Sunday, April 10, 2005

Slow
haven't really had it in me to post here much lately. I been a little bit sick, and also wasting most of my time doing videogame stuff.

Cartoon life is looking good for this spring/summer. Samurai Champloo is coming to cartoon network in May. Its the best anime I've seen in a while. I actually already own it as a fansub and have watched a little less than half of the show. It was created by the Cowboy Bebop guy (Watanabe) and is as good as you might expect, unless you're Tony who though CB was boring. I can't possibly imagine champloo seeming boring though, so even he may just love it!
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Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Don't look back in anger
Well, mostly been killing time with my PSP and doing school stuff. Not the most interesting past few days, thats for sure.

Lately I've been delving back into older albums and bands that I hadn't listened to much lately. Its easy to get caught up in the latest indie rock bands and whatnot, but I go back and listen to an album like "the Bends" from Radiohead and it really puts them in their place. Radiohead is a bit unfair to compare other bands to though, their just on another level altogether. The Bends is a perfect album to go back to, since its before they started to delve deeply into their more experimental guitars and pseudo-electronic sounds. Few bands excite me like this album does, maybe Muse or Say Anything are close to that level of greatness.

So if you've got the Bends do yourself a favor and pop it in. If you're strapped for time then just listen to the title track or "just".
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Monday, April 4, 2005

All the things I said
Thinks I have said (paraphrase)

1. The PSP is waaaay too expensive, especially with the games going for $40. Spending $250 is silly for a hand held.

2. I don't really play hand held games very much, so there's no sense in me picking up a DS or PSP if I'm only going to play it on airplane rides.

Things I have done:

Bought a PSP on Saturday, along with Lumines and Twisted Metal: Head on (Metal Gear Acid is sold out everywhere except online).

I don't really know what I was thinking, but when I got to play around with the PSP in Circuit City (they let you check it out at customer service) it was so slick I needed it. The screen is utterly fantastic, looks better than my TV except that its small. Its actually pretty decent sized as far as screens go for hand held games. I absolutely love it. The interface for the PSP is really cool, its exactly like a computer from the future that you see in movies. The games come in shrunken down DVD cases, and the actual games themselves are tiny discs in a case that you pop in the PSP.

Lumines is a cool game, pretty analogous to Tetris in gameplay and addictiveness. It plays crazy electronic music and words and images flash on the screen on certain levels (skins). Twisted Metal plays really well on the PSP, with graphics pretty close to the PS2 version. It has a couple of new cars and a bunch of classics, and all of the levels are new. The levels are really huge too, which feels odd in a handheld game. For these two games at least the load times are fine, nothing better or worse than any other console system.

Really I don't know why I bough the thing, but I'm really happy I did. Hey, money is meant to be spent, right?
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Sunday, April 3, 2005

RIP Mitch, Pope, Shiavo and the baby hippo
This weekend has been a bit of a weird sad weekend. Mitch Hedberg was found dead in his hotel room. He was only 37 years old, but apparently had a heart condition which may have been complicated by drug use. He was really funny, especially because of his delivery of his fun, childish jokes.

Of course the pope passed away as well, which has the monopoly on all TV news channels.

Terry Shaivo died wednesday, only after 15 years of not being able to do anything but lie in bed and be fought over.

Even the animal channel had a cool story of a carefreebaby hippo bounding around underwater playfully but strayed too farfrom its mom and got eaten by a croc.

sad day.

I did make an interesting purchase though to help balance the day. I'll talk about that later though.
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Friday, April 1, 2005

Fool
I always have great ideas for April Fool's day pranks, but never have enough guts to pull them off. I had the idea to feign an accident in lab today and get a bunch of fake blood, pour it all over my hands and the floor and scream. The rest would take care of itself.

Not a prank, but we have a poster session for prospective grad students in Chemistry today. Ok, a little background first...basically we make posters highlighting our research projects and stand by them to show people what we are doing in our lab. I made mine NES-themed by photoshopping a Super Mario Brothers title screen so that it has the title of my project and my name on it. I'm going to try to upload it to my site and I'll try to link it. Its quite nerdy.

I finished Devil May Cry 3 last night and am quite proud of myself. It really is the coolest action game I've ever played for PS2. Its really well written, where the banter between Dante and all the other characters (mostly each boss) is really funny. There's nothing cooler than knocking an enemy up in the air, slowing down time and clearing the room before killing him before he hits the ground. Also I cheated after beating it and unlocked a bunch od cinemas and art from the game. The best thing is a movie of the motion-capture actors that you watch with a picture in picture of the actual gameplay playing alongside. Its cool to watch the actors do the moves with wires and plastic weapons.
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Thursday, March 31, 2005

Season 2
I just caught a little ad on adult swim that was very exciting. Seems that finally the Venture Brothers were greenlighted for season 2, 13 more episodes of goodness. We can find out what's going to be the fate of the brothers who died in the last episode.

Ambulance ltd. was pretty decent, worth seeing for 10 bucks if nothing else. They have a good singer,and some pretty cool songs, but its a little on the light side for me. I need a little more distortion and energy. Hopefully I can catch Death From Above next time they come around. Spring/Summer concert season is close at hand, so there should be a bunch of good shows popping up.

Sorry for you folks who missed the Say Anything shows for various reasons, lets hope their headlining tour comes through.

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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Music
I wanted to go see Death From Above 1979 this Wednesday, but its kinda tough on a school night. Basically I'd have to go by myself since Rachael has to be at work a lot earlier than me, she would get about 3 hours of sleep if she went. I don't so much want to do all that tomorrow, but there is a show in Eugene (here) that might be ok as a consolation prize. Anyone know much of Ambulance LTD? I heard clips of their songs on their website, but it doesn't really tell me that much. They sound ok, maybe worth seeing as a cheap local concert. I'm pretty sure I'll go, but I still wish I had heard more of their music. I really like live shows and almost any excuse to go to a small show should be a decent one.

So I ask of you, reasons why I should go to the show. Or why not to.
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Monday, March 28, 2005

Infinite
Ha, I got to read Countdown to Infinite Crisis, the big DC comics spectactular thing and its pretty cool. It comes out on Wednesday on the cheap, and is probably going to be a ton bigger than the Identity crisis was.

It happens to co-star one of my favorite JLA former members too which doesn't hurt.
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suck versus great
We went out of our way this weekend to go tour this cheese factory on thursday...and it sucked big time. I was hoping to see all stages of production and maybe sample some experimental cheeses or something. It was all videos and a bunch of mechanicsworking on the cheese conveyor belt. I was hoping it would be ok, since I went to a potato chip factory and it was really cool. Can't win em' all I guess.

Saturday made up for it though, we went Ice Skating (indoors) and itwas much fun. I hadn't skated since I was 15 but I think I did ok after a few sketchy minutes.

I also rented Gran Turismo 4 and Tekken 5. I really didn't like Tekken 5, the controls are kinda unintuitive and hard to pull off any kind of decent moves. GT4 was pretty fun though, I'm not sure if its worth buying though.

I just finished watching the newest sealab 2021 episode, and it was pretty bad. they kinda madefun of howbadit was in the episode itself, ...and they were right. It really wasn't funny at all. I haven't really watched the show much anyway, but at least I know I'm not missing anything. Just makes me hope for more Venture Brothers episodes sometime.
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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

photo
One thing that I have fun with is taking pictures of my toy collection. Its kinda silly, but with low light and a cool digital camera you can get some neat pictures. I made some smaller versions of some fo the pictures I took and put them up on my website for the hell of it. Somehow I think that only a collecter might care, but you never know. I've got this free graphics editing program for my mac called Graphic Converter which is really exceptional. Its a lot easier to work with compared to photoshop, and you can do a ton of stuff with it. The price is right too.

Other than that, I'm finally going to take some time off for spring break starting tomorrow and make it a long weekend. I may just be going to a cheese factory to do a tour, but I haven't decided since its kinda far away. The four day weekend should be nice no matter what though.
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