LadyCrimson

That's a film I liked a lot when I first saw it, but after a few repeat viewings didn't like all that much at all. Except for the brief earthquake scene. I find all such earthquake joke-scenes hilarious. I saw Casino Royale. I like Bond movies, but am not a huge fan overall, so I didn't bother to see this one until now. Great film, great new Bond actor dude. And now I've seen it just in time to for it to be fresh in my mind when I see the new Bond film.

Things I'm phobic about even as a supposedly rational adult: Ladders (even short ones) - if it requires a ladder, and hubby's not home, it plain doesn't get done. Fear of falling I guess, and ladders are always shaky. Swimming pool drains -- used to have nightmares about them as a kid and I still avoid going too close to them. Needles -- medical/bodily usage, not sewing usage. I can't look at my arm when they do blood tests. No acupuncture for me. Bacteria/germs in "wild" water -- it's irrational because the very idea of all that algae/bacteria filled water possibly dripping/getting in my eyes and mouth etc. grosses me out and prevents me from doing much more than wading. I know how to swim (drowning wouldn't be fun, after all), I just refuse to unless I must.

As I get older, I find myself more and more in agreement with this one:

A lot of screens have at least minor spoilers in them...it's the nature of screenshots, imo. I guess for me it's rarely a spoiler since I have no clue about the context, plus my memory is bad enough I won't remember I saw some specific scenery before. heh Thanks for all the cool shots, people. Certainly looks nice. A lot of them look very shooter-like graphic wise - does the gameplay follow suit in feeling more like a shooter, or does it "feel" like a roleplaying game whilst actually playing, if that makes sense?

More Fallout3 pics, please.

"Right at Your Door" - low budget movie w/pacing similar to "Open Water"...about a man during the aftermath of 'dirty bomb' attacks on Los Angeles. He seals himself in his house w/duct tape and then his wife shows up on the porch. The first half is compelling enough, but the middle bogs down and the two leads don't have a lot of chemistry. I kinda liked the ending. One of those movies where if you're in the right mood, you'll think it's interesting, but if you're not, you'll probably think it's just boring. "The Happening" - Direction: Ugh. Acting: Argh. Plot: HAHAHA. An attempted homage to "B" movies that fails miserably at even that. Someone please tell Mark Wahlberg to never play a soft-spoken clueless 'good guy' again. Crazy woman near the end (Betty Buckley!!) was amusing.

I listened to the rain. I watched the rain. I took a walk in rain. I snapped photos of things wet with rain. I danced with kitty to the beat of rain. I listened to the rain. I watched the rain. I'm now bored of rain.

After the awesome ALCS games, I'm trying to be excited over the Phillies/Rays World Series, but it's not working. The Ray's may be Cinderella of the year w/some great players, but I'm just not grooving on them, or the Phillies either for that matter. High respect for the players but none of them make me emotionally want to cheer them on, if that makes sense. If last night was an indication, it should be a close series, so it could ramp up. Must...watch... I love baseball...it's the only sport that makes me yell at the TV screen.

Indiana Jones part 4 Some cute moments, but the thrill is gone. I couldn't say there was anything horribly wrong with it, really...but every scene in it I felt like I'd seen in another movie (and often done better). ie, no suspense or wonderment. But it was still cool to see Ford swing that whip one more time.

Home remedies seem to consist of everything from garlic cloves to peanut butter to vanilla extract to peppermint extract - dabbing such directly on the aching tooth/area or soaking a cotton ball. I have no idea if any of them really work. One page of people's suggestions: http://susangaer.com/studentprojects/tooth4.htm

Viral Video of a couple weeks ago, apparently... The very literal interpretation of a-ha's "Take on Me" (a hit from the 80's). The guy singing it is pretty good, too. "Band montaaaaage!"

Waiting for the ALCS game. My life revolves around MLB in October.

There were some jokes about McCain's gruff voice in one rally making him sound kinda like the Penguin from 60'd Batman series. So someone "dressed him up". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtx97MR08Cg

Oh, no...sorry...that guy did do it on purpose, cause he wanted to play Space w/out being invaded every 10 min. or whatever...he wasn't complaining. I was just using what he did as an example of where one might/could accidentally discover that something one did affected their other planets. I realize it's not earth-shattering or anything, but I'd still prefer to have a few separate 'galaxies' rather than just one that's all interconnected. I guess I'm used to games where you either can A- save multiple games to try different things out, and B - start a map all over again (ala strategy games). In Spore, you can start a new species/planet, but to me it's not 'starting a new map/from scratch'. And the ship - heh, well you know I saw the 'cat whiskers' deco and had to make something that used 'em. lol

Yeah, that's the one. I think for what it is, it's not terrible or anything. Just not memorable.

It probably wouldn't bother most players, no. But it does bug me. But one aspect where it might - emphasis on might - bother in a more general way: You and your wife (or kid, or sibling) are playing Spore on the same computer, and you don't want to "ruin" anything for the other person with your actions, since not everyone likes to play the same way. There was one forum post on the official forum where a player said they used their first space-colony race to zip over and destroy/clear out most of the planets anywhere near his current tribal stage race, or something to that effect...with the result that when that tribal race went to space themselves, they had almost no invasions/alerts/issues. That's fine if you plan/want it that way, but it might be annoying if you weren't aware. So what you do in Space stage w/one planet/species can potentially dramatically effect another "planet" you're also playing - especially if you chose to play planets that are very close together on the galaxy map.

That movie where Sylvester Stallone tries to be Rambo again. Did I mention that already? I don't remember. It's not worth remembering. "The Midnight Meat Train" - has a decent creepy atmosphere for a while, but then fell flat for me. "In Bruges" - I loved this movie. The ending was a bit disappointing, because it didn't keep pace w/all that was so great before that, but if you like "matter of fact" humor, it's awesome. The ads try to make it seem like an action movie - it's not. Deliberately slow-paced most of the time, surreal...and often hysterical. The action is at the end...and while it ties things up, it does so too neatly, or something...but still worth the ride.

I turned 39 again not long ago. Today I watched the Phillies get trounced by the Dodgers. Boo, I want the Phillies to win ... so they can be trounced by the Red Sox ... or the Rays. I prefer the Sox, but it doesn't really matter - they'd both currently be very likely to trounce either NL team, imo.

Hiya! Nice to "see" you again, even if briefly. I'm not currently "missing"...still, I'm much the same at this point. ... although I frequently fly in and make a post or three every day for a few days, once every couple weeks or once a month or ...

Yesterday and today I got to watch my cat have 3 grand mal type seizures which were several hours apart. It's horrible to watch. He hasn't had any at all for several months (since I put him on an all wet-food high-meat diet), so I thought I could save some money again by giving 1/4-1/2 cup dry-kibble during the day and only 1 can of the wet food per day at night (instead of 2 cans a day/no kibble). So I did that for about a month. Then watched as his ribcage area became disproportionately wider again even as he yowled that he was always still hungry (he didn't act hungry w/the 2 cans of wet a day), and now the seizures come back. Guess I was wrong. I had one leg mostly over the fence about the whole dry/hi-carb vs. wet/high-meat food debate, but now I'm definitely all the way over.

The actual space-map where you click to travel isn't that exciting no matter what...bunch of colored dots on black...but yeah, if you have a lot of lag and the pixels look like huge legos it definitely wouldn't be the same, since half the appeal is the 'cuteness.'

On the DRM issue - I'd largely agree w/Montgomery Markland & neckthrough's positions. I can understand the distaste for companies trying to restrict customers abilities, since no one likes to think their freedoms are being infringed upon, but I don't think DRM on its own is some kind of major violation of my rights, or something. I'd also agree that if a consumer misses a cut-off date because they never check their mail/email or never watch/read news etc, that's not Wal-Mart's fault or responsibility. You can't expect them to hang around everyone's front door all day to make sure everyone who's ever bought a song from them knows of the date. And imo, Wal-Mart is no worse than any other company who ends up with a near monopoly for their target market or area. IIRC Blockbuster had some similar flak early on. Wal-Mart allegedly does some shifty work-outsource/insurance stuff which might be considered ethically objectionable, but at this point so do lots of other companies. If a city/town doesn't want a Wal-Mart, and succeeds at blocking them from building one, more power to them...but not wanting a company in your city doesn't make the company itself evil.

Space is visually fun, but I'm feeling frustrated by it more than enthralled. 1 - I'm poor. I'm sure the money will come as I figure things out more, but the point is it feels unbalanced because...in the first hour I was already offered the ability to buy a planet - because I said "hey wanna trade?" and did one mission for them - of course the amount to buy was completely out of my financial reach to do and likely will be for a long time. It makes the gameplay feel very lopsided or out balance or something, that they're willing to be bought before I've even made half the amount of the initial starter cash. On the plus side, the Speed Demon trait is one I like. It isn't necessary, I'm sure, but I can't imagine flying around at a slower speed once used to being so fast. 2 - I placed buildings on my first colony, then completed another (homeworld tutotrial) mission ... and when I went back to the colony, those buildings were missing and I had to re-pay to put them down again. Since they were expensive and I'm poor, this sucked. I don't know if it was because I'd put them down before I was 'supposed' to and the new mission re-set the planet - either way seems like a bug. There was no raid etc. 3 - reading the Spore forums I'm under the impression that what you do in one save game affects the other - ie, if you destroy 'Earth' while playing your "Grog" creatures, if you then load the save game to play your "Bizzby" creatures, when the Bizzby's get to that point in the game, Earth will be destroyed there too. If true (and some people ran casual tests so it seems to be) this also sucks. I can understand wanting to design a game where the whole galaxy is intertwined, but this means you cannot play separate civilizations and count on having certain options available to all of them, if that makes sense. Unless you buy more copies of the game/do separate installs, of course. Maybe there's a way around it, like some techie file-fiddling, but it's a poor concept to not allow for more than one 'galaxy' per install. IIRC, the Sims had a few "neighborhoods" you could play...keeping what went on in them entirely separate. They should have followed that model, because for me, this makes the entire new game/evolve-a-new creature on-a-new-planet aspect pointless. Unless I'm missing a 'new galaxy' type button somewhere? Or they changed it in the patch? Anyway .... again, it's visually fun, and I like the zipping around from planet to planet to explore, even if all the planets basically look the same...there's some silly fun to be had, to be sure, and I think you can safely ignore 'raids' if you want, most of the time (not all the time, but...) so you can explore more if that's your thing, but over all ... meh. The city-building games like Pharaoh do a much better job at integrating casual/simple strategy-goals w/the tinkering fun of watching/building an evolution-civilization process. P.S. If I had to score, I'd give Spore a 5.75 out of 10...and that mostly for the creature editor and being generally 'cute'.

I mean in-game, after you've "won" a stage and hitting the button means "automatically take me to the next stage" while I'm hollering "No, no, I didn't want to leave yet, and the save game was from 30 min. ago!" Heh. I don't have any confirmation screens of any kind at all, even for exit to desktop. I don't have the patch, if that means anything. Anyway, I finished Civ and went to Space. Civ was horrible in a "oh god this is very awkward" way. So much so that I went ahead and went Econo instead of Military (so no raid bonus) because it seemed the easiest/fastest. I essentially did nothing but click cities and bribed my way into being allies & thus "conquering" everyone. The early part of the space/tutorial aspects were ok...your spaceship moves very fast at least. I dunno tho...I'm not finding it enthralling yet, but I just started. I like my spaceship, however. I made a whiskered mousey-ship or something.

True...in Creature stage I wanted to delay so I could build my creature w/some high-level or just cute parts...but after a while I realized/remembered it wouldn't matter in space stage much, if at all. At the moment the main aspect to these early stages, for me, is making sure my actions mean I get the stage-bonus I want. Tho I was wondering if anyone felt like the bonus skills you get for manually playing through the phases was generally worth the bother? I haven't used them at all.