9/11 came and went rather quietly this year.  There were the obligatory television spots, and the memo's being sent around, but I found that it was pretty quiet compared to the last few years.  As everyone knows, 9/11 has a different significance for me.  That's the day my grandfather passed away of leukemia.  I considered an outing to go and visit his tomb, but life tends to get in the way, y'know?

I think I'll change the subject now.  I'll talk about my cat.

I keep Sonny in my room at night because I don't want him trying to have a go at the bird cage in my parent's room in the middle of the night.  Well, he's learning the times when I get up in the morning.  Specifically, he's learned that when my alarm clock goes off, it's time for me to get up.  So he does his best to try and get me up in the morning.  He paws at me, he walks over me, he headbutts me, and then he'll lay down against me, trying to make me feel uncomfortable enough to move.  It's all a part of his plan to make me get up and let him out.  And usually it works.  It's especially annoying on weekends when I want to sleep in.  I usually want to sleep until noonish, but Sonny will get me up at about ten.  My parents will ask why I'm up so early, and I'll simply respond with "the orange alarm clock".  When Sonny's ready to be active for the day, then he demands that I be active for the day.  That's my cat for ya.

Laterz.

I finished Bioshock.  I got the good ending for going through and rescuing all the little sisters.  I believe it has multiple endings, so now I'm going through and harvesting the little sisters.  Man, they make you feel bad for harvesting them though.  But all that extra Adam sure helps!  Now that I've gone through it, I wonder when they're gonna put out an SDK for people to start modding this thing?  You know that there's gotta be at least one group of people out there who want to take this and turn it into a System Shock game.

I finished Metroid Prime 3 Corruption.  And at the same time, I learned how many playtime hours the rechargable battery pack for my Wii Remote has.  As I was fighting the final boss, the battery pack went dead, after approximately 12 hours of playtime without a recharge.  Luckily for me, Nintendo was smart enough to make the Wii smart enough to recognize a dead Remote and halt the game until you can get the Remote back up and running.  And also lucky for me, I had some AA batteries lying around.  I popped them in and pwned the final boss.  I was suprised at how easy the final boss was.  It wasn't easy getting there, but the fight, which was a three-parter, left something to be desired.  But on the other hand, there's closure.  And I got 100% item collection.  Go me.  My only remaining gripe is that I don't have anyone in my friends list who actually has this game so I can't trade in my Friend Vouchers to get Friend Credits, so there's a whole bunch of locked content that I can't unlock.  I've unlocked everything that doesn't require Friend Credits.  Yeah, it sucks.  I only know three people with Wii's and none of them have this game, or even like the Metroid series.  Hmpf.  Guess that means I need to find an alternative method to getting these friend credits.

The next game that's coming up, and soon, is The Legend of Zelda - The Phantom Hourglass, for the DS.  I have it on preorder and it's paid in full.  That comes out next month.

Last night I was poking around in Steam.  Normally that's not a good thing right?  Whenever I poke around in Steam, I usually end up spending money, right?  Right.  I bought the Super id Pack.  $70 for a whole load of games, ranging from Commander Keen through Doom 3.  Heck, they even have the expansion packs for Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny.  Ah, it was nice to get a bit of nostalgia with that.  Oddly enough, there are only two games missing from that pack: Heretic 2 and Quake 4, which I already have both.  Heretic 2 wasn't exactly the greatest game, and Quake 4 probably doesn't even support Steam yet.  And as strange as it may sound, Doom 3 was having a really hard time running on my machine, yet when I played the CD version, there weren't any problems.  It must be an issue in Steam or something.  But other than that, my list of Steam games is all nice and fleshed out now.

I can't help but wonder if the people who subscribed to me actually read what I write in their digests.  I know they're not coming to the site.  My amount of footprints have dwindled down to... my own.  Which is sad really.  Ah well.  This is more for me than anything else.

Anyway, onto other things.

Bioshock.  Is.  Teh.  Win.

I don't think I can put it in better words.  At first I felt disappointed that they weren't continuing the System Shock storyline.  I almost didn't want to play it when I read the initial articles about it.  But then I started seeing screenshots and videos, and then I knew that I had to play the game, but I felt that I would still be unhappy with it because it didn't continue where System Shock 2 left off.

I was wrong.  Dead wrong.

Even with the lack of SHODAN, this game is simply too awesome for words.  This is like going from Morrowind to Oblivion in terms of graphics and gameplay.  Yes, everything is a bit more simplified, but that doesn't cut from the experience of the game at all.  The graphics are simply beautiful.  1950's era art and music is everywhere in this game.  It's like you've gone into a time-capsule... gone horribly wrong.  And then you mix in the Plasmids and Gene-Tonics and you've got one helluva game.  Plasmids are genetic modifications to your body which allow you to do different things, like hurl lightning bolts or set things on fire.  You get Plasmids by getting a substance called ADAM, which everyone wants.

The game starts out with a plane crash, that you, obviously, survive.  As you swim to the surface, you see this building sticking up out of the water.  There are some stairs to climb which lead to an open door.  Since there's nowhere else to go, you'd might as well explore a bit right?  Exploring the inside of the building you see a giant statue of a man, who you will find out is named Andrew Ryan, and a big bathysphere.  When you go into the bathysphere, you are taken 18 fathoms deep, and you see an introduction video by Andrew Ryan, telling the virtues of this underwater city he calls Rapture.  He made Rapture to get away from capitalism and communism and all the other political and economic woes of the surface world.  It seemed like a good idea.  But something has gone terribly wrong.  As soon as the bathysphere lands, it's attacked (don't worry, you're safe) by what's called a Splicer.  It runs off and then you're told to pick up a nearby radio, and you are contacted by an irishman named Atlas.  He fills you in on everything that's going on here and the adventure begins.

There are a whole bunch of enemies.  There are your basic Splicers, people who have done so much genetic modifications to themselves that they've become dependant on ADAM and will kill to get their next fix.  Splicers come in three different flavors: thuggish (they run around and hit things), leadhead (they have guns), and spider (they crawl on the ceilings).  And if you've got any psychology background then you'll definitely love the splicers.  Then you've got the security bots: turrets, flying bots, and cameras.  And then there's the beast on the cover of the game, Big Daddy.  Big Daddy is a hulking brute who protects the Little Sisters.  The Little Sisters run around and collect ADAM from corpses.  If you kill a Big Daddy, you can get the ADAM from the Little Sister, but you have a choice.  You can harvest her, which gives you a lot of ADAM, but she won't survive the process, or you can rescue her, which gives you half of what you would normally get, but she survives and becomes a normal little girl again.  It's up to you.

All in all, Bioshock is a freaking awesome game.  Go buy it.  Go buy it now.  Why are you still reading this?  You should have gone out to buy it last week when I first mentioned it.

Are you still here?

Fine then.  On to something else then.

Metroid Prime 3 Corruption.

Oh my freaking gawd!  If anyone tells you that Corruption is just a cleaned up copy of the other Prime games, you need to smack 'em upside their idiot heads.  This is not just a Prime revamp.  This is a completely new game.  The interface is new, the enemies are new, the worlds you visit are new, and you actually interact with other characters.  And they actually talk, yes there are voiceovers and they're good!  This game puts the Wii remote to very good use.  The switches in this game are not all like what was in the other Prime games.  You don't just scan them and they work.  There are switches that you have to grab, pull, twist, and push back in.  And there are other switches that are primers that you have to pump.  And they make new use of the grapple beam too!  In fact the grapple beam has been split into two separate items, the beam and the lasso.  You use the Nunchuk to activate the lasso to pull things off of walls and enemies, and use the beam to swing from grapple points.  Oh, and then there's the Phazon injection system, which lets you go into hypermode at any time, at the cost of 100 energy points (one whole energy tank), but there is a risk of overload.

As it was in Hunters, you get to interact with other bounty hunters, and each one has their own voiceover and personality and special ability.  They really went to great lengths to make this game something good.  It's worth it to buy this game.

I have only one complaint about it.  It's murder on my trigger finger.

After playing it for awhile, I think I might have a clue as to the origins of Mother Brain.  In the game you find out that the Pirates had introduced a virus into the Aurora network (there are hundreds of these things).  Well, they didn't give a timeline for that, so it could be assumed that that had happened prior to Zero Mission, and the Pirates had taken the initially infected Aurora (which probably would have been one of the earlier Aurura's) and then repurposed it to be the Mother Brain, and while Samus was on Zebes for the first time and during her trip to the planets in Prime, Prime 2, and Hunters, the Federation was working to vaccinate and cure the rest of the Aurora network.  They don't mention a lost node, but that would be something that would be kept under wraps, or that it doesn't need to be said since by the time Prime 3 comes around, she'd already destroyed Mother Brain for the first time.  It sounds plausible enough to me.

That is all.

Well, my mom has decided that she's going to go across the lake to stay and watch my nephew every week, monday through friday.  This leaves me and dad by ourselves in the house all week long.  Dad has a hard time sleeping when mom's not there.  It's going to start getting interesting very soon.  I guess that this means I will have to start cooking dinner when I get home... again.  Joy of joys.  Well, we'll see how long this will last.  I'm sure that my brother and his girlfriend (they got back together, by the way) will eventually see how mom can get.  She just hasn't been the same since the strokes.

Ah well, on to other things.

As you already know, come the end of this month, I'll be picking up my copy of Metroid Prime 3 Corruption.  Tomorrow I'll be picking up my ex-roomies copy of Bioshock, and at the same time I will be downloading Bioshock.

Wait, did you read that right?

Yes you did.  I will be downloading Bioshock tomorrow. 

From where?  From Steam.  That's right, Steam is going to be hosting Bioshock.  Interestingly enough, they're also hosting a bunch of games from id's catalogue.  I don't think they're hosting Quake 4 though.  I think they're hosting up through Doom 3 and it's expansions.  I'm really becoming impressed with what Valve has done with it's little Steam engine.  Kudos to them.

The only disappointment that I will be having about Bioshock is that it's not following the System Shock story, which got left at a cliffhanger at the end of System Shock 2.  Of course, the reason being, the System Shock franchise has been split amongst so many different companies that it would be impossible to make a continuation, unless it was fan made.  And I'd be willing to bet that someone is going to make a mod for Bioshock to continue the System Shock series, at least "unofficially".

Continuing on in the PC universe, GameTap acquired Overlord.  And I downloaded it.  And I played it.  And I love it.  This game is just so incredibly awesome!  The basis of the game is that you are a recently awakened evil overlord.  Your predecessors were defeated by several heroes and your tower demolished.  So now it's up to you to rebuild your dark domain.  But you can't do it alone.  You have an army of goblins to help you.  Well, at first you only have 5, but you can build up that army fairly quickly... by having them kill things.  There are four types of goblins.  I've only found the first two types.  You have the brown goblins, which you start with, who are your normal guys.  They have no special abilities.  Then you've got the red goblins.  They can absorb fire and throw fireballs.  There's also blue ones and green ones.  I haven't found those yet.  The goblins are your main attack force, they collect things for you, and they will arm themselves with whatever they find.  As for you, your weapons and armor are custom made for you in the forge that you find in the game.  You have to sacrafice your goblins to improve your stuff and each different type does something different to your weapons and armor.  And then you can customize the tower, which you get after you find the mistress of the tower.  But I digress.  This is a very fun game with a large world to explore.  Get this game.  Or get on GameTap and get it and 900 other games for $10 per month.

I can't seem to say enough good things about GameTap.

But I digress.

Going back to Metroid Prime 3 Corruption for a moment, Nintendo put out some new videos on friday, and Super Metroid should already be in the Shop Channel, waiting for me to download it.  I am particularly interested in the Aurora video.  If you haven't seen it yet, or don't care, I'm going to spoil it for you anyway...

OMFG MOTHER BRAIN WAS A CREATION OF THE FEDERATION AND THERE ARE MORE OUT THERE!

Okay that's enough Metroid nerd stuff for now.

...

Oh yeah.  My sister sucks.  I leant her my copy of Twilight Princess.  The other night she called me up to tell me that she had gotten through the Cave of Ordeals without using the magic armor!  Are you kidding me!?  I saved up the magic armor for the final fight and I barely made it out of that alive and she got out without using the armor AND SHE HAD A FAIRY LEFT!  It took all of my skill to get through that and she did it better than I did?  Forget that.  I'm gonna get back to playing it on the Wii and pwn the Cave of Ordeals.  I won't let her show me up.

Laterz.

It is so freakin' hot outside!  It wouldn't be so bad if it was a dry heat, but the humidity in the air makes it nearly unbearable!  And it's not doing good things to my house's AC system.  My room is hot day and night, and I've got three fans going full blast in there!  When I sat down to eat dinner, I realized just how thirsty I was when I downed a whole glass of iced tea without stopping for a breath.  I had gotten dehydrated and didn't even notice it.  Gah!  I hate it when it gets so hot like this!  On the bright side, I work in the server room at the office, and it's a very pleasant and dehumidified 68 degrees F in here.  The server room has it's own AC system which means I have my own private AC.

Anyway, on to other things.

You've probably noticed that the list of webcomics has grown and changed around.  If not, you should check out my list.  It grows whenever I find something new.  So you should be checking back often.  Yes, even you people who get my updates in a subscription.

Some time ago we moved my roommate back to Hammond so he can go back to Southeastern.  I'm very happy for that.  Now I don't have him bugging me all the time.  Hell, even the cats are less stressed out, and my parents aren't bitching about him anymore.

LilBigBlue has been put on hiatus for the time being.  The reason being, it wouldn't take any Windows server version at all.  In fact, I found that the only OS it would take is Debian Linux.  I know that Ubuntu is based on Debian, but Ubuntu doesn't seem to have a PowerPC port.  Anyway, it's having problems booting now, which probably means the first drive in the array is bad... or something.  I don't know.  I'm not going to deal with it for now.  What I am going to do though, once I figure out how to do drive concatenation in Ubuntu, is consolidate all the larger drives I have into my old Dell XPS box and make a big Ubuntu box out of that as a backup for BlueMonster, and whenever I get LilBigBlue running, I'll have that one running as an offline library for me to store all the crap I download and then never use.  No packrat jokes please.

Also, I got a new laptop.  It's an Acer Aspire 3100.  I bought it from my friend's computer store.  It's a rather nice laptop, but it has a few drawbacks.  One, it's running an AMD Sempron.  And if you know me by now, I prefer Intel over anything else.  But at the time, I needed a new laptop, and this was the best deal for a new machine that I could find without jumping on eBay.  The second problem is that it has 512mb of RAM.  The reason that's a problem is that it came with Windows Vista Home Basic edition on it.  I wiped it and put Windows XP Media Center Edition on it.  There is no way that Windows Vista would have survived for very long on this thing.  See, Acer has all of these extra, but very useful and necessary programs that help keep this thing running at optimal performance, and to help maximize battery life.  The problem is that they suck up memory faster than anything I've ever seen.  After starting up, I have maybe 32mb left over and I have to use Acer's memory manager to get it back up to 128mb.  Think of how bad it would have been if I'd have kept Vista.  Yeah.  I'm solving that problem.  I've ordered another gig of RAM off the internet.  It should be showing up any day now.  The third problem with this laptop is that it's got an ATI Radeon XPress 1100 graphics card in it.  And you all know how much I really dislike ATI's.  But other than that, it's got a built in Broadcom wireless card which runs really great.  It picked my wireless without any problems whatsoever.  It has a built in wired NIC which is pretty standard.  And it has a DVD-RW and a CD-RW drive in it, which is fantastic for me.  But even with these little problems, it's running good enough for me, and that's what counts... for now.

On the gaming edge of my universe, I went and pre-ordered and pre-payed Metroid Prime 3 Corruption.  It comes out at the end of this month.  Any Wii owners out there should have gotten a message from Nintendo announcing Corruption's arrival.  In fact, if you did the latest update, you'll notice some changes in the Shop Channel.  The most significant change is the News section!  And I was really happy to see one significant article in the news section.  In preparation for the upcoming event that is Metroid Prime 3 Corruption, they're putting up Metroid for the NES and Super Metroid for the SNES on the Virtual Console!  And if you know anything about me by now (and if my cursor trail is any indictation) then you'd know that I f'ing love Metroid.  I really do wish that they'd start putting up GameBoy games on the Virtual Console.  I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard for them to put up a version of the GameBoy Player.
"But Rai, don't you already own every Metroid game already?" I hear you asking.
It's true.  I have all the physical games (well, except for that incredibly rare arcade version).  I have Metroid for my NES, I have Metroid II for my GameBoy, I have Super Metroid for my SNES, I have Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission for my SP, I have Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2 for my GameCube, and I have Metroid Prime Hunters and Metroid Prime Pinball for my DS.
"Then why do you care about these two games on the Virtual Console?" I hear you asking.
Because they're on the Virtual Console!  That, and my SNES controller is crapping out on me.  It's easier to play SNES games with the Wii Classic Controller than it is with my actual SNES controller.  And while there's nothing wrong with my NES and it's controller, I still really enjoy the convenience that the Wii affords me.

So, that's it for now.

I took some new pictures of Sonny to send to the people who had him before me.

He decided to catch a nap.  He always sleeps in that same spot, on the floor next to my desk.

This is outside my room.  Lookit how fat and happy he is!

Last friday I paid a visit to my friend's computer store, and he had an old server for sale.  It's old.  It's an IBM PowerPC.  It's got a 13 disk array, 10 of them are 4 gigs, 3 of them are 36.5 gigs.  It's got two PowerPC processors and 256mb ram.  I'm going to see about updating the ram in it, and try and load Windows NT4 Server on it, since I can't seem to load anything else on it.  Heck, even Ubuntu won't run on it.  I think I'm gonna name it LilBigBlue.  Anyway, here's pictures of it.

A view from the side.

The front panel.

The front panel door opened.  That's a CD-ROM, probably a 4x.  And only one of those extra bays is usable.

From the back.  I haven't removed the stickers that the previous owner put on it.

A view of the 13 drive array.  Sonny was helping.

The side panel opened.

A closer look inside.  Yes, the RAID card has external RAM.  The machine's RAM is under the card on the bottom.

And I realized that I haven't ever taken pictures of BlueMonster for you guys to look at.  So let's fix that.

There it is, in all it's glory... and next to my wireless router.  Also, my DS is there.

A close up view.  It's all crammed in there really good.

The front panel.

A close up of the drive bays.

And my two LCD screens.  Remember "A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind".  You can see my Classic Controller, Wii, SNES, NES, and if you look closely, you can see the corner of my PS2.

So my roommate and I are making a costume to suit a dwarven priest.  To get the costume, we checked out this place called Halloween Costumes 4 U (www.halloweencostumes4u.com).  The costume we grabbed was the Dark Skull Lord (http://www.halloweencostumes4u.com/prods/rub73261.html).  It looks really well done.  I was poking around the site some more and I found that they have some really authentic looking Darth Vader costuming too, which is a plus for a nerd like me.  And they've got costumes for kids too, so I'll be poking around in here when it comes time for Halloween for a costume for my niece and nephew.  You should look there too.  In fact, why are you still reading this?  Go check out that site now.

My friend and I made up last night, ending the silence between us.  We worked it out, so we're no longer not talking to each other.  I guess I'm just the forgiving type, especially when it comes to friends.  And this wasn't the most horrible thing that anyone's ever done to me.  Now, if he had lied to me and kept it from me and I found out about the lie from someone else, then he'd be definitely cut off for good, no apologies accepted.  I've done that with only one other person in my life, and that was only because she dared to try me.  But anyway, back on track... hopefully this kind of thing isn't going to happen again.  Though it may be a little different now.  Things were said that will be hard to take back.  But I'm confident that we'll be able to get over all that.

Anyway.

I started playing God of War 2.  All I gotta say about this game... damn.  Starting off the game by fighting the Collosus of Rhodes.  That's what I'm talkin' about!

Laterz.

If anyone remembers, a buddy of mine runs a computer store here in Louisiana.  At times, I go over there and teach some classes for them and I get a cut of the cost of the class.  Well, last time I was down there, he pushed a copy of Ubuntu in my hands and told me to try it.  It sat on my desk for a couple of days before I finally decided to run it in a virtual machine.  For some odd reason, it wouldn't run under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.  I mean it wouldn't even load, at all.  The whole thing just locked up.  But, as luck would have it, I still have an old copy of VMWare's Virtual Workstation 5 handy.  And guess what?  It worked.  So I installed Ubuntu on that.

"But Rai," I hear you saying "I thought you were against using any form of Unix/Linux?"

Well, understand something.  I'm not totally against it.  Linux does have some uses.  From a gaming standpoint, Linux is fairly useless so I wouldn't be using it as much as I do my Windows XP box.  But from a networking perspective, Linux might actually be useful.  I doubt I'm going to do any programming on it, but it looks to be something that I would be able to use as a storage node on my network, maybe make a beowulf cluster, or even a standalone box that I would be able to type and store documents.  OpenOffice might actually come in handy, even though I have the whole MS Office 2003 suite on my WinXP box.  And as I understand it, Linux boxes work great as web servers in conjunction with Apache and MySQL.  So I suppose I'll set up a physical Linux box as an intranet server or something along those lines.  I haven't decided yet.  I have enough hardware to set up two, maybe three more boxes.  And since it's free, I don't have to worry about any licensing issues.  So, we'll see.  I may set up something, I may not.  I haven't decided yet.

As I experimented with Ubuntu, I discovered Wine which allows you to run some Windows programs under Linux.  The major drawback of this is that it's not perfect.  A lot of programs still don't run on it.  One of my major problems with it is that it doesn't support GameTap.  I was able to get Furcadia to run though.  I'm going to have to do a lot of testing with all of my other games to see what runs and what doesn't run under Linux.  GameTap is a major thing for me because I use it a lot and they've been putting a lot of awesome games on there lately.  The value of GameTap has been going through the roof, and the cost hasn't increased at all.  It's basically around $1 per game now.  I don't want to switch to Linux and lose something major like that.  So, a lot of testing is going to have to go into this so I can see if dumping Windows is actually going to be worth it.  So far, the answer is a resounding no, but more testing is needed. 

As of right now, I'm still running Windows XP.  I'm not going to think about touching Vista until after SP1 comes out, and even then I'm still probably going to avoid it like the plague.  I like getting things for free, and Linux may just be one of those things.  But that is a "wait and see" situation.

Laterz.

Ranting now.  Scroll down to read about the things I bought at GameStop.

I'm not going to name any names, but if you happen to know the person I'm talking about, then you know what all I've been going through.

I had this friend, he lives somewhere in Canada.  He's got Asperger Syndrome, which is sort of a form of autism so he's got some problems dealing with people on a social level.  And to top it all off, he was abused as a kid, but there's not much he can do since Social Services in his area is pretty much non-existant.  So right off the bat, he's not in good shape.  But I put all that aside and made true attempts to be this guy's friend, because frankly, no one else gave him as much patience as I gave him, and for good reason.  He has a mindset of everything being in black and white.  It's either his way or you hate him, there is no in between.  He demands that, if you don't agree with him, you must suffer in some way.  I've tried every possible way to get him out of this mindset, but it has become completely futile.  He will go into IRC chatrooms or talk to people on MSN and voice his opinion to someone.  A decent start, right?  Well, his opinion is usually 180 degrees from popular opinion, usually dealing with how capitalism is a horrible thing, higher education is useless, and anyone who has more money than him is an evil person.  When someone disagrees with him, he gets into heated arguments in which he quickly accuses the person of making personal attacks against him out of hate because he's a Canadian or he has AS or something else entirely.  To him, it has nothing to do with the fact that his arguments might, in fact, be wrong.  And then he wonders why people get mad at him, why they ban him from IRC chats, and why people block him on IM's.  He's dealt with people who do get completely irrational when he makes them lose their tempers.  But the fact is, and one that he refuses to see, is that he's the one starting all of this.  And then he comes to me, asking me to fight these people for him because he can't understand why they're mad at him.  Now, before going into a flame war, I want to see logs.  I want to see how it started, who made the first shot, etc.  And so he'll send me these logs.  And they're just full of damning evidence against him.  I try to point that out to him, I try to show him that he keeps going in the same patterns over and over again.  He keeps dealing with the same people he's already pissed off, and keeps dealing with them in the exact same way.  Before this weekend, he was listening to me.  He would look at the logs and I would point out his mistake.  A child could point out his mistakes.  But then he gets mad at me because I won't fight his battles for him.  I won't fight a flame war when he's the one who started the whole thing and it's obvious that he's wrong.  So now, it happened again.  And again I reminded him of these patterns and how he keeps dealing with the same people over and over again and that I'm not going to fight a losing battle for him.  So he gets mad at me.  He denies that I've ever pointed out where he's been wrong in the past, and calls me a liar for saying that he's been wrong, and proving that he is wrong with his own logs, where only he thinks he's right when he's obviously wrong... painfully obvious.  So I've had enough of it.  I've been dealing with this for a very long time and I just don't need it anymore.  I just can't talk to him anymore, not after he's called me a liar for all the wrong reasons.  Am I a bad person for having done that?  I mean, if you'd seen the logs I'm talking about, you'd be able to point out where he's the one acting like an ass.  But I'm the liar?  I'm the one being mean?  I don't need this right now.  I have far too much going on in my life right now to keep dealing with someone else's self-imposed drama.  The really sad thing is, I'm probably the only friend that guy had.  So, he wants to push me away?  Fine.  I'm gone.  And that's all that's left to say about it.

So anyway, I decided to go spend some money this weekend, before all the crap happened.  I picked up some hardware for my Wii and some games.

I got the Classic Controller for my Wii.  I've been needing this.  Do you know how hard it is to play Super Mario World with the GameCube controller?  It's near impossible.  So now that I've finally gotten my grubby paws on the Classic Controller, playing these NES and SNES games is a breeze.  And with the way the Wii saves the state of NES and SNES games, I can just pick up where I left off.  No resetting my score, no resetting my extra lives.  It's nice.  I also grabbed hold of Super Mario Bros. 2 on the Virtual Console.  Ah, reliving my childhood feels so nice.  Anyway, the Classic Controller will also control the cursor when you're on the channels screen, which is nice in itself.

I also got a cooling unit for my Wii.  It's a modified Wii stand with a fan underneath to suck in cool air and push the air into the Wii's own intake vent.  It's made of clear plastic and has an LED in it that makes the whole thing turn blue when you turn it on.  It doesn't cool as much as it should, but every little bit helps.  And it looks cool.

And the final bit of hardware for my Wii is a rechargable battery pack for the Remote.  It fits right into the Remote, and has a faceplate similar to the original plate.  The whole remote fits onto a stand that's powered by a USB connector.  There's also a place to store the Nunchuk.  That's cool.

Yep, my Wii is all pimped out now.

I picked up the Starcraft collection.  It was on sale.  Now I don't have to borrow my brother's CD's anymore.  Now I have my own.  Do I need to talk about Starcraft?  No.  But I'm playing through it in anticipation of Starcraft II.

I grabbed God of War II, but I haven't played it yet.  I will, soon enough.

I also snagged The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion expansion pack The Shivering Isles.  Now this is what I'm talking about!  This is how an expansion pack is supposed to look.  There's a whole new world to explore, including a new and complete world map, new weapons, new alchemy ingredients, new monsters, and even some new spells and effects.  If you've looked into it, The Shivering Isles is Sheogorath's world.  Sheogorath is, if you don't already know, the mad daedra.  The land and the people of The Shivering Isles are just as mad as the daedra himself.  So far, it seems that there's some kind of apocalypse coming to the isles and it's up to you to put a stop to it.  Along the way, you meet all kinds of colorful characters, and even speak (often) with Sheogorath himself.  I haven't gotten there yet, but apparantly there's a whole section dedicated to skooma addicts.  This should be fun.  A definite must-have if you have Oblivion.

My roommate got himself a new video card for his computer.  But when I installed the card, nothing came up.  What was even wierder was that the computer didn't even beep when it started.  And you know what that means?  Bad motherboard.  Yep.  Luckily enough though, the motherboard has a 12 month manufacturer warranty so he'll be able to get it replaced.

And that got me to thinking, I need to clean out my computer.  So I pulled the blue monster up out of the little cubby space I had it sitting in and popped it open.  All the vents were full of, you guessed it, cat hair.  So I cleaned all that out.  My roommate commented that I could probably make a whole 'nother cat with all that hair.  So I figured it's time to rearrange my desk.  So I cleaned off my desk and put my computer up behind my monitor.  It's a flat screen so it all fits.  So now I have my computer up on my desk so that it gets better ventilation, and hopefully it won't get so much cat hair in it now.

Yeah, that's it for now.