Goodbye 2007

Around this same time last year, I was just about smack dab on the equator, sitting in a hot apartment, cataloging DVDs and games and putting them into boxes for an imminent move to the other side of the planet. Out of all the months in 2007, only January was a low point and that’s only because it was still spent in Singapore.

I don’t foresee the same problem this year.

Happy New Year, all. Hopefully the rest of 2008 will be as good as 2007 was from February onwards.

Sunday Of Drumming

This is going a LOT slower than it did with the guitar. Either that or else I’m simply too used to being familiar with the more rapid progression of guitar playing. Regardless, current progress has ground to a halt on drums on Hard. I’ve resorted to going back and 5-starring everything I missed on Easy and Medium, and finding that 5-starring things on Medium is Incredibly Difficult when your foot and hand still refuse to operate independently of each other.

Holiday Slowness Continues

I expect that at some point once the New Year arrives I’ll finally do something other than play Rock Band…

Friday Is Errand Day

Aside from a few of the usual tasks around the neighborhood, not much goin’ on outside the world of playing in a Plastic Band.

Christmas Tally

It was a much quieter more laid back Christmas in terms of loot since, for obvious the reasons, the one thing I really, really, REALLY wanted this year was already picked up during American Thanksgiving and has been played religiously since then. However, some other stuff has been picked up along the way. The Wife is now the proud recipient of a piece of her childhood in the form of this:

Since she’d grown up as a kid watching this, it’s a precious piece of her childhood, and now she can watch it in the comfort of her own home, commercial free and enjoying the Deep Dark Shame where no one can see.

I have to admit I was quite surprised when, upon viewing some of the episodes I saw the name Paul Dini (he created Batman: The Animated Series amongst other Warner Brothers modern animation classics). I had no idea he had actually been involved in the series, but upon watching the episodes he wrote, it was pretty obvious that even at that early stage, he was already showing a flair for half-hour animated episodes since his episodes, in some incredible way that I still can’t believe, actually evince something of plot and characterization. That’s not to say that he wrote Emmy worthy episodes of He-Man, but compared to the quality of the more usual staple in the series, he did actually manage to create genuine moments of story here and there in the episodes he wrote. I guess when you’ve got it, it’ll always shine through in some way, shape or form, regardless of limitations.

This is the other thing, and man are we ever happy with it. I’d been hearing for ages and yonks about this “totally freakin’ amazing nature documentary with the British guy” that was supposed to have had some of the most startling footage ever put to film. After watching this, I can totally believe it. When you hear some of the stories that the camera crew went through (like waiting around on a Norwegian polar reserve for four months just waiting for ONE shot of a Polar Bear coming out of hibernation and crawling out of its hole) you immediately begin to appreciate just how much work went into this series. Despite the fact that nearly every shot looks like a high budget CG rendering from Lord of the Rings or Walking with Dinosaurs, aside from some tricks with time lapse photography, every shot is the real thing. Which I find somewhat disturbing because even when I know it’s real, I still sometimes find myself thinking “That shot of the shark looked more realistic in Chased By Dinosaurs.”

Boxing Day At Home

Yup, we totally avoided the sales on Boxing Day and instead spent the time doing… more of the same. Rock Band has become the new vortex of suckage for all spare time.

Merry Christmas

First Christmas in Canada for the Wife, meaning that it is the first White Christmas of her entire life. And how do we spend it? Spending time together doing the Endless Setlist AGAIN on Rock Band. Why? Because we can.

Yup. Life is officially good. Merry Christmas to the rest of you.

Sunday For Singing

The Wife continues to mess with singing and consequently upping her career score.

Weekend Of Rock

Yup, getting pretty predictable, ain’t it?

Experiments In Tug of War

For the first time today, we dipped into the “duel aspect” Rock Band. There’s a mode called “Tug of War” which caught us by pleasant surprise. For one thing, it allows both competitors to choose their difficulty level, which seems fair. For another, it actually works almost like a “sing off” in that a meter appears on the left, and as the song begins, vocalists trade phrases, handing each other off in turn, but both singing during the chorus. Depending on the performance, a cursor, sitting in the middle of the meter, gravitates towards whoever is doing the better singing. Whichever singer said cursor is closer to at the end of the song is considered the winner.

Finding vocalists to sing with is pretty hard since it’s not a very popular choice among Rock Band players, with many folks buying it for the drums and the guitars and having an almost phobic reaction to the thought of a microphone stuck near their mouth. We ended up playing with one of the “usual crowd” that the Wife has been befriending online since she started playing, and it was kind of a slaughter, since the other person was an admitted non-enthusiast of the singing portion, and mostly did it out as favor to test out the mode.