Oh, frabjous day!
Today it is my unbirthday! Following Lewis Carroll, raininva and I have decided that having two birthdays a year is funner. Hers is in November, but she picked today for mine. We are going to a Comedy Club tonight and she gave me a very nice clothing accessory Tuesday night as a present.
Last night I managed 90 minutes on World of Warcraft. I am totally a geek because I’m enjoying smelting and engineering more than I am killing stuff. I made level 10 with my gnome mage, and moved to another page of my map for the first time (but then moved back, as I have lots of unfinished quests where I was). I also replaced a dead headlight and re-aligned one that I installed improperly a few months ago. I like my little Hyundai, but it’s not great design when I have to pull the battery to get to one of the headlight lamps.
I woke up to 70 degree temperatures and sun, which makes it hard to be grumpy even when I do have to get up before 10am. I really needed the quiet night last night; my social life has been cranked up to 11 lately, which is nice, but a little overwhelming. The 1.5 hours of video-gaming was a present to myself. Lord knows when I’ll finally finish Halo 1, Jedi Knight II, Elite Force II, NOLF, BloodRayne, Tron 2.0, ./Hack, Robotech: Battlecry, Red Faction II… okay I’m going to stop working out this list because it is depressing me 🙂
Congrats to yubbie & colleenk, and nius & rainbowsaber, on their new housing developments! (Ouch. That was unintentional, I swear.)
Since everything’s all Star Warsy right now, here’s a pair of websites you should visit:
Pink Five: two of the funniest fan films I’ve seen, easily up there with Troops as fan classics. The third film should be out soon, and they posted a production blog which includes the lead actress’ reaction to meeting a fan dressed as her! I want a Pink Harvest t-shirt or button or something.
A lot of people have heard of this one, but Darth Vader’s blog has the distinction of not only being funny, but damn well written. The entry about Qui-Gon actually sent chills though me with its ineffable appropriateness. I found myself nodding, and saying to myself, “Wow… that makes sense.” And the blog even has an RSS feed.
Okay, back to working.
Movie thoughts etc.
Why couldn’t Watto take Republic credits? They’d have to be a pretty solid currency at that time. For that matter, why couldn’t Qui-Gon find someone who’d change his Republic credits over to Tatooine ones for a fixer’s fee? “Wretched hives” always have someone who can do this.
Message to the Wachowskis: I saw some of Revolutions the other day, and I’m sorry, but your movies make a lot more sense if Morpheus. Oracle, and Architect were supplying Neo with inaccurate / incomplete information, and Zion / the tunnels were simply another layer of the Matrix. This explains too much to be dismissed, no matter what you tried to sell us in movie three. Maybe what you told us “was true, from a certain point of view.”
I remain amazed at the Tolkien fans who feel that Peter Jackson did a poor job with LOTR. He pulled off a movie-making miracle, coherently filming a epic that the original author considered unfilmable, and in the process winning the hearts of both the general public and the Academy with a fantasy film. Sure, lots of us would have made a few different choices, but I don’t care to hear anyone say he’s a hack until they personally can produce something better.
Over the weekend, a friend made some excellent conjectures on who Harry Potter’s “Half-Blood Prince” might be. At least two of them could lead to very interesting storylines; the trick will be to not have it spoiled before I can read the actual book.
Rain got her PSP yesterday. I’ll say the first thing everyone else does – “Nice Screen!” She’s enjoying a couple of the games, too. With the default settings I found on the web, 30 minutes of video are ~200 MB more or less of a memory card, so at ~$100 for a 1 GB card, it’s clear we won’t be carrying around a fistful of pre-loaded feature-length movies.
I might head to the Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight. We’ll see.
From sepia tone to sickness
So I’m finally fully aware again, for the first time since Wednesday night. raininva had brought home Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow last week, and we settled down to watch it, but halfway through the movie I couldn’t stay vertical (and it wasn’t the film, really). This turned into an excruciating night’s fight with stomach flu (I lost). It’s taken this long for the nausea and weakness to fully recede; last night was my first full meal in days, and eating a proper dinner felt sooo good. Of course, insult to injury, Rain was battling the flu too by Friday morning 🙁
Sky Captain‘s visuals impressed me – the integration of the virtual sets was very slick and never distracting. I think “Dex” won the spot of my favorite character over the leads, though. Interesting to watch that movie in such close proximity to The Aviator (which I really liked, but I’m an aviation geek and a Cate Blanchett fan).
I heard on the radio this morning that the B-52s covered “Paperback Writer” for a Buick commercial that won’t air. The heck with the commercial, I want a copy of that cover!
Busy morning. Information Services is the only career I can think of where one will be metaphorically asked, “Come over and move some furniture for me; I’ve lost the keys to my house, so bring burglary tools.”
EDIT: Almost forgot! I have addicted one of our houseguests to Katamari Damacy. Resistance is futile!
Wet Christmas
They have mounted speakers on the side of downtown Norfolk buildings for the holidays. Christmas carols don’t sound quite right when it’s 60 degrees and raining outside.
I hate that I’m not buying software anymore, but a software license. Half-Life 1 was fun, but I don’t like the idea of playing Half-Life 2 enough to go online and beg for the publisher’s permission every single time I want to play it. That’s an irony, too, because a Mac version of HL2 has a much better chance of seeing daylight than the Mac HL1 did. I’d almost certainly have bought it.
DHTML Lemmings on the web. One more way to kill a few minutes anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
Ever type up a really long rant for LiveJournal, then realize that typing it’s gotten it out of your system and it’s just not that important that the rest of the world see it? 🙂
Katamari Taters
After reading about the fun that kittykatya, eeedge, jsciv and impink are having, I put a copy of Katamari Damacy (PS2) on my Wish List, and raininva bought it for my birthday. This game is incredibly surreal and trippy, and has that wonderful “let me just try this level one more time” quality. The player must rebuild stars by rolling together clumps of loose objects on Earth – you have to try it out to understand it. Highly recommended.
Finished watching the Brent Spiner episodes of Enterprise. Pretty good overall, with the last episode the strongest. Despite its enjoyability, the arc hit some of the most tiresome cliches in Star Trek: “it only takes five guys to take over a Starfleet vessel”, “with the fate of humanity at stake, we’ll nevertheless give the bad guys all the access codes they want if they threaten one of the show’s stars”, “the Enterprise isn’t worth diddly in a real fight unless the heroes know their opponent’s Secret Weak Point(tm)”. Yes, they all made sense in the story context, I’m just tired of seeing them again.
The Meyers-Briggs-Trek personality test says that I’m an INFP, much like Kes or Elim Garak. Rain’s response was “Garak? Eww! Well… hm. Actually…”
“Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew…” – Sam Gamgee rapping about taters.
“La Repth – Staccato – Data Drain!”
I finished .hack//INFECTION tonight.
Got some side quests to do, but the main storyline is complete. Next week maybe I can start on .hack//MUTATION. The final boss battle wasn’t as rough as I feared, but I’ve seen raininva do it, and I was well prepared. Good game! I’m enjoying it.
I have several unfinished PS2 games, it always makes me feel good to clear one from the queue.
