Just a heads-up on the last.fm “Most Recently Played” image up there. I know it sucks. I know it doesn’t update properly, or even at all sometimes. I’ve looked into other solutions, including just pulling the data myself from their RSS feeds, but that’s an even worse solution because it randomly decides that I’ve never listened to a single track ever. So we’re just going to have to bear with it.
GASP was fun yesterday, though I have to admit that I should complain about the traffic more often. Yeah, there was nary a hiccup at all going in and only a brief slowdown coming home. See you all tomorrow.
I will admit that I am fascinated by the disc tray on my Wii. It glows blue, for those of you without one of these machines, and it seems to only glow blue when there’s a message waiting for me. Yeah, I did do a neat little trick to force the issue, but all that really did was temporarily desensitize me to the wonder that is the Blue Glow of Love. I stopped sending feeds to the Wii a week or two later.
So, when it was announced that the Wii would soon support DS demo downloads (and try saying that rapidly while caffeine-deprived), you can imagine my delight. There was a little ‘ping!’ in my heart, the kind of adulation I reserve only for news about Mega Man Legends 3, or girls… in that order. The blue glow would again say, “Good morning, John! I know you’re busy, but do you maybe have a second? I have a present for you.” Actually, now that I think about it, a quiet lilting voice announcing that would mean I would probably become a complete shut-in. At least until I realize that the ‘present’ is never going to be food. That might actually take me a few months to get.
See, that’s the thing. It’s a classic Pavlovian response. No matter how hurried I am in the morning, no matter how frantic things are getting, if the disc tray glows, it commands my attention. Blue. Glowing. Must know. I don’t even care if it’s something silly like a message telling me that the Wii is selling better than bread in Moscow. I am hopelessly addicted to blue glow. It’s not even my favorite shade of blue; I like deeper blues, this is more of a cyan or neon blue. See? My blessing and my bane.
Even now I’m glancing back at the Wii to make sure it didn’t start glowing while I type this. That would be such a Nintendo thing to do… it would glow, and there would be a message saying, “Aww, that’s sweet that you’re thinking of me! Also, you might want to comb your hair down, it’s sticking up in the back.” I would be thrilled to see the message! Then I would be creeped out because there’s no webcam attached to the Wii, but that would come later.
Yeah, I’m kind of glad the 360 doesn’t light up the Ring when I have messages. Between that, the Wii, and my cell phone, I would be a total neurotic wreck. “IT FLASHED! IT BLINKED! MUST CHECK!”
I was talking with Slip a while ago about how the Smash delay affects me; the thing is, it’s not that bad, really. I actually had a rough decision in limiting the number of games I wanted to play, and Smash being in December meant that something worthwhile was getting shafted. In this case, it’s likely CSI for Wii, but I’m not so sure that wasn’t going to be a rental anyway. Actually, since I narrowed it down, I haven’t been keeping up on the releases aside from Smash and maybe Rock Band (which is WAY too expensive for me to consider right now). It’s probably for the best; I still have a HUGE backlog, and November is totally shot for gaming these years. I’ll probably just delay getting Eternal Sonata until December, and skip the November purchase. It’ll hurt me– I keep hearing more and more good things about ES– but I’ll channel that frustration into my writing and end up ruining it. Ah well. C’est la vitriol.
Incidentally, for nobody’s real information: I’m about halfway through the Pokemon Sapphire run, well ahead of my concept of a schedule. Granted, if I don’t finish this weekend, it’s not looking likely that I’ll beat my record, but I’m less concerned abotu that, really.
GASP tomorrow, but I have no clue if I’m going; the traffic concerns are starting to weigh into my decision to cross the city on a day when, strictly speaking, I don’t have to. Oh, and I have another obligation tonight. We’ll see.
The tech gods giveth, and the tech gods taketh away. Smash Bros. Brawl delayed until February, Electronic Arts buys BioWare (also putting the quality– or even the continued existence!– of the Sonic RPG in doubt), and the Comcast TiVos (real TiVos, not the crappy-ass Scientific America DVR that I’ve been stuck with that is too stupid to understand that I do not need nine copies of Episode 2 of Torchwood before I see Episode 1) roll out in New England only so far.
At least Touch Detective 2 came out on time. Mmmmm. Touching stuff. It feels good to touch stuff again.
Aside from the news which I dare not say, lest Rick rise up and feast upon my tender, non-vegan flesh (seriously, he’s right, it’s way overhyped, but if you’re a gamer and don’t know what I’m talking about, just go to IGN or something and glance at the headlines for this morning), I found this little gem, which would have made me quite happy. See, the gist is, along the lines of such wonderful avatar makers as Zwinky, Imvu, or even that half-assed Flash one for South Park, one could create a 3-D model in the style of the Final Fantasy characters, leaning more towards the Ivalice or FF9 style than the more realistic style of 8 or 10. I was so thrilled to give it a shot, until I discovered that it’s a Japan-only thing, as it’s locked behind some weird membership level or something that I simply cannot figure out.
I’m hungry now, and there’s about to be a storm, so I’m going to eat and play games. That seems like a good overall plan.
Today is another quiet day, but for one thing. I’ve made little secret of the fact that I’m fond of the music of Vanessa Carlton, and so it was with some amount of excitement that I picked up her newest album this morning from iTunes. The disc is a bit on the slower side, and a bit deeper than what I was expecting (I was hoping for more than one uptempo track, or at least one longer than “Hands on Me”’s just-shy-of-three-minutes), but overall, I’m totally in love with it. It just meshes so well, and there’s little there to complain about. I do wish it were a bit longer, though, but for the price it’s well worth it (I was shocked that it wasn’t the standard $10, though I would have gladly paid that). In any event, that’s my big music thing for the time being.
I’ve got, as usual, way too many projects running right now, competing for attention and brain-bandwidth. In order, though: I’m still concentrating on the Poketoberfest run, and as of this writing I’m just about to enter the fourth Gym (in English: just under 40% of the way through the game, counting leveling and sidequests); I’ve had a burning desire to start writing my Nano outline because it would set me up for what I’ve randomly decided I really want my NaNo to be (using the existing outline as another exercise to ‘feel out’ the characters); and I’m still mid-viewing through Doctor Who, Torchwood, Bab 5 Season 5, and trying to get caught up on the various CSI-alikes running now. I have letters to write, GASP is coming up this weekend, and then there are the thousand other obligations I deal with as they come up.
I’ve been doing a little bit of thinking about the whole “daily entries” thing. I’m not giving up on the challenge this year– heaven forbid, actually; I got this far, and I’m not going to quit with just under three months to go. But, more than anything, I’ve been looking back at how many of my entries were, for lack of a better term, completely worthless. There’ve been good posts to come out of this year, but more often than not the daily update is something along the lines of “I’m too busy” or “nothing interesting happened, so I’m going to natter on for two paragraphs to fill space”. When I do post, it’s of limited use to some people. And I’m really not exactly thrilled with intermingling too much of my gaming, anime, and media stuff with the real-life updates and other rants on normal, non-geeky life.
There’s solutions, of course, that allow me to not give up the daily updates; I could set aside one day a week for each different topic, but that is way too regimented for me. Besides, I tried that at the beginning of this year with the “Link Wednesday” tag… and you can see how much use that’s gotten. No, I think the best way to handle this is to do some re-thinking and redesign. I’m still hammering out the details, but starting at the beginning of the year, there’s going to be two regular places one can see and hear my jibba-jabba. And, if I’m lucky, my dear readers will only need to look in one place to see them. It makes sense if you think about it.
Today, however, is laundry and Pokemon day. Catch you all soon enough.
Nothing special today, folks. Just did some switching around of some layout bits on the blog front page. I may eventually go ahead and do some actual work on a better “real” front page, but that’s in the future. Catch you folks tomorrow.
This might be a bit preliminary, but I am warming up to the idea of actually buying a Playstation 3. I certainly am not putting it on my “to buy” list anytime soon– I will always maintain my stance of not buying systems based on promises of good games– but it’s no longer on my “won’t buy at all” list. The reason for this change, of course, is the rumored/announced price drop that’s a year too late.
Europe, as always for Sony, gets the news first: a 40GB PS3 at a price point of 399 Euros was announced, and the latest rumors are that the US could see this as an official announcement of the same hardware for $399 as soon as next week. The hardware in question is slightly modified from the original PS3 specs; the new model loses a couple of USB ports and the memory card reader, but retains Wifi connectivity and HDMI output. The most important difference, of course, is that the ‘budget’ (ha!) PS3 also sacrifices PS2/PS1 disc compatibility. You would think I would be upset over that, but I’m not, actually.
See, the reason I’d buy a PS3 wouldn’t be just to play PS2 games, but more for the PS3 titles (which, coincidentally, is why I don’t already have one). I already have a PS2. I don’t need another one. More to the point, the rest of the hardware losses are of negligible importance. How much USB crap am I really going to attach to the PS3? I have a memory card reader already, and if I really want a bigger hard drive, I can get one (but I doubt I’ll want it). Those changes don’t affect the perceived value of the machine in my eyes. The PS2 probably would only get me about $55 in credit towards the PS3; Sony’s just telling me to keep the machine and knocking $100 off. Since I could give two craps about Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, the movie playback capabilities are also a non-issue.
It’s still expensive– still too expensive right now given its library– but it’s getting closer. As soon as there’s a set release date for Metal Gear Solid 4 or Disgaea 3, or previews of FF13 that praise gameplay, I’ll consider it. A price drop further would sway my favor as well. But for once, Sony might actually be doing something kind of almost right. Now, if they just weren’t trying to spin the pulling of backwards compatibility as a ‘feature’ rather than a sacrifice, I would have been willing to say they actually did do an unqualifier-affected good thing.
