Fixing This Broken Life

I’m not going to say I don’t have problems. I’m human, like everyone else (at least one would imagine), and we all have our mistakes or personal traits that could/need_to be fixed. I know who I am, for the most part, and I know what people don’t know about me, and I also know what people should know about me. Where is this going? I’m sure I had some reason for starting this week’s blog entry like this, but maybe it’s just the product of sitting at work and reading news stories, or just letting my thoughts wander as the minutes slowly tick by endlessly.

So what’s on the board for this week? We have Monday the 8th till today, Friday the 12th (almost there, you creepy people who enjoy Friday the 13th). Let’s jump right in, shall we?

Monday! I don’t remember specifically if it was this day or Tuesday that I did these few things, but I’m gonna say it was Monday. When I got home from work, I hopped on Xbox Live and finally purchased Braid and Castle Crashers. I had already played the demo of both and they were amazing, but I hadn’t felt like dropping money on them. The reason behind that? I also started up my Gamefly subscription again, wheee.

I restarted the Gamefly subscription because Gavino’s been raving over Mercenaries 2, and the fact that there’s a billion new games coming out within the next weeks/months. He was true about that at least (not that I didn’t put Mercs 2 in my queue, but it’s still “Low Availability”), there were more than enough interesting looking games to toss into my queue (i think they call it GameQ or something like that). Since like…everything I wanted was at little to no availability (Tales of Vesperia, Infinite Undiscovery, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Mercs 2), I tossed some older games up there I hadn’t played (Bully: Scholorship Edition and Order Up! [Wii]).

After buying Braid and Castle Crashers, I proceeded to play the hell out of Braid. What do I have to say about it? In-fucking-credible. I for one love puzzle games, and toss some nice, artsy-ness to it, and I’m one happy person. The music, the gameplay, the environment, it’s all amazing. I could only play through a few worlds, but when I finally beat the game, you’ll definitely hear more about it from me. I haven’t put too much time into Castle Crashers (past playing the demo). Gavino said he and April wanted to play with me, but besides being at the end of the game, they did other stuff instead of playing the night he suggested. I’ll probably hop on either tonight or Saturday to check it out more.

To finish off Monday, I’ll add this: Luke has finally started doing dailies on his own! I don’t know if it was because he finally realized, while doing the island quests with me, that it’s the easiest thing in the world (I thought we did them together before O_o), or the fact that he’s finally able to support his own gold needs. Whatever the reason, in the next few days, he’s been doing dailies on his own and amassing a nice amount of money. Though he still hasn’t paid me back for the gold he owes me, it’d be cool to see him on an epic flyer finally (and maybe get the gold back after that, hah).

Tuesday: BT reset push was so horrible, it made me want to throw up. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, obviously, since we still were able to down Mother before the night was over somehow…but god, like 2 or 3 wipes on Supremus, people not paying attention throughout the night, so annoying. Aside from all that ridiculousness, I was able to get Goochy’s banner ideas out and about around the forums, with the choices narrowed to these 4:

The thread and banner were both really fun to be apart of. It’s nice to have that sort of graphic design ability looked upon as good work. My favorite quote from the whole thing was from Goochy himself: “It’s not very often you give someone a rough plan and it turns out as amazing as the picture you had in your mind.” That made me smile.

It may must have been either tonight or Monday that I watched Big Dreams Little Tokyo. I want to say Monday, just for the fact that I didn’t have too much going on. The movie was awesome. Very funny, nicely done. I’m surprised I had never heard of it until now (thanks Walt). Some of my favorite scenes included the hospital scene where “Sakebono-san” did his chest muscle bounce thing and hummed along with it, and a scene closer towards the end where they had a translation session between Spanish and Japanese. Good stuff, highly recommended…I even tossed it on one of my new USB hard drives (one given to Terry already) and brought over Gavino’s house, with Rec, on…

Wednesday! Interesting day, to say the least. Went over Gavino’s house after work, which was also interesting in a way. Before I talk about Gavino’s, I might as well say what happened at work. We were taking some trash to the dumpsters at Raou’s apartment complex, and as soon as we were done, this old guy pulls up and starts saying stuff like “This is the last time you’ll dump here, I got your tags!” Raou started defending us by saying he lived there, but the old man wouldn’t have it. Thankfully, to this day (knock on wood), we haven’t heard anything of it, but Raou did have an apartment there…however he WAS in the process of moving out, and we were in a company vehicle. Whatever, what was done was done and it’s over.

At Gavino’s house (after heading to mom’s for a bite to eat), we discussed the direction of our show while making fried chicken. Podcast underway (H2 on top of the refrigerator and kitchen counter), we put batter on the chicken and tossed them in the frier while talking about the show. We decided that we want the item that I made to be the basis of where we were going. The item would be seen by the “TV Gavino” and that’s when we’d introduce that character. TV-G would sooner or later give me a better item, the thing that would be the point of each episode. This thing would have different processes/abilities every episode.

The original pilot and first two episodes would be reshot or repositioned. My proposition was this: Currently we have a pilot (the short we did for my school project) and episodes 1 (where I first blink in and we do a flashback to the pilot with the “hands” scene at the end) and 2 (where I discover the “teKnology” lab, make something, and use it to blink around). I want to take the pilot out and redo the first episode. It will stay basically the same, except the flashback will have the full pilot in it’s place. Couple that with the actual “green screen dance” and some reshot stuff, and the episode might be long enough to be decent.

Then, with the second episode, we can reshoot the scene with me discovering the downstairs area and such. April was saying how the scene was funny, but there’s nothing down there to make me seem so interested. We’ll add some boxes, a green screen most likely…basically make the place look more interesting to go with the acting. We’ll also have this episode introduce the TV Gavino character and possibly keep the blinking around all over the place thing happen.

This will set us up for a few episodes, having the device doing different things each episode. Hopefully this will keep us flowing with ideas for a little while at least. ALSO, besides wanting the episodes to be longer with an ongoing story like this, we want to cut it up and put random things in between the story, like sketches or commercials or different ideas. For commercials, we have one idea where we’ll use the “As Seen on TV” stuff, and blend it all together, with people not being able to do the simplest of things, and ending it with a commercial for something that would be funny. And of course, we still want to include the “You Call That An Opinion?” idea in an episode or two somewhere.

Thursday! Back in BT, only took like 3 times to get Council down (people are slowly getting better at standing away from each other to avoid raid damage). The first wipe or so could have been avoided by not letting certain people die (aka mage tank). Anyway, then we went up to Illidan, and surprisingly it only took us about 4 or 5 tries to kill him for the second time. Yay for us! We finished off the night in Hyjal, only downing the first two bosses…but barely. People are so stupid sometimes, and get way too comfortable. So the first boss, though we didn’t wipe, gave us a couple dead people through stupid mistakes. Second boss we actually did wipe on due to more easily avoidable errors on the raid’s part. In the end, it put us further in progression, for now we have only 3 more bosses in Hyjal for Sunday, leaving us with Sunwell trash after Archimonde.

Well, that’s it for now! What’s to come this weekend? Tonight is some dinner/UpWords/political talks over mom’s house, followed by some (hopefully) Kara and whatever else we come up with. Saturday will hopefully be some relaxing times, my brain is all befuddled from this week, and I’ll need it for Sunday. Maybe on Saturday I’ll play some WoW, some Castle Crashers, make sure all my filming stuff is ready, etc. Sunday is our first “every other Sunday FILMING TIME”. I wonder how organized we’ll be / how much footage we’ll get. Should be interesting I’d say, so stay tuned!

Oh, my two random w00t shirts came in. One was a cool maroon colored shirt with dogs playing cards on it, which I think dad gave to Carol. The other was this weird one with a car on it saying “Excuse me”. I really didn’t care for either of them, so I figured I’d let them enjoy ‘em.

K, check back Monday for the weekend update! Later humans!

You wanna live like common people, you wanna see whatever common people see