I added this button/link to the sidebar today, realizing that I’m about 6 months late. All info is good info though, right?

Anywho… click it. Check the info and keep your little one safe and healthy.

A week later than intended I managed to catch an iMax showing of Spider-Man 3…

By my unofficial count, there were no less than 950 crying scenes. It was ridiculous. Which is unfortunate as the movie, outside the fucking emo, wasn’t horrible. At least from a CGI perspective.

As is his modus operandi over the run of this series Raimi ham-fisted the material and rendered barely adequate caricatures of the “real” people from the pages. I tolerated the organic web-shooters fiasco (a friend of mine ran that website!) but the Gwen Stacy thing bugs the living crap out of me. Ben Parker’s death formed the motivation for Peter to become a “hero” and to use his gifts to help people. The death of Gwen Stacy, however, truly changed the way Peter saw those gifts and crystalized the oft-quoted axiom: with great power, comes great responsibility. This moment is a pivotal one not just for Peter, but for the medium itself! Ignoring the story in favor of one that will get more teen girls and itty-bitty children in the theater is detestable, at best.

Instead of manufactured teen angst we could have had a movie with actual emotion and relevance for the viewer. Running away from this opportunity is tragic. Especially given that Raimi COULD have done a meaningful story given the unparalleled financial success of his little trilogy.

Note: The Venom and Sandman CGIs were fine. The Venom stuff, despite some whiners, is pretty close to the page and I found that I was genuinely impressed by their willingness to go that route. The Sandman stuff was wrong, but only “a little”. I don’t recall a point in time where he ever flew off as a cloud of dust.

The rotten tomatoes score is pretty close to how I feel. It was passable and rousing for a summer popcorn movie. Beyond that it remains in my memory only because of its failure.

I ran across this on wwtdd.com this morning and had to link it up.

Jail Paris Hilton (sign here if you’re down like that)

He’s actually got a free Paris one as well, which is losing by a minimum of 2:1 to the jail version. (40k vs 20k)

Honestly though, given the facts of her crime and “regular” person would have served the full 90 days as mandated by the sentencing guidelines. Mandatory minimums, for once, having a positive effect.

For whatever reason I seemed to have forgotten to mention that I was playing a neat little webgame called inselkampf. It’s quite fun, but be prepared for a rough entry. It’s not my particular bag, but new players should give world2 a try first as it just opened this week and you won’t be facing folks with 20 islands and 20k troops at their disposal.

The premise of either world is that you start out on an island. You can build resource gathering, troops, ships, defenses, etc. You build up, you find an empty island (or make one empty by force) and colonize with extreme prejudice. After about a week playing you’ll be at the point where you have queues running for 5+ hours so micro-managing is easier.

Note: if you play on world 1, make sure you join an alliance before you colonize a 2nd island and make sure it’s one with support close to you and ranked in the top-15.

Another game I found courtesy of corpnews is called Hell Rising. I’m still trying to get my bearings, but it has potential.

NCSoft and/or Cryptic Studios are certifiable geniuses. Not necessarily in the money-hat-factory sense of Blizzard, but they’re certainly putting in the effort.

About a week ago I received an email warning me of the impending “free weekend” for City of Heroes. The free weekend is exactly that – free. No muss, no fuss, just log in and play on my old CoH account with no restrictions or hooplah. For serious!

The process was literally thus:
1) Find install CDs (harder than it sounds)
2) Install & Patch (1.8gb from launch masters to issue 9, 8 hours)
3) Play. Well reset password and then play.

No codes, no activations, nada. I did waste another 2 hours making a new character on a newer server as my old one was “double yellow” and laggy as hell. That and it really did take 8 hours to patch at an abysmal 70k/s, but if I had installed a few days after I got the email vs 5 minutes after I decided to play…

That’s all fine and good, you say, but “what’s the point?” The point, dear reader, roadblocks. Or more precisely, the lack of roadblocks. This is a lesson Blizzard taught the industry with the runaway popularity of WoW. WoW isn’t a super l337 hardcore game. Learning the basic mechanics of any class and the game itself is a process easily completed in the first week of free play. This allows a new player the maximal amount of time to discover the game and not just how to play.

Cryptic “got it” with the concept of free weekends. It looks like they do these events periodically when there’s a major change to the game. The “excuse” this time was Issue 9 going live. I played CoH-beta and for the first 3 months following launch. I know exactly why I left, but this chance to jump back in with no strings attached had me seriously considering a 1-month resub. Ultimately I came to my senses and realized that none of the reasons for my departure had changed so a resub would be silly.

But still… good try. No MMO I’ve ever played has ever come close to this level of nostalgia.

The end result? I can spare the 2 1/2gb. So who knows what might happen?