If the situation calls for it, i may restart a blog on the free wordpress domain but we’ll have to wait and see if that is necessary.

Twitter will likely be my new output medium, as its lightweight and i can easily update from anywhere via my phone – So i guess i’ll try and use that more often.
aka. Make sure you’re following http://twitter.com/#!/mengplex

Stuff on my agenda…

19th- Graduation

23rd – Holiday in Mallorca for a week

Started playing Assassins Creed brotherhood, which is pretty much exactly what I expect from Assassins creed at this point im time, the game does do some things differently but for the most part its just a refined version of Assassins creed 2, not that I have any problems with that, because its a great game – If something is a winning formula, why change it – although I do feel like the games are coming out a little bit too quickly, id hope AC:Revelations is the last in the series, the last thing we need is another overmilked franchise.

I also had a look at mobile phones, im considering going contract just because i’ll (hopefully) have a full time job soon, which means more time spent out the house and away from a computer, the last thing I want is to become like one mythical Sean Penney, so a good phone with mobile internet and a fuckload of free minutes and texts will be useful for keeping in contact with everybody. Godknows I have a pretty small circle of friends already, I dont want that getting any smaller.
Thanks to a family friend, i’ll probably end up getting a 50% contract deal, letting me go for a pretty outrageous £30 a month deal and only paying £15.
Strongly considering getting the Samsung Galaxy S2, which seems to be getting amazing reviews everywhere and is supposedly the best phone on the market right now, £15 a month is the minimum they let you get with the family/friends deal, so im thinking if I get the £17.50 a month deal, on a 24 month contract – I get the phone free and the total price of the contract over 2 years is £420, considering i’ll get 900 minutes, infinite texts and unlimited mobile internet as well (per month obviously) and the fact that the free phone they give me is worth £475 on amazon right now… Id say it sounds like a pretty good deal. What the fuck im going to do with 900 minutes and infinite texts when I have about 6 friends is fucking beyond me, but at least i’ll be ready should the txt-pocalypse occur.

Finally, given the possible buying of smartphone and jobsearching and stuff starting, I thought i’d clear out my email inbox, it had around 3000 unread messages in, so looking at the MSN ‘new messages’ notification was anyones guess.

I’d say that went well.
Also uncovered some super retro emails from up to 7 years ago, including some nudes of a girl I dont know

The story is fairly simple and follows the life of young borrower Arrietty as she does her first borrowing from the house she lives in, however things dont go quite as planned and… thats how the movie plays out.

It runs fairly short for a modern film at only 90 minutes and it feels it, I personally have no problems with this as theres nothing worse than watching a film that outstays its welcome, The borrowers Arrietty does what it comes to do, and then disappears much like the borrowers themselves. Its a great film, but falls short of other Studio ghibli greats like Porco Rosso or Laputa. The film also does a fantastic job of conveying the scale of the borrowers, the sound is particularly well done.
Im going to stop now before I start sounding like a film student.

8/10
Definitely worth the 90 minutes.

Note: This film comes out in cinemas in the UK on the 29th of July according to imdb

We ended the holiday by once again meeting the girls, we met them at a beach near to their hotel – it was on the way to this beach that we realised that their hotel is actually really really close to ours (see maps posted on the first day, if you cut through the town you can walk it in <20 minutes, as opposed to the 4 hours or godknows what we walked around the coast)
There wasnt a huge amount of drinking or anything special involved on the beach, a little bit of drama throwing each others sandals into the ocean, the hennesys concoction (which is something like equal parts rum and coke with some vodka)
Mostly just some nice civilized chitchat as we watched the sun set, which quickly turned into sex-chat as the girls got more drunk.

We opted to not go for an all-nighter on the beach with the girls, as our flight was pretty early in the morning at around 11, and we planned to catch the 8am bus to the airport (as its an hourly bus)
In retrospect though, I should have stayed out for the all-nighter because I basically did one anyway, the room that night was stuffy and hot as hell, all of the nights I had actually slept in the hotel I had been pretty fucking drunk, trying to sleep that night was horrible and sticky – opening the balcony doors only seemed to increase the drunken shouting coming in from the streets and not cool down the room at all.

And so the 2nd night of no-sleep happened.

In the morning we caught the bus, checked out fine etc, got on the plane, arrived back in birmingham UK in the early afternoon.

An overall fantastic holiday, even if we did get robbed of phones, time and (personally) sleep by the island of Ibiza.
I cant wait for the next holiday with my housemates, skiing sometime maybe guys? :P

We headed out to the usual place for breakfast, Rita’s 1 Euro brekkie round the corner, and then went for a dip in the hotel swimming pool – which, for a 1 star hotel, was pretty reasonable (we were expecting it to be filled with piss and needles)

Spent mid-day wandering about town, there are plenty of clothes and souvineer shops around the edge of the alcohol maze, alot of the shops which sell tickets to events also double as rave clothes shops. I did want to buy some dance-like clothes but nobody else seemed interested due to money issues, not wanting to make a fuss i just went with the flow. I did pick up a souvineer fridge magnet though, we have a family thing of buying magnets for the fridge/microwave everytime we go abroad so I thought I had better keep up the tradition.

Phil decided it would be ‘funny’ to buy a pack of cards with naked transexuals printed on them to show to his parents, I do not understand him (apparently at one point he found a stash of gay porn in a McDonalds car park and thought it would be funny to take it home and hide it under his bed, Why is this guy still a virgin? I dont understand…)
Duncan bought a snazzy ‘I <3 BEACH’ bag, which is every bit as good as the english on the bag.

The girls told us they were going to a Water Party at Es Paradis via text, we figured it would be a good opportunity to experience our first club night in Ibiza, we knew we had to go at least once, but the club nights there are so expensive – The most famous club in Ibiza, ‘Pacha’ costs 70 euros for entry, you also need transport to and from the club, and the drinks inside are apparently something like 18 euro for a JD and Coke, Other clubs werent as ridiculous but still had average entry prices of 30-50 euro. Water Party was 30 euro, but with entry for 2 for some reason (so 15 euro entry, still more than Im used to paying for a club, but seriously cheap for Ibiza)

We found a nice restaurant on the beachfront selling cheap food, full english breakfast for 4 euro and the rest was decently priced too. Hung around for a while afterwards and just watched TV, checking out the top 20 dance tracks according to MTV-Ibiza

We headed back to the hotel to do some casual drinking games on our balcony, I have never, Most Likely, and so on. Apparently Im the most likely to say ‘Ive got this’ the most times in a night, I beg to differ.

From buying large packs of cheetos we managed to accumulate a small selection of temporary tattoos, and thought it would be a good idea to put them on….
Duncan : Tramp stamp
Luke : Stars below his ear
Ian : Tribal across his neck
Me : Eagle on my tit looking like its about to grab my nipple

We met the girls at the Egg, a sort of landmark in Sant Antoni which looks like a big egg with a ship through the middle.
They were completely fooled by the tattoos for a few minutes, until it got to me, at which point they sort of realized nobody is dumb enough to get that stuff done for real.

The girls wanted to get drunk, back to the alcohol maze then.
We ran into a street salesman trying to pull people in, he offers us 10 euro for 2 drinks, a pitcher between 2 and 3 shots, we ask him if its the london bar, he says no, and so somehow we got roped along into yet another night of heavy drinking. We get taken… just across the road from The London Bar, and get given Vodka and Lime shots or something, they are fucking abysmal and we want no part of it.
After drinking, playing more drinking games (I have never), and finding out that all 3 of the girls we have been hanging out with are completely mental in the bedroom (90 minute blowjobs, 69′s and anal by age 18? what the fuck.) , we stumble over to the coast and head to the club…

We entered Es Paradis, A large pyramid looking structure on the coast. Inside was a jungle of floating platforms with dancers atop, balconies, a huge bar running along one side with an aquarium behind it, a misty dance floor area and the thing we came for….
Tuesdays at Es Paradis is the water party, majority of the club had gathered in a colliseum pit area in the middle of the club, steps lead down to a dance floor in the middle and a mirrored platform is above where paid dancers do their thing. We were told that the night starts at 12, but the water doesnt usually come on until 4 or 5am, we entered at 4am, danced around in the colliseum abit, it was pretty fun as we were still drunk/tipsy from the drinks earlier, the lighting was well controlled and pulsed and strobed with the loud dance music…
At 5am, the lights blacked out, singing in the rain starts playing and fountains from all sides of the colliseum area start spraying water everywhere, the water ricochets off ceilings, people, hands, heads… Fucking everywhere. It is already the most insane thing I have ever seen at a club, the music thumps, the crowd starts to strip down as the water drenches clothing, then the water starts to rise…
Apparently they dont have any drains in this dance floor that they are spraying water onto. It rises slowly through the night, I point it out to my friend as it starts to get to above ankle level..
An hour goes on, the fountains are still going full whack, the water is now up to my hip, relaxing my arms whilst dancing results in my arm entering water – my wallet and everything in my pockets is completely soaked through, people are now splashing water from the floor similar to how people have water fights in a shallow swimming pool, people are still raving. A conga line forms where people kind of float-hop around the place as its now impossible to walk properly, dancing stops being so intricate and devlolves into jumping up and down as any other leg movements is far too difficult.

The night eventually ends, and we pour out onto the street, where luke and duncan decide its a good idea to run into the ocean because its cold outside (the sun has yet to come up, probably around 6:30am), against my better judgement I join them, the water is warm – im shocked.

We get back to the hotel at around 7am, and dont walk the girls home because we arent insane (sorry girls, you live way too fucking far and are way too not-single to walk home), wash up, throw our stuff onto the balcony to dry off and then me and duncan went out to find food as we’re fucking starving.

Most of the local shops are closed, a corner shop is open along with a cafe, we go for the cafe and try to order some croissants – the woman speaks no english at all, duncan tries his best but ultimately fails, the woman also doesnt understand that we want to know how expensive the croissants are, we eventually submit to hunger and just order them and prepare to be mugged in plain daylight, 2.50 euro, we lucked out.
Bought some more cheetos from the shop, and sat down on a street corner to eat, and that was probably the most satisfying meal I had in the whole of my stay in Ibiza, Croissant and Cheetos at 7am in the morning sitting on the floor on the side of the road.

I return to the hotel and cant sleep, and thus the 2 nights of insomnia began.

Being that Ibiza is such a tourist trap, there are con-men fucking everywhere roaming the beach, throughout the day, overly friendly young girls walk around and sit with groups of guys (or hot guys sit with groups of girls) and offer them what sounds like the most amazing experience, some of the claims we heard was a party boat with free alcohol, a beach party with all you can drink alcohol… etc etc. These nights out are of course limited entry and stuff and as such they need to take a deposit…. you pay them 20 euro and then pay 20 euro on the night… So… we just give them 120 euro and then they walk off and we turn up to the club and assume it actually exists? IDUNTHINKSO.

Lots of banter in the ocean, including seeing Ian scream like a little girl at starfish, we are still making fun of him after returning home.

This is where the day gets rough.

Im not sure if i clarified it yet, but the people on this holiday is 4/6 of my housemates (me, luke, ian, duncan) , and 2 friends from lukes course who I’ll hopefully never see again (Phil and ryan)

Our house came back from having a swim in the ocean to discover that basically all of our bags had been stolen… whilst 2 people were with them, right under their noses.
Fuck.

Losses:
Me : Phone, Vest, 5 euros
Duncan : Phone, Bag, Shirt, hotel keys
Luke : Wallet with 10 euro (all cards), hotel keys
Ian : Everything? (Wallet with all his holiday money in, full set of clothes, new phone, book….)

Pretty shitty. Especially Ian who lost probably around £300 or £400 worth of stuff
I Lost all the photos I took on my phone as well, and I was pretty much the only one on the holiday that was taking photos, this is why there are pretty much no photos of the holiday, which actually makes me more upset than losing the phone itself.

We got back to the hotel and found out we had to pay 40 euro for each set of keys stolen, as they had to change the locks and stuff. Expensive and annoying, but necessary I suppose, better than having my passport stolen.

Spent a few hours sulking, having a nap and so on until dinner, where we went to a beachfront restaurant for a cheap burger and chips or something to that effect.

The night rolled in, and we decided to meet up with the girls…
But where would we meet them? They decided to meet up at the London Bar again.
And so the 10 euro pitchers appeared again.
The girls sussed out that phil is a virgin (forever alone) and took it upon themselves to try and teach him how to pull girls, they tried teaching him a subtle technique of slowly brushing a bit of the girls hair out of their face and offered themselves as practice dummies. Phil spent the next hour or so essentially palming poor kate in the forehead instead of brushing her hair out of the way. It was painful to watch and I still dont understand how anyone can be so shit at life.
Earlier in the day, duncan took out 50 euro for Ian to survive off for the rest of the holiday (as he literally had all 150 euro or whatever of his holiday money stolen), Ian somehow manages to lose this 50 euro at the London bar, unsurprisingly he is kind of bummed the fuck out at the fact he has lost all of his money twice in one day.

The alcohol is hitting me pretty fucking hard.

We leave the london pub and go into a Vodka Bar, which was like a free entry club-bar place, the music was pretty good and they had smoke/fog machines and lazers all over the damn place.
Of course by this time I was out of it. I stumble to the toilet to throw up, but all the stalls are taken, I start to feel dizzy and worry im about to collapse – at this point an english skinhead gets in my face and starts shouting at me, I ask him to help me get to a seat, he does, I am surprised at the kindness of said skinhead.
The next half hour or so is a blur for me as I am essentially slumped on a sofa in this foggy club, the only thing keeping me conscious is willpower at this point, I pump my leg in time with the dance music to try and keep myself in the game, I have no idea where the fuck any of my friends or the girls are at this point and the last thing I wanted to do on my 2nd day in Ibiza is pass out in a club when I can barely find my way back to the hotel when sober…
I open my eyes at one point and the skinhead is like inches from my face, thankfully he skips the rape and gives me a bottle of water and we basically have a chat about how nice he is and how he hates seeing people have a bad time, who am I to argue – he was genuinely a pretty nice guy for helping me out.
The rest of my housemates find me and realise I need to get home, I promise them ‘ive got this’ and slump back on the sofa to sober up a little more.
We eventually leave the club and get back to the hotel alive.

Sant Antoni where we would be staying for all 4 days of our holiday is basically only divided into the beachfront, and a wealth of bars, pubs and small clubs in what essentially forms a big alcoholic maze of roads which look exactly the same and young girls who desperately try to pull you into their bars with alcohol deals so cheap that theymake you question the relatively high price of water.
We had 2 rooms of 3 booked, we were actually kind of expecting a single and a double in each room but fortunately we got 3 singles – They were arranged into a single and a double but we werent having any of that shit.

^Heres a map showing where we were staying (Hostel Rosalia) along with some other key places i’ll be referring to…

After faffing around with keys and dumping our stuff into the room, we hit the strip to look for food but as Ibiza is such a tourist trap, all of the food shops were crazy expensive – we ended up in a spanish pub like place, got some lasagne and chips….

So we decided we’d ‘take it easy’ as it was our first night in Ibiza, we didnt really fancy hitting a club or anything just yet, the plan was to get some cheap sangria from the nearby alcohol shop and then sit on the afternoon beach… However, we made the mistake of going the opposite direction of an actual beach and ended up at the marina… where we (wrongly) assumed, “if we keep walking in this direction, we’re bound to hit a beach eventually”
Basically, instead of hitting ‘Beach’ on the map we went all the way south from our hostel, through the alcohol maze and then walked west all the way to rock beach, where we eventually said fuckit and just sat on the rocks and started drinking sangria. A few of the less typical drinking games were played, I Spy in particular (drink if you get it wrong, nominate drink if you get it right).

After about an hour sitting on this rock beach something bizarre happened. Duncan (my housemate) was identified by 3 girls he knows from UK, his best friend’s (hot) little sister and her 2 friends…
Bizarro.
Little did we know at this point that we’d end up meeting with these girls (Kat, Kate and Jess) every night for the rest of our time in Ibiza. We headed to the alcohol maze to find a cheap bar…
And there we had our first run in with ‘The London Bar’ . Oh Goddamn.
For 10 euro, 2 mixed drinks (I think doubles or triples) of whatever you want, a bottle of peach schnappes (about 2~3 shots each for our group) and then a 2L Pitcher of cocktail to share between 2 people.
….
I nearly died. Holy shit.
But it was fine. I had this. I was the best.
Drunken banter ensued.

Ian disappeared, then reappeared very drunk, thought he had lost his phone, and had to be escorted back to our hotel by Phil and Ryan.
Eventually we were tasked with taking the drunk girls home (whilst completely drunk ourselves) – You can see their hotel on the map (The hotel Abrat), its actually not THAT far from our own hotel…. However we did not know this at the time. We stumbled arm in arm in pairs back to the beach (me, luke and duncan and the 3 girls) … and around… through rockbeach.. It was fucking ass. And it took around an hour or more probably. Im not sure if it was just me, but i was actually expecting to stay the night at their hotel – but when we got there the guard at the door basically wouldnt let us in because we didnt live there (cockblock’d). We started heading home…. Except we didn’t because Luke had different things planned for us.
We walked in the wrong direction for about 20 minutes, before me and duncan turned around. We saw many bizarre things that night, things which I likely dont completely remember, a stairset from tony hawks underground 2, a hybrid ATV-Car thing, many drunk people….

^The route we took, if only we had known where the hell we were going at the time….

We got back at around 5-6am after originally going out for a ‘light’ night , collapsed on the bed.
And that was the end of day 1.

its not looking great tbh.
I may consider watching Usagi Drop and the idolm@ster anime but the rest of it all honestly looks/sounds terrible. bit of a disappointment after there being so many good series on now (spring season). Ah well, maybe i’ll watch some older series like Geass/Darker than black

Mind. Fucking. Blown.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is not very good as a game, infact, about half of the time I was playing I was curious as to whether it should even be classified as a game.
The stories people tell about MGS4, saying its the best movie ever on the PS3 ( I wouldnt really know as I havent played Heavy Rain) are completely justified. MGS4 could easily be described as a 15-20 hour film with some interactive scenes – Worth mentioning also that the story of said film will make little sense if you have played through the other games, and probably no fucking sense at all if you’ve never played the previous games.

That said, for metal gear fans (Myself? Maybe? Im not even sure…) there are alot of cool throwbacks and flashbacks in the game, references to itself and its unique humor ["Damnit otacon pull yourself together this isnt a game"] along with a complete remake of some parts of shadow moses island from MGS1

The game is somewhere around 8-10 hours of cutscenes/codec calls, and 6-8 hours of ‘gameplay’ – although I feel like a fair amount of that gameplay isnt the desired type from a MGS game….
Basically alot of scenes have forced combat, which i suppose could be worse, but fucking hell the combat in that game is so shitty, the third person aiming style is pretty badly done if you need to actually move at the same time (its fine for tranq’ing soldiers in the side of the head, ala MGS2/3), god forbid you actually attempt to take cover in a full scale firefight, or aim down the sights of your gun, as you’ll find yourself in a clusterfuck of useless buttons, tiny aiming area and general bullshittery.

The one big thumbs up it gets from me is for certain climax scenes near the end of the game, the game does a very cool and arty split screen style with action going on along with cutscene in the other panel, its very well done, powerful and memorable, and im amazed I havent seen anything like it before. Also, the final fight against ‘youprobablyknowwho’ is epic as fuck (I quite dislike the use of the word epic nowadays because its overused, but the final battle really can’t be described in any other way)

verdict: Its okay if you loved the previous games I suppose, but in all honesty I’d probably say its just not worth your time unless you really really care about the MGS universe. I for one couldnt really give a shit about sons of the patriots, big boss and so on…

Gaming :
Replayed Resi5 with a friend (god that game is so much fun on a clean playthrough with no guns), Played through LEGO Batman because I had nothing better to do, League of legends as always, Downloaded and played some of Duke – but it runs really ass on my PC so it kind of kills the enjoyment a little

TV:
Southpark this season has been pretty disapointing on the whole, there was that huge err…. twist… or… something… at the midseason though, which has gotten alot of discussion going….

Anime:
Aside from the regular shows ive been following this season (Click Me), I recently picked up the somewhat now infamous ‘Mahou shoujo Madoka Magica‘ along with ‘Kimi Ni todoke 2′.
Whilst the latter is kind of whatever, Madoka has been very very interesting, Its bizarre in that it doesnt really fit the genre/tags it bestows upon itself, I actually gave it a miss in the spring season just because its a fucking Mahou shoujo anime (Magical Girl), y’know… one of those shows where teenage girls transform to fight evil and have a transformation sequence where they get pretty little frilly clothes and shit [see also, Cardcaptor sakura, Sailor Moon....] .
The show is however, anything but cute girls running around with bows in their hair, this is some serious shit, a dark plot and kind of twisted characters make for a bit of a sinister take on the cutesy genre, I zerged through 9 episodes in about 3 days because its really one of those anime that you want to keep watching once you start… Give it a try if you have nothing to do.

other:
This reddit is kind of fucking amazing…. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/ca4bl/time_to_get_classy/

feel free to prove me wrong

worthy mention goes to A PICTURE OF FINN FARTING (which renard is offering for free :O )

edit:

Have one more from a different artist

edit2: and one more…

We have some smurfs on the US league of legends server, my summoner name there is Twilight Sparkl3

(We also still play on the EU servers where my summoner name is Mengplex)

If you dont play yet? Then you fucking should. (and use my referral code so i get cool shit)
http://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c209680df1ef

Even before they platinum games, most of the staff came from Clover Studio which made Viewtiful joe, Okami and God Hand, and then they go on to form Platinum Games to make Madworld, Bayonetta and Vanquish?

And now they’re making anarchy reigns, which if you havent seen it – looks fucking amazing. I only hope its more of a Spikeout (ARC) clone than the MOBA they seem to be advertising it as.

So yeah. this post goes out to Platinum Games, making flashy, challenging and fun games since whenever the fuck they were founded.
Keep at it son.

^ Proof that ponies break the laws of physics.

^ Giggle at the ghostie techno/dance mix

<No pictures of inside the actual laboratory yet, i’ll try and get one soon but its always so busy in there>

^ Picture of my workarea in the glasshouse, where I had to pull the flowers off of these plants, the flowers as you can see if you click to open fullsize – are the little white/yellow bits on the ends of the stems. I had to fill 20 1.5ml eppendorf tubes with the flowers, with each tube holding maybe 100? (so around 2000 probably)
I Did this over 2 days, about 10 hours work ~.~

(The pictures in the glasshouses are weird and look like someone taking a picture of a SDTV because of the special lighting they use in there for the plants)

^ The next job involved  taking sliques from the flowers (essentially a small tube of seeds), pulling the petals off and then slicing both ends of the tube with a razor blade, these things are on the scale of…. maybe if you imagine about 33% of a grain of rice? (really tiny)

Then there was the flower grinding using liquid nitrogen…

and then finally…

^ The microscopy room, where various microscopes are rigged up to computers (that one on the left has a 30″ monitor). They are used for various things, for example putting fluorescent markers into cells or just phenotypic analysis [in english: put radioactive stuff into cells, microscope can see the radiation and shows it as fluorescent green, alternatively they can be used for looking at shape/structure of stuff]
I was tasked here for a few hours to photograph some seeds for analysis of size, the seeds of course were seriously tiny, smaller than table salt, hence the need for the microscopes. I also had to make sure the seeds weren’t touching by using a needle and – using the monitor/microscope for guidance, separating out the microscopic seeds

update:1 – Liquid nitrogen video up
update:2 – greenhouse vlog up

By the way, what do people think of video blog style stuff? Im not saying its something I would do on a regular basis, but as you can see – my phone can output some pretty decent quality video…

This morning, kind of impulse bought Deathsmiles from a buy it now auction on ebay, so that’ll hopefully be coming in a few days to play.

also.
This game looks like fun, although kind of scary that I can play 37′s on Pop’n Music (the difficulty goes up to ~42) and cant follow this shit at all