3rd Blurbling

Hope everyone had a happy new year. I have a good feeling about 2007. I think it's gonna be a good year. Better than the last one, anyway; not to sound to whiny, but I can hardly see how it could be worse.

Yep, we're Blurbling again. I find I kind of enjoy these, so they're probably going to be a staple of this blog's content for a while.

Blurbling III, esq.

I'm starting to find that one of the big advantages to having a review blog is that occasionally people send you free stuff for mentioning their name. On a related note, I've been listening to Fishing for Comet's CD, Scattered Among the Archipelago. A solid chunk of music, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a shill. I found the tendency towards intellectual lyrics and richly textured production to be quite pleasant, but on the other hand some might find a couple of the songs a little too sugary to their tastes. Now, if only we could get them to tour outside of Texas...

And while we're sucking up giving objective opinions about wonderful things, I recently came across a, well, I suppose you would call it a webcomic, but it really has little in common with any other object I have used that term for. With absolutely incredible eclectic art, and writing that doesn't just border on pretentious but has actually invaded and set up a brutal dictatorship, it was more or less predetermined that I'd be a fan of Dresden Codak. Note that as of this writing, the most recent comic is mostly a joke, and you'll need to go back a page to get to the good stuff. I would also like to state that I would pay good -- possibly even real -- money to play Dungeons and Discourse.

I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I picked up the translated copy of the first of Keiichi Shigusawa's Kino no Tabi novels. The translation is solid, but imperfect, choosing to leave out a lot of the book's unique terminology: Persuaders become just handguns, et cetera. There's also a bit of wonderful incongruity in that there's quite a lot of descriptive, bloody violence going on, especially in the later chapters, but the characters all say things like "darn" and "crap". They also rearranged the chapters, which doesn't have a huge effect, since the chapters are pretty well self-contained, but it seems rather unnecessary. I can understand -- even if I don't agree -- some of it: putting Land of Adults first to get the back-story out of the way right out of the gate, but then I feel that Land of Peace has more of an impact to end on than Colosseum, so I dunno.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is proving to be a rather effective time-waster. It plays rather more like the Baldur's Gate games than the original Neverwinter Nights, which is a good thing in my book. The NPCs are actually interesting this time around, and the new Warlock class is a lot of fun, but there are some quibbles: for instance, the camera is always centered on the character you're controlling, which makes it very difficult at times to get people where they need to be. And the NPC AI can be rather poor, which leaves you with the unpleasant choice of either micromanaging every little thing they do in combat, or letting the AI waste spells and abilities because you don't feel like baby-sitting them. It's not as much of a deal-breaker as it may sound, but it is aggravating at times.

And that's it for this round. Now, if y'all will excuse me, I'm off to work on getting my WoW characters prepped for The Burning Crusade. Later!

2nd Blurbling

The problem with thinking things in your life can't possibly get any worse is that the bounds of possibility are so damn wide. At any rate, no one comes here to hear me ***** about my personal problems, wonderfully ironic they may be, so let me sum it up this way: the reason there was a light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be because it was on fire.

Moving on, it's time for another Blurbling!

Blurbling 2: the Son of Blurbling

Saw Deja Vu in the theatre the other day. A very good movie, I thought. One of the best I've seen recently, though as a devoted Denzel Washington fan, I'm really not an unbiased commentator. I specifically appreciated the movie's subtle and intelligent, if constant, use of foreshadowing. This is opposed to how movies like, say, X-men 3 use it: as a weapon, wielded in malice against the audience. There was, as I watched Deja, a vague feeling that I'd seen this all before, but if you think about it, that's actually pretty clever.

Found a site a while back, Tektek.org, which has a pretty neat little avatar creator. Technically, it's meant for some weird little social MMO, Gaia Online, but the sheer amount of customization available here means that it works pretty well in a general sense, as long as you can stand the overall hyper-cutesy anime style. Quite useful, I think, to anyone whose online personae take on a separate reality of their own. A couple examples: Clara and (Living) Marr.

Got Yggdra Union recently. Those with remarkable memory capacity will recall I blurbed about this one in the past, but now I can actually understand what's going on when I play it, which is always nice. Well, usually anyway.... It plays like a slightly dumbed down Fire Emblem, with somewhat more interesting artwork. I really wish the battlefields weren't so cramped, and the formation system could use some serious work, but it's still an interesting diversion.

I've actually been buying some modern music recently. (Please no theorizing about what I'd been doing up until now; I always buy the music I listen to. Although, to be perfectly honest, cause and effect may be a little more tenuously linked there than is the case for most.) Generally speaking, if it's been recorded in this country in the last twenty or so years I've had fairly minimal interest in it, but in the last month I've picked up the most recent BNL and Indigo Girls albums, both solid releases from bands I regularly follow. And, thanks to Pandora and ultimately Nigolos, a few Dream Theater and Fishing for Comets CDs are on my list next time I head out.

That's it for now. These Blurbles are kinda fun, so I think I'll keep doing them for a while. I guess it just depends on how long I can keep coming up with cutesy titles for them. See y'all later, I'm off the drown my sorrows in Pepsi and video games.

(Healthy living is something that happens to other people.)

1st Blurbling

Oh em geez! An update! Betcha never thought you'd see one of these again. Once again, no, I haven't died... Wait, actually I have. I'm posting this from the next world, and, lemme tell ya, you wouldn't believe the kind of connection you get get here in Nirvana is nothing short of incredible. So... Hmm, what's that? I'm not in Nirvana? Nerdvana? Oh, I see, that explains it then.

Okay, in all seriousness, I am still alive and even breathing occasionally. I would like to say I've been busy, but that simply wouldn't be true. What I have mostly been is lazy. And in the few instances I've actually had the motivation to actually do something other than my eggplant impression, I've had too many things and people jockeying for my attention to want to put forth the effort to write here. In an effort to rectify this, I'm trying out yet another sort-of-kind-of new format. To whit: Blurbling. These are going to be quick and loosely connected, so hang on. And no, there is no double entendre in that last sentence, so you can stop looking.

The First Blurbling

My good friend Nigolos over at Undead-Karma recently introduced me to Pandora radio, and I may never forgive him for it. Basically, you input your favorite band or genre of music, and it, based on you ratings, slowly builds the perfect internet radio station tailored to your personal preferences. Well, that's the theory anyway; the actually result is usually far more interesting. I just wish the music in their database was a bit more varied language-wise, but I guess you can't have everything.

Went and saw The Prestige the other day. A solid movie. It's just smart enough to keep you interested, but not so much that there are any real surprises coming out of the twists. Oh yes, if you like plot twists, this is definitely the movie for you. If, on the other hand, you think 2,034 clever little reversals is just a bit too much for one movie, you may want to stay at home.

Oh, and I'm doing something I promised myself I'd never do again: I'm playing two MMO's simultaneously. Until I come to my senses, I am Whimsy on the Seraph server in FFXI and (for the time being) Garrov on the Stormreaver server in WoW. If you happen to play either of these games on those servers and see me around, feel free to drop me a line. If nothing else, it'd be good to know that more than two people read this blog.

Finally, my PS2 has been seeing some heavy use lately. Between Okami, a powerful little action-adventure which plays like a cross between the Legend of Zelda and the original Actraiser, and Guitar Hero, the game that brings out rock-superstar in all of us, my aging black-box hardly has time to cool down.

Okay, I should probably break there. Gotta save some stuff for the next blurbling, after all. I might get an actual review up some time in the near-ish future, but no promises. See y'all later! (By the way, am I the only one who thinks that Blogger's spellchecker catching the word "blog" as a mistake is horribly amusing?)