The new Dragon Age: Inquisition is finally here. Been playing it way to much and haven't gotten anything new done on the site yet.

Compared to the previous dragon age games, this one is more open, very similar to skyrim. Lots of interesting sidequests to do in addition to the epic main story. And as usual in dragon age, lots of interesting characters to talk to, both on mission and in between.

Right now I'm playing a dwarf rogue (pictured to the right) but I'm already planning my next playthrough, this time as a warrior. Haven't decided on a race yet, but either a human or a qunari.

I've added a few screenshots in the gallery under dragon age folder from the new game. It's a beautiful game, the new engine really makes it feel much more alive than the previous one, where it all felt very flat and stale. The level designs are really nice with lots of complicated and overlapping terrain.

And best of all, it's now possible to jump!

Diablo is back. Haven't finished the game yet (on normal), but my highest character is level 30 (wizard) and has just entered Act IV (last one). Still playing a lot of world of tanks though, so playtime is limited.

Also started to re-read the "Deverry Cycle" by Katherine Kerr. I've never finished it before, I was following it in swedish, but the publisher stopped after book 12, so it will be interesting to finally see how it ended.

Oh, and summer is kind of coming back, so I'm starting to dust off the golf clubs. Our local course hasn't opened yet though. I hope this will be a good golf year, would really like to lower my HCP a bit

I doubt anyone will call me out on it, but I'm going to cheat a little. I forgot to post something this month, this post is actually written in october and I ninjaedited the date ;).

Finally finished Code Geass second season. Left it in episode 17 two years ago. I liked it, good ending etc, but the part with the emperor and his machine and killing gods and all was a bit stupid/irrelevant or whatever, just felt misplaced.

Also been reading some new and old books. New books being the 5 parts of Elizabeth Moon's "Vatta's War", and old being Paksenarrion by the same author. Good stuff. Read more about it in opinions!

Also been playing way to much World of Tanks... The main reason I forgot to post this

For next month (this one!) I hope I have a new wallpaper ready... really!

I've been working hard on my opinions since last time. I now have a total of 535 items in six categories, as well as a nicer overview page with some graphs and stats. The 'games' category is finished, all the games have an image, a rating as well as a short comment. 'Anime' and 'TV' have images and ratings on all items, but still missing a lot of comments. 'Books' and 'movies' are still missing a lot of images, but they have ratings.

I'll keep working on updating them, as well as adding new features such as fallback browsing without javascript, linking to a single opinion and the ability to post longer 'reviews' instead of a short comment (the limit is 4 lines of text at the moment).

Also been playing a new game, 'The Witcher 2'. So far I'm enjoying myself quite a bit. It's a bit more hack n' slash compared to dragon age, but the story seems nice. It's not a forgiving game though, I've probably died close to 50 times already and I'm only playing normal! Here's a screen from a boss in chapter one:

Had lots of good titles but couldn't settle on one so I picked an even worse. Been almost two months since last time! I've finished Dragon Age 2 and started playing Mass Effect 2 (free with DA2 purchase!), but I just had to get Mass Effect original because there were just too many references to game one for me to continue to play the sequel. Almost finished the first one now, here's a picture from the game:



Thats about it for gaming, also been reading tons of books, finished three trilogies! See 'books read' section below for more info. I think my personal favorite was the "Tamir Triad" (The Bone Doll's Twin, Hidden Warrior, The Oracle's Queen).

Aslo during my book craze I've been looking for a place similar to anidb but for books, so far im trying goodreads and librarything, both have their ups and downs, I would probably prefer librarything, but it cost money if you want to add more than 200 books :/.

Okay, I guess I dragged it out long enough now... Time for the main event!

Tadaa, new wallpaper:



Surprise, it's Yui Makino . Also available in 1080p in the gallery.

That's it for now, cya.

It's finally here!!



Been waiting for dragon age since new year, and now it's here eating up all my free time.

Also been reading a lot of books lately, 'The Deed of Paksenarrion' was really good, 'The Black Magician' trilogy was okay and 'The Steel Remains' by Richard Morgan (previously known by me from his Science Fiction books). I must say I was expecting more from 'the steel', it had kind of a long introduction, and then a quick end battle and that was it. But the world seems really well fleshed out so hopefully he will return for more epicness later .

Well that will do for now, gotta get back to Dragon Age again!

Damn it, missed to post in September... To much gaming. First of all, in the beginning of September I got a new game for the PS3, Valkyria Chronicles, and I really liked it. It's a turn based tactical RPG, a bit similar to one of my favorite PS1 games Vandal Hearts. So, a few weekend spent playing that...

Then when the freshness started to die down a little, Civilization 5 was released. I've been a fan of "Civ" all the way back to the first release for MS DOS. And the "one more turn" really makes the hours go by in lighting speed. These last two weeks I've played over 50 hours Civ, a sickening amount . And also, of course a couple of HoN-games every day as well...

So maybe not totally surprising that I missed the monthly update. Anyway, an October post it is, and what does it bring?

I've uploaded lots of new images in the gallery. Added a new folder with images from a recent trip to Ireland, as well as images in various existing categories, most of them in "Photos/Summer".

There's also been a slight improvement on the front page, images are now resized to fit automatically using the same function that is in the gallery, so no more HTML-scaling here either. That will hopefully speed up the loading time a little bit.

To showcase both this and the new photos uploaded, here's one of them:


My next photo project will be some night photography, either of the sky or light trails from cars, depends on the weather

Well, summer is over... Nah not really, but my vacation is so next monday is back to work. Weee!

Been doing some golfing (still needs work!), a lot of agricola-playing, a lot of anime watching, and just recently, a hell of a lot of Final Fantasy XIII playing!

Just wanted to post something before the end of the month... so not much news, maybe next time.

Oh, and starcraft 2 just released, only played the first mission yet, but looks promising.

I've been working to make the site a bit more search engine friendly, and maybe sometime in the future HTML 5 conversion. A first step on this long journey is some proper page titles. Until a few days ago, all pages had the same title (skallen.net - interweb 3.0).

Now all pages are named like this: skallen.net - category - subcategory. For example: "skallen.net - gallery - wallpapers - yui makino" (2 subcategories!) or "skallen.net - tags - worldofwarcraft".

Not completely finished yet though, projects and polls are not done. Projects still have some remnants from skallen 2.0 code structure and needs to be remodeled into my current standard to work with the new title system, and to a lesser extent, polls as well.

Edit: Projects are fixed!

Finally have a Starcraft II beta key! Got it after pre-purchasing the game, woopiedoo. The only sad thing about it is that I really suck at it :/. Needs more practice!

Heroes of Newerth is "going retail" may 12, I've already pre-purchased that one as well, but on the release day I'll have the chance to claim my real nick instead of the one I have now (with some number/letter substitutions).

Yeehaa!

For a new wallpaper

This time it's actually based on an image taken with my camera, on the CD-booklet for the fuwafuwa single (I don't have a scanner). But quality-wise it turned out pretty okay, but feels a bit primitive.

Well well, anyhow, here it is:


Also working on a 1920x1080 version with a different text. And don't forget to check the other one I did last month, it's in the gallery!

Been playing some other games than HoN this month, an old classic (civ 4) as well as a new "tactic rpg" game called The Last Remnant. Not gotten into it yet, took a while just to get the controls right, but at least its playable

One more month then it's finally golf season up here again

Not much new to tell about, all my free time has mostly been consumed by Dragon Age: Origins, talking to a demon pretending to be Morrigans headless mother:



After a finishing fighting her and cutting her head of I talked to Morrigan (to the left) a bit to fast, and the whole dialog before the fight repeated, but her mother (to the right) was now missing the head

Tomorrow its x-mas theme time, december. So I got work to do tonight, need to update that theme to more look like the current ones.

Oh noes, is the last day of my vacation, and most of it was rainy .

Rainy days -> Stay Inside -> Play games...

I started replaying Baldur's Gate 2 a bit, but only got to act III, then I got into too many sidequests and didnt finish the game. And when we finally got the network running in our summerhouse I played some Age of Mythology vs. my brother (and won every time ).

Also read some books, the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem and Permutation City by Greg Egan. The first one was very interesting, definitely need to get more books by Lem. The second one (Egan) was a bit to complicated for me, I cant say I totally understood it, and there were some weird subplots that I think really didn't fit in there. But I'll give him another chance. I'm currently reading another one by him, Incandesence, and I must say, so far (4 chapters in) it feels a lot more appealing than Permutation City.

Phew, just barely made it for this month, cya next time.

PS. Lots of golf on sunny days ;)

This time no-one was sick! Was watching metallica at the Globen this monday, and it was great. It was a new concert instead of the one they we're suppose to do march 8, but James Hetfield was sick so that one was cancelled.

Also bought a new game last week, Left 4 Dead. Haven't played that much but the new multiplayer mode with zombies vs living is really cool, even though I mostly just died and didn't understand anything in the beginning.

And of course, lots of WoW, our guild just killed Hodir in 25 man, and we have killed yogg-saron in 10 man. Here's a pic from that kill:



Full image and more at our guild website!

So this one takes me past the 100 mark, yay! Old poll ended, new poll started!

I've stopped playing World of Warcraft for the fourth time this week, and currently I'm gameless o_O. I dont really feel like going back to DotA again so I'll just gonna chill with the gaming for a while. Age of Conan looks a bit interesting but I'm a little negative to the "playable on Xbox as well" concept, the PC controls might suffer from that. Gonna check if they have and free trial week or something, dont wanna pay for a game that's probably just a wow with a prettier dress.

Aria, one of the best animes I've seen, have ended. Boohoo . Great ending though, and there's still a DVD-only episode unreleased.

That will have to do for May, next time its summer (we're not quite there yet up here in luleå) see ya then.