Longklaw.com

I have been a Netflix member for a little over 2 years now. I use it mostly for TV shows and movies that would be hard to find at Blockbuster or Movie Gallery. They opened a distribution center in Jackson within the past year, so for the most part the DVD’s get here faster than when they were coming from Georgia. Another positive is that I can keep DVD’s as long as I want to. I usually don’t keep them very long. It seems like a waste of money to hold on to a movie for an extended period of time. My biggest problem is that if you rent a lot of movies, you don’t get a high priority because they don’t make money off you. Google the phrase “Netflix throttling” and you’ll see what I mean.

I promised myself at the beginning of the month that I wouldn’t rearrange my queue for the rest of the month of April. The last time I rearranged it was on April 1. The problem is that I keep moving DVD’s to the top and I’ll never get to some of the movies farther down the list. The only thing I’ve allowed myself to do is remove DVD’s that I rented from Movie Gallery or Blockbuster. I currently have 355 DVD’s (a lot of them are TV shows with multiple discs) in my queue. I don’t know that I’ll ever see them all. Even though I haven’t really been tempted to break my promise, I’m glad the month is almost over. I’ve already planned out what I’m going to make my top 20 items when May 1 gets here. Some of them are made up of multiple discs:

1. Wonderfalls
2. Strangers with Candy Season 3
3. Aeon Flux
4. CS Lewis: Beyond Narnia
5. The Commish Season 2
6. The Rainmaker
7. Capote
8. K-Street
9. North Country
10. Rock School
11. Summer Lovers
12. Angel Season 1
13. Thirteen
14. Holes
15. Conan O’brien 10th Anniversary
16. The Dark Crystal
17. Mulholland Drive
18. Fun with Dick and Jane
19. Interview with the Vampire
20. The Shield Season 1

Weird, huh?

I am enjoying my time in Azeroth. Somehow, it’s better than Starkville. I like the paladin and druid equally at this point. My only problem is that sometimes I have trouble getting into the game. From what I’ve heard, that is a common problem.

I signed up for a one week free trial of DDO. I just have to download it. Unless it takes an incredibly long time to download, I’ll be playing it sometime this weekend.

It looks like Xfire is being bought by Viacom. I remember when I first heard about it on TechTV, back when it was still TechTV. It couldn’t have been too long after Xfire first started up. If only I could remember to run Xfire every time I play a game. If anybody uses Xfire, my screen name is longklaw.

I decided to try Internet Explorer Beta 7 for a little while. I know it sounds risky, but I wanted to try it. I’m ok with IE’s new look. It reminds me a lot of Netscape 8 for some reason. I’m really glad that it has tabbed browsing. That feature is the only one I wish IE6 had. Of all the web sites I went to, there was only one that looked weird when I viewed it using IE7. After using it for a little while I decided it was time to uninstall IE7 and course IE6 froze up every time I tried to use it. Thank goodness for system restore.

Final Fantasy VII – Advent Children finally came out on DVD yesterday. I went to Sam Goody and picked up a copy. I’ll probably be watching it in the next few days. The manager at Sam Goody told me that I had been shopping there as long as he had been manager there, which is a long time. He said that I was one of those customers he expects to see there at least once a week. Though that used to be true and I have started back shopping there recently, I don’t go to Sam Goody nearly as much now that we have a GameStop here in Starkville. Still, it was nice to know that he appreciated my bu$ine$$.

The spambots have found me in my new home. [sarcasm]I am so thrilled about that.[/sarcasm]

Another relaxing afternoon. I’ve spent a little time working with Google SiteMaps, so hopefully Google will be able to crawl the site more easily.

I’ve been watching the first season of Six Feet Under. It’s morbid, but fascinating.

WoW is just as fun as I remember it. Maybe I can get in an extended session within the next few days.

I really like World of Warcraft, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist the urge to play Dungeons & Dragons Online. Maybe one game will win out over the other if I try both. I have too much free time on my hands right now.

World of Warcraft has won for the time being. I have a character on Frostwolf and another on Detheroc. The one on Frostwolf will probably be my main. You get three guesses on his name, but you’ll probably only need one. He’s a human paladin. The one on Detheroc is a Night Elf Druid and might be deleted if I don’t like him.

I haven’t done anything with either character yet, but tonight after 24 that will change.

My dilemma right now is whether or not I should play World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons Online. If I don’t decide on something soon, I may play neither and put off MMORPG’s for a little longer.

I’ve played World or Warcraft before. Unfortunately, it came around the same time as Everquest II, so I didn’t get to play WoW much. I did have fun when I got to play. I really like Blizzard games. The game performed well on my system. I liked being able to work alone at times. I liked the fact that you could get in a quick session and feel like you’ve accomplished something in that time. The look of the game wasn’t my favorite, but it worked. I only know of one person for certain who is still playing the game, so I would have to play mostly with strangers, which isn’t really a big deal. I still have my copy of the game, so I wouldn’t have to buy another one.

I don’t know whole lot about Dungeons and Dragons Online. My computer is starting to get close to the low end, so it may not handle this game as well as WoW. From what I’ve heard it’s hard to make progress if you go solo. Fortunately, there will probably be a lot new people near the same level as me since it is a fairly new game. I think some of my friends are playing the game right now, so that would be a plus. I don’t own a copy, so I would have to buy one.

It’s been about a year since I’ve played an MMORPG. Hopefully I’ll be back in the mix soon.

I am very excited about the new Pearl Jam album coming out next month. Yes, they are still making music. The self-titled album is their 8th studio album and will be released on May 2. It’s their first studio album since late 2002. I’m going to pre-order my copy now.

The first single, “Worldwide Suicide”, has been available for free download on http://bootlegs.pearljam.com for the past few weeks. It’s an anti-war song, not a song telling everyone to kill themselves.

What’s really cool is how much I’ve heard that song on the radio around here. I would’ve expected it on the MSU station, but I’ve only heard it on two completely different stations. I think those two are owned by the same company, but it’s nice to know there are still some stations around here that are friendly to Pearl Jam.

The phrase “Fighting crime in a future time” has been in my memory and pops into my head at random times (not very often, though). I don’t think I knew where it came from until tonight. I was in Blockbuster and saw C.O.P.S. on DVD. This is an animated series that aired from 1988 to 1989 (yes, I’m that old) and has nothing to do with the reality show Cops. It’s one of those things that come up that make you think of your childhood and the good old days. I’m sure I’ll rent it eventually, but I wonder if I’ll even like it. We’ll see.

It’s come out in the past few days that Robert Jordan has a rare blood disease called amyloidosis. You can read the note he wrote on his publisher’s web site here. He gave a lot of interesting statistics, but is seems like he has a median life expectancy of 4 years. Of course he could live less than that or a lot longer than that.

I think the 12th and supposedly final book in the series was scheduled to be released in 2007 or 2008, but that may be up in the air now. I’ve known since I started the series that he wasn’t a young man. I used to jokingly say that if the died before he finished The WoT, I would find a way to kill him a second time. I don’t really care about all those other books he wants to write, I just want him to finish The WoT. I wonder if we would ever find out what was supposed to happen if the last book was never published.

I know I’m being insensitive by focusing only on the fact that I may not get to see the ending. I don’t know what it’s like living with amyloidosis and I don’t know what it’s like knowing that your life may only have a few mores years left in it. I hope that his treatment is successful, he gets those 30 years that he wants, and he can give us many more books. Where would we be without his long, drawn-out, artificially-inflated stories? We love them and we him for writing them.

Lately almost all of my gaming time has been devoted to a game called Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube. It’s a highly addictive RPG that came out a couple of years ago, but I had never heard of it until late last year. Yes, the plot is a little involved, but the battle system is great and the audio and graphics are good too. My roommate and I beat it in about 72 hours and are currently going through the game a second time.

I re-rented Indigo Prophecy. This fulfilled a prophecy that I made in a previous entry. I like this game a lot more now that I’ve had a chance to really get into it. You get to play from the perspective a someone who has committed a crime and the detectives investigating the crime. Fun.

I also rented Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the Xbox and played it a little. Back when Pacman got this game I wasn’t a fan of the show, but now I am so I thought I would give it a try. So far it’s been a really fun game to play. I’m looking forward to spending more time playing it and moving on to the sequel.

Maybe I’ll be trying out DDO – maybe not.

“No power in the ‘verse can stop me.”