Thanks to a lot of amazing friends, I had an unforgettable birthday. How awesome was it? It started at 5pm Friday evening when the first guests arrived and ended just minutes ago, at 3am Saturday morning.
Longer post to follow. For now, bed.
Happy anniversary to me!! No. Not "Denis me"; "One Terrific Day me"! My blog turns 300 with this post.
Three hundred posts. Wow. I never thought I'd do it. And in a fraction over four years as well. Not bad. It's nice to think I stuck with this thing, and continue to do so. I've had a good time, and had a lot of readers. My Google Analytics stats tell me that there are loads of people all over the world stumbling into my little piece of the world wide web. Here are some interesting facts from Google about my blog:
Tweet.
@quaidrayn now exists on Twitter. You can choose to follow me, but really, I can't imagine I'll be updating often. It was really just to follow what Claire is saying about me behind my back. I've posted three times already, but that may well be it for the year.
Speaking of Claire, my wonderful wife is, as some of you know, a writer of large chunks of text without drawings to illustrate the physical action. I think they still call them novels. She has had a blog about writing and all sorts of things that interest her for some time now, but only recently decided to open it to anyone to read.
Taleweaving is a much more cerebral that my effort at contributing toward the unified intelligence of the internet. Her breath of knowledge and interests in topics that include politics and technology are clear in her writings, far flung from my bashing at the keyboard about video games and comic book characters.
Most of you may not recognize the name, but I'd take a fair guess that if you spend a resonable amount of time surfing the information super highway, you've heard his voice by now. Eduard is the man responsible for this music video, from way back in 1976!
I learned about this through following the exploits of geek superstar Wil Wheaton, who enjoyed performing a reenactment of the video onstage in front of PAX East with fellow geeks Paul and Storm.The homage was funny, but the original was hilarious. I don't mean to suggest I'm laughing at Eduard. He has a stunning vocal range, but, after 34 years the video has an old-world quirkiness to it that seems to make everyone that sees it smile.
But the story continues. Eduard has now put forward a challenge to the Internet! He asks everyone watching to... well, just see:
Now before I get complaints, I know the subtitles claim the recording was from 1966, not '76, but Wikipedia says '76, and I've seen that in a few other places as well related to the video. Besides, it looks like something from the 70's anyway.
So will you be joining him? Will any of my readers take up the challenge and write lyrics to the tune? Even just a verse? I think it would be hilarious to be part of this. It's the newest internet meme, fast becoming as widespread as Rickrolling. Be a part of history.
Claire was on a serious cleaning buzz this morning and we spent a good deal of the day tidying the spare room, throwing out a bag or two of waste paper, as well as sorting out a bunch of stuff that just needs to be gotten rid of, preferably for a small monetary exchange. I have boxes of comics that I don't need, mostly random single issues or stories I didn't like. We both have more books than we need. Most of the DVDs in my substantial collection are just gathering dust thanks to living in the 21st Century, and the joy of a broadband connection. Incredible!
But after hoovering the house, we were done and dusted by half three. I sat back, flicked on the Xbox and started shifting about in the menus. My 360 has been networked to my PC for years now. It's how I watch a lot of my media, on our projector screen through the Xbox rather than on the relatively tiny PC monitor. Enormous!
But today I clicked into the Music tab on the dashboard. I expected it to be empty. I have a lot of media shared to the Video tab, but I don't remember sharing any music. Instead, I found my entire collection there, as well as any Playlists I had set from the PC. This probably comes as no surprise to the majority of you, but it was a shock to me. I could suddenly play what little amount of music I do have on my PC through my 5.1 surround sound speakers. Amazing!
After spending a stupid length of time playing with the visualizer (like, more than one song!) I decided to test firing up a game to see what happens. As soon as the game started to load, the music cut out. Ah well. Fair eno- But wait! The music came back! And when I tried to load from the menu into the game, the music stopped again, but came back once the level had loaded! Fantastic!
Suddenly, much to my delight and Claires amusement, I was playing Splinter Cell: Conviction with Hanson providing the soundtrack. I was killing terrorist scum to the tune of "Penny and Me". I think the most appropriate song to pop up on the playlist while I ran a level has to be a toss-up between Chesney Hawks "I Am The One And Only" and Foo Fighters "DOA". Surreal!
Even after owning an Xbox 360 for over three years, it still manages to surprise me. Penis!
io9, one of the sci-fi heavy news feeds on my Google Reader feed, posted a wonderful chart on the evolution of Cyborgs in cinema and TV, created by Online Schools. As an extra cool feature, they provided the HTML code to embed the chart in your own site, so I have.
I'm a big fan of the small screen Terminator series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The main friendly Terminator in that show, Cameron, was very cool. Thanks to Summer Glaus training, the killer cyborg had a wonderful weight to her movements, while still looking like a young, agile female. Such a pity it got canned before things were wrapped up. John Henry was a joy to watch as well as the once evil, now under "rehabilitation" Terminator. Even the parts that really shouldn't have worked worked really, really well, like, for example, casting the lead singer from Garbage, Shirley Manson, as the sinister head of a major computer company clearly interested in the future development of Skynet.
Other than the Terminator franchise, there are lots of other cool cyborgs on the list, from the Borg, the Cybermen and the Cylons facing off against the heroic figures of Robocop, Steve Austin and Tony Stark.
With that kind of power on both sides, I wonder who'd win in a fight between the good cyborgs and the bad? On one hand, humanity is defended by Iron Man. On the other, we also have Inspector Gadget on our side.
We're doomed.
As I start this, it's 14:27 on May 1st, according to my PCs clock. I relaxing in our apartment, watching Mythbusters and enjoying tea. Adam and Jamie are testing pain tolerance in varying groups, including males versus females, and red heads versus, well, everyone else, while Kari, Grant and Tori are blowing propane tanks sky high.
And despite all this brain candy, I am finding myself reading over a few old posts here on the old blog. And while doing so, I suddenly realised that it was around this time of the year, way back in the halcyon days of 2006, that I started this endeavor.
Sure enough, on May 2nd, 2006, I posted my first blog, "What's in a name?" I never thought that I'd still be posting four years later! At the time, it was just something to do. Another hobby to add to my day. I always liked writing, and blogging allowed me to write anything I wanted to. I could jump from factual posts about my day, through movie and comic reviews, onto thoughts on world events, right through to fiction and short stories.
To commemorate four years of blogging, I'm going to try to blog as often as possible for the month of May. I'd love to commit to a post a day, but I'm not promising anything. I have a busy month ahead of me, as we get towards the last few weeks of school, but I'll do my best to inform and entertain. Besides, I have loads more to write about for Splinter Cell, as well as a Nutshell Review for Iron Man 2. That's... well... two more posts anyway.
An open letter to Ubisoft, re: Splinter Cell: Conviction Co-Op Story Ending
Fuck you, Ubisoft. That was uncalled for. Awesome? Yes. Amazing? Yes. Fun? Yes. The perfect ending? Totally.
Still doesn't make me feel any different towards you lot for pulling that shit.
Fuck you very much,
Sincerely yours,
Denis.
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