I saw these a while ago, indeed it has been a long time since I have had any free time to do much with photogabble; so long in fact that my “For Photogabble” link list contains more than 50 web addresses for me to check and write about! When I first saw this product a number of months ago they where at full price, however now you can pick them up at an amazing 43% off their full price saving you a whole £3 and costing just £4. They aren’t exactly long socks in the style that I usually review in these articles however they stood out from other socks so I felt they deserved some form of praise. The fact that they are at a reduced price makes me believe that they are soon to be phased out, in which case if you like them go ahead and buy some, at that price they can be considered cheap

I’m not sure if I have reviewed stockingirl.com before but they have a really nice collection of socks and although they are quite expensive, for what your paying for the quality far surpasses any product you would get from some budget outlet. I do quite like the style of these ones and at the moment they are at 40% off.

I imagine it is the summer sales on as every online shop I have been to have had a load of their stock on offer, although that also tends to mean that they are wanting to get rid of excess old stock ready in time for the new line to come in for Autumn07/Spring08. Still, its a good way to stock up on things that you wouldn’t otherwise have bought due to cost restrictions.

The last website I have for you is sock pron, this isn’t really a shop or outlet of any sort. It’s actually an art’s and crafts related blog which is how I find out about a lot of this sock related information as I am into a lot of make it yourself stuff from wood working and metal working to home brew electronics. Some of the website in my favourites post interesting information on things, which I then collect and post here for your enjoyment. I have already had a few people say that these have been informative which is a nice boost to the confidence. Even though this article has been written pretty shoddily I’m sure the point has been put across

Last december I posted the last edition of this post, then it was an excuse to publish an aticle with scantly clad women in it and the same excuse goes for this post to be honest. With that said this is a serious review, i’m just writing it to put off doing work for an hour or so.

I became led onto this when I found the above image in the live journal latest image posted feed, viewable here. I showed them to Sora and she liked them, they are different to what you normally see people in and non-conformality is what it’s all about. If people notice you and like what they see then that’s hardly a bad thing is it?

I searched the net a while for the images source due to the orinal live journal post a) not sourcing it and b) apparently being one of those “adults only” blog content type blogs. I eventually found the origin if the image to be stockingirl after a short google. They have a lot of really nice products on sale, but being an American company I am unsure if they ship outside the states. They are $22.99 (

(To skip the long story and get to the point go to the bottom)

FOG Games which stood for Free Online Games was the very first website I managed that became a sucess (you could say photogabble is my seccond). It was quite obviousley a free games website and back in 2000 and earlier there were very few websites that hosted a load of javascript, DHTML and java games so as soon as mine was found out it became an instant hit. I used to bounce around the net on various different free hosts and I never cleaned up after myself so there became various versions of the site fossilised there for all time and forgotten by me. To keep my visitors linked to the latest version on the latest host I had one or two fixed domain names which were of course obtained from free sources such as da.ru amongst others, supprisingly I never actually paid for anything to do with my website! I learnt to code html and css in 1999 and went through several websites before settling on foggames, as soon as I noticed I was achieving 1000 visitors a week with over 50 page views per visitor I knew I had a good thing going. Just thinking about it I must have only just started seccondry school

FOG Games evolved into FO Games (to remove the typo in the original name) in 2001 but I have yet to find any existing versions of that site… This is truely an amazing find for me, because I can see that even then 7 fucking years ago I was pretty damn good at what I was doing! From then on FOGames was achieving in its hay-day almost 4000 visitors a week but then either during the summer of 2002 or 2003 the traffic took a nose dive as other websites popped up with custom flash games combined with kids being off school. Due to most of the traffic originating from schools because my website was one of the few that wasn’t actually blocked my website became a dried up desert and because I couldn’t really understand where all the visitors had gone I gave up on FOGames. To put this in perspective as to what I have now, photogabble regularly gets on average between 150 and 200 visits a day (by 3000 visitors a month) so you can see how much better FOGames was doing in contrast. Being influenced into anime and furry art styles by kina-ink I bought anime-planet.co.uk a domain I let go a few months ago, and which I wish I hadn’t because one of those spam mongerers has nabbed it FOGames was quietly shut down and all traffic forwarded to anime-planet and my new hosting I paid for with my first job. After then my dad bought me the photogabble domain a year before I got into Coventry university and I ran a very, very old apple power pc (built in 1982 dual 20Mhz w00) as a server which the first version of photogabble ran on, wordpress and pretty much anything else would run shit show on it so I developed my own blogging software that ran incredibly fast on the server – which was doing well for its age running apache and mysql services on 20Mhz!

(End long story, begin point to post)

Well I have found an example of FOG Games, one of my earlier websites, it would be amazing if I could find my very first hand coded html website but I guess that shall just remain a dream. It’s hosted by fortunecity a horrible host at the time (and a worse one now) but fortunatly they don’t delete old accounts so most my stuff is there abeit horribly scarred by google adverts and other shit fortunecities decided to shove on it

You can see the website here, and it’s actually taken me a lot longer than normal to write this post because I have been playing the games on there! It’s still got its charm lol. I am now in the process of ripping my website off their servers and stripping out all the extra crap fortunecities added it shall be then hosted for prosperity here on photogabble for all to see

Stay tuned!

It’s going to be pretty much guaranteed that I am going to get a hell of a lot of unwanted interest in this post due to the nature of its title. I have been searching the Internet for some nice long socks that I may buy for Camilla when I get my finances sorted… as well as maybe getting my self some to keep my legs warm in the on coming Winter and its shitty cold weather (I walk 2 miles to uni, I don’t like freezing legs). Well I hadn’t much luck finding any nice website’s or any that sold any product of any decent quality (I know the grammar in that sentence is appalling, so correct me!), they were all too “smutty” and contained pictures of models which were wearing what can only be described as a belt and a string with the actual description being “string thong and mini skirt” – I assure you anything less than 8″ is a belt!

Well as you do with searching for things I tried out a few different search phrases the down side of this was that I re-discovered that the Internet was infact invented as a mass distributor of porn with 9 out of every 10 website I fond though the image search being a porn site. I thought I would experiment with adding the word “sexy” with mundane every day words such as kitchen, sofa, socks, etc. In every case the results where nothing that I wanted, but unfortunately everything I had expected (see pics to the right, its one of the more photogabble content friendly ones). It is I feel pretty innocent to search for “Sexy long socks” and expect actual online shops that sell socks to appear, because I’m sure they would like us to think we look sexy wearing their long socks (or at least the girls amongst us, I just wear them for the convenience… ok, ok yes I like to think I look “sexy” in them, in some twisted reality I probably am).

In the end I gave up with Google and its apparent fetish for providing porn over actual content. I asked around a few friends and was referred to sock-dreams.com unfortunately its American but I can look past that seeing as they look to be providing some pretty high quality products. sockshop.co.uk looked promising but a lot of their stuff looked cheap, not that I wouldn’t buy one or two items from there (see left), the novelty looking ones perhaps but it just looked like they sold pretty much what you can buy in the shops. If sock dream were a British company, and if I had some spare money (which I don’t) I would probably buy Camilla a few pairs of nice socks that go with the beautiful clothes she loves to wear and look spectacular in

My ?2 Plan

Thinking about how the Internet is full of nice people (I’m being optimistic here, I know how nasty the internet can be and I have the T-shirt and cookies to prove it!). The thought struck me that if I get 100 people to donate ?2 then I would have a nice ?200 pile of coins and if that was from the effort of simply setting up a small website that would take 30 min’s to create then it’s not a bad lot. Then I began to think about maybe creating a “Sponsor a Starving Student” website where people could pledge ?2 a month to help feed me That’s ?2400 for the year if I got a hundred people doing so, and to be honest that’s the bear minimum when you think about what we have to spend it on. Housing eats up as little as ?180 a month and as much as ?300 or more a month in some peoples cases. Then you have housing related bills, then on top of that you have to actually feed yourself and then there is travel, going out costs and then misc costs such as accidental loss and phone contract. I barely get along on the student loan that I have some weeks I can go with just one meal a day usually paid for by someone else

I may start this project in the new year, if I only get 100 people giving ?2 each I will be happy as that will be the next six months food money. I don’t go out clubbing or to the pub as I see it as a bit of a waste of money – I would much rather go and see Camilla!

So yeah you see that donate button to your right… well all I’m asking for is ?2

Because I use xp64 on my pc a lot of the good old dos games I used to play wont run, even under dosbox – which is a problem from windows 2k onwards im afraid. One of my favourite games of all time UFO Enemy unknown will install from cd but the actuall game wont run on my pc. Now if i were to admit to being a hard core computer user, I could boot up from dos on a floppy disk (yes ancient technology I know but it works!) mount the cd rom and play the game – but thats a lot of hard work just for one game. I decided to google it, see if anyone had fixed the problems I had come accross, since I used to play it loads under windows 98 and when we upgraded to XP none of my old dos games would run, let alone on my even newer xp64 box. This is where I stumbled into the world of abandonware. After a few hours of searching I had found UFO Enemy Unknown and decided to download it as the website said it supported windows xp. Im not sure of the legality of downloading it but as its abandonware and as I already bought the cd years ago – and still have that cd in my posesion – I dont see it being a problem.

The file downloaded was pretty much the game files so all I had to do was copy them accross to where I wanted to run the game from… D:\My Applications\Dos Games\UFO\ and it worked. It just worked, sound and everything (because im doing this from memory i cant remember if it just worked natively under x64's 32bit emulation, or if I had to use dos box. But thats not important, the important thing is it worked).

Well seeing as todays modern PC games – with a few exceptions: doom III, UT2k4 – are focused totally on graphics and less on game-play I decided to go on the hunt for some free ones online (not the abandon-ware ones mind you, the open-source free ones). My first port of call is sourceforge and I have found a huge list of games that look to promise some good game play. As I am not at home atm I am unable to provide a first person review of each game, so for now this shall have to provide as a preview and when I get home tonight I shall download the ones listed here and play them so as to write a comprehensive review on them.

Automanic

From the description this sounds like it could be a fun game to play. I used to spend countless hours playing twisted metal in turns with friends and my sisters – so it could be classed as a good favorite of mine. It is written in C++ and python and although as far as I can tell they have only ported it to Linux because of the languages used to write it, it shouldn't be too difficult to port to other frameworks – if they don't have an x86 windows port I might try to compile it with native x64 support. The graphics aren't all that good it seems, but then again it was always the game play in twisted metal that kept me playing for hours on end.

Irrlicht Engine

Not a game on its own but the Irrlicht Engine really does look like something good. If you go to the engines website you can find a varied list of games that have been built using the engines base. I have included this here in the list because I shall be checking out some of the games that have been made using it and writing an article on that. Also I am bored of the useless collection of windows screen savers that come with xp, so I may use this engine to create some pretty ones all depends on how quick it is

UFO2000

This one goes back to the beginning of this article my love of UFO Enemy Unknown and looks to be one of the first I shall download and try tonight. Im not too sure how well developed this is as it is still in beta. But from the screenshots it does look to be a pretty good representation of the UFO games, and the developers say that it is able to import the image maps from the actual game to provide an even better representation. Even though I am likely to play UFO Enemy Unknown over this, it does look to be an interesting game and so I shall give it a go and let you know what I think.

EDuke32

Next to UFO Enemy Unknown on my list of games I loved would be Duke Nukem 3D. I haven't been able to find this in recent years, although ages ago I managed to find a demo download which was basically the full first level. The last time I properly played this was on an N64 and since then I have only been able to find and play demo versions for the pc. Alas since getting an x64 pc I haven't been able to find a version of Duke Nukem that will run – however if this one doesn't run the source is available and so I may be able to port it to native x64 architecture – although I don't know too much about such things. In the past I have simply pressed compile and ran the executable it produced. The developers describe this as A cross-platform, OpenGL-rendered Duke Nukem 3D port which provides many new features for mod authors. So if it wont run under native 32-bit emulation I should be able to compile it for native x64. If this works I will be one happy bunny as I have tried numerous times this year to get a version of Duke Nukem working.

Scorched 3D

Summarized Scorched3D is a 3D remake of the popular 2D artillery game Scorched Earth. Scorched3D can be played against the computer, other players and remotely across the internet or LAN. I never played Scorched Earth, never even heard of the game to be honest, what attracted me to this one is the multiplayer function. Many a late night has been burnt up with me and Andrew playing Worms Armageddon and AOE II over the network, and if this provides some good game play then it may be added to our list of multi-player games. The problem with many PC games nowadays, is the fact that you need a fkn cd to play the game, so what if you want to play the game multiplayer on your computers on your network? You can't, unless you crack the cd! I don't know about you but this sounds like the game companies are fueling piracy… all the way though the UT series up-to UT2k3 you could install the game on any PC you owned and not need the cd when I found that UT2k3 wouldn't run without the cd the first thing I did was hunt for a crack! Fortunately the game makers discovered the dismay this caused the UT community and almost immediately released a no-cd patch for the game. Fortunately you don't get this problem with open-source :p

Secret Maryo Chronicles

Described as a Classic Mario game like Super Mario World or Super Mario Brothers with an advanced Leveleditor and new Graphics based on SDL, written in C++. Im really interested in the level editor as I always liked the concept of being able to make your own maps for a game. I really liked the Mario Games on the NES and Super NES so being able to play similar on the PC and to be able to edit my own maps for playing is a really cool idea. The graphics look rather good, albeit in a cartoon style. But I'm all about the game play and if they have managed to make that even half of what the original was like then this should turn out to be a new favorite. Says it runs under linux and windows so we shall see if it runs on my x64 box if it does this looks from the screenshots to be a game I may play often.

Cytadela (the Citadel)

From the description it sounds like this is a port of an old doom clone for Amiga. They say that it is OS portable, so I hope they have a x86 version for me to run under emulation. I don't know too much about this as the description was rather brief so all I can comment on is the screenshot that I have got hold of. From the screenshot this looks like a good old 3D FPS and if its based on doom then I'm interested to see what the game-play is like – seeing as I really liked the doom series right up to doom III (which I am having problems getting to run on x64). I shall be able to shed some light on this one and let you know wether its good or not, once I download and play it at home.

As you can see from the tiny selection I have posted above, the world of free open source games is pretty varied and of reasonable quality. Some of these projects have as many active developers as closed-source games and the quality of some can match if not surpass that of retail versions. I chose to ignore any games listed on sourceforge that didn't have screenshots in the main listing when I was browsing. However I am sure I must have missed a few good ones, mainly because Azerius didn't have a screenshot in the browse list either and although I really don't like that torrent program (Im a utorrent guy) it is of good quality.

I shall attempt to get some of the aforementioned games working tonight and get back here with an article explaining a) how i got them to work and b) reviewing how they play. 

I like the music that this band have produced, and as I find more bands I shall keep you updated and link to more free music to download.