Midnight Madness

Very weird standing in line at midnight for a video game. There are maybe 200 people in line here at the Best Buy in Sherman Oaks. Everyone is under the age of 35. Maybe 50% Asian. A handful of actual honest-to-goodness girls... here with their boyfriends.

Now THERE's a great date. Hey, let's go stand in line at midnight for the video game that I'll be playing while I ignore you for the next few days.

The mood in line is pretty mellow. Like we're all too cool to be getting excited about this.

Line's moving!

Grand Theft Auto IV & Iron Man

It's a great week to be a geek.

April 2008 Music Diary

Here's what iTunes says I'm listening to this month-

Stop and Stare - OneRepublic
Chasing Pavements - ADELE
Run (I'm a Natural Disaster) - Gnarls Barkley
I Need Something - Newton Faulkner
Dream Catch Me - Newton Faulkner
Pump - The B-52's
Funplex - The B-52's
Keep This Party Going - The B-52's
Cheap and Cheerful - The Kills

Stop and Stare is on repeat on iTunes right now - love love love this song. And looking at the pop charts, so does everybody else.

The only other song close to getting as much play as Stop and Stare is the track by ADELE. I fell for this song a few months ago on UK radio, but her album just got released in the U.S.

Gnarls Barkley. So. Much. Fun. And the guy's name is D.J. Dangermouse. How can I not like them?

Newton Faulkner - more great, upbeat, acoustic guitar BritPop. Check his stuff out on the iTunes store. Four out of five tin roofs (rusted) for the new B-52's album. And don't forget to grab your free iTunes song each week, like The Kills.

It's time to start panicking

From the L.A.Times-

Rice in short supply at Costco, Sam's Club
Worried about rising prices worldwide, customers have been stocking up, prompting Sam's Club to limit sales to no more than four bags. Costco is considering a similar move.

So there it is, ladies and gentlemen. We're looking at a potential rice shortage... and I am FREAKING OUT.

I don't want to get all political here, but suddenly I care a lot less about the war, health insurance, the economy, taxes, Supreme Court justices who enjoy a good waterboarding on a Saturday night, ANY OF THAT. One of these fine people who want to be our next president better have a solid plan for solving the rice shortage.

I'll vote for any whacko candidate who can get me rice. White or brown.

The rice, not the candidate - you sick, sick, sick hilarious people.

SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING. Because I don't want to live in a world where a billion Asian people have to subsist on sourdough, wheat, white, and heaven help us, ciabatta...

Ow, my foot (and other insightful observations)

Nothing noteworthy. Just a few quick hits-

-Work is... um, well, it's work. It's quiet, but yet I'm still swamped. And looking at my calendar, it looks like it's only going to get busier.

-I got hurt again in hockey. Blocked a slapshot Monday night - whole foot went numb. Besides some swelling, the foot is fine. Now if only I could find some way to avoid getting hit all the time.

-Less than one week to GTA IV. I'm seeing billboards around town - and I'm GEEKED.

-New Cartoon Network show Ben 10: Alien Force is a hit. Big congrats to the whole team, including Dwayne, Glen, Tramm, Sam, Man of Action.

-And remember home shopping on television? Did anyone actually ever WATCH home shopping, let alone actually pay money for anything from them? Maybe if there'd been more events like this, I would've watched more.

Nostalgia Time!

Still in clean-up mode. Earlier this week, going through the garage looking for stuff to Ebay, I found my Kenner Star Wars Death Star Playset.

REMINISCING AHOY!



I must have been four years-old - my parents dragged me along to some other person's house. Their kid had a Death Star Playset, and I played with that thing non-stop for hours. It must've been on the drive home that I started my pleading and begging for a Death Star of my own.

I don't remember WHEN I got the Death Star. I just remember eventually getting my own playset - and I loved that thing.

Then when I was eight or nine, I looked for my Death Star playset... and it was gone. I asked my mom, who dropped the bad news. She'd decided that I wasn't using it anymore, so she gave it away to Goodwill so that some less fortunate kid could play with it. So not only did my mom give away my toy, but there was now some other kid out there... WITH HIS GRUBBY HANDS ON MY TOY.

[ASIDE - I once told this story to someone, who asked, "Well, was your mom right? Were you still playing with it?" SO NOT THE POINT. Doesn't matter that she was right, the point was that IT WAS MINE. MINE MINE MINE.]

Anyways, so I lost my Death Star Playset. And because it was one of the few Star Wars toys that Kenner stopped selling, eventually none of my friends had them either.

Fast forward fifteen years. I've got some spending money for the first time in my life, and thanks to the internet, I could find anything I want. So sure enough, I bought myself a Kenner Death Star playset. And it was awesome.

When I had room to show off all my cool geeky stuff, I had the Death Star playset displayed in my office. But now I don't have the room, so my toys are in boxes stored in the garage. So this week, cleaning my garage, I found my Death Star. And for a brief moment, I wondered if I should sell it.

Then I came to my senses.

I couldn't put myself through this all over. It was mine. My Death Star. I went through too much heartache and agony to get it. Years of being without one. Mine. MINE MINE MINE. And I wasn't going to sell it. If I have to be buried with it, so be it - I'll take my Kenner Death Star with me like some Egyptian Pharoah heading to the netherworld.

So that's that.

Or so I thought. Last night while digging through some more boxes in the garage, I came upon a surprise. A second Death Star. I'd totally forgotten that my first Death Star was missing a few pieces, then I'd picked up a second complete Death Star for a steal. So I'd boxed up the first Death Star and forgotten about it.

Oops.

Anyways, there's probably a lesson to be learned here about the stupidity of conspicuous consumption by nerds. No idea what it is, but there's probably a lesson to be learned here. But since I have two of the playsets, I think I'll go ahead and sell one.

Maybe.

E-bayked

Sorry about the lack of updates. My mind has been totally fried the past few days.

See, I've been telling myself that I have to get rid of all the clutter of cool stuff that I've accumulated over the years. So for the past few months, I've psyched myself up and grabbed three boxes of stuff that I had to let go. It's been a long slow process, but I finally put a whole mess of stuff up on Ebay last week.

The horrible part is that all that stuff only represents about 1/20th of the stuff I gotta get rid of, but I digress.

Since the auctions ended, I've been up to my armpits in bubble wrap and packaging tape. Most of the packages have been sent out, but a bunch more go out tomorrow. I just have to swing by the post office tomorrow on Tuesday, April 15th...

Um. Yeah. I really should've planned this better. Instead, I'll be going to the equivalent of a System of a Down mosh pit. Only less civilized.

I better get some serious positive feedback for this.

Blog Dropping

Hm. I meant that title to be a take-off of "name dropping" - but for some reason, now I picture blogs leaving droppings everywhere.

First, a few of my patented random uninspired thoughts-

-Work has been off and on the past few weeks. I wake up every day not sure if I'm going to have new work or not. Ah, the glamorous life of a freelancer. Still, I have some fun stuff I'm in the middle of now, and there's some neat stuff on the horizon.

-I'm almost done with Mass Effect. Yes, everyone, you were right - it's really good. Though, I hate that it suffers from "run slowly from one end to the other end to complete the mission" syndrome that a lot of RPGs suffer from. Still I love that my character got "paramour" bonus points.

-I'm counting down to the event of 2008. It's the defining moment of the year, perhaps the decade, perhaps my generation.

Yes, the Sex in the City movie. Because as a heterosexual male, I MUST KNOW what happens to, uh, um.... Cindy, Marsha, Tootie, Natalie, uh, Jermaine, Tito, and uh, whats-her-name - the ugly one?

So if you see me at the movie theatre this summer, I'm not there to see Iron Man (May 2), Prince Caspian (May 16), Indiana Jones (May 22), Dark Knight (July 18), or Star Wars Clone Wars (Aug 18).

-In all seriousness, the event of the year is April 29th - Grand Theft Auto IV. They're predicting that it'll sell 5.8 million copies in its first week - a tidy sum of $360 million. When I get my grubby evil hands on my copy, I'm cutting off all contact from the outside world and immersing myself in its sweet-sweet morally bankrupt goodness.

Now for some blog dropping (ewwwwwww)-

-John Rogers explains in his current post how he's breaking stories on his new television show. If you're not a writer, it's interesting insight into the process. If you are a writer, it's always useful to learn how other people are doing it.

-L.A. Times Funny Pages 2.0 collects amusing stuff around the web (it's where I learned about Improv Anywhere's "Best Game Ever"). If you're a gamer, you'll dig "GF TF2" - where a guy recorded his girlfriend playing Team Fortress.

Best Game Ever

I know, I know. A lot of improv stunts are uninspired and dumb. But not this one. None of the players, parents, or coaches were in on this - check it out.



You can read the behind-the-scenes here.

Where's my Parade?

My ice hockey team made the playoffs. And we take the playoffs very seriously, considering the high stakes of being in the lowest beginner division at an ice rink in the San Fernando Valley.

VERY. SERIOUSLY.

We won the semi-final playoff game on Saturday night, then won game one of the finals on Sunday night.

Early in that game, I got the puck on the left wing, one-on-one against a defense(wo)man on their team. I faked left, then cut to the middle, cranked up a huge slapshot, and BOOM - but she managed to block the shot. She got up shaking her wrist so I thought I'd gotten her in the hand.

After the game, I skated over and apologized and asked if she was okay. She laughed and said, "Thanks, now my b**bs hurt." Apparently, my shot hadn't gotten her in the hand - it'd gotten her in the chest right under the shoulder pads.

Now I mentioned this to a girl who plays on our team. She shuddered and said that taking a hit there is extremely painful and uncomfortable.

Wow. Learn something new everyday. So now I know if I'm ever being attacked by a woman, the best way to defend myself is to lash out like a maladjusted thirteen year-old boy. Gotcha.

Oh yeah, and my hockey team won the league championship Monday night, 6-3. But like I'm really going to blog about that?