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

A simple smile would suffice

Sept. 2nd (Tues) – Sept 7th (Sun)

Another week, another blog entry. I had a sentence typed out about dying, but if I write about it, it’s just going to bother me (now and in the future when I look back at this), so I figured I would just skip that depressing stuff and go right into the stuff that happened this week:

Tues: We shoved our way through BT last week, downing everything including Mother, giving us a great head start on some Illidan attempts for Thursday. Nothing much else too exciting that I can remember, beyond it was Dad’s actual birthday, hah. Come to think of it, when I was out picking him up a card, this old woman working there (at least I think…she was up front talking with the cashier girl and I thought she had a name tag) was like “ooooh, you have such a nice smile *giggle*”. She proceeded to point it out, which sort of embarassed me a bit, and apparently making me blush, because she then had to immediately mention that as well, while rubbing her old hands all over my face (maybe not to that extreme, but ugh). Lol, she was a nice woman, I’m probably making it out to seem like she was some creepy old hag that touched random strangers. She complimented me, I should appreciate it. I’d like to say that I believe dad enjoyed his stuff (card, money, whatnot), but who knows anymore.

Wed: Headed over to Gavino’s on Wednesday as usual. I could tell it was going to be as it ended up being, another day of no filming. Because of this, I brought up the notion of an additional day of filming, especially if we wanted to get more things taken care of. April had agreed with me, saying that it would be a good idea to block off a full day for filming, since that’s usually what people do (and it’s more productive). So we agreed on Sunday’s for filming (not every Sunday, every 2nd Sunday), and continuing with Wednesday’s for discussions, podcasts, and whatnot.

We recorded a podcast, where we discussed a lot about video games (not just things that are coming out, but creativity, originality, and so on). Thankfully it was just an interesting audio podcast, because I accidentally forgot to rewind the tape and only got a few minutes of the video, but it wasn’t interesting from the video standpoint anyway. After that, we went and bought some chinese food (sesame beef is nasty, only chicken is good) and watched the original The Producers.

Speaking of Gavino and April, I wish I could discuss with them how annoying it gets when they start arguing. It’s funny / entertaining now and then when they’re just joking, but then it gets old and stupid. Not only does it make things awkward, but it makes me think like I have to push the conversation along so that we can move on with things. I’m positive it’s something that can be avoided, and it usually starts off with something so stupid like Gavino making a comment and April not approving of it or being offended by it, and it just spins into a downward spiral. Whatever…I should just start ignoring when it happens.

Thurs: Hopped back into BT for some Council downage and Illidan attempts. Once healers took their heads out of their asses and ranged were able to stop fucking standing on each other, Council became a cakewalk, which it should be since we’ve done it a few times already. Then it was on to Illidan. We actually mastered phase 2 pretty quickly, making phase 3/4 attempts more frequent that night. Amazingly enough, we ended up getting our FIRST Illidan kill that night as well. Everyone was so pumped up, and I’d have to agree, it was very exciting. Edub even got his car door. After the kill (and after the normal “first time downing” screenshot), a few of us lined up for Goochy’s banner idea. After playing with Photoshop for a bit, I came up with a few things that can be seen in this thread: http://crimsonguild.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=778

Fri: Went over mom’s for dinner as usual. During diner, it was time for Terry’s “Friday night political discussion hour” where he would rant and rave over why he hated the Democratic party. I couldn’t stand it, especially when he got pissed and started yelling at me because I couldn’t give a reason to NOT like Sarah Palin. It would seem, according to him, that if you don’t know anything about a person, you’re supposed to like them UNTIL you hear things that make you dislike them. Apparently the fact that she has a family is supposed to give me an erection. How about I watch more of the RNC and get back to you, until then, calm down about politics. That whole discussion (which usually the discussions aren’t too bad, it’s only when you disagree and try to counter his points, that’s when he gets mad) was the reason I spent the weekend listening to the conventions and will probably, now and then, load up some political podcasts.

We played UpWords and I finally won =D. Afterwards, I headed home for some delicious drunken Kara…at least, we were hoping it would be. I think it was whoever changed the GMotD to “Crimson > Illidan, let’s wipe more on drunken kara!” jinxed us…because that’s exactly what we did. I hadn’t respec’d back to holy on my paly, so they wanted me to tank again. By the time we got to Nightbane (which involved me being inebriated enough to BoP the tank at 5% ), I knew I was going to be hopping on another character. I think I finally switched after Curator. People need to understand that I don’t have a full tank set, GRR. Afterwards, we did some 3’s and then I went to bed.

Sat: Taking a page out of Luke’s book, I went and picked up herbalism and mining on my druid. I figure since he’s got an epic flyer (like mah priest), I might as well get some gathering professions. The priest has fishing/cooking/tailoring/alchemy and is my current main pve class, so he’s all maxed out and ready for the expansion. The druid has pretty damn good pve and pve gear, epic flyer, and is super fun to play, but had no professions up to that point. So why not give the class that has the quickest, easiest way to get around some gathering professions. Sure, my rogue is maxed out in herbalism, but I play him NEVER.

We did another ZA bear run and it went as smooth as it usually goes. Supermassive finally put another rule up where people will be allocated bear mounts depending on how often they’ve done the runs, which is fine. I never really cared much about the bear mount over badges (for gems and gold), gear (got the helm which is comparable to T6 until I have 4 piece; need trinket and haste caster ring), and the quickness of the run. I’m sure I’ll get one soon, I think I’m in the next bracket or so.

Sun: Went over mom’s early to help her work. I woke up at around 8:50am to get ready (wanted to get there by 10am so I could get the stuff done earlier), but my stomach was killing me. I ended up finally leaving (after making a cd with McCain’s speech) at 10, got to her house around 10:40. She had me cut some branches down, rake up leaves, dig some holes, move the canoe, take wheelbarrows of stuff and toss them at the pick-up area, mow the lawn, etc. By the time we were done, I was sweating (there’s a surprise), so I took a shower, had some lunch and was on my way home.

Played a bit of WoW, but nothing too crazy. Read some more Bone, almost done…I’ll probably read The Watchmen next. Hopped back on WoW closer to raid time and we did a full clear of Hyjal. Lost T6 helm again, sooner or later ~_~ though it’ll only really be good once I get my shoulders cause it’ll give me my 4 piece (current helm is comparable), and the shoulders alone will be a great upgrade.

What’s to come this week? I still have yet to watch Big Dreams Little Tokyo, and besides that, there’s some other movies I think I got that I have to check out as well. I gotta look into 24 Hour Party People and Hamlet 2. I’ve heard good things about them, so I should keep an eye out. I keep saying that I have to upload podcasts and then get caught up in other stuff (procrastination? lol). I’ll get them up soon, probably tonight. It’s just a matter of converting them to flash and uploading them. I’ll probably also edit the podcast page and make clickable links to each podcast, so there’s not a whole page of flash files loading up when it’s clicked (same thing with the “Show” section probably).

To get ready for Wed, I first have to take the latest podcast off the H2, I’ll rewind and check all my tape stock (to make sure there’s nothing on them that I might want to take off), though we probably won’t be recording much on Wed. I also have to try playing with the “dancing in front of the green screen” footage we took weeks ago. It was in front of the old green screen and I had problems with it when I tried last time, but I might as well give it a go…and it’d finish off the first episode ><. Wednesday we’ll probably be discussing what we’ll be doing this Sunday.

I have 2 random w00t shirts coming, should be here in a few days hopefully…I’ll probably get the BEST ones (lol). Debating on restarting my Gamefly subscription. It’s not like I need Netflix, and I do want to continue playing other games besides WoW. It’s a shame I couldn’t use it to get Braid / Castle Crashers, which I would like as well. So I’ll probably restart it up and get back into the swing of things…and maybe TREAT myself to Braid . One thing about Gavino, he’ll say he doesn’t have money for things, but he’ll keep his Gamefly subscription, buy Castle Crashers, and tell me to do both because he wants to play with me, but when it comes to WoW, it’s a big “NOPE, NO MONEY OR TIME HERE”, ugh. Probably the reason I’ll get the Gamefly subscription (can play some games w/him), but not Castle Crashers over Braid (though I did enjoy the CC demo).

I hope I get some sort of response to this stupid $400 tax payment thing that I got. I don’t wnat to pay it…and I constantly get “we’re sorry, due to a high call volume, we will be unable to answer your call at this time. lower call volume is usually before 10am, try calling back between the hours of 9 and 4:30″ and that’s with me calling at 9:30am a few times. I still have the email I’m waiting to hear a response from…ugh I’m gonna end up paying this SHIT aren’t I?

Lastly, I’ve been watching the lynda.com flash cs3 tutorial vids and they’re great, just what’s to be expected of lynda.com stuff. I’ll be jumping between flash and photoshop tutorials to broaden what I already know of both. Also, iTunes podcasts are great. Some are just awful to listen to and I can’t even begin to comprehend how they have so many fans, but it’s great to have stuff to listen to besides just music or mega64 horrible podcasts when grinding / doing dailies.

That’s it for now, be back with the Friday update most likely!

One Step Further

August 25 (last monday) – Sept 1st (yesterday/monday)

Keeping with the swing of things, work wasn’t very interesting last week, so the chance of it being mentioned is very little past this opening paragraph. I don’t wish to bash my job, and it’s not a very hard one at that. I just hope that I can make something of myself with my film career. Do I have a career? I mean, I guess I put out some stuff that people enjoy, but I don’t know past that. I want to do more. I want to do a documentary, or make a movie! Speaking of documentaries, that Second Skin one comes out soon I think. It’s that MMO documentary playing in NY I believe. Would be awesome to see it.

I’ll put days that I can remember things happening:

August 25th (last monday) – Mom and I were going to go to some festival around her area, but when we got there, it looked pretty lame (at least to me). So instead, we first drove around to different areas where she grew up (which were also in the area). Afterwards, we went to this resturaunt nearby, and god help me remember the name…can’t fucking remember for the life of me, lol. I’ll have to ask her and edit this at some point. Anyway, it was right near the water, and the place was really nice inside. I ordered the special house margarita, but it was too strong. Mom got the creamscicle, but it was kinda meh. So, drinks aside, the food was ridiculous. The burgers we got were HUGE, and delicious. Was a good day all in all, and mom had a lot of fun.

August 26th (last tuesday) – Our normal BT push. Didn’t do so well, but we got up to RoS. Didn’t down the stupid 3 faced creature, but it was mainly due to stupid wipes on bosses like Supremus and Bloodboil.

27th (wednesday) – Went to Walmart to pick up some green cloth. Got around 4 yards of it (for future projects, may need more) and brought it to Gavino’s. We cut it in half and April proceeded to sew it up, giving us a nice green screen to work with. With the screen tacked up to the wall, we had a much wider area to film with. Not the biggest thing in the world, but for the price (like $1.50 a yard), we can definitely get more. AND it’s a million times better than the old blue/green folding screen we used.

Speaking of that screen, we ended up busting through it for the site. What does that mean? Well, right now it’s just the static splash image to our site over at bsofdeath.com, but hopefully in the future I’ll take the video of us breaking through it, and (using the idea of breaking through the blue screen of death code) make some flash intro of sorts.

Gavino whipped out a guitar and started singing some ridiculous songs he made up, and it was all pretty funny. Ended up using the footage (with some older green screen stuff) to make TV Gavino (http://vimeo.com/1634668). It came out pretty well I think, and with some more effects, we’ll be adding the character into the show soon. We also were able to record (some) podcast stuff for the week. It wasn’t the best, and mainly was us talking about pizza. Hopefully this week will be slightly better. I want them (Gavino especially) to be a bit more interested in the whole idea.

28th (thursday) – Back into BT. RoS went down in one shot, Mother in a few. Council, on the other hand, was a night of fun. Thankfully, by the last attempt of the night (right around midnight) we got the stupid boss down. It ended up being a much longer fight than last time (ended up around 30 seconds or so away from enrage, so it was like 14 1/2 minutes). Hopefully this week is much cleaner.

29th (friday) – Went to mom’s after work. Got to leave early due to the fact that not only did the plotter die halfway through the day, but since everyone had the upcoming Monday off due to Labor Day, a ton of people took Friday off for a 4 day weekend. So, at moms, we had dinner, played some Upwords (Terry won 3rd week in a row, grr), and chatted it up for a while.

When I got home, I knew it was time for some drunken kara. I just barely made it this time, and interestingly enough, they wanted me to come on the paly. What’s so interesting about that? Well, the fact that they wanted me to spec prot. I’ve tanked stuff in the past, and I really enjoy it mind you, but the stuff I usually tanked were regular 5 mans, and the ocassional heroic with the guild. Main reason behind that is because my paly has terrific healing gear (and tons of resilience), but only half an epic prot set. They cared nonetheless. So I spec’d prot and began to main tank Kara (LOL, never thought I’d see the day).

It wasn’t the worst thing ever. We actually didn’t wipe on any bosses up until Prince, surprisingly enough. We only wiped on trash, and on trash did we wipe…multiple times lol. But it was all fun, we were all drunk or high. Many humourous things were said that night, namely one part where someone discussed a woman with a bottle in her ass, and Carl interjecting with a quote along the lines of “doesn’t she know the ol’ lefty loose-y, righty tight-y saying”, which had us rolling.

Afterwards, we treked into ZG, downing the snake boss for fun and Bloodlord / tiger boss for mounts (Which didn’t drop /sad). Then we rushed to MC (all guild run only stuff) for some ridiculousness in there. Downed Gehennas, Garr, Baron, Shazzrah, and I think that was about it. Failures led us to stopping around there. We didn’t wipe on the bosses, but on our way to the next group of bosses, we kept wiping on trash. All in all it was a fun retro night for the guild (and Carl, hah).

30th (saturday) – Relaxing day. No plans, just worked on the site, played WoW (nothing too out of the ordinary, maybe a ZA bear run, dailies, and the like), and just hung out.

31st (sunday) – First day of dad’s 50th birthday celebrations. Lucky guy gets 3 days for his birthday. Today was the horse race track, which I loathe. I sucked it up and went, and it wasn’t bad, though I still hate the place…I made the best of it. We lost every single bet we played except for one, which for me ended up being a loss basically because it was a $6 bet and gave me $3.50 in return (dad won the same bet, but he only bet $3, so he won $0.50 hah). He was pretty upset that he lost, but he said he had a good time. We had tuna sandwhiches, snacks, ice cream, and I bought and shared a cigar with dad (yuck, lol). I think I lost $60 that day.

Almost forgot, we did Illidan on Sunday. When I say we did him, I mean we attempted him. We actually finally got him to his phase 3/4 shift. It was really cool to see his demon form, which is incredibly badass. We didn’t do too well, only getting him there once, but that’s progress.

1st (monday/yesterday) – Played WoW and hung around until 2:30-ish. Headed over mom’s for a Labor Day BBQ. Matt, Brenda and the kids (Haley & Bobby) were there, with Joan as well. We had clams, hot dogs, chicken and beans. I made some malibu baybreezes and we had a pretty good time, although it was hot as anything that day. After everyone left, I stuck around w/mom and terry, enjoying some conversation, some Dirty Jobs, and some tea & cake.

After I said goodbye, I headed back to dad’s. We headed to the boardwalk for dad’s 2nd day (night?) of birthday goodness. We walked around, played some games (inside and out), had some yummy food (funnel cake for me), and had a good time (at least I think so, hah). I ended up going on this big slide with Jewel, which was sorta fun, even though I hate heights.

That night, I continued to read Bone. I think I’m around 550+ pages into it. Great stuff, glad I got it. Also, we ended up selling our Illidan to Noto, but with some interesting results. They ended up letting some (3-4) of our guys join them, but after 5 or 6 attempts, the closest we got Illidan down was 35%. It was great to see more of phases 3/4, but sad that we couldn’t down him. At least now the guild downing will feel more epic

I think that’s mostly it for now. I’m sure I left something out here and there, but that’s why I have this blog…to try and remember and write down all I can. I have a terrible memory, and hopefully this will help things. And it’s always nice to look back months from now and see what was going on (as awfully boring as my life is, heh).

Anything exciting on the plate this week? Tonight is BT push again, get as far as we can so we can have more Illidan attempts. Also, it’s dad’s last birthday night, so I think it’s some special dinner and cake. Tomorrow (Wed) is filming fun with Gavino and April. Hopefully he has some ideas, I think we’re leaning towards working on the next episode (which I think is #3). May or may not have to refilm the dance scene (I’ve gotten better at using chroma key, so I may be able to use the footage we already had w/the sucky screen). Either way, should probably film what’s left in episode 2 so that I can finalize the first two eps (HOPEFULLY). After that, I’m hoping we get a podcast and work on the next episode.

That’s about all I can think of. Don’t think I’m taking classes this semester, so I need to somehow get that check mailed back to Wachovia (and probably start making payments on my $1500 loan…yay more payments!). That, besides this tax thing that’s going on, is all I think I have to worry about. Just keep paying bills and get through life, one day at a time. I try not to think I’m living paycheck to paycheck, I don’t want to be one of those people (no offense, though I know I currently am that way). Hopefully one day things will work out.

Should I Give Up

The thought crosses my mind now and then, and it wasn’t this morning, but it was in a song that I like so I figured I’d make it the title of today’s unfortunately late blog entry. Now, the title isn’t really in reference to anything like giving up the blog or the video projects I’ve been working on. Of course, I’ve given up on things in the past, as I imagine some people have done in their lives before. Does everyone always finish things through in every aspect of their lives?

No, it’s not particularly in reference to anything in general, just a four worded open ended question. And why is this blog entry so late? Possibly because I was really busy working on things all weekend? No, just because of laziness and the fact that usually I try to get the entry done by Friday near the end of work or when I get home, but neither of those were a possibility and we’ll find out why it wasn’t the latter in a bit.

We have a lot to cover, so let’s get it over with so I can go to lunch

(last) Monday! (8/18): Not really much interesting that I can remember. Sorry last Monday, you obviously weren’t good enough to be remembered . Edit: One thing I looked up was that I sent an email on okcupid on this day and checked again today (8/25) to see if I received a reply…and nothing! So Monday, you’re still terrible, hah!

Tuesday: BT push. We wanted to get as close to Illidan as we could in hopes that we would be able to get some attempts in at him. And although we had a lot of afks and silly wipes, we still got RoS down by the end of the night.

Wednesday: Usual filming day, but Gavino & April said we shouldn’t because they wanted to discuss things about the show instead of filming a new ep. Before that however, I went to mom’s to grab some dinner.

We solidified our site name: Blue Screen of Death. After we had finalized it, it was just a matter of time before I got some website space from our good friends over at Powweb. Now we have space and the new site url!

www.BSofDeath.com

Nothing there yet, obviously, but throughout the week I’m HOPEFULLY going to have something up. Once I work on a layout, I can start uploading previous podcasts (audio for first, and hopefully video and audio for the next few) and probably the pilot episode (the original one that started it all). If we get a skit done this week, that may go up as well. I’m thinking of talking to Gavino and seeing if he wants to maybe do a commercial, like the “no hassle walking” commercial. Guess we’ll see in time!

Didn’t record a podcast again, so this Wednesday we’ll have to get back in the swing of things, whether it’s after or before filming. Speaking of filming, we did end up getting some green screen footage for me to play with. Ultimately, I found out that the green screen worked great, but the fact that it’s such a small green screen kind of makes it really hard to work with (especially cause it’s a PAIN the f’n ASS to put back in the bag). I sent an email to Gavino recently suggesting we follow others who buy cheap cloth and make their own screen.

Thursday: We wanted to get some Council attempt in after we went in and downed Mother, but we didn’t have a good enough makeup to handle it. So in light of that, we rushed into Hyjal and cleared up to Archimonde. Took a few stabs at him but stupid problems stopped us from clearing it. We put that on the calender as a Monday off night thing to down him (which sucks because I made plans for that night and wanted the helm >< so tired.

Saturday: Did some dailies, some heroics and whatnot. I can’t remember if it was today or Sunday that I started thinking about what I wanted to do w/my Paladin. She is my best PVP healing geared toon, but these days is my least favorite to heal on. I’ve gotten so used to the mobility and whatnot of my resto druid that having to stand around and heal or only toss myself small holy shocks now and then just isn’t cutting it. I thought about going ret, but then looked at the sad list of gear I had to work with. Then I thought that I might go back to working on prot, since I already have done it a few times before and had a decent amount of gear for it. All I gotta do is either heal heroics or do some karas, collect badges, and buy the tanking gear and then see if I have the ol’ prot paly tanking touch I used to have.

The night continued with battlegrounds and retro instances! We started with MC which we cleared (it was fun watching Rag go down again). Then we pushed into BWL up to Broodlord and AQ40, but we couldn’t get Viscidious or Huhuran down, so we called it there. All in all it was a pretty fun night.

Sunday: Didn’t do too many dailies, but got a few BG dailies done on other toons and other stuff with the guild. Did a pug ZG that stopped before Hex Lord because they were awful (well, we did get 3 timed chests, which is pretty good for a pug, but past that, ugh). After that it was back into BT!

Illidari Council went down after 3 shots. 9 1/2 minute epic 3rd attempt saw them die and we collected our loots. Everyone was pumped up with excitement to see Illidan, which was really cool. Everything from the door opening to the epic conversation between Akama, it was very fun. Then the actual fight started. We mastered phase 1, which really wasn’t too hard for the most part. Phase 2, the most colorful, fires everywhere in your face, exploding blue death beams phase there ever is…kept us at bay. We couldn’t pass it. By the end of the night, we finally got one Flame of Azzinoth down, which I guess is pretty good.

So that’s it up to this point. Exciting as usual, I know. We have Illidan on watch though. 3 1/2 more phases to go! It’s really cool that we at least got to this point, especially because a lot of the ppl in the guild have school starting this week and coming up, so I’m sure that’s gonna hurt our attendence soon. Getting Illidan down would be a massive push for our gulid and (I could only imagine, since it will do it for me) will boost morale for everyone in general. We’re currently (due to another guild breaking up recently) 4th for Horde on our server. Sunwell soon!!!

Plans for this week? Some festival w/mom tonight. Said she called me Saturday to see if I wanted to go Sunday, but I saw no missed calls whatsoever, but w/e. Might miss Arch tonight, but I mentioned that already. Back into BT Tues. Filming Wed (hopefully a new ep? new skit? we’ll see). Illidan Thrusday? Party time action Friday?! lol, guess we’ll have to wait and see. Julius texted me at god awful 10AM on Sunday, I know he wants a music video soon. Gotta talk it over w/Gavino.

You’re the queen of the superficial, and how long before you tell the truth

World Without Wikipedia

What an impossible thing to think of these days, huh? It’s sort of like how cell phones, computers/the internet, and the such have become a staple in today’s society. Just ask someone if they know of such-and-such, and in two minutes they can have the entire background of the topic at hand in front of them by going to everyone’s favorite website, wikipedia.org

It almost brings us to a time in our generation where it’s almost a crime NOT to know about certain things. Can I get through a day where someone will mention something, and if I say “huh” or give a glazed look of bewilderment and not receive the comment “WHAT?! How do you not know this?”. It’s true. How often do you go home and have a list of things that you need to look up and add to your already long list of random facts and interesting tidbits that have made home inside your brain?

What makes me think of discussing this? My friend Gavino made a comment about the band The Black Kids, in reference to us trying to decide on a website name this weekend. His comment was something along the lines of “it’s like that band, The Black Kids. There’s no black people in the band”. I obviously retorted with “um, the lead singer is black, and his little sister is in the band as well”. Why did I know this? Well, besides the fact that I did come across them a few months from hearing them on XM radio (I think at the time it was “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance” playing), I looked them up on Wikipedia, just like I do with most media related things that I come across and find interesting.

ANYWAY, time to dabble into this weekend’s activities that passed. We have Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday to go over (DRR, that would be the WEEKEND wouldn’t it), so let’s kick it off with…

FRIDAY (night): Went to mom’s after work for dinner. We ate, played some Upwords afterwards, and I showed her the episode we worked on the week before. They both really enjoyed the episode, and Terry liked the music video that I had made. It’s always fun to receive positive comments on things

Hopped on WoW when I got home. They had already started drunken kara without me (even though it was only like 9:20PM). I did dailies, BGs with Luke, etc. I didn’t want to do arenas. I told Luke and Carl (who came on later) that arenas were pointless. Unless I was going to horde points (arena & honor) for the expansion, I saw no reason to spend it on gear that would be outdated soon. Different from PVE, which in my mind had goals to accomplish (like our closing in on Illidan and hopefully getting into Sunwell and finishing that before the xpac).

Anyway, Carl gets on and starts crying about how he wants to do arenas. So we agree we’ll do the minimum 10 on our toons after killing Onyxia. Usually it’s not too bad in there, but for some reason we had the worst time ever. Our record is 3 manning her, but we couldn’t even do 4-man after three or so attempts. Saddened by our loss, we went and did some horrible arenas on two sets of toons and called it a night.

SaTuRaY: Woke up early-ish (lol 10:30?) to get ready to head over Gavino’s. When I got there, we watched the latest video we had worked on earlier that week:

http://www.vimeo.com/1539087

It needs some work obviously, but we got some laughs out of it. After that we watched the first episode of the new Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job season. Some chuckles and Mega Man 7 action later, we were off on the road to Digital Press.

We got there and started perusing the store as usual. Gavino was looking for an xbox 360 light gun for some Sega CD action, April and I weren’t looking for anything in particular. They ended up not getting anything, but I bought some old video game cards (these old cards from the 80s that come in packs of 5, with stickers and scratch offs of old games like Zelda/Mario and the such – 99 cents a piece).

We left and started heading to Mitsuwa Marketplace. I was so hungry, but also had to pee. So when we got there and stared at the packed parking lot (it’s always SO packed there…it’s really incredible), I shook my fist in anger. We finally found a spot, went to use the bathrooms, and then gawked at the deliciousness that is Japanese cuisine. Gavino go some mayonnaise shrimp & rice, April got some steak of sorts, they both got us all some appetizers, and I got a nice big bowl of shio (salt) ramen, YUM.

Afterwards, we went across to Kinokuniya to check out the awesome books, magazines, stationary, kids books, educational guides, and the like. I saw Bump of Chicken had released two new albums in the last year (one in ‘07 and one this year), so I made note to go home and check that out (acoustic version of Everlasting Lie? YAY).

We went from there to Mars, the toy store area (after passing through the teas/sake sets to get there – eyeing up the awesomeness along the way). Before leaving, Gavino had to point out the incredible Russian Roulette game they had available. It was some sort of contraption that you set up with a balloon and it either squeezed it to make it pop or shot a pin into the balloon. Either way, it was pretty insane and we wanted to buy it just for the fact that it existed, but we had to pass.

To finish up the Japanese marketplace extravaganza, we went to the food store and started to check out what we would fill our basket with that day. We got the usual alcohol (like beer for Gavino, sake for the rest of us [sparkling sake is like delicious champagne]) and candies/snacks (my jelly chews and soy bean pod chips). I also picked up two ramune bottles, but they weren’t the usual ones that I get (although they have, duh) – instead of the ones that you have to force the marble down to get to it’s sweet liquids, they had these new twist cap ones. Yeah, it takes away from the fun, but I figured Jewel would like to try this new kind.

After picking up some yummy red bean paste filled pastries and soy bean ice cream with almond maple syrup sauce, we were on our way home. When we got back to Gavino’s apartment, we watched two more episodes of Tim and Eric season 3, and then after suggesting it on the ride, we watched the new Morgan Spurlock documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden (in full this time, hah). We all enjoyed it, and it was a fun way to end the night.

sunDAY: Got up a little later, hopped on WoW, and started the day. Grinded the usual dailies and noticed I was very close to 5k gold for my 2nd epic flying mount. I hopped on all my toons and started selling anything that I realized was pretty useless and would never need come WotLK. It ended up putting me at around 5050G, but I needed more (not only to buy the mount itself at 160G [nether ray], but to at least have gold for repairs and whatnot for the raid that night).

So I hopped on my mage and did some dailies, sold some more stuff on the AH, and ended up buying the training and mount on my priest. I was torn between who I should buy it for, the priest or the paly, but then I realized that I still have a few months until WotLK comes out…what’s stopping me from getting one for my paly? Sure I bought a bit of gold for the druid’s epic flyer, but I did ALL the grinding for my priest’s mount and in all honesty, just hopping on now and then, doing dailies, selling stuff on the AH…wasn’t too bad. So my next goal is to get an epic flyer for my paly and save up gold after that for the expansion.

We headed into BT that night to start Illidari Council for the first time. Our best attempt that night was 14%…fucking close eh? Sadly, we didn’t down them last night, and although it will reset come Tuesday, we will push back in there and hopefully have Illidan down soon. Then it’s just a few Illidan farming runs, some Hyjal runs for those who need anything (gear/rep), and then onto Sunwell!

I won’t go too much into what we talked about with the show, but it’s definitely going a step in the right direction. One tidbit of info I’ll give is the podcast name: Fuzzy Face and the Plus Sized Gentleman. After that, it’s all in the works. We definitely talked about good stuff on Saturday, and hopefully this Wednesday, we’ll fill in some episode gaps from what we already have, and push forward into this project.

Another week awaits. Monday through Friday. Work work work. Let’s see by Friday how things go, shall we? Today? Easy. Tomorrow? We’ll have to wait for that, won’t we? I get paid this Friday, maybe I’ll take the folks out somewhere to eat? Or buy some groceries? I don’t know, something.

Everything looks perfect from far away