| Jul. 7th, 2008 @ 12:57 pm Relevance; Internet again; the Pandas, they are a kung-fu fighting; and ninjas that flip out. 2! |
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I keep on writing partial entries and unfinished paragraphs of half-formed thoughts and yet never get around to posting anything. My mental discipline and Writer-Fu are weak.
Sometimes I wonder - why write a blog/livejournal at all? I think that it comes down to history - I've had an online presence and a webpage for 12 years, and having no webpage / online presence would be strange and jarring. Yet, most of the things that I used to do online have fallen by the wayside. The old GRIT ended, taking my involvement with it. The Impro fiction sites have mostly died, taking my involvement with them. I have written almost nothing and drawn almost nothing, making my webpage nothing more than an old decaying repository of my stuff from several years ago.
And I won't talk about the email, except to say that I won't talk about it.
About all that is left of my online presence these days is this Livejournal and my WoW/CoH accounts. If they go, well... I don't know what would happen.
Except, perhaps, I do. There have been a couple of recent times where I've barely touched LJ or WoW/CoH. I practically became a hermit. With my various social hangups, it is very very easy for me to be a hermit. Not of the wise/mystical kind of days of yore, but rather more of the hikikomori kind.
No, I haven't stopped being such a hermit. I'm just trying, once again, to get out of my shell.
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And now on to the quick updates on various topics of the (not at all a) spectacle that is the Life of Steven.
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I finally did something about the lack of a decent internet connection at home. Browsing the internet via the Wii was nothing more than a stopgap measure. No keyboard, a not completely functional browser, and using the TV screen instead of a higher-resolution computer monitor became a pain the arse after a while.
So this past weekend I finally got a new router/ADSL2+ wireless/4 port modem (Netgear, and I can't even remember the model number anymore) and got it set up on Saturday morning without too much fuss. I was really worried about how much faffing about would be required to get it working - my Hardware-Fu has really deteriorated. But there was no trouble at all, and now - a stable internet connection! That isn't flaking out every ten seconds or dying completely, like it used to!
This also means I can finally get on WoW and CoH again, after about four months of next to no activity. I foresee that they're going to suck up vast reserves of my time again, at least in the short term.
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I went and saw Kung Fu Panda on the weekend. I was all set to ignore this movie - the last Dreamworks movie I saw was Shrek 3, and that was extremely forgettable. I was sure that Kung Fu Panda was going to be awful as well.
And then the positive reviews started coming in. And I'm a martial arts fan. Plus I had a movie gift card that needed using. So I decided to go see it after all.
You could say that it is essentially a martial arts movie with a fairly typical and cliche-ridden plot. (There I go, being negative again.) You could also say that it rocked and was filled with awesomeness. The voices are well done (without being drowned in celebrity) and the action scenes are great fun, and there are even some moments where they play with convention and expectation really well.
Especially the bit where Po's father says he has a secret to tell Po. Po being a panda, his father being a goose, and the villain being a foundling, you expect to find out that Po is also a foundling and get some dramatic parallelism going. Nope. The secret turns out to be something else entirely.
The movie is full of little things like that, that make you laugh. Such as Po having to imagine that the Maguffin of Power is really a cookie, so that he's motivated enough to dash up a wall to get it. Or the food training, where Shifu discovers how to properly motivate Po in his Kung Fu training, and Po becoming as awesome as he always dreamed of being.
About the only thing that really bugged me about the movie (I didn't really mind the formulaic story) was Shifu's name. Because, if I remember right, Shifu means "master". So they're all calling him "Master Master."
Very big props go to the depiction of little Tai Lung. He was just so adorably cute and eager... which makes his fall so much more wrenching.
And I love what the secret of the Dragon Scroll means for the final showdown between Po and Tai Lung.
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I finally finished Ninja Gaiden 2. Overall impression, great fun, but not quite as great as the first game.
5 bosses in quick succession at the end of the game? Yeargh. Mind you, I didn't mind the Genshin fight or the Archfiend fights all that much, once I learnt the fights. Elizebet and Draga Dai can go die in a fire though.
Overall, I like the game. There were just all these bits when playing it when I was swearing like a sailor at how ridiculous the game was getting. Soldiers with cluster rocket launchers? At opposite ends of a tunnel? OW
One of my favourite bits is the cutscene in chapter 11 where Muramasa shows up and shows off his l33t sword skillz. Not bad for an old man pushing 100.
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It's thoroughly belated, but happy 4th of July to all the USAians reading this, commiserations on the 'holy crap we just lost our American Colony' day to the UKians, and happy "it's just another Friday" to everybody else. |
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