Best traditional costume for beautiful women: Cat
Best traditional costume for beautiful men: I have no idea
Best traditional costume for ugly women: Witch
Best traditional costume for ugly men: Football Fan
Best traditional costume for children: Black Ghost

I am dressing up a business-casual network administrator. It was a hard costume to make. The minutes involved were long and harrowing. I remember it like it was yesterday, which is odd because it was this morning before I left for work.

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I started playing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow last night. It is probably the most enjoyable Castlevania game since Symphony of the Night. Some of the things they've done with the game were quite ingenious. Simple things, like the ability to save-pause your game. You select "pause game" from the menu, and it saves your game, then quits out of it. Then, when you load your game, you are exactly where you were when you saved, and it the save-game reverts to your old save-game. In other words, you can't continuously resume from where you were. This makes it easy to stop playing at a moment's notice, but doesn't make it easier to beat bosses (like that needs to be easier).

It takes place in the year 2035, Dracula's castle doesn't look a day over 1700 (aside from the grenade-lobbing zombies). While it does take place in the future, there is nothing futuristic about the gameplay. Your character is whisked away to Dracula's castle without any guns or explosives and told that he was special powers. You start off with just a knife and gay clothes (oh, they're stylish clothes, but not ones a straight man would wear). No matter what kind of full-body armor you put on, all you see is the gay clothes. I'm not really complaining, it would be a rather unimportant feature, except when you forget which armor you're wearing (it pays to change armor sometimes). Later, you get powers you absorb from monsters, like throwing bones, spears, or very weak grenades. My favorite is the golem that punches behind you right after you attack. It's not useful, but it looks really funny.

The weapon array is diverse. You have really bad high-damage weapons, slow short-range weapons (they must have figured out how good the baselard was in SotN), some good swords, and a really kick-ass far-reaching whip-sword. To me, most of the weapons are unuseable. I haven't seen any noteworthy armor, yet. There does seem to be two basic kinds of armor: the kind that raises your defense a lot, or the kind that raises your attack and defense each half as much. I prefer the latter.

Spells are easy to cast. You select one, then push the button. None of the Up-Down-Left-Right crap we had to deal with in SotN. That's nice.

Some of the "monsters" in the game are very cute. There's the Student Witch, who launches cats at you, and hits you with her broom. There's the maid that greets you very nicely then busts out with karate. I almost feel bad killing them. There's the almost-naked chick with four arms that just walks back and forth swinging swords. She doesn't notice you, she just walks back and forth. She's quite bootylicious... well, you know, for a Castlevania "monster". None of the monsters so far are truly grotesque, but then that's never been the objective of a Castlevania. They just use the gothic-horror theme. I think it's best that way.

Anyway, if you own a Gameboy Advance, I highly recommend it. If not, there's always emulators. It's still more fun than most games that are out. No links today because Konami's website sucks. It feels like they're trying to sell the company rather than its products.

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What's the point in getting legally married? It's more a business merger between two people than a pledge of love. Can't you have the wedding and marriage ceremony without the legal bondage? If you believe in God, isn't your union before him enough? It costs more money to be married, you know. Also, you'll always feel that shackle of law upon you.

I like having options, regardless of whether or not I would actually use them. If I was told I could never move out of my house, I would dislike my house. Since I have the option to move out of it, I can appreciate my current place of residence. It would be the same for me being in a relationship. If I'm legally bound to a woman, I will start to think "I'm stuck with this woman. I'd have to go through a divorce to change." It's just not as fun anymore.

I would also start to think, although subconsciously "She's legally bound to me, so I can slack off on the romance and such." How many married couples of more than a year can honestly say they still have the same passion in their relationship that they had before they got married? Yeah, I know most of them can easily lie about it. I also know that there are some who could honestly say they do. There's just not many of them.

I would go through with the whole ceremony of marriage, but I don't think I would want to get legally married. Maybe some kind of other legal arrangement that isn't quite so binding. I don't know, maybe I'm just talking.

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Honestly, I'd prefer that foreign people have subtitles rather than mangle English.

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If there's one thing that my spam has taught me, it's that I need Viagra.

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The "Rush in Rio" DVD is released today. It is also showing at some theaters tonight, for those of you lucky enough to live somewhere that it's not already sold out. It's a one-time showing only. Shit, I just found out about it yesterday when I went to the theater to watch Intolerable Cruelty.

Intolerable Cruelty isn't a bad movie, it's just not one I'm going to remember in a year, or one day down the road think "I want to see that movie again." It's amusing, but forgettable. I kept my eyes closed during the Lord of the Rings trailer. I never watch trailers for movies I already know I'm going to see.

So I can't go to the theater to see "Rush in Rio". I preordered the DVD yesterday, so it should be shipping today, and I'll have it next week. I'm excited. As you may know, I saw them in concert last year. It was great. I imagine I'll be watching the DVD several times.

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A while back Origin released Ultima 4 on the internet for free, in promotion of one of the newer ones (I think 9). At the time, Ultima 4 was considered by many to be the best game ever made. I mean, even now, how many games are there where your ultimate goal is to read a book?

Well, in a similar spirit (more just out of being cool than promoting something), Rockstar Games has released the original Grand Theft Auto for free on the internet. You have to fill out some form to get it, but no one ever puts their real information in those, anyway.

There are a few things in the original that I miss in 3 and Vice City, such as combos. In the first game, you'd have a line of nuns walking down the sidewalk, and if you could take 'em all out in one fell swoop, you got a combo bonus. They need to have nun lines in the next 3D iteration.

On a side note, while looking for the link where you can download Ultima 4, I've discovered that, despite 9 being the last one, there's going to be an Ultima 10 (Ultima X). I guess they're back to the original plan. I hope they don't screw this one up like they did the last one. Unlike their original plan, it's a MMORPG. I did not, however, find the link to Ultima 4 at Origin's site. Why do they suck, now? I guess they took it down. Do a search on Google and pick a place to download it if you want it. For GTA, there is a direct link.

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I think I've figured it out. It doesn't seem to matter how much sleep I get, I'm always tired in the morning. When I was working the graveyard shift, I never had any problems of the like, even though I would wake up from horrible nightmares quite often. Before that, when I was working at the video game store, I only felt tired when I had to work the morning shift. Back when I was in High School, I was tired all day at school, and I usually couldn't stay awake more than a couple hours once I got home, and that much was a struggle. So I wondered. Also, no matter how tired I am during the day, I have trouble getting to sleep at night. What's the difference/similarity between when I'm sleepy and when I'm awake?

The sun.

I think the sun makes me sleepy. If you think about it, sunlight is like a bright, self-heating blanket that's on you whenever you're exposed to it.

I was fine when I got to work today. It was cloudy. It's clear skies now, and I've fallen asleep about four times while writing this (past 20 minutes).

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I started playing Temple of Elemental Evil the other night. It's a new Dungeons & Dragons computer game, surely meant to follow up on the success of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. Here's my review of it.

The character creation is both old-school and new school. You have your choice of simply assigning points however you like, or rerolling dice a few thousand times. The die rolls almost always turn up higher totals than simply selecting where you want your points to go, so it pays to sit there and look for the better stats, which is both silly and boring. Also, there is no on-screen information about what things are or how they effect what. You have to flip through the manual any time you want to know anything. There is a miniscule choice of hair colors and styles, some of which are unusual (ie pink mohawk), as well as a poor choice of character voices. All the female character voices seem to be done by the same actress, and the same with the male character voices. They're all done badly.

That brings me to another point. I don't think they even hired voice actors for this game. I think the developers did the voices for the characters. They are terrible. Many of them don't even sound like they're trying. The few that do are just pitiful. I recommend playing this game without voices.

The gameplay is nice in concept, but the interface fucks it up. I absolutely despise the scrolling. It's like that bad scrolling in Lionheart, but ten times worse. You move the mouse cursor to the edge, and the scrolling accelerates. When you take the mouse cursor away from the edge, rather than stopping because you're where you want to be, it just decelerates, then stops, often leaving you a half screen away from where you want to be.

The combat system is all kinds of fucked up. It's turn-based, at least, so you have time to figure out what the fuck you're doing, but I still greatly prefer the real-time-with-commands-while-paused combat system they had in Baldur's Gate. I love in the new system how, I'll click on the enemy, he'll have the attack icon over him, my character will run over into the approximate vicinity, and then just stand there. It's not that she ran out of movement, it's that she just followed a command different than the one I gave her. Also, to issue specific commands, it's got one of those radial menus like the one from Neverwinter Nights, except that it sucks and it's hard to select what you really want.

The game is completely 3D, as far as I can tell, and viewed from a bird's-eye perspective. The leaves on the trees constantly move with the breeze. It's cool to look at, but it makes scrolling choppy, even on my computer. Aside from slightly smoother animation, I don't really see the point in the game engine being 3D.

One nice thing about the game over Baldur's Gate is that it's really easy to find the doors. In Baldur's Gate, you would enter through a door facing South, wander around inside, and then not be able to find the door you came through. You would have to move your mouse around until the pointer icon changed. In Temple of Elemental Evil, there are door icons on all the doors you can use. There's also stair icons on all the stairs, and such and such. It looks bad, but I prefer it to the "Where is it now?" game I'm used to playing in Baldur's Gate.

Another thing that's probably really nice is the ability to just "go there now". After you talk to someone, and they give you a quest, you can have your party go directly to where your quest would begin, rather than having to walk out of town and such. It saves quite a bit of time. I hate games where you spend most of your time walking *cough*everquest*cough*.

As for conversations, I haven't really gotten into a decent ones, yet. Nobody I've talked to really has anything to say. It looks like they really fleshed out the conversation system, though. Most of the "skills" you can build up have nothing to do with combat. I think most of them involve conversation, such as motive-sensing and intimidation. While this allows for a lot of interesting gameplay in the conversation arena, I haven't seen it pan out very much yet. I wouldn't expect it to this far into the game, as I've only played it for a few hours (most of which was spent on character creation, a process that really needs to be tweaked).

I'm not sure I'm going to continue playing it. It may be a great game aside from the technical details I've mentioned, but those details may make it unbearable.

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So, nearly a month after its release, I saw Underworld last night. I liked it. It was a little light on the plot, but they obviously knew that when making it. It was stylishly executed, and had good action sequences.

I think they faded red and green a bit too much. I understand why they did it, but I think it was just a bit overdone. I also with they had just said "lychanthropes" instead of "lichens", as a lichen is a fungus, not a werewolf. They also didn't have any lychanthropes other than werewolves, so it didn't seem like there was much point in addressing them as such.

It was awfully nice of them to have Kate Beckinsale (Selene) in that tight leather/vinyl outfit throughout the entire movie. It might sound like I'm putting down the movie when I say that was my favorite part, but I'm not. She's just that hot. It was what I wanted most and didn't get from The Avengers. Also unlike The Avengers, the rest of the movie was good as well.

I'm very glad they didn't play up the whole "We're vampires" and "We're werewolves" shit they normally do in movies. It gets old. No, they decided that people were already familiar enough with them both that they didn't need to go into it. Very wise. I mean, who doesn't know what vampires and werewolves are? It would be like not knowing what a blender is.

The movie hasn't done too well in theaters, although from looking at recent box office activity, that doesn't have much to do with the movie itself. Nothing's doing well right now. I guess people just aren't going to the movies. Underworld had a bad release date, starting right after school starts. Nobody's on vacation anymore, kids are caught up in everything that is entailed in school starting, parents have to worry about their kids more, college stuff... Who has time for the movies? My largest criticism of the movie would be its release date. That was just stupid.

All in all, I'd say it was a good movie. I'd watch it again (more for Kate Beckinsale than anything else, honestly), and I look forward to the sequel.

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I really like the show Licensed by Royal(ty). I've only seen three episodes of it, but I liked what I saw. It has one of the best opening sequences I've seen, with music by Billy Preston, which is quite good. Unfortunately, ol' Sgt. Pepper didn't sing the whole soundtrack, just that one song. For the rest of the soundtrack, they used Japanese singers, singing English lyrics.

Big mistake.

There was obviously no vocal coaching for these singers. Their English is so bad, you can't even recognize it as English sometimes. The rest of the time it just sounds like they hired some retarded peole to sing. I am not exaggerating, it's really that bad. It's good music, but the singing is so bad it hurts my brain more than country music.

Fortunately, for the show, they mostly just used the instrumental versions. Also a wise decision, they released two versions of the soundtrack: one with vocals, and one without. Obviously, the latter was intended for karaoke, but I have a bit of hope that someone out there will do their own vocals to it and release that on the internet. To get the Billy Preston song, you can just buy the single.

At least they didn't employ one of those singers I hate. They should have just gone with Japanese lyrics. They do get props for using Billy Preston, though. He's cool.

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I got one of those Sony DVD burners. I was closing in on 600 CDs (not counting the spindle of about 100 I haven't indexed yet), and I've only got room for 720, so I figured it was about time. Honestly, I wanted one sooner, but was waiting for a price-drop. My father decided I was going to bury myself in CDs pretty soon, and went ahead and bought one for me.

At first it didn't work. Then I found out there's another place to set DMA mode for your drive (which is in the IDE controller properties). I found this out when my dad told me. I was quite embarrassed that he figured it out before I did, considering I'm the one who does this kind of thing for a living. So, now, I've only got one real problem with the drive.

It is ugly.

For some reason, Sony decided to forgo design standards and make this futuristic, shitty design that disguises the eject button from your fingers. You can't feel it, you can't really see it (not from my angle), but you know it's there somewhere, and if you keep applying pressure in random areas, eventually the tray will open. I actually considered using the "eject" function in Windows, even though it would be more like using a Macintosh, a prospect I'm not fond of.

So now I've got this 5.25"x1.75" rectangle of ugly on the front of my computer that invariably stands out (literally). You can't tell from the picture, but the front is designed to look like bubbles, kind of like those you'd see used in pool toy designs, or possibly packaging material. The photo is actually quite flattering considering how ugly it is when you look at it. I don't really notice it most of the time, though. The big gaping hole in the front usually detracts attention away from the ugly DVD burner. The hole is good for ventallation, but I have to vacuum out the computer more often.

The larger capacity per disc really makes it easier to index, though, so I'd say it's worth it.

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Because real women are just so damn inconvenient.

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The problem with removing the right to bear arms is that it opens the door to removing other rights. I'm not too keen on the right for people to carry guns around, and keep them in their house where their kids can get them, but it is one of those rights we're not supposed to take away. One thing I think should be done is, if your guns are used illegally, whether its by you or someone else, you should get prosecuted. That might make parents think twice about keeping their guns where their kids can get them.

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