The Fightin’ Corgis
Football season is just around the corner — I’m talking NFL, not that sissy college stuff — and the excitement is building like it does every year. The only problem is that I’ve been a Bengals fan all my life. The team hasn’t been near a Super Bowl since I was in third grade, and it looks as if this year is going to be a long shot for even a playoff berth.
Luckily, my friends and I are heavily into Fantasy Football. Every year we draft our league and duke it out like the stat-dorks we are. My usual team, The Heroes of Cybertron, are sitting it out this time so that I can launch a new team into the fray. As the weeks go by, my rivals will learn to fear the name: The Fightin’ Corgis!
Growing Up Transformers
In my review for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen I wrote:
Growing up, I was fascinated by machinery and form. As a young boy, like most boys, I really liked trucks and construction. Monster trucks, bulldozers and heavy farm equipment fascinated me, and I always loved cartoons and characters. When the two met, and I saw a tractor-trailer semi transform into a robot, that was it. Ever since, I’ve been collecting Transformers toys — I have ones that I received as gifts when I was four — and I still look forward to the new figures coming out now. I’m sure a therapist could explain the true, and possibly disturbed, reasons I hold onto and collect these toys, but for me, it reminds me that no matter how old I get, I never have to really grow up.
I thought I’d write a quick post to show you a what I was talking about. Here are a couple photos from when I was young. The first one is above, the other below the jump.
In the first one, I’m probably around five years old, maybe six considering the room I’m in, and you can see I have a few Autobots. This is how the madness started.
The second one is a photo I found while looking for the first one. I’m probably around three in this one and I wanted to share it just in case you couldn’t picture me rollin’.
Because I Am A Digital Boy
I’m excited about the prospect of living in an entirely digital world. Being slightly obsessed with new technology and gadgets, I can’t wait until all of my entertainment options — the non-physical ones — are available from a single digital hub. Pushing a button to summon a song through the stereo, a movie on the television or a game on the console of my choosing fills me with glee. This is the kind of thing that makes people shut themselves inside their homes, away from the world at large.
Guitar Hero: Soldering
I really like plastic instrument music games. I’ve owned almost every version of Rock Band and Guitar Hero (except GH: Aerosmith because that’s just stupid). Last year when we moved into our house, I chose the Rock Band side of the “which plastic band set will you own” war. And while I am still completely satisfied with the music selection in Rock Band, the peripherals weren’t up to snuff. I used the drums because it was all I had, but I reverted to my Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul for the guitar “playing”.
Anyway, when Guitar Hero: Metallica sucked me into the GH Band setup, I decided to add the Guitar Hero drum set to my collection. I have to say that not only are those drums far superior to the Rock Band set, but it seems as if more care was put into the note-tracking so that you really feel like you could play the songs on a real drum set.
The happiness I felt for the drum set made me go and purchase a copy of Guitar Hero: World Tour so that I could have more songs to “drum” along with. I found a person on Amazon selling a used copy along with the new GH:WT guitar (which I kind of liked) on the cheap. So, I bought it and it was shipped to me in a couple of days.
I popped the game in and copied it to my HDD (a good way to test if the disk is readable) and then sat down with my new guitar to try it out. The strum bar acted a little funny in the menus, but I chalked it up to some lag and went into a song. Then I started missing notes. Almost every note. This was not good.
Deciding to go ahead and void the warranty, I popped it open and took a look at the strum bar switches. Everything seemed alright, so I used this guide to tighten the switches and try to improve the performance of the strum bar. After putting the guitar back together, it worked fine for a while, but soon reverted back to its note-missing self.
By this time, I was fed up with it, so I decided to go all-out and just replace the switches altogether. There is a great how-to on the same site as the tightening guide, so I went out and bought a couple switches, some solder, and gave it a shot.
I took the guitar apart again, heated up the soldering iron and started melting the old solder away. After an eternity of breathing in some fumes, I could finally pry the switches away from the board. I put the new switches on and soldered them into place.
After putting everything back together, the mechanics of the guitar seemed tighter, and I was getting a more satisfying “click” from the strum bar. Now it was time to test it for real. I fired up GH: Metallica and turned on the guitar. Success! At least so far. The menus responded to the clicks on the strum bar without hesitation. I proceeded to play through five songs in the game and missed zero notes because of the strum bar. I did it! I fixed it!
I’m pretty proud of myself since I hadn’t soldered anything since some stained glass in high school, and it felt good to be able to fix something that was broken. It would be nice to try to mod a real guitar with the plastic buttons, but there’s no way that would happen with my limited time. I’m just excited that I did it on my own, and I didn’t screw up the guitar beyond repair in the process.
Feeling Sad? Enjoy A Pack Of Corgis
I just wanted to post really quickly and share this image with you. Gordie (our Welsh Corgi) is having his first birthday on Monday and we’re having a party for him tomorrow. Hopefully I can post a photo from the party for you next week. Until then, enjoy the corgi pack.
Fallen News: Excerpts Of Excerpts
The Transformers Live Action Movie Blog posted some excerpts from two articles posted by USA Today and Yahoo! Movies about some of the major characters in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. Things are going to start picking up news-wise since we’re now under the “three-month till release date” mark.
Here is an excerpt of some of the news:
Ravage and Soundwave
“In the spirit of ‘more than meets the eye,’ Ravage isn’t just lethal because of his sharp teeth,” says screenwriter Alex Kurtzman. “There’s actually another skill set Ravage has that didn’t exist before, so there’s going to be a surprise for fans.” …his role will be similar to the 1980s cartoon and Hasbro toy — the ultimate spy.Ravage doesn’t turn into anything. But Soundwave will appear, again serving as an evil communications expert but this time in the form of an orbiting space satellite.
And Ravage, as before, won’t speak like the other Transformers. “We wanted to stay true to the idea that Decepticons who take visual clues from beasts maintain that,” says Orci. “It would be strange to have a talking jaguar, or a scorpion with an English accent.”
Insecticons
“We have big guys, some little guys. We have a lot of littler ones, too. Little weirder ones,” Bay says. Like the Insecticons, which were giant bugs in the original series and Hasbro toy line, but are now tiny creepy-crawly infiltrators.Jetfire
As in the original, this fighter plane crash-landed on Earth a long time ago, and he will become a reformed Decepticon now fighting for the humans. His alternate form is the SR-71 Blackbird, the outdated but still-sleek Cold War spy plane.“He’s old, craggy, forgetful … doesn’t work very well. Can’t transform very well, because he’s very geriatric. They get stuck with him a lot,” Bay says. “He knows the plan of the bad guys, but he forgets all the good parts of the plan.”
The Twins
“Some of the junior Transformers are just dumb,” Bay says with a laugh. “But it’s great for kids because they’re like the Little Engine That Could. They’re (screw)-ups, but they get really heroic at the end.”Arcee
Arcee is the only female and turns up as Megan Fox’s hot-pink motorcycle. Co-screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci say she was in an early draft of the first movie. “But we felt we needed to win the audience over before asking for that suspension of disbelief: a feminine alien robot,” Kurtzman says.The Fallen
The Fallen is an ancient robot, sort of the Transformers’ version of Lucifer. He’s one of the original robot aliens, and his defiance and arrogance led to his banishment into another dimension. The screenwriters say that The Fallen holds the key to life on both Earth and Cybertron, the Transformers’ home planet.The Doctor
A smaller, but no less malevolent Decepticon is known as The Doctor — a spider-like droid that transforms into various implements of torture and has a not-so-nice encounter with star Shia LaBeouf.Devastator
These seven robots — Scavenger, Scrapper, Hightower, Longhaul, Rampage, Overload and Mixmaster — transform into construction machinery, but also link up with one another to form one gigantic robot stomper named Devastator.
Soundwave, Ravage and Devastator interest me the most. The first two because I really think they’re going about the way they look and act in the right way, and Devastator just sounds bad ass. I’m curious to see how Demolisher (the huge, wheeled guy from the Super Bowl trailer) is not part of Devastator. Also, I think “The Doctor” is going to be called “Scalpel“.
Bulletproofing
Two important things were accomplished this weekend. The first being that the basement was cleaned, and the second was completing 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand (or BotS as it’s commonly called).
Laura wanted to do spring cleaning over the weekend, and although I was reluctant at first, it put me in a really good mood to go through all of these things I thought were a necessity and either organize them in a meaningful way, or throw them in the garbage, removing them from my life altogether. I found my baseball glove, my Haan bag (made in Home-Ec in 8th grade) full of golf balls that I didn’t even know I had, and a box of Micromachines toys from when I was really young. It was also nice to create an area for “overflow” on my video game and DVD collections, as well as one place to store all the extra cords I’ve accumulated over time.
So the basement, the final space in our house that didn’t feel put together since we’d moved in, was finally cleaned, organized and made part of our home. I did, however, bash my head on a light fixture down there, completely obliterating the housing and everything. Until I can get some advice or help to fix it, we’re doing laundry by flashlight.
Since 50 Cent: BotS didn’t feel the need to add split-screen multiplayer to its bevy of options, Mark decided to bring his TV to my house, because you have to play something like this in the same room, no matter how good those Xbox mics are. And we were very happy with the result.
If you follow gaming news, you probably already know that 50 Cent: BotS is generally thought of as a “good” bad movie. In the same way that I enjoy watching Street Fighter with Van Damme, even though it’s a terrible movie, I enjoyed playing 50 Cent: BotS. The characters are awful, the story is ridiculous, the music is atrocious and every piece of dialog in the game is idiot speak. But it’s fun. Like stupid fun. Mark and I played through the entire game in about 6 hours, me as 50 and Mark as DJ Woo Kid or something.
While definitely not a good game by any means, if you have a friend and a Hollywood Video renters card, it’s probably some of the best $8 you could spend.
Proving The Old Axiom
Two weeks is way too long between posts, but I feel like I’ve been really busy. Emphasis on the feel part. I can’t really think of a lot that’s been going on, but I know there is quite a bit that I should be doing that I’m not.
I should be working on Laura’s corporate identity. I’ve started designing the logo for her business, purchased the domain name, and installed WordPress for the backend, but that’s about it. However, I don’t want to do too much more until we settle on a logo design. I think we’re getting close, but we still need to iron out some of the smaller details and choose a color scheme.
I should be working on Nick’s illustration. Nick wanted me to design a cartoon character for his website — and I’m going to do it, I promise! — but I’m going to need to start on it soon. I wanted to wait until I finished the work on Laura’s stuff, but it seems that’s going to take a while. I may have to switch gears after finishing Laura’s logo and start on Nick’s.
I should be finishing my self portrait. I’ve illustrated myself a profile portrait, similar to the ones the fighters use in Super Street Fighter II HD Remix (sneak peek in the image above). The drawing has been inked and is ready for coloring. I want to get this done so I can post it as my Gravatar image and put it on all my websites. That should work better than stealing Ken’s.
On top of all these projects, the house needs a good Spring Cleaning, the yard needs worked on, and I’d like to spend more time with MarkMark since he’s moving to Chicago in two months. It’s so weird that all I have to do is go to a job from 8 to 5, but somehow I have very little free time. A lot of it has to do with the time black hole that is Street Fighter IV. I can’t stop fightin’ streets!
Note: I got bored and changed my blog design a little. I like the new look a lot better.
Job Title 3.0 Release
I’ve been working as a web designer for a little over five years now. I love the ins and outs of mixing graphic design and coding with the fun of the intarwebs. The downside has been, up until now, that the company I work for has been using a content management system, while helpful in some ways, has a lot of faults. A couple of the biggest faults in my opinion is that it requires a specified type of design (thus limiting artistic creativity) and it doesn’t teach us anything new in terms of web design (thus limiting our learning).
However, that is all about to change. The company decided to invest gobs of money into revamping the website product, and it will enable us to not only spend more quality time improving our designs, but it will allow us to learn new coding languages. My favorite aspect of this is Wordpress. We’re going to start creating and developing Wordpress sites, and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve spent some time dabbling in it, but now not only will I get to use it in my day-to-day job, but they’re going to teach me how to use it, for free!
Switching from a CMS to a Wordpress and Dreamweaver HTML environment is going to take time to get used to, but because of it, I feel a renewed interest in my job, and that’s definitely a bonus.
I Watched The Watchmen
This entire weekend was spent starting new things entertainment wise. In video games, which I am unashamed to admit that occupy a lot of my time, I took a break from fighting streets to try my current GameFly rental: Psychonauts. The game is a little old (like original Xbox old) but I have to say that it’s pretty modern in its design. While most games targeted at an older audience deal with shooting guns in a brown environment, it’s nice to see something that feels “kiddy” in aesthetics, but is quite complex in its underlying tone.
You control Raz, a student at a summer camp that trains future Psychonauts, warriors that fight in the subconscious. So far, my experience with the game has involved everything from collecting merit badges that allow Raz to set things on fire, to dealing with creatures lurking in his own mind. The game is incredibly well-written, and a solid, creative platformer. If you like 3D platforming and good stories, and can do without the HD-glisten of the current generation, give this one a shot. My friend Danny wrote a more in-depth description of the game if you’d like to know more.
I also went to the movies for the second time since The Dark Knight — the first being The Wrestler — to see Watchmen. Now, I read the novel and it’s definitely one of my favorite stories, but I’m not one of those elitists that think the original is so sacred that any change will ruin the name. I mean, I like pretty much all versions of Transformers, even the movies, and I don’t run around saying that the new stories ruin G1. Although, the flames on Prime are a bit much, but I digress.
Anyway, as a movie about the comic Watchmen, I loved it. I thought it portrayed the characters perfectly, and there was some brilliant casting choices — most notably Rorschach. The music choices were incredibly smart, and just like 300, you felt like you were watching the comic come to life. I don’t really care what was left out or changed because it worked — this wasn’t like forgetting to tell us who created the Marauder’s Map in Harry Potter.
And finally, Laura and I got sucked into The Sopranos on Sunday and it took over the entire day. We’re only eight episodes into the story, but I can already tell that this is something that I want to finish completely. I never had the chance to see it before (no HBO) and we’re just now getting around to the DVDs. All in all, I can’t wait to see what happens.