Seriously, a musical by Joss Whedon starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion, what’s not to like.
Update: Well it was free streaming for awhile.
After over a month of not seeing a movie in theaters, I caught 3 over the 4th of July weekend. The last movie I saw before that was Iron Man. On the 4th, I went to see Wall-E and then theater hopped to see The Incredible Hulk. Loved Wall-E! It was surprisingly dark and gloomy in the first half, which I really liked. There was also a point at the end where for a second I was like… if it ends like this, it will be the darkest animated movie I’ve ever seen. But of course, given that it’s Disney and Pixar, it ends happily. It may not be as high energy and silly as something like Kung Fu Panda, but it demonstrates mood and emotion perfectly and using robots no less.
Hulk was entertaining. They kept the thinking to a minimal and had lots of action. I could of used more character development, but not in the way of the other Hulk movie. It was fun, but I’d like to see the director’s cut with more of the meaty scenes back in.
The day after I saw Wanted. It was also very entertaining. The over the top action was unique and the style was fresh. The movie tried to make a point about taking control of your life, but didn’t translate it well in the actual movie. In ways it reminded me of Fight Club in that it tried to convey a message, except Fight Club did it better. In the end it’s just a high octane action flick.
Been keeping busy lately, which is always good when you usually don’t have much to do. Got a new coworker so I’m not as immensely bored as usual. Get to train her and talk and stuff. I’ve been watching the NBA Finals whenever it’s on and watched the Lakers completely get destroyed last night to end the series. As much as I wanted the Lakers to win, the Celtics had a great year and deserve it just as much. At the beginning of the year, finals were not even in mind when I thought about the Lakers so they have done better than expected and when Andrew Bynum comes back they’ll be in great position next year.
I also got Metal Gear Solid 4 last week at midnight launch. Been playing it whenever the Lakers weren’t playing. Finished it in 4 days or so. I highly enjoyed it, but because of some typical Kojima design choices it doesn’t reach that “perfect” status for me. But it’s not like problems I didn’t have with prior iterations of the series so I can’t really complain too much. I just hate the little things that mar the seriousness the game usually has. Things like breaking into reality by mentioning Playstation hardware in use, ridiculousness like soda-drinking/cigarette-smoking monkey, corny lines, Johnny comedy antics, and especially Snake’s voice. About his voice, it would be wrong to change it now, but it just seems so fake in contrast to everyone else’s normal voice. Despite all this, the game was great. You’ll find out that the game was more story than gameplay as I think there are 10 hours of cutscenes. I don’t mind so much cause they are awesome. And the women in the game are hot.
Couple things came out yesterday that people should check out. First, Firefox 3 final was released. If you’re not using Firefox then you must be on Mac using Safari, because Firefox is so much greater than Internet Explorer. I recommend you get it, even if you are a Mac user. I prefer it over Safari as well as IE.
Finally, Spore Creature Creator came out. Spore is game created by Will Wright (SimCity, The Sims) and is supposed to be the next evolution in Sim games. The Creature Creator is just a utility that gives you a head start in designing the various creatures you can use in the game. The trial is free and only has a small portion of the parts available or you can pay 9.99 for the full thing.
After fiddling with my Wordpress theme, I thought I should enhance it a little bit with some plugins.
Teaser trailer for Beyond Good and Evil 2 was unveiled at an Ubisoft event. Doesn’t show much but it confirms a sequel to a great game that nobody played. Originally intended to be a trilogy, BG&E’s poor commercial success had many doubt there would be any more games in the series. Trailer
I have previously expressed my adoration for everyone’s favorite American Gladiator and female fighter. Now she’s getting even more mainstream attention. Tomorrow night on CBS is the debut of EliteXC on primetime tv. Not only is fighting beast Kimbo Slice on the card, but so is Gina Carano. On top of that it has been announced that she will appear in the video game Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. She will appear in the live action cut scenes that the C&C series is known for, as well as a digital representation in game. Head over to Kotaku for press release and video clip.
Delicioius Monster released version 2 of their Library software. Delicious Library 1 was a nice looking app. It was a good way to manage your stuff and show off how cool it looks on a shelf. Except you couldn’t really show anyone other than looking at your screen. Now version 2 lets you export your library to the web and view others’ libraries right in the app. Other than that, the upgrades are minor and long over due. I still find the PC knockoff MediaMan to be more functional for me, like adding items directly into distinct categories like DVDs and Blu-rays instead of adding them to Movies, creating a shelf for Blu-rays and dragging each one over. The other thing that bugs me about DL is not being able to change the case size of items. DL1 had the wrong size for PS3 games forever, and never bothered to change it with a simple update until 2 came out. And now Dreamcast games are still the wrong size. MediaMan lets you change the size of any item. However the export feature is lacking and certainly doesn’t look as nice as DL.
Check out my library.
I updated Wordpress to the latest version, which was easy peasy thanks to the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. While I was at it, I decided to put a new theme up. I had that old look for many many years now so it was due. I also got rid of Gallery and started using Flickr as I debated about it earlier having found out I had a free Pro account. I kinda wish I had uploaded them in the order they were taken so they would make more sense in the photostream, but what can you do.
Now I need to go back and tag all my posts so I can use the cool tag cloud thing.
iTunes has never been as quick performing on Windows as it is on OS X, but on Vista it’s particularly bad. No matter how powerful your system is, Vista chugs along just scrolling through the library, especially if you have a lot in it. I finally figured out why. It has to do with Vista’s search indexing thing it does in the background. Apparently, iTunes uses .xml files to handle temporary functions. Every time these files change, Vista tries to re-index it. So the option here is to disable indexing of xml files.
Go to Control Panel -> Indexing Options -> Advanced -> File Types -> Find xml and uncheck it.
If this is not an option, and for some reason you must have indexing of xml. Then I guess you can disable indexing for the iTunes folder itself by going to the properties of the folder -> Advanced -> and uncheck indexing.
