Come Sail Away

So it didn't hit me what Danimal's passing really meant to me on a personal level until probably twenty-four hours after I made my last post: I'm never going to be able to sing "Come Sail Away" ever again, because I've lost my Chef. I don't do anything else well at karaoke, and now my Chef is gone. So it reminds me of this tribute to Mel Blanc:



I have to be at a funeral in seven hours, so you'll have to excuse my being so brief. By the way, the next time I post, it is going to be about that band I saw last Friday. Life's too short to lock something like that away forever.

AIM: therbmcc71

Fell On Black Days

So I was going to post this running commentary I was scribbling last night while I was out seeing the band, but I'm not going to bother doing that today because my friend (and the guy who runs the karaoke I regularly attend) Dan died suddenly yesterday. One of those "just dropped dead" things. So I'm not really in the mood to type up something really extravagantly entertaining. I think he'd have enjoyed what I wrote last night, but now's not really the time to giggle to myself as I type.

I'll post it at some point. It's not as entertaining as the show with Gypsy the Biker, but there are some good zingers in there. But it'll have to wait.


AIM: therbmcc71

Boys Don't Cry

So I told Kevin that I'd try to update. To be specific, I told him that I'd try to try, but I took the time to hit iTunes and go shopping. I still haven't found anything that I particularly want to buy, but at least I'm out of this bizarre week-long fetish that I had for post-Rammstein European electronica/industrial music that I only use for playing player-versus-player in World of Warcraft, which I've fallen back into ever since they released the expansion back in January, at which point I decided to make myself a Paladin on a new server. It's quite the experience, and it's been taking up a fair bit of my time.

Right now I'm listening to this rather eclectic mix of Unplugged performances, from Alanis Morissette to Oasis to Paul Simon to Elton John to Lenny Kravitz. I'd mention Hootie and the Blowfish, because it's in there, but will be deleted at my earliest possible convenience. But the mention of music kind of hinges on the reason that I stopped blogging some four or so months ago:

I realized that I'm starting to get old, and I made a note to myself that by my next birthday, in standing with a promise I made to myself several years ago, that I have to put together a Bruce Springsteen cover band. I've always wanted to be in a bar band, and I've always thought the E Street Band is probably the best bar band on the planet, and so it makes perfect sense that I'd like to be Bruce Springsteen. After all, who wouldn't? I figure I'm halfway there, with my Parker P-36 "Telly knockoff" that I'm fabulously in love with but don't play nearly enough. Sadly, I can't sing like Springsteen, but Kevin said, "Just scream," which is probably about accurate. I mean, hell, I can sing "The River" or "Brilliant Disguise," but "Born to Run" and "Born in the U.S.A." and the end of "Jungleland" are a bit of a challenge.

But I saw Kevin and the boys (read: Small Shiny Things) tonight, and it was a good time. Probably would've been better if they'd gone on earlier, but I can't complain, because I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in several months, a few that I really wasn't expecting to see, and a lot of people that it was a real joy to see. My friend Shawn was unexpectedly in attendance, and he showed me his new tattoo of Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. It was a really good St. Patrick's Day show.

I would elaborate, but I just had to switch over to iTunes and immediately delete the Bjork song that was on there. Stupid compilation CD's. There are precious few things that I will not listen to willingly: Screaming children who are not related to me, Imogen Heap, and Bjork. I can tolerate most other things, but those are the big three that make me want to hit people.

While I'm on the subject of music, I've asked all of the girls at work who went to the Justin Timberlake concert, and none of them can answer this for me: What the fuck is "Sexyback" about? Every single one of them says, "I don't know," and it pisses me off, because it takes one or two listens to a Springsteen song to get the gist of it. It took me more than a few listens to Nirvana's Nevermind before I got the joke and realized, "Y'know what? These songs don't mean shit."

I need a vacation. I really do. Unfortunately, situations at work preclude this, because we have this one girl who's completely incompetent, and I can't leave for more than two days until she's off the schedule (read: hopefully fired) without thinking that she's trying to burn down my lab. Unfortunately, I have no control over this and management doesn't seem to think it's a priority, as I can't prove to them with invoices and things the dollar amount of things that she's destroying on a daily basis. But I really want to take a vacation, or at least have three or four days off in a row without work calling me to ask how to do some particularly complicated thing that they shouldn't be doing in the first place.

I've bought a number of videogames, a few movies, and probably several other things that I should have commented on over the last few months, but I'm not going to at the moment, because my comments are quite wordy. I'm trying to figure out how to put together a new site, but I need a domain name and a lot of control over the layout; far more than Blogger is willing to offer me. I'm trying to do something with a page in which there's no scrolling involved, and the pages look and flip like a magazine or newspaper. I find that columns are a hell of a lot easier to read than the "wall of text" that comprise most blogs. For some sites, you'll find something like this on the front page, but then you'll find walls of text on the subsequent pages, but I'm looking for something uniform, which means a lot of work up front, and I'm really not sure how long I'd like to keep it up, anyway. At this point, this paragraph should look like a wall of text in your browser, so you now see what I'm bitching about.

Anyway. I'm going to go to sleep now, as I have to work tomorrow. I'm going to fall asleep watching the Miami Vice movie, as I have the last two times I tried to watch it. As much as I like Michael Mann films, for some reason I don't think this movie is as good as the TV show. And I don't mean the TV show as a whole, but pretty much any episode Michael Mann ever had anything to do with. Given the several years of Nash Bridges, I never figured I'd want to see Don Johnson step back into the loafers and bright pink shirt of Sonny Crockett, but I just don't think Colin Farrell really brings much to the table in the role. I think it's the fault of Michael Mann's script, as I've seen Colin Farrell make much more out of a lot less (read: Daredevil), but I watch the movie and keep thinking to myself, "Y'know, I bet Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas would have been badass in this movie."

Yeah, so like I said. Sleep. I told you I'd update, Kevin! Ha-ha!


AIM: therbmcc71

Until the End of the World

The last week or so has been absurdly crappy, so I'm going to go low-profile for a few weeks or so. In the meantime, I'm going to ponder things like the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the ontological argument; where Superman Returns ranks in the grand scheme of superhero movies; whether I have to replace the CD-R drive on my desktop because of its sticking door; whether or not to buy Trauma Center for the Wii; read some books; crap like that. Before anything else, though, I'm going to read through the entire run of The Amazing Spider-Man, which should be arriving at my door tomorrow afternoon.

And I think I'm going to start exercising my writing skills again. I came up with an absurdly bad plot for a movie about a week ago, and I think I'm just going to knock the script out for shits and giggles. And, when I say it's absurdly bad, it's bad. I mean, I know I use the word absurdly a lot more than I should, but I'm not a walking thesaurus, and this plot is certainly absurd, to the point where I wouldn't have considered writing it when I was in high school and I thought highly of my writing skills. But the story (all thirty or so words of it) makes me giggle, so I'm going to knock out a really bad script for a really bad movie. I'm putting a handlebar mustache on the main character, which just makes me giggle that much more.

In any case, I'm not posting for a while; not that anyone's going to notice, since Technorati lists a whopping one site that links to mine. So I'm going to go be productive and shit, but it's going to be a while before anyone sees me again. In the event that you happen to instant-message me and get an away-message, chances are about fifty-fifty that I'm deliberately ignoring you.

AIM: therbmcc71

Eight Days a Wiik

Yeah, I've got no shortage of Wii puns for the blog titles. Anyway, it's been about a week that I've had the Wii, and it's only now that I'm finally getting back to my blog to say how obscenely cool it is, beyond initial impressions.

It is obscenely cool, even after a week, which is odd, given that most videogame systems (or, more appropriately, the games themselves) don't really keep my attention for this long. As I've stated before, it took me about twenty-seven hours' worth of gameplay to realize that Final Fantasy XII simply wasn't any fun. If nothing else, it seemed like work. As a counter-point, the four games that I got for the Wii continue to be fun, sometimes absurdly so.

Wii Sports went over exceptionally well at my sister's place on Thanksgiving. Everyone played, and my nephew bitched for over an hour, because everyone else wanted to have a bowling tournament and he doesn't like bowling. He prefers boxing, though he's exceptionally bad at it, as he doesn't listen when I tell him to keep his guard up or try to dodge the incoming punches.

Rayman Raving Rabbids, in particular, fits the bill for "absurdly fun," since half of the selling point on the game is the fact that it doesn't take itself seriously in the least. An entire section of the game is devoted to shooting toilet plungers at lunatic rabbits. Some sections of the game are almost obscenely difficult, and I say that because I tend to mumble obscenities about the enormous amounts of physical pain inflicted by those particular sections of the game, although men who jerk off with their left hands will find that God has granted them a much easier time in the level in which the player shoots carrot juice at incoming rabbits who happen to be wearing snorkels and goggles. Like I said, it's absurd, and it's still very fun to play.

Excite Truck is a very nice change for me, since I long since got tired of racing games like Gran Turismo and Forza, where they claim the physics are terribly realistic and you spend half of your time racing shitty little courses you've done ten times before so you can equip your Volkswagen GTI with a new exhaust system. This is to say nothing of the Pimp My Ride aspect that they've been growing into in recent years. No, instead, Excite Truck is simple, the physics are laughable, and it's actually fun. Playing Forza was a simulation to the point where I thought my accountant was trying to screw me.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (hereafter referred to simply as Zelda) is a very good game. I think I'm fourteen hours into the game, and I'm still not sure if it deserved the scores it did, and I'm still sure I liked Wind-Waker better, but it's now gotten to the point where it's a good game. I've finally gotten the nifty stuff that comes standard with a Zelda game, like the boomerang and bow and arrows, which is to say that it's finally getting fun. It's just a good time, laying the smack down on countless bad guys, thinking your way through dungeons...

And I have to say this, because it's gotta be said: If you have to consult a FAQ or strategy guide in order to beat a Zelda game, your mind isn't analytical enough to make the minimum wage. We should just outsource you to foreign countries, where you can join their manual labor force for five cents an hour and no bathroom breaks. I feel very strongly about this, because the boss-fights in a Zelda game have never been very difficult; rather you just have to think your way through it. Sure, you might die once or twice, but it's generally very simple, and then you move on. But I hear about these people saying the dungeons are too hard to get through, and I just want to beat these people repeatedly about the head.

But I digress. Fourteen hours in, it's becoming a standard Zelda game, in which we get to see Peahats and Death Mountain, and other familiar aspects of the series, but there's one very freaky sequence in which the game earns its ESRB rating of "T," which is for "Teen." As we all know, "E is for Everyone," just like your mom. Bwa-ha! Anyway, freaky cutscene, the likes of which I wouldn't have expected out of a game in this series, not unlike dead younglings in Episode III, though a dead Jar-Jar among them would have been a nice addition.

I figure I'll probably get Trauma Center somewhere closer to Christmas, as my game money for next week is going to get spent on that Amazing Spider-Man DVD-ROM I was talking about a couple posts ago. I'd really like that big-ass 14-disc Superman box-set, but I have to sock away some dough and buy other people stuff for Christmas, which is no fun. Something else comes out on DVD this week, anyway, and I was going to buy that and watch it on Friday night over Chinese food, but dammit if I can't remember what the hell it was. ... Oh yeah, it was Clerks II.


AIM: therbmcc71

Everybody's Workin' for the Wiikend [update 2]

It's all hooked up, and now I'm waiting for the update to finish. This is probably a lost cause and Nintendo's probably totally bogged down in their update pipeline, so I probably shouldn't bother trying to access the weather channel. I might add that it's terribly cute, and I now totally understand why the wrist strap comes attached to the Wiimote (no, I didn't accidentally throw it).

... After playing Wii Sports for about an hour or so, I have declared the Wii to be the coolest thing ever made. I might add that I also got Zelda, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and (because we didn't have any copies of Trauma Center) Excite Truck. I figure my niece and nephew can have a blast with the latter two of those, but Zelda is mine, all mine.

Also, my arms feel like they're about to fall off. Wii Sports for an hour is pretty much cardio for the day. That I've now been up for twenty-four hours is beside the point. It's all terribly exciting, and I don't know what I should do next. I'm thinking food would be a good idea, since I stayed up all night on Coca-Cola and coffee; you might say to me, "Well, if that was what you had, why not just drink Coca-Cola Bläk, or whatever it's called?" Answer: Because that is some foul shit that should be used as rat poison, if not for the fact that the rats won't go near it, either.

I'll be back after I take a break of an indeterminate amount of time.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I totally forgot to mention how it went, actually getting the unit. So anyway, as with any launch, there were more people than systems. Happens all the time. Now, most of the people who got there before the store opened got one, because the last ticket was handed out at 7:45, but that didn't stop a couple of guys from yelling at the manager, "We've been waiting here for three hours!" This didn't fly, because the guy would have had a ticket, had he only been at the store for three hours. He was a liar, so he didn't get any sort of consolation (so to speak) from the manager. The lady who was eighty-second in line demanded a system, because she got there right after the eighty-first (and last) person to get a ticket. She didn't get one, and said she was going to Wal-Mart, and they would get her $250. Yeah, good fucking luck there, lady.


AIM: therbmcc71