Categories
Gaming

Wii few, Wii happy few

Wii are coming. (Torchwood joke there - but thanks for looking!)

So I got a slightly early birthday present there. Somewhere, my wife scrounged together some money, and, along with a Gamestop gift card that John “felixthegamer” Morrison sent me around Christmas, went and got me a Wii. I’ve only been obsessing over this thing since it came out, and my wife admitted that the tipping point was when my dad came to visit and actually complained because he was hoping I’d have a Wii set up – he knows someone who has one and he loves the thing – and was disappointed when Mr. Video Game Collecting Guy didn’t even have a Wii. You know, when you pass yourself off as a video game historian (though I’m starting to think that, given my post-NES-era blind spot, maybe video game archaeologist is a better title – it says “fossils” right up at the top for a reason, folks), and even make part of your living from it, and your 85-year-old dad busts your balls because you haven’t even got a stinkin’ Wii… well, that is kind of embarrassing. Considering the outcome of that complaint, I’d like for my dad to complain about my grievous lack of a million bucks and a hot tub next time he visits.

I’ll post my Wii code tomorrow or over the weekend, though I’ll warn you up front that, for now, I’ve just got Wii Sports and that’s it; I can’t even believe I’ve got one of these in my living room, and expanding the library certainly isn’t a line item in the budget at the moment. But you know what? I’m so jazzed by this thing that even Wii Sports is awesome. I liked it way back when, and I still like it – if it puts things in perspective, my three favorite video baseball games are Wii Sports baseball, the original Baseball on the Game Boy, and Baseball! for the Odyssey2. I don’t care about anyone’s stats or career batting average, I just want to hit a frakkin’ ball on the screen. Wii Sports will do me just fine for a while.

Without saying too much because I don’t want to jinx it, I’ve talked to someone about a job this week which would be a godsend in terms of pay, benefits, and being interesting to me personally with my areas of knowledge and interest. It would, however, be quite a drive every day, which means it’d eat into my Evan time. Thankfully, it’s not in broadcast, so don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you’ll have to put up with me again. 😆 As reluctant as I am about a job that would steal an hour or so of Evan-and-daddy time away from me each day, this would be a big help to us, and would kind of spin my career off in a different direction from what anyone might have thought to expect, so…think good thoughts, please.

More good news as it arrives; I’m just gonna continue to throw bad news into the round file. Along with all the bills. These people think they can just send something in the mail and get my money? What the hell?

Once again, a huge thanks to my wife, and to John too – this is just awesome.… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

Tune in, turn on, or drop out?

Sci-Fi ChannelToday is the day that we officially declare the Sci-Fi Channel dead. The question is…do we say long live “SyFy”?

Let’s see…um…no. Just not feeling it. Being the card-carrying sci-fi geek that I have been since about the age of four or so, you’d think I’m a shoo-in for just about anything that airs on this channel, regardless of what they call it, but the more I think about their rebranding as “SyFy” – supposedly so they can “own their brand” (okay, I do understand that’s important) without alienating their core audience – the more a voice in the back of my head is saying “Guys? You’re doin’ it wrong.” … Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff Television & Movies

Asteroids: The Movie

AsteroidsThis is gonna rock. Ha! Get it? And no, I’m not joking – check out this item from the Hollywood Reporter…

As opposed to today’s games, there is no story line or fancy world-building mythology, so the studio would be creating a plot from scratch. Universal, however, is used to that development process, as it’s in the middle of doing just that for several of the Hasbro board game properties it is translating to the big screen, such as “Battleship” and “Candyland.”

So, as long as there are asteroids in Asteroids, and someone is shooting at them, we’re golden. … Read more

Categories
Critters Funny Stuff

You’ll be malfunctioning within a day or two. And so will your dog.

A bit of background here: several years ago, my dog attracted several potential suitors despite the fact that we’d been told she was already spayed (hint: she wasn’t). It was kind of like the dog version of The Bachelorette, in that you didn’t so much have lots of moon-eyed soft-focus close-ups in fabulously romantic mansions and vacation spots, as you walked out the door to see dogs gettin’ it on in the front yard. (Thankfully, this was years before Evan was born – how in the world would we explain such a sight now? “Well, son, they’re hiking the Appalachian Trail…” But I digress.)

Both of the dogs pictured in that earlier blog entry still live near here, and they still drop by, often bearing gifts – as if to say “Pleeeeeeeeease, can we do that thing again? ohpleaseohpleaseohplease!” These days, post-spay, Xena’s more like “Howdy, want to follow me down to the pond on the adjacent property and go swimming? Maybe gang up and kill one of the pond geese or something?” It’s altogether unlikely that she’s physically capable of caring any less. (I really need to learn her secret someday, my life would be much happier. Or maybe I need to go kill a goose to release the tension? Anyway…) The male dogs bring her dead deer (or pieces thereof) and other strong candidates for road kill – it gets disgusting, especially once it’s built up that beautiful aroma that only comes from not-so-freshly-dead animal carcass that’s been baking in the noonday sun. Guess who gets to dispose of these “gifts” from Xena’s boyfriends? Who else?

So imagine my unfettered delight when my wife informs me that the backbone and ribcage of some unfortunate creature has been left at the top of our driveway by some ex-boyfriend of Xena’s. Nothing says romance around this house like dead things. When I walked out to look at this latest gift from the gods, er, sorry, dogs, I was completely perplexed. At least the usual dead things have some meat on them – there’s some practical value to a dog. This poor thing, whatever it had been, had no such value.

WTF?

But once I laid eyes on it, I realized that, as the head of the household, I had a responsibility to do the only thing that would resolve the situation to anyone’s benefit and with any kind of dignity whatsoever. … Read more

Categories
Gadgetology

Holly Hop

As if fighting to keep a web site on the air over something like six or seven weeks wasn’t enough, I can also announced that I have slain another technical dragon: I finally declared victory on getting the wife’s living room media center PC working, and only a few weeks after Mother’s Day too. It plays Master Of Orion II, it plays movies, it plays music, it plays Monopoly. In theory it can browse the web and do e-mail too, but let’s not get too carried away – it’s using a fairly old TV as its monitor and I’m having a hard time imagining trying to do a lot of reading off of it.

Meet Holly

Thank God the machine’s previous owner set up a restore partition on the hard drive; I must have reinstalled the OS something like 20 times. The thing is, while the machine runs on XP Media Center edition, I was never actually able to get the Media Center crap to work. The Media Center functionality is really cool, at least in the brochure – you have a remote control that lets you navigate your media files in a very-easy-to-read-on-a-TV environment and play any of them at the touch of a button. Neato, eh? But the problem, I suspect, is the fact that I put a new video card in it that would do S-video out. Somewhere, having that new card in the machine gummed up the works with some arcane hardware conflict, and so I finally said “@#$% it, I’ll install Nero.” Except that didn’t work too gracefully either. Reinstall again.

I had previously planned on naming this system “Gambit” for network purposes, but after all the reinstalls, I started to think that Holly – from Red Dwarf – would be considerably more appropriate.

Another few reinstalls later, I was scratching my head as I installed Winamp (for music purposes). Now, I’ve been using Winamp since it came out. You know what? Nobody ever told me that it’s suddenly become a damn good video player as well as a damn good music player. I had no idea. Solved all my problems right there. Didn’t bother with Nero. Didn’t need to. With the possible exception of the Media Center-specific DVR functions, that pretty much got me on track. I’m still not sure what to do there – I suspect, however, that I’ll continue to use binaries newsgroups as my DVR for recently-aired stuff that’ll be wiped again as soon as it’s watched. (I know, I know – tut tut tut, shame, iTunes is out there and it’s legal! But how much do you pay for every show that you record and then wipe off of your DVR/Tivo? Heh. Thought so.)

Meet Holly
My wife’s favorite part about the new machine: the wireless keyboard. This and the new video card were virtually the only pieces of the machine bought brand new. Total expenditure on the whole project barely crossed the $250 line – hooray for tax refunds!

To sidetrack for a moment: I was gazing at Winamp doing a damn good job of playing some video when I noticed that the playlist window was still up. And that I could add stuff to it. And that’s when it dawned on me: around 1995 or so, when I was working at the (original) Fort Smith Fox station, the station purchased a computer-based commercial playback system which, when hooked up to a cable spot insertion timer (normally used to drop local spots into place unattended at a cable TV head end), could practically run prime time by itself. There are no words to describe what hot shit that was in 1995.

And here we are, barely 15 years later, with a system, in my living room, that could basically run a whole station. If one carved up a show into segments, and then had commercials on the hard drive to run between those segments…

…one would really be onto something if there was still room in the world for standard definition. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t think it’s one I’m going to put into practice anytime soon, not even for fun. Because unlike the guy I worked for back in the day, not every single little idea that occurs to me needs to become a company memo and a “hey, let’s try this!” But it sure would’ve been neat in 1995, aside from the whole thing about not needing many human operators anymore that almost certainly would’ve followed.

In the meantime…happy Mother’s Day. Only about a month or so late.

P.S. I’ve kicked off a summer special for some of our DVDs, to celebrate the site’s seismic shift to a vastly superior hosting service; you can order a bundle consisting of the 4-DVD Classic Gaming Expo set plus either Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2 or the Phosphor Dot Fossils Brown Box (Level 2 + the first Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD). If your DVD shelf has a gaping, “stuff-produced-by-Earl”-shaped hole in it, and you dig video game history, you can find the limited time special prices here. I had tried to start this deal earlier in the month, but then we got bitten by vampire Globats. The prices on these are good both inside and outside the U.S., so get ’em while you can! End of plug.… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3

It’s that time again…

…time for yet another Evan & daddy picture, taken the day after Fathers’ Day.

Evan and his daddy - June 2009

Not seen here, but mere moments away from sticking his head into the shot when I wasn’t ready to snap another picture, is Oberon. Too bad – that would’ve been a one-of-a-kind shot of the entire male membership of this household! At least until Nimitz comes home…… Read more