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The All Blacks had to lose at some point. After a historic 18 test victories in a row as well as being the world champions, they were riding as high as you can go. Until today, you could literally count the number of nations that had beaten the All Blacks on one hand. But today we must add another finger, as Ireland have finally defeated them for the first time in over 111 years of trying. Good fucking game!

Again, I always knew the All Blacks would have to lose at some point to a new nation. But when that fateful day came, I always thought it would be Argentina. I never would have considered Ireland.

I kind of consider the DAPL vandalism to be political as well, so between the two, yeah, it does seem that way. As much as I agree with the sentiment of said grafitti, that's not the way to express your views.

Same here.

Well, my copy of Dishonored 2 arrived sooner than expected...

I can't believe I haven't posted anything yet about this, but we had another quake. This time, it was a 7.8 which hit at midnight on Monday and was felt all over the country. Kaikoura and the surrounding region was hit hard, and by hit hard I mean buildings destroyed, people killed, landslides for Africa, all roads and rail to Kaikoura utterly wrecked and impassable, and to top things off, the quake was so powerful, that the seafloor around Kaikoura was lifted up by more than a metre. Yes, that means there was also a tsunami... thank fucking God that didn't do much damage. But Kaikoura has been isolated from the rest of the country all week.

Now, this quake was a real shit start to the week, and it happened just as the NZ Navy was preparing its 75th anniversary, which was supposed to involve warships from all over the world, including China, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Canada and... the USA . Incredibly, for the first time in over 30 years, we finally gave permission to an American warship, the destroyer USS Sampson, to visit for the celebrations after confirming it possessed no nuclear weapons or reactors. And this flotilla, including the Sampson, has now arrived at Kaikoura with the NZ Navy to help out the locals and stranded tourists.

I sincerely thank the international community for their kindness. The last two weeks have been a real shocker, with Trump and this damn earthquake, but I am heartened to see the world still has beauty and humanity still has common decency.

Having never been in any kind of earthquake, let alone one of that magnitude, I can hardly imagine how scary such a thing must be.

I guess if such a disaster had to happen, at least the timing was somewhat fortunate, eh...? It's remarkable how, sometimes, even a terrible catastrophe like that can have unexpectedly positive results.

And Japan just had a 7.4 yesterday as well. Same region as the 2011 one at that.

My car, right now:

I keep forgetting that Christmas was originally a winter holiday. Down here we crank up the barby and go to the beach because it's the heat of summer. Still, I do wish that I'll get to see a white Christmas one day, if only to see what all the fuss is about.

Oh, and our Prime Minister resigned last week and is stepping down today. So that happened. It's honestly a surprise, as no one saw it coming. I daresay John Key - for all the shit I give him - was the most effective leader in the Western World over the last decade. For one thing, his position has been utterly unassailable and he's remained overwhelmingly popular with the public - contrast that with Australia's five Parliaments and the mess with Bush and Obama in the US in that same time period. He's also had to grapple with two major natural disasters (Christchurch and Kaikoura) and one man-made (the Recession), so it's admirable that we've managed to come out of those okay. But most importantly, what made him able to hold on to power for so long was because people found him relatable, which I don't think you can say of any other politician in the West today, except maybe Bernie Sanders. If he hadn't resigned, he'd have won a rare fourth term in office effortlessly.

You could argue Key was our version of Reagan or Thatcher... and that's the problem. He was a neoliberal, and his profession before entering politics was that of a currency speculator. His nickname at the time was "the Smiling Assassin," because he cheerfully went about his business during the Russian Financial Crisis while he laid off hundreds of staff. And he oversaw thousands more layoffs as Prime Minister across multiple industries. And under his watch, the lives of my generation have become even harder because we can't afford our own homes anymore - which has never happened before in modern NZ history. Here in Auckland, afforable housing is all but extinct, and easily goes up into the million dollar mark. We are literally locked out of the market. Poverty has reached proportions not seen since the Great Depression, and that goes for homelessness too for obvious reasons.

I don't like Key. Never have, never will, even though most of my countrymen can't see beyond his patronising disguise as an everyday Joe.

...about this long. So yesterday encompassed reinstalling Windows, discovering that the driver disc that came with my Alienware only had drivers for the monitor, finagling file transfers to get the network driver installed, super-magic to keep Windows Update from halting things since there were apparently a series of mandatory updates to Windows Update over the lifetime of Windows 7 (note to self, determine if it actually does update instead of just not breaking other installers)....Still putting things back in order, but the system is operating fine; and since this SSD drive is twice the capacity of the old one I shouldn't have drive space issues this time around.

Awesome! Hopefully.

And I guess I'd better get back to Mankind Divided so I don't get completely left behind, huh...

I still find it astounding how the Aliens vs. Predator movies were able to take one of the coolest concepts imaginable, and make two embarrassingly shitty movies out of it.

There are too many blindingly stupid things in them to list, but one of the most glaring has to be the fact that they reduced the duration of the Aliens' gestation cycle to about 15 minutes.

I'm currently trying to mentally separate the administration from Trump himself. This may be unwise and will probably be a futile pursuit in the end.

Right now I'm using my Xbox One to play...Phantasy Star II.

As of yesterday, I now have every Christopher Nolan movie since Memento on Blu-Ray.

Get a load of this: Auckland is under water restrictions for the first time in 20 years. Back in 1994, it was because there was a drought and we had too little water. Today, it's because we have too much water. Essentially, we've had the equivalent of 2 months worth of rain dumped on us within a few hours, and it means our reservoirs are chocka full of silt from runoff, which means that if we don't take it easy and cut back, the silt won't settle, and we'd be drinking mud.

Too much water, can't believe I'd ever say that in regards to a water shortage.

Turret placement in Fallout 4: u r doin it rite

We're having a real wet start to the year. We've been hit with the remains of Cyclone Debbie, and, well, the town of Edgecumbe hasn't taken it well...



The nearby river burst its banks and basically submerged an entire town of over 1600 people. The people, thankfully, are safe and evacutated, and cleanup has begun. Or would have, if not for one small problem. Edgecumbe (and the rest of the country, but mostly Edgecumbe) is about to get hit by another cyclone within the next 24 hours. At the moment, the country is more water than land, so we're predicting a real shitty Easter. Bugger.

I'm kind of kicking myself for not buying this a few years ago, when I had the chance.

Even though I couldn't afford it, and had nowhere to put it.

Sigh.