power grid and the power was now out. As soon as the power went out there was pretty much madness everywhere with people congregating outside and yelling, hysteria. Later on we figured out that it indeed wasn’t the zombie apocalypse we had been hoping for but had it been were we ready for it? Hell no.

So we start off the apocalypse with spread of zombie infection at night with a power outage. Obviously theres no electricity, but we can assume that water still runs in buildings for some reason. The infection is spreading very fast, and we will also assume that anyone not

in their room, and even some that are in there rooms get infected by the time the sun comes up in the morning. Also it is now spreading throughout the surrounding towns and pretty much by nightfall the next day the entire country is infected. Of course there are others like you out there but they are few and far between.

What does it take to prepare for the apocalypse. A lot more than we were ready for. Living on the fourth floor of a 22 story tower does leave us with some protection however the worst thing to do had that been the apocalypse would have been to leave our room. We have no weapons, not even any blunt objects. I am making the assumption here that the only way for the infection to spread would be to come into contact with infected blood in the mouth, eyes, or open wound.

None of this Open-air contact bullshit. With my luck I wouldn’t be immune.

We have very very little food, and no water. The only thing in our fridge are some Dr. Peppers of course, and 2 oranges. Outside of that we have a small amount of trail mix already in the room. There is a water fountain right outside our door, however before even thinking about leaving the room we would have to be prepared with some type of weapon to finish zombies in a melee fashion. This is probably the most dangerous part of the scenario because theres a high chance of coming into contact with infected blood.

Last week I came across some windfall profits, and folded and decided to pick up the PSP. It was a total spur of the moment purchase, and I really didn’t even know what I was going to be getting my hands on. After I placed the order(of which I wanted to do Overnight but my credit card keeps getting denied - Need to make a lot of back payments but thats another story) I decided to find out what kind of features it has.

I went with the Silver Daxter bundle for a number of reasons over the core and Star Wars bundles. All the Star Wars bundle comes with is a white ceramic and Star Wars Battlefront Rogue Squadron. No memory card.

The Daxter bundle costs the same, comes with a silver psp, 1gb memory card, Family Guy on UMD, and Daxter. It just doesn’t have a badass Darth Vader silkscreen on the back.

I was in Game Theory when i got the text it had arrived. I wanted to get up right then and leave, but I held back. I returned to my room opened my new toy and played for a while. The menu is very intuitive and there is a lot that can be done. The Wifi has excellent range, much better than my iphone. Daxter plays pretty well however I got bored with it pretty fast. Just like all games that are not World of Warcraft.

I recall many years ago when the PSP was first released that it had no copy protection on it. At the time I was very involved in the original xbox modification, and was one of the first to install the newly released Xenium modchip to my v1.5 motherboard. My PSP however had the newest firmware which would make it impossible to execute unsigned code on unless I hard modded the battery. Oh well.

The weekend went by and all I could think about was modding my PSP to get the most out of it. There are many large PSP modding scenes out there, the largest being http://www.pspiso.com . It is possible to download games directly from the internet and send them to your memory stick and play them from that without ever having to buy the game. (piracy is bad mmk) I did all of the research, and used some application to turn my memory stick into a Magic Memory Stick. The next part was to remove the battery from its casing, and cut the trace to the 5th pin on the battery’s eeprom. If someone has a Fat or PSP running custom firmware it is possible for them to take a fat battery and flash the eeprom serial to 0xFFFFFFFF or something. What that does is when you put it in the PSP the PSP thinks its a service battery and will boot from the memory card. You then Flash the PSP’s internal firmware with whatever custom firmware you would like.

In my case I opened the slim battery and cut the trace with a pocket knife. I suggest using a razor or box cutter. Once you cut the trace, put the battery back together and stick it in your slim. It should power on automatically. The memory stick light will flicker, and the screen will be blank. When its not flickering anymore press X, and it will flash the onboard firmware. Do not remove the battery or the memory card otherwise your PSP will be bricked, or no good, unless you can find someone in posession of a pandora’s battery, and magic memory stick.

Well the flash went ok, but I had to turn my battery back into a normal battery. This is the part that worried me the most because the way you do it, after you just took a knife to a trace on the microcontroller of the battery, is draw a line with a mechanical pencil across the place you cut. I basically filled it in like a scantron. Popped my battery back in and it didn’t power on, which is a good sign meaning that its no longer a pandora’s battery. I upgraded the firmware to Dark_Alex’s 3.90 m33-2 and its amazing what you can do with it. I loaded games onto the memory card and have been playing them from there. The PSP has Skype, so you can use it as a phone provided you have a skype account and credits, which are cheap as hell, $10 for 7 hours of talk time anywhere in the world is awesome. I haven’t even found out all the things you can do with it yet, but I have linked it up with a PS3 and played Final Fantasy 8 wirelessly, played n64, snes, and game boy advance emulators. Its great.

So is it a great handheld, or the greatest handheld?

The preliminary fights were less than interesting given the names of the fighters that were on the card. Josh Koscheck, Diego Sanchez, Andre Arlovski - wow pretty funny that these are fighters typically on the main card, now they were fighting preliminary? First bout I missed the first time around because we were at the liquor store, oh well.

Welterweight bout: Chris Wilson vs. Jon Fitch

This fight was sub par as far as matches go. I was certainly expecting a lot more out of Jon Fitch. He won by unanimous decision, but still I was expecting stoppage earlier on. He has done better and given much more entertaining performances in the past.

Middleweight bout: Evan Tanner vs. Yushin Okami

Evan Tanner once held the middleweight title in the UFC before losing the belt to Rich Franklin at UFC 53. You may realize that was a long time ago. Hes getting older and it shows. Yushin Okami did beautifully and knocked him out with a knee to the face in round 2. From the start it looked like Yushin Okami dominated the fight.

Middleweight bout: Chris Leben vs. Alessio Sakara

I was expecting a lot more out of Alessio. Chris Leben has very very well in the past but Sakara is a beast. I knew this fight wasn’t coming to decision or submission. Stoppage was the only way and Leben won by TKO in round 1

Heavyweight bout: Heath Herring vs. Cheick Kongo

The next letdown the the night was this fight. Kongo came off a big victory against one of the best strikers in the weightclass - Mirko Filopovic. However it could be said that Cro Cop did not perform at his best, and I think many would agree. This fight came down to decision and the fight was given to Heath Herring. I hope we see more of Kongo in the future.

Middleweight unification bout: Anderson Silva vs. Dan Henderson

The main event of the night. Henderson was the last fighter that can possibly take on Silva. There is no one else that can beat him right now and I for see him holding the belt until 2009. Who else can beat Silva? Franklin/Silva 3? I don’t think so. Henderson lost in the second round with only 8 seconds to go via rear naked choke. I have heard that Wanderlei might drop to 185 but I don’t see that happening for a while. He is fighting Jardine next in UFC 84

All in all I was very hyped for the card, tons of great fighters and many that are known to be entertaining to watch. However I was let down by the fights they put on. Maybe I over-hyped it a bit but this card had a lot more going for it than the event showed. Next UFC is GSP/Serra for the welterweight title.

The NAGA New England Grappling Championship scheduled for this Saturday, February 23, 2008 in Fall River, MA has been postponed due to a sewer line explosion inside the venue.

Source:  http://xkcd.com/275/

Today, Jeff, Mickey and I went to Modern, we got two large pizza’s the first, a regular mozz, the second a meatball.  It was good, not great, I am a fan of Pepe’s, what do you guys think?

If things look different, don’t worry, you’re not drunk. Well, maybe you are, but things should look different here.

Everything that was on the site before is still here, it might just be somewhere else. Something that is new are the ads. Money from them goes to help pay the hosting bill. There are a few other new things that let us take better advantage of the software that the site is running on.

Nothing should be broken, but if you do notice something that isn’t working as you’d expect it to, leave a comment and let us know about it so that it can be fixed!

Sean, Mickey and Myself are headed to the NAGA tournament on Feb 23, should be interesting - Wish us luck, we will update with photos as soon as we get them.

Now, I realize that I am going to be victim to a lot of uneducated hatred and from fellow posters. I also am aware that I might be described as a ” Faggot”, ” NewFag”, or even a ” Nigger”, however I am willing to take the heat. Last night I saw Atonement, and it was amazing. It shocked me from the very beginning all the way to the end. Truly a powerful and epic film, which is up for best picture. I highly suggest seeing it. I did cry at the end, which means it was a fantastic film, only two movies have made me cry in public, LOTR ROTK, and Exorcism of Emily Rose ( I cried because I was so scared).