Yay for Rock Band

November 21st, 2007 • chatter

BOO for stupid lock ups. I just got Rock Band yesterday like I’m sure hundreds of thousands of other people did. However, I can’t play drums for more than a song or two before the game locks up and I have to hard reset my 360. I know it’s not a cooling problem because the back of my 360 is completely open for airflow. I’m getting quite annoyed with this now. This is the highest amount of lock ups I’ve had since I’ve had my 360, all games combined, and I’ve had it for practically the entire time it’s been out.

Add this to the instrument failures a bunch of other people are having and this looks pretty bad given the game has now been out for roughly 32 hours…and there was already a patch pushed out over XBL for guitar issues.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 James Westfall

Man I’m so addicted

November 17th, 2007 • 1 comment chatter

To Call of Duty 4. Having played the first 4 (#2 had an expansion pack) games, I was almost hesitant to get the latest installment mainly because I’ve really stopped getting on my PC late at night since I already have enough trouble sleeping. Well, this game certainly isn’t helping that. The addition of the XP/unlocks and perk system really added a new level of fun to the game. On my local IRC server, I’m doing well at handing out ass whoopings but when I go on public servers, I get my own medicine served up right and left .

Next week I get my review at work — 3 months after it was due — and I’m not as worried as I was last time. I know what it’s going to say about my “brashness” or what have you, I’m just worried about the fact that Jess and I may not be alloted the same amount of vacation hours so it’s going to make taking any vacation difficult. I hate the fact that we work on a tiered system that’s mostly based on how well your coworkers like you and not on how well you do your job or on how well you know how to do your job. I’m pretty much guaranteed to stay at my current tier since people think I’m a jackass overall not knowing that I’m just a very curt person in real life. I just don’t like small talk or pandering to people and I really hate when I have to do it at work. But what bugs me the most is the general disregard for policy and procedure. When people break policy to bother me with something, which is usually a few times a day, I just get pissed because it’s like no one cares about the rules we’re supposed to follow. But when I stop following policy, I get in trouble, typically enough to ruin the rest of my day.

Oh well, I’m trying to get over the fact that no one cares about the policies but if you’re going to have them why not make people follow them to the letter? I just don’t get it at all. It’s like fighting the war on apathy.

So Horrorfest’s over for us

November 11th, 2007 • chatter, movies
Tags: horrorfest, movies

And today wasn’t a total disappointment. We saw the last two movies we had on the list: Tooth & NailNightmare Man. Boy, was Tooth & Nail a let down. It had a somewhat star-laden of Robert Carradine, Michael Madsen, Vinny Jones, and Rider Strong (who died, again). It was a post apocalyptic movie set in Philadelphia and there are two kinds of people: foragers and rovers. Rovers are cannibals — and looked like any actor from a medieval movie — and foragers who were everyone else. It was 94 minutes of slow moving story and very little interest in the characters. all of whom except one had no back story. The only character with a back story was Neon (all the foragers are named after car models) and even then, hers was not terribly interesting. I want my $9.25 back for the movie.

Nightmare Man was, much to our surprise, the campy cheesy horror movie that I thought was missing from the line-up (Horrorfest 2006 didn’t have any) and it delivered on all levels. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, start to finish. It was very campy and cheesy and even had Tiffany Shepis of Troma fame as a somewhat major role in the movie. I’ll be buying this on DVD because it was that enjoyable. The story is a possession/revenge story that has a good twist at the end (and a cameo from Richard Moll!).

Top 3 favorite movies:

Borderland

Nightmare Man

Mulberry Street

Last day of Horrorfest

November 11th, 2007 • chatter
Tags: horrorfest, movies

Today is our last day of movies for Horrorfest and we’re only seeing two movies: Nightmare Man and Tooth & Nails.

We saw Mulberry Street and Lake Dead. The latter was just a boring incest/slasher flick that I’ve seen before and it was MUCH better the last time I saw it, and it was called Blood Ranch (yes a different movie). Lake Dead was a nice attempt but frankly was very predictable and boring. Mulberry Street was the night favorite for both of us. It was a virus outbreak/infection movie with a psycho twist. The story wasn’t very thcik but given that the movie takes place over 2 days, there’s not a lot of time for plot development and deep character interaction. It was a more sci-fi movie than a real horror movie but it was much better than the other two we saw.

Mulberry Street did everything right for me from the homemade/hi-8 look down to the bad camera angles and a good twist on the outbreak genre. A number of people in the theatre said they didn’t like the movie and wanted a refund but these are the same people that walked in 45 minutes after the movie started and missed the entire set up. These same people walked right out and walked into IMAX Transformers and walked right out because they’re looking for movies they don’t want to pay for.

I’m looking forward to the last two movies and this year we’ll have seen 7 of the 8, with Unearthed being the only one we haven’t seen. That’s better than last year when we only saw 4 of the original 8 movies.

Can’t wait till we go to the theatre in an hour or so.

just saw Crazy Eights

November 10th, 2007 • chatter
Tags: horrorfest, movies

3 movies down, 5 more to go. Crazy Eights is one of the psychological terror movies at Horrorfest and it was a let down. 85 or so minutes of Traci Lords shouldn’t be this boring!

Given the budget of this movie, I think they spent most of it on their cast and not on competent writers who can write a “ghost gets revenge” movie without a ton of plot holes or ended up leaving most of the important parts on the director’s cut.

Next up is Lake Dead, starts in 7 minutes!

Horrorfest, day 1

November 10th, 2007 • 1 comment chatter, movies
Tags: horror, horrorfest

We trudged up to West Palm Beach today for the first day of Horrorfest, the second annual weekend of horror movies “too scary to show in theaters”. We’d planned to see three movies: Unearthed, Deaths of Ian Stone, and Borderland. Unfortunately due to traffic, we missed Unearthed (the one I was really looking forward to). We walked right in as the lights were dimming for Deaths of Ian Stone which was kind of like Groundhog Day meets the Boogeyman. Ian Stone lives his current life one day at a time until his friends — really brood mates — come to kill him. See, Ian isn’t a human, he’s a “harvester” who feeds off the fear of humans. The movie starts out with utterly horrible camera work, enough to start churning my stomach, something that really hasn’t happened since g-force tests at Space Camp when I was 12. It got better about 15 minutes in thankfully, it was god awful. Almost as if they didn’t rent a steadycam on the first few scenes of the film. It turned into love-ghost-story but was well done overall, we both enjoyed it.

After that was the gory Borderland about a Santeria cult trying to relink Santeria with some ancient African practices to raise a demon. It’s got enough good stuff to make up for a fairly thin story, by “stuff” I mean dismembered limbs and assorted lopped off animal parts. I commented, more than once, that Sean Astin looked like he hadn’t showered since he left the shire years ago, he just grew facial hair in the meantime. See the movie and you’ll know what I mean. I loved this movie because it really fulfilled what I look for in a basic, dirty horror movie: animals and people dying, typically through losing body parts. It was awesome when “Papa” severed Rider Strong’s achilles tendon with a rusty machete and then bit out his tongue. Lots of blood and gore, thumbs up from me — not so much from Jess.

Tomorrow and Sunday bring 6 more movies and more money on gas. Hey, it’s only one time a year right?

Woohooooo we’re going to Horro…

November 9th, 2007 • tweets

Woohooooo we’re going to Horrorfest now!

WOOT! New hookah soon!

November 7th, 2007 • chatter, hookah
Tags: hookah

Well, my birthday hookah is nearly here. It’ll arrive around 6PM today from UPS and I’m so anxious. It’s a 39″ Khalil Mamoon and I can’t wait to take pictures!#$ I’ll be breaking this in with a nice white peach/regular peach shisha mix and a nice cold water base.

I’M EAGER, CAN YOU TELL?!!

What a lazy Sunday

November 4th, 2007 • chatter
Tags: boredom, hookah

Jess is still gone, which sucks in its own right, and I’m utterly bored today. After my failed attempt at cooking some turkey sausage, I decided to see if we could still purchase VIP tickets for Horrorfest only to find out that we can’t. Today’s not going so well already so I really need to find something that’ll turn out well.

I did manage to pick up some French Vanilla shisha last night and I’m anxious to taste that! The new Khalil Mamoon hookah should be here Tuesday by my best guess and this is my (good) birthday present from Jess since the last one was pretty gaudy and ugly and not at all what she thought she was ordering. It was supposed to be a large, mostly copper and brass, hookah with extruded Egyptian glyphs on the base as decoration. Instead, what we got was this ugly blackened copper flower-covered hookah. Now I’m getting a very very nice KM with a green base that sits over 36″ tall. I could really use that hookah now to occupy my time.

Just installed Flock (again)

November 3rd, 2007 • blog, chatter

So let’s see if their blog editor works better than it used to.

Tags: flock