Sunday, May 02, 2010
-Hey Yo! I cannot believe it either, but I am actually updating after only about two weeks, thus expect a significantly shorter blog! High-fives all around!
-Well, I think I am going to finally pull the plug and cancel cable. There were only two shows I have been watching that are not on Hulu or viewable on their respective network's website. One was Bullrun, which just had its season finale last Thursday. Congrats to Team Lambo by the way for winning it all. Part of me would have liked to have seen Team Hummer in the final three instead of Team NSX since Hummer were the kings of the challenge in the first several shows of the season, but NSX, Lambo and HemmeCuda put on a great show for the finale. And thank you again random LiveJournal BullRun user who notified me of the upcoming season when I blogged about watching a few shows off the BullRun season 2 marathon during Christmas. Now please convince Goldberg and SPEED to release all the seasons on DVD please!
The other show that is not legally viewable online I have been keeping up with is RAW, which has been a staple of mine since its inception in 1993. However I have been starting to watch RAW over at Matt's these past couple of weeks, and in glorious HD cable to boot. WWE's other three prime time shows: Superstars, NXT and Smackdown are all available on Hulu. As is 24 & Lost, both of which are unfortunately are rolling out their final episodes over the next month or two(I will have more thoughts on these shows once they conclude). Office is also on Hulu, as is the animated shows I irregularly watch in South Park, Simpsons and Family Guy. I rarely kick back at home and channel surf, so I told myself I do not really see it being worth an extra $40-50 a month just to watch RAW. I ran into an old acquaintance at a bar a couple months ago who is now a cable installer and asked him if they have been getting more people than average over the past couple years canceling cable with the emergence of Hulu and Netflix Instant Q and to my surprise he said installation rates are actually on the rise.
I am going to use that money I save on cable and put part of it to going to the gym. I literally had four different people ask me this past month to be their workout buddy at the gym so I am going to take it as some sort of sign or something and try and get in shape for once, or at the very least manage to try and go regularly for a couple months and get some results. My brother Bob and I already got a decent workout in cleaning out my mom's old shed that has been locked up for nearly 25 years. We were not all that surprised to find three dead cats and an accompanied raunchy smell greeting us when we opened the shed of doom.
-Found another bar in town offering karaoke on Tuesdays in Joe Blacks. I hit it up these last two Tuesdays. Got a surprising round of applause with my baritone rendition of "The Final Countdown." Another karaoke highlight occurred at a friend's Rock Band party recently where I thought I picked Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak," but alas it was the live version from AC/DC which featured nearly ten minutes of long drawn out instrumental parts and it ticked off nearly everyone else playing. They could have just quit out, but they wanted to see it through to the end.
-I am about a quarter of the way through this new book I have been reading, The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. I am not a guru on the sport and have been more of a casual fan on and off through the years, but thought the book would be a great way to catch up. I am loving it so far, some players and references are going right over my head due to me not being a diehard hoops fan, but Simmons has an ingenuous writing style. To me it is like he is writing like he is BS'ing with you at the bar, and I love all his witty footnotes he has on nearly every page. Definitely check this one out.
-I believe my last blog I wrote how my Zune bricked on me, well just a couple days ago my laptop took a shit too. It has been running great for over a year since my buddy Chris took a look at it, and especially well for being a near-five year old machine. However that all changed, I had Facebook and Twitter open in the background in between rounds of Gears of War 2 online and all of a sudden my virus protection went off saying to block an attack. I attempted to run my virus protection but got a pop-up greeting me that AVG was infected and will not work, and the same pop-up occurred for many other programs I attempted to run. I immediately rushed my laptop into intensive care back at Chris's and hopefully he will get it up and running smoothly again in no time.
-Anyone else see Kickass yet? If you have not, please do, easily one of the best films this year thus far. I even hear Nicolas Cage haters saying he is surprisingly enjoyable in it. I must be in the minority since I am somewhat of a fan of Cage. I loved both National Treasures, Next and Gone in 60 Seconds. Only films I did not care for him in I can think of were Con Air and Bangcock Dangerous. I also caught I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I loved the book it was based on, which is essentially a collection of drunken dorm stories from a law school student. The film is a fair representation of it, with some of the book's finest moments mixed into bachelor party weekend gone to hell plot line. If you read the book, I would recommend at least renting the flick since there are several references from it that are worth seeing how they translated onto film, especially the hotel diarrhea story.
-Concerning the latest games I have played, there has really only been just a few I can talk about since my last blog. Other than the aforementioned Gears of War 2, I rented and plowed through the single player campaign of Splinter Cell: Conviction. I have never been that much into the previous Splinter Cell games, other than briefly enjoying Chaos Theory. I like the shift away from pure stealth to more of a stealth-action hybrid, or kind of like MGS4, it gives you the option to play it entirely as pure stealth or mostly as a shooter. I went through about a quarter of it as pure stealth and got a good rush with some of Sam's specialized stealth tactics, but more often than not I got impatient or a little too frustrated at tipping off the guards and played it as a shooter. I still had an awesome time playing it through that way, I just wish the ending gameplay was a little more dynamic, the cutscene in and of itself was cool but not a lot of interactivity on my part.
I got my Hori Fight Stick 3 and Super Street Fighter IV within a few days of each other. Only had a little bit of time to play it though, so I am still rusty as hell and getting the hang of adapting to a fight stick. I have also been playing more Retro Game Challenge and unlocked the second shmup in it titled, Star Prince and man is it kicking my ass. It is not as bad as the spoof RPG I tried out off the Xbox Live Indie Games channel titled Breath of Death VII. It is only $1, and features several hours of gameplay and classic NES calibur graphics!
-That wraps up this "shorter" version of my blog. Maybe, just maybe I will be back in another two weeks!
-Well, I think I am going to finally pull the plug and cancel cable. There were only two shows I have been watching that are not on Hulu or viewable on their respective network's website. One was Bullrun, which just had its season finale last Thursday. Congrats to Team Lambo by the way for winning it all. Part of me would have liked to have seen Team Hummer in the final three instead of Team NSX since Hummer were the kings of the challenge in the first several shows of the season, but NSX, Lambo and HemmeCuda put on a great show for the finale. And thank you again random LiveJournal BullRun user who notified me of the upcoming season when I blogged about watching a few shows off the BullRun season 2 marathon during Christmas. Now please convince Goldberg and SPEED to release all the seasons on DVD please!
The other show that is not legally viewable online I have been keeping up with is RAW, which has been a staple of mine since its inception in 1993. However I have been starting to watch RAW over at Matt's these past couple of weeks, and in glorious HD cable to boot. WWE's other three prime time shows: Superstars, NXT and Smackdown are all available on Hulu. As is 24 & Lost, both of which are unfortunately are rolling out their final episodes over the next month or two(I will have more thoughts on these shows once they conclude). Office is also on Hulu, as is the animated shows I irregularly watch in South Park, Simpsons and Family Guy. I rarely kick back at home and channel surf, so I told myself I do not really see it being worth an extra $40-50 a month just to watch RAW. I ran into an old acquaintance at a bar a couple months ago who is now a cable installer and asked him if they have been getting more people than average over the past couple years canceling cable with the emergence of Hulu and Netflix Instant Q and to my surprise he said installation rates are actually on the rise.
I am going to use that money I save on cable and put part of it to going to the gym. I literally had four different people ask me this past month to be their workout buddy at the gym so I am going to take it as some sort of sign or something and try and get in shape for once, or at the very least manage to try and go regularly for a couple months and get some results. My brother Bob and I already got a decent workout in cleaning out my mom's old shed that has been locked up for nearly 25 years. We were not all that surprised to find three dead cats and an accompanied raunchy smell greeting us when we opened the shed of doom.
-Found another bar in town offering karaoke on Tuesdays in Joe Blacks. I hit it up these last two Tuesdays. Got a surprising round of applause with my baritone rendition of "The Final Countdown." Another karaoke highlight occurred at a friend's Rock Band party recently where I thought I picked Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak," but alas it was the live version from AC/DC which featured nearly ten minutes of long drawn out instrumental parts and it ticked off nearly everyone else playing. They could have just quit out, but they wanted to see it through to the end.
-I am about a quarter of the way through this new book I have been reading, The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. I am not a guru on the sport and have been more of a casual fan on and off through the years, but thought the book would be a great way to catch up. I am loving it so far, some players and references are going right over my head due to me not being a diehard hoops fan, but Simmons has an ingenuous writing style. To me it is like he is writing like he is BS'ing with you at the bar, and I love all his witty footnotes he has on nearly every page. Definitely check this one out.
-I believe my last blog I wrote how my Zune bricked on me, well just a couple days ago my laptop took a shit too. It has been running great for over a year since my buddy Chris took a look at it, and especially well for being a near-five year old machine. However that all changed, I had Facebook and Twitter open in the background in between rounds of Gears of War 2 online and all of a sudden my virus protection went off saying to block an attack. I attempted to run my virus protection but got a pop-up greeting me that AVG was infected and will not work, and the same pop-up occurred for many other programs I attempted to run. I immediately rushed my laptop into intensive care back at Chris's and hopefully he will get it up and running smoothly again in no time.
-Anyone else see Kickass yet? If you have not, please do, easily one of the best films this year thus far. I even hear Nicolas Cage haters saying he is surprisingly enjoyable in it. I must be in the minority since I am somewhat of a fan of Cage. I loved both National Treasures, Next and Gone in 60 Seconds. Only films I did not care for him in I can think of were Con Air and Bangcock Dangerous. I also caught I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I loved the book it was based on, which is essentially a collection of drunken dorm stories from a law school student. The film is a fair representation of it, with some of the book's finest moments mixed into bachelor party weekend gone to hell plot line. If you read the book, I would recommend at least renting the flick since there are several references from it that are worth seeing how they translated onto film, especially the hotel diarrhea story.
-Concerning the latest games I have played, there has really only been just a few I can talk about since my last blog. Other than the aforementioned Gears of War 2, I rented and plowed through the single player campaign of Splinter Cell: Conviction. I have never been that much into the previous Splinter Cell games, other than briefly enjoying Chaos Theory. I like the shift away from pure stealth to more of a stealth-action hybrid, or kind of like MGS4, it gives you the option to play it entirely as pure stealth or mostly as a shooter. I went through about a quarter of it as pure stealth and got a good rush with some of Sam's specialized stealth tactics, but more often than not I got impatient or a little too frustrated at tipping off the guards and played it as a shooter. I still had an awesome time playing it through that way, I just wish the ending gameplay was a little more dynamic, the cutscene in and of itself was cool but not a lot of interactivity on my part.
I got my Hori Fight Stick 3 and Super Street Fighter IV within a few days of each other. Only had a little bit of time to play it though, so I am still rusty as hell and getting the hang of adapting to a fight stick. I have also been playing more Retro Game Challenge and unlocked the second shmup in it titled, Star Prince and man is it kicking my ass. It is not as bad as the spoof RPG I tried out off the Xbox Live Indie Games channel titled Breath of Death VII. It is only $1, and features several hours of gameplay and classic NES calibur graphics!
-That wraps up this "shorter" version of my blog. Maybe, just maybe I will be back in another two weeks!
Comments:
Post a Comment
