Your Odama-ma

Another word about the Gamecube video game Odama, which I'm currently playing now: this game is so friggin' hard. It's making my life a living hell right now.

As I mentioned earlier, Odama is a quirky new game that mixes pinball and battlefield strategy. The appeal of this game is that you get to mow down trees, buildings, and enemy soldiers with your giant Odama ball. Conceptually, it sounds like a lot of fun.

I suppose you could say that I just suck at video games, but to achieve the objectives of each level under the given time limit is really, really hard and frustrating. In a lot of video games, if you keep practicing at the game, eventually you may develop the skill to successfully get through the game. In Odama however, there's a randomness to the pinball side of it which means you simply need to get lucky to advance in the game.

The sun will set on you many, many times.

You also need to be good at multitasking. On one hand, you're batting your pinball around; on the other, you're trying to use the microphone to order you're troops around the battlefield. It can be fun when you do well, but when you're getting nowhere it really sucks. It's taken me a long time to get nowhere in this game. If you saw me play this game, you'd see me screaming "March left! March left!" into my microphone, then throwing down my controller in disgust as my troops march straight ahead.

I hate this game so much. I'm going to have to start looking for cheat codes soon.

Um...yeah. Good luck with that.

Red Eye

During my bout of illness over the past week, I had a case of conjunctivitis in both my eyes. More commonly known as pink eye, this affliction is very common, but it was the first time for me. My doctor told me I actually had red eye instead of pink eye, and it was the worst case he'd seen all year. Yay for me!

So I was looking for a DVD to watch, and my fiance suggests to me, "why don't you watch Red Eye"?

Red Eye? Brilliant!

If you haven't seen it, Red Eye came out last year and is about Rachel McAdams getting drawn into a plot to assassinate some Homeland Security muckity-muck. She plays a hotel desk clerk who gets pressured into switching the Homeland Security guy's hotel room to where the assassins can do their jobs more easily. Cillian Murphy is the bad guy who holds Rachel McAdams' father hostage and coerces her into helping them. This coercion takes place aboard a late night flight, hence the movie's title.


Overall, it was a decent thriller, but it wasn't particularly nail-biting. If you think too hard about parts of the story, the whole thing seems kind of ridiculous. I kept thinking about Cillian Murphy; he played the bad guy in Batman Begins, and he's a bad guy in this movie. He better not play another bad guy for a long time, or he's going to get typecast. Incidentally, he makes a pretty non-threatening villain. In the Batman movie, at least he had the scary mask going for him. In this movie, Rachel McAdams pretty much kicks his ass, stabbing him with a pen, a high heel, and beating him silly with a hockey stick. Pretty sad.

As far as airplane movies go, this one doesn't lead the pack. You know I'm just waiting for Snakes on a Plane! Yeah! Ssssssssssssssssss!

Our Man Bush

Sorry folks, I've been sick for a while. I'm still sick now, so don't get too close.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice this, but there was a news story the other day where Bush defends embattled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by saying, "I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

Decider? Oh, Dubya. There you go again, using those big words to make yourself sound smart.

President. Visionary. Decider.

Bad Ideas

In the spirit of opening presents before you're supposed to, I've been playing with my new digital camera that my fiance got me for my birthday (even though my birthday isn't until May). I'm going to be looking for things to photograph, so everyone better close your curtains and blinds.

Just kidding. Really.

I'm reminded of my days back in school when I was taking a photography class; for every one good idea you have for a project, you probably have a half-dozen stinkers that never made it off the ground.

One of my ideas was to take a series of black & white photos of varioius kinds of roadkill. It would have a lot of visual punch, plus it would make a statment about man's callous inhumanity to our furry friends. The only problem is that the roadkill you typically see in this area (possums, raccoons, etc.) are usually on the always-busy freeways. It's just wasn't very safe for me to stop my car on the freeway and try to get some good shots of dead animals.

See? Bad idea.

Another idea I had was to take a series of photos of different parts of a gutter of one of the major streets going through Oakland. It would start at the more affluent, well-kept neighborhoods and run all the way down to the more seedy, run-down parts on the other side of town. The project would show the contrast between the sparkling clean world of the rich versus the filth and piles of refuse of the not-so-rich.

I did a little research on the street first, and you know what I found in the gutters? Gutter water. That's it. I discovered that all gutters look the same. No story to be found here.

Yep, bad idea.

So once again I have a camera in my hand, so look out. Maybe I'll come up with some better subject matter this time. Warn your pets.

His Boring Ass Life

I'm a big Kevin Smith fan - I eat up anything related to Clerks, and it's really entertaining listening to the man himself speak. Lately I've been reading Kevin Smith's blog My Boring Ass Life, in which he is currently publishing a multi-part true story called "Me and My Shadow". It deals with Jason Mewes' (Jay of the Jay & Silent Bob duo) struggle with drug addiction over many years. It's really gripping stuff, and it rises way above the typical blog fodder of celebrities with botox and guys getting kicked in the nuts. Start here for the beginning of the story - so far he's published seven chapters of the story.

Also, the sequel to one of my favorite movies, Clerks 2, is coming out in August!

New English

There used to be a time when I thought I had a handle on the English language. If a word wasn't in the dictionary, then it technically shouldn't be used. At least that's the rule when you're playing Scrabble: if it's not in the book, then you can't put it on the board. There are slang words, but those are the kind of words you use when you're talking to your homies on the street, not in regular conversation with normal people.

However, our language is constantly evolving, and if people use a made-up word enough, it will eventually work its way into our collective subconscious and become a part of the English language. You know, words like Homer Simpson's "d'oh" or Will Smith's "jiggy". Here are some of my favorite made-up words:

guesstimate: guesstimate is the less accurate cousin to the word estimate. This is your slow, not-so-bright backwoods relative that you don't get to see too often, which is probably for the best. I always wondered why people ask for a guesstimate rather than an estimate. What you are really asking is for someone to pull a number out of their ass.

ginormous: gigantically enormous or enormously gigantic. If gigantic and enormous aren't enough to describe how big something is, then here's the word for you. Wait! I've got a new one: if something is more than yummy and better than delicious, then it's yulicious. You can use this for describing attractive people as well, like "baby, you're yulicious". I just made that up. You heard it here first.

craptacular: I actually like this word - it's fun to use. It simply means spectacularly crappy, as in "Hey man, that song you just sang was craptacular", or "Mmmm..., your pot roast is craptacular". It's fun because if someone is not paying attention, they may think you're paying them a compliment.

rig: A while back I registered with 1up.com to try to win an Xbox 360. On my personalized member page, they asked me to describe my "rig". Rig? What's a rig? Isn't that what they call trucks?I thought it meant your form of transportation. I didn't have a picture of my car, so I inserted a picture of my bike:


I later found out that "rig" means a computer. Duh.

It can also mean a syringe for shooting up. Neat!

Luckily, there are sites like Urban Dictionary to help hopelessly unhip people like me figure out what everyone else is talking about. Word!