Month: May 2008

I transferred registrars from Register.com — whom I’ve been a customer of for 10 years — to Godaddy.com. Still waiting on it to come through, so at some unknown time, my site will go down for at least a few hours until I bring up the new records.

So after watching tonight, my list of movies made much better by Rifftrax™ has increased by one! Star Trek V has been on the list for a year — that movie is hilarious when you watch it with RiffTrax™ — and now I must add Eragon to the list.

Favorite line: “Wait, wait, wait for it… pull my finger!”

Highly recommended. If you’ve never before watched a movie with RiffTrax™, these two are, in my humble opinion, the best places to start. Eragon had us in stitches for two hours straight watching the sad excuse for a movie adaptation of the really quite-decent book.

Well, OK, the book is actually quite a bit cheesy in ripping off from other books and movies in the genre, but the movie appears as if they ripped out all the non-cheesy parts from the book, condensed the remainder for time, added an extra heaping helping of stinky cheese, and then shoveled Lord of the Rings-like melodrama and massive battle scenes with scores of corpses, blood, and fabulous gold lamé battle costumes and overweight men dressed like Orcs — er, I mean, Urguls — to attract the key eight-to-fourteen-year-old element that so loved the book.

Umm, but one suggestion: The ending, with Disembaudio singing all the way through the credits? Yeah, much like Oh Holy Crap of yesteryear, it’s only funny because it’s so awful, and nothing else happens for the rest of the RiffTrack. Enjoy!

Friday Morning, 9:30 AM. Our weekly interdepartmental meeting:

VANESSA THE ENTERTAINMENT DIRECTOR: All right, so that wraps up marketing, production, costuming, and the equine department. Before we close, let’s open for Round Table. Does anyone have anything they’d like to bring up?

JOHN: Actually, I would like to announce that last night I actually rolled *three*, yes three, natural 20s *in a row.*

((dead silence))

WES: Holy @(#$. Really?

JOHN: Yes.

ROWAN: Oh my God. Dude… well done, sir.

KEVIN: What are the odds of that?

((quick calculator work))

JOHN: .025%?

KEVIN: What is that, 1 in 400,000?

What followed was then a discussion of the exact damage multipliers that were involved because of said natural 20s (x9), which when coupled with the weapon type (axe) and strength bonuses already in effect (+10), meant that John did 189 damage in one blow on the night of Thursday, May the 8th, 2008.

And this was genuinely important enough to be discussed in our staff meeting.

I… simply don’t know what to say. How can he assume such vile things about the video-gaming community?

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/04/jack-thompson-p.html

The juicy quotes from this letter from Jack to Strauss Zelnick, the producer for Grand Theft Auto IV. Jack has been prohibited by the court from contacting Take Two directly, so sent it to Zelnick’s lawyer…

Dear Mrs. Zelnick:

Your son, as you may know (or maybe you don’t know), is Chairman of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., whose most popular video games are the Grand Theft Auto murder simulator games banned in some countries but sold to children here…

…Experts note that the recent plethora of cop killings is caused in part by your darling son’s entrepreneurial energy. There are three policemen dead in Alabama because of Grand Theft Auto…

…Is there a Ted Bundy merit badge? If so, your loving son deserves one now…

…Maybe you, Mrs. Zelnick, were so taken by your handsome son that you spared the rod and spoiled the child. That would explain why he has brought you, by the way he presently acts, “to shame.”…

…Your son, this very moment, is doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be “a Boy Scout.” More like the Hitler Youth, I would say…

This man is sociopathic. Write a letter to the mother of a computer game developer, blaming her for the murder of cops in Alabama?

Shame on you, Jack. Grand Theft Auto IV may be violent, bloody, and not something a socially responsible parent wants their child to play, but you made it personal.

Added a Twitter block to the right-hand side of my page. I hop on a couple of days a week, do a half-dozen mad updates, and then do something else. I think maybe if it’s on my blog, I’ll remember to update it more regularly.

I dig the brief-social-networking aspect of Twitter. No more than 140 characters means you must be succinct.

Ring, Ring.

“This is Matthew.”

“Hi, Honey, it’s Christy.”

“Hey, babe, how are you doing this morning?”

“Well, the Federal Express man just came and brought two shiny new boxes from Apple.”

“Our iPhones came?”

“Our iPhones came.”

“Will you please take them out and plug them in so they are fully-charged by the time I get home tonight? That way we can activate them right away.”

“I won’t be home tonight, I’ll be out with a friend.”

“So sad for you.”

“But I’m looking forward to my new iPhone!”

“So am I. OK, I’ll see you tonight, love.”

Got off phone. Did happy dance. Co-workers universally told me I suck because I have an iPhone and they don’t. Didn’t care.

Happy Cinco de Mayo. It’s practically a US holiday anyway, so go celebrate in US style: drink some Corona with lime, set off a bunch of fireworks, and eat way too much Mexican food!

My sump pump has been crazy overactive since the ground unfroze this spring (spring technically begins in late March, but it almost snowed last weekend). Every 45 minutes, the sump pump is going off and spewing out approximately 5 gallons of water into the backyard through the exhaust tubing. Normally, this would make me feel secure, especially after a rainstorm. However, regardless of the weather, the sump pump has been going off, like clockwork every 45 minutes. That doesn’t make me feel secure.

Anyone have any experience they could share? Like before my basement floods?