2015 - New Year, New Crusade

Happy New Year, Everyone!  (Image source: Orlando Local Guide)

2014 has been an awesome experience for yours truly. There have been lots of things that happened, including part of things that I have finally done in the previous year. From joining tournaments, both physically and submit-your-results-online-ly (cannot make up in a shorter word unfortunately lol), to doing and learning things like redesigning my blog, my site, and making stuffs, not to forget that I also made new friends both online and physically in that year.

Minecraft - The Most Awesome Cubical Sandbox Poison

So as the Winter Holidays go on, with the Christmas Day past and the New Year's Eve is coming, everyone's busy playing snowball wars in their neighborhood and making snowmen after receiving some gifts from Santa. In Indonesia, however, winter is non-existent (DUH!) and most of the college students will face the Finals week, including myself. There's a good news and bad news for this; The good news is the Finals week has started on 29th December through 9th January 2015. The bad news is THAT above statement. Who has planned their New Year's Eve vacation plan in the middle of the Finals week? I wonder... (Only if there's a break between the New Year's Eve celebration then it's fine)

Cut to the next blog post where I will post something new, and it is about a game. While the majority of this blog covers racing games and racing simulators, I would be pleased to give something totally new that isn't related to racing: Minecraft, a.k.a the Most Awesome Cubical Sandbox Time-Wasting Poison. There's something in this game in which it wants me to play it, even the first time I played it on a web browser, in which the web version is the most basic version where you just need to build something out of the assorted selection of blocks. As the time progresses, new versions come out, from the version with an addition of the crafting element and the monster-fighting element in which monsters will haunt you down like crazy at night, to the version with amplified world resources and a compatibility to user-made mods thanks to third-party mod loaders. Building things are also more fun thanks to new additions of blocks throughout versions plus nature elements such as biomes, trees and animals. It is amazing to see how well put everything is in this game, even to think that it even attracts a racing gamer with absolutely no intensive Minecraft experience like myself.

Things Come and Gone

There's so much happening last month- November 2014; while the 30th marked the end for Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3DX+ card transfers to MT4 for the Indonesian version, which I don't even care because I don't have any tuning cards left, the same exact day Tom Kristensen officially retired from the racing world after finishing his last ever race in Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace a.k.a Interlagos in the final round of FIA World Endurance Championship. He did announce his retirement moments before the Brazillian six-hour started, and we knew that it is indeed a "right in the feels" moments for motorsport fans, especially looking at his career, most prominent being a nine-time 24 Hours of Le Mans champion with Audi, the constructor he's comfortable with within the endurance racing fandom since 2000, save for his years with Bentley Speed 8 in 2003 which gained victory.

This month also marked the new versions of games. Among them are Turbo Sliders with its new version with promised features I have posted in separate posts way back and MiniRacingOnline with the new SDL2 graphics plus the day/night cycle (it's currently a beta for the time being). The new Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 5 also arrived in Indonesia yet the MT4 cabs will be updated to MT5 by 17th December. For the latter game, however, there's a caveat to note: in the International version, features found in the Japanese version such as the Maxi.NET subscription service and the Maxi G system for purchasing Dress-Up parts, are absent. It is more likely that the Indonesian version would have the same absence found in the International version, looking at the condition. Other than the absence, everyone gets to try new cars such as Toyota 86 and its clone Subaru BRZ plus cars from BMW and Mercedes Benz, adding the roster of foreign names after RUF and Chevrolet. Also worth noting that new tracks, such as Mount Taikan pass, are present in the new version.

As the 2014 is on the edge with 2015 draws near, let us enjoy the last weeks of 2014. On a personal side, I'm trying to recover from my old HDD's crash while trying to find a way to get money faster.

Officially Losing Everything, One Click Sound At A Time

If you think that my unable to back up some files (due to TeraCopy) when my Windows 7 had a coming together is bad enough, you are very wrong. It's been almost a year that this happened, and I've been downloading stuffs and making game contents, to the point that I have a tendency of changing my mind of working my WIPs. Unfortunately, it was this day where the laptop I have been using up to now (prior to this post) did have a coming together, this time it's a serious one; its HDD unleashed its "click of death" sound, rendering the 1 TB HDD dead and signified the loss of all of the downloaded things.

Losing lots of GB consisting your downloads, movies, songs, WIPs, and documents while you didn't have lots of money to back all those up? Right in the Feels! (Image: LolSnaps)

The New RENDY'S BLOG - The New Face Within The Same Core

Remember when this blog had somekind of "untidy" interface and less-attractive colors as seen above? Now try to compare what the blog now has, design-wise. Thanks to my expertise at tinkering CSS and layouting, plus keeping the golden rules of designing (including web designing that is), GARAGE-R has become simply RENDY'S BLOG. Yes, it was the name of my old blog and adding Hi-v would be much better than just the aptly-chosen name, but it is the shift of direction this blog has taken. In fact, this is my second step on fixing my social media life after I stopped crossposting within the Trinity (Facebook, Twitter and Google+). Well, despite blog is technically anything but a social media, but it is actually a "media of thoughts" where every user can post anything pertaining to the subjects they are interested in.

This post takes a look at my history of blogging, how this blog is born and how it underwent design changes until the blog is what it is now.