| Thinking of giving myself an early Christmas present...

This

| St. Jude's just sent me personalized address stickers with Elder Signs on them

What the heck man. This has been a weird week.

Aww... sorry I missed you. I went out with some dudes from work to this hamburger place in the east bay and got this HUGE, delicious but atrocious meal: cheeseburger with bacon, steak fries, and a vanilla milkshake. Easily 2,500 calories. Delicious, and yet, I feel like I can stop eating things like that for a long long time.

Dunno if you'll keep the game past this weekend but if you do, I'm always up for some more! I've got a level 19 Siren and a level 16 Hunter in addition to the character we were playing. I have a shotgun that lights people on fire. It's glorious.

| I Torchlight yo house!

www.torchlightgame.com
Torchlight - Action RPG. This game is pretty fun and runs well on my shitty old computer, so a heads up to you Diablo fans. It's from the people who made Diablo 1 and 2. They were Blizzard North for awhile then it got disbanded and they made a couple more games. This one is only $20 bucks and it's a really fun loot and click-fest. I got it through Steam, you can get it there or from their own site. Only single-player, but their next project will be an MMORPG in this Diablo-esque style that will be free to play. Here's a few mins of the Giant Bomb dudes playing it so you can see what it's all about.
Quick Look!
I think it's worth checking out!

PS: Jon, tonight I'd be down for some Borderlands if you're around - I don't gotta work tomorrow and I friggen played race-car games all night so need a break from that. Do it!

EDIT: Hmm, nevermind, sounds like some pre-order bullshit gets you access to the demo. Nothing to see here, move along!

Left 4 Dead 2 demo up on Steam today! I believe it gives you one episode to play (or probably a part of an episode like the first game's demo did.) PC gamers, get on Steam and grab it so we can have some mini-goodtimes.

EDIT: Well, demos might or might not be out yet, I'm at work and just seeing chatter about it, but who friggen knows. Goes for the Xbox version as well. I'll be busy playing racing car game all week, so I won't get to it till later.

Ryan, I'm pretty sure he was kidding as I seem to recall that he took some anatomy courses. Unless he took Conversational Anatomy, in which case he would've learned body parts by name like "pecker," "shitter" and "corn hole."

Aeryk glad to hear your kid's OK too. "I never was afraid in my life until I had my first kid." - D. Oeterson

Rudy, Enron and I (although not all together) have been playing some co-op Borderlands on the 360. It's SUPER fun and definitely worth picking up with the caveat that it is best played co-op with pals. You team up to shoot stuff and grab loot, it feels like exactly what I want to be playing on Xbox Live.

Worked too late today. Blah.

Five minutes later, I am still laughing about Eric's post. For some reason, this strikes me as really funny. I don't know if it was the explanation of Eric's misunderstanding of the word "anus" (were you serious?) or if it was the quote "my anus (butt hole) is really really itchy." Both are good.

Funny!

| Smart, considerate, people

I was reading about the poisonous beginnings of raw cashews and found a very insightful and helpful quote in the comments:

"As mentioned above, cashews are part of the poison ivy family and I think the raw cashews I bought were poorly steamed because my anus (butt hole) is really really itchy especially right after I go to the bathroom."

Anus has been one of those words that I just never really knew what it meant, so I have just sort of nodded along all these years when I hear it in conversation, but after reading this person's comment, so much has been explained.

Thank you, Intarwebz.

| Paranormal Activity?

More like Para-BORE-mal Activity! Saw this last night and it was just alright. I will be spoiler-free but it is very much in the vein of Blair Witch but somehow less "real" feeling. Still fun to watch but seriously, quotes they have in the trailers about people being SO scared, that's just shady marketing, it has to be. Or our world is full of a bunch of fat babies.

Note: I watched a copy of the DVD screener which is the version from about a year ago (the movie is from 2007.) It has a different ending than the one in theaters now. After I watched, I looked up the different endings and maybe my ending is better than the new one. I don't know.

It's fine, but I think this new Alien movie coming out, 4th Kind or something, looks scarier.

| Holy Shit

Ugh! Thinking of Wylie hitting the concrete skull first gives me the creeps like you wouldn't believe. Sooo glad he pulled it. Not only do kids have have amazing abilities to regenerate, but also they really don't have far to fall. Sounds like you have a hockey/polo player in the making there!

That's also really annoying about the ER. 2 hours??? I guess we can thank the media for scaring the shit out of everyone who has a sniffle, making them think they have H1N1.

Wow, glad he's ok Eric! Kids are friggin nuts, I don't know if I have it in me to raise them. That seriously has to be THE most rewarding/horrifying things in the world - raising a kid. But like you said, they're all unbreakable at that age thank goodness. And speaking of cat scans and all that stuff, This American Life, the npr radio show also available on itunes (it's SO good) had it's last 2 episodes about Healthcare and yeah, don't give your kid cat scans and mri's if he doesn't need them. Lots of stuff can go wrong from unnecessary treatments, etc. Listen to those shows though, really fascinating stuff!

Glad the boy is well!

This American Life

| Lets see here

Let me preface this by saying everything is fine, fyi.

Last weekend Wylie was running in a park in Fresno (never going back there again!) and slipped on an old puddle of scummy rainwater - went right from standing to his head hitting the concrete, direct hit. The old adage with kids is if they cry, they are "okay", if not, there is a problem. Wylie sort of started convulsing before I grabbed him and it took him a good minute to get his bearings and start crying. Needless to say, we were FREAKED THE FUCKING FUCK OUT.

Amazingly, there was no blood. I was sure there would be broken skull, brains, blood, etc. - I had never seen a head hit concrete more directly than that before and was sure it was going to be bad, bad, bad. After calming him down we rushed off the the ER post-haste.

It was late in the day, and he had skipped his nap, and was probably scared to death from the hit and the crying and wanted to close his eyes and take a nap. First rule in head injuries, no napping. So we had to keep him up best we could on the way there which was good times.

So here we have this kid with a possible scrambled egg for brains and arrive at the ER only to end up waiting for 2 hours before being seen because the place was crammed top to bottom with people that thought they had the H1N1. It was absolutely ridiculous. Their triage system worked like this: Are you sick? If yes, sit there and wait for us to call you. Head injury? If yes, sit there and wait for us to call you.

Now I'm sure that if there was blood streaming down his head and his eyes were rolled back and I kicked the security door down someone would have seen him sooner, but alas, thankfully none of those things happened.

During our wait, amongst the masks, the barf bags, and the general malaise and stink of the place, Wylie moved past the stage where I basically had to constantly move him so he wouldn't sleep in my arms, to somewhat mild interest in his surroundings, to laughing and me playing with him. Eventually he perked up and became his old self. At this point it shouldn't be surprising anymore, but the massive goose egg that was on the side of his head disappeared (kids have AMAZING regenerative powers - necromancers, all of them!) and really he was just bored.

He was a trooper, and once we were admitted to the hospital proper, the bevy of doctors that came in and checked him in the identical way all agreed that he showed no signs of concussion, drain bramage, etc. and we were free to go. Thank God no MRI, CAT scans, etc. because as I understand it, that can get expensive?

He's fine now, and my constant replaying of the fall in my head all day and night is starting to subside. Just seems like it could have been so much worse...

Yikes.

You are free to move about the Blog now, nothing more to see here.

mcd game is a total scam like the scam-wow guy.

I'm so easily goofed... or perhaps i shoulda just done a search online to check the printed odds. But it's Mcdonalds! (destroys inner kid of trusts) The online game is rigged too. Moral is?: Internet is consumers best friend.

I'll hopefully be getting Borderlands by Wed from my game rental sight, so would be awesome to do some co-op with you. I gotta say, I also have a PS3 and been playing a ton of Uncharted 2. It's a friggen INCREDIBLE game! It is so good and looks amazing and plays so fun and it really feels like you're in control of a really good Indiana Jones type of movie. Wow! Also, Batman: Arkham Asylum is really excellent. The melee combat in it is just fun and brutal and you really just feel like such a badass being all stealth and taking out all these thugs. Brutal Legend from Tim Schafer (Grim Fandago, Psychonauts, Full Throttle) is kind of a bummer. Story-wise it seems really funny and full of great writing. It's the heavy metal one with Jack Black. He's pretty hilarious and it's just a rad idea for a world, but the actual GAME is not very fun, especially with these other high-caliber games out there. It's something like a God of War clone with the hack n' slash but I guess it also has Real Time Strategy segments. I dunno, it's sorta open-worldy too. Just wasn't having fun with the actual game portions and was just tolerating that to get to the next cutscene. Play the demo, it's pretty funny and gives you enough of a taste.

Watched Watchmen on Blu Ray for the first time last night. It was alright! Not like movie of the year material or anything, but also not totally offensively bad or anything. I remember there being talk of Terry Gilliam wanting to do a 12 hour mini-series of the comic but I was struggling to make it through 3 hours on this one, don't think I'd need 12 hours! But overall I think it did a good job of telling the story and I liked all the performances.

Any of you fools planning on picking up Borderlands? I'm thinking it looks like a good, shootfest, RPG lite game to play co-op on the ol' 360.

Just watched the Swayze's Road House last night. Hilariously bad and cheesy. Just as good is that they randomly got Kevin Smith to do a commentary track on it; very funny.