Thursday, March 13, 2008
-Wow it has been way too long since I updated. I'm way off track. I guess I can say I have been quite busy past few weeks, but now things have calmed down a little bit now that it's spring break, but when that's over within a few days, the hell will pick back up again with the second half of the semester of classes.
-So Brett Favre finally retired, huh? That guy has been an active quarterback since I was 7....and now I'm nearly 25.....that's rare to have that kind of staying power for a starting quarterback in the NFL (and not miss a game since becoming a starter in Green Bay to boot!). I'm kind of surprised too after Favre came off a hell of a season last year to end now, but at least ended on a hell of a year and breaking the alltime TD (and INT) records. Favre, you will be missed, my fondest memories of you will be me cursing at the tv every time you knocked the Niners out of the playoffs (except in 1999 playoffs with "The Catch 2" from Young-Owens, huzzah!), and consistently having the fastest bullet of an arm for every single year. Here's an interesting article I saw on SI.com relating Favre to the soon-to-be-retired Ric Flair, check it out.
-In other football news, the Niners did a few free agency pick ups and releases. Gone is my favorite backup running back Maurice Hicks after being with the team for 3 seasons. Now who is going to return balls for me in Madden!?!? They did however pickup DeShaun Foster.....which I question since he seems to be a bit injury prone, but also managed to snab Isaac Bruce, who is getting up there in years but I believe he is still to have a bad season, so maybe he'll be able to produce for a season or two still. Niners also got some Defensive End from the Bengals who's name is escaping me right now.
-Louie's funeral and wake was a couple weeks ago, and that was well......a wake and a funeral. He got buried up in Warsaw by his farm. I think that's the fourth time I got to be a paulbearer, was also a little odd with my dad being a paulbearer too since he was Louie's friend from many years ago. He said some things though before the funeral that I'm never gonna forget though...Been visiting my mom a bit more than usual too just to help her through the post-lost process. Still can't believe he's gone.
-Hung out with Steve a couple of times last week. It was his 24th birthday, and I grabbed a few drinks with him at Bucs. Steve happened to start working there too recently as a bouncer and he loves it there. He got pretty hammered there, and I ran into some old classmates and neighbors that I haven't seen in years too, which was nice to run into again, but unfortunately Bucs blast their music so loud it made it near impossible to converse. A few days later I met up with Steve to support him in the Guitar Hero semifinals at the bar in the Ramada Inn. He didn't do too great, as he drew a song he didn't play before since it was one of those unlockable co-op songs, "Helicopter." Rock30 (the local indy game store in town) is doing another Guitar Hero tournament, way differently than last time with qualifying rounds and so fourth, so I'm going to have to toss my hat in the ring for that one.
Speaking of Guitar Hero, Chris finally helped me finish my co-op career. A few days later I also helped Scott plow through about half of the career co-op songs. I am almost done with hard difficulty career in Guitar Hero 3, and am on the sixth tier of songs where the difficulty is amping up to where I need to replay some songs and practice them a lot before having the slightest chance of three starring the song.
-I'm working on a term paper for my Technical Writing class about podcasts and their continued growing presence in media. I actually use podcasts to get most of my news now, I still check news sites and every great once in a while pick up a paper and tune in for the local news, but podcasts have rapidly become my main way to keep up on games, sports, and news. I'm looking for a few other people to touch on the same matter so I can insert some quotes in my paper, so if anyone else would gladly assist me by throwing in a couple of lines on the subject, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thankee!
-Recorded a new episode of my podcast last week with Chris and Steve, we discussed how Devil May Cry 4's deceiving save system pissed me off, give Call of Duty 4 some love, I review Culdcept Saga, we take a quick look back at the shmup (shoot-em-up) genre of games, and we have our first installment of our backlog box where we randomly pick one of our old games we've been meaning to finish and/or put more time into, and the game I covered here is Metroid Fusion for the GBA. Take a listen
-Jeff Gertsmann's new site is pretty interesting, right now it is him and Ryan Davis heading up a Joystiq/Opposable Thumbs-esque gaming blog called Giant Bomb. They got a couple of interesting reviews and videos on there too that I'd suggest checking out. Now all they need to do is add all the former ex-Gamespot alumni like Rich Gallup, Greg Kasavin, Alex Navarro, and Jason Ocampo.
-So I finally made my late arrival to the party of paying my bills online. Well, not all of them. Some bills are giving me a little trouble, but I managed to set up my insurance and electricity to automatically pay online. So that'll save me a couple of treks out to get money orders. One day I'll manage to converge all of my bills online, it is just soooo much more convenient.
-I spent last weekend at Jane & Shawn's since Shawn is leaving for 4-5 months today for training for a promotion he got in the Air Force, then he'll be back for a month before he and Jane and their kids move down to Georgia for good. This'll be the first of my siblings living more than a few hours away from me, and I have no idea how often we'll see each other afterwards. So I managed to hang out with Shawn one last time before he moved. I crashed at their place and we played a ton of Madden and NCAA football 08 on 360.
Now if you've been reading this blog from the beginning....nearly five years ago and have a darn good memory you may recall how I praise Shawn's holier than thou videogame football skills, as a matter of fact it has been about a good five years, maybe even six since I beat him last. We would play each year of Madden/NCAA against each other regularly since Madden 2001 whenever we had a chance. We fell out of the habit for a couple years up until a few months ago. Anyways, point being I haven't defeated Shawn in EA Sports Football since Madden 2003. He got so good that once he demolished me in NCAA Football 04, with a score so unique I'll forever have it imprinted in my mind of 100-6. Yes, 100-6. We played 2 rounds of Madden, and 4 rounds of NCAA, and during that point I finally ended the curse, and beat Shawn, not once, but twice! Both time in NCAA. Both my Madden losses were with the Niners (and Shawn was the Chiefs both times), but for NCAA, since there's a plethora of teams to choose from we randomly picked a non-ranked team each time we played. I recall one of my two victories were with the Gamecocks, and the other I think with La Foyette. It was a great way to end our long videogame football rivalry....or did we? Shawn's saying he may be able to set up Xbox Live at the hotel he's staying at so I still may be able to play him online while he's away.
Besides play a ton of Madden/NCAA we also celebrated Shawn's birthday a little early. It didn't start out so strong....only my mom and I made it down the day before and it was starting to snow a bit the next day which prevented Joey and Ann from making it out to base, which is about 15 miles out of town. So that bummed out Shawn a lot the whole family couldn't make it there, and when we went bowling later Shawn wasn't having that much fun since he had a sore back from falling down recently. He still creamed us in bowling, breaking 200, I did a little better than my average of 100, and got a lucky score of 115.
However, Jane went out of her way to plan this awesome surprise party for Shawn days in advance. Shawn and my mom rode out to the bowling alley first so Jane and I could quickly decorate the place. While we were bowling, everything went to plan where people started showing up back at Jane & Shawn's place while we were striking and gutter-balling away. When we got back, we made sure to come through the back and everyone bursted out of the kitchen and totally surprised Shawn. I thought he'd know something was up, but he said he had no idea it was coming. It totally flipped his day around and he had a ball. Jane went all out, and made the most ambitious cake I have ever seen. She knows Matt Kenseth is Shawn's favorite NASCAR driver (and ironically enough, he won his Nationwide Cup race that day), so she got a picture of his face and crafted a cake out of it, she asked me how it looked and I told her "you gotta have the trademark NASCAR bad-ass shades" so she proceeded to add shades. Anyways here is a result of the masterpiece.....
-The Human Giant DVD came out last week. I brought this show up to several people, and it seems not a lot of people are too familiar with it. I love it, but I don't know if it's for everyone, as it is a balls-out, over the top sketch show. Some of the sketches are so out there they had me in stitches, while other just didn't work for me, thankfully it's more of the former. But if you're a fan of sketch shows like Chapelle's Show, I think you may like Human Giant and recommend checking it out, or at least youtubing some of their sketches.
-I will close this insanely long entry by mentioning that MGC is right around the corner at the end of March, and I'll be making the trek out there with Chris and my brother Joey. Will be awesome to see everyone from teamfremont.com and the vgevo.com communities again since I missed out on the Darryls event in January. I will try and keep this blog updated a little more regularly, and thankee for making it all the way to the end! Latez!
-So Brett Favre finally retired, huh? That guy has been an active quarterback since I was 7....and now I'm nearly 25.....that's rare to have that kind of staying power for a starting quarterback in the NFL (and not miss a game since becoming a starter in Green Bay to boot!). I'm kind of surprised too after Favre came off a hell of a season last year to end now, but at least ended on a hell of a year and breaking the alltime TD (and INT) records. Favre, you will be missed, my fondest memories of you will be me cursing at the tv every time you knocked the Niners out of the playoffs (except in 1999 playoffs with "The Catch 2" from Young-Owens, huzzah!), and consistently having the fastest bullet of an arm for every single year. Here's an interesting article I saw on SI.com relating Favre to the soon-to-be-retired Ric Flair, check it out.
-In other football news, the Niners did a few free agency pick ups and releases. Gone is my favorite backup running back Maurice Hicks after being with the team for 3 seasons. Now who is going to return balls for me in Madden!?!? They did however pickup DeShaun Foster.....which I question since he seems to be a bit injury prone, but also managed to snab Isaac Bruce, who is getting up there in years but I believe he is still to have a bad season, so maybe he'll be able to produce for a season or two still. Niners also got some Defensive End from the Bengals who's name is escaping me right now.
-Louie's funeral and wake was a couple weeks ago, and that was well......a wake and a funeral. He got buried up in Warsaw by his farm. I think that's the fourth time I got to be a paulbearer, was also a little odd with my dad being a paulbearer too since he was Louie's friend from many years ago. He said some things though before the funeral that I'm never gonna forget though...Been visiting my mom a bit more than usual too just to help her through the post-lost process. Still can't believe he's gone.
-Hung out with Steve a couple of times last week. It was his 24th birthday, and I grabbed a few drinks with him at Bucs. Steve happened to start working there too recently as a bouncer and he loves it there. He got pretty hammered there, and I ran into some old classmates and neighbors that I haven't seen in years too, which was nice to run into again, but unfortunately Bucs blast their music so loud it made it near impossible to converse. A few days later I met up with Steve to support him in the Guitar Hero semifinals at the bar in the Ramada Inn. He didn't do too great, as he drew a song he didn't play before since it was one of those unlockable co-op songs, "Helicopter." Rock30 (the local indy game store in town) is doing another Guitar Hero tournament, way differently than last time with qualifying rounds and so fourth, so I'm going to have to toss my hat in the ring for that one.
Speaking of Guitar Hero, Chris finally helped me finish my co-op career. A few days later I also helped Scott plow through about half of the career co-op songs. I am almost done with hard difficulty career in Guitar Hero 3, and am on the sixth tier of songs where the difficulty is amping up to where I need to replay some songs and practice them a lot before having the slightest chance of three starring the song.
-I'm working on a term paper for my Technical Writing class about podcasts and their continued growing presence in media. I actually use podcasts to get most of my news now, I still check news sites and every great once in a while pick up a paper and tune in for the local news, but podcasts have rapidly become my main way to keep up on games, sports, and news. I'm looking for a few other people to touch on the same matter so I can insert some quotes in my paper, so if anyone else would gladly assist me by throwing in a couple of lines on the subject, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thankee!
-Recorded a new episode of my podcast last week with Chris and Steve, we discussed how Devil May Cry 4's deceiving save system pissed me off, give Call of Duty 4 some love, I review Culdcept Saga, we take a quick look back at the shmup (shoot-em-up) genre of games, and we have our first installment of our backlog box where we randomly pick one of our old games we've been meaning to finish and/or put more time into, and the game I covered here is Metroid Fusion for the GBA. Take a listen
-Jeff Gertsmann's new site is pretty interesting, right now it is him and Ryan Davis heading up a Joystiq/Opposable Thumbs-esque gaming blog called Giant Bomb. They got a couple of interesting reviews and videos on there too that I'd suggest checking out. Now all they need to do is add all the former ex-Gamespot alumni like Rich Gallup, Greg Kasavin, Alex Navarro, and Jason Ocampo.
-So I finally made my late arrival to the party of paying my bills online. Well, not all of them. Some bills are giving me a little trouble, but I managed to set up my insurance and electricity to automatically pay online. So that'll save me a couple of treks out to get money orders. One day I'll manage to converge all of my bills online, it is just soooo much more convenient.
-I spent last weekend at Jane & Shawn's since Shawn is leaving for 4-5 months today for training for a promotion he got in the Air Force, then he'll be back for a month before he and Jane and their kids move down to Georgia for good. This'll be the first of my siblings living more than a few hours away from me, and I have no idea how often we'll see each other afterwards. So I managed to hang out with Shawn one last time before he moved. I crashed at their place and we played a ton of Madden and NCAA football 08 on 360.
Now if you've been reading this blog from the beginning....nearly five years ago and have a darn good memory you may recall how I praise Shawn's holier than thou videogame football skills, as a matter of fact it has been about a good five years, maybe even six since I beat him last. We would play each year of Madden/NCAA against each other regularly since Madden 2001 whenever we had a chance. We fell out of the habit for a couple years up until a few months ago. Anyways, point being I haven't defeated Shawn in EA Sports Football since Madden 2003. He got so good that once he demolished me in NCAA Football 04, with a score so unique I'll forever have it imprinted in my mind of 100-6. Yes, 100-6. We played 2 rounds of Madden, and 4 rounds of NCAA, and during that point I finally ended the curse, and beat Shawn, not once, but twice! Both time in NCAA. Both my Madden losses were with the Niners (and Shawn was the Chiefs both times), but for NCAA, since there's a plethora of teams to choose from we randomly picked a non-ranked team each time we played. I recall one of my two victories were with the Gamecocks, and the other I think with La Foyette. It was a great way to end our long videogame football rivalry....or did we? Shawn's saying he may be able to set up Xbox Live at the hotel he's staying at so I still may be able to play him online while he's away.
Besides play a ton of Madden/NCAA we also celebrated Shawn's birthday a little early. It didn't start out so strong....only my mom and I made it down the day before and it was starting to snow a bit the next day which prevented Joey and Ann from making it out to base, which is about 15 miles out of town. So that bummed out Shawn a lot the whole family couldn't make it there, and when we went bowling later Shawn wasn't having that much fun since he had a sore back from falling down recently. He still creamed us in bowling, breaking 200, I did a little better than my average of 100, and got a lucky score of 115.
However, Jane went out of her way to plan this awesome surprise party for Shawn days in advance. Shawn and my mom rode out to the bowling alley first so Jane and I could quickly decorate the place. While we were bowling, everything went to plan where people started showing up back at Jane & Shawn's place while we were striking and gutter-balling away. When we got back, we made sure to come through the back and everyone bursted out of the kitchen and totally surprised Shawn. I thought he'd know something was up, but he said he had no idea it was coming. It totally flipped his day around and he had a ball. Jane went all out, and made the most ambitious cake I have ever seen. She knows Matt Kenseth is Shawn's favorite NASCAR driver (and ironically enough, he won his Nationwide Cup race that day), so she got a picture of his face and crafted a cake out of it, she asked me how it looked and I told her "you gotta have the trademark NASCAR bad-ass shades" so she proceeded to add shades. Anyways here is a result of the masterpiece.....
-The Human Giant DVD came out last week. I brought this show up to several people, and it seems not a lot of people are too familiar with it. I love it, but I don't know if it's for everyone, as it is a balls-out, over the top sketch show. Some of the sketches are so out there they had me in stitches, while other just didn't work for me, thankfully it's more of the former. But if you're a fan of sketch shows like Chapelle's Show, I think you may like Human Giant and recommend checking it out, or at least youtubing some of their sketches.
-I will close this insanely long entry by mentioning that MGC is right around the corner at the end of March, and I'll be making the trek out there with Chris and my brother Joey. Will be awesome to see everyone from teamfremont.com and the vgevo.com communities again since I missed out on the Darryls event in January. I will try and keep this blog updated a little more regularly, and thankee for making it all the way to the end! Latez!
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