Star Drifter

This forum looks gorgeous on my phone. As of late, mobile browsing has been getting more important to me too. Thank you.

I actually have City of Doors queued up to listen to as soon as I finish with this 300 hours of audiobooks. (Only about 110 more to go!) I've found that in the right dosage, podcasts and audiobooks can turn a slow work day into a swifter and more relaxing work day. City of Doors will be the first roleplaying podcast I listen to, but I'm a fan of the Escape Artists casts (Podcastle, Pseudopod, Escape Pod) and the Secret World Chronicle -- all fiction podcasts.

I wound up getting my own Wii for father's day. Aryanun knew I wanted to play, but our oldest son took over the one in the living room. I love how pretty the high-def systems are, but I also had an Atari back in 1982. The Wii was something fun and different, and at that time the only PS2 games I still played were DDR. So I love the getting up and moving aspect. I'm Internet connected, but don't really play a lot of games online with it. Without the online games, it's pretty much just a colorful email system.

For what it's worth in the "buying music" arena, almost everyone except Apple has gotten rid of the DRM. I buy at Napster, and Emusic regularly, and sporadicly through Amazon. I also love Windows Media Player for synching up to my mp3 player. I don't know so much about playing media, but it is extremely pleasant as far as organizing libraries -- especially across different drives or folders. Winamp is still great for playing media. The plugins and everything-at-your-fingertips interface are really nice. Audiograbber is a fairly good mp3 ripping program, but I like that WMP will also get the album art. To go free or open source, however, you will probably need a handful of applications to replace the one, which already came free with your computer. Egads. Free and open source video editing software is painful. Almost without fail. That's just on a Windows machine. My one dive into doing it on Linux was a days-long nightmare that led to all kinds of other horrors. I would almost suggest to find some new, inexpensive hardware - such as a capture card or a dvd burner - that will come with dvd authoring tools included. DVD burners tend to come with OEM copies of either Nero or Cyberlink software. It will be less expensive than buying the nicer software on its own, gain you some hardware on top of that, and save a lot of time & frustration. That's not to say the tools aren't out there -- but "free" stops being so free after spending hours trouble-shooting sensitive software.

It's a chance to have fun. There really is one of those squeezed in between all the time spent shopping and playing nice for relatives you don't really care about. I do enjoy surprising my wife and kids with fun Christmas gifts. I'll usually do a "light" start in October/November if I know someone is interested in something (usually the kids). Then I do most of the rest online where I can be generous, frugal and anti-social. The jack-o-lanterns hanging from the Christmas tree do offend me. I can't believe they would do that to Halloween. But just the same, I like spreading the purchases out over as many paychecks as possible.

If I ever have any really strange requests then I send it in an email with a web link. This tends to be necessary even more lately, considering my new hobbies.

Sometimes you can blow up an image like this to get small detail. Unfortunately, FailBlog has to add even more JPEG artifacts to an image which may already be an Nth generation resized copy of someone else's work just so they can put their watermark on it.

While my wife and her mother fussed over the decorations downstairs, my son and I put up our Superhero tree again. This started 3 years ago when we were due to move on New Year's Eve. My wife and her mom didn't want to go through the hassle of having to pack their tree and all its ornaments back up, but I wanted my son to have a tree. I got a cheap 3 foot tree with the fiber optic lights, and hung superheroes from it. And since it's mostly Marvel, I put a normal-sized Archangel action figure in a red frilly dress on top of it.

We have George Romero to give us both.

I got one of the 2 Disk versions of Rock & Rule directly from Unearthed when the dvd was released, complete with hand-numbered goodies. It's one of my prize possessions. My first avatar on this forum was even a picture of Mok. Considering my wife rolls her eyes at almost every movie I love, except our shared love of late 70s/early 80s animated fantasies, almost all of the movies I like are guilty pleasures.

I hope so too! Been going through that a lot with my oldest just starting school. I hope he gets well soon, and I'm very sorry you won't be making it.

It got up to 90 today in Austin. I wore shorts to work and was still warm.

I've had nice results making bruises out of eye shadow. It comes in a surprising number of colors that turn putrid when you blend them together, and is more accessible in non-standard colors.

I grew up in Wyandotte, so I guess it depends. Once you get far enough north to where the snooty people are, or west to where it turns into farm country then I guess it isn't so bad. But it's also a place where the cops told my dad "it's not my job" to help when someone shot at our car. Overall, you have to agree. When the cops on I-75 are flying past the "Speed Limit 55" sign at 80 MPH along with everyone else so they can get out of danger ASAP, the place is a ghetto.

I think so many of us are either parents or accident prone that this is no longer a mysterious incident, but a variation of a common occurrence.

Thanks! I'm downloading it now. I made a balloon hat and sword, and have been harassing my own family all morning. There's even a little white Jolly Roger on the hat.

Congrats! And happy birthday!

My hobbies aren't cheap, but I remind my wife regularly: "I could always just watch football instead." As long as the bills are paid, the wife is very happy.

Ugh. The character customization reminds me too much of furcadia - down to paying money for details no one but the most hardcore will notice. And the game play is some mix between WoW and Daggerfall. I'm on Khyber too, and may try to join if anyone ever asks. But I'm not feeling this game yet.

I'm downloading it right now. Will try to be on later tonight.

I was mixed on the D&D movie. A lot of it was outrageously bad, but so are most D&D games. (That's why we love it!) In light of other movies, at least it was a fun letdown with lots of pretty eye candy. I can't even begin putting it near MOST disappointing.

Entering Denton, TX didn't work for me. Entering Lewisville, TX did! Thanks for the tip. (Edit to say, now it's time to make a shopping list. My son wants a new mini for when we play D&D -- this time of a human male archer. And I'm sure my wife will want me to pick a few things up.) (Edit again: The zip code on the web site currently says 26210, which is actually Adrian, West Virginia. )

Batman Begins. Batman needed some Halls or Chloraseptic. Badly. I'm not too happy about this new trend of Superheroes being a bunch of sniveling crybabies either. Signs. How a technologically advanced race of killer aliens can be so absolutely stupid is beyond me. I can only hope that Earth was being used as capital punishment for their worst criminal offenders. Diary of the Dead. George Romero is a brilliant and wonderful human being. Yet the only character anyone cared about was Samuel, who was much under-used. I've been disappointed by many a movie, but these come to mind first.

Umm.... such as getting bought out by Hasbro? A Marvel/Hasbro collaboration has occurred int he past with some notable success.