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One of the trailers we saw before X-Men 3: The Meh-ening was for something called My Super Ex-Girlfriend. The message pretty much boils down to "if strong women are scary and emasculating, just imagine how scary and emasculating the most powerful woman in the world is." C'mon, guys. This is just embarassing.
See, my wife has Supergirl pants, and that makes me say hooray.
"I do for bullshit what stonehenge does for rocks."
I so want a bumper sticker.
Another entry in the "character poster" series.
For some reason, ever since Daggerfall, I've always had a character named Felicia. In WoW, this turned out to be especially apropo, since the word "fel" refers to warlock-y things in the Warcraft mythos. Not that I realized this until a year later, of course. Sharp as a tack!
For the World of Warcraft nerds in my audience -- yes, I finally started raiding a few months back. I resisted it for a long time -- playing with 40 guys seemed a lot more impersonal than playing with 2 or 5. But then we found a like-minded guild of nerds, and discovered we kind of kicked ass at it.
One of the aspects of playing the game is that when you slay the dragon, you get some nice loot to make you smarter, faster, sexier to all the virtual girls (or guys, or antelopes, or what have you). It's random, so you keep going back week after week, hoping the +5 Boots of Kicking Ass will drop this week, and that you will beat out all the other grubby-handed gearhounds who you compete with... I mean, are part of a big happy family with.
I've had, to understate it slightly, extremely good luck. In the past few months, I've upgraded was already a very nice end-game set into a crazy, all-singing, all-dancing set of healing garb. I play an infrequently played class -- a healing class that, to the uninitiated, appears to be a weaker class because it combines aspects of multiple roles. Since it's infrequent, I tend to get the "phat lewtz" (as the kids say) in a more steady stream than the eight hunters that keep showing up to our 40-man extravaganzas. But it's a satisfying class because of that very hybrid nature, and when properly outfitted, my abilities to heroically keep our band of battle-hardened noobs up and about can be terrifying to behold. Well, I got my Tier 2 Antlers of Omniscience a few weeks ago, and last night.... last night I finally got my Epic Oven Mitts Body Wrap of OMGWTFPWNAGE. So yeah. I'm pretty happy. And far too tired.
It's been interesting to see the difference as I upgrade all of this gear. For the more damage oriented roles, the only way to measure progress is to watch your raw damage output climb up the charts as you compare your virtual phagitude to all the other wielders of arcane mysteries out there. It's all pretty relative, because in the end, you're a wheel in the cog of raw damage output to bring down the fiery lord who resides under the earth. Healing's different though -- with healing, if you expend your own reserves too fast, other people start dying. So healing output, mana pool, and resource regeneration all play factors. As you start hitting the crazy end game stuff, fights go from 1-2 minute affairs, to -- I kid you not -- 8 to 20 minute long epic blastfasts. Suddenly regeneration becomes much more interesting than it had been in what, in retrospect, seems like an incredibly short fight. Last night, I realized that I'd gone from "good effort, but easily exhausted" to "what? are we done already?" As we fought our last, desperate, doomed fight, I heard the other healers cry out around me "I'm out of mana," while I kept on trucking.
Yeah, it's all virtual. Yeah, it's a self-contained world. But... we fought a dragon. And now I have Epic Oven Mitt Bodywraps of OMFGWTFPWNAGE. It's a nice way to end the week and start the weekend.
From the XBox.com page shilling for the intriguing superhero crimebuster Crackdown:
Legendary game designer: This explosive masterpiece, set to define open-world free-form gaming, comes from Dave Jones, the creative mastermind behind Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings.
GTA and... Lemmings. Ow. Head. Hurts.
Man, I miss Lemmings.
Yeah, it's all comic posts lately. As with Teen Titans, Justice League Unlimited has come to a close. There were a few good moments in the final episode but... bleah. Maybe this new Legion of Superheroes cartoon will be good.
Sometimes I'll just get this low level subsonic hum going on in my body that means I've got the jones for some piece of consumer electronics that I've been deferring the purchase of for months. And when the vibration hits -- well, it's good I'm well compensated. Today, the compulsion hit, and it was for the XBox 360.
It's been several weeks since the 360 finally hit production in force -- and several months since release -- and I've been biding my time, telling myself I was waiting for "the killer game" to come out. psu succumbed and has been incessantly talking it up to me, and -- although as of press time he hasn't blogged it yet -- peterb has succumbed to. Cosmic irony requires that we walked into identical Best Buys at the same time today, since clearly the compulsion hit him too. (But how could he resist -- how else was he going to play Oblivion? Too many mind control rays were focused on him, and it was only a matter of time.) And Parrish, a WoW compatriot, has been talking his up for about the same length of time.
So what did I get? Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. This has widely been talked up as the prettiest 360 game out there, and I'm here to tell you it's all true. Oh, the textures. Oh, the high dynamic range. Oh, the little screen gewgaws. It's got the same vibe as Rainbow Six 3 from back in the day, but gussied up and ready to hit the burning, desolate town. I played the first few missions from the campaign, and then Parrish and I spent some time with the co-op discovering how we regretted we had but infinite lives to give to our country.
So what's to like about the 360?
Basically, my only complaint is that you can't start a demo downloading and then let it download in the background while you go play a game.
So yeah, I'm feeling the love. I even like the box design. Yeah, the power brick is big, but it tucks away fine.
I've been freaking out with the DC-verse lately; Teen Titans, Birds of Prey, watching Justice League Unlimited on Cartoon Network... I'm all about the spandexed supers. So I finally buckled down and read the Infinite Crisis on Infinite Earths and the new Infinite Crisis. I started with the current IC, read up to issue 6, and then went back and read the '80s one. The '80s one is -- to put it bluntly -- '80s-tastic. It's pretty cornball.
What surprised me, though, is how much more enjoyable reading it made the current one. I just picked up issue 7 out of 7 today and... wow. I liked it. A lot more than I expected to.
Regardless, Identity Crisis and Villains United and Project OMACS all rocked, so liking IC was just the icing on the cake.
God help me, I'll probably get a subscription to 52.
Please don't worry if you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. I didn't provide links because if you don't know, I swear to god you don't care.
Look! Up in the sky!
