It started small. Joined to keep track of an ex-guildy. Then have of the returners old guard added me. Then I found Castle Age. So in addition to being a 'social network' with a bajillion people, Facebook also has these things called apps. I'm going to guess some of them actually do something but most of them are games. These range from browser text based RPGs (like Castle Age & Mafia Wars) to cheap flash games like Farmville and Treasure Madness. So like I said, at first I started small. Then I got bored. Then one turned into like... 20. While I'm still on the look for the next best thing(tm) like usual, I've trimmed it back to Castle Age, Mafia Wars, and Farmville.

tags: games

That some of the oldskool Returners are playing EuphRO again. I'm somewhere between "Why the hell are you playing a 10 year old korean grinder?" and "Can I play with you gaiz?". I'm not sure.

tags: games

District 9: this is why I hope we never run into an alien species. This is exactly the dumb shit that we would pull off: Give them whores, catfood, and a slum for badass weaponry. Good job, humanity. You fuckers. But a damn good scifi flick. I was rooting for the Prawns by the end of the movie and the power armor Wilkers uses was freaking sweet.

Inglorious Basterds: the idea of a jewish revenge plot during WW2 is an awesome idea. What's not so awesome is making half the movie NOT about the title characters but a jewish girl that decides to burn down her theatre full of Nazis. The movie, especially in the middle, was godawful slow. Worth renting at least. Brad Pitt was surprisingly awesome and I'll be pronouncing it "Natzi" for a while. I just wish there was more screentime for him and the basterds....

tags: movies

So my dad got me a $50 gift card so I figured I'd spend it on a new mp3 player since I've become pretty grouchy with the ol' iPod as of late. So I bought myself a 16g Zune HD....

And it's pretty freaking sweet.

A lof of that comes from the whole Zune Pass thing which is basically me paying $15 a month for a carte blanche to load up the zune with songs downloaded though its software/marketplace. I think longterm it'll be pretty nifty. Think about it -- how much stuff is out there that you wouldn't mind listening to, but don't want to blow $10 for their CD? I haven't listened to the Scorpions in years, but I could easily go in, download it, and load it up if it tickles me fancy.

And it's got a radio player built-in. So if I get bored of what I download I can go see what 98 rock or DC 101 are playing. I haven't had a good excuse to listen to the radio for a couple years so this little feature is a nice one to have.

Now I need a case....

tags: music

Merry Christmas, you glorious bastards. <3

Tomorrow should be interesting. I don't expect much in the way of epic lootz, but I figure i'll come out with a copy of Dragon Age probably. Maybe a Zune HD if my dad took me seriously. We had an interesting conversation a couple days ago.

Him> What do you want for christmas?
Me> I dunno. I don't need anything (after putting out $$ to upgrade to Windows 7)
Him> It's not about what you need, it's about what you *want*.
Me> Well.... A Zune HD (because I'm still ready to set my iPod on fire since I can't recover my music from it)

I anticipate some post-christmas shopping. Cuz I bought mom some plates and Dad a new hair trimmer.

This is why you tell people what you want, because odds are high they'll buy you the wrong stuff. >.>

So couple weeks ago I bought windows 7. This week I got the new DVD-ROM I need to install the damn thing (my old DVD was old enough that it didn't load dual layer discs). I've long been plagued with a 'Ntldr not found' problem when I boot my system because I probably installed it wrong. I made the retarded decision to format my old 'media' (read: porn & music) drive rather just do what I later wound up doing which was unhooking the old drive. So in the end I wound up formatting my main drive with all my stuff on it.

About 80 gigs and 5 years worth of ill-aquired comics, porn, and music, gone.

Manly tears were almost shed. But hey I have a clean install of Windows 7 now.....

Also: when my iPod dies, I'll never buy another iPod. Fuck Apple. I have to redo all my mp3s manually now since I can't just get the ones I have off the iPod directly. At least I have backups, thankfully, of the stuff I bought.

tags: life

What with the whole christmas thing and stores trying to rip you off for everything, I'm wondering if now is a good time to pick up Windows 7. I'm using windows xp so I figure sooner or later they'll discontinue xp and it gives me a good excuse to upgrade my ram since it's dirt cheap nowadays.

Maybe I'll get more than 5 fps in 25 man raids in melee.

Signed up on facebook to follow an ex-guildy and probably some of the other guys I used to raid with.

Still, it feels weird. Then again, I have a LJ so.... yeah.

Also damn you Blizzard for not releasing 3.3. Another week spent banging my face on hard modes. :(

So, when it comes to an samurai anime series one must ask: "why anime?" After all, there is the whole live action chanbarra thing. There's a precedence, basically. Shigurui (I think I'm spelling it right) has a really good answer.

So it can be ridiculously ultraviolent.

There is, an example, a scene where the series' protaganist, Fujuki, rips the lower jaw off an offending ronin with his bare hands. It's been awhile since I've seen an anime this violent so I found that enjoyable. The storyline was otherwise enjoyable even had a certain level of deja vu going on. Been there, done that. The only thing that annoyed me about the series was the ending seemed... incomplete. Like there's some episodes missing or there's another season of shows. You're introduced in the first episode to Fujuki as 'the one armed swordsman', but they never explain how he lost his left arm. They never conclude the match in the first episode, but it's a samurai anime. They probably kill each other simutaneously. :P

tags: anime

Roaming around a music site like say Amazon's mp3 site with a willingness to burn money is a dangerous thing. Picked up three CDs of varying awesomeness.

Dragonforce - Ultra Beatdown. Seriously, you guys fail. Why didn't somebody tell me a year ago Dragonforce dropped their fourth CD? Maybe it's just as well that I wasn't told. Not that the CD is really bad, but it sounds almost just like Inhuman Rampage. There's a couple really good songs and a bunch of other songs that just go in one ear and out the other. For the sun and the flames of hell and steel and dragons and stuff. It sounds like they're having trouble coming up with lyrics, but to be fair I've only listened to the CD once.

Muse - Integrity. One day, Muse will be more famous than the Beatles. It'll take time and a couple more CDs, but one day Muse will produce a CD so awesome that it will blind us. It's like every CD they release gets better and better. I also find it weird that as Radiohead goes further away from using the guitar and more synthy, Muse embraces their inner Queen. When the band rocks, they rock and when they're pretty, they're very very pretty. Like kittens in a meadow of sunflowers.

Alice in Chains - Black gives way to blue. Argh. I hate record companies. This is the kind of CD that makes me wish I still had newsnet access (damn you Verizon) so I could pirate CDs before I buy them. "Oh look. This song sounds pretty cool ('Check my brain'). I'll buy the CD... only to find there are like 3 good songs and the rest are all FAIL". Maybe the CD will grow on me. Oh well. Decent filler for my iPod I guess.

tags: music

Protip: if you make an anime series out of a successful manga, you should at least bother to stick with the fucking story. The anime was great until the fight with Rigaldo.... At first I thought it was gonna be a bland Berserk with chicks, but it turned out better than I thought and started reading the scanlations. Reminds me that one of these days I need to read all of Berserk.

God knows I need to read/watch something more manly. The anime version of Raki has to be one of the most annoying worthless male characters of all time. The manga version, who looks a lot younger, wasn't half as annoying. Maybe it's just the medium or the anime version's voice actor.

TLDR: manga > anime

tags: anime

For those that need an action RPG fix until Blizzard puts out Diablo III sometime before 2020, Torchlight has been pretty fun so far. And for $20, it's a pretty good buy for a single player game.

tags: games

http://penguinsattack.com/

Need to find more quality games, but this one was pretty enjoyable. You basically build turrets and missles and stuff along the path these evil penguins march upon. Not exactly hard, but still enjoyable.

tags: games

I now know what it's like to set a $50 bill on fire and watch it burn.

Part of me knows that I shouldn't do it. Knows that within a couple months the game will have free trials. Knows all about how badly NCsoft is with botting and goldsellers from reading their own forums.... but dammit, I'm bored.

tags: games

So. About a month ago I decided it was finally time to find me a new morning raid guild. So.... I did and wish I had done so sooner. The new guild is pretty cool and I like the raid leaders. I found having a raid leader that cusses and yells a surprisingly nice change of pace. A lot better than my old raid leader who coddled bad dps.... For the first time in a long time, I feel a need to improve how I play and be concerned about my general performance. It feels a lot better than sitting around having the raid leader for nthmillion freaking time explain the same old tired fights. That and now that the tourney is out, I have only set foot in ye ol' naxxaramas once in a month and that was with my weekend pally diversion.

We just cleared ToC25 last week so things are looking up. And now that my trial is up and I have 'member' status, I should start getting a degree of priority for loot.

Things are looking good. Maybe I will see Arthas before the next expansion.

tags: wow

You suck at putting together furniture. Hell, you suck at putting anything together that involves screws (note the Perfect Grade Wing Gundam model box sitting around collecting dust).

So basically I decided to buy a new desk. It's a nice desk and it was only $100. Has a tempered glass top and looks generally attractive for a desk. Only a couple problems. Of course being a put-together cheap desk, the instructions were rather vague and the little wrench that it came with was apparently engineered for asian midgets. That was... yeah. My fingers still ache from that little adventure. But hey three hours later I got the damn thing together.

Now I just have to get rid of the old plywood monster of a desk.

tags: life

Rented Transformers G1 Season One. I could remotely swear that this show was not quite as dumb. This show definitely has not aged well.

tags: anime

I loved Gurren Lagan. I thought the first 13 episodes was one of the best "boy becomes a man" stories ever in mecha anime history. The rest of it was just pure craziness. WHO DO YOU THINK I AM! but Gunbuster 2 was pretty cool and deserves some love. It's got the same 'wait, you can do that in mecha anime?' trend that FLCL and Gurren Lagan had going for it. I appreciated that it was a basically six episodes too like FLCL.

It's good suff. Go watch it.

tags: anime

Watched the first season on YouTube. Nothing especially new and exciting about Gundam Wing 2.0, but I did enjoy it more than I did Seed/Seed Destiny. There were a few serious "OH SHIT NO THEY DIDN'T!" moments near the end and I enjoyed the overall lack of whining and general wankery. OK, Setsuna's Gundam worship came close, but it was acceptable compared to the excessive emofabulous Kira/Athrun/Shin combo from Seed/Seed-D.

One of these days I need to actually watch Gundam Wing in its entirety.

Oh and protip: never, ever look at the comments when you watch any anime on youtube.

tags: anime