Grinding it Out

Now that the weekend is upon us, we come to crunch time. I have to finish playing Too Human, write the review and then write my Mr. Binky column. Given that I want my column to be about Too Human, both the review and the column will have to be done by the end of the evening on Sunday for that to happen. I think I can write most of the column now, but I don't want to fully make fun of the story without seeing how it ends.

Finishing up this game has turned into a supreme grind. It probably doesn't help that I've played it every evening this week, every morning while working out and have come home at lunch two days this week and played it. It's just not good enough to warrant this much attention, but alas, it's what the job requires. My review, technically, isn't due until Tuesday, however when the opportunity to run a column about a game I'm reviewing presents itself, I like to take it. Plus, I need to start Tiger Woods 09 for the Wii and I want to get some time in on Mercenaries 2 for at least one evening before I leave for Vegas. It's a lot of writing about Too Human in such a short amount of time, and honestly, the game doesn't deserve this much attention, but given how half of that attention will be spent making fun of it, I guess I'm ok with it. Also, I don't have any better ideas as to what to write my column about, so it's either this or some last ditch, Sunday night attempt. Those never go well.

My hope is that I can finish the game tonight so that I can be done with it, but that seems improbable. I can only hope this mediocre jaunt ends soon as I've been ready for this thing to be over with since yesterday. That's the sign of a quality game right there.

Employment Change

I was informed by my son today that my impressive skills as a "fixer" have awarded me the illustrious position of custodian at his Power Ranger Academy. I couldn't tell if the school is a school for the Power Rangers, or one where the children are taught by Power Rangers as the story changed with every passing second, but I can tell you that I'm now the man in charge of fixing things.

The fact that I was given the job after absentmindedly not drilling a small test hole first, thereby drilling a hole into the wood that was large enough for a drywall anchor but way too big for the screw goes to show you the incredible state of disrepair in store for the Power Ranger Academy. I can only hope that their problems are limited to busted light bulbs, clogged toilets and the occasional ceiling fan replacement. If one of the Power Rangers accidentally bowls a hole in the wall, I can fix that too, however it'll take me a few months to do so. Anything more than that and these poor folks are well and truly fucked.

I was also introduced to a sport taught at the Power Rangers academy whereby a super ball is rolled on the floor with one's hand. First it was called Floor Ball, then Floor Hand Ball, then Hand Floor Ball, then "One" and finally "Thirty Eight". I wish I was making this up. After hearing about the rigorous PE program at the Power Ranger Academy, complete with shifting names and made up games, I'm glad that my duties exist solely in the realm of fixing things. I'd hate to tell the kids that we're spending the period playing a rousing game of Fifty Seven when they're clearly dressed for a match of One Hundred and Seventy Nine. That would just be too embarrassing.

Vegas, baby, Vegas!

So next week I'll be heading to Las Vegas to spend the day playing the upcoming gangsta sandbox game, Saints Row 2. I didn't mention this before because I wanted to wait until all of the details were nailed down. They are, so now I can chat a little about it.

Basically, they're flying me to Vegas and putting me up at the Four Seasons. I'll spend six hours in my hotel room with a debug 360 unit and a copy of the game and will spend all of that time shooting up the city of Stilwater and engaging in various gang related shenanigans to prepare myself for the inevitable review. After that, I'll get a small break and then head to the penthouse and engage fellow games journalists in spirited co-op play. It should be a hoot. Once the co-op play is done we're free to do whatever we want, with the itinerary mentioning hitting Vegas with the folks from THQ. On the one hand, that sounds like fun, on the other hand, it seems like an invitation to get labeled as "that jackass who threw up the Elvis impersonator".

As many of you know, I'm not exactly the type of person who goes out clubbing or whatever they call it nowadays, so I'm not sure what I'll do once the controllers are down and all of the consoles are powered off. Honestly, the whole notion of a game publisher paying for a trip such as this speaks to the current problems with the gaming press so much that as a gamer, I should probably be a little appalled at the notion of such a trip, but at the same time, I know how to be objective when reviewing games, if I didn't do it someone else would, and honestly, the game does look like a lot of fun.

The idea of just sitting in my hotel room for six hours playing the game is kind of strange, but not much stranger than what I did a few weeks ago when Linda took the kids to Chattanooga for the weekend, namely sit in my basement for 5.5 hours and beat Half-Life: Episode 2. Luckily, the bevy of Las Vegas buffets will ensure that I get enough to eat prior to the dropping off of the debug unit so that I'm sufficiently sated until the drinks and dinner provided at the co-op event.

While I'm there, I'll definitely be gambling, but what I'll be playing is currently in debate. I know nothing about blackjack and enough about no limit Hold 'Em to get myself into a heap of trouble. Roulette is a waste of money, and I can't understand Craps, so that basically leaves slot machines and video poker. I guess I could play Keno, but only if the lighter I'd usually use to burn up my money in the hotel bathroom garbage can doesn't work, seeing how the results will probably be the same. I had planned on putting money down on the Redskins game, as I'll be in Vegas for the season opener, but after the way they played against Carolina this past Sunday, I think I'd be better off with Keno. Or the lighter. So, it looks like slots will be it. Me and the blue hairs will undoubtedly have a great time. If you never hear from me again after next Thursday, me and Doris hit the progressive jackpot and have retired to Boca.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 13

Man, I have been slacking off something fierce in the posting department. Damn. I don't know how you put up with me. Oh wait, you don't, or so the referral logs would appear. Yeah.

Any way, this week saw my triumphant return to the world of exercise as our bike was fixed. The guy who repaired it basically did a Six Million Dollar Man job on it and rebuilt pretty much every moving part on the thing from the ground up. Were it in his reach to weld a new frame he probably would have done so. As a result, the bike is quieter than it has ever been. There are times I'm not sure I'm even using it, so quiet it is, but then I realize that I'm about to keel over from a massive heart attack and I remember. As Monday he was still fixing the bike, I didn't start riding it until Tuesday. Even without a full week of exercise, the weight loss continued to astound and I'm down to an even keeled, 172 lbs. Whee!

I didn't exactly keep to the diet this week, so the fact that I lost more weight makes me one very happy camper. It's going to be hard to get back into the exercise swing of things, made all the more difficult by the remnants of tropical storm Fay causing night time thunderstorms that send my stupid dog into a panting frenzy. If last night's stellar four hours of sleep is any indication, it's going to be a rough exercise week. Last week I watched The Insider and really enjoyed it. This week I'm forgoing a movie as I was too lazy to pick something out, and am instead playing Too Human. Along with making it so that I don't have to make a movie watching decision, this also gives me more time to get my review finished. This morning I spent 40 minutes walking through various halls in the game. It was thrilling! And by thrilling I mean stiflingly boring. Better I do that in the morning than spend my only gaming time at night traversing the halls of Norse cybserspace. Don't ask.

Now that the bike is back, I'm hoping that I can get rid of the remnants of my gut quickly. I've dropped the Sunday morning work out as my kids were starting to drive me crazy. When I'm riding the bike I have a hard time refereeing the various fights they get into all of the time now, and it was just too much of a hassle. Once I lose the gut, I can decide how much I want to ease off of the diet. I kind of thought that by now I would have hit a plateau and am curious to see just how much weight I could lose before my body got used to everything, but then I see a Baconator and become curious as to how many I could eat in one sitting. I'll give you one guess as to which curiosity would win out.

Finally, and this isn't exercise related, but soon I'll be collaborating with the always excellent Greg Howley on a gaming site called Lungfishopolis. I'm quite excited about it and Greg has been doing a bang up job on the site. Between this site, Greg's site and my reviews, it means a lot of writing for me, but it's important to flex one's muscles when one has them. Of course, that would mean that I have to start writing more here, but these are details that can easily be dealt with. If I could teach my son to type, he could recount for you the thrilling Power Rangers tale I was subjected to, I mean treated to, over the weekend. I think it was called Red Power Ranger and the Tale of a Thousand Millenia. At least that's how long it felt.

Braid Review

My review of Braid is up. Yay for fantastic games!

A few items of note about the review. First, is that I gave the game an A+, but the final grade ended up being an A. Honestly, I don't know what qualifies a game as an A+ game over an A game, obviously, given my flagrant mis-grading. Is Braid perfect? No, but no game is perfect. Any way, don't let that lack of a "+" discourage you from playing the game because it is fantastic. EDIT: Apparently we don't grade higher than an A. Yes, I am an idiot.

Second, eagle eyed readers may notice that I dropped the nickname from my name in the review. I started doing that on a lark and it has become my thing, as I appear to be the only person who does it. Usually I use it as a means to pile on additional scorn, or just generally be snarky which befits my acerbic nature. That and I hate everything. For this review I couldn't come up with a nickname that didn't sound like I was making fun of the game, and I didn't want to make fun of this game. So, I dropped the name. Don't worry, when the great review engine cranks up again, I'll be sure to put the name back.

Finally, I wasn't kidding when I said that this review was hard to write. It's probably just my lack of skills as a writer, but I had a hell of a time explaining why this game was so good, and I think that it's because the game struck such an emotional note with me. That's a much harder thing to quantify. Now, even if there were no emotional beats in the story and Tim was just some wacky dude in a suit, the game mechanics and visuals would be enough to make the game a strong recommendation, but the story, particularly the ending, is where it all comes together. Obviously, your reaction to the story will be different, and I realize that my desire for a strong story causes me to rate games with great stories higher than their more technically impressive counterparts (witness my review for The Darkness), but I play games for the story, so if there's a game that absolutely nails a narrative, I'm going to rate it higher. Personally, I don't have a problem with people saying "oh, he only gave it a high rating because it tells a really good story", as if any one discusses my scores in the first place. We all play games for different reasons, and I play for the stories. Well, achievements and then the stories. The ability to ignore my children is up there too.

Now I'm just waiting for Too Human to arrive. I'm excited to see how the final version came out, what with all of the mixed reviews. I wasn't thrilled with the demo, but I'm not a big fan of unskippable cut scenes in any game, much less in a demo. If, five minutes into your demo, you're making me just sit there, I shut your demo off. I'm more than happy to give your game's story time to breathe in the full game experience, but in the demo, I ain't got the time for your jibber jabber. Besides, everyone in the cut scenes had dead eyes and it was kind of freaking me out. I don't see that changing in the retail release, but maybe it just won't bother me that much. I doubt it, but I'm trying to be impartial going in to this whole mess. Using the word "mess" certainly doesn't help. Whoopsie.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 12

Once again, the dieting sans exercise paid off with yet another pound of weight loss. I'm now down to 173.5 pounds, which means that I officially weigh less than when we first moved to Georgia. Granted, it's only half a pound, but I'll take it. I'm basing my move weight on my driver's license which means that I've been a filthy liar for something like two years now as it's been at least that long since I weighed the 174 on my license. For the record, I also now require corrective lenses, despite my license's insistence to the contrary. Well, one eye does any way. It's like my wallet is just one big lie.

I finished Braid over the weekend and absolutely loved it. On the other hand, Conan is trying my patience. I spent an hour and 45 minutes last night on one boss battle. One boss battle. It was the same boss broken into two stages, if that makes any difference, and it was a complete and total pain in the ass. I'm almost done with the game, and it would appear that I've missed two of the 60+ chests needed to get the achievement despite me following a guide to find all of the chests. This pisses me off to no end as part of what has made the game take a long time is taking the time to find all of the chests. I've read reports of people getting the achievement with two chests left, so maybe things are buggy and I'll get lucky. I don't think I'll be playing the game again, so I may just have to be happy with the chests that I have.

After Conan comes Too Human which, by early reviews, appears to be a big mess. I'm not exactly surprised as I wasn't very impressed with the demo. We'll see. Hopefully I'll have it for the weekend as nothing says weekend gaming like mediocre action games based in cyber Norse mythology.

Carnival Games DS review

My review of Carnival Games for the DS is up, notable because the tag line implies that this game will cost you a piece of your eternal soul. I have no real data to back up this claim as I'm still alive, so the final resting place of my soul has yet to be determined. Upon death, if communication with the living is still an option for me, I'll be sure to let you know what ends up where.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 11

You've heard of the expression "a day late and a dollar short"? Well, this week's weigh in found me a week early and half a pound short. Which means that I weighed in at a whopping 174.5 lbs, yeah that's right, half a pound down from my goal and one whole week under the wire. This was without exercising as the bike is still broken. The repair guy came out today to fix the bike, but alas, all of the parts that they sent were for fixing things that aren't wrong with our bike. Bummer. He offered to put it all back together so that we could ride it, but the speed sensor is broken and it still makes noise, so I couldn't see him doing all the work to put it together when a) it's still broken and b) he'd just have to take it all apart again. In the mean time, I'm getting dangerously used to sleeping in, even if it's only an extra 25 minutes or so.

Even though I hit my goal, I'm still not done with the dieting and exercising as I still want to drop a few more inches off of my waistline. Not sure how long that will take, but I'll keep reevaluating as I'm going along. At least now, I can have an occasional dessert or breakfast biscuit and not feel like I'm doing damage to my progress. I really want the bike to get fixed though as I'd like to watch Casino Royale again.

In gaming news, I'm playing Conan on the 360, and while the game does have its share of problems, at 20 bucks it's a pretty good value. If I wasn't going for achievements, I'd probably be close to finished by now, but as it is, I'm enjoying the grind, so there's no need to stop. I'm also playing Braid for review purposes and man, this is one amazing game. I can't wait to see how it all ends.

Top Spin 3 Review

My review of Top Spin 3 for the Wii is up, albeit in a completely hacked up form. I tried to do something a little different in this review, and apparently it wasn't appreciated as it was removed completely. How I'm supposed to grow as a writer when attempts at doing things differently are removed and any request for explanation falls on deaf ears is beyond me. All I know is that the money is the same whether I try to step things up or not, so there's not much point in doing anything other than what I've been doing. That appears to have been fine all this time, so it can continue to be so.

It Lives!

It's the Top Ten List several months in the making, GameShark's Top Ten Summer Game Releases. Hooray! Seriously though, this thing took forever. I wrote a top ten list that basically just had games of this decade, but then when Bill noticed that System Shock 2 was released in the summer, but summer of 1999, I foolishly mentioned that we could do an all time list. He asked me how, and I said I'd just sit down and do the research.

Yeah, it's not quite that easy. I mean, it is that easy, you just have to search multiple sources to find the North American release date, and then, the right one. Then, you have to take all of the choices, there were many, and boil them down, being sure to include ones that your editor specifically asked for, only to have him then drop it from the final column. I was a little sad to see MechWarrior 2 dropped for Tie Fighter, but when the man who doles out the work says it's so, then it's so. The original list had a lot more games that I had played personally, so I was a lot more invested in it, but this is a good list too, and it scratches the retro gaming itch that people seem to have. Doom 3 was released in August, so this list also allows me to continue to get hate mail from people about how I forgot Doom.

For those that may be interested, here's the original list, back when we weren't trying to include every game in recorded history:

10 - Metroid Prime: Corruption
9 - Dead Rising
8 - Soul Caliber 2
7 - Icewind Dale
6 - Eternal Darkness
5 - Max Payne
4 - Deus Ex
3 - Diablo 2
2 - BioShock
1 - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Not a bad collection of games there.

The New X-Files Movie

So I had a chance to see the new X-Files movie recently and I'm telling you, this movie is much, much better than people are making it out to be. Now, I'm a die hard X-Phile so I may be a bit biased, but I thought it was pretty damn good. The story was straightforward, it had a nice creepy vibe to it, there were a ton of nods to fans of the show, but most importantly, Duchovny and Anderson just did fantastic jobs with their portrayals of Mulder and Scully.

Maybe I was just really happy to see them back on the screen again after so long away. I don't know. Back when Linda and I lived in upstate New York, watching The X-Files on Friday nights was a huge deal. We had another couple we were really good friends with and we'd switch off whose house we'd go to to have dinner, play some games and then watch the show. Those nights were some of the best nights I can remember. We always had a really, really good time. Henry was a puppy at the time and our friends had an older Lhasa mix and the dogs would always play together when everyone was at our house. When we went to their house, Yin and Yang, the two cats would usually spend the evening beating up on Henry while he tried to make friends with them. Once the show started, everyone would hush up and we'd all get scared together, or laugh together or say "what the fuck was that" together. If you could call a tv show a friend, or a companion, then in this case, on these evenings, The X-Files was just that.

Watching the movie brought a lot of that back, but my enjoyment was more than just from reminiscing. Mulder and Scully have moved on from their jobs in the FBI and the characters show that. The problems arise when Scully asks Mulder to get back involved, just to debunk a psychic, and in typical Mulder fashion, once he realizes that there's no debunking to be done, he's in with both feet. The conversations that ensue were so well done because if you've been in a relationship for some time, you know that you don't have a lot of fights, you just have the same fight over and over, and these characters have had this fight before. Scully doesn't want to get pulled in, but Mulder can't help it. He's already there. Furthermore, he's there because Scully asked him to be there. He can't understand why she doesn't want to come with him when it was her idea, and she can't make him understand that she wanted him to only go so far, not all the way. It's amazing to me that they could craft a conversation and a conflict like this, one that seems so grounded and realistic, and place it in a movie with missing FBI agents and shadowy medical experiments and not have it sound stupid or corny.

I'm sure that those who don't know the show, or weren't huge fans, won't find much to like here, and hell, I realize that I liked the show more than most, so I probably liked the movie more than most, but I don't care. I thought it was great and I can't wait for it to come out on DVD so that I can buy it, unlike the original movie which has been on my wish list, unpurchased, for years now. Now that we've moved away and had kids, Linda and don't have friends like we did when we watched the show, and in fact, haven't really kept up with couple we spent all of those Friday nights with. Seeing Mulder and Scully again, and seeing that there was hope for them, despite their problems, was like seeing old friends, if only for a night. I don't know what's going to happen to them, and I may never see them again, but I know they're ok. Somehow, that's enough.

Renaissance Man

Not only am I an accomplished humor writer and games reviewer (Ha!) but I'm also a Transformers news hound!

Check my front page (for now) submission about finding Universe Silverbolt out at retail.

Man. I need a life.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 10

Sorry for the late weekly weigh in post. Last night I got to playing the Eschelon demo from Greenhouse games and well, there went the evening.

If you like old school RPG's, Eschelon: Book 1 may scratch that particular itch for you.

Anywho, this week, despite only working out one day (the bike is still busted), I dropped another pound and a half and am down to 175.5 pounds. I find it very hard to believe that I lost that much weight only by dieting, but hey, all I can do is weigh myself three times and if the scale says the same thing each time, then it must be true. Who knows? Whatever the case, I'm only half a pound from my goal of 175 and I have until August 16th to do it. I bought the bike on 5/15, and started on 5/16, so three months would be 8/16. I don't expect to have lost any weight this week, and possibly to have gained some, what with me not believing the scale from this past weigh-in, so hopefully I can get the bike fixed so that my goal isn't in jeopardy.

I mean, I could always find another way to work out, but let's not get hasty.

Just because I've hit my target, I'm not going to stop as I want to lose the gut as much as I can, which means another couple of inches off the old stomach. Right now the diet is pretty much on auto-pilot, so it shouldn't be too hard to keep going. If I find that I'm dieting and exercising and not making any progress, I'll just be happy with how I look and call it a day. Once that happens, the exercise will continue, and for the most part, I'll stick to smaller portions, but if I want to eat a little more at dinner from time to time, or have a Frosty, then by God, I'll do it. Just watch me.

More Reviews

This time, it's a review for Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns. As it turns out, I don't like roguelike RPG's. Good to know.

Yeowch!

If you want to see me absolutely go to town on the frakked up mess that is the Hellboy PSP game, then tardy no longer! Head on over and check it out. I must have been in a bad mood that day because I was pretty cruel. Oh hell, who am I kidding? I'm in a bad mood every day.

100%

Last night marked the end of my GTA IV experience until the downloadable content drops as I killed my last pigeon, thereby earning the coveted Key to the City achievement for completing 100% of the game. So, what exactly did that entail? Well, you had to do the following:

All story missions (there were over 60 of them if I remember correctly)
All 10 courier missions
Win all nine street races
All ten car export missions
All thirty stolen car missions
All 30 most wanted missions
Twenty vigilante missions
All five helicopter tours
All nine assassination missions
Beat the computer at every game (bowling, darts, pool, QUB3D)
Take every friend out to every event
Fly under all 14 bridges with a helicopter
Meet all 21 random characters and do all of their missions
All 50 stunt jumps
All 200 pigeons killed

In addition to this, for achievement purposes I also won an additional 11 street races, rolled a car five times in one crash, did a 500 foot wheelie, scored with a woman, escaped a four star wanted level, survived a six star wanted level for five minutes, scored 180 points in darts, bowled a turkey in bowling, performed 10 melee counters in four minutes and blew up ten cars in ten seconds.

It took me about two months to do all of this, and this was with using a strategy guide. The guide certainly helped in some places, such as finding pigeons and finding the stunt jumps, but not so much in other places like actually completing the stunt jumps or for things like rolling your car or blowing up ten cars in ten seconds. For those, it was nothing but try, try and try some more.

I was pretty happy last night when my final achievement (the roll over one) popped, but sad at the same time as I've spent so much time playing this game that I'm bummed to see it go. Not since Mass Effect had I played a game that I looked forward to every night. Oh sure, I love me some Rock Band, but when it's not the same thing. When I wasn't playing GTA, I was thinking about it. I looked forward to sitting down with Niko every night. Not as much once it was just stunt jumps and pigeon hunting, but I still enjoyed it even then.

Now that GTA is done, and I have my achievement for completing the vocal tour on hard in Rock Band, I've started playing Condemned 2. So far I'm enjoying it, but I'm only about 45 minutes into it. I have three weeks until Too Human drops and I have to review it, so I'm not sure what I'll do once Condemned 2 is finished. I'm sure I'll think of something, but being in between games is so unsettling to me. It's like I'm lost, rudderless in a sea of inactivity. God forbid I do something constructive with my time.

On Loving and Golf

My We Love Golf review is up, and despite me describing the controls as the absolute worst video game golf controls ever when I first started playing it, I actually ended up like the game a fair amount. Ok, so when I derided the controls, it was because I wasn't using them correctly due to me being an idiot, but at least I didn't then include my initial impressions in the review. It's not that the controls are unintuitive, it's that I'm stupid and I attempted to play a motion assisted golf game while sitting on my fat ass. It did not go well. Once I stood up, things went much, much better.

A Typical Evening

Monday night I punched myself in the face while trying to fix my exercise bike. Anyone who knows me, knows that this is not atypical for me. After all, I am the man who bowled a hole in his basement wall. The face punching was not intentional, nor was the wall bowling for that matter, but it did happen. There was a very stubborn bolt, my very earnest effort, and a socket wrench that, when forced upon by my earnest effort, slipped off of the stubborn bolt and, clad in my hand, struck my right cheekbone.

It was both humbling and enraging at the same time. Mostly it was just unpleasant.

Why was I fixing my own exercise bike, despite it still being under warranty? Well, because when I called Kelley at Schwinn, to tell her of my squealing, banshee infested bike, she said that she'd send me some new bearings and then talk me through the installation over the phone. Troubleshooting, she called it. Fixing my own damn bike, I called it.

When the parts came, complete with a 12 pound box of 419 ball bearings that was supposed to go to an auto parts place in Marietta, I was surprised to see not just bearings, but a giant wheel, another wheel thingy, some more bolts, a lemur, seventeen midgets and a Grecian urn. It was a very large box.

In the 40 minutes that I was on hold before talking to Connie, I managed to get the entire exercise bike apart, cranks and all. I then spent something like five minutes trying to not say "crank" while on the phone with Connie, and instead managed to say "crank" something like thirteen hojillion times. I hope that Connie knew that I meant the bike cranks and that I wasn't spending the previous 40 minutes engaging in onanism. I was pretty pissed, which isn't usually the state of mind of someone who just spent almost an hour pleasuring himself, so I'm sure Connie knew what I meant.

After explaining to Connie that I couldn't get the crank shaft assembly bolts undone, the very bolts that caused my face punching, she then put me back on hold. I managed to get one bolt undone, then, when using the wrench to stabilize the big wheel that the crank shaft assembly was attached to, I managed to move the wheel which in turn made the wrench slip which then hit a wire, breaking it in the process.

Whoopsie.

At this point, I was pretty pissed, and I let Connie know this. I explained to her that I didn't understand why I was fixing the bike. She told me that if I had the parts, it's probably because I wanted to do the work myself, rather than wait for a technician. I told her that Kelley with an "e" never mentioned any fucking technician. Ok, I didn't swear. Well, not in that sentence anyway. Connie was very sorry after hearing this, and promptly put in an order for a technician and a new motor. Luckily, I don't have to pay for the motor, partially because it was broken during a repair process that was undertaken by myself when I hadn't been told that someone else could do it and partially because I didn't tell Connie that I was the one who broke said motor.

Again I say, whoopsie.

I'm not sure when the technician will be here, or when the motor will be here, but the bike is in pieces and wouldn't work even if I were to put it back together. Bottom line is that I have to figure out an exercise alternative for the near future. Tuesday morning I got up and walked the neighborhood. It was unpleasant what with all of the humidity and my near complete dislike of the outdoors. I could work out at work, but that's kind of a pain. I could also work out with Wii Fit but I'd spend most of my time in the menus. I don't know. I'm sure I'll think of something. Or I won't and instead will just gain weight. Either way, something will happen. Of that I'm certain.

Well, mostly certain.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 9

A week of little progress, but progress nonetheless as I stand at a svelte 177 lbs. No change in the waistline, however with only a pound of loss, there are certainly plenty of places for the fat to come from.

This week I watched American Gangster which was good, however it ended way too quickly. The movie was basically 2.5 hours of the rise of Frank Lucas and then like 10 minutes of his fall. Ok, so I'm sure the proportions are a bit off, but that's what it felt like. The other thing that bugged me was that there was a scene with Cuba Gooding Jr. where he gets confronted by Denzel Washington (as Frank Lucas) for taking Denzel's premium Heroin, cutting it and then selling it under the same brand name. Much yelling on the part of Cuba ensues and Frank leaves. I fully expected him to show up dead somewhere but he never did. In fact, you never see him again, at least I didn't. Maybe something happened in the brief span of time it takes for me to look down and see my heart rate. It's not entirely impossible. The movie was very well acted, so I didn't mind these small story problems but your mileage may vary.

As my exercise bike is somewhat busted and sounds like there's a banshee trapped inside of it, I then switched over to Hard Boiled figuring that if I'm going to be reading a movie any way (subtitles are a must over the din of the bike), I might as well read one of the greats. I hadn't seen this movie in quite some time, and having recently played Stranglehold, the video game sequel of sorts, it was cool to see all of the things in Hard Boiled that I had just seen in Stranglehold. That and things blew up real good.

The bike's repair kit arrived today, meaning that I'll be on the phone with Schwinn customer service tonight in an attempt to fix it, or as Schwinn would say "troubleshoot" it, so hopefully tomorrow morning I'll have a quieter ride and a movie that doesn't require subtitles. If I don't get around to fixing the bike, or if the kit doesn't fix it, I don't know what I'll watch. Truly these are the questions that weigh heavy on a man's soul.

Out Again

Once again, the call of live music has pulled me out of my hidey hole.
Tonight I'm taking in Mr. Butch Walker, one of my favorite artists.
As Butch is from nearby Cartersville, gigs in Atlanta tend to bring
out the best in him. Hopefully, tonight will be no exception. For
now though, it's all anticipation and people watching. Good times.

--
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

Disparate Elements
http://disparateelements.blogspot.com

Riddle Time!

Question: When is an E3 preview not an E3 preview?

Answer: When it's my preview of N+ for the PSP, conveniently posted today.

Simple, right? Ha. No. See, I played N+ and wrote the preview while E3 was going on, but I didn't do so at E3 on account of my E3 absence. The presentation of my preview at GameShark makes it look like I was at E3 which is kind of strange, but in the end, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that I played the game, which I did. In fact, me not being at E3 probably means that I was able to spend more time with the game as they up and sent us a preview build, two copies to be exact, so I was able to spend as much time with it as I needed, rather than spend whatever time allotment they dole out at these conventions.

It being my first preview, I think I did alright. Nothing spectacular. I tried to stick to the "write what you see" mode of preview writing so as to not load the thing up with bullshit, and to that effect I think I succeeded. It's harder than it looks. For example, the game has co-op, but I only have one PSP, so I couldn't play the co-op mode, but I did see that they had several modes. In that situation, do you mention co-op? On the one hand, it has it, and you can see it, so you can mention it, on the other hand, it could be horribly broken in the retail release to the point where saying it has co-op is a lie because co-op doesn't work. In the end, I decided to elaborate on the things I witnessed with mine own eyes, and mention in passing everything else.

For the record, I did, in fact, download a custom map. A nice one too. It had rocket ships.

Not being able to inject my opinion made it a bit harder too. Again, sticking to the "write what you see" kind of mode, I tried to just give the facts and let the reader decide if the game was something they should be interested in. It's tough, I mean, it's not the final version, so everything could change completely, bad to good or vice versa. In subsequent previews, I'll try and do better to strike the right tone between honest commentary and cautious optimism. Given that I'm pessimistic about pretty much everything, even cautious optimism will be a stretch for me.

Grrr

Stupid hurricane.

I can only assume that Dolly is the reason that my broken 360 is currently sitting in some UPS depot some place. The tracking information says that my 360 can't proceed further due to inclement weather. I find this odd for a number of reasons. One, the tracking information states that my 360 is in Mesquite, Texas, which is where it's being delivered to. Two, today it was sunny and like a hundred degrees in Mesquite, so unless the inclement weather was extreme sunniness, I don't know what the problem is.

I can only assume that the information as to where my package actually is, is wrong and it's some place being affected by the hurricane. I hope not as I don't want my 360 being swept out to sea although I'm sure all of the marine life in the Gulf of Mexico would enjoy it. Perhaps they could make a nice coral mini-reef out of it.

Hopefully they'll be able to deliver it soon as Too Human drops in the middle of August and I need a working console to review it. Luckily, I have options for obtaining another console for review purposes, so my opinion will be heard by all on the matter of Too Human. This voice can not be stifled! Not by hurricanes! Not by extreme sunniness! Not by coral mini-reefs!

Weekly Weigh In: Week 8

This weekend saw the return of glorious progress in the quest to lose weight. I'm down to 178 and a 37 inch waist. Whee! I haven't seen a weight in the 170's for a couple of years now so I'm quite excited. I was also glad to see that my week of no progress wasn't repeated as I wasn't relishing the thought of trying to figure out ways to mix things up. I'm now three pounds from my weight goal of 175 however unless that loss of three pounds comes with a couple of inches off of the waistline, I will most likely continue dieting until my gut is a little smaller.

This was a high point in what can be described as a very uneven weekend. Friday night I set about seeing if playing bass in Rock Band on Hard is hard (it is) and all I got for my trouble was a busted Xbox. Luckily it wasn't the dreaded red rings of death, just a general hardware failure, but the end result was the same, namely I had to pack up the 360 and send it to Texas where it'll sit for two to three weeks. I have other systems on which to play games, which is good, however I was looking forward to putting the nail in GTA IV's coffin. Guess those stunt jumps and pigeons will have to wait a bit longer. In the mean time I'm playing God of War II which is OK and soon will have to start reviewing We Love Golf.

Saturday was the weigh in, so yay for that, but then Saturday night my daughter's high temperature from earlier in the week reared it's ugly head putting the plans of seeing The Dark Knight on Sunday in jeopardy. My reaction to this piece of bad news was to not sleep well for the rest of the night until 5:50 when the stupid carbon monoxide detector started chirping every 30 seconds to tell us that the battery was going. Shortly afterwards the dog decided to smear poop all over the carpeting necessitating an ass bath for him and a cleaning of the carpet, and this was all before the kids woke up. As callous as this sounds, I honestly can't wait for that fucking dog to die. He has ceased to bring anything to the table but shit stains and odd growths on his back. My wife still enjoys his company for some odd reason, but I guess it bodes well for my body's eventual slide into disrepair.

Luckily come Sunday morning my daughter was doing well so we headed out to buy Ben some school supplies and my insistence what we go to a different, rarely tread Walmart was rewarded with the Animated version of Jazz, the only figure I had yet to purchase. Double whee! He is much smaller in vehicle mode than I imagined and his transformation is very straightforward but he's Jazz and he comes with nunchuks, so I don't care.

Sunday night Linda and I went out to dinner and saw The Dark Knight and I have to say that every review I've read of it was spot on. I was concerned going into it that it wouldn't live up to the hype, or that I'd seen everything in the trailer, but this movie was so different from what I thought it was going to be, that it was like never seeing a frame of film before sitting down and watching it. Rather than rehash what I'm sure you've read elsewhere, I'll just say that it was brutal and harrowing and like being kicked in the stomach for three hours, but in a good way.

Today is similarly uneven as a trip to Target yielded a new Universe 2.0 Transformer, but our medical insurance company has denied the claim for Abby's therapy sessions because insurance companies were spawned in the pits of hell and are staffed by demons with shit spewing cocks for brains. Apparently they'd rather we stick a tube in her stomach and feed her that way than pay for some therapy sessions, because that makes perfect sense. I hope they all die. Did you get that, warrantless eavesdropping fuckwits?

Grrr.

Teh Absence

Oh, how the week flies by when you don't actually write anything!

Not sure why I didn't post this week. I just...didn't. Not that anyone cares, but hey, why should people stick around if I'm not here? Why indeed. I'm feeling a bunch of writing malaise of late including with my GameShark stuff. I managed to pound out reviews of Hellboy for the PSP and Carnival Games for the DS (both sucked) but now I'm facing the task of writing a preview of N+ for the PSP. I also need to get off of my ass and work on this top ten list I've been kicking around for like a month now. Me so lazy!

On to various bits.

I finally finished everything but shooting all of the pigeons and hitting all of the stunt jumps in GTA IV. I was quite satisfied with the ending of the game. The final mission was a bit of a pain, what with no ability to save mid-mission, but it had a nice balance. You drove, you shot, you ran, you biked, you flew a helicopter. It had thrills and chills. The story ended on a nice downer too which I felt appropriate. I mean, Niko Bellic is not a nice guy and while he may have done some things for good reasons, he was a violent killer all the same, so things shouldn't end on a happy, high note. You play with fire, you're going to get burned. Still, it was an odd choice, as at the end of the game, Niko basically states that none of what he did was worth it which usually isn't how you want people to feel after they've sunk dozens of hours into your game. Personally, I loved it as I think the world is shit, so I'm all for someone expressing those thoughts.

I know that some fans of earlier games lamented the lack of true, free roaming destruction that was present in earlier games, but for someone like myself who is paralyzed by so much choice, I felt that the structure was just what I needed to truly enjoy the game. Now all I need is to roll my car five times in one jump, kill all the pigeons and hit all of the stunt jumps and I'll be all done until the DLC comes out. Whee!

Linda and I watched Batman: Gotham Knight and while I loved the animation, I wasn't thrilled with using Kevin Conroy as the voice of Batman. Conroy voiced Batman in the animated series back in the 90's as well as in the JLA cartoon and the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, so it certainly makes sense for him to be the voice, however these stories are set in the Batman Begins universe, so I found the mix of the old and the new somewhat jarring. Granted, that mixture is probably exactly what they were going for, but as a fan of the comics, I've learned to keep all of the various comic property universes separate and in this case, I don't want no animated chocolate in my big screen peanut butter.

In other Batman news, Linda and I are going to see The Dark Knight on Sunday. We are both very excited as we're also going to eat copious amounts of pizza and when we get home, the children will be snug in their beds. Babysitters rule.

Let's see, what else, what else. Oh, Psych season 2 came out on DVD and man if this still ain't one of the funniest shows out there. Those two kill me.

Finally, save for one figure, I have all of the Transformers: Animated figures that are currently out at retail and I love each and every one of them. They're all so clean and big jawed, unlike the spiky movie figures, and with the exception of Bumblebee, they're all very fun to transform and pose. Me likey. I picked up some of the new Classics figures too, and they're fun as well, but I'm really digging on the animated line right now.

Well, I think that's about as much boring minutia of my trivial and sleep inducing life that I think I can come up with. I'm sure you're looking forward to more regular posts of this stellar caliber. I know I am.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 7

Sorry for the lack of posts last week, but I swear that every day either I or Linda was bringing the dog to the vet for some multi-hundred dollar procedure to see what's wrong with him. After the ultrasound on Friday ($250), he's back to being like his old self, so apparently all that was required to fix his problem was about a thousand dollars of tests and medications. It was a stressful week, so I didn't feel like posting.

This week I didn't lose anything, which was to be expected after the four day eat-a-thon that was the 4th of July weekend. I also ate a metric ton of food on Friday as work paid for it, so that certainly didn't help the weigh-in on Saturday. The official number was 180.5, which represents an actual step backwards of half a pound. Oh well. This week I'm back to the diet and working out, so hopefully I'll see some weight loss on Saturday.

This past weekend I saw Hellboy 2: The Golden Army and it was quite the kick-ass movie. Very well done with lots of action, lots of humor and some incredibly creative creature design on display. Everything that was there to like in the first one was in this one, only more so. Three awesome comic book movies in one summer before The Dark Knight drops? Surely the apocalypse is upon is. Linda and I managed to get a babysitter for this weekend, so we'll be rocking The Dark Knight date night style. I'm super excited. That movie is going to kick ass.

Speaking of excited, the Rock Band 2 track list was released today and man, September can't get here fast enough. The Replacements, Jimmy Eat World, Fleetwood Mac, Silversun Pickups, Modest Mouse, Billy Idol, Duran Duran, the list goes on and on to the tune of 75 master tracks with 20 more downloadable once the game launches and the ability to import most of the songs from the original Rock Band disc. Guitar Hero IV on the other hand, gets the Eagles and Van Halen as exclusive bands. Wow. That's so, what's the word? Oh yes. Boring. There were other things released today at Microsoft's press conference like strange singing games about lips, and the ability to stream Netflix movies to your 360, and something about the next Final Fantasy game being on the 360 as well as the PS3, but I could give a shit about any of that stuff. Rock Band pretty much rules my world at the moment and that track list is the shit.

The. Shit.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 6

Not a lot of movement this week as I weighed in at a whopping 180 lbs, a whole half a pound less than last week. I did lose about half an inch off of the waistline though, so that's good and my body fat percentage is 20.5% which is a good 5% less than when I started. I weighed myself early this week and didn't do any Wii Fit all week so I'm sure all of those things accounted for less loss. That and it's just what my body decided to do this week.

I started watching This is Spinal Tap as I needed something that I could get through in two days as the final season of The Batman comes out on Tuesday and I want to start watching it on Wednesday. Spinal Tap is just as hilarious as I remembered it to be. The "mime is money" line always kills me.

Linda and I went and saw Wanted today and man, that was one kick ass action movie. I had read a review that said that if you had read the comic, the movie doesn't work, a statement I disagree with 100%. There's no way that the comic would have worked on screen without looking ridiculous. I mean, one of the characters is a guy made of shit. Come on. The movie reminded me of Running Scared, the Paul Walker movie, not the Billy Crystal movie, in that it was incredibly violent, and once the action started, it just kept going. Angelina Jolie looked amazing, which certainly didn't hurt. If you like action movies, with tons of kick ass stunts and bloody violence, it's not a bad way to spend two hours.

Happy 4th of July!

What a fantastically awesome 4th of July I've had!

First, based on some tips from people on the TFW2005.com boards, we headed to the Target in Buckhead to see if I could score some elusive Wave 3 Transformers: Animated deluxe figures. For our efforts I was rewarded with Oil Slick, Soundwave and Snarl. Alas, Jazz was AWOL, and despite the price scanner stating that there were more figures in the back, a call to the back room brought news that all of the figures were out. I find this hard to believe, but what choice did I have but to believe them?

After that, we headed to the nearby Walmart to look for a bed for Ben and while we didn't find a bed, I did find one of every Marvel Transformer! Score! I completely cleaned out the store, buying Spider-Man, Hulk, Iron Man and Venom for myself and a Spider-Man for Ben. As much as a callous bastard as I make myself out to be, when presented with the opportunity to teach my son about the joys of robot superheroes that turn into motorcycles, I don't back down.

After all of the retail excitement, we headed home and I grilled up some peppers, onions and spicy Italian sausage for dinner. The sandwiches, along with Linda's kick ass macaroni salad made for quite the tasty meal.

Now there's nothing left but to sit back and watch the dogs shit themselves in fear from the inevitable fireworks. Can't wait!

Here's hoping that your 4th of July is a good one. Enjoy the weekend.

My Afternoon Itinerary

Here's the schedule of my afternoon today, to give you an idea of how we roll at Hyphen Ridge.

3:30 - Get a call from Linda telling me that the dog shat all over the house.
3:35 - Get a call from Linda telling me that the dog also threw up all over the house.
3:40 - Get a call from Linda telling me that there's blood in the dog's shit.
3:41 - Call the vet and make a 5:00 appointment for the blood shitting dog.
3:45 - Head home to pick up the dog.
4:10 - Get home and greet the family.
4:25 - Get back in the car with the dog to head to the vet which just happens to be down the road from where I work.
4:45 - Get to the vet.
5:45 - Find out that the dog will need to get shots, fluids and have blood drawn because the dog shouldn't be shitting blood. Also find out that the dog won't be ready to be picked up until around 7:00.
5:46 - Get back in the car and head home.
6:05 - Get home and help finish up the kids' bath.
6:15 - Put Abby to bed.
6:20 - Get call from Vet that the dog is ready to come home.
6:21 - Find out what Linda wants for dinner.
6:22 - Get back in the car to go back to the vet.
6:40 - Get to vet and find out that the dog has pancreatitis, possibly caused by stress from the massive thunderstorms we had Saturday and Sunday night.
6:45 - Pay $350 vet bill.
6:46 - Get back in the car with dog and head home.
7:10 - Get dinner.
7:20 - Get home, hopefully for the night.

Sadly, this is the second time in about six months that Henry has had pancreatitis, so we're familiar with the drill and we had the medicated food left over from the last time, thereby saving us 25 bucks. Not that I want anything bad to happen to the dog, but seriously, he either needs to tell his pancreas to get with the program, or see about shuffling off his mortal coil. He has lived a good life, there's no shame in giving up the ghost now. I told Linda that when I get old, if I start shitting all over the house, she can take me in and have me put down and I won't think poorly of her.

Hopefully the dog won't have to go out every couple of hours tonight and we can actually get some sleep. Hopes are high.

All Binky, All the Time

GameShark is ruled by Mr. Binky today as my latest column is up as well as my review of Secret Agent Clank. The column is a Baldur's Gate 2 story I've had in my head for a couple of years now, I just never put it down on paper. I think it turned out pretty well, and it had all of the beats I intended, so I'm pretty pleased. Plus, I got paid for it, which is something that wouldn't have happened had I written it when it was originally conceived. The Secret Agent Clank review reads better than it did when I first wrote it, without any extra editing, so I'm pleasantly surprised at that one. Sometimes I like stuff when I write it, sometimes I don't. I don't edit my stuff, which can be a good or a bad thing, choosing to ruminate over the piece in my head well before I put it on paper, so when I don't like something, I kind of feel like I don't know what else to do with it, so I just submit it anyway. It's not like I think that the piece is crap, more like a meal that is perfectly edible, you just wish it tasted different, and slightly better.

In other news, Circuit City continued to provide an absolutely shitty retail experience today as I attempted to get rid of the gift card I've been toting around for two months now. I don't know what it is about this store that they feel the need to carry absolutely nothing but their bitter seeds will eventually bear the rancid fruit of bankruptcy and I will dance in the fucking streets when that happens. Seriously, if it weren't for the fact that my not using the gift card would mean money for nothing for them, I'd cut the damn thing up and throw it out. Of course, it would probably show back up in my wallet like some kind of cursed monkey paw, forever chained to my person, but at least the act of cutting it up would be cathartic. I've heard many people complain about Best Buy, but at least when I go there, they actually have things, to, you know, buy. I may not be well versed in a lot of things, but I'm pretty sure me going to a store and being able to buy things sums up the very heart of the retail experience. Anything on top of that is just gravy.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 5

This week saw a couple more pounds drop off as I have gotten myself down to 180.5. With this, I have officially crossed the ten pound threshold. Whee! I didn't notice much of a change in the waistline, but the weight is coming from somewhere, so I'm happy.

I've started working out for ten minutes longer each morning, bringing it up to 40 minutes a day, in part to help with things if I can't work out over the weekend, but also to make myself feel better about slacking off with Wii Fit. Now at least I have an excuse as I have to review Top Spin 3, but I won't always have that. Incidentally, Top Spin 3 gives quite the workout as it uses the motion controls to simulate your player's swing, so I'm still getting some video game exercising done, just not as much as with Wii Fit.

Now that I have lost some appreciable weight, the desire to cheat is so much greater because I feel like I've made good progress so I can now let off a little. I will fight this odious desire though, lest I lose all of the progress I've made. I'm enjoying the fact that I can wear shirts that used to be too small and I'd hate to lose progress. Once I hit my target weight, I'll have to decide if I want to keep going to build in a buffer zone, or stop where I am. I'll keep working out every day, but will probably allow myself a little more to eat, and my usual Friday post-bowling Frosty can come back into my loving arms. Other than that, I don't see much changing. The benefit of dieting, other than losing weight, is learning to enjoy seeing a smaller number on the scale more than eating some late night snack, or something similarly bad for me. As long as I keep working out, and enjoy the bad things in moderation, everything should be just fine.

I finished watching The Cottage today and really enjoyed it. A lot of good comedic bits, even if the horror aspect was a bit formulaic. I'll have to see if I can find the DVD to add to the collection. Not sure what's going to be next, but probably The Mist as I can get the whole thing wrapped up before Friday's day off and lack of working out. The weigh-in will be a day early this week as I'm sure I'll be eating more than normal on Friday, so waiting until Saturday will throw off things. Hopefully the extra working out I'll be doing Mon - Thurs will help make up for losing a day before the next weigh in. Either way, I get to be off the diet (mostly) for an extra day this weekend, two actually as I get Monday off from work, so I don't really care. I'm all about the long term goals so a few extra days of eating, or fewer days of working out won't make much of a difference.

Busy and Such

Sorry for the light posting schedule this week but I have been equal parts busy and lazy. Busy as I needed to finish Secret Agent Clank so that I could return it, thereby allowing GameFly to send me my next review game Hellboy: Seeds of Evil for the PSP. Lazy as once I finished Secret Agent Clank I wanted to watch a movie with the missus and play GTA IV, none of which are conducive to posting.

Speaking of movies, I finished The Ruins and was quite happy with the movie until the ending. Spoilers need to be spoiled in order to have this discussion, so if you wish to see this movie on DVD and don't want things ruined, then run along now.

The movie is about four vacationing Americans and the German tourist they meet while in Mexico, traveling to this archaeological dig site in search of the German guy's brother. Once they get to the temple, one of the Americans, Amy, the wishy-washy girlfriend of Jeff, the take charge med school student, accidentally steps on the vines covering the dig site while their group of people is being yelled at by some crazy villager guy. Once Amy steps on the vines, crazy villager guy gets even crazier, calls his homies, shoots an unfortunately expendable Greek tourist who was along for the ride and makes our intrepid group of five high tail it up to the top of the temple. The villagers don't let the five leave the temple, folks get injured and it turns out that the vines are sentient and will pretty much do whatever they can to kill and eat you.

Bummer.

In the book, everyone dies. I don't remember exactly how, but nobody gets off of that temple alive. It's pretty bleak, and gross, but that's the way the book is. In the movie, not so much. After Jeff and Amy's friends die due to some unfortunate knife action, and well after the German guy had to have his legs cut off and the vines choked him from within, Amy and Jeff hatch a plan to get Amy out of there. Jeff brings her seemingly dead body down to the base of the temple, lies it on the ground, and then walks away from it, around the base of the temple, talking to the villagers and drawing their attention away from Amy. After a very nice speech, he yells her name, the villagers shoot him full of arrows and Amy gets up and bolts into the jungle. She is chased by the villagers, but eventually finds the jeep left by the last group of people, starts the engine and drives off. As she drives off, a vine appears under the skin below her eye and we know that Amy is infected.

Again, bummer.

Here's my problem with that. As bad as it was for everyone to die in the book, they pretty much had to. The vine was growing on their clothes, even in places that hadn't been touched by the vines. The villagers kept watch on the temple, and salted the ground around the temple, to keep the vines out of the surrounding jungle, knowing full well that the vines would spread like crazy and probably kill everything. Amy was probably the weakest character in the group, and while the right thing for her to do would have been to turn around, go back to the temple and take one for the team, I'm pretty sure she didn't do that, so as a result, our world in that movie is probably overrun with killer plants now and we're all dead.

Thanks a bunch, Amy. Loser.

The other problem was that Amy was so whiny that it's not like you really want her to live. The book was much better because you knew that these people were all going to die, it was just a matter of when, and how awful it would be. I had the same feeling while watching the movie, so to then have one of them escape seemed wrong to me. Plus, I don't want to be killed by malevolent plants so Amy needs to die. I've heard that there was an alternate ending, probably more in line with the book, so hopefully in that version, killer vines get a small snack of six tourists, but are denied the main course of our entire planet.

Now I'm watching The Cottage and it's fucking hilarious. Andy Serkis is a genius. Hopefully it won't end poorly.

Have a great weekend.

Now That's What I Call Cost Savings

So I had to bring my car into the dealer today because every time I braked, my brakes made this horrible grating noise. For one it was kind of annoying, for two, anyone who drove with me thought that my brakes were going to fail at any moment, plunging them into a fiery death. As my car is still under warranty I was forced to go the dealer.

While I was there, I was told that my car was due for it's 20k service, which entailed an oil change, tire balancing, emergency brake tweaking, whatever the fuck that is, and a car wash. I needed a car wash. I needed an oil change. I needed my tires rotated. Seemed like a good deal to me.

Several hours later they called to tell me that the noise is normal, however there was an update out for my car, so they replaced the brake pads with new ones. Odd that an update for a car is new brakes however I can't see how my failing brakes would be fixed with software, so I guess it makes sense. Anyway, they also told me that my front tires were out of alignment and as a result they were worn down and needed to be replaced to the tune of 400 bucks. Yeah, I don't think so.

When I picked up my car, the guy explained everything that had been done and then proceeded to try and send me on my way without me paying for anything. When I told him that I needed to pay for the 20k service, he looked confused and then said "But you declined the service." I told him that I declined the new tires, but not the service. Whoopsie. He was very apologetic and said that they could take care of it right away, but I couldn't stay and I figured that if I had to get new tires, getting my existing tires rebalanced and rotated probably wasn't worth it. I told him not to worry and went on my way.

When I went out to my car, I noticed that the car had been washed. Sweet! Free car wash! As I was driving home, I noticed the temperature display. My car has a charming feature that when your oil life gets down to 15%, every time you start the car, the engine light comes on and your normal temperature and trip odometer display is replaced with the oil life. The only way to reset it is to change the car's oil. My car wasn't showing the oil life, it was showing the temperature and the trip odometer. Then I looked up in the corner of my windshield and there was the sticker thanking me for going to the dealer, and that I needed my next service at 25k. Sweet! Free 20k service, or at least free oil change!

When I left the dealership, the service guy said that I'd be getting a survey in the mail and that he knows he'll get dinged on the service snafu, but the only way he passes if I give him "excellent" across the board. Sir, you just saved me 100 bucks. I'd say that's pretty fucking excellent.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 4

After a week of what seemed like complete and total starvation, I emerged from the week with a new weight of 182.5. This represents a loss of either a pound or a pound and a half, depending on which value from the previous week's weigh-in you're going with. I was a little disappointed in the loss, as I had wished for more, but I was a Wii Fit slacker all week, exercising maybe one night. My disappointment quickly faded though when I busted out the measuring tape and found that I now have a 38 inch waist line, something I haven't had in years. It's all very strange how you can go all week, seemingly without losing anything and then a bunch of weight falls off, or how you can be losing weight but your stomach remains the same size until you lose some minuscule amount of weight and it is coupled with a 2 inch drop in the waist size. Methinks there's some inaccurate measuring going on, but still, it all can't be chalked up to incompetence. Then again, this is me, so maybe it can be.

This past week I finished watched Bullitt and Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms which I finished up today. Tomorrow I'm going to start on the stack of horror movies I've had sticking around for some time now but never got around to watching. I have The Host (Korean monster movie), The Cottage (crime horror comedy), The Mist (American monster movie) and The Ruins (American sort of monster movie). Most of them are around 90 minutes, which makes for something I can watch in the space of a week without the weekend dulling my memory. My memory isn't so good to begin with, even when it's not being starved so all bets are off when dieting. I'm lucky I remember to put pants on in the morning. I did put pants on didn't I?

Uh-oh.

Ah. Ahem. Back in a bit.

Hot Shots: Open Tee 2 review

My review for Hot Shots: Open Tee 2 is up. Personally, I think my original is better than the edited version. Oh well, such is life in the big game reviewing city.

Panorama-rama

As promised, here are some panoramic shots of my desk at work. You'll have to forgive the blurriness of some of them as a) it's a cell phone camera, b) the lighting in here is conducive to one and only thing, crushing the souls of men, and c) my hands shake a wee bit, making it somewhat tough to line up the seams in the photos. Enjoy!


So here we have the view from my chair, were I to scoot back a few feet from my desk. Starting on the left we have my Redskins mug, the Hellboy movie poster that everyone keeps knocking down, a picture of palm trees from last year's vacation, my Xerox hat which is resting atop the unseen Dr. Chiaopolis, my Einstein-esque Chia head. After that are a bunch of pictures of the kids, a poster of Pearl Jam at Benaroya Hall, and the beginning of the Transformers collection resting on my PC (those are the Real Gear robots). The desktop image is from Okami, with Legends class Cyberton Transformers below the monitor, flanked by the protoform movie Transformers and with Pikachu in the middle, as he should be. After the monitor is Donatello from a co-worker's kid's Burger King happy meal, some more family pics, my Hellboy Animated statue, my Get Fuzzy calendar, my phone, and the deluxe class movie Transformers. Whew!


More phone goodness. More Transformers, along with my Weighted Companion Cube, half of Lugnut from the animated Transformers show and my lenticular Transformers: The Movie card resting in front of the framed picture of Fido, my trusty T-rex. Don't ask.


Here are all of the deluxe class Transformers (the ten buck ones) with some Legends class movie robots and the aforementioned Lugnut thrown in. Lugnut looks blurry because he's quivering in anticipation of being reunited with his beloved Megatron, not because I'm a shitty photographer. You can also see the corner of my New Yorker Office calendar which is filled with hilarious cartoons from New Yorker magazine about the crushing toil of everyday work. They're a hoot.

Up here are all of the Classics Transformers with some Cybertron ones thrown in as well as Animated Blackarachnia, Ratchet and Grimlock. I have some toy moving to do, so they got shoved in where they'd fit. Long time fans of the site will remember this as the location of the Battle Royale. That diorama is no more as I got tired of it and some of the combatants kept falling down. Bastards.

Finally, up top are all of the big guys. The movie Voyager and Leader class toys. Rescue Ratchet, Incinerator and Evac are in vehicle mode because they're fun to transform and I haven't gotten around to transforming all of the others. Plus, the Leader class toys make a hell of a lot of noise when you transform them, thereby cementing my coworkers' ideas about me not doing a damn thing at work.

So, there you have it. Behold my work lair of geekishness. It may be time to chronicle the Lego stronghold that is my home office as well. I'll have to spend more time with my phone's camera first though, or see if my wife's camera has the same functionality. It'll be damn hard to line up shots based on three inch tall Lego figures. To the research lab!

Enjoy the weekend.

Riddle Redux

Yesterday I found out that the contact lenses I'll need to wear for the rest of my life, or until I get cybernetic eyes will cost $46 a month. Minus the $140 a year I get from the insurance, the answer to the riddle "When is free not really free", works out to "when it's $412 a year". Lovely.

In other news, a shiny new phone from Sprint showed up on my doorstop today, a full day after my original shiny new phone showed up. Either the Sprint shipping department heard of my praise for them and decided to reward me with a new phone, or they're the reason that Sprint is having so many problems. Sending free phones to anyone who asks for one can't be good for the bottom line. I need to give credit to my beautiful bride, Linda for that last joke. She'll be here all week. Try the veal.

After a night of blistering frustration, my phone is humming along nicely. As it turns out, the Java suite, or whatever the hell you want to call it, can't run programs for shit, so Gmail's client, and Opera Mini, the two programs I used the most on my Palm, didn't run at all. Bummer. One new Java suite and one Opera Mobile download later, we're cooking with gas. This phone is damn nice, and I'm already having a good time with it, having lost pretty much my entire day to fracking around with it. It even has a panoramic camera thingy where it'll stitch three photos together. Very nice. Tomorrow I'll take some pictures of my cube at work so that you can see the panoramic mode in action, as well as how many toys I have. Try and sleep tonight, despite the excitement you must be feeling.

Take That Terrorists

In my ever increasing effort to single handedly prop up this great nation's economy, thereby destroying terrorism at the speed of thought at the very same time, I have made a number of purchases this week that I feel the need to share with you.

First up, is my shiny new toy, the HTC Mogul, courtesy of Sprint. I had grown tired of my Palm of late, what with it's sluggish touch screen, no doubt made slow from the various high speed ground collisions I subjected it to, and it's need to leave the phone portion of the device off even though the dulcet start-up tones led me to believe otherwise. I need a full size keyboard for all of my Gmailing on the go, so those fancy touch screen models wouldn't have worked. The notion of dealing with Windows Mobile somewhat scares me, but I think in the end, I'll be happier. The ability to remote into my machine at work while on the go, combined with the ability to turn the phone into a mobile WiFi access point certainly makes the OS wrangling worth it. Plus, it's a damn pretty phone. I hesitate to call it sexy, as I hate that term for describing inanimate objects, or animate objects that aren't actual humans, but it is certainly attractive, for a phone, and if I were a telecommunications device, like a fax machine, or a CB, I'd certainly want to freak it nasty. Linda ordered it for me on Monday and it arrived before Wednesday barely had a chance to get going, so despite the problems that Sprint as a company is dealing with right now, their shipping department is not one of them. Good for you Sprint shipping department, way to knock it out of the park.

Realizing that terrorism wasn't quite dead ye, I continued to spend, spend, spend, striking a blow for democracy everywhere. The fine people at TopatoCo have a brand new t-shirt for preordering, so I did just that. The first, displays the result of when a chicken and a pig love each other, very, very much. Let's just say, that the results are delicious.

The second t-shirt shows the calamitous result of a gorilla meeting up with a great white shark. It ain't pretty. I bought this shirt partially for myself but mostly to inform the general public as to the destructive powers that would be brought to bear on our fine race if the natural cunning of the gorilla were ever teamed up with the ruthless ferocity of the great white shark. Luckily for us, their mutual hatred of each other ensures that they will never join forces and focus their ire on us, but if they do, God help us all.


Finally, I bought a shirt that lays bare the human condition for all to see, namely that at the end of the day, we're all just made of meat. It doesn't matter how pretty you are, or how much money you have, or how many beautiful people you have sex with, you're just a walking pork chop, with little or no defenses at your disposal should a gorilla or a great white shark want to roll you in Shake-and-Bake and serve you with a side of applesauce. As much as I love this shirt, I will refrain from wearing it to the zoo lest I give the tigers any good ideas. The last time I was there, they looked at me in a manner best described as unnerving.

Unfortunately, not all intended purchases were able to be made today as my attempts to procure the season 1 set of Burn Notice was unsuccessful. If you don't watch this show, you should as it's awesome. Michael Westen is super cool and the show moves at a really good clip. Plus, it has Bruce Campbell in it. Bruce Campbell! If you don't want to pony up 35 bucks for the set, at least rent the dang thing so that you're all caught up for when the second season starts in July.

Phew! I'm tired. Securing capitalism's footholds in an uncaring world is a tough job. I should go take a nap and then maybe write some reviews or something so that I can pay for all of this shit.

Riddle Me This

Here's a riddle for you:

When is free not really free?

The answer is a long one, so sit tight. Back in 1999, Linda and I started working for a company that managed to somehow get LASIK as an approved procedure in the vision plan. When I say approved, I mean, no out of pocket cost whatsoever. Nada. Zip. Zero. We both got the corrective surgery done and neither one of us paid one cent.

Fast forward to last year and I noticed that my vision was starting to diminish, especially in my right eye. I got glasses for driving, but mostly, things were ok. Fast forward to the beginning of this year and my vision in my right eye had gotten to the point where I couldn't read street signs. I do all of the legwork and find out that because I had been keeping up with my yearly eye appointments, I'm eligible to have my LASIK touched up free of charge.

So a couple of weeks ago, I go for this mega-dilation that they do so that my optometrist can get a better look at my eye before I go in for the LASIK evaluation and he tells me that my vision has gotten worse since February, which is kind of strange, because it had only been a few months and I had developed astigmatism, which is also odd. He also tells me that my cornea is kind of thin, but is probably thick enough for the surgery.

Today I went for the LASIK evaluation and found out that they can't use LASIK to correct my vision. It would appear that back when they did the original surgery they thinned out the cornea too much causing two problems. One, my cornea is too thin for further surgery, and two, the thinned cornea is bulging out due to the pressure in my eye, hence the astigmatism.

Unfortunately, glasses won't correct the problem due to the fact that the lenses are farther from my eyes and my brain won't be able to put 2 and 2 together and I'll feel like my head is going to explode. That leaves contact lenses, which I wore in high school, and hated. If things continue to get worse, I'll have to switch to a hard lens, in the hope that it will keep the cornea's shape. If that doesn't work, then I'll need a corneal transplant.

Granted, that last one is probably not going to be needed, but at the same time, I woke up this morning hoping to be able to get my vision touched up and instead found out that I'll need to wear contact lenses for the rest of my life. Not exactly what I was hoping for, especially when you consider that prior to getting the LASIK, I wore glasses which are pretty much the easiest thing in the world to deal with.

Oh well. At least I'm still alive, and my vision can be corrected so if all I have to deal with is putting in contact lenses, then I guess I got off fairly easy. Tomorrow I go in to get fitted for the fucking things. I can't wait!

Oh, and Stan Winston died, so it's been a pretty big crap storm of a day. Here's hoping tomorrow is better and I don't find out that my physical therapy caused my knee to fall off.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 3

This week saw the largest weight movement thus far with a weigh in of 183.5 lbs, for a loss of 3 lbs and one inch off of ye olde waistline. Woo-hoo! The waistline measurement isn't exact as sadly, my gut is bigger than what the fabric measuring tape we have can measure. It seems like an inch, so let's just go with that.

This past weekend I did pretty well with the eating. My Father's Day choice was to get ribs from my favorite rib shack, and seeing how we did Father's Day on Saturday, I had a chance on Sunday to eat more normally, thereby making sure that I don't spend the first half of this week working off all the food I ate over the weekend. The diet is still going well, although my sister is in town this week, and today was her birthday so I ate more than usual. I still did better than I normally do in these situations, so there's that.

Last week, I finished the Doctor Strange animated movie and then finished the week off with Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron. The Doctor Strange movie was OK. There was a lot of build up and very sedate final battle. Blood and Iron, on the other hand, kicked ass. The last time I watched this movie it was when Cartoon Network originally broadcast it and they managed to take a 75 minute movie and stretch it into two hours. In doing so, they completely shattered any narrative flow that the movie had going on. Watching it without commercials was so much better. Since then I've taken a break from the animation an am now watching Bullitt. Steve McQueen is so fucking cool that I can barely stand it. Jacqueline Bisset is pretty easy on the eyes too.

Hopefully my progress will continue on this week and soon I'll be at my goal. Then I can go back to eating like a slob. Whee!

Happy Friday

Yay, it's Friday, happiest of days!

Or is it?

For some reason, yesterday I got to thinking about how glad I was that I was just one day away from Friday, when it would be the weekend and I could get down with my bad self, hang with the family and generally get away from work. Then, for some reason, I thought of the people for which Friday represented the end of something wonderful and not the end of a week spent in drudgery and toil.

It's summer time now, which means summer vacations and exotic trips and times spent at camp. Right now there are people who are having the best week of their lives, as they spend their time frolicking on exotic beaches and eating fantastic dishes paired with refreshing drinks. These people have never been so relaxed and free as they did this past week.

Or there's a woman who went on a trip, not meaning to do anything but spend time with herself and she happened to meet someone, someone who stirs in her feelings she never knew she had. She lives away, far away from this someone, far enough to make it unreasonable to have more time with this person exist outside of this bubble of paradise she has managed to find herself in.

Or there's a boy who went to camp, not wanting to at all, lonely and depressed when he arrived, because he couldn't compete with at the athletic events, nor did he really want to. He planned on a week of misery until he saw her, and her shy smile told him that she felt the same way about her surroundings as he did. When they finally kissed, each sharing their first with each other, under the late week evening's swollen moon, he hoped that he would remember this moment for all of his life, how her lips were so soft and how her hair smelled like strawberries.

For these people, Friday represents and ending to something they will never get back, never be able to extend, never be able to recapture. The very fact that their experiences were finite, and that they knew of this limitation, even when they desperately tried to forget about it, made their weeks so much sweeter yet makes today so much more painful.

We'll always have the pictures, they'll think. There will be other vacations! We'll go on one every year! And they will, but no matter how good a time they'll have, it will never be as good as this time, and it will sit there, in their hearts, gnawing away at their good times.

We can write, we can call! We'll see each other! But they won't. Geography and time and lives and the real world get in the way to when you can't remember exactly what it was about the other person that got you so excited. If you do meet, you'll desperately hope to recapture what you felt during that blissful week, but it is lost, gone into the ether.

We can call, our parents will take us to visit each other! But they won't. They don't remember what it's like to be 13, when everything seemed to be life or death, when love was uncluttered with adult responsibilities and diminished by the passing of time and the eventual familiarity of decades with the same person.

To these people, I say hold on to this week. Hold it in your heart and guard it and keep it precious. You may never relive it, or return to it, but you can never lose it. It will stay with you even when the details are somewhat fuzzy and you can't remember which place you went on what day, or the exact color of his eyes, or where she said she went to school. At that point, it will have become something else to you, possibly even bested by some greater event you experience, but it will be no less comforting, no less wondrous, no less stirring.

To the rest of you, I say, Happy Friday. Drinks are on me. This is some depressing shit.

Lego Indiana Jones DS review

After a short, though fun romp through the Lego Indiana Jones universe, my review is up.

Enjoy!

About Fucking Time

The Supreme Court ruled today that detainees in Guantánamo Bay can challenge their charges in civilian courts. Basically we've given them the right of habeas corpus, which they should have had from the beginning as they're being held in an institution controlled by the US government.

I'm sure that this doesn't feel like a big deal, and I'm sure that our shitty ass media won't talk much about it, but this is a huge deal. Basically, the Supreme Court told the present administration that you can't just suspend basic constitutional rights simply because times are tough. In fact, the Constitution is designed to weather tough times as the opinion so eloquently states:

The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system, they are reconciled within the framework of law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, part of that law.

Habeas corpus is so important, and was so important to the framers that it is included in the Constitution. In other words, they didn't need to sit around and think about whether or not the government should be able to imprison you for no reason. They knew that the government should not be able to right from the start.

Make no mistake, the part of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that this ruling strikes down is exactly that, the government imprisoning people for no reason. This might seem all well and good when it's some dude from thousands of miles away taken in the dead of night and imprisoned with no knowledge of the charges against him, but what if it's you? What if your kid starts hanging out on message boards online with no real understanding of what they're espousing and gets flagged as a possible enemy combatant? There is no piece of legislation that says that "enemy combatants" can't be US citizens. There was nothing in the law struck down today saying that the government couldn't come into your house, seize you, an American citizen, and deny you the most basic of Constitutional rights that this country was built on. I'm not so naive as to think that every detainee in Guantánamo Bay is completely innocent of the charges brought against them, however suspicion of guilt is not enough to deny them a fair trial, even if they are guilty of crimes against US citizens. We, as Americans, are better than that. We have to be. The underlying principals that our country was founded upon demand that we be better than that. If these detainees are guilty, then let them have their trials so that we can have justice. If not, then for Christ's sake, let these people go. It's been seven years since the detention center opened.

One more thing to consider before I get off of my soapbox. Three of the Justices who sided with the majority, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter are all expected to retire during the term of the next president. Obama has stated that he favors Justices in the mold of Souter and Ginsburg whereas McCain favors the kind of Justices in the minority, Sam Alito and John Roberts specifically, none of whom are expected to go anywhere any time soon. This statement only serves to emphasize just how important this next Presidential election is, and how the decisions made during the next Presidency will have effects that will last for decades. Supreme Court appointments are life long appointments. It doesn't take a master detective to determine who I'll be voting for in the fall, but if you think that you don't need to vote because it's all meaningless, I can assure you that it is not.