What's the video game equivalent of sommelier?

Mr Piggs asks, "What game should I get next for my Playstation 2?"

That's a good question. I've not been buying as many games as I used to lately. It boils down to a couple of reasons:

1. I rent a lot of things from GameFly, decide they're not worth keeping, and send them back.
2. There aren't a lot of games coming out right now, every company having blown their wad in November in a stupid attempt to compete for your holiday dollar.

Games I recommend:
If you don't have Katamari Damacy yet, I'd say to get that one. It's a fantastic game on many levels, with a great soundtrack you'll find yourself humming, and gameplay that is not just the glorified tag that most FPS games end up being.

If that's not your style, I'm really into LEGO Star Wars, even though I vowed that Lucas was never getting any more of my money. I am more content to give LEGO funds, since this game really demonstrates how much fun minifigs are to play with. It also does a better job of explaining the last three movies than Lucas could in nine hours, because there is no talking and no cute robot jokes. Instead, you have the ability to chop Jar-Jar up with a light saber. I know I am repeating myself from the last time I talked about this game, but that is important, people!

I hear good things about Brothers in Arms: The Road to Hill 30, but I am wondering just when the WW II FPS genre is going to be oversaturated. This is like the thousandth game like this to come out in the last few years. At this point, the great-grandchildren of those who fought in this conflict have seen more of the war than the people who fought it. Kinda like MASH, come to think of it.

The PS2 release of Psychonauts has been pushed back to July 7, which annoys me. I really want to play this game. It's by the same guy who did the Monkey Island series and Grim Fandango, and everything I've seen so far about it has been stunning. The writing is good, I like the graphics (though I'm a little nervous to see how they'll play on the PS2 instead of the X-Box), and the lead voice actor is the same guy who did Invader ZIM.

Going back a ways, if you haven't played the Ratchet and Clank series, I'd urge giving those a try. The second and third games are stellar, with good writing, fun level design, and a cathartic gameplay of just blowing the hell out of everything. I imagine Mercenaries from LucasArts is sort of the same thing, but I have not tried it yet. (I think it might be on my queue, but my queue is pretty long at this point.)

Games I do not recommend:

Even though it got a lot of good reviews, Burnout 3: Takedown made my head hurt. Take a mediocre racing game, and add all the joys of vehicular homicide to it. I don't really want to be a crash test dummy, so having that as encouraged behavior just didn't do much for me.

At first I thought Spider-Man 2 was not bad, but the more I played it, the more repetitive and annoying it became. It wants to be GTA only with Spidey in it, but only offers a handful of things to do. Once you've stopped one armored car robbery, you've stopped them all.

There many other games to avoid. Anything with the words "Megaman" or "Dragonball" or "Barbie" or "Extreme" in it, for example.

In other news, the guy who was Deep Throat appears to have uncovered himself, and it was not Hal Holbrook after all!

The absence of war

One of my earliest memories of Memorial Day is standing at the VFW hall in Delhi, Iowa, watching a pair of trumpet players play "Taps"—one echoing the other note for note after a delay. There's something about hearing that song in front of a color guard that gets me every time.

The broadcast networks take this time of year to play every war movie ever made, which given the output of Hollywood in the 40s and 50s, is quite a lot. Currently playing Patton, which is astounding on many levels. Not the least of which was the Dimension 150 process used to film it. (A bit like Cinerama or Super-Panavision, this was intended to beat TV by being wider than everything else. 150 degrees of vision across the screen goes a long way, but because nobody wanted to tell a story in this manner, there were only two D-150 films ever made.) It's a big story. It's got an intermission, something we don't have the attention to deal with these days.

Patton was a complex man, something George C. Scott makes clear with his nuanced performance. His portrayal of the general is of a dedicated believer in war as human endeavor, the kind of guy you want on your side in a fight but somebody you'd back away slowly from if you met him on the street. It's one hell of a performance and one that deserved the Oscar, if there ever was one. (It's also quite telling that Scott refused the award, saying that such contests were "meat markets.")

Patton is also eminently quotable. To wit:

Soldier: Where you goin', General?
Patton: BERLIN! I'm going to personally shoot that paper-hangin' sonofabitch!

I spent today hiking around the woods of Oregon, thinking of the hedgerows of France in WW II and the towns of Iraq right now. There's a moment in the film where they speak of Patton and peace, saying "the absence of war will destroy him." There hasn't been a year in the last century without an armed conflict of some sort, but it would be worthwhile to strive for. (Other things worth striving for include Scarlett Johansson.)

I can never have nice things

David Hahn makes my day with news of the Bite Club sequel. New characters, revamped(!) old ones, a vaguely Gotham Central direction with the Vampire Crimes Unit. Maybe if we're lucky, there will be some werewolves.

Currently watching Antiques Roadshow, which mostly reminds me that I can never have nice things. They just had three jugs that were bought at acutions for a total of about $31, with an estimated value of $50,000 or so.

We have three cats, one of whom delights in checking the continuing function of gravity by knocking things off the mantle. He's also fond of attempting to make sonic booms by running around the house at top speeds. Perhaps if our house were bigger, we could find some secluded place that would be feline-proof. On the other hand, cats are clever and cannot be bargained or reasoned with.

It's been a much more mellow day than I'd originally planned—I'd been thinking of playing a pickup game for my local kickball league—but instead I we stayed at home to clean. On the other hand, I've been looking outward though Google Sightseeing. I've been amused by Google Maps for quite a while, but other people have found some very interesting things. Including some unexplained stuff, and rare stuff like an SR-71 Blackbird parked outside.

A shining beacon in space, all alone in the night

Somewhere out there, there's a secret admirer unknown to me that wants to buy this for me.

(The Book of G'Kar used as an on-screen prop by Andreas Katsulas on Babylon 5? Holy shit. As of this writing it's going for more than $10,000 and it still hasn't hit the reserves.)

A very special thanks to Tegan for the heads-up on this!

I'm actually a little surprised that I don't own all of the Babylon 5 DVDs by now. I was a huge fan of the show. Not so much that I wanted my own prop PPG or whatever, but it was important enough to me that even now, years after the show has ended, there's a full storyline in the back of my head. Part of my brain thinks it knows where seasons 6 through 10 would have gone, even though it was only ever going to be a 5-year series at best.

There are some mis-steps in the show, of course—the last season has all the marks of an over-stretched writer struggling to fill holes without any help or editorial assistance. And they sort of blew their wad by filming season 4 as if it were the last season, so they'd painted themselves into a corner. Perhaps in retrospect, they should have just had a note for season 5:

The entire run this season takes place just before the events in the last five episodes of season 4. We apologize for the inconvenience.

It worked for Sledgehammer! when they ended up nuking L.A. after the first season. (They even had Robin Leach make the annoucement.)

Yeah, my brain could remember how math works, but instead I remember plot points from shows decades ago. It must have some survival value; just what I have yet to determine.

Desk accessories I can live with

Forget those little magnetized bits of metal or the executive toys with steel spheres.

What I really want is a desktop trebuchet. This is just the thing I need for a LART.

Somehow our weather has returned to normal this week—it was stuck on "March" for about three months so I am confused by the bright thing in the sky.

(Thanks to Amanda for the tip. And yes, we evidently have to be told the bright thing in the sky causes tanning...)

Debating what to do with my weekend, but I think that a trip to see the Hitchhiker's film may be in order. I'd rather see that than Revenge of the Sith. I'm still recovering from the overwhelming awfulness that was Attack of the Clones. I saw the thing on broadcast TV and I still want my money back, other than the scenes with Jango Fett.

(And really, I'm a little disappointed there wasn't a Wedge Antilles shout-out somewhere in the prequel trilogy. Wedge, people. WEDGE! But my fanboy is showing, so I'll stop.)

I'll never get anywhere with these games!

I watch a lot of X-Play, and one of the recurring commercials on G4/TechTV (I still think of it as Tech TV, since all of the shows that originated with G4 suck out loud) is something for a degree in game design from Westwood Online.

The ad goes something like this:

Two slacker dudes pretend to play video games really hard by mashing the hell out of the buttons on some Dual Shock controllers. One has scruffy hair and a maroon shirt, the other is mysteriously dressed in a bright pink shirt with Mike-Brady-esque permed hair. At any minute, this commercial could turn into porn.

VOICE-OVER FROM WOMAN, THAT SOUNDS SLIGHTLY OFF:

ARE YOU GUYS FINISHED WITH THAT GAME?

The slackers look up. One says his lines like it's take 42 and he's finally got it drummed into his head.

MAROON-SHIRTED SLACKER:

SURE, WE JUST FINISHED LEVEL THREE AND WE HAVE TO TIGHTEN UP SOME OF THE GRAPHICS.

Cut to: Blue-shirted woman with her hair in a jaunty ponytail. She's clearly the manager. Note that the production values on this are such that she's sounds slightly different now, as if the ADR wasn't quite the same person in the voiceover.

MANAGER-TYPE WOMAN:

GOOD, BECAUSE I HAVE SOME MORE GAMES THAT NEED DESIGNED.

The manager lady leaves. Cut back to slackers, still looking like porn could happen at any moment, particularly with the Brady hair.

BRADY-HAIRED SLACKER:

I CAN'T BELIEVE WE'RE *GAME DESIGNERS!*

MAROON-SHIRTED SLACKER:

YEAH!

BRADY-HAIRED SLACKER:

AND MY MOM SAID I'D NEVER GET ANYWHERE WITH THESE GAMES!

Cut to voiceover about earning your degree in game design from some shady online school that offers degrees in E-Business Management and Fashion Design blah blah blah void in Texas and Massachusetts don't read the fine print.

There are so many issues with this I'm not sure where to begin.

First of all, game design not all fun and button-mashing, not by a long shot. For the most part, it's boring, tedious work spending hours managing bits of ones and zeroes. There are endless meetings with clients and client bosses and your bosses. And then there are long hours in front of a hot compiler or Wacom tablet, trying to figure out where the stutter in one animation is happening.

Secondly, games cost shitloads of money to make. You can't really make a game in your basement and sell it to a publisher any more, unless you're prepared to subsidize your income with plasma donations or lots and lots of credit cards. Snagging some cheap degree from an online school isn't going to convince the people in charge of millions of dollars to hire you, not even when your hair is feathered like the wings of a majestic eagle.

And third, low-budget porn production values don't really convince me that you're representing a degree of higher learning. If I didn't know any better, I'd suspect the numerous high-tech gaming ads on G4 were pandering to people who think that game programming is just like winning a boss fight.

Still, it's not as annoying as the Leptoprin ads. (When is a diet pill worth $153? When WE SAY PLACEBOS ARE WORTH $153, BITCHES! YOU THINK GLUCOSE GROWS ON TREES? THAT SHIT IS EXPENSIVE!)

On the other hand, this ad for Red Stripe that I saw during Cheap Seats today may be my new favorite ad.

It's beer! Hooray! Beer!

Now those are words to live by.

Looks kinda rough--fetch me the Three Sword

I've been unhappy with the performance of our laptop lately, so I've spent part of the evening re-installing OS X. It appears to be a bit more responsive, so I am guessing there is a Aqua half-life the way there's a Windows half-life.

One of the things I'm enjoying the most of lately is the GBA game The Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap. (D'minish Cap! GET IT! It makes you smaller! HAHAHAH. Ahem.)

This was made by both Nintendo and Capcom, which is a little weird to me as I associate Capcom more with Resident Evil than anything else. Granted, they also made one of the best puzzle games ever—Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo—but for the most part they're all about the gore and the shooting and the beheadings and whatnot.

The Minish Cap isn't really like that. It follows the Zelda formula to some extent, which goes a little something like this.

1. The Royal Family of Hyrule names their daughter Zelda.
2. Something horribly bad happens to her.
3. A shadowy figure is up to no good.
4. It's up to a young lad named Link (or whatever) to find a bunch of tools and weapons in order to save the princess.
5. Triangles are serious, triangles are important (usually).
6. One of the most useful things in the entire world is a bottle, and there are only four of them in the known universe.

People are oohing and ah-ing over the new "serious" Link announced at E3, but I will take the super-cute Minish Cap Link over him any day of the week. My reasoning is simple: one of the tools you get in Minish Cap is the Mole Mitts.

I'll say that again. Mole Mitts. They let you dig through rocks and... um... rocks. But it advances the plot, and the caption in the manual showing a young, golden-locked Link digging maniacally through the ground makes me giggle with delight. Mole Mitts rock.

Other aspects of the game that are cute like Squee the kitten include the little Picori you have to befriend, the fact that you have to wake up your hat before putting it on, and the way the most fearsome beast in the game is a ravenous pack of baby chickens. The big game mechanic is that you can become quite tiny—Capcom does a fantastic job of making the mundane appear monstrous at a reduced size. Raindrops are lethal and tall grass is an impassable barrier.

If you've ever played Ocarina of Time, imagine how you felt when you had to fly using a Cucco, only stretched out over many hours and in portable GBA format. It's that much fun.

I was thinking the other day that Nintendo has wrung all the life out of most of their franchises. Pokemon, Mario, Donkey Kong. All of them have toys, games, cards, breakfast cereals, statues, plushies, etc. The Zelda games have escaped that, perhaps as fallout from the ill-fated CD-i titles, the less said about, the better.

On a more serious note, it appears the nuclear option in the Senate has been disarmed for the moment. I'm not thrilled by this compromise, but I am also glad that the rules are retained with nothing but a promise. In the winners and losers tonight, it appears that Bill Frist can probably kiss his presidential aspirations goodbye. This is all warm-up to the next Supreme Court justice, and we still retain that hole card. Reid and the Democrats walked away with the best of a bad hand. Frist and Bush, they blinked.

Fun with Illustrator

Yeah, I'm thinking of dropping this. Why do you ask? Maybe it's Gwen Stacy's nose in this image. (I didn't touch that, I swear.)

9 1/2 weeks plus another 42 1/2 weeks

Somehow with all the shenanigans in my regular life, I missed the year anniversary of blogging. My first post wasn't terribly promising, but I think I've improved as time has marched on...

Sorry I don't have much else to say today—played a pickip game of kickball today, was rained on, got filthy from the rain, etc. So I'm waiting for the painkillers to kick in while I mess about with Flickr. All I really wanted was a good way to show you the best panel from Essential Fantastic Four, but that will wait a while.

After a year of blogging, I have my favorite posts, some stuff I'd rather forget, the same as every other endeavor, really. So I'll open the floor to questions, if anyone has any. Here's hoping this medication which some know as Drop Top Amber Ale will kick in at some point.

Yuletide in May

It's E3 this week, and all the big announcements are happening.

Another clash of the titans, with the PS3 and Revolution squaring up against the X-Box 360.

The X-Box has never really appealed to me all that much, not being a huge fan of Microsoft in any forms. (I wrote my first novel in Word, mostly for the word count feature. I really should have used BBEdit, though.) There are only a few games on that platform I have any interest in—KOTOR and maybe Halo, but I am still bitter about that game after the whole Bungie-announcing-at-MacWorld-then-moving-to-X-Box-exclusive thing. (It's only been six years. Why do you ask?)

Kevin and I are already interested in WarHawk and the new Killzone. I also want to see the new Animal Crossing DS.

One thing I do not want to see anymore is booth babes. Isn't the industry old enough by now to not need a bunch of Hooters waitresses earning some extra cash by pandering to nerds? Then again, that's how some careers are made. (Greg Horn art books, for example...)

Star Wars: Episode III comes out this week. I swore that Lucas had no need of my money after the dreck that was Episode I. And so far, the only exceptions to this role have been video games. I still haven't seen Episode II. I might not, having played through an abbreviated form in LEGO Star Wars. No shit acting and dialogue, there.

It's not all sunshine, though. Frist thinks he can push through the nuclear option. We're still bombing the fuck out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and all of a sudden the worst thing in America is a Newsweek article. And my work situation is FUBAR, same as it ever was.

I wonder if the liquor store is still open. I am craving a bottle of Hendrick's gin.

Rolling Thunder

Somebody at Nickelodeon must be reading my secret thoughts. (If so, I wonder if they liked the dream where I had a daughter who wore the Buster-inspired togs over at Beaucoup Kevin's...)

Season one of The Adventures of Pete and Pete is out soon. I watched this show a lot during college. It had a ton of people in it you'd never expect—Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Michael Stipe as the world's scariest ice cream man, etc. Some of the cast has gone on to better things (the elder Pete co-starred with the freaking PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES in one of the funniest short films involving a sitting President), some of them have mostly disappeared. But now it's endless summer and younger Pete must find out who's calling the phone that won't stop ringing.

Kos and the gang mention more about the Newsweek "retraction" than I ever could. Suffice it to say that the White House, of all people, should not be lecturing ANYBODY about intelligence sources since the main guy they listened to before rushing to war was a crazy motherfucker named Curveball. Funny how it's OK to lie about WMD and kill thousands of people, but don't you dare mention a story that's been in the press for months.

Tell me where I can find this... Hermano

Arrested Development has been renewed for a third season.

Evidently I'm not the only one who's relieved. From a story off TV Tome...

Arrested Development has won USA Today's annual "Save Our Shows" poll. A whopping 66% of the 54.000 votes received want to keep the show, with only 12% voting for cancellation.

This has been a shitty month for me, but this makes up for it.

Arrested Development is one of my three favorite shows, along with the Venture Brothers and Battlestar Galactica. If you'd told me a year ago that not only would there be another season of the best cartoon in years, but a show involving Opie and one of the kids from Valerie's Family AND that the best SF show on TV is a 70s remake... well, I'd have probably backed away slowly.

Still, this makes up for other shows getting cancelled by Fox in their prime, like Firefly or the Tick (either version).

On the comics front, I've been reading a lot of Morrison's Seven Soldiers. It's a nice contrast to the tailspin that Ultimate Spider-Man and others are in. Because, you know, it doesn't suck. Reading Zatanna, I imagine Morrison thumbing through a copy of Promethea and saying, "No, Alan, it goes LIKE THIS."

I hope it's not too much to ask for a cameo from Danny the Street, since obviously Flex Mentallo will never see the light of day again.

Never throw the letter Q into a privet bush

One of my favorite books in the past few years was Stefan Fatsis's book Word Freak. I learned a lot reading it, mostly that the people playing tournament Scrabble are playing a whole different game than the one I dabble in every once in a while. Their game is one of letter frequency and word memorization, combined with rack management and board positioning. Most of them have spent years memorizing obscure words that mostly just appear in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.

Many of the same people from the book show up in the film Word Wars, which is more narrow in focus but does have a theme song about Scrabble written by one of the stars... Word Wars features just four players, with some cameos by familiar faces. It also claims a Scrabble ranking of 1900, which I think is probably pretty bad. Witness the daily routines of serious players, watch them play innumerable games for fun and profit, watch the hustlers in Washington Park talk about a Scrabble circuit.

Other watching for this weekend included the first four episodes of Samurai Champloo, which is by a lot of the same people that gave us the stellar Cowboy Bebop. Two samurai and a teahouse waitress wander around ancient Japan, trying not to kill each other while looking for the "samurai who smells of sunflowers." The soundtrack isn't Yoko Kanno's brilliant jazz from Bebop, but the hip-hop stylings of Minmi and others are pretty funky. It meshes a lot better than it sounds at first. The first episode in particular is worth seeking out—complex, funny, and almost as much blood as Beat Takeshi's remake of Zatoichi. (Which reminds me, I must find a recording of the ending from that film.)

Hopefully this next week will not be as... eventful as last week was.

Clobberin' time

Marvel's publishing house takes a small break from publishing yet another sneak peak of House of M or another gosh-being-Peter-Parker-is-hard-laden-why-am-I-doing-this-lather-rinse-repeat issue of Ultimate Spider-Man to bring back something that should have never gone out of print.


Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 1 is back on the shelf. Hopefully it won't get to the point where copies on eBay go for $70 or whatever. I also snagged the first Gotham Central trade, which I am really looking forward to. I hear good things, but I have been so wiped from this bizarre week that I barely know what day it is. I believe it may be Friday. Yes, yes, it is.

The last episode of Doctor Who that I've seen had something I'd never contemplated: an existential Dalek. (Come to think of it, that might be a good name for a band.)

The Canadians? They do not mess around...

I have been incredibly, horribly busy at work, at least when I haven't been feeling like crap. So blogging hasn't really been on my horizon all that much, alas. Sorry.

I try not to write about work for a variety of reasons, but this is kinda interesting. Or at least it was to me, but I'm also the kind of person who likes to talk about fonts. Bear with me...

A while back I wrote a grant for work to buy a rather large piece of hardware. That hardware arrived yesterday, in a package of such magnitude that I have to write about it. The device in question is the SmartTech Rear Projection 3000i unit. The entire surface of the screen is touch-sensitive, and it responds to touch as if you'd clicked your mouse there. It's cool but I am really aching to try one of their Sympodium models, even though the name sounds more like something from Pfizer than anything else.

So anyway, this gets shipped to us from the Great White North in a giant cardboard box. After undoing the straps, we find that the entire unit is wrapped in plastic, shielded by styrofoam in the corners, and bolted to a pallet. Which has shock absorbing rubber as part of its construction. Each corner was bolted with two three-inch-long bolts about 3/4" thick, and then they'd screwed a RAMP to the pallet to roll the thing off. I wish I'd taken a picture—it's the best packaging I've seen since I unwrapped my Dyson vacuum.

I'm excited about packaging of home products. I must be getting old... On the other hand, the other thing I've been doing lately is playing LEGO Star Wars, which takes everything I liked when I was 6 and compresses it into an everlasting gobstopper of fun.

First of all, it's LEGO. I adore LEGO, always have. Then it's Star Wars, only the second trilogy which is a bit of a shame. But I am reminded a bit of Dark Forces, which had plugged into the collective unconscious of my generation by running around shooting stormtroopers with real blaster sounds. (I am guessing the transition of kids running around neighborhoods yelling, "bang bang!" to "p-chewwww! p-cheeeeww!" can be tied back to 1977 or so...)

One of my favorite things about LEGO Star Wars is that they manage to make Episode I actually watchable. There's no dialogue. You see Jar-Jar but you do not hear him. You can chop him into pieces with a lightsaber.

And that, my friends, is worth the price of admission alone.

One other fun thing—as you collect new characters, they wander around your little digital world, so as you explore the parking lot of the diner that serves as the game's hub, the various factions (Sith and Jedi) start fighting like the Jets and the Sharks. Bystanders are blown into their component parts. Shots are fired. And you get to pick up all the candy that falls out.

Caption this

All I can think of is Fearless Leader making "brum brum" noises to make the car go.

271 rupees

Nearing the end of Wind Waker, but I decided to take a break from saving the world to go back and complete a couple of tasks that I had left for later.

One activity involves an auction—the bidding system is kinda weird but in the end I won a treasure map for 272 rupees (the game's currency). Then after digging up the treasure, I gained 1 whole rupee, for a total loss of 271. It feels like the designers had been watching Bargain Hunt that day or something.

There was an explosion at a chemical factory somewhat near-ish my house this morning. As Kevin said, I SMELL ORIGIN STORY. (It couldn't be any worse than a pet rat teaching turtles in the sewer...)

We spent last night at a friend's house, socializing with their kittens, who will be all of three weeks old on Tuesday. Maybe if I remember, I'll upload some photos later on this evening.

Free Comic Book Day

How do you know when it's been too long since you've been in the shop?

One of the things in your box is a flyer about Free Comic Book Day, listing the authors and artists that will be there that day signing everything in sight. There were many locals (PDX is a great comics town), including Craig Thompson, David Hahn, and Paul Chadwick. I see Bendis in that shop now and again, but he was not there today.

I'm feeling a bit of a chump today since had I known, I would have had Hahn sign my Private Beach comics. I saw they released a manga-sized version of Bite Club, but I have all the issues so I gave it a miss.

Private Beach is well worth looking into if you've not read it. The story is intriguing and Hahn's art is always a pleasure to look at. (I've not seen his work on Fables yet but I'm eagerly awaiting the next trade.) Trudy Honeyvan and her friends have adventures, get into trouble, and look for the meaning of life. You'll never look at a Magic 8-Ball the same way again.

The slumlord who owns the house next to me came over and tried to mow the lawn. I was just about to file my yearly complaint with the city, too. I'm not quite sure why he just leaves this house vacant. Perhaps he enjoys paying taxes. Perhaps he knows how funny it is for me to watch him destroy a lawnmower by attempting to mow grass that's over a foot high in places. Given the state of the housing market, if he wants to sell this would be a good time to do so.

Pie Horse

My team in kickball is all about pie. All of us have secret names based on pie. French silk, key lime, banana cream, etc. Should be fun.

I particularly like the rule about how "It's just kickball." One of our team is just ITCHING to play the jackass card as an umpire.

There's a new area in KoL this week: South of the Border

It's possible to pick up an elusive hovering sombrero through adventures there. There are two rare drops involved, one involving a bet and the other a combat. I'm gathering through a peek in the forums that there have been problems in procuring one or both items, but I was able to do it without chewing any of the new gums or drinking the Handsomeness Potion.

Friday random shuffle

I don't have any good pictures of my cats at the moment, so it's time to see what pops up on the shuffle play.

1. Banco de Gaia: Sakarya
2. Funtopia: Do You Wanna Know
3. Bump: House Stompin' (Big Bump Mix)
4. Fluke: Slid (PDF mix)
5. The Avalanches: Flight Tonight
6. Underworld: Dirty Epic
7. Underworld: Dark & Long
8. Air: Talisman
9. Moby: Machete
10. Groove Armada: If Everybody Looked The Same

(Yeah, lots of stuff from Underworld and the Renaissance Mix Collection. I'm kinda predictable that way...)

The Avalanches really need to come up with another album—their first is the best party album I've heard in years. Put it in, open a bottle of wine, and break out the snacks.

I've been trying to track down just why I lost that post the other day. Somehow the combination of Firefox and Flash on OS X does not mesh well. Some sites will peg my CPU at 100% for no reason. Are people embedding SETI@home clients in their movies? It's getting so I can barely watch Homestar Runner at home anymore. Does anybody have a workaround?

Blogger lost this post last night...

Let's see if I can remember what it was like today.

First of all, there was a preview on 1Up.com about We Love Katamari, a sequel that sounds kinda fun. Evidently instead of repairing stars that the drunken King of All Cosmos destroyed on a bender, katamari fans tell the Prince what they want to see in a new katamari. Rock on.

Back in the day, I really liked Virtual On: Cybertroopers. Fun game about running around battling with giant robots. So when I saw the sequel on Gamefly, I had to pick it up. Virtual On Mars sounds great. Better graphics, an actual dual-stick controller instead of the makeshift one on the Saturn, etc. But man, unplayable. And quite possibly the worst voiceovers since Vandal Hearts—I can still crack K up by shouting the opening line from that one. SOSTEGARIA! (If you've never played it, imagine the most bombastic thing possible, then put it to early CGI films and hand-drawn animation.)

Speaking of bombast, I see that Kansas is once again trying to make other states look advanced by trying to put a scientific theory on trial. Seriously, if intelligent design is an actual theory, why isn't it in the peer-reviewed literature? Where are the tests to prove or disprove a hypothesis?

Every time I hear these "scientists" talk, I hear Professor Enid Gumby.

I THINK THAT DINOSAURS WALKED THE EARTH WITH PEOPLE!
*claps bricks together*

It is a good thing tomorrow is Friday. This week can be over any day now.

Ascension is near?

Wondered where the beanstalk went to in KoL? Visit the Council of Loathing and they'll open up a quest that I am guessing will open up the mystery...

Though I really wish my Disco Bandit could wield a Giant Discarded Plastic Fork. You know that would deal some serious damage.

Haven't been feeling great lately. Maybe I need a vacation or something.

Defense pattern delta

Dave at Yet Another Comics Blog is having the best Free Comic Book Day giveaway ever. Not content with a mere 24 hours of free comics, he's giving away a free comic every day for the entire month of May! (Now that's promoting comics right there.)

Thanks to the magic of the internets, I've almost caught up with the UK on episodes of Doctor Who. (It's probably not giving away the store to mention the site right now features a Dalek. And some really good sound clips that are crying out for remixes.)

When I was a young DougBot growing up in the Midwest, the Doctor and his companions ruled Friday nights on Iowa Public Television. The one summer I really remember watching was devoted entirely to Davros episodes, so I'm fairly grounded in battles between the Doctor and this particular nemesis. The last episode with Sylvester McCoy had the mighty Special Weapons Dalek, which is probably my favorite Dalek ever.

Watching Eccleston's Doctor and his companion Rose has been a treat. I do not understand why the Sci-Fi Channel decided to give it a pass—though as I have imagined before it's to save money for more pieces of dreck like Mansquito. There is some slight hope that BBC America will bring it over, but considering what surgery they have to do on MI-5 to retrofit American commercial breaks in it, that may be better if they pass as well.

Lion's Roar technique

Spent yesterday cleaning, getting the car washed, shopping, and then a lovely evening with friends. Went to the Horse Brass for fish and chips, then saw Kung Fu Hustle. I was a big fan of Shaolin Soccer and this continues Chow's wonderful use of CGI to tell his stories.

Regal Cinema has this annoying thing called the Twenty, where you pay extraordinary ticekt prices to watch 20 minutes of commercials masquerading as news/entertainment. Put me a bit off my lunch, as did the previews (None of which I can remember, since they were mostly generic horror/action titles.). I try and avoid Regal if I can help it, though there are few non-Regal theaters in this town.

Anyway, after all that crap was over, we got to watch the one of the best films I've seen all year. Kung Fu Hustle demonstrates Chow's underdogs triumphing over adversity—a common theme from King of Comedy and even God of Gamblers. (Which reminds me, the latter is evidently back in a better print. My copy has some really shitty subtitles but the new one has ones you can actually read. God of Gamblers has Chow and Chow Yun-Fat. What more could you ask for, other than Shu Qi?) There are secret kung fu masters. A lollipop as plot point, the first on-screen ramune drink I can remember. Great chase scenes that combine Bullit with the Road Runner and Coyote. Evil Blues Brothers with musical instruments of doom.

It was a toss-up between that and Hitchhiker's Guide, which I am also interested in seeing. My mom asked me if I was going to go see it, since that I read and re-read that book a lot as a kid. It's getting mixed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but they are trending up as more reviews show up. Mostly I want to see it for Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman.

My trip to the mall today reminded me why I hate going. None of the items I wanted were there, neither the last two volumes of Planetes nor a copy of LEGO Star Wars. So I had to resort to Amazon for my retail therapy fix.

I hope that Lucas and LEGO notice how well their game is selling, and make one about the first trilogy of films. You know, the ones that people want to watch.