Archives for Category "Anything Goes"
I Dream of Zombies
I’m not sure which dream was crazier, the dream I had about going to Harbin in a spaceship with several people I knew from high school and getting in trouble for rollerskating in… Okay, if I don’t stop now, this is going to turn into a huge run-on sentence. Let’s start over. So I had a dream about going to Harbin in a spaceship with several people I knew from high school and… uh… This is going in the same direction. Scratch that.
In last night’s dream, I was cooking dinner in the apartment I had apparently rented inside an amusement park. Suddenly, an old, scroungy man fell out of the vent above the stove and landed in my pot of soup. He claimed he was the previous tenant and was returning to collect all the belongings he had left behind. Specifically, he wanted his NES and television back. I knew these things were his, but the guy had supposedly died several years ago. That NES was mine, now! I refused to give it to him and escorted him out the door.
A few hours later, he came back with a huge group of zombies, fellow shipmates he had brought back from the dead. Holy crap. He really wanted that NES! And so did I. So I fled, and the zombies chased after me through the park. I finally found a hiding place near a high suspension bridge. The zombies congregated on the bridge, looking over the sides to see if they could spot me below. One by one, I crept up behind them and pushed them over the side. Of course, this didn’t kill them, but when their leader saw how serious I was, he called them off, and they limped away.
Site Statistics Say You’re a Pervert
I love checking my site statistics. It’s a daily ritual, like checking the stock market or Facebook (when it was available… still no luck with that one). It’s always interesting to see what search queries led people to read my blog or at least glance at it and say, “Screw that, I’m outta here.” September’s winner was “paypal sucks,” though it could have done even better if people knew how to spell Paypal (patpal and pappal made the list, as well). Here are the top phrases:
Hey, wait a minute… what’s “hot sister pics” doing on that list? How does my site even come up in those results? You really have to dig deep to see a link among so many porn sites pointing here. All right, so my post about the national park, Huanglong, was titled a little misleadingly. Sister-seekers, however, should realize that a website called “Clark Nielsen for the Win” isn’t going to give them what they want. Huanglong does sound like one hot chick, though. I can’t resist a girl who has “long” in her name.
The Five Best Multiplayer DS Homebrew Games
One of the best aspects about the Nintendo DS is its great library of multiplayer games. Unfortunately, this is something homebrew developers have struggled with, or if they haven’t, it’s sure been hard finding the good stuff. That’s where I come in, ’cause I’ve got nothing better to do. While you won’t see many games that allow you to play DS to DS, there are still a few gems out there which play great using only one system. (Note: running homebrew involves using a flashcart like the Acekard, DSTT, or M3.)
5. DS Chess / ChessNET
I don’t really like having to pass the DS back and forth. Chess, however, is always nice to have readily available. The cool thing about these games is how they’ll save your match when you turn the system off. In the case of ChessNET, you can store several matches. Still, I favor DS Chess, even though it forces you to use the touch screen, because it at least keeps track of your moves and tells you where the other player went.
4. Tag DS
The way this game requires you to play—sitting face to face so you can look at your own screen—is a little strange, but the game itself is fun in short bursts. The person who is “it” chases the other player around a small arena, trying to dash into them before the timer runs out. It’s a little too simple and easy, but when you’re able to outsmart your opponent just by running in circles, it can be pretty funny.
3. Ioceropong
There are about 20 different versions of Pong available on the homebrew scene, but all of them are buggy beyond playable and/or don’t have a two-player mode. Ioceropong isn’t perfect, either, though it comes close. The additional soccer mode that sees each player controlling two paddles (one on offense and one on defense) is a great twist to an old formula and, despite the flaws, makes this one worth having on your card.
2. Tetattds
Okay, so it doesn’t beat owning an official copy of Nintendo’s Planet Puzzle League. Nonetheless, Tetattds still works surprisingly well as a single-player game or as an eight-player local Wifi romp. Yeah, that’s right. Local Wifi! You don’t see many homebrew games that can pull that off. The connection isn’t always stable, but the fact that it works at all leaves me with little to complain about.
1. Marshmallow Duel
This one doesn’t support Wifi, but it’s still among my favorite homebrew games on the system. It’s a straightforward platform/action deathmatch where you race to grab the best power-ups as they randomly appear. It only takes one hit to kill the other player, but rounds start so quickly, you’ll hardly notice the pause. The power-ups are also kooky and diverse enough to keep things fair. Two people on one DS can be a bit cramped, but this game is perfect fun.
Honorable mentions
Despite a somewhat irritating setup, Hoover Maneuver is a decent remake of a Warioware minigame. Tic-Tac-Toe isn’t exactly must-have material, either, but carrying a portable copy around sure cuts down on paper, and Gekinzuku’s version is easily the best on the DS. Also, while I could never get Explosive Gas to run using a DSTT card, it seems like a very competent Bomberman clone.
TV Roundup: Volume 7
Lost (Seasons 1-3)
I’ve always been fascinated by stories of people crash-landing on a remote island and having to make do. Lost isn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it’s still a gripping adventure that’s had the same effect on me 24 did years ago. No matter how frustrating the show becomes, no matter how many questions remain unanswered or how many characters unfairly die, I have to keep watching, to know what happens next. I’m a sucker for cliffhangers and have missed a lot of sleep staying up late, glued to the TV. The cast is great, too, and the characters who do stay alive are likable and carry enough complexity to keep the show interesting. The numerous flashbacks certainly help achieve that layer of depth. But while many of these scenes are useful to the overall story, they’re often placed right in the middle of a crisis. When I’m watching an exciting chase between a giant bear and a little kid, I want to see that get resolved as soon as possible. I don’t want to put that on hold so I can learn more about his parents’ relationship.
Gary Unmarried (Season 1)
Some people would probably take offense to a sitcom about two recently divorced adults juggling their kids and taking potshots at the other’s shortcomings, yet even with the TV-14 rating, Gary Unmarried plays it safe. They even stuck with the obnoxious laugh track in case you weren’t sure this is supposed to be a comedy. While there are some funny moments, the overall experience feels very B-quality, like the creators’ only ambition was to outdo According to Jim (a ridiculously easy feat, anyway). Despite some recognizable faces, the actors all seem cast for the wrong parts. The lead characters would be better off as secondary characters on another show, and the secondary characters would be better off as understudies until they learned not to ham it up so much. If you can’t get enough of the traditional sitcom, these are harmless 20-minute episodes, but I don’t think I can take one more viewing of a show where the kids act ten years older than they really are, and everyone yells their lines in order to be heard by the audience that may or may not even be there.
Psych (Season 1)
Ignoring that the pilot episode was two hours (one hour too long), Psych starts out with a lot of promise that’s eventually squandered by an annoyingly talkative lead character. What little charm he had in the first episode completely vanished mid-season. Okay, so his pointless sidekick and the general soap opera staging of the show don’t help things, either, but let’s stick to the important issues. Shawn Spencer’s ability to notice small details and piece together obscure information is dangerously similar to Adrian Monk of Monk fame, except Shawn caters to a younger, hipper crowd and pretends to be a psychic in order to win favor with the police. He takes the psychic schtick a little too far, though, and instead of annoying the police force, which is supposed to be funny, annoys the poor suckers watching it on TV. It would be nice if Shawn would mellow out (and he does later on, but not enough), because the cases he gets involved with are pretty engaging when the rest of the show isn’t already killing the mood.
The Goode Family (Season 1)
King of the Hill is one of my favorite TV shows, but I was not impressed with the episodes leading up to its cancellation. The Goode Family, instead of correcting what was wrong with the Mike Judge formula, only picked up where King left off with the same style, pacing, and family stereotypes. The Goodes are a much less endearing family than the Hills, however, and father figure Gerald’s dull anecdotes aren’t as funny told through the rose-colored megaphone of an environmentalist. Their eco-conscious practices are still amusing when they’re pitted against something they’re supposed to like but don’t (like a disgusting endangered species), but it ends up feeling a little too preachy, even though you can tell the show is trying to be satirical. Maybe liberals don’t offer the same comedic gold mine as conservatives? Or maybe it’s just more fun to see a conservative, like Hank Hill, come to terms with someone else’s alternative lifestyle than it is for the Goodes to propagate that lifestyle from the beginning? Yeah, that’s got to be it.
Paypal Sucks
Every time I try to order plane tickets using Paypal, I get a call from the flight reservation company telling me Paypal is preventing them from receiving my money. So I open my Paypal account and see that it’s been frozen due to suspicious activity. Every… damn… time. When this first happened, I called Paypal in Shanghai and explained that I was on vacation in China. They agreed to re-open my account and mark it as a special “China case.”
A few weeks later, I had to order some emergency tickets from Beijing to Xi’an. Surprise! Paypal froze my account. I called them again. They weren’t as willing to cooperate this time around but finally opened my account so the transaction could go through. Another week later, I tried to order tickets again, this time from Jiuzhaigou to Chengdu. BAM! Frozen. And Paypal refused to help. Nevermind the fact that they opened it twice before and had supposedly marked my account to prevent this from happening in the future. Their only suggestion was to call Paypal’s office in Omaha.
Uh… I’m on vacation in China, you idiots.
When these disputes arise, there are ways you can resolve them without having to call customer support. Their website offers many solutions. Of course, these methods include Paypal calling your house at a certain time, uploading bank statements, or copying information from a check, none of which you can do when you’re on vacation in China! So my account’s still frozen and will probably remain that way for several months. At least I know I’ll have some money waiting for me when I finally go home.
A Day Without a Computer
My reliance on computers had become pretty evident when I was more worried about the prospect of not having my own PC for the month of July over not knowing what I would even be doing about a job. I was able to convince a friend of a friend to let me rent his laptop, but said laptop is old and decided to blue screen me before I had a chance to back up my meticulous itinerary for next month’s vacation. I should learn by now that saying, “Nah!” after telling myself to back something up usually means I’m going to regret it.
A local computer shop re-installed Windows for me—and for free—but the catch is that they installed the Chinese version instead of the English version. The original owner of the laptop is Chinese, so maybe I actually did him a favor, but for the time being, I now have to deal with menus that look like this:
Keep in mind, there’s no way to change Windows from Chinese to English without re-installing with the English CD!
The sad part is, I actually know (for the most part, anyway) how to find my way around Chinese Windows. But before you start to marvel at my superb character-reading skills, I should tell you I’ve already spent so many years of my life navigating around PCs, I have a pretty good idea what the third option from the bottom of every menu does. I’m one step closer to being able to do this in my sleep. Though when I’m having computer problems, I find it hard to sleep at all…
TV Roundup: Volume 6
Monk (Season 1)
I’m a little new to the detective genre of TV, but I can already tell there are much more gripping shows than Monk out there. Of course, the real reason people watch Monk is to see Adrian offend people and get himself into sticky situations because of his neurotic behavior and unrealistic fears. Being taken on a murder mystery is just a bonus. Adrian Monk is one of the better TV characters I’ve seen in a while, and I love how he channels his obsessive-compulsive disorders into solving crimes. The show tackles a case two ways, though. It either shows you upfront who the murderer is or keeps it a secret and leaves you guessing. I prefer the latter, as I like being given a chance to figure it out myself (even though I may be a moron). However, Monk often neglects to let you in on some of the most important details until the very end, when Adrian gives his “this is how it was done” speech. His solution is always clever and would have been difficult to piece together on your own. Considering he had all the clues and you didn’t, though, that’s not very fair.
Worst Week (Season 1)
Remember the movie Meet the Parents? Now imagine if that movie was stripped of Ben Stiller and cut into 20-minute episodes. Sounds like I’m about to wage a complaint, doesn’t it. I actually enjoy these kind of “disaster” shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, where, despite the main character’s best intentions, everything goes horribly wrong. Sam Briggs attracts trouble like a small boy wandering dark alleys at night, holding a neon sign that reads: I’m filthy rich and completely defenseless. Sam isn’t very easy to commiserate with, though. You want to feel bad for him, because he really is trying to set a good impression on the in-laws. Most of his mistakes, however, could have been avoided with a small dose of common sense, and the clean-up afterwards could have gone a lot smoother if his first instinct wasn’t to lie. The trouble he gets into you can see coming, anyway, and there’s nothing funny about calling every plot twist. Still, it’s nice to finally see a sitcom that doesn’t utilize a laugh track or shaky documentary-style camerawork.
Firefly (Season 1)
FOX has a habit of canceling good shows, or so I’ve been told. Well… no, they really do (i.e. Arrested Development, Futurama). But in the case of Firefly, FOX brought down the axe a little too soon. I think Season 2 would have been a great place to jump into this series, since things started out rough but gradually got better and better with each episode. Space smuggler Malcolm Reynolds definitely gives Han Solo a run for his money and is probably my favorite of the two. But the rest of the cast is very hit and miss, and the Wild West influence leans towards suffocating. I’m not entirely against seeing cows and spaceships onscreen at the same time. Why should the future be a crazy place where anything goes? It even makes sense for the “outer planets” to be a bit primitive. But this is still the future, and if people can have things like hovercrafts and laser guns and digital pool tables, they should have also progressed past the horse and carriage and tacky cowboy hats. Don’t give me a horse and carriage and call it sci-fi!
Shaun the Sheep (Seasons 1-2)
I don’t particularly like shows where the animals are smarter than the humans but adhere to some untold law that says they have to play dumb and can’t let their masters know the truth. Half of the episodes of Shaun the Sheep feel like that. But since each episode is only seven minutes long, it’s easy to forgive the bad ones, while the goods ones—the ones where the flock’s curiosity only gets them into trouble—leave you wanting more. Well, as much as a children’s show can leave you wanting more. The stories here are pretty straightforward and are packed with enough safe slapstick to theoretically turn away any intellectual mind. Nevertheless, I still find the show amusing because of the infectious theme song that It’s Shaun the sheep. It’s Shaun the Sheep. He even— No. Stop that. Anyway, I still find the show amusing because of the top-notch clay animation and subtle throwaway gags, like characters’ funny reactions or clever props. And it’s all done without a drop of spoken dialogue. Nice.
TV Roundup: Volume 5
Hustle (Seasons 1-2)
I do like a good con, and when an episode of Hustle is on a high note, it’s every bit as fun as Ocean’s 11, only with 90% more British accents and 20% less pretentiousness. You do have to suspend disbelief while watching, but I suppose that comes with the territory. I mean, these characters are a little too lucky to find so many secretaries, museum guards, and bank clerks who never question a couple of strangers performing a spontaneous, unscheduled cleaning check. The show can become a bit silly and ridiculous, then, but we could just blame that on the fact that it’s English. Hell, I can’t even understand half the things they say. It’s hard to miss the heavy-handed “we only con greedy people” shtick that attempts to excuse their behavior, though. Regardless, in an early scene, ringleader Mickey Bricks flashes a wicked/charming smile at the camera at the very moment he knows he’s hooked the next mark. That smile sold me on the entire series. Whatever happened next, I knew I was in good hands.
Pushing Daisies (Season 1)
A part of me recognizes there’s a good idea behind the humble pie maker who can bring people back from the dead by touching them. The rest of me sees the final product for what it really is: an irritating and overbearing pile of moldy, used toilet paper. These TV studios need to realize you can’t make a successful “dark comedy” that deals in murder, cover-ups, and mutilated bodies and yet panders to an audience of teenage girls who eat up anything even remotely romantic or sweet. Pushing Daisies is so sugary, it’ll knock your teeth out with its cheesy computer-generated backdrops, goofy camera angles, awkward dialogue, disgustingly bright colors, sappy music that never lets up, and cast of characters who might pass as decent cartoons but who don’t make for very convincing humans. It’s not like they get many opportunities to demonstrate their acting chops, anyway, since the narrator does all the work. He basically reads the story to you, beginning to end, without any feeling, like a dullard of a grandfather who can’t tell a joke. Sleep… sleep… sleep!
The Middleman (Season 1)
Any show that tries to slip the Wilhelm scream into every episode gets an automatic thumbs down from me. But let’s be fair about this. The Middleman is what happens when you mix Supernatural with a can of Silly Putty and air it on ABC. It’s a classic mistake of taking something that reads well on paper and translating it verbatim to TV. Suddenly, all the long-winded, run-on sentence-filled dialogue loses its cleverness and just makes the actors look like they’re gasping for air. There is simply too much useless chit-chat for a show selling itself as a kooky paranormal adventure. Only half of each episode is even about investigating a case. The other half assumes you care for the main character’s normal social life outside of her humanity-saving temp job. Sure, it could be fun to see how she juggles the two extremes and hides her secret from her roommate, but the aliens and demons are barely interesting as is. When they’re absent, The Middleman has nothing going for it, and, unfortunately, those cheesy CGI ghouls are absent a lot.
Futurama (Seasons 1-5)
Futurama is a show whose enjoyment is proportionately related to how many years it took you to get sick of The Simpsons. I’m not sure what the exact formula looks like. Groening’s “gentle” touch is easily noticeable, which means the hilarious jokes and memorable characters are still there, but so are the sudden plot shifts, the disregard for continuity, and Tress MacNeille’s annoying voice. I almost favor Futurama, though, because it’s based in the future and in space where anything goes. Now all the over-the-top Simpsons-staple sight gags and non sequiturs feel right at home. Plus, the cast of characters is a little more likable. The lead female isn’t a helpless housewife, and the lead male (and mandatory idiot) isn’t trying to pass as a caring father figure. I’m sorry, Homer, but I think I’ve reached a level of maturity where, instead of watching a man endanger the lives of his family and friends every episode, I’d rather watch a robot endanger the lives of everyone in the whole universe. I love that crazy robot.
