Just watched a pretty spiffy movie called Day Of The Sirens. It's sort of like 24 meets Grand Theft Auto. It's a bunch of intertwining stories of people going about their lives in London whilst a crazy gunman is on the loose. Pretty neat.

I found this link on Userfriendly today and being the ravioli lover that I am, I couldn't pass it up.

Professional Pasta.

Mmmm... everything there is to know about pasta! Woo!

Well, I decided to postpone the Sesame balls because they're going to be a real hassle to make. So I made about 900 potstickers instead.

Mmm... They're soooo yummy.

Mmm... Phase 1 of Operation Dim Sum for Dinner is done. Got the potsticker filling made... mmm....

Now to work on the sesame ball filling.

Regarding Chicago, it most definately is one of those movies that is a chick flick, but not. Don't let the fact that Julie fell asleep make you think that it's not a chick flick. But it's more than that. Granted, if you absolutely detest musicals, this likely won't change your mind.

It's just that Julie is a narcoleptic when it comes to watching movies after 9pm. I'm amazed she ended up staying awake for the first half hour of it.

Also, we went on a shopping spree tonight. I have all the necessary ingredients to get my Dim Sum on tomorrow... mwahaha... and I didn't invite James over!

HAHAHAHAHA!!!

(Sorry James! The edict has come down that we are to have no guests this weekend... I'll just have to eat all the potstickers on my own!)

I also got a new frying pan. Yup. I'm excited about a frying pan... why? Because it has a lid! Woo!

And it was only $19... can't beat that.

Well, I just finished watching Chicago.

I liked it. I think it's the kind of movie that grows on you the more times you watch it. While I did like the way that they shot it, it wasn't until right near the very end that it just clicked and I really started to get into it.

I will definately have to watch it a few more times... if for no other reason than the fact that Julie slept through 3/4's of it :)

Hee hee... Kill Clippy...

OOo!

"Silent Hill 3 will hit the PC in Europe in October, according to Konami of Europe. The PC version has been created by Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, the team behind the PlayStation 2 game. Series creator and producer Akira Yamaoka worked to ensure the conversion benefits from the improved capabilities offered by PC hardware, resulting in higher resolution graphics. Another change is the ability to save the game at any point during play, as opposed to to using the red save points found in the console version."

If you don't have a console, get this game when it hits the PC. Amazing.

In fact, I'm actually going to break my rule and play it during the day today. It's foggy, dark and the birds are freaking out outside, so I deem it sufficiently creepy to play SH3.

Oh, in other game news, Otogi is pretty sweet, but I haven't had a chance to try Disgaea yet... maybe later today.

Hee hee... I like this line from the Gamespy review of Tron 2.0.

"TRON 2.0 was a pleasant surprise, like waking up next to a stranger who's cute."

Ok. I guess I can tell everyone the big news.

I'm going to be an....

Uncle!

Yup. My little brother Grant is pregnant, well, actually, his wife Suzie is. They're at around 3 months... hee hee... sucks to be them, getting pregnant on your honeymoon :)

But it's cool. The first official member of the Wager Gamer Army is on the way. I just didn't think it'd be Grant who would be the first one to have it!

And it looks like Tron 2.0 is getting amazing reviews, as well it should. I was not expecting a movie-license game, even of Tron, to turn out as thoroughly great as this game is. I hope this trend continues. Though the fact that they waited 20 years to put the game out meant there wasn't any rush to hit a movie release date...

I should be getting Disgaea and Otogi tomorrow (today?) so my weekend is set. Hmm... didn't I just type this yesterday? It was cool though. I was just checking if those games were in today and when I was leaving the mall, who should I bump into but Sabrina, the old manager of 'MY' EB!

I got to chat with her for a bit and hassle her to give me back the game she borrowed just before she left the store to move over to EB head office... Sigh. I wish I could get her to just send me promo copies of games :P

On the upside, I got a copy of Republic: The Revolution, which is probably THE game I've been waiting for this year.

The concept is just too cool. You're a guy in a fictional Eastern European country. There's a dictator who runs the country. You don't like him, so you have to overthrow him anyway you can. You start with just one follower and you can either bully everyone into joining your side or persuade them by doing nice things to them. I can't wait to see if they were able to actually do everything they set out to do.

I had a good day teaching my Driver Improvement course. I'm not really looking forward to tomorrow though... I have a LONG and busy day ahead of me.

Oooo... I have some pretty cool and big news, but I have to wait for a bit before I can tell everyone...

ARG!

Oh, I got the new Harry Dresden book, Death Masks, today. The Harry Dresden books are fast becoming one of my favourite series.

I finished watching Niea Under 7 on Tuesday.

It was a very good anime, but totally different than what I expected. I wouldn't say that the ending was disappointing. It was more of a 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' type of ending.

But from a kind of feel good standpoint, it was a great anime.

Oh, I got to watch The Blues Brothers tonight too. I love that movie.

Well, the computer at work was infected with the Welchia virus. Sigh. I think there might be a virus on my home PC, but so far nothing has come up after repeated scans...

I have a long day ahead tomorrow, (well, today). I have to teach a Driver Improvement course. This is ok, but it is only my second time teaching it and this time I have my boss's boss taking it, no less.

I guess I could have fun and fail him :)

I'm watching a movie/miniseries called "Threads". It's absolutely phenomenal. It is set in Sheffield, England and was made around 1984. The scary thing is just how timely and topical it is, even though a lot of the technology in the show is dated, the overall tone and message is eerily familiar after the spring of this year and some of the other things bandied about on the world stage.

Read the IMDB user comments for a good summation of it. And you can d/l it here if you have BitTorrent.

Need to read a book but don't know what to read? Check out Whichbook.net, where you can input the various attributes of the book you'd like to read next and it will recommend several with those qualities.

Pretty nifty, actually.

Though in order to borrow the book you need to live in Scotland or Wales :P

oh, and did I happen to mention that I finally got my copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night back? Huzzah!

Well, I'm off to read more of this love letter to microbes and go to sleep. zzzz...

I just finished watching Freddy Vs. Jason. Pretty fun movie, especially since I've been a Nightmare on Elm Street fan from way back when I'd have to sneak over to my friends' house and watch them on sleepovers.

It made me think though. These days we don't really have any big horror movie icons anymore. Sure, there's the 'Scream' mask guy, and the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers is pretty cool, but they don't have the cool personality and motivations that Freddy & Jason have. Just makes you think.

I'm glad they did FvsJ as a 'serious' horror film (though with funny bits) rather than a tongue-in-cheek horror movie like Scream and most other recent horror movies. They did a pretty decent job.

And it looks like Xiao Xiao of the stickmen of death flash movies is back in action. And Heineken has actually harnessed his stickfigure powers for advertising purposes! Woo! Maybe in a few years I'll be able to do something with my comics :)

I've got a broken Handspring Visor that I am debating on whether to spend the $100 US to fix, or just put that money towards a new PDA. It's just the screen that's broken, but still...

This is a great little thing to entertain the geek in your life: The Slash Dot Story Generator v2.0.

The Tall Ships festival in Sarnia rocked. I have about a zillion pictures that I took. So great. I'm so sunburnt though... ouch ouch ouch.

Ooo... George R. R. Martin will be at the World's Biggest Bookstore to do a signing on August 27. Just thought you'd all like to know that.

Well, I'm heading to Sarnia again for the weekend. I might update, but if not, I'll be back on Sunday. Here's to hoping the power doesn't go out again!

Oh man. I'm having a blast with the new Tron 2.0 game. It's so good. It captures the feel of the original movie but with updates since it's been 20 years since that movie and computers have improved so much. It's a FPS but it feels almost Deus Ex-like in the execution. I highly recommend it.

The lightcycles could use a bit of work, as they're not the friendliest things to maneuver, but the on-foot parts rock.

This site is nuts.

Very neat article about Parallel Universes. Very LONG article too. Very bad grammar used in this entry. Very little sleep gotten last night.

I'm reading a neat book called 'Impossible Extinction'. I got a chuckle out of this quote.

"Some parents will tell their young children that babies come from under gooseberry bushes, but this isn't entirely accurate. Babies actually come from supernovas; explosions of stars that died during the formation of our galaxy ten billion years ago. All of us are made from the atoms generated in these violent stellar explosions. Your parents merely assembled these atoms into you, but that was a much less energy-intensive task and so they shouldn't take too much credit for your existence."

Hee hee.

As a side note, what's with people not using the proper plural form of nouns? It's supernovae, not supernovas. Same with virii vs. viruses. I will use viruses when talking about more than one computer virus, but not when talking about biological virii.

I got my Niea Under 7 (aka Niea_7) box set today. Woo!

It's by the guys who did Lain, only rather than take your brain and turn it into mush, it's an anime that already assumes your brain is mush and goes to the completely goofy side of the spectrum. Can't wait to watch it!

Vidocq is cool. It's got some City of Lost Children vibes to it, but it is pretty neat on its own. Very unique cinematography, lots of roto-scoping and a really really cool villain. My only complaint is that it ends too soon. I wanted to see more nifty things with the villain!

Gotta love a bad guy that uses lightning to kill people :)

I've been getting a couple queries about where I took my Dim Sum course.

Loblaws in Milton has cooking classes on a regular basis in their upstairs conference room. You can check the schedule here (click on Community Rooms). They haven't put the new schedule for the fall up yet.

There is another Dim Sum course coming up in a month or two. The menu is changed, but it'd on a weeknight which means I can't go as I have to work :(

If you happen to be in the Acton area and want to find some good ethnic food, I cannot reccomend Yo Yo Japanese Restaurant in Georgetown enough. It's along Highway 7 on the East side of Georgetown, just past the Boston Pizza as you head towards Brampton. The prices are decent, the atmosphere is incredible and the food is scrumptious. And the staff there are so friendly :)

I'm looking for a Thai restaurant in the Acton/Georgetown/Guelph area. I know there is one that just opened up in Brampton, but I have heard that there is one in Georgetown, yet I can't find it. Does anyone know about this? Drop me a line or a comment!

Oh! Lemmings is online. Nifty!

Ah. Had a great meal at Yo Yo with Doug on Tuesday night. He got to experience the wonders of wasabi and tempura, and I got to experience having a full tummy for the first time since Saturday :)

Then we watched Ravenous, which was great, as usual. I got Bowling for Columbine, Chicago and a cool french movie called Vidocq yesterday as well and we watched Bowling and loved it too.

Anyway, I'm off today so I have to get some stuff done for my little bro's reception this weekend, so I'd better get cracking!

Sigh. I have to break down and check a FAQ on Silent Hill 3. I'm so completely stuck it's not funny. I've spent two night so far just wandering around the same level/area bit and I have no idea what to do to get any further. Sigh.

Here you go. I typed up the recipes from my weekend Dim Sum course and now you can all enjoy the yumminess that was my Saturday afternoon. Enjoy, and if you like them, all thanks go to Florence Kwok, our instructor!

Check the Sesame Balls with Red Bean Paste and the Pot Stickers for my two favourites from the weekend. I can't even count how many potstickers I ate... at least two dozen :)

Oh man. I was about ready to kill the lady two doors down from the group home today. There's an electricity and water restriction on right now while we wait for everything to get stabilized after the big power outage from last week.

So the lady two doors down spent THE ENTIRE DAY running her sprinkler on her lawn. Which would have been fine had not 90% of the water just been running off her lawn, down her driveway and down the street to the storm sewer.

She even had the gall to come out just before I was on my way home and move her sprinkler, which at this time had been running for at least 2-3 hours, if not longer, to another spot on her lawn even closer to her driveway.

Grr... And she wasn't the only moron I saw today. This other lady down the street was busy hosing down her driveway. Sigh. I guess she was trying to get it to grow or something.

I was talking with a guy out for a walk in the morning and he was complaining that there was sand along the edges of both sides of the street. Sometimes I think people need to leave the burbs and see what dirty streets really are like. This sand is nothing more than what would take a good rainshower about 10 minutes to wash away, yet everyone was acting like they had a mudslide creeping down the street. Sigh again...

At least everyone out this way seems to be acting responsible and I hear no air conditioners rumbling away in the distance. Goooo Acton :)

I'm currently working on a special project that I think a lot of you will be happy to get once I'm done. I will hopefully have it all done in the next hour or so.

Ah. New Strongbad E-Mail. With at least TWO games!

Ah... my FTP server is working, so without further ado, here's the latest comic:

Woo. Just finished Runaway: A Road Adventure. Great classic point & click adventure game. It's still pretty sad that there is only about one worthwhile adventure game put out each year for all the hundreds of shooters and RPG's... Sigh. I miss the heyday of Sierra and the various Quest games.

Hee hee. This is not what Microsoft wants to see on the Macey's window display.

Oh, and sorry I didn't post any comics last week. I'm sure my fans are weeping after the stellar two outings I posted two weeks ago. I have been busy puttering around on the consoles mainly this week and then we had the power outage. I do have a new one ready to post and inspired by the blackout, but for some reason I can't connect to my server to upload it right now, so you'll just have to be patient!

Time for bed. I got a bunch further in Silent Hill 3 tonight. Man, it's creepy (have I mentioned that before?)...

For example, I was in this manniquin storeroom (don't ask) and found the one manniquin with a head. It was already kind of creepy what with the lights out (in and out of game) and nothing but a flashlight to illuminate things. I went to leave the room and I hear this high-pitched scream and a thump. I turn around and the manniquin's head is now lying on the floor in a puddle of blood...

*shudder*

This game has been full of great little things like that that just unnerve you. But that's why the Silent Hill series is so good. They operate on a much more subtle level that just erodes your sanity, what little there may be in some cases :)

I am starting to notice more direct links to the original Silent Hill now with regards to the story. I wonder where it's going to go from here?

The only thing I haven't seen yet that I kind of miss is the ubiquitous fog of the Silent Hill series. So far SH3 has mostly taken place indoors and the fog, which was almost a character for the first two games, is nowhere to be seen. But I am only about 3-4 hours into SH3, so hopefully the fog will make an appearance.

And that Dim Sum we made and ate today at our class was amazing. Much better than most of the stuff we pay crazy $$ for in the actual restaurants. And it's pretty easy too, so I might see what I can do and make some up for dinner this week if the inspiration strikes me (and our power stays on :)

Ok. I just saw a relatively, make that rather, disturbing ad on TV tonight.

I thought it was just a normal late-night dating service phoneline ad until they started their spiel.

"We're a dating service specially tailored for people IN a relationship, especially for those whose needs are not being met."

What the... I can understand it if people who are married or in a relationship happen to call one of these things, but to actually come out and say that you've got a tailor-made infidelity service?

Granted, they didn't say it was for married people, just for 'people in a relationship', but still... *shakes head*

Mmm... Dim Sum course goood. Tummy full... must... rest... or burp...

Well, Toronto seems to be getting about 75% power now, all thanks to Mel Lastman and his frizzy hair. He's just been running around, rubbing his head on electrical towers to get the city back up and running.

That's why we haven't really heard much from him. He's too busy saving the city, one head-rub at a time.

I'm just surprised he hasn't asked everyone to put on wool socks and shuffle their feet across their carpets and then touch some metal in the hopes of generating enough power to offset the downed nuclear reactors.

Sigh... welcome to California.

They're doing rolling 2-hour blackouts as they try to get the grid back up to snuff... The power went out around 4pm today and just came back on.

The funny thing was that I was watching a movie yesterday when the power went off. We were watching a movie today at about the same time and the power went off.

Note to self: Don't watch movies at 4pm.

The neatest thing about this whole blackout is just how well behaved everyone was and how you start seeing people out and chatting who haven't talked before :)

Ah ha. I knew I'd find out who caused the blackout.

Yerg. Well, we got hit with that big blackout yesterday. I was watching Chasing Amy and probably 5 minutes before it was over, around 4:10-15ish, first my AC conked out, then bam. No more power.

It was an interesting night. I thought it was just Acton that had lost power until about 6pm when Julie got home and told me the entire province of Ontario and most of New York State and surrounding environs was out of juice too.

At least we got our power back now rather than on, say, Saturday or something. From the look of my clock, it looks like it came back on around two hours or so ago here... 2-2:30am then.

It is pretty scary that one downed power station can knock out such a wide area. At least they got us back up relatively quickly.

Had a nice evening though. Just sat outside, chatted with the neighbours and listened to the portable radio for a while. Then we came inside and lit every candle we could find and read books for the rest of the evening.

On the upside, I FINALLY finished The War Of The Flowers. Now I can finally read Messiah Node.

Downside was that I didn't get to play any Silent Hill 3 yesterday :(

Just finished watching a great documentary about DJ's and DJ culture called 'Scratch'.

If you're at all into techno/hip hop/drum & bass music, or just want to see how DJ's do that crazy scratch sound, check it out. Very well done and the music rocks.

Plus, they do a great scratch version of Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' at the end :)

The only problem with Silent Hill 3, and the whole Silent Hill series to be exact, is that you really can't play them until it's dark outside, preferably after midnight with all the lights off in the house.

If you try to play during the day, especially on a sunny day, it completely loses the creepiness and scare potential. Sigh. So I guess I'll have to play Mario Golf all day now.

That said, after I finished posting my message earlier this morning I heard a thump and a crash downstairs. Now normally I'd just go down and see what it was, but I had a hard time convincing myself to go downstairs to see what it was. I was just imagining some crazy monster or something lurking in the refridgerator. I had to turn on all the lights and creep around my main floor till I found the culprit.

A calendar had fallen off the fridge. Sigh.

Mmm... Silent Hill 3 rocks.

The graphics are phenomenal. Probably the best ingame graphics I've seen on the system so far. They look better than most games' rendered cinematics.

I was sort of worried it wasn't going to be as scary as the previous two entries, but after about half an hour or so of playing in the dark, with the world getting more and more creepy on me and the crazy sounds getting louder and louder, I conceded that it was starting to spook me.

I'm only about 40 minutes or so into it, but I'm loving it. But I'm stuck, so I'm going to bed. At least I'm off work till Monday now. Woot!

I found that going over President Evil's Plot Guide To Silent Hill has helped get my brain back in the mindset of what is going on in the creepiest town in the world. Supposedly SH3 is linked to the first Silent Hill a lot more than SH2 was, so the Plot Guide was a good refresher on just how wonky the first one was and exactly what happened in it.

Gotta love games that require a guide as long as the Plot Guide is to explain what happened in it :)

And to further indicate how scary a day it was today, I went to see Spy Kids 3D: Game Over with the guys from work. It was a pretty fun movie to watch, what with the 3D glasses and all.

One of the guys got home and wouldn't take his glasses off till he went to bed :) It was pretty cute.

As for the movie, well, it was Spy Kids... In 3D. I enjoyed the first Spy Kids movie for all of it's inherent cheesiness. This one was pretty much the same level of cheesiness but with the added gimmick of 3D. I think we were sitting a little too close to the screen though because the effect wasn't as good as it could have been had we sat a few rows back. Oh well.

I haven't seen the second Spy Kids movie but I heard it was pretty bad compared to the first... take that as you will.

Speaking of getting scared, I was eating some soup I found in the fridge at work tonight when it dawned on me that I had finished up the last of the batch of soup that I made yesterday for lunch today... and there was way too much in the fridge to have come from the batch I made yesterday.

So that means that the soup I was eating tonight at work must have been in the fridge since the last time I made my Potato-Bacon soup... which was over a month ago...

It did taste a little salty...

If I am dead tomorrow, at least we'll know why :P

Woohoo!

Silent Hill 3 has finally arrived. I can't wait to sit down and get scared.

Aaaah... I'm just NOT tired today. It's pushing 5am and I'm not sleepy at all. The last few days I was nodding off around midnight, but not tonight. Sigh.

Oooo!

I can't wait for a week this Saturday. I'll be in Sarnia for my brother's reception (the little eloper) but since I have to kill time for a goodly portion of the day on Saturday, I'm going to go check out the Tall Ships!

I love old ships. I'm a sucker for most things nautical and this should be a fun day as long as the weather is nice.

This is a pretty sweet little site. It's a collection of homemade animated shorts that are really quite good.

It would be really nice to see some of these people go on to get paying jobs in the film industry. Too much talent going to waste here.

WOOHOO! I just beat Knights of the Old Republic. It took me about 55 or so hours, but I'm done playing as a goodie-goodie Jedi. This is one of the very few RPG's that I am actually planning on going back and replaying just to see how different it will be playing as a Dark Lord Of The Sith :)

Hooray!

Futureshope finally has released my copy of Silent Hill 3 from shipping limbo and it should be in my hot little hands tomorrow. Huzzah!

Of course now I really have to finish KOTOR tonight or tomorrow before work for sure.

There's a very good article on the 'Grey Market' of gamers out there...

Of course, I've never heard this term before, but for a game related piece in Macleans of all places, it's quite good at laying out the basics of the state of the videogame industry today, the types of games being made and the type of people who play them.

All this with only a passing reference to crazy kids and their violent games at the end of the article, and even that is mostly showing that attempts to regulate the games are mostly dismissed when the government tries to step in.

I just thought it was timely what with Penny Arcade's rather vitriolic newspost on Monday about violent games and morons who can't parent properly.

Wow. I got a real-live, English speaking, HAPPY customer service rep at the Futureshop.ca help line within seconds... gasp. And they applied the sale price to my order.

Gotta love good customer service. Almost makes up for their crappy ESA that doesn't cover 'physical damage' to our stupid digital camera... grr...

Grr... Futureshop has lowered the price on Silent Hill 3 to $49.99... The price on my order that is still in shipping limbo is $59.99 (though it should be shipped soon).

If I don't get the $10 off, I'm going to call them up and yell since I can't cancel the order and just reorder it at a cheaper price but I also didn't get it last week like I should have since I preordered it... sigh.

Yuck. My friend got hit with that new virus that's making the rounds. I think it's Mblast. Here's what Symantec has to say. I'd recommend making sure you have the latest patches from Microsoft since it's pretty nasty.

Thanks Luke for the info!

This is pretty spiffy. It's a Make A Paper Snowflake simulator!

As usual, Penny Arcade has reached into my brain and pretty much put down on paper (or screen, as it were) my thoughts on videogames, kids and parental responsibility.

"So why don�t people lend the same legitimacy to videogames that they do to film? It�s because they still think videogames are for children. Those of us who cut our teeth on Atari games are pushing thirty at this point. Is it so unreasonable to expect that as an adult I should be able to purchase an M rated videogame that includes adult material in much the same way I might see an R rated film that contains the same. The fact that pornography exists does not mean that film as a medium is inappropriate for children."

Give their newsposts for today a read... especially Gabe's a little ways down the page.

Ah... had my first 'REAL' day back at work since my crazy trip. It was fun. Had a staff meeting and I did a bunch of paperwork and took the guys bowling and then just got home.

Plus, on the drive home, there was a really neat program on Ideas. It was about Stalinist Russia and all of the various bits of information that they've been able to learn since the archives have been opened after the fall of the Communist government.

ARG!

They had THE final, last, never-gonna-be-another-one NEW episode of Futurama on Fox tonight and nobody told me!

Sigh.

Looks like I'll have to find it on Suprnova.

I think two more signs of the impending apocalypse occured today.

1. Yvette & Noel actually came to visit! Yay! Much videogame fun was had by all and good food was eaten too. We even went to Acton's Leatherfest during several intermittent rainstorms.

and

2. Julie spent a good portion of the night actually playing Mario Golf with us as we birdied and bogeyed our way through 18 looooong holes. I even got a hole in one :)

But yeah, Julie played the game and actually seemed to be having a bit of fun, which is scary.

Great night all round though and hopefully it'll happen a little more often.

I had such a good time I might just put a squid in my next comic in honour of the occasion.

Ok. I was at the grocery store today and they have HALLOWE'EN CANDY OUT NOW!!

It's not even the middle of August. Give me a break. Why not just start putting out the Christmas decorations? Soon the people who leave their Christmas lights up all year won't be fools but progressives!

Man... between my feeble attempts at a web comic and a post (and picture) about crazy anime boobs, I have been getting quite the number of comments!

At least I know what my audience wants to have me post about now :)

And no. I don't think I'll start drawing stick-figure hentai... *shudder*

Tonight seemed to be the night for all the frogs between work and home to play some real life Frogger.

I don't think I resulted in any Game Overs, but you never know... at least until I check the tires in the morning :P

And now for more painful Webcomicry!



*shudder*

I think I'll just stop now.

If I had a scanner I could at least make some neat robots or something. Trying to draw on the computer sucks.

While you're there you can check out Divergence Eve. It looks like it has a pretty neat story. Unfortunately I don't know if I can watch it after seeing the first episode. The boobs! They're just not natural! When every female character looks like they have had badly botched implants with basketballs no less (and these are on the 'flat-chested' women at that...) it just is offensive and ridiculous. I thought it was a joke at first but nope. It's the style of the whole series.

Which is a shame because the actual story and so forth seems really neat and has nothing to do with boobs. All sorts of parallel dimensions and evil creatures and robots and planetary travel and so forth... Who knows? Maybe they're just the air tanks for their space suits or something... man....

Ah ha. Found a screenshot here. Just check it out if you want to see what I mean. The sad thing is that I think those are some of the more petite women on the show.

Sigh. It's like the people who think that tossing in some swear words into a game (or movie for that matter) make it 'Mature'.

I've been watching an excellent horror anime called Boogiepop Phantom. I'm going to try to finish it up tonight (yeah, it's after 2:30am, but I only have about an hour of eps left... and they're just so goood!).

The way in which the episodes and story progress is neat. It started off with an episode about a girl. The next episode involves a guy that met the girl in the first episode. The third is about a girl who's life was changed by an encounter with the guy from the second.

It keeps going like that through each episode. You get these neat one-off episodes about these characters but as you watch more and more you see how they are all connected. They tend to jump around chronologically as well. You get 2-3 minutes of stuff happening in the present, then it goes back 5 years, then back to the present and so forth. It is a little confusing, but you can wrap your head around it pretty quickly once you notice the patterns.

In a less confusing vein, I just started watching Last Exile tonight as well. This anime is amazing.

Steampunk + Airships + Grandiose Political Maneuverings + amazing animation = My Dream Anime Series :)

Go over to AnimeForever and download the series.

Ah, there are times when it's nice to be Canadian.

"The Canadian Copyright Act is a lot different from U.S. law. Our act says it is perfectly legal to copy music for your own purposes. The language clearly says that "the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright."

It's telling that the only time the CRIA website uses the word "illegal" in the pages it devotes to piracy is in reference to U.S. industry losses, not Canadian ones. The word "theft" is not used at all.

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Lawsuits against Canadian downloaders are also likely to collapse if they were to be tested in court.

That's because in Canada, the industry is collecting a levy on recordable CDs. (It now wants to extend this to MP3 players, flash memory and blank DVDs. Ordinary PC hard drives could be next on their list, but the industry fears wrath of the giant computer hardware industry, and has held back on demanding a levy on hard drives).

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All this suggests that using the legal system as a weapon in a scare-tactic campaign to dissuade file-sharers � the industry has been quite honest about this � is not something that would be as easily accepted in Canada as it is in the United States, where litigation is part of daily life."

Check out the rest of the story here.

I was talking with someone the other day and they were saying how they've done studies to show the proper ratio of lawyers to 100000 people in a population to have an efficient society.

I think the proper ratio is something like 8 lawyers to every 100000 people. In Japan it's about 4:100K, which is why Japan rocks :)

In the US it's 40:100K. Guess which society is more litigious? I think we're right about the 8-10 mark up here.

Ah... just went for a walk over to the local pub for wings. Of course, it starts to pour on our way home and so we got totally soaked.

But I love it. Nothing beats a great summer shower.

Man, with high quality artwork like that in the previous post, I should start a webcomic... hmm...



Or not :)

Ok. Silent Hill 2 still has the creep factor going for it.

I was playing it tonight... After midnight, no lights on, sound pumped up...

It's super creepy in the game... all foggy and so forth.

Now, in my own house we've had a few big moths and such flittering around inside tonight so bear this in mind...

I'm playing the game and I see what I think is a little bug run across the side of the screen. By the time I've registered it it's already on the opposite side of the screen and it's BIG (well, maybe 2-3 centimeters) and has LOTS of legs and just doesn't look like something I want in my living room.

It ran off the TV and so I hopped up, ran over and turned on the lights and started tearing apart the area around the TV looking for this monster bug before it decides to wander upstairs and lay its eggs in my ear.

I gave up after about 5 minutes but decided to keep the light on a bit just to make sure that I can see this monstrosity should it rear it's ugly head in my vicinity.


Artist's Rendition of Killer Bug on My TV

Of course, shortly after I settle back into my game I see another of these bugs on the TV but this time my character steps on it and squishes it. So I just spent 5 minutes or so hunting for a bug that was in MY GAME...

I love Silent Hill :) It's the only game that truly freaks me out when I play it. Well, 1 & 2 do. Silent Hill 3 is supposed to be coming my way any day now and they're saying it's supposed to be even scarier than the first two! WOO!

This is pretty cool. You have to zoom in (right click and then zoom in) and find the little guy in the observatory to start your adventure.

I got to the engine room... Does anyone have any idea how to get past that spot?

Crazy Czechlosovakian Flash game.

UPS had me ticked. I was sitting, waiting for my package to arrive today and when I went to check on the status of the delivery, there was a note on the website saying they'd tried to deliver it but nobody was home!

I was sitting on the couch with the front door wide open and not 20 feet away... NOBODY except the mailman had been near my door all morning.

So I called and yelled and they said I'd just have to wait until tomorrow. So I was wondering what kind of neon sign I'd have to put out to make sure the UPS guy came when I got home from work and discovered that they'd dropped off my package at my neighbour's house around 4pm... sigh.

At least my stuff came. Now I can play some Mario Golf and some Silent Hill 2 (to get refreshed for Silent Hill 3 either later this week or next week).

And my Boogiepop Phantom box set arrives from Amazon tomorrow. Woo!

All right. I got my pictures developed yesterday and will post something akin to a travelogue of my trip to Moosonee last week during my days off tomorrow and Friday.

In the meantime. Enjoy this picture of me on the train, whisked away to Moosonee.



I like how the picture ended up getting the reflection in the window. I wish I looked a little more awake, but I was tired...

And my Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (for the Xbox) and Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour (for the Cube) shipped today. That should be fun to play later this week after my one day at work :)

Woohoo! I just finished installing an air conditioner in this place. Yee haw.

It was a pain to put in, but with some help from my neighbour and Julie, I was able to get it installed and working without too much bloodloss. Now to sit back and soak up the freon...

Well, I'm back from my quick trip to Sarnia. It was good. But I'm tired. I'll post about my trip... TOMORROW!

Sure...

Gah. I have to go to Sarnia for a day. At least I don't have to work until Wednesday, but still...

There is one cool thing I wanted to mention about my trip. On our Moosonee tour and the boat cruise we were on (and staying in both our Motel in Cochrane and the Polar Bear Lodge in Moosnonee) was none other than Robert Munsch!

He was up there on vacation with his family. They were from the States and were commenting on how in the States, nobody knows who Robert (or Bob to them) is, but up here he's a celebrity :) I got his autograph, so that was cool.

But go figure. I go to the back end of nowhere and run into a celebrity, not to mention an author I really like and whom I used to have read to me as a kid.

I do think there's something wierd going on though. I was flipping through the channels yesterday and came across an interview on Vision TV with none other than Mr. Munsch himself, talking about his childhood and life and such. It's Munschapalooza here!

Sorry about not posting yesterday. I slept a lot, then watched a couple movies with Julie and played a bunch of KOTOR.

We got an Air Conditioner yesterday. Woo! I don't know if it works. It's second hand and all, but if we actually do have a heat wave, which this summer has thankfully been very light on, we'll have something to fight it's evil presence with.

UG! The subtitles on Trigun aren't bad. They're relatively close to what they should be. The subs on my Cowboy Bebop set, on the other hand... yerg!

I just turned them off and basked in the radiance. The nice thing is that you can appreciate the excellent animation better that way.

But since Trigun is the set I wanted the most, I'm glad that the subs aren't that bad. And concidering I got the set for $45 instead of the $260+ it would have cost for the official translation, I don't really mind. It'll just give me more incentive to brush up on my Japanese :)

Of course, it would be nice if the cheap Hong Kong sets had someone who could speak english doing the translations, but scarily, I'm understanding the Japanese enough that I don't really need the subs except to give a basic guideline for some of the less straightforward parts.

The fact that I've watched both sets with decent subs on my computer helps.

I like Trigun. It reminds me of Firefly. Speaking of which, supposedly they're making a Firefly movie! WOO!

I'm baaaack... and I'm bloody tired. I got about 4 hours of sleep last night and had a 12 hour train ride today and I've been up since 4:30am... must... sleep... now...

I'll blab tomorrow about my trip. Suffice it to say, I loved it. It was not a relaxing trip at all, but very good nonetheless.

Oh, and my Cowboy Bebop & Trigun DVD's came today :) Nothing says "Welcome Home" like cheap anime box-sets.