The Endless Wars: The Descent

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20090526

Post-Memorial Day Reawakening

I really want Infamous.

Read the 1UP Review!

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It looks really cool, in that Crackdown kinda way.

Memorial Day Weekend
They boy and I met the Lady at her parents' house in Kingston, IL last Friday night for Memorial Day weekend. She had flown up the Wednesday before to get some time to hang with her girlfriends and sister. As I discussed in the last post, they live in a rather remote area, but as usual, it was fun.

Part of the fun was I finally broke down and bought an iPod, as I mentioned previously. I've had some time to really get to know it, and so far, I really like it, but I have some serious reservations about iTunes. Here's a quick love/hate breakdown for ya:

I LOVE:

- the sorting functions; it sorts music in all sorts of helpful and interesting ways

- the slickness; it looks purty while it's doing it's thing

- the way it handles podcasts; I used to waste a lotta time manually managing my podcasts; it's nice being able to just set rules for each podcast in iTunes and just let the thing function the way I told it to once

- I'm actually starting to come around on the way iTunes handles playlists; I hated it for a while since it's different from Winamp, but I've started to kinda dig it these last few days

- sound quality; the sound quality is stunning

I HATE:

- the interface; I know Apple is allergic to buttons, but add at least a couple; context-sensitivity is cool and all, but that one button is responsible for too much; the scroll wheel is cool, at times, for song selection and volume, but it's a little twitchy when it comes to setting ratings for songs

- the initial loading of the library; it should just look at my music directory and go 'okay, here's your songs;' it doesn't; I don't care what fucking encoding a song is in, just play it; I accidentally ripped 2200 songs in .wma (forgot that WMP rips in .wma format by default) when I re-ripped my CD collection; a music player should just play them; instead, it spent 7-8 hours converting them to .aac, in a furthering of the Apple/M$ pissing contest; it then duplicated half the songs, so I had to wipe out the whole library and try again; I didn't properly sync the fucking thing until I'd had it for a day and a half; this was the worst part of the experience

- too susceptible to fingerprints (very minor complaint)

- doesn't play HD Quicktime (small Quicktime looks like shit)

- it doesn't save my place in a podcast; since my podcasting device was separate from my music before this, I used to flip to music occasionally and come back to the podcast later in the day. Now, I can't do that. If I flip to music, it starts the podcast over. I'm starting to see why all you iPod-loving fucks would bitch when we recorded podcasts that were actually a good length. WE weren't the problem, that piece of shit device on which made yourself dependent was the problem! Yes, it does. Oops.

Overall, the iPod and I have formed a decent relationship. We're like those grudging cop buddies in an action flick.

The Lady and I took in a double feature yesterday of Terminator: Salvation and Star Trek. I'd already seen Star Trek, but she hadn't. Wii Apologist John also joined us for Terminator.

Terminator: Salvation was better than I was expecting. Given that it was directed the amazingly hyper-cutting McG who is responsible for such abominations as Charlie's Angels and Fastlane, and the giant dumps AICN had been taking on it, I was almost sad about the movie before even seeing it. Then, when it ended up being a really fun action flick, I was okay. It continues the story of the Terminator films, has great action, and that's what I needed outta this movie. If you see it, I'm curious about something. Did you think it was John Connor's movie, or Marcus Wright's?

Star Trek was actually a lot better for me the second time, since I wasn't wasted this time. This time around, I really felt like captured more of the spirit of what Star Trek is. I do have a hell of a bone to pick with the writers and producers, though. This is NOT an alternate time line. It is the new timeline, and they've obliterated everything that happened in Star Trek, Star Trek: the Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager. It's not an alternate timeline because Nero went back and changed events. He didn't create a second reality, he just changed the existing one. Therefore, according to this film, nothing after Star Trek: Enterprise counts. That's sorta fucked up. I don't know how I feel about that.

Anyway, it was a fun weekend, which we concluded with my sister's birthday.

Oh, perhaps you saw this?

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I am more excited about that game than you can imagine. How about you?

Before that, though, what are your big summer entertainment items? I'm stoked about Drag Me to Hell next week, NCAA Football 10, Madden NFL 10, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Watchmen on BD. What about you?

-Blaine

4 comments:

  1. Somehow Terminator turned into this this highly sophisticated piece of narrative based on how much everyone hates T4 for it's popcorn action. I thought it was visually pleasing and a lot of fun. I don't know what other people were looking to get out of the movie, but I had a good time. To answer your question, it was Marcus Wright's movie.

    Modern Warfare 2 looks amazing and will sell one billion copies - you heard it here first.

    Don't feel to bad about the iPod - I am on a mission to convert my entire Soul over to Apple before the year is over. I can't sleep knowing Microsoft gets so much of my money.

    I am looking to get the Director's Cut of Watchmen and hopefully see Star Trek. My summer will be a success if I can mangae those two measley tasks. Oh, I'm pretty interested in Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3 as well - not sure when they will be coming out though.

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  2. @laurance When "its" is possessive, you don't need to add an apostrophe. That being said, I'm with ya about T4. I never thought the larger fiction of the films was anything amazing. My wife had an interesting point, though, in that most of her Terminator exposure was from the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which raised the bar for the series' emotional complexity tremendously, since the show was driven by familial relationships, and not action. For me, the show informed all the scenes of John Connor listening to the tape (?) recordings of Sarah, as well as the complexity of his relationship with Marcus. What's interesting about your belief that the film is Marcus's film (a belief I agree with) is that one of the arguments I've heard about the film is that John Connor has no arc, that he is the same person at the end of the film that he was at the beginning. I don't agree with that, but I can see how non-thinking, generic reviewers would come to that belief. Agreed about Modern Warfare 2. Are you buying a Mac? Didn't you, last year, buy a totally pimp PC? A PC that you don't use for Steam? I'm curious to see what you think of Star Trek. I know nothing about Red Dead Redemption or Max Payne 3, so I'm curious why you, a man who is known to have pretty damn good taste (aside from being an apologist for Bethesda Software), are interested in these games.

    -Blaine

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  3. I know the rule for "its", I just don't proofread. If you clown on me again - all your base will belong to us! I have bought a new desktop and laptop in the past couple of years (the laptop very recently), but I can't stand Windows anymore. Plus, I have to sit and watch my friends with their Macs every time we get together and I find myself in a trance of lust. This is the case especially when we are working on art projects.

    Whoa, whoa, whoa. When have I been an apologist's for Bethesda? Did you forget about this blog? Just like with Bioware games, I play despite the glitches because the content is so darn good. I am looking forward to Red Dead Redemption because I really want a good Wild West game. I think Rockstar could pull off a fun experience with their sandbox style. As far as Max Payne 3 goes, I don't know anything about it, but I liked the first two games a lot. Wishful thinking I suppose.

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  4. So, yeah...at Kingston, you were 32.1 miles away from my place (less as you traveled there), and didn't even call. You bastard....

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