So I’ve made the appropriate clicks, and at some point this week search engines will be blocked from the posts on Salted Lithium. This will Not effect people using bookmarks, or typing the URL and it shouldn’t have an effect on RSS Feeds. It will only effect searches using search engines.

Today I received six hits from people searching “504 gateway time-out”, so I will no longer be a resource for people looking for “504 gateway time-out”… or “bible stories/drugs”, or “best baklava places in montreal”, or “bipolar porn”.

If you feel like your RSS feed or viewer is being effected let me know and I’ll see if I can change something.

I’m still trying to decide whether I’m going to be using Categories or Tags anymore. I’ve been told the deGoogleing process can take a few days… so, in the meantime…

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The four pre-release TV trailers for Grand Theft Auto IV
2,3 and 4 are freaking near orgasmic so… careful.

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First, Grand Theft Auto IV is a video game like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are movies. Weekend At Bernie’s was a movie. The Sims is a video game. GTA IV is an epic achievement in storytelling.

Previous versions of GTA have made half-hearted parodies of cities like Los Santos for Los Angeles and San Fierro for San Francisco, and Liberty City for New York. But this version of Liberty City feels like New York. When you’re ripping a car door open, kicking some civilian in the ballsack and throwing them to the street so you can steal their car, it feels like you’re doing it in New York.

A fan video set to Click Click Boom! by Saliva
Let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.

There are comedy clubs with hours of known comics, like Ricky Gervais, doing standup. There are hours of TV programs you can watch, all done using the same animation as the game. In GTA IV you’re not limited in your choices, when you get a prostitute into your car you have the options of receiving a handjob, fellatio or “Cowgirl Position sex”… none of which I’ve tried yet, but I’ve just started.

There’s even a cellphone which you can use to call other characters in the game, or with an ethernet connection, you can call Other Players on Other Consoles. Which means I can be speeding down a sidewalk in a Humvee on my machine, you can be driving down a boardwalk in a classic muscle car on your machine, and we can chat.

Within the game you can visit an Internet Cafe where you can visit more than 100 websites…

Even cooler is the decisions you make (ie: do I kill this person or let them go?) have an effect on the game. Within the missions everything you do as a player effects something down the line. That’s how open this game is…

Then there’s the choice of the “hero” of GTA IV…

In GTA III the main character never spoke. In GTA: San Andreas the main character, and really the entire story, was a parody of gang life in Los Angeles.

In GTA IV, however, Niko Bellic is a Serbian veteran of the Yugoslavian civil war. He has been working as a merchant mariner for ten years trying to work out the things he did in the war, and has come to New York/Liberty City to find someone who betrayed him during the war…

It’s an eighty-hour long movie where you’re in charge of the decisions and how it turns out… which, from what I remember, is exactly what videogame developers were promising ten years ago.

And the gameplay itself is just about perfect. I’m just past the initial tutorial stage where the computer teaches you the things you’ll need later on. I’m still having some problems with cycling through targets with the guns, and there’s so much to learn in terms of what the character can do… but I’m willing to keep playing until I figure it all out.

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