I remember reading Childhood’s End a while back and getting to the point where humanity didn’t have to work for a lot of and people became absorbers of media. It made me think of how much time I spent watching TV, playing games, listening to podcasts, etc. It’s fun. I can do what I want with my free time :). Here’s some of the stuff that I’ve gotten into over the past few months.
I rented Robot Chicken: Season 2. Still hilarious. Some of my favorite skits:
• The Neverending Story
• Final Fantasy VII
• E.T.
• Captain Planet/Ted Turner
You can probably find these skits on YouTube if you don’t want to get the DVDs.
I played BlackSite: Area 51 on the Xbox 360 on an off over a couple of months. Those commercials with the little girl made me want to play it. Fun game with excellent graphics. Not the best first person shooter, but still good.
I finally played Portal. Now I know what everybody’s been talking about. It’s a first person shooter puzzle game. I felt smart when I figured out some of those puzzles.
Five Days was a British miniseries that came on HBO. It was an interesting concept. You get to see 5 days out of a 79 day missing person investigation. Neat, but I got bored.
John Adams was an HBO miniseries that I actually liked. I love those historical dramas. Guess what it’s about.
In Treatment was an interesting show that came on HBO. It’s about a therapist named Paul and his patients. It came on 5 nights a week and you got to see the same patient each Monday, each Tuesday, etc. On Fridays you got to see his sessions with his own therapist. It started out really slow and I thought about only watching the episodes with the patients that I liked. However, I stuck with it and about 3 weeks into it got really good. I’m interested to see what it’s going to be like next season.
Enchanted Arms is a strategy RPG that I played on the Xbox 360. It’s a pretty good. I found myself getting bored at times. You spend way too much time scrolling through dialog. And there’s no animation during a lot of those scenes. You just see images of the characters in the foreground that change occasionally. The graphics are great and the battles are fun. It has a flamboyantly gay playable character. The manual says that he’s a transvestite. *Spoiler Alert* After he supposedly dies early in the game, he goes around disguised as someone else. At the end he reveals that he did so because the stuff he had to do to help save the world wasn’t ladylike. Fun stuff.
If you’re a fan of LOST, you might want to play LOST: Via Domus. It’s not a long game and you get easy achievement points. I had heard that the executive producers of LOST said that the ending to this game wasn’t a dream, so that meant that I definitely had to play it. I’ll give you a link to the ending so you don’t have to suffer through the game.
I rented Planet Earth and it looks awesome in HD. Enough said.
The Lost Odyssey commercials with that Jefferson Airplane song made me want it. It’s a really good game. I haven’t gotten to the end. I really need to get back to it.
I’m got around to playing Halo 3 only about 9 months after everybody else played it. I liked the game and the story. I’m not really sure about the ending. I’m going to start playing multiplayer this weekend. Some of the guys at work are having a Halo night next weekend.
Heavenly Sword is the first game that I’ve played on the PS3. I decided to rent it from Gamefly since reviews said that it was as short game. It’s a very good looking game and a lot of fun to play. It reminds me a lot of God of War. It is a pretty short game, which is fine by me. The final boss fight is annoyingly hard, and I almost gave up on the game because of it. But a couple of weeks later I picked it back up and beat it. Score!
I first started watching Babylon 5 near the end of its thirds season when I was still in high school. I immediately liked it and watched all the remaining episodes and TV movies while in high school and college. I got caught up on the previous episodes during my freshman year in college when TNT started airing them 5 nights a week. I remember trying to be sure to be back in my dorm room every night or recording the episode if I wasn’t going to be there.
I’ve been meaning to re-watch B5 for a while now. I bought season 1 recently and finished watching it earlier this week. I hadn’t seen these episodes in over years. I had heard people say that season 1 is bad compared to the rest and I remembered the later seasons as being much better than the first. There were some moments here and there where I cringed a little on the inside, but I really enjoyed the first season.
Part of my enjoyment may have come from the fact that I know what’s going to happen later. Each season has a title, which is also the title of one of the episodes from that season. The title of season one is “Signs and Portents’’. I can see them planting the seeds for future storylines. I remember why I liked this show so much. I can’t wait to jump into season 2.
I got a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice yesterday. A postal carrier was found to be in possession of multiple Gamefly and Netflix rentals. One of the rentals in her possession was either on its way to me or on its way back from me. Her illegal activities had been going on since August 2007. She’s out of custody and her trial was supposed to take place this week. I went to the victims’ website that the DoJ has set up and I can stay up-to-date on the developments of the case.
Since this trial is taking place in California, I’m assuming that the crime took place there and it’s a Gamefly rental. I wish I knew exactly which game it was. It was probably a game that I sent back and marked as sent on their website when they didn’t get it after a while. I think there has been a game or two that I didn’t receive after a week, so I asked for another copy. Whatever the case, at least somebody is doing something about it. The long turnaround time annoys me sometimes. I figured that this kind of thing does happen. Gotta have my games and movies 🙂
I became interested in Brandon Sanderson when I found out that he was finishing The Wheel of Time for Robert Jordan. I decided to start with his first book, Elantris.
Elantris was a city of magical people whose inhabitants were thought of as gods. Something has changed and now Elantrians are thought of as being cursed. It’s been 10 years since the fall of the city, and book focuses on 3 characters with related plot lines. The story takes place both inside and outside of Elantris.
One thing that attracted me to this book is that it’s a standalone story. It’s not one part of an epic series. Nice! As always with fantasy novels, it took a little while to get into. I think part of it had to do with learning a new universe. I was having a little trouble in my head figuring out how some of his terms should be pronounced and somebody else’s pronunciations might be different. I just had to make myself not worry about that and get on with the book. I also didn’t like the frequency in which Sanderson was throwing out new terms and not really explaining what they mean. There’s no glossary in the back to help clear things up. Eventually, everything was explained enough to understand what he was talking about. Once I started getting into the book, I really enjoyed it. I do remember thinking that there were a lot of surprising twists happening, but that’s okay. I found it interesting that there weren’t many battles. There was a great deal of intellectual maneuvering, but not much physical fighting. I’m pretty sure I’m going to read Sanderson’s Mistborn series when I get a chance.
F.Y.I. – There’s an Elantris glossary on Sanderson’s website. I wish I had known this when I was reading the book.
The Sword and Laser’s current book is Unshapely Things and I’m already reading it. I don’t think I had ever heard of elf punk until now.
I buy songs from iTunes every once in a while. Sometimes a band that I like will release songs exclusively on iTunes. Sometimes I’m at work and I get an urge to hear a song right away and iTunes seemed like the best option in that situation. Now I think I’m going to start using Amazon MP3 when I want to download a song if it’s available there. Why? Because it has no DRM. With iTunes I can only listen to it on one of the 5 computers that are authorized on my account. I don’t even have an iPod. If I get it from Amazon MP3, I can listen to it on any device I want to that plays MP3s. Also, I don’t really like the iTunes software. I REALLY don’t like it.
Amazon just came out with a new widget that you can put on your website that allows people to preview songs. The owner of the website gets a small percentage of each sale. I decided to try it out.
Back to my ever-growing reading list. This time I read The Appeal by John Grisham. This is another one of his legal thrillers. The man knows how to write legal thrillers, so I’m glad he’s back to what he does best. What is The Appeal about? A company with a factory in Mississippi has just had a huge verdict returned against them. They were dumping harmful chemicals into the ground and the people in the area started getting sick. They are going to be appeal the case before the Mississippi Supreme Court and the company wants to get a friendly justice elected to the court. I saw an interview where Grisham said that this is the most political book that he’s written. He makes a good argument for appointing state Supreme Court justices instead of electing them. He gets Mississippi, its people, and their attitudes right so the book felt very familiar. It’s a pretty good book and I enjoyed reading it.
It’s been about a year and a half, but I remember being upset that I didn’t get the “free” portable DVD player that I was promised for signing up for DirecTV. Instead I got a crappy DVD player and then a second one. I didn’t think about calling in and complaining. I guess I just figured that DirecTV changed their deal sometime after I made the call to order service and something in the fine print gave them a right to do that. Every time I see portable DVD players in stores I kinda want one, but not enough to actually buy one myself.
Last week I got an interesting letter. There’s been a class-action lawsuit filed against DirecTV for not coming through on those portable DVD players. I had no idea. So there are others who got screwed like me. That must be why those two posts I made about the DirecTV gift received a lot of page views back then. It seems like a lot of people didn’t get DVD players at all. It’s great that I’ll finally be getting that portable DVD player. That’s all I want.
This letter about the lawsuit came on the same day that my DirecTV bill came. Is that a coincedence?
When I picked The Taking by Dean Koontz as my next book, I had no idea there would be similarties to my last book, Childhood’s End. There’s an alien invasion, but this time they appear to be hostile. The adult characters in this book have read a lot of science fiction books and watched a lot of science fiction movies, and that kind of annoyed me at times. The way that they talked didn’t seem like the way that real people talk, but maybe I just don’t know how real people talk. SPOILER: In the end the aliens leave and the survivors are left to rebuild society. You end up wondering if it was truly aliens that caused the catastrophe in the first place.
I keep hearing good things about Koontz, so I’m going to assume that I just picked the wrong book by him to try first. I’m not sure how I came to across this book in the first place. Next time I want to read one of his books, I’ll ask for recommendations from my friend John the Dean Koontz expert.
I’m glad that Battlestar Galactica is back on. A lot of us BSG fans are eager to find out the identity of the last Cylon, who is signified by the empty spot in the left part of the picture above. I’m throwing in my guess.
They’ve pretty much ruled out most of the remaining major characters. I guess they could’ve lied about certain characters not being Cylons, but I doubt that. As much as I like characters like Dee, it won’t be that big of a deal if it turns out to be her. I think it makes sense to bring in somebody completely new.
I remember hearing a story last summer. I may be getting some of this wrong, but I’m too lazy to look it up now. Billy Campbell, who played Jordan Collier on The 4400, met Ron Moore (executive producer of Galactica) and was practically begging to be given on role on the show. He’s a fan and offered to be on Galactica for free. The head of SciFi Network was there. She said she was going to Campbell to what he said.
Later on I heard that Ron Moore had actually had an idea in mind for Campbell and he was going to be on the show. My guess is that he’ll be the last Cylon. Of course, I’m probably wrong. I just hope they don’t make us wait the entire season to find out.
Update, 4/28
I guess my theory isn’t really new and a Google search would’ve shown me that. I didn’t watch the Season 3 finale until about 6 months after it aired. When the story about Billy Campbell came out last summer, 4 of the final 5 Cylons had already been revealed and at the time people were already wondering if he was a Cylon. At the time I hadn’t realized that they had revealed any new Cylons.
Today is Tax Day. I started on my return online a couple on months ago. I realized that I was going to owe the IRS for the first time, so of course I’m waited until the last day to pay them. I just finished my return.
I’m going to celebrate Tax Day by buying a PS3. I’m not buying any games. I just want to use it to watch movies. I’m not sure that I’ll buy any Blu-ray DVDs anytime soon, but I’ll rent some.
I rented Robot Chicken: Season 2. Still hilarious. Some of my favorite skits:
I played BlackSite: Area 51 on the Xbox 360 on an off over a couple of months. Those commercials with the little girl made me want to play it. Fun game with excellent graphics. Not the best first person shooter, but still good.
I finally played Portal. Now I know what everybody’s been talking about. It’s a first person shooter puzzle game. I felt smart when I figured out some of those puzzles.
Five Days was a British miniseries that came on HBO. It was an interesting concept. You get to see 5 days out of a 79 day missing person investigation. Neat, but I got bored.
John Adams was an HBO miniseries that I actually liked. I love those historical dramas. Guess what it’s about.
In Treatment was an interesting show that came on HBO. It’s about a therapist named Paul and his patients. It came on 5 nights a week and you got to see the same patient each Monday, each Tuesday, etc. On Fridays you got to see his sessions with his own therapist. It started out really slow and I thought about only watching the episodes with the patients that I liked. However, I stuck with it and about 3 weeks into it got really good. I’m interested to see what it’s going to be like next season.
Enchanted Arms is a strategy RPG that I played on the Xbox 360. It’s a pretty good. I found myself getting bored at times. You spend way too much time scrolling through dialog. And there’s no animation during a lot of those scenes. You just see images of the characters in the foreground that change occasionally. The graphics are great and the battles are fun. It has a flamboyantly gay playable character. The manual says that he’s a transvestite. *Spoiler Alert* After he supposedly dies early in the game, he goes around disguised as someone else. At the end he reveals that he did so because the stuff he had to do to help save the world wasn’t ladylike. Fun stuff.
If you’re a fan of LOST, you might want to play LOST: Via Domus. It’s not a long game and you get easy achievement points. I had heard that the executive producers of LOST said that the ending to this game wasn’t a dream, so that meant that I definitely had to play it. I’ll give you a link to the ending so you don’t have to suffer through the game.
I rented Planet Earth and it looks awesome in HD. Enough said.
The Lost Odyssey commercials with that Jefferson Airplane song made me want it. It’s a really good game. I haven’t gotten to the end. I really need to get back to it.
I’m got around to playing Halo 3 only about 9 months after everybody else played it. I liked the game and the story. I’m not really sure about the ending. I’m going to start playing multiplayer this weekend. Some of the guys at work are having a Halo night next weekend.
Heavenly Sword is the first game that I’ve played on the PS3. I decided to rent it from Gamefly since reviews said that it was as short game. It’s a very good looking game and a lot of fun to play. It reminds me a lot of God of War. It is a pretty short game, which is fine by me. The final boss fight is annoyingly hard, and I almost gave up on the game because of it. But a couple of weeks later I picked it back up and beat it. Score!
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