12.04.08

Some Minor Housekeeping

Posted in Gaming, Movies, Shameless Self-Promotion, Site News, Television at 7:10 pm

In case anyone’s planning to rob my house really interested, I went ahead and updated the Collection page, over to your right. I’ve been on the verge of wanting a second ‘big’ shelf to put the cabinet stuff in for quite some time now, and while I still have plenty of room, the primary purpose of the big shelf is to give me an at-a-glance look at the backlog. Despite my best efforts, this is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish.

Anyway. Enough bragging, I go now to eat and relax for a little while.

06.28.08

Just A Note

Posted in Anime, Gaming, Movies, Shameless Self-Promotion, Site News at 9:18 pm

Today saw a great many chores being done, but the most interesting of all is the only one really relevant to the usual readership of the site: I updated the Collection page, over there to your right. For the first time since last July, you folks can see what I’ve got on my shelves. The picture came out a little hard to read– I wanted to get both shelves in one shot– so I added the helpful and very long legend underneath it. Granted, it is a little bit more show-off-ish than I usually am, but I figure that if it only gets one update a year, then it can afford to be a little showy. (Before you ask: yes, there is an organization system. I just haven’t figured it out yet.) Anyway, enjoy it.

06.06.08

Whatchu Waitin 4

Posted in Anime, Gaming, Movies, Rants, Television at 5:26 pm

In certain cultures, the number 4 has unlucky or dangerous connotations. Some folks associate it with death, while computer geeks associate the number with loss (as in “404″). However, this coming weekend and the week thereafter, the number 4 is looking to come up with alarming regularity. To wit:

* I’ve just picked up the core rulebooks for Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, and will be reading over those to provide impressions at some point in the near future.
* I currently have four “active and new” series to watch: Avatar S1, School Rumble, .hack, and Veronica Mars S2. Furthermore, I’ll be starting Disc 4 of V.Mars.
* Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out on Thursday. There are 4 midnight launch parties at Gamestops in Pittsburgh (none of which are the store I pre-ordered from).
* And I’m thinking about taking a run through Wild ARMs 5 or XF. The connection’s not obvious until you realize that it would be the 4th Wild ARMs game I’ve cleared (I skipped 2 and 4 thus far).

There’s a fifth incidence as well, but mentioning it here would be bad. Anyway. I’m likely to be hip-deep in dice for the rest of the night, so I’ll catch you folks later.

05.22.08

Irony Man

Posted in Coding, Gaming, Movies, Rants at 5:33 pm

So… ( The promised Iron Man minireview is behind this. » )

In the interim between writing the above discussion of Iron Man and the retooling I did of it here at lunch, something else has started to bug me, and I feel it ought to take precedence over movie discussions. Most of you know that the little scrolling thingy at the top of the blog front page is powered, normally, by Twitter. I was introduced to Twitter through one or more podcasts that I listened to, and found it to be a pretty clever tool. Twitter’s primary function is as a micro-blogging tool; you’re given 140 characters to describe what you’re doing or where you are. It feels almost like a haiku, actually; you have a very small space to work in yet complete freedom within that space. Needless to say, I love the concept. I’ve even used it to somewhat great effect here on this ol’ blog.

Twitter’s implementation, however– and this is being nice about it– sucks.

Now, I’ll be completely honest in that my utilization of Twitter is not exactly what the developers intended. I imagine that the Twitter team felt it would be a slower-paced version of instant messaging; more akin to passing notes around class than a live conversation. To some degree, then, my use– posting thoughts without devoting the amount of time it would take to make a full post on the blog– could be considered a case of “you’re doing it wrong”. I’m fine with that. The problem is, however, that my “wrong” use of Twitter stays perfectly within the provided capabilities of the service. I’m not hacking anything, haven’t made any bizarre customizations, and nothing I’m doing is anything someone else couldn’t do. It’s the intent I’m conveying that seems different from other Twitterkin. That’s not my complaint.

My big complaint, in all honesty, is the same complaint I had that forced me to move from Blogger/WordPress.com to a custom tool back in 2005, and then back to WordPress in ‘06. I did not want my ability to work on my site to be reliant on an external application which fails repeatedly and inconveniently. Yesterday’s post exemplifies the fact that Twitter’s instability is causing problems for me. Therefore, I’m thinking about a way to do more or less the exact same thing as Twitter… but just for my site. I don’t want to knock the efforts of the Twitter team, but the constant downtime and slow access of the web client are more than a little irritating.

To that end, I’m thinking maybe I could create a small Windows or OS X client to carry around (ultimately creating an iPhone/iPod Touch version as well). I’m actually leaning towards creating an AIR-based client to start with, as that would easily let me prototype what I want the actual client to look like. And, you know, use it before I do the native clients. We shall see, of course. I imagine I’ll have a web-based mockup available soon.

Catch you folks tomorrow.

05.20.08

D’oh

Posted in Bailout, Gaming, Movies, Site News at 7:36 pm

Okay. It appears that in my rush to get through TWEWY– and believe me, it was a rush– I forgot that I wrote up a post over lunch. So instead of that post– which was about Iron Man– you get this, and the Game Clear notice that’s about to go up. I really am sorry, folks; I’m not usually one to space on this sort of thing, but as work is calming down (proof of this being that I really did get the post prepared over lunch) I should be getting more verbose very soon. Let’s just stick the Iron Man post on Thursday and see what I work out for tomorrow– I’m thinking I might watch NCIS now that the DVR’s built up a good buffer, but we shall see, huh?

Game Clear notice imminent…

02.27.08

Tangled Up In Blu

Posted in Movies, Rants, Television at 7:12 am

Note: I’m in abject misery; an honest-to-god cold has struck me, as opposed to surprise!badfood from two weeks ago. I don’t know how my parents managed to digitize their plague and transmit it over the telephone to me, but they did, and I have them (and the crystal-clear reception of my cell phone) to thank for this round of “will it nauseate?”. What I’m trying to say is that you probably shouldn’t count on a big long diatribe tomorrow.

I came across an interesting little factoid yesterday: apparently, the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 is now priced at $50. That would certainly make it a very tempting prospect if I had not also come to a realization– a fundamental paradigm shift that better explains how I’ve been looking at the whole, now-over “format war”. The revelation is this: ( I’m not ’smart’ enough for anything better than standard DVD… » )

01.02.08

Back To The Usual

Posted in Movies, Rants at 7:44 am

So, things are quiet this morning. Yesterday was quite relaxing; nothing of any real interest happened, except I treated myself to the last trip to the Chinese buffet for a very long time.

I also went to see The Golden Compass, which was a bit of a mistake; the film wasn’t bad as much as it was disappointing. It didn’t have an ending so much as they ran out of film and just put the credits on. Put another way, it felt like they were making the movie as if it were an episode of a television series, and not even a particularly well-paced one either. If they bother continuing it– which I would doubt at this point– the next one is going to be criticized for starting with a huge set of downers. Ah well.

Anyway, nothing much else to report right now; there are a few things I have to say about the gaming and anime accomplishments, especially Senko no Ronde, but those can wait until tomorrow. It’s strange, really; the first day I try to focus on life stuff, and my acute lack of a life hinders it. I suppose it’s no less than I deserve, though. Catch you folks tomorrow.