My mother called me a week ago and said that she is looking for a new computer monitor to go with the Lenovo Thinkpad laptop she's buying for my father. Thinkpads are office laptops so they come with a docking bay and my father is going to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in front of that laptop writing books and my mother wants it to be as easy as possible to plug in a larger screen and an ergonomic mouse and keyboard. And as awesome as my mother is, she said that she will buy a monitor for me too. After a couple days of searching, we ended up buying two BenQ G2200WT's. Everything about the screen is average but it's the best I could find for 150 euros from the local stores (my mother preferred it to stay under 200 euros). And anything is a huge improvement over my old screen. LCD monitors from the beginning of this decade aren't exactly known for their superior image quality. At least it still works and has only one dead pixel.

If you haven't noticed yet, I made myself another new banner. You might remember that I wasn't exactly fond of the last one, but this is something I can imagine using for a bit longer, unless it starts to depress me too much. And I'm of course giving away a virtual cookie to the person who knows where it's from. Here's a hint: how come many of the best anti-war films are animations?

I'm finally done with Grand Theft Auto 4, or at least with the story, I still have plenty of free-roaming to do. For the first month after the release, I barely even touched the game because of horrible performance. My two year old rig isn't exactly top of the line anymore but I still expect to be able to play a console game on at least medium settings. So far I've been able to max out every console to PC port. But no, if I wanted playable frame rates with tolerable amount of stuttering, I had to set every setting down to the lowest - and this was with my old 17'' screen. Now with the second patch out, the game actually looks better on my PC than on consoles, and with playable performance. Even with all the technical issues, it's still a great game and very much worth playing. But unless you have a PC from the future, go with either of the console versions if possible.

As long as Gamestop/EB Games have been in Finland, I've pretty much hated them. Selling pre-owned Wii games for 50 euros is a total ripoff. That's how much new Wii games are supposed to cost. And rest of their games aren't any cheaper. At least that's what I thought until I started searching their PC game bargain bins. Even if most of the games in the bins are total garbage, you can find some incredible deals with enough patience. For instance, I picked up Unreal Anthology (Unreal, Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament, UT2004), Condemned and Gothic 3. The three games costed individually 6 euros each but thanks to the 'Buy 3 for the price of 2' deal I got them for an incredibly cheap price of 12 euros. I had already owned Gothic 3 before but I did unspeakable things to the disc after a bug completely ruined my save 50 hours into the game. It's been a couple years since then so I'm ready to give it a second try. Then I heard that Gamestop's '3 for 2' deal concerns every PC game that costs 15 euros or less. That means you could get World in Conflict, Company of Heroes and Medieval 2 Total War for a total price of 20 euros. I'm really starting to wonder what's the point of buying PC games at launch when they are that cheap after just a couple years.

P.S. I'm leaving for Munich in a few days. Does anyone know any places I should visit?