It seems like half the people on my friendslist are having a rough time in one way or another (am I bad luck?) so I feel kinda bad just being all WOO VIDEO GAMES but...woo, video games!

( Fallout 3 )

( Video Games Live )

We went to the polling place at 6am to find a line already out the door (although admittedly it was a small building). Inside was kind of ridiculous - stand in one of three lines to pick up your registration thingie and then stand in one big line to get your actual ballot (there was also an option to use the lone electronic voting machine, but it didn't look like there were a lot of takers) with lots of lines snaking around and crowding that would surely be looked upon unfavorably by fire marshals and the like. And we're not exactly a swing state.

Anyway, it took about 40 minutes, and aside from the people behind me complaining about not getting their stickers in a timely enough fashion, it was generally headache-free. So I voted, yay me! Unfortunately, it turns out I was mistaken in hearing that John McClane had won the GOP nomination (I thought "Live Free or Die Hard" was a pretty good campaign slogan!), so I had to vote for one of the other guys.

(Not appearing on the Illinois ballot: HRM Caesar St Augustine De Buonaparte, Emperor)

Further down the ballot, I was generally kind to moderate incumbents and unforgiving toward people who have been bothering me with junk mail attack ads and robocalls.

After days of waiting patiently I finally got to see Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The reviews of the movie have...not been kind.

So...yeah, it wasn't perfect. The animation was a little stiff, the character models make everybody look like freaky puppets (not that that's really hurt...oh, pretty much every CGI movie ever...) and the main plot -- the Jedi and Clone forces trying to retrieve Jabba the Hutt's baby before the Separatists do -- isn't terribly epic and sort of betrays the movie's origin as a pilot for the upcoming TV show. (Also, for a powerful gangster, Jabba is either incredibly gullible or has no short-term memory.)

But y'know, it's fun. Anakin's angst is understated and kept to a minimum, there's cool lightsaber battles and laser fights, a good portion of the humor actually works, the characterization is such that even the clone captain gets a token personality, and, holy cow, they managed to introduce a "kid" character who's not terribly annoying and is in fact actually useful. I'm not really sure what more people want out of a Star Wars movie. If you're still bitter about Episodes 1-3, thinking they're some kind of personal affront to you, it's probably not going to convert you, but there are far worse ways to spend less than two hours at your local multiplex.

Another fun thing that doesn't seem to be getting stellar reviews: Too Human. The Diablo comparisons are pretty apt, and while it doesn't quite replicate the fun of that game, it's a pretty serviceable substitute. (I should note that I'm only about an hour into the game, so maybe it gets bad later.) The people who complain about things like "melee combat is imprecise" are, IMHO, kind of missing the point. It's not about being able to carefully execute targeted attacks; it's about going into a frenzy and knocking bits of robot goblins all over the place and looking cool while doing so.

(Incidentally, the Valkyrie animation you get when you die, while annoyingly repetitive, is not as long as everyone says. I doubt it's 30 seconds and I know it's not 1-2 minutes as I've heard somewhere. If it were a loading screen, most people probably wouldn't notice.)

Anyway, Too Human should hold me over nicely until The Force Unleashed comes out. (Played the demo - three times already. Very cool.)

I got a free World of Warcraft disc in the mail the other day. Apparently, WoW is the new AOL. Tried it before, wasn't my thing. I'm currently downloading the Too Human demo to see if that game scratches the old "kill lots of monsters to gain increasingly better gear" itch.

Anyway, we went on a cruise to Alaska the week before last. It was very awesome! We saw whales and sled dogs and mountain goats but no bears, sadly. It's very weird living your life in suburbia and then going on a trip where you are told more than once what to do if you happen to come upon a bear. (Stay together with your group so as to appear larger and less vulnerable, do not approach the bear, and -- this is from the folks at Mendenhall Glacier -- give the bear the right of way.)

Anyway, pics are up here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/spheley

So I got Grand Theft Auto IV, kind of on a whim (gift cards will do that to ya). It's decent as such things go so far (I'm partway through the second of five chapters) but I would really like to play the version of the game that all the reviewers got, because I'm somewhat convinced I'm not playing the same thing.

( Read more... )

I don't have much to say today but I felt like posting today, if for no other reason than to make sure nobody mistook me for some crazy dramatic boycotting type person. "Oh NOES, Livejournal doesn't want to subsidize my IMPORTANT Harry Potter/ROM slashfic community!"

Also, incidentally, I'm on that Facebook thing now, if you want to find and "friend" me or whatnot.

Passing of Gary Gygax Reaction Table:

01-15	I feel very... [rolls dice] ... saddened by this news.
16-30	The announcement took me by surprise...so it gets an extra attack and my dexterity bonus doesn't count.
31-45	I disbelieve!
46-60	Let's all observe a moment of Silence, 15' Radius.
61-75	What, NOBODY had the right cure spell memorized?
76-85	I hear that his will stipulates that he leaves behind Treasure Type M, to be guarded by a gelatinous cube and a chessboard-themed trap...
86-99	...and that he's only going to need one pallbearer, because nobody pays attention to the encumbrance rules.
00	Let's go beat this "natural causes" thing. It's gotta be worth a ton of XP by now.

Rest in peace, sir! Thanks for the memories!
- Ayaan/Liam/Killian/Davyn/Razhio

We just got back from Distant Worlds, the orchestral performance of selected music from the Final Fantasy games. I hadn't realized until looking at that Wikipedia link that this was the only US stop after the tour's beginning in Stockholm a few months back, so I guess we're lucky that we live here!

Anyway, it was pretty cool, especially if you're like Dana and you remember tons of stuff from all the games. Me, I can basically remember three songs (and they played two of them!) and I still had quite a good time. They've got screens above the stage showing clips from the games and such -- mostly cut scenes, clips from Advent Children, that kind of thing, but there was some pretty amusing 8- and 16-bit stuff as well. My one complaint was that the video for the two multi-game montages (one for games 1-3, one for the whole series) used some of the same footage as the individual songs, but oh well.

The ultimate message of The Nightmare Before Christmas is this: Even if your whole life centers around waiting all year for the one night you get to participate in a musical number by singing two lines introducing yourself to nobody in particular, by no means should you try to break out of the routine or change things in any way, because if you do, you'll just mess it up horribly.

No wonder the emo kids like it so much.

There's this bit in Four Weddings and a Funeral where the old Scots guy declares that people get married becase they've run out of things to talk about. I suppose, had the movie come out in more recent years, he might have opined it was because they'd run out of things to post to LiveJournal about.

So yeah, my wild hedonistic bachelor days are officially over. The ceremony and reception seemed to go by very fast, much as I'd been told they would. I wish I'd had a bit more time to spend with some family & friends, but I was happy to see them as much as I did nonetheless.

For the honeymoon, as you may know, we did a road trip involving a handful of Civil War sites, capped off by a couple of days in Niagara Falls.

( Road trip summary, and bits of wisdom acquired on the way )

Borrowed from slyon and other assorted people:

( Career meme thingie )

Okay, so I've got a few songs I want to burn to a CD. A few of them are bought from the iTunes store, so that means I'm pretty much stuck with using iTunes to burn them.

I'd like to insert some extra space between the third and fourth tracks. iTunes prefs have a setting that lets me add a few seconds between every track, but it's not really what I need. Does anybody know an easy way to get, say, 30 seconds of dead air between tracks?

Or, failing that, anybody got a program that can make me a 30-second silent mp3?

Fortune cookie fortune, taped to the cash register at Panda Express:
"Fortune not found. Abort, Retry, Fail?"

Bumper sticker at Best Buy:
"My gamer fragged your honor student"

I was a little less than a month away from being born when the original Star Wars premiered. I'm not sure if my parents went to see it or not -- I would guess they didn't, but it was the seventies and who knows what kind of crazy stuff was going on -- but I can only imagine that my in utero exposure to SW-mania had some kind of lasting effect on me.

( Nerdstalgia ahead! )

Batman Sighting Puts Schools on Lockdown
[via]

It seems likely that I'll want to get a next-gen video game console at some point. I mean, I'm a card-carrying nerd, it's inevitable.

The PS3 is ridiculously expensive, so that's right out.

The Xbox 360 is nice. It's got some good games, and some interesting stuff via the Marketplace. And I yearn to play HALO, just because. But I don't know if I'm really into online play (it's fun with friends, less so with strangers) and that whole business with Dead Rising having unreadable text on standard-definition TVs left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't have an HDTV set, and I don't plan to have one unless my current TV breaks at a time when the price of a high-def set is way down. I'm also not crazy about the seemingly increasing reliance on micropayments, particularly to unlock content that's already on the disc.

Which leaves the Wii, which has several things in its favor, mostly the price and the cool control scheme that emphasizes new kinds of game play and yadda yadda. I hear Wii Sports and Zelda are addictively fun. But I'm just not sure I want to put all my eggs in that basket. I mean, that Nunchuck looks like a horrible kludge to me, and you know, I'm just fairly certain that SSX is not meant to involve drawing hearts on the screen. I fear that only Nintendo and a couple other companies will really get the hang out of developing for the Wiimote, and everybody else will just try to tack the control scheme onto games that aren't designed for it.

I dunno. Maybe I should just see how much life I can still suck out of my PS2 and my DS and convince myself I'm old-school.

Anybody bought any of this stuff yet? Any thoughts/advice?

Happy New Year, peeps! Currently it is the no-year's-land between midnight Eastern (when the ball drops) and midnight Central (when all the clocks in my apartment decide it's 2007). We opted to observe the occasion at midnight Eastern for whatever reason.

How did I do on my resolutions for 2006? Let's see...

I want to lose another...oh, let's say fifty pounds. A bit optimistic, I guess, but I still have a net weight loss for the year (I'm probably about 30 pounds down from my all-time high) and though I kind of let things go for the last month or two, I expect/hope to get back on track to be at a nice healthy weight (whatever that might be) by the fall.

Invest some money, including keeping a better eye on my 401(k) funds. I did keep better watch over the 401(k), but I haven't done a whole lot else on this front. 2007 will probably be a bit better in this area.

Find an interesting hobby or something. This year I was introduced to the wonders of archery. High on my to-do list is to buy a nice starter bow and get some practice in, perhaps joining the local club.

Maybe set a wedding date. 9/22/07 is the date. Yeah, we can now say we're getting married this year. Anyway, as they say, "a small family wedding is planned". (Although it's not entirely "family" and not at all "planned" right now, but it's definitely small. And a wedding.)

Hey, that wasn't too bad. I don't think I'm going to come up with as many for 2007, I'm just gonna make weight loss my big priority (well, that, and planning this wedding thing) for the time being. Go me!

It doesn't look as blue in this picture as in real life, but here's my new Saturn VUE!

( Pic below the cut )