On my way home from work today, I noticed the lady behind me driving somewhat erratically. I assume this was because she was eating an ice cream cone at the time. It’s really the perfect food to eat while driving - it has a high potential for falling on your lap, it requires the full use of one hand until it’s finished, and if you’re licking it like a child, your head is tilted at 45 degrees to the road.
I can only assume this was the reason for her poor driving. It could have been anything. For example: extensive brain damage.
The latest P05 bios update for my new motherboard seems to have improved the stability dramatically! Unfortunately, I can’t use my newly-stable PC to connect to the Internet on account of my cable getting fried during the previous week of thunder storms.
I’m using the brief periods where I can connect to write and post this update. In a way it’s a good thing, because it lets me focus on the recently released Metal Gear Solid 4 for the PS3. I’m a pretty huge fan of MGS1 and 2 (and Twin Snakes, of course) but sadly never got around to MGS3. It’ll definitely be hard to try at this point, since 4 is so good and fixes a lot of things that people consider “broken” about the series.
I also picked up Coldplay’s latest album, Viva La Vida and Tiesto’s newest entry in the “In Search of Sunrise” series, “In Search of Sunrise 7: Asia.” I always enjoy a lot of Coldplay’s songs, but this latest album is fantastic throughout, especially in the last half. “Life in Technicolor” reminds me of something that Bloc Party would do (although I suspect it has more to do with producer Brian Eno), and you can definitely hear the influences of Blur in “Yes.”
In Search of Sunrise is also good, although I don’t think it has any standout tracks like the Gabriel & Dresden remix of Way Out West’s “Mindcircus” from In Search of Sunrise 3: Panama. At least it plays like an actual trance CD, unlike Armin Van Buuren’s Imagine. If you haven’t seen the video for “Going Wrong” yet, I highly recommend it! It answers the question “What if you tried to make a boy band video with one boy, no budget and a blue screen?” The funny thing is that they’re blue-screening the streets of some Mediterranean city. You guys are European. You couldn’t fly to Ibiza for a weekend? The whole thing looks like it was cut together on a Sega Saturn.
In case you haven’t been keeping up, Too Human has a release date now: August 19th, sirs! Which explains why I have been incommunicado for the past five weeks. We’ve been very busy putting the finishing touches on the game to get it ready for release.
And now that we’re winding down I have time to upgrade this blog to 2.5.1 and change the theme a bit.
Australian electro group “The Presets.” I’d heard their other single “Are you the One” and wasn’t that taken with it. I don’t know what “This Boy’s in love” would be classified as… perhaps poppy EBM? Anyway, it’s pretty good. This video is a bit messed up at the end, though. Also, half-naked guys fighting in water, so maybe NSFW
I just got back from seeing an advance preview screening for Iron Man. In two words? Fucking amazing.
This is by far the best superhero movie I’ve seen since Batman Begins. I may, in fact, like it more because it has a robot suit in it, and that robot suit is so well thought out, designed, and modeled/animated that it makes everyone who green-lit the visuals in Transformers look like giant assholes.
When Iron Man gets hit, he moves like he’s a giant metal suit getting hit by something. When he takes off, flies, and lands, he looks like what a metal suit would look like doing that. He doesn’t float through the air like he’s made of tissue paper and twist-ties like 90% of the shitty animation that accompanies modern movies.
Robert Downey Jr. is so believable as Tony Stark, it’s one of things that seems like it couldn’t get any more perfect. Not only does he bear a striking resemblance to Whilce Portacio’s rendering of Tony from back in the late 1990s, but he’s a fantastic actor as well. The evolution of the character through the movie is seamless.
If I had to put hard numbers to it, I’d say that Iron Man was about one hundred times better than the Spiderman movies. Not just because I find Toby Maguire’s toady little face obnoxious beyond belief, but I know that I will never be bitten by a radioactive spider and gain super powers. I may, however, one day own a robot suit. Robot. Suit.
A new Nine Inch Nails single was released this week. The song’s titled “Discipline” and you can download it directly (for free!) from the official NiN website here. If you liked “Year Zero” at all, you’ll love this.
The final piece to the PC crashing puzzle lies not in faulty memory, or Windows Vista, or bad drivers, but in an overly complex PC case. That’s right, several important pieces of the computer were being shifted out of place because the case has a hinge with too much give. Now that all the cards are seated properly, everything looks good and Bioshock doesn’t crash every 5 minutes.
I’ve spent the better part of a week assembling a new PC and trying to get the stupid thing stable enough to use. I was originally going to title this post “fuck Vista” but it’s not Vista’s fault. It’s the fault of every manufacturer who still doesn’t have stable drivers out for Vista more than a year later. And there’s a lot of them - the only thing that’s worked out of the box has been the sound card.
I can’t get any game to run for more than 20 minutes under Vista, so forget it. I’m nuking the HDs and going back to XP. I may write another post later about the process of shopping for PC parts, and putting them together, but it might depress me.
Not only is it my birthday tomorrow, but it’s also the day the movie Doomsday opens. And it just so happens that Doomsday is the handle I used to use back when I played LAN games of Descent with my friends.
After a grueling all-weekend affair with Devil May Cry 3, I finally finished the game on Sunday night. By the end I had maxed out all of the styles (except the somewhat useless Royal Guard) and had enough purple orbs to Devil Trigger for fairly ridiculous stretches of time. I think one of the reviews I read when the game came out said that you should just stick with the Trickster style, and they were probably right.
I got wrapped up in the high-damage style of Swordmaster, but letting any of the later enemies hit you can really mess you up. Better to have level 3 Trickster to Star Dash out of trouble than to take a 4-bar hit from something.
Anyway, with DMC3 out of the way, I can finally start to play Devil May Cry 4. I’m trying this new thing where I have to finish 2 games before I can get 1 new game. This is in the hopes of clearing the ridiculous backlog of games I have, and to stop wasting so much money on them. My friends have already told me “good luck with that.”
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