LadyCrimson

Tombraider: Anniversary is a bit more fun on the 50" plasma ... ... Excuse the messy room ...

Isn't Thanksgiving tomorrow? Not that it matters - anytime's a good time for a great meal. :D We're 'prolly going up to the sister-in-law Thurs. evening just to chatter and eat her leftovers (they eat the turkey for lunch). They have the craziest (hyper) wolfish dog ... the kind you have to put in a crate when you're not at home or else it'll tear your house apart ... but also have 2 great cats, which makes up for it.

He was a bit annoying at first, but I guess he grew on me. And I love Creedence, but I thought his cracks were hilarious. :D The bad guy was too bland/vanilla for me. Plus he didn't really have a whole lot to do, acting-wise, except glare wide-eyed all the time. Plus no one can beat Alan Rickman.

That last Die Hard movie, because CostCo had it for cheap. It was fairly entertaining in that action-hero kind of way, actually. Bruce can still play that role just fine and his geeky 'sidekick' was somewhat amusing, too. But the bad guy wasn't a very good bad guy, so a lot of supposed tension fell flat. Good explosions.

Nice to hear from you, Ros! Glad you're having fun, and you know I always love pictures ... Non-stop dancing for 12 hours?? On the one hand, sounds like blast - on the other hand, sounds very ... tiring. Haha. :D Take care.

Depends on the oven temp. you're using and the weight. Around 325F, maybe 10-15 minutes per pound to heat through.

I rode the exercyle for 25 minutes then drank a big cup of oolong tea to try and wake myself up, while browsing a couple game forums. Now I'm going to take a scalding hot shower.

The parts in Adaptation w/Chris Cooper were awesome - the rest not so much. :D Cruise surrounds himself with actors who are (usually) much better than he is, in the hopes that no one will notice what a limited range/talent Cruise really is. Not that his movies aren't entertaining at times ... but it's not usually because of Cruise.

I prefer PC's. The last console I owned was the original Nintendo, from the early 90's. Or maybe it was the 2nd version of it, I don't remember/don't care. I've kept my eye lightly on the consoles, tho ... there are certain aspects to consoles (couch-potato-ing or more social) that are appealing. They just haven't added enough other appeal for me to buy one. Especially when they get more and more expensive and still do almost nothing but play games, unlike my computer. Plus, I almost always end up wanting to buy at least some games that aren't made for/aren't ported to consoles, while most console-only games I'm totally uninterested in. But if my computer ever becomes nothing but a deposit for email, I might start buying consoles.

Hubby bought Legends a while back ... I still haven't played it. At least they're trying to re-invent TR and bring it back closer to it's actual tomb-raiding roots, tho. I got pretty sick of Lara pretending to be a modern FPS in 3rd person.

Grabbed Sim City Societies on release day. After 3 or 4 hours of "hmm, not sure", by hour 6 I came to the conclusion that it's an entertaining city-building game. Perhaps a tad too easy if you're familiar with such games already - I switched to the harder difficulty, for instance, which made making cash somewhat more challenging. It is true, however, that if you're into micro-managing every detail of city-managment for hours on end, that you'd likely think it's boring/no point - but still, it's fun and somewhat addicting, so good enough for my dollar in my book. There's some subtley to the game in terms of goals and managing the societial-values, that make up the different city-type themes you can fiddle with, that give it more depth than might seem at first glance. I feel pretty bad for Tilted Mill, actually - all the SimCity nuts screaming at them and EA for daring to try something different w/the franchise, when all they were trying to do is broaden the audience away from a core gaming group. Well ... can't please everyone. I'm having fun, anyway. Wish I could still play 8 hours at a time. Hahaha.

"Next", via Comcast-HD. It wasn't too bad for a mild action/suspense film, until the ending. But I loved watching the aging but still handsome Nicholas Cage doing his precognition/time-based semi-Matrix-like bits. Leave the brain at the door and it's a fair entertaining time-passer. I haven't read the story it's based on - I need to remedy that. Edit: I still hate keyboards ...

.... I bought the game on a whim last weekend; haven't gotten any further than the first 'caves' area. Such lack of 'return-to-it-itis' is becoming a habit of mine with most games I guess, haha. The PC controls felt a little awkward and I spent a lot of time in the Mansion trying to get used to them. I miss the "sidestep" function. But it is pretty and it feels a lot like the original TR, for certain, which is really nice. Bat's in the caves, ahoy. Still ... they'll never beat the first TR.

Fraps is the most popular/well known. Guncam is another similar option. There's many programs of the above type & quality these days - do some Google searches for game recorders or similar phrases. Download, compare; your mileage may vary. BTW, "Free" for many of the shareware programs often means you download the whole program, but your video will have a visible name/logo watermark embedded in every frame. Some of them also use a length-timer to restrict time you can record in one shot; ie, 30 sec. Thus you'd have to register the program by paying for it (usually $30 US) to get the license code to unlock/get rid of them. But if you don't mind the watermarks, you can use the free version forever. I don't know anything about opensource/linux possibilities. VirtualDub is a common seperate program for editing/compressing video game videos. It can also supposedly capture some video, but I've never tried to get that to work (there's some requirements), so I don't know what that really means/entails. G'luck.

Yeah, VirtualDub isn't meant for/doesn't work with DV. But I do like them for editing Fraps-made videos. I also don't have a Mac/Apple and have no plans to get one, although I must admit their gorgeous flat-display screens beckon temptingly to me whenever I browse through stores; something the ones for PC's have yet to do. Edit: and most of my use isn't in the serious pro category ... or rather, all of my useage. I like to tinker, but not quite to that extent. Maybe one day, heh.

I think it would be possible for a program to record using a high-compression mode - whether it's practical is another story. For instance, such on-the-fly high-compression methods might not be able to keep up in terms of 'real-time data speed' - resulting in a jerky-motion, missed-frames, sucky end-result. Example, for many folk, turning on Fraps - a program that results in huge video files - to record whilst in-game, the FPS drops drastically because of the extra load. You'd probably need a really, really powerful computer to handle it. So in short, my guess is that under most circumstances the answer would be "no."

Ulead VideoStudio was on sale for $40, and I figured "hey, it can't be any worse than Pinnacle" ... so I'll give that a shot. If that doesn't work, I'll look for the Sony one. Stuff like this only emphasizes how irritating it is (to me) these days, when you just want simple, basic functionality, but software keeps going in the opposite direction.

Agreed. There are still many many old houses, however, that probably don't meet current fire-resistant standards, because of the 'grandfather' concept - homes pre-built before certain years being exempt from having to alter stuff until/unless they rebuild/apply for permits to re-do/addon etc. I'd also read an article somewhere that because of the housing 'boom' of the past several years, they were allowing people to build in actual 'fire zones'. I don't know exactly how risky these 'fire zones' were/are, but that practice seems rather dangerous; hence, my build skyward instead of outward opinion. I like the ideal of every house having a big yard and white picket fence as much as anyone else, but there comes a time for every area when it's not practical anymore.

Shock value is a good way to describe them ... they're not really about "BOO!" type of scary.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

Cute. I tried a few different settings ... the story is pretty much the same each time, tho.

I'd be playing Sim Societies if it was out in stores.... Looks like my kind of game ... if you're short on time, easy to play in short sessions, and full of god-sim tinkering-madness. Not long till release, tho.

By video I mean camcorder-generated files, not Fraps-or-similar game videos. I've been using Pinnacle Studio for a while now, and while it was fairly powerful/easy to use for simple things, it would crash/freeze a lot ... and I finally got fed up with it. Movie Edit Pro and Video Studio are two brands that some folk have mentioned before, but they seem an awful lot like Pinnacle - ie, feature-bloated that'll likely slow everything down. I suppose if they don't crash as much, it'd be worthwhile, but still ... I don't know if many people here work with home videos, but just idly curious if anyone's used any other program and liked it a lot? It has to work on XP and preferably be in the $100 or less range.

I knew the demo wasn't that great, but was wondering if the final release might've improved it some. Ah well. Back to Caesar4 I guess, then.

1408 - I liked it better than slug apparently did, but mostly because of the first half. The second half slid further and further into an abyss. The alternate endings on the DVD were kind of cool to see tho ... I liked one of those better than the theatrical ending. Transformers - finally saw it. Better than I expected, with of course fantastic eye-candy, but still silly fluff. It did, however, have some great little moments for those who've watched the cartoon series; odd bits of humor here and there. But mostly it's just one big explosion etc. after another, with a weak ending - they turned Mr. Prime into a serious wuss for the climax.