Dull Canadian Moment #3784

Aside from writing a comic script and watching Wife play more Persona 3 (she is mighty now. All tremble in her presence) GUM was purchased! And it was legal and everything! And we won’t get charged or fined for having it on our person! I was slightly amazed when I realized that in the months since we’d arrived, I had completely failed to purchase a pack of gum, but now a pack of sugar-free Freedent sits in our home, ready to be chewed and enjoyed with legal sanction from the Canadian government. Wow, what a country…

Also, I got Superman Returns on Blu-Ray today. Whoo hoo. The man of steel in High Def…

Caught On Film

I got a note from the guy I’d hung out with at X ’07 that he’d posted his thoughts on some of the events, and he decided to include some of the footage he shot. To the left is a screen capture from said video with me holding the Fender Strat that will go into both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Rock Band. In addition, however, he managed to catch on film my “Vanna White” impression of showing off the various features of the guitar, as well as some footage of The Hive’s Main Offender being played with me on bass.

This is me showing off the guitar.

This is me not screwing up too much on Main Offender. Bass meter is the far right.

If you want to save this stuff, just right click on the above links and “save as.”

Big thanks to “TrackZero” and the Evil Avatar website for the images.

Oh, and just to keep the Rock Band-mania going, WITNESS THE POWER OF ROCK!

Saturday Is Game Day

Meaning that aside from a teensy bit of shopping it was an RPG day all the way.

What Do You Do When You’re As Boring As I Am?

You write outlines for animated TV show episodes and watch your spouse take a bunch of high school kids and repeatedly shoot themselves in the head to summon demons to fight in a giant supernatural tower that sits atop their school during a “hidden moment” called the Dark Hour that rests between 11:59 and midnight.

Oh well…

I’m A Pretentious Jerk

Because today I slipped in a movie borrowed from the Upstairs Neighbor, I Heart Huckabees, and I laughed. And enjoyed it. Not a ton, not as much as Being John Malkovich, but I still found it cute, enjoyable and somewhat engaging, even if it was running a little shallow on the whole existentialism thing. But then what can you do with an hour and 45 minutes, really?

I’d vaguely heard about the movie, but it was only after being given the DVD that I was told a lot of people had some serious issues with the film. I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t one of them, so I suspect this probably does make me a pretentious jerk. After reading some of the more critical reviews in wake of having just watched the film, I think a lot of people were overthinking this movie, because it wasn’t that complicated. If I had to sum it up, I would say that it’s a little Nietzsche, a little Sartre and a whole lot of Beckett style absurdism that all meets somewhere in the middle of the Nietzsche/Sartre thing, but with laughs. I mean, seeing Donny Wahlberg whack himself in the face with a ball so he can experience Being & Nothingness and enjoy how cool it is was, to me, FUNNY. I laughed at it. I laughed at a lot of stuff in here.

I am a pretentious jerk. I have now made peace with that.

Day Of Errands

Just another quiet, pleasant day in the Annex. Bank stuff was done, groceries were picked up, walks down the street occurred, advice was dispensed about how best to play God of War II (I loaned to the Upstairs Neighbor, he’s no longer getting any work done) and dinner was had in the backyard with all the neighbors to welcome Upstairs Neighbor.

Also, while walking down Bloor, we happened to walk past a used CD/DVD store and saw, brand new, in the window, this:

It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that we would pick it up, since the Wife is a huge fan of Go/dzilla/jira, and at $17 for a brand new DVD of the remastered version I’d heard about, this was impossible to resist. I don’t think I’m going to be seeing this on Blu-Ray anytime in the near future anyway, so bring on the rubber-suited, model busting goodness.

I’m pretty happy with this particular version, since not only did they remaster it–as best they could, considering the deteriorating, surprisingly NOT archived state of the original–they also include the original 1956, bastardized American version with Raymond Burr as a reporter commenting on the carnage, and there is a pretty in depth commentary from some “Godzilla experts” and give a fairly detailed account of not just the production of Godzilla, but the post-war society and mindset of the Japanese that created one of the most famous rubber-suited monsters of all time.

Now to settle in for a busy next few days. The animated series requires some gearing up for writing scripts, the magazine still has one last article owing, there’s the monthly installment of the comic book to crank out, and IGN has suddenly written in to pretty much say yes to ALL the article ideas I’ve thrown at them, so it’s time to get some more game writin’ in.

Damn, when did I get so busy?

But first, more Persona 3.

First Day Of School! And Markham.

It was a 12 year delay compared to my peers, but finally, at long last, I too can be a sore winner. Today was the first day of school, and for once, I was living in a part of the world where this actually meant something, and got to enjoy that quiet, smug satisfaction that comes from knowing I didn’t have to go to school, register, and start worrying about classes. Since I went off to Asia straight after graduating and stayed there for over a decade, I never got this feeling that my friends immediately experienced upon getting their degrees, roughly around the school year of 1996.

Aside from that, a friend of the Wife’s invited us to hang out in his neighborhood, the area known as Markham, which has a 35% population of Chinese and thus, has many, MANY shopping areas catering to Asians, as well as an abundance of those whacky Asian people wandering around. We visited Pacific Mall, apparently the largest Asian-centric shopping mall on the entire continent. To visit it was a weird feeling, not because it was underwhelming, because it wasn’t. Instead, it simply felt familiar. Aside from the fact that I was wearing a jacket, the sights, sounds and most tellingly, the SMELLS of the place felt exactly like being in any shopping mall in Singapore. There were videogame stores that didn’t even have games out, just binders with a selection of games that you picked from, at which point, upon making your selection, they simply gave you a burned DVD of your choice for dirt cheap. Same applies to movies, of course. The fact that this was out in broad daylight, in Canada, of all places, stunned me. But upon thinking about it, they couldn’t really call themselves an Asian shopping center if patrons were expected to buy legitimate copies of games and movies, so I guess this merely adds to the “authenticity” of the shopping experience here. Unsurprisingly, no PS3 or Xbox 360 games were available for purchase, as those systems haven’t been hacked yet and pirate copies are not available, although plenty of Wii/GameCube games as well as PS2 games were on hand.

Once again, obscure food objects were purchased, including, to the Wife’s delight, the much sought after “green tea kit-kat” which she had sampled a couple of years ago in Singapore, and then promptly failed to ever find again as they never imported it back to the island. Here, it was in abundance, which I think pretty much guarantees repeat visits.

It is good to know that while millions of kids across North America are going to bed at a reasonable hour once more, facing the prospect of another year of humiliation, marginalization, social politics of epically stupid proportions and possibly fatal shootouts as result of the previous, I am now well past all that, and will never have to hate a cheerleader in an intimate and personal way again.

Thank God school is over…

Labor Day

Another quiet day, except that I note that this is the first Labor in 11 or 12 years that I am spending in Canada. Weird how all these firsts keep popping up…

Sunday At Home

Not much of note except for some Persona 3, some co-op Guitar Hero 80′s with the neighbor and a talk with the Old Friend.

Right. Back to Persona 3…

Too Much Sushi

Mental note to self:

The next time you go into a Canadian Sushi restaurant and order food, remember that the servings will be sized for North Americans far bigger than you, with much bigger stomachs, and that ordering a whole bunch of food thinking they will be in tiny Singapore portions will lead to a mountain of sushi so huge it will be painful to breathe in the aftermath.

My God, I’m still feeling bloated…