Further Adventures of Alex in DS Wonderland

So far, I've tried most of the features of the DS once each. I've used the touch-pad. I've played a match of Mario Kart online. I've played it against a friend locally. I've played a multiplayer match with a single cartridge. After today, there's only a few left.

Swung by Gamecrazy, a walled-off subset of Hollywood Video that serves as a mini game store. I went there in search of a DS Download Station, a place alleged to give me the power and authority to download a demo through the very air. A huge young fellow with the pasty complexion, soul patch, and horn-rimmed glasses stereotypical of gamers informed me that there was no station, per se, no glossy plastic box to point my DS at, but rather the entire store would yield a positive result. He entreated me to "download away".

I complied. True Swing Golf. Decent game, but it's no Tiger Woods. Either way, the Download Station idea is a valid one. It combines the wireless tech and community feeling that Nintendo are clearly focusing on in a simple way. And considering what a cheapass I am, I'm sure to be using it quite often.

It's funny 'cause...

Which File Extension are You?

Juicy Fruit

Her Worshipfulness told me I should not post this picture, as it depicts me as being fat.

I've always had a bit of trouble visualizing my own size. As a teenager, I wondered why my shirts were all sized as "XL" when they clearly were made to fit normal-sized people. In college I would often be referred to as skinny or by the proper name "Slim", and didn't really get why. After I got a desk job, people who wanted to ask me for fifty-seven cents so they could get downtown attracted my attention by calling me "big guy", another epithet I never agreed with.

Apparently, I believe myself to be the one person on terra firma who is "normal-sized", and everyone else is either short or tall, diminutive or large. Sources would point to me being bigger than most people, and I'm just starting to catch on. So, if I inadvertantly crush you as I walk by, my mammoth stride spanning valleys and my head somewhere where the air is thin and crisp, cut me some slack. After all, you're the short one.

The Cup

The Stanley Cup stopped by work today. I snapped a few photos using The Digital Camera That Time Forgot, including a fantastic pic of my foot.

Thin

Hooverphonic's "This Strange Effect" is featured in a commercial for the Motorola SLVR. I feel safe in saying the general motif of the advert is "the latest, coolest, thing". Blue Wonder Power Milk, though, was released in 1998 -- ancient by late cool thing standards. My undefended thesis: the prevalence of online music services over the last few years has shone a light on acts which were only known by music geeks prior, and since the mainstream audience has never had them presented to it, much of this stuff is cool despite being old.

Unrelated postscriptum. Blogger's spell-check replaces 'hooverphonic' with 'overpayment'.

Starry Night

Allow me to say the following: FInally. Sure to drive you crazy after a few minutes, the Mega Man Effect has been available for Mac "users" for some time now.

How can this have happened? How can modernity developed to point where homegrown apps are made for Macs before PCs, or as I still find myself calling them, "IBM clones"?

Natl Polemic Radio

Here's a little rhetoric for you, sure to either increase your blood's temperature to the point at which it converts to gas or inspire you to pull out the US flag and march up and down your street.

Not Dropping

Had another Leadership Buffalo thing on Wednesday, this one taking me on a tour of Elmwood and the Cobblestone district. The Elmwood tour was held by "the Buffalo Rising guy", who appears to be the de facto mayor of the street. Every human we passed on the sidewalk and several of the people in cars stopped to say 'hello', and to ask with eyebrow raised what he was doing, the inference being, 'what are you doing with these squares?'.

Want to see the shells of the lofts being built next to the arena, or just can't get enough pictures of Alex? Check it out.

Like Diddy Kong

On Tuesday night, six men met in a darkened room to compete for glory. The fundraiser was a success in that it actually took place, the tech stuff all worked, people had a good time, and decent money was raised. It was a failure in that only seven people showed, but rumor has it the first iteration of an event like this is always poorly attended. I have many ideas for next time, so we'll see if I can't make this something a little bigger. If you're interested, my man Del has some pics up of the event -- well, the set-up for the event, anyway.

In addition to the many fine folks who donated prizes, Bungie sent a box full of knick-knacks. I ended up with this little red dude as part of my 2nd place prize. Now Rooster* lives in my office, and I'm just not sure what to do with him. I feel he needs to be on display, both to up my geek cred (a necessity, since I dress like a management stooge and have to work with the IT guys) and to advertise for the next event. But where, and doing what? I am accepting suggestions.

*10 B A Start points to anyone who can guess why I named him that.

Diamond in the diamond in the rough

One of those true rarities, a post on webshite, has occurred. Greg reviews Kingdom Hearts 2, which continues the series of games set in the various Disney universes. Personally, I'm looking forward to KH3, in which Sora, Goofy, and Donald fight evil in the realm of the Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit.

Even the Simplest Lines

Decades from now, some desperate grad student will write a thesis on the new social archetypes which started with the pantheon of characters from 80's TV ads. You may remember the post on the Noid -- today we discuss the pink bunny with the drum. He's entered my conscious thought a few times recently, as follows.

Elliott Smith refers to this ever-drumming automaton in his song Rose Parade, a depiction of someone too much of a mopey, self-involved coke addict to enjoy a parade.

"They asked me to come down and watch the parade
and to march down the street like the duracell bunny".

This morning on NPR, some dude -- sorry, "listener commentator" -- was bitching about the national debt.

"Like the Duracell bunny it just keeps on going".

Here's the thing: it's the Energizer Bunny. I mean, I know Duracell has more name recognition, but come on. It must drive the Energizer marketing people crazy.

Here's another thing. Apparently, there are Duracell bunnies, at least according to Wikipedia. These are not, though, the bunnies in question.

Kali-mahhhh

Sabres. Going to the playoffs, but that slump was not so good. I read this article on the topic, and will provide for you now a fairly disturbing quote from Ryan Miller:

"It's not panic mode," Miller cautioned. "I don't think it's been terrible. It's been less than stellar, but I don't think it's any reason to go change everything and start sacrificing live animals."

I have to agree, Ryan. No reason whatsoever to start sacrificing live animals, or even dead ones for that... wait, what the hell are you talking about? To whom? What dark gods of hockey would be appeased by this nefarious act? Whatever unholy alliance you have formed with these beasts-who-are-not-of-God, I'm going to assume they would be more happy with a sacrifice of Tim Horton's and Coffee Crisps. The Canadians I know always want my "Yankee cigarettes" -- perhaps a few cartons of those would help.

Stupid Canadians

Bored with your Rhapsody station? Ipod getting monotonous? I recommend a trip over to edge.ca's streaming service page and checking out "Edge 2". Unless you're Alan Cross himself, I'd be pretty surprised if you don't hear something you've never heard before. Unsurprisingly, many of the tunes I heard today were typical Cross choices -- the new wave stuff that girl in high school who you thought was a wacko but now realize was really cool listened to while she spent study hall sitting by herself drawing freaky designs in her composition book -- but they were satisfyingly interspersed with non-eyeliner stuff. Happy hunting.

Indicators

You know the archetypal image of two men carrying a large, fragile, thin rectangle down a city street? Like a mirror, pane of glass, or painting? A new incarnation of this classic appeared on the sidewalk the other day as I drove home from work. I saw the two guys. I saw the oversized rectangle. It took me a moment to see, though, that it was a big honkin' plasma TV.

On the dotted line

Is it too late for me to change my signature? My written one, I mean.

About fifteen years ago I was impressed into signing my name several hundred times in a row. By the end of that, the sig had gone from a 14-letter scrawl to an unintelligible scribble. What happens if I decide to change how I do it? Let's say I do some drills for a week or so to make sure the new style is consistent. What happens on the rare occasions someone checks the back of my credit card? Would they believe me?

Eavesdown

Always did have a problem with names. In my various writing projects throughout the years, I have consistently dreaded the moment at which I must choose a name for a person or a place, the cursor blinking at me as if the computer was drumming its fingers. I used the same first name for the main character in the last several stories I've put to paper (or whatever the modern equivalent of that idiom should be. Wait a minute, isn't that what writers are for? Let's just call it "put to text" for now) . Ages ago I was in an online writer's group hosted by an author, and on Q&A day the only question I had was how he picked names. It's a bit of an issue.

So, here I am writing something new, and trying to hoard words that make good place names. (Serenity and Firefly are littered with superior examples: Whitefall, Maidenhead, etc.) Over the last few days, it's become something of an OCD-freakout. Every written word, every song lyric, every combination of phonemes I've exposed to has been put to the test. Eating Lay's potato chips? "Classic Station...". Listening to music? "Tourbus Station...". Blogging? "Dashboard Station...". So, if you see me and notice a glazed-over look as you're speaking, don't be concerned. When I make my millions, I'll give you a dime if I use a shard of your vocab as a place name.

Shard Station...

On the Fly

Damn it, Nintendo. You came frighteningly close to changing the world.
Why? "Why?" I ask you. Why could you not go the extra step? You make the DS. You give it a touch screen and some decent processing power. You wave that special wand of yours, the one that has "The Breaker of Ground" etched down the side, and bless the thing with wireless connectivity.

Visions of people on subways having pick-up games of Mario Basketball during their commutes, of people at coffee-shops wi-fiing it up to race against their friends in Budapest, Lima, and Des Moines, of heply-dressed urban teens walking down clean sidewalks with your machines in their long hands flickered in your eyes. A gaming revolution.

As what I assume must have been a throw-away feature, you toss in Pictochat, the software that sets up local chatroom so kids can IM each other during recess. And here's where you flub it up. You can now compose messages on your handheld device, but the wi-fi doesn't work for it. Users can't IM each other over the internet. I can type up an email, but can't send it to anyone.

I've done a decent amount of composition on PDAs. It's great -- you can get a few lines down wherever you are. My PDA went all fritzy recently and had to be sent to the Heaven of Broken Electronics That An Unmarried Geek Would Keep In a Box Somewhere But A Married Geek Throws Away. And here I am with a handheld electronic device with a primitive word processor on it, and damned if I want to keep what I write. One half as expensive as a PDA, and which runs games with great awesomeness. I'm not even asking that you put a calendar etc. in there (which of course you should). Just unlock the stuff you've already got.

Fie on you, Nintendo.

The Wearing-down of the Green

Eleven and one half hours. That's how long I celebrated St. Pat's (read: all aspects of my self-destructive behavior) last night. Kudos to Lisa for being there and sober for the entire damn thing. I mean, you out-lasted sixteen people who came and left over the night. Krieky.

Oh my god my neurons.

There's nothing left upstairs. I wish I could claim some belfry bats, but I'm afraid they've all gotten themselves shot out of the sky by a more advanced technology. Jess has detailed our media consumption over the last few days; now add to this my as-of-last-week-rekindled interest in an extremely out of print college textbook anthology of science fiction stories which has withstood my flirtations for the last decade or so, about five hours of interminable presentations-turned-seminar in the last couple days, and the creeping feeling that the story concept that came to mind between Scrubs and Boston Legal has been irrevocably erased, and you can imagine the precise consistency of mush my brain has reduced itself to.

So what to do? A little word sandwich ought to hit the spot.

Teamwork

Dear videogame creators:

Please create more situations in which players on the same team can physically interact. Of note: in X-men Legends, where, for example, Storm can pick up characters and fly him around. This adds a new element to a game, and not just a co-operative play element. It gives the players opportunity to bug the hell out of each other.

The prime example is the fastball special, a move in which Colossus picks Wolverine up and hurls him towards the enemy. This ability was meant to be used for attack, but is far more entertaining when used for multiplayer annoyance. Bored with saving civilian mutants from Sentinels? Why not chase Wolverine around and throw him against things? The verbal ping-pong game of "get-back-here-you-little" versus "would-you-stop-it" adds new interactivity. Colossus getting out of hand? Take Jean airborne and try to catch Colossus, creating a game of dog-and-cat-and-mouse. Great fun for all players.