CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Monday, January 03, 2011

this entry brought to you by queens of the stone age, "battery acid"


THE GOOD

Wii Sports I'm aware that everyone else on the planet has a Wii. I'm aware that I actually really, really care about video games, play them often, and yet people's Grandmothers have it and basically think that "Wii" is just that machine that you play bowling on-- a $200 toy. But oddly enough, I hadn't even played a Wii in all that time, not at someone else's house, not in a demo kiosk at a store, nowhere. So while I was initially taken aback at how god-awful Wii Sports' graphics were-- and I mean, I was aware that they were bad, I'd seen screen shots, but seeing it in real life, yech-- I was absolutely enthralled with how fun it was. Playing tennis is fun. Playing baseball, even in as limited a simulation as it is, is fun. Bowling is fun. It made me want to actually go out and, for the first time in my life, buy actual sports games. The games available on Wii Sports are fun, but they are extremely simple, which makes sense-- they're a pack-in game meant to demonstrate what the system is good at, so they're not supposed to be the real thing. But this actually has me itching for something with more depth, and I think I'm going to spend some money on sports for the first time in my life. Of course, no football, because football is overly confusing and boring. But baseball, tennis, and golf? You bet your ass!

A new toaster I'm aware I'm the last person in the world to be amused by Wii Sports, but you should see this fucking toaster we have. It's so awesome. Seriously, though-- have you ever gone a long time without a toaster? It's not that we didn't have one, we did. And we had it since I moved down here nine years ago. And also, it lost the ability to spring the toast up like normal at least two years ago, so when it was ready it just made this horrible buzzing sound, you had to run to the kitchen so the toast wouldn't burn, then press the slide up real quick to bounce the toast up manually, and it would usually slide back down by itself, so you had to try again until you bounced it up high enough that it didn't fall straight down, but instead popped all the way out. The thing is, toasters cost like three dollars, but whenever I'm in Target I'm usually there to buy something specific, and unless I was just wandering around the house department aisle, I never thought about it. Michelle bought one, however, and I'm ceaselessly amused by it. Look! The toast comes up by itself! And it's always evenly toasted! Who'd've thought?

Edamame I'd heard about edamame, and it seemed like a really trendy food-- I kept hearing it in context with hipsterdom or with being spoiled, so I expected them to be expensive, but when I found them for 3 bucks for a bag enough for three or four people to eat, I picked it up. The package said that they can be served hot or cold, so initially I nuked them. The way you eat them is you place the entire pod in your mouth, which is initially disconcerting because it tastes like, well, there's a pea-pod in your mouth, and you suck until the beans inside come out. I disliked them initially; they tasted too green-bean-y to me. I decided to give them another try and buy another package, and this time I ate them frozen, and I loved them. The green-bean-y flavor is replaced by a strong nutty flavor, and the texture is like a frozen chocolate bar.

My Ipod is back I complained last week about not having my Ipod and what a horrible, horrible state of existence that was. That Wednesday it came in the mail, and my god was I glad that it came before the New Year, because it if hadn't come by then, I'd have to wait another weekend before getting to use it. But the good news is that both speakers work! I can listen to music without any care in the world! It is amazing.

XBox 360 Streaming movies to TV One of the features of my Xbox 360 that we've been getting a lot of time with is the ability to stream videos from your computer to your TV. I've always disliked watching movies or television shows in front of the computer, but it's been necessary in order to watch television when I want to see them, as I'm never up when they're airing. When we got the new computer and hooked it up to the Internet the X-Box recognized it immediately and we're able to watch stuff that's sitting on our hard drive on our couch, and again, while this is something I'm sure lots of people have been doing with various boxes for years, it's fucking awesome, I'm getting a kick out of it, and I hope you try it if you have not.


THE BAD

Year-End Music Lists for 2009 When my Ipod lost its ability to play music out of both speakers, I pretty much stopped listening to music. Some people might find that weird, but I find it impossible to appreciate music when it's coming out of one headphone, one, because it's distracting as shit, and two, because of stereo mixes, you're often hearing only half the song. You'll hear drums as if they're being played in another room, no guitar track, and just the backing vocals. That's not a way to appreciate music, so I spent the entirety of last year listening to podcasts exclusively, because people talking out of one speaker is much easier to get used to. This means for the past year I haven't heard any new music, and I was eager to start reading "best ofs" at the end of the year after I sent my Ipod out to be fixed to see what was what. And I was rather surprised at how unexciting it all seems. M.I.A. released a new record and everyone loves it. Kanye West has gotten "Album of the Year" all over the place. Eminem's new album was on lots of lists. There didn't seem to be any surprises. It really left me cold. For all I know, maybe after I've listened to this year's music, I'll be completely out of my mind with excitement. But just looking over it, it seemed so predictable. I dare to say that 2010 was not that great a year for music.

The over-the-top outrage over Michael Vick You know, it's weird. When Michael Vick got arrested for his dog-fighting, I was absolutely positively appalled by the apologists out there. Whoopi Goldberg, I mean, what the fuck. Michael Vick deserved to go to jail, and I was glad that he did. And you know what? I think it's kind of weird that the NFL let him come back. I mean, I'm not offended, and I'm not a football fan so it doesn't effect me, but if I were the head of the NFL, maybe that was a decision I wouldn't make. But with that said, I've heard people-- white people, in case that makes any difference-- saying things like "He should have been executed". Fucking really, white folks? And this puts me in a weird position, having to defend Michael Vick. But the truth is, I don't think Michael Vick is the worst person in the world-- I think we can agree that he's a bad person, but the worst?-- and I do think that he was sentenced fairly, and I think he should have been able to get a job out of prison, if not necessarily a million-dollar football job. But hell, I think all athletes are overpaid, so that almost negates itself.

PC Gaming I was really agonizing over whether I should buy this particular game over New Year's weekend or not. It's only a three-month old game, it's a game I want, and it was only 12 dollars. But it was for the PC, not the X-Box 360. And the thing is, I don't really like playing real games on the PC. I do like playing casual, five minute games on the PC-- little indie shooters or interesting experiments that cost only 5 dollars, but in terms of actually sitting down and gaming, that's what my consoles are for. If the game had been for the Xbox 360, I would've bought it without a second thought. But the idea of buying it for the PC, not having Xbox 360 achievements, and, more than anything, having to sit here at the desk with a mouse and keyboard to play a game just seems so unappealing to me. I ended up not buying it because, as Michelle argued, I would literally never get around to it, because if I'm on the PC I'm browsing the web, and I agreed with her. I would have bought it and, some months down the line, uninstalled it because I needed the room, and then literally never seen it again. Still, it was such a good price.

Dr. Drew Here's the thing. I think that, in his heart, Dr. Drew is a good person. I just think that, with Celebrity Rehab and his reality shows, he has become a monster. And I don't think he necessarily knows it yet. I think that somehow, in ten or fifteen years, when his career has slowed, he'll look back on his life and realize, oh shit. I lost my soul for a good long stretch there.

X-Box 360 and certain MP4s You see how, up above, I talked about how awesome it is to stream from my X-Box to my TV? Well, for some inexplicable reason, it will stream some MP4s, but not others. And this drives me crazy, because I can't find a way to fix it, it's inexplicable, and it means that, dammit, I will have to fucking watch stuff on the computer. Seriously, get used to streaming shit to your TV, then go back to watching it in front of your computer. It's like going from a house with a toaster to a house with a toaster where you have to spring the toast up manually and catch it mid-air.
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with love from CRS @ 3:44 PM 

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