Wallpaper of the Week: Wolverine vs. Hulk

FROM JASON’S DESKTOP – Well, that was a nice break.

I didn’t mean to take off the entire month of September. Sorry ’bout that. It’s not my fault — the siren lure of Netflix  is entirely to blame. I joined up in late July and, well, you’ve seen the posts slip.

There was also a slight obsession with Team Fortress 2. Expect another absence in November when Left 4 Dead 2 drops.

Netflix, though, has allowed me to catch up on a backlog of movies that I had wanted to see. Because I have been working nights, getting to the video rental store wasn’t an option. With streaming movies and delivery to my mailbox, that’s no longer a problem.

A few weeks ago, the mail brought me Hulk Vs., a double-feature released in January by Marvel. One flick shows Wolverine taking on Hulk while his old Department K enemies interfere. The other story on the disc has Loki possessing the Hulk in a plot to overthrow Asgard during the Odinsleep.

The animation of neither is stellar; however, the action is something of a fanboy wet dream. The Wolverine tale is a throwback to the characters’ first run-in back in 1974 and features Lady Deathstrike, Deadpool (whose dialog was spot-on), Sabretooth, and Omega Red. Thor’s story is full of rainbows (oh, I hate the Asgard designs), and features the Enchantress, Sif, and even a trip to the underworld to visit Hela.

I was surprised to see a 7.1 rating for Hulk Vs. on IMDB. Personally, it was a guilty pleasure — a callback to my infantile love for the old Hulk television show. I would have rated the double-feature at about five out of 10. Maybe the Marvel fanboys have skewed the data. But I’d say that if you enjoyed some other direct-to-video comic adapatations (Ultimate Avengers, The Invincible Iron Man, Dr. Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme), then you’ll probably get a kick out of this one, too.

Now, it took me a while to find some decent Hulk vs. Wolverine wallpapers, so enjoy these ones, aight? As always, click the thumbnail to enbiggen.

Part of the problem getting higher-quality desktops involved the demise of a certain chan aggregator — you might remember I was a fan — called 4scrape (RIP). Since it went belly-up, some brilliant netizens have delved into the source code and compiled their own 4scrape clones. The one I’ve latched onto is 4walled, which does the job pretty well despite some load time and formatting issues.

Wallpaper of the Week: Kurt Vonnegut, or Slaughterhouse-4scrape

FROM JASON’S IMMEASURABLE GRIEF — It’s true. That fool’s paradise of visual filth, flamboyance, and foolery known as 4scrape is no more. It’s just another 404 now.

So it goes.

When it comes to image boards, as we’ve said before, 4scrape was the best way to scan for new desktop art. It not only cut out everything but the wallpapers themselves, but it also reduced the need to click through hundreds of links and page loads.

On July 27, the creator’s blog said the site is down and he/she won’t cast rez on it. The source code and SQL were posted, though, so the entire engine is open to the public for any willing to continue the good fight. There might even be a torrent release of the 150GB of image data cached by 4scrape (though that kind of a download is impractical at best and retarded at worst).

It didn’t take Ice-9, a prison riot, a Martian invasion force, a timequake, or nuclear holocaust to bring down 4scrape. Apparently, there were too many problems with the code to put more blood, sweat, and tears into it:

Cache for searches (potentially just post searches) is broken.

Threads need to be cached as a whole unit — assembling them from a 500,000-row table is too slow.

General consistency errors — there’s a bunch of images missing (???)

The scraper likes to shit itself to keep things lively.

The backend would occasionally crash/spinlock (???)

The JavaScript shit is a horrible mess.

So it goes.

Right before the site folded, I had been searching almost in vain for Kurt Vonnegut wallpapers to share. The top-most one was easy to find; but when I went looking for others — well, that’s when the 404 struck.

The subsequent announcement that the site will be abandoned put me in a particularly grouchy and very Vonnegut-story-defeatest mood. I stomped around a bit, and then figured the universe will manage to realign this mistake somehow.

Truth is, even with 4scrape’s help, Vonnegut ‘papers are awfully rare. I turned to customized Google Images searches. They turned up very little. The best I could find, aside from a few badly-patched-together and quite ugly photo mosaics were oversized scans of some of book book illustrations and one fairly large but grainly photo that didn’t make Kurt’s face look like a catcher’s mit.

Some Photoshop filters, sharpening, and color-tweaking later and here are some (moderately) presentable pieces of Vonnegut-icana to ease us all through the rough patches.

As always, I’ve put the images in 1024×768 — which despite some protests is still the most widely used m0nitor resolution (and 4:3 is still the most widespread aspect ratio). Enjoy.

Wallpaper of the Week: Team Fortress 2

FROM JASON’S WALLPAPER FOLDER – Admission time: I am not good at first-person shooters. I’m just not. My synapses are better suited to slightly slower-moving games. And I get irked by insta-deaths that I couldn’t see coming.

That happens a lot in Team Fortress 2.

So I resisted picking up Valve’s update of the classic MMOFPS for the longest time, at least until Steam lowered the price for a weekend deal to a paltry $9.99 a month or so back.

Since then, I’ve spent the better part of 40 hours getting fragged in every way imaginable: flamed, riddled by shotgun shells, darted to death, mowed by machine gun fire, rocketed, proximity bombed, caught unawares by a sentry, napalmed, arrow through the head — you name it.

I’ve took a few lives myself.

The engineer is my man. There’s nothing more satisfying than putting a sentry gun just out of sight around a high-traffic corner and watching it take out four or five opponents before it’s demoed.

I do have some complaints, though. The engineer needs more traps. What about pitfalls, tripwires, and logjams? For that matter, why can’t he build energy shields or barricades? And he’s not the only one who’s under-powered. C’mon, Valve, the medic deserves a better gun — one that doesn’t take 400 direct headshots to bring down a scout

I’ve spent more time playing those two classes than all the others combined, and I’m all thumbs when it comes to the spy (average lifespan there is about 12 seconds). And I’m just getting into the groove with the demoman, who I believed at first to be completely useless and now understand to be the perfect anti-engineer character.

I’m also coming into my own with the sniper, as long as there is sufficient cover to be had; he’s almost as good with a submachine gun as a rifle scope.

So I went looking for TF2 wallpapers and found a lot of very lame ones, sporting poorly-done  fan art and little charisma. What I decided is that expertly-timed screen caps of in-game action make for the best desktops — especially when they show imminent doom for our players. Enjoy these 1024×768 beauties, and as always, click to embiggen.

Wallpaper of the Week: A-10 Warthog

FROM JASON’S WALLPAPER FOLDER – Like a lot of boys, I spent a lot of hours as a teen building model planes, and even had an early aspiration to fly for the Air Force. Most kits were Strike Eagles or Migs or the like — anything you could see in the movies.

But sleek and sexy as those were, a different type of aircraft always appealed to me more: the chunky, decidedly awkward A-10 Warthog. I don’t know why; maybe it’s because it’s shaped like me, slim in the wrong places and with too much weight in unattractive places. (There’s a body image crisis for you.)

Or maybe it’s that the Warthog is packed with frightening power. It’s an anti-tank, anti-personnel plane that flies in low over combat operations and blasts a path clear for advancing ground forces. If I were the Taliban and I heard the grumble of an approaching Warthog, I’d crap myself and run. Maybe not even in that order.

The Warthog’s almost a flying tank. It can take direct hits with armor-piercing rounds. It can survive explosive bullets. It can fly with one engine and only one and a half wings. Fuel tank gets hit? No problem — the Warthog’s got auto-sealing systems that button up the holes. The whole cockpit is wrapped in titanium armor. It’s 30mm Gatling gun fires off 2,100-4,200 depleted Uranium shells per minute. And when rounds won’t do, the Warthog’s packed with air-to-surface missiles and laser-guided bombs.

I’ve long since given up any desire to be part of the military, and my feelings on even being in Afghanistan right now are mixed. I’m long past that Top Gun-fueled phase every young guy hits where we romanticize armed aircraft. But if you have to rain down death and destruction from 1,000 feet up, and you don’t mind an entirely functional, non-aesthetic means of delivering said bloody interdiction, then I’m glad the Warthog’s on our side.

And yes, Andrew, that third wallpaper is taken from ArmA. Stop jumping up and down in your seat. I know you like ArmA. And I know ArmA2 is out. I hope you’re enjoying it.