This past weekend I got to see The Faint. I hadn’t been planning on going, but I’m really glad I did get to go, since they put on an amazing show. I wasn’t familiar with a lot of the material, since there were two albums (one of which had just been released) that I wasn’t aware of, but it was still great. Also, I like the new album.
SOMA wasn’t as terrible as I had assumed, but yeah it was bad. You can read a review of the show here that will paint a picture of it for you.
For the past couple weeks I’ve been thinking “shit, nothing’s been going on for me to write about here,” but then I realized I was just being lazy. I mean, I haven’t really felt like writing a serious movie review, but there definitely has been some stuff worth mentioning, at least.
I saw Chromeo play at the House of Blues here in San Diego last week, which was awesome. It happened to be P-Thugg’s birthday so they brought a cake out and sang for him. Immediately after that they did a short Journey tribute. Totally rad. Here’s some video I took of it… sorry it sucks.
Later this month I’ll be seeing Radiohead and next month I’ll see Ratatat. I can’t wait for those shows.
Before that was Comic Con. My objective of not spending money was a devastating failure. I bought Tachikoma, Fuchikoma, EVA-01, Paragoomba, and Bob-omb action figures, as well as 8 Samurai Executioner books and 2 Hellboy books. Overall, the show was a laid-back experience. We didn’t make a big effort to get there early on any day, and didn’t go to many panels. The three panels I attended in full were Watchmen, Pixar, and Kevin Smith / Seth Rogen. We tried to go see the Ghostbusters Game panel, but it was cancelled due to a “scheduling conflict” with the talent (aka Dan Aykroyd). I also got some awesome t-shirts. Among them are designs featuring Donkey Kong, Megaman, Watchmen, Ghostbusters, and Marathon.
Aside from that, I’ve gone to see some movies. The highlight has to be the Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which I’ve seen twice now (once in IMAX). This was the Batman film I’ve always hoped for. Heath Ledger steals the show and sets the tone of the movie.
I’m terrible at finishing games that I start. Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out in a couple of weeks, and I intend to get it on release day if possible. Metal Gear is a series where the games demand to be completed. The stories are far too rich and compelling to leave them or rely on spoilers for plot details.
Back to the topic at hand… before I get Metal Gear Solid 4, which will consume my attention as far as gaming is concerned, I resolve to finish at least some of the games I’m playing currently, some of which I’ve left unfinished far too long. The top titles on this list are:
Grand Theft Auto 4
Bioshock
Sam and Max Season 2 (Episode 5)
I thought about putting Oblivion on the list, but I’m far too obsessive and that would just take me forever. I’ll most likely just abandon that one. I also have No More Heroes, but at this point I may just save it for after MGS4 since I haven’t actually started it yet.
I did one more level of Bioshock today. Check again soon for more updates on my progress!
It’s always great fun to stare at your PS3 downloading a firmware update.
Helping me achieve new levels of boredom.
I really don’t understand why the update can’t be downloaded in the background like anything else. Sure, it shouldn’t run in the background when the update itself is happening, but why do I have to stare at the download itself? It’d also be nice if Sony would give us a list of the changes/improvements/fixes included in the update before downloading it.
Those of you who see me or speak with me on a day-to-day basis may already know this, but for those of you who don’t: I’m not dead.
I haven’t been watching that many movies, and unfortunately the few that I have I wasn’t really compelled to write up here, even the really great ones. I sort of fell out of the habit. I shouldn’t use that as an excuse to not write here, so maybe I’ll start posting more stuff along the lines of what I used to on Abattoir Noises 1.
These days I’ve been dedicating most of my spare time to playing games. Some on the PS3 and Wii, but the vast majority have been PC freeware indie games. In my PS3 and Wii I have Grand Theft Auto 4 and Smash Bros. Brawl respectively, and both are awesome. Enough hyperbolic nonsense has been spouted on the internets about these two games, so I’ll spare you here. Maybe someday I’ll put up a few critical nuggets if they occur to me. For Brawl they’ll most likely be too technical for most to really care.
I’ve also been trying to teach myself Flash, in hopes of broadening my skillset for web design and game development. I’ll eventually be posting some of the fruits of those labors here.
The last movie I saw was Iron Man. I was quite impressed… I expected it to at least be good, but the more hype built the lower my expectations were getting. In the end, the movie was a lot of fun, and lived up to my original expectations from seeing the preview the first time at Comic-Con last summer.
So, I’ve been avoiding writing for two reasons. Yes, one of them is that I’m lazy. The other was that I had to move the site due to a really stupid technicality with my service provider. In moving, my domain name stopped working for a while, and I spent a couple weeks trying to get their tech support to fix it.
Anyways, it seems to be fixed now, and the domain is pointing to the right webspace and the right database. Back to business as usual.
This is now my 2nd attempt at upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. My first attempt earlier today somehow killed the blog, but so far I seem to have everything back up and running. Now it’s time to test my theme and plugins…
Update: The dust seems to be settling… Looks like I’ve lost use of Extended Live Archives, but so far nothing else. We’ll see if I run into any other problems over the next few days.
Update 2: K2’s sidebar seems to be broken, too. Fuck.
Also, they still haven’t fixed the div/p issue. I had to go edit the code to fix it manually again.
This year’s Comic Con was a vast improvement over last year’s. All four days sold out, so I was dreading the crowds, but it wasn’t nearly as packed as it was last year on Friday or Saturday, which were a nightmare.
Some of my acquisitions from the Con.
I actually didn’t buy any comics at the show this year, since I buy them so regularly now. Instead, I scoured the floor for Nintendo-related merchandise, and found a bunch of neat little figurines and such. Last year there were barely any, so I was very pleased. Oddly enough, Nintendo itself didn’t have a booth at all this year, besides the Pokemon TCG booth.
Read about movie previews and more after the jump.
So, I’m re-reading the whole Harry Potter series, but out of curiosity, I opened a PDF for book 7 that I downloaded via BitTorrent other day. I had expected it to be a PDF copy somehow leaked from the publisher, an OCRed scan of the book, or the entire text transcribed by a crazy fan group.
It wasn’t any of those things. The PDF was actually just a series of photos someone had taken of the book, spread by spread. For some reason I found this hilarious.
Here is a SPOILER FREE sample (I even blurred the text):
Click the image to see it full size as it appears in the PDF.
As it is, the pages were already hard to read, since the resolution of the images was too low to begin with, but on top of this, some of the photos are blurry.
There’s an oddly pornographic feeling about the whole thing. Anyone else get that sense?
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