Stop coming here

Okay, I know not many people read this, but for those who do I'm moving to http://www.theoffwhites.com/shinystuff/
Please start going there, commenting there, update your bookmarks (or Hearts or Stars or Favorites or whatever your browser calls bookmarks.) If your browser calls bookmarks anything other than bookmarks, please go download something that isn't Internet Explorer and then come visit me at http://www.theoffwhites.com/shinystuff/
Drop by soon!

True Story

Lisbeth: "This show is awesome!"
Me: "Seriously?"
Lisbeth: "Yeah, let's watch another episode."
Me: "Um, okay."
Lisbeth: "Don't you want to?"
Me: "Yeah, I'm just surprised you want to."
Lisbeth: "You know what you've done to me, right?"
Me: "Yeah, I've turned you into a geek."
Lisbeth: "Not a geek, no."
Me: "Sorry, a nerd."
Lisbeth: "Yes. A specific kind of nerd."
Me: "An anime nerd."
Lisbeth: "Yeah. Don't tell anyone."
Me: "...I was planning on blogging it..."
Lisbeth: "Fine, just turn Samurai Champloo back on. I want to see another episode before Grey's Anatomy starts."

---------------

So I thought the next logical step was to throw in my Cowboy Bebop DVDs when we finsh Samurai Champloo. It occurred to me though that the story might not be linear enough to keep her in it, so I'm downloading Evangelion. Hopefully it'll be finished before we finish Samurai Champloo, but that may not work since SC is only 26 episodes and on Sunday we watched 13 of them, and two more last night. Oh well, if not I bought the CB set a while back, maybe she will dig it, since both are Shinichiro Watanabe creations. Maybe after all of this we'll try Wolf's Rain. Is it wrong that I'm so thoroughly enjoying Lisbeth's plunge into the Dork Side?

I don't like Mondays

Hi everybody! Do you know what today is? Anybody? It's Friday! And do you know what that means? Well do ya? Don't be shy, it means today isn't Thurday! Which conclusively proves that even a brilliant professor, even the brilliant Professor Shiny himself no less, can make a mistake. On the plus side, if today were Thursday, I'd be leaving to walk to class right now. Maybe even five minutes ago. But it's Friday! So I leave in a little less than two hours.

I honestly don't know why I felt the need to share that. I actually intended to post about a game. On Tuesday I got Mario Kart DS. I have to play in bursts when I have 10 minutes here and there, but that's what it was designed to do, it feels like. Well, it really feels more geared to 15-minute sessions, but it works. The DS is quite possibly the best game console an adult can have, especially because of its portability. I had my dad try MKDS last night, and he thoroughly enjoyed it. The online aspect could use some work though. Getting wireless set up for it is unbelievably easy, connecting to Nintendo WIFI is painless, but actually having an online match is almost an exercise in futility. The game tells me it's searching for opponents, but then it just sits there and continues to tell me. Once in a while the indicator light next to a potential opponent's box will light up...then blink a few times, then die. The game has set up a four-player match for me successfully one time, and it still didn't happen because one guy dropped out in the first race. Most of the time it's a two-player affair, and even then half the time the opponent disconnects before the race starts, or after the first of the four prescribed races. And since the game's been out for a few months, and I've had it two days, the matches are pretty unbalanced. I've successfully held three or four matches, and in each instance I've managed only to have my ass handed to me.
It's not a bad game, not by any stretch. The single-player is incredible fun, and wireless matches with people I know would probably be a blast, if any of my friends had their own DS. And with practice, and patience, I'm sure I'll get to like the online game as well. But until then it's pretty frustrating.
Also the custom emblem editor needs to let you save multiple emblems. I slapped together a three-minute low-res version of "The Scream" for mine, and I'd like to try making more, but I don't want to lose what I have if the new ones don't turn out well.

The Something Bavarian

I thought there was a new place on Broadway called "The (something) Bavarian" but there isn't. There's a place called Curbside Coneys, and they had a Nutty Bavarian trailer parked in front. Either way I like it. When I walk to school they don't make much impact usually. But when I walk on the other side of the street than I usually use, it makes for a whole new experience. The first time I switched sides of the street (because I'd had to stop at the bank) the new place had my walk smelling like Worlds of Fun for about 20 or 30 yards. Today they had a small metal drum smoker out so it smelled more like the Renaissance Festival. Both are nice, but the Ren Fest is nicer.

They can't tell it's not bacon...

You know the sound bacon makes when you throw it in a hot skillet? I made that sound today with my mouth. When I say I made the sound, I don't mean a faithful reproduction thereof, I mean the actual sound. Also the smell. Lesson learned: if you roast hot dogs over the gas stove (don't do that, BTW, it doesn't work well) don't try to lick the juice off the fork when you're done. The result is one of those moments during which you think "Oh shit" in wide-eyed fright before even completely realizing what exactly is stupid about what you've just done. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes to start really hurting, too, so you believe, until you eat the mustard-covered fruit of your stupidity, that you've gotten away with your red-hot misdeed. You have not.

On a lighter note, I have a new toy. It's actually my birthday present, even though that was in November. Kind of a long story. Short version is, Jandaman came through with the goods, and in record time, too. We ordered it on Friday or Saturday I think, he shipped on Monday, told me it would be here in 3-5 days, and it showed up on Wednesday. Not bad for going through the USPS. This thing rocks though. It has built in NES, SMS, and Game Gear emulators. I've been playing so many 8-bit games in the last 24 hours it's almost sick. Also, a kid in one of my classes saw me using the flash cart, resulting in a discussion about games, and he may want to buy one of the way-too-expensive SNES games that I've been thinking of putting on eBay. We'll see how that turns out.

Basically nothing

So I'm bored. I'm not quite ready for school to start again, but I need something to fill my days in a structured way so that I don't feel like staying up at night. I'm sort of watching the last couple episodes of the BBS Documentary, but I'm not paying as much attention as I normally would, because I'm not supposed to be up right now, I just can't sleep. I do enjoy it though, I've thoroughly loved every minute I have actually paid attention to. I'll have to rewatch parts 7 and 8 later, I guess.
Boingboing today linked to an interview with Steve Wozniak. I've only read their excerpt at the time I write this, but I always love interviews with him, no matter what the subject is. They also linked to this, which is just a euphoric sort of wierd. That's pretty much all I have tonight. Not much for a month absence, but whatever.

Wrapping up the school year

Woohoo! We have internet again! It was doubtful for a while there. The short version of that is that I was briefly convinced Cox Communications was not, in fact, my friend in the digital age. We had it scheduled for Thursday by 5 p.m., and it didn't happen. They said it happened, but when the servicemen came the next day, they were angry at the guy who said he hooked it up. They were angry because he didn't do anything, and they had to do his work for him. But it's here now, and I'm able to use it to help me do my homework. And by homework, I mean of course that our shiny new connection is so saturated by UDP and SSH traffic that I can barely load pages. Azureus, WinSCP, and Firefox. It's like the holy triumvirate or something.

We did Christmas with my mom's side of the family this weekend. It was cool, we did a different type of gift exchange than we had done before where we drew numbers, picked a gift in numerical order, then opened them one at a time and everyone else got the chance to steal them from us. It worked out better than I had hoped, in that I got the gift I brought, which was a Die Hard DVD and a pound of peanut brittle. That's Christmas, folks.

Now I'm working on my last paper of the semester, for Modern Epic Fantasy. It has something to do with how much hobbits don't like giant spiders, or something like that. It's due tomorrow, and I'm planning to work on it pretty late tonight. Of course, Azureus won't run itself. Well, okay, it will. But it won't watch itself run. Unless you count its logs. But it really won't ring a bell and tell me when my strange, obscure, never-been-on-video TV shows are done downloading. Maybe it would, I hadn't actually looked into that. Maybe after the paper is finished.