| 4e

It's out.

Anyone (named Denis) pick it up today? Thoughts?

As soon as I found out it was released (at about 10pm on Slashdot) I sort of had an impulse to buy it! I had a small fantasy of playing D&D again! It just seems so fun!

Briefly read some good things about it, like it has positive comparisons to WoW and that everyone has powers that are fun to use, so no more 'not the healing kind of clerics' in the party.

Dunno. Might get it for nostalgia sake?

EDIT: Actually, reading up on it a lil bit on BGG and it appears that it is a superior tactical boardgame masquerading as a roleplaying game. So it is like Descent: Road to Legend, but with better tactical combat. There is actually a section in the new DMG that says you can play D&D w/o a DM as long as you make an encounter deck, etc....

Very interesting proposition....

Zelda Phantom Hourglass is great, AND it really takes advantage of the stylus controls. Do it!

Haven't played either Animal Crossing or Advance Wars but they are supposed to be great too.

I loved the first two Phoenix Wright games. Still gotta play the third one! They also released a new one in the series (Apollo Justice or something) that takes better advantage of the DS features... wanna play that one too.

RED RINGS OF DEATH!!! Oh that sucks man if it's dying on you, but apparently it will happen to all of us sooner or later. You might as well put in the call to 1-800-4MY-XBOX to get your replacement. Linky

Quick, tell me a DS game to get that will get me to take it out of the box and use it! Not an adventure game, because I've played most of them, or will rent them (like Hotel Dusk.) Animal Crossings? Advanced Wars: Days of Ruin? I need direction like the Bad Religion song!

Yeah, the Lego games are "cute" and the cutscenes are "humorous" but there's just something that totally doesn't click with me! I can't figure it out! If I had friends or kids to play the co-op with, I'm sure I'd like them a lot more. But even though I LOVE the Indy movies, the game just leaves me cold.

Not cold is the Phoenix Wright games. Oh my gosh, I'm so in love with them. Playing the last case in the 3rd game, and it's SO good. They got some really good writers/translators/localization-people. It's just funny and smart and just super charming. Sometimes the game mechanic of just dialog to the nth degree gets boring and old, but overall it's just such an amazing series.

Soulless? Really? I like the Lego star wars games better than I like the movies, at this point. They're so cute! I mean how can you not like the way Chewbacca tears the arms right off of Stormtroopers. Or the way his head is too big so the Stormtrooper helmets just wobble on top, but everybody still buys the disguise anyway.

Although I do find that if I went through the levels and tried collecting everything on the first pass, getting all the coins etc., the levels are long and boring, whereas if I tear through the levels at a rapid clip just trying to get to the end they're really fun (and feel more like the movies).

My 360 is starting to freeze up on me. I am a sad panda :[

Like whoa, that's pretty fucked up Ryan. Imagine if you're septum or whatever is really that full of blockage, you haven't been getting a decent nights rest in like 10 fucking years! There was some total cocking sucking piece of shit at an old job who had to get an operation for a similar problem. Well, I think they shaved his fucking TONGUE (or was that Johnny!?) because he was a gnarly snorer and had sleep apnea (or SLEEP CHEAPNESS as the spell check wants me to spell apnea). But after it was done, he said his life was so much better and totally amazing. The guy was such a fuck though, I kinda wish they woulda shaved his fucking head off too. Anyways, good luck with that mess. Holy shit, that's pretty crummy. I've been in Extreme Bootcamp for 3 weeks now, and since it forces me to get up at 4am every goddamn day, I've been taking sleeping pills at like 8pm, knocking out before 9, then waking up and doing drills. I don't even know why I'm relating this.. oh well, I guess the point is it forces me to knock the fuck out and actually SLEEP (which before Extreme Bootcamp I did very little of) and I feel much better. But, I don't think sleeping pills are gonna cure a blocked up nose. Next time man, tuff it out and just let them partially choke you in your sleep. Then at least you'd get a proper diagnosis.

I bought a DS a few days ago! I haven't even taken it out of the box yet... :( Impulse buys are grrrreat! Someday I will.

Lego Indiana Jones is just as un-fun as Lego Star Wars! I don't know why I listen to the hype and try these Lego games. As co-op games, I'm sure there's SOME kind of fun to it, but as solo-games, they are absolutely soulless and horrible, IN MY HUMBLE OPINION. I also just got Ninja Gaiden 2 in the mail today - it's supposed to be pretty good, so we shall see. And I have a new DS which is still sitting in it's original Toys R Us plastic bag in the corner of my room. And later tonight I will continue playing a Phoenix Wright game on my DS EMULATOR ON MY PC because I am a confused asshole like that.

I also went to a bday party tonight, so I'm way buzzed and feeling woozy. John, kudos on finishing those Stephenson books. You are a better and stronger man than me, by far. I never made it past mid-way of book 2, and I already own all 3 books hardcover that I grabbed super cheap from a used bookstore. Yet another impulse buy that will remain unfulfilled. I am reading the 2nd book in the "mars trilogy" though which stumped me about a year ago but that somehow seems really good to me this try around. GREEN MARS. I like that book title Ryan. The plebes I kick it with are always aghast and confused when I throw out the "how can hell be any worse?" line from BR whenever the opportunity presents itself. Now I'm gonna use that line from that book even though I'd never heard of it till just a few moments ago.

| Finis

I finally finished Neal Stephenson's baroque trilogy. 2,700 pages long! It was up there with his other books and I certainly learned more about that time period than I did in ap history. When I finished the series I was weirdly sad. You live with the characters for several decades of their lives and almost want to know more about what happens to them. The ending was also really satisfying which, with Stephenson, you can't always take for granted. So, 6/10 for the first book, a solid 9/10 for the second and third. And a 16/f for Rudy.

Ryan: holy shit. Entertaining and horrifying. That's what The Action Team is about!

| Crapsy=pizza

I have to share this experience with you guys. I have been losing my voice very quickly recently, worse than ever. By the end of my day, it is often like I have laryngitis, whoch makes coaching and talking to the babes tough. So I went to the ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat) doc. She looked at my throat and she saw nothing out of the ordinary. She said that I just need to rest it more often and that since I do such strenuous talking on a daily basis, the chances of me losing my voice are greater. Basically, just get over it. Then she looked at my nose and said,

“Oh, wow!”

I ask, “What happened?”

“Have you ever had your nose broken before?”

“Yeah, once in high school in water polo.” I caught a follow-through once from Roger Von Dippe right on my nose. It hurt really badly and I had to go to the doctor to get it fixed.

“Well, your septum is shaped like an ‘S’. I don’t know how you are breathing at all at night. You have total blockage on your left side and about 60% blockage on your right.”

“Hmmm,” I responded. “That could explain my snoring.”

“I want you to go to a sleep clinic as soon as you can.”

“Sleep clinic, eh? That sounds horrible,” I said.

“It’s really not that bad. You sleep in a bed, and we monitor your sleeping patterns overnight. That way we can see if you are having sleep apnea or not. We can then determine if you need an operation.”

That doctor was a fucking liar because it really was that bad. I went in at 9:00 pm to what amounted to your basic hospital room at Torrance Memorial Hospital and this weird Pilipino woman who definitely had a language barrier took half an hour to wire me up. I had wires in my hair, on my face, on my neck and throat, on my back, on my chest, and on my legs. I had a wire coming out of my nose; I had a monitor clamped to my index finger. I told her,

“I usually sleep on my side or on my stomach. How am I supposed to do that here?”

“Oh no. We want you to sleep on your back. Goodnight!” And with that she shut off the lights and left. I sat staring at the ceiling for about an hour and a half, but finally fell asleep.

At 1:30 am she woke me up and made me put on this mask that forces you to breathe out of your nose only. I told her (mind you I was groggy), “That is the fucking problem in the first place. I can’t breathe out of my nose. How in the hell am I supposed to wear that goddamn thing?”

She then asks in a kind of bitchy tone, “So you want to quit this part of the test?”

“Yeah. I want to be left alone.”

“Okay.”

So I rolled over and went back to sleep. At 5:30 am, she wakes me up and says, “Okay, the test is over. You can go home.”

I find out the results on Wednesday. This will determine what kind of operation that I will have to have. It is shaping up to be a fucking killer summer boys!

On another note, has anyone read I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max? He is seriously the most reprehensible guy and a total asshole to the bone, but it is the funniest fucking thin I think I have ever read. Read it!

We'd all been better off if the man had just done his job... :(

Imagine, this would be over 20 years of post-apoco living. Life sure would be more interesting if we had to scavenge the wastelands everyday. Fight some goddamn mutants. But no. We have to go to our shit jobs EVERY fucking day. Fucking-A.


What we might have looked like if we lived through the Apocalypse?

| Stanislav Petrov Day!

I believe that jr0n brought this up last year, but let's all tip our hats, fedoras, whathaveyous, to a great world hero, Stanislav Petrov, the man that when faced with the worst of all decisions, and saddled with the fact that he could kill the planet, despite being told what to do by his boss, and possibly invoking a self-inflicted double-tap 'suicide' to the skull by some Spetznatz wetworks team, said "Fuck that" and saved us all.

Karate Kid in 5 seconds:

LINKY