Hard Times

So it's been a while since I posted, and that's ... as much as I'd like to say that I've had a social life, that's largely untrue. I went out to see Five Year Jacket, and bookended that weekend with weekends of karaoke, in both of which I set new standards for bad renditions of Wilson Pickett songs.

I got my 40 Years of Avengers DVD-ROM, and it kicks considerably more ass than the Fantasic Four anthology I got several months ago. While the Avengers series went through its ups and downs, like any comic book, I can unequivocally say that it's a generally good series, whereas Fantastic Four hasn't been consistently good since the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby administration. As a whole, I rate it as being on par or slightly above Uncanny X-Men, as a series, though it never really hits the emotional points that the past ten years of X-Men, given that the latter has always been a book about tolerance, and they've really been hitting that point in the last decade, though occasionally to the point where it almost gets annoying. Next up is the reissue of 40 Years of Amazing Spider-Man, which is even more consistently good, with the exception of anything having to do with clones or non-Venom symbiotes.

Yeah, eat that, fanboys.

In technomological news, the Nintendo Wii (a name I will never like, but will unfortunately have to use) looks terribly nifty, with a new Mario game, a new Zelda game, a new Metroid game, and a couple of other games that look very interesting (and several I can do without). The special secret of its controller turns out to be... yeah, it's got a speaker built in. Ooh, ahh... If not for the fact that the games and the controller kick so much ass, I wouldn't be terribly excited. Well, then there's the 'virtual console', which will have Genesis and TurboGrafx games, so at least I'll be able to play some Altered Beast between games of tennis and golf. Wise fwom your gwave....

Meanwhile, the Sony Playstation 3 is slated to cost five-hundred bucks for the model with a twenty-gigabyte hard drive, and six-hundred for "the good version," complete with a multi-card reader, sixty-gig hard drive, and HDMI-out for running 1080p televisions, which are so absurdly pricey that $600 is pocket change. Sure, it'll have Final Fantasy XIII, but that'll be out around the time "the good version" is down to $400.

In other E3 news, the Xbox 360 still sucks.

In movie news, I picked up Final Fantasy: Advent Children, and it's still astounding, though I pretty much just watch the last forty-five minutes over and over again. Fuck the plot. Seriously, it's like Titanic, where you can watch the first half and get all of that plot mumbo-jumbo, but the real movie starts when everything totally goes to shit and Bahamut comes out to rain hell on everyone's day.

I picked up Munich tonight, because Tarzhay didn't have any copies of The New World. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm really hoping for a movie that I can sit back and absorb, as opposed to most of the stuff where I feel like I'm sitting on a ride.

There's this album on iTunes, Us and Them, which is symphonic Pink Floyd, which only occasionally resembles Floyd's original work, and I can't figure out whether or not I want to spring the ten bucks to buy it. I mean, one of my primary reasons for wanting it is because Pink Floyd, for me, is better than Valium, and I figure that a symphonic version would be even better, but this album is very brassy. I don't sleep well to horn sections.

If I ever have a son, I want to name him Lord Kelvin, because that's just a badass name.

I'm drunk right now.

If you're an MMO player, and you know if you are, you should read this blog, because this is seriously what the GM's think of you. I recommend starting with the oldest posts in the archive and working your way up. If you don't know what 'MMO' means, this paragraph does not apply to you.

Last night, David Blaine attempted to beat some kind of underwater breath-holding record. Not only did he fail, but he couldn't even bump the ratings up a few points by drowning in his eight-foot snow-globe.

The season finale for Veronica Mars was even better than expected. It's the best show on television, you should have watched it. I say this, because I know you didn't. Shame on you. Yes, I know House is a very popular television show, and I'd like to be Dr. House almost as much as I'd like to be Simon Cowell, but Veronica Mars is one of those shows that's just surprisingly really good. The first season might still be $22.99 at Tarzhay, but I'm not sure. I think there's a massive sale on Warner Bros. television box-sets through around the 21st or 22nd of May, so pick it up if it's still on sale. No, I'm not sure, because I don't work in that section.

There are apparently a large number of people at work, including people almost twenty years older than myself, who have no idea that Poseidon is a remake, let alone one that had no good reason for being made.

All righty. I have to be at work in six hours, so I'm going to go to bed. I'm quite sure I've forgotten several links that I've found over the past several weeks, but they'll just have to wait until such time as I remember them..


AIM: therbmcc71