Well Happy (slightly belated) Australia Day folks! In 1788, the English First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove and started the first British penal colony on Australia. My, have we come a long way since then. XD

Since I was out in the countryside until the evening, I didn’t really feel like traveling out to the river to see the fireworks. When I talked to my friends, they all said they had the same feeling. ^_^;

I’m getting the feeling that a lot of people are starting to think you’ve seen one fireworks display, you’ve seen them all. I wouldn’t be surprised if the only people visiting the foreshore these days are either tourists or families with young kids… particularly after alcohol was banned. XD

On that note tho, I’m quite glad that alcohol got banned this time around. The amount of violence that occurred at this Australia Day was actually extremely low. Lack of alcohol is a small price to pay in exchange for that. 🙂

Anyway, I thought I’d do the ‘patriotic’ thing and just wish everyone a Happy Australia Day. Be proud you’re Australian and do your best to uphold our morals. 😀

Whew! Just got home 30 minutes ago… really tired, but I thought I’d try and crank out a blog. XD

So for the unfamiliar ones, Wai-Con is Perth’s premiere anime themed convention that’s usually held in January each year. Aside from a host of stalls selling all kinds of anime/manga/Japanese merch, there are also a lot of cool events such as drawing panels and such, a dedicated video games room and a freakin huge cosplay competition. XD
For the past few years, I’ve usually just picked a panel or two I liked the look of, just went to them, and then nicked off after… not this time. XD

I got a message from a friend who is one of the co-ordinators last week, saying that there is a slight shortage of volunteers and asked if I’d like to help out. I was already considering volunteering from before, but after hearing there was a shortage, I knew I had to jump in. 🙂
So, this year around, I was an official volunteer for Wai-Con, mainly helping out in the games room, but also a few odds and ends elsewhere too. And I must say, it was a pretty awesome experience. 🙂

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As it stands, since I spent nearly the whole weekend playing it, I figured I’d do at least one thing constructive and write a blog post on this game. ^_^;

So, the official open beta for Star Trek Online came out last week. I tried and failed to pick up a beta key from several sources, and so originally didn’t really pay much attention to it.

But then, as the week progressed, as a lot of friends online had picked it up (through beta keys or just by pre-ordering), I started to hear a lot of good things about it.
After several chat sessions on IM and forums, I figured what the heck, and on Friday, pre-ordered it. I figured at the very least, even if I hated it, I’d be helping to continue currying some interest in the Star Trek games franchise. Since my little games group and I have been responsible for one of the only other Trek-based roleplaying experiences around, I was going in with a very stern view on the entire thing.

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So just for those of you who missed it, Steam had a holiday sale over the Christmas holidays where they sold the majority of their games catalog at price discounts of up to 75% off.
Me being the stickler for bargains that I am, I couldn’t resist and bought every game I had been holding out for at that time. I probably spent something like 150 bucks, but I ended up with over 100 new games in my account. And these weren’t just small indie or casual games, either. I’m really looking forward to trying out Prototype, GRAW and Arkham Asylum… after I’ve finished playing Dragon Age. ^_^

So while I was settling down to playing my new games, I started to actually ponder the concept of digital distribution a little bit. I was feeling a lot happier and excited about getting and playing these games that I had downloaded, rather than bought from a store and was trying to figure out why.
I guess in its simplest form, it’s merely just buying digital content online and downloading it to your hard drive, as opposed to going to a shop and buying the exact same data on a physical form of media. On it’s own, this seems pretty uninspiring, so I started to think more about why I was feeling more satisfied about it. Here are some of the reasons I came up with.

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Woohoo! We’re back in business! 😀

So, I’m sorry to say that EpicLensFlares no longer exists on the internets. Long live EpicLensFlares.
In its place is this lovely new blog here, built on a totally new copy of WordPress, with a new name, of which I now plan to simply call ‘my blog’. 🙂
Now, at this point, I’m sure you’re a little confused as to what happened exactly… why I basically stopped posting in the middle of last year, and have now come back with a totally new system. There are a multitude of reasons, most of them stemming from my lack of experience, for why I changed everything and I’ll briefly mention them here.

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Wheeeew. You can really see the dust on this thing. XD

Truth be told, I wasn’t thinking of writing another post on this blog. Thanks to the latest WordPress updates, most of the code I’ve written has broken, and this thing’s currently teetering on the brink of total collapse. O_o

But, given the time, I thought I’d write one last post on here. After this, I have a new blog deployment lined up, but that can wait until next year.

So here ends the last day of 2009! But not just that, this also marks the end of the first decade of the 21st century. How about that hehe. A lot of stuff has happened since 2000 and when I reflect back on the fact I was still a junior high school student back then (and now a uni graduate and full time worker) it really puts it into perspective. I don’t think I’ll really try and cover all that stuff, but I”d like you to stop and think about what you’ve achieved in the past 10 years.

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