Sunday, May 21, 2006

Build Me Up Buttercup

By and large, my night of karaoke... was shit. I mean, it was garbage from beginning to very nearly the end. The Commitments' version of "Hard To Handle" is generally pretty easy for me, but I couldn't hold it together until the last part of the song. And then I was going to sing the Barenaked Ladies' "If I Had a Million Dollars," but I apparently, being relatively drunk, wrote down the wrong song number and ended up singing "Ice, Ice Baby." I wasn't bad. "If I Had a Million Dollars" ended up being a duet with the karaoke guy, and it was okay. And then came The Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup," which was fitting for the time, but still not very good.

Ah, but then came the piece de resistance, the Eric Cartman version of "Come Sail Away." Oh, god, was I good. I got a standing ovation, though I'm not sure of whether it was because I did a good job, or because no one else would ever have the balls (or the blood alcohol content) to attempt it. Regardless, I'm pretty sure I was damn good.

I'd bitch about the rest of my night, but I make it a habit of not talking about my personal life on my blog. I'd say call me for details, but I'm not planning on picking up the phone for about a week, unless I can be pretty sure that you're you, and not one of the people I don't want to talk to. Basically, if you didn't see me tonight, go ahead and call, but don't expect much, because I'd just as soon put it all behind me. Except the Cartman thing, because I was fabulous.


AIM: therbmcc71

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

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

Friday, April 28, 2006

Revolution

So you say you want a Revolution? Well, you're not going to get it, because Nintendo made the bizarrely questionable decision to name its new console "Wii," which is pronounced the same as "we," which also functions as British slang for urination. Oh, sure, it's also pronounced the same as the French word for "yes," but that doesn't make it any less stupid. No, it makes it even more stupid, because it's French.

In any case, let me just state for the record, in case you couldn't tell already, that I hate this new name. I really, really hate it. And I'm pretty sure that the reason I hate it stems from the fact that I'm American.

See, if you're from another country, you have to realize that we in America love the word revolution. We wrote the book on it. We have a holiday commemorating it. Oh, sure, the French had their revolution, but they were just copying ours. Other countries have revolutions, but usually they're just coup d'états of the military variety, after which nothing really changes, except for maybe the person in charge of the country, replacing one corrupt regime with another. As such, I really liked the name Revolution. It had moxie, or whatever the appropriate word is, ever since Tarzhay invented an overpriced chocolate brand named Choxie, which made me hate the word "moxie" forever.

I mean, seriously. How are people in the business of videogames supposed to sell a console named Wii? "What do you want to play with this Christmas? A Playstation 3? No, you want to play with your Wii." Seriously, even trying to sell something with such a stupid name to people who don't know what the fuck you're talking about will be damn near impossible. I mean, I'm a big fan of the concept of the console, given that the Happy Trees guy is supposed to have a painting game for it, but this is a marketing clusterfuck on the level of the Atari Jaguar claiming to be a 64-bit machine (it wasn't... not remotely, unless you know nothing about computing, whereas you could make a case for it being a 224-bit system).

But I digress. Nintendo, you're being retarded. Could you please change the name back to Revolution, at least in America? I don't want to walk into a store the day after Thanksgiving and, when asked what I'm going to be buying, I'm going to have to reply, "I'm taking a Wii."


AIM: therbmcc71

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Combat Drop

Still alive, but there's really not a great deal to talk about. This week I bought the score to Aliens, my Avengers DVD-ROM still hasn't shipped, and nothing came out on DVD this week that was worth buying. "What about Hostel?" you ask? Get the hell out of here, I don't know you!

The band's playing at the Venice Tavern tonight (Saturday), and then next Saturday at the Tiger Club. Both should be a good time, but I really have to get to the Venice Tavern earlier, because it took me a couple of hours to get a seat the last time. If you're in the Aurora metropolitan area, you should really go.

I've also gone back to playing World of Warcraft on a semi-regular basis, focusing primarily on my priest, Father Karras. Yes, it's an Exorcist joke, but it's not nearly as clever as naming my Tauren druid Cowardly, or my Tauren warrior Cowasaki. Cowasaki, I think, is the best World of Warcraft name ever; it's just a pity I fucking hate playing warriors. I also started a warlock, but really haven't found myself that enthralled with it yet. Maybe I just don't like playing squishies.

I just took an air compressor to my friend's computer, eliciting a massive gray cloud as soon as I hit the CPU. And he wonders why his system was seizing while playing World of Warcraft. It's bad enough that he runs his rig with the case open and has something like four cats. Thankfully, that's mitigated by the fact that the only cat that ever comes downstairs anymore is Yokozuna, the fattest cat I've ever personally seen.

The big electronics boat reset at Tarzhay is supposed to happen next week, and I'm really hoping that we start carrying the Nikon D50 digital-SLR camera, so I can give people an honest answer when they ask me what kind of camera they should get. I'm still considering getting a Canon Digital Rebel XT, but I'd almost rather take that eight-hundred bucks and throw it toward getting a dual-core laptop later in the year. To think that I've had this laptop for about six months, and I'm already considering replacing it. Damn you, cult of Apple! Damn you and your ever-improving technology! ... Now, if they can just make it in black, I'll be really happy.

Final Fantasy: Advent Children is still coming out on Tuesday, and all of the guys in the electronics section at work are very excited. Most of us have seen it already, having watched the release date slip time and again, ultimately resorting to downloading copies of it from the internet. My copy is astoundingly good, but it takes up a couple of gigabytes of storage on my laptop that I'd really like to have back. It's the most phenomenally badass movie I've ever seen in my life, though. Maybe I'll watch Appleseed later and some other anime tomorrow (probably Ghost in the Shell 2) just to start preparing for its release.


AIM: therbmcc71

Monday, April 10, 2006

Come Pick Me Up

I really don't have much to update with, other than the fact that the Pirate Radio set was every bit as good as expected. That is to say that it's nothing short of fantastic, given that this is the Pretenders we're talking about. In other news, my 40 Years of the Avengers disc has been delayed yet again, going from 3/31 to 4/7 to "mid-April." Fuckers. I haven't yet gotten a digital-SLR, either, as the Canon Digital Rebel XT currently has a mail-in rebate that doesn't require my purchase until the end of July. One of my friends has one, so I'm going to fiddle around with it sometime this week and see how I like it. I'd still prefer a camera that's got some heft to it, but don't really want to spend the extra $400 for a magnesium-alloy body.

I haven't been back to That's Just Not Right since my world went into total-clusterfuck mode, and I've been turning off my instant-messaging utility for extensive periods of time, because I just don't feel like dealing with people on the internet for the time being.

Ooh, big news at Tarzhay. So, yesterday I missed some fun (they always have fun on my day off) when one of the service-desk guys got taken out in handcuffs by the cops. He'd apparently been picking up receipts somehow and keying in the items as gift-returns, which thereby put the amount on to a giftcard, which he then pocketed. In small amounts, I'm sure this would be hard for the company to trace, but he decided at one point to return a $150 chair, which the store doesn't carry, which meant the back-room probably noticed that it never got back there for shipping back to... wherever that shit goes. Anyway. So then he makes the mistake of taking these giftcards and using them to buy stuff with his discount, which sets off all sorts of flags in asset-protection, because the giftcards were the result of returned items for which no employee discount was ever used. It's a hard rule to explain, but it doesn't set off any alarms if you do it the way asset-protection asks you to. Unless you're a dumbass like this guy and you're returning things you never bought, all while you're standing under a fucking camera. Dumbass.

So, yeah, he got taken away in handcuffs by the police, because they checked how much he'd bought with giftcards that were issued by himself, and it was a lot of money. Not sure if it's like felony-level kind of stuff, but I think they're going to be telling stories about this guy for a few years as an example of what not to do when you're thinking about how you'd like your job to be more financially rewarding.

Anyway, I'm going to go to bed, because I'm probably going to head out for coffee in the morning or early afternoon. Yes, I'm quite the social butterfly lately, going so far as to actually singing at karaoke night on Friday. Yes, it was "Mustang Sally" again, and I really should have done "In the Midnight Hour," but my singing was pretty lousy, regardless; sort of like the time I made the very unwise decision to try and do "Try a Little Tenderness," which I can't hold together at all. This wasn't quite that bad, but it was bad, nonetheless. Was I as bad as the guy who seemed like he'd never heard "Walk This Way" before? No. Or the guy who sang "Luck Be a Lady" so badly that Frank Sinatra actually walked in and gave the guy the finger before returning to his grave? Certainly not. But, by my exacting standards, it was pretty bad. Another two or three beers, I would've been great. I would've probably fallen to the floor halfway through the song, but I could've just written it off as a James Brown kind of performance.

Anyway. I'm going to go now, and watch the remainder of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is a wholly unremarkable film in virtually every respect. I'm sure that one of these days, I'll dig out my copy of the book and come to much the same conclusion. I also bought the special-edition version of Crash (Haggis, not Cronenberg), and I've yet to watch that. I figured I might as well pick it up, given that it won a few Oscars. This week is the special-edition Mission: Impossible, which I have to get, because I still think the first movie is fucking awesome, thank you very much, Brian DePalma. Okay, so the helicopter chase through the chunnel leaves a bit to be desired, but it's still a pretty good suspense film for about three-quarters of the movie. The following week is apparently the HD-DVD release of a couple of movies, for those three people who will have HD-DVD players by that time, and then the following week is the release of Advent Children, which will have me absolutely giddy.

In the meantime, though, I'm going to bed. No, seriously, I am. And, if nothing else, my laptop is going to make me go to bed, as it's down to about a ten percent charge, which gives me about ... another twenty or so minutes to fuck around on the internet, but I can't do that if I'm busy telling you about my day. So there. Go read something interesting, like videogame news from Joystiq.


AIM: therbmcc71

Monday, April 03, 2006

The First Cut is the Deepest

I've had a really rough last couple of days, so I don't have any funny to spare anyone, outside of my little instant-messenger club. I've been watching Grey's Anatomy for the last couple of days, and I find myself looking up medical terminology like 'central venous catheter' and 'Seldinger technique' on Wikipedia. This is yet another category of Wikipedia that I'd never previously tapped into.

Because of the degree of severity with which life has slapped me around this week, I have found it necessary to spend money, and so my PC should be finished downloading the Pretenders' Pirate Radio box set (fifty bucks from iTunes), and I placed my order for the 40 Years of Avengers DVD-ROM from Tales of Wonder. Hopefully that ships soon, since it's been delayed a couple of times already. I'm still hoping that, sometime in the next couple of weeks (though it'll probably be more than that), Tarzhay starts stocking the Nikon D50 digital SLR, because I really want one.

This week, I've met people that range from terribly interesting to deserving to be knocked da' fuck out, and I've seen things that I simply don't understand in the least, and I've seen on a television screen what is the single coolest thing that I have ever seen in my life. I've lied to members of my family, or at least gave them the Soviet version of the truth.

I've myself contemplating the forces of the universe, ultimately waxing poetic on the nature of lightning, and I don't understand how I hadn't done so prior. I've found King Kong to be one of the best movies I've ever seen in my entire life. Twelve-minute doses of Robot Chicken can get you through most bad days. Chrissie Hynde is the only person in the world who can do a cover of any song in recorded history and make it better than the original. The random article link on Wikipedia is the doorway behind which the secrets of the universe are kept.


AIM: therbmcc71