Emptyeye

I’ve decided that, contrary to my previous stance of absolutely despising the New England Patriots–I’m pretty sure there were very few people happier than I was when they choked hardcore in last year’s Super Bowl–I’ve decided I want them to make a 2001-esque miracle run to a Super Bowl victory.

Why my change of heart? Not because I suddenly like the Pats, mind you–I still can’t stand the media love fest for them, and I still think 90% of their fans are worthless bandwagon jumpers who couldn’t name their quarterback at the start of the 2001 season (More on that later). No, I just decided I want the Pats to win so that everyone will love Matt Cassel and go “Tom Brady? What’s a Tom Brady?” like the bandwagon jumpers did with poor Drew Bledsoe (He’s the answer to the little trivia question posed above, by the way) seven years ago. I’m of the opinion that Big Babychick Bill Belichick isn’t the coaching messiah that so many see him as (Look how the Wildcat absolutely confused the heck out of the Pats during the Dolphins game this season. Gimmick plays aren’t supposed to work more than once or twice, but the Dolphins kept running them, and the Pats–led by the supposed defensive genius that is Belichick–bit every single time), but rather just got really freaking lucky that a sixth round chump selection got some playing time thanks to a freak injury and turned out to be one of the best quarterbacks of my generation. I’ll remind everyone once again that after two games of the 2001 season, Bledsoe was out for the year, the Pats were 0-2, and everyone had proclaimed their season D-U-N Done. I’ll also remind everyone that Brady’s record through his first five games was 3-2, the same as Cassel’s record. And yet everyone who follows the Pats, apparently forgetting how their Golden Boy QB came to prominence in the first place, has apparently just given up on this season and are waiting for Brady to come back. Wrong attitude, I say.

Well, no I’m not. Indeed, according to Score Hero’s Rock Band Section, I seem to be only the 350th best (As of this writing) fake cover band singer ever. But really, I’m writing because last night, I score my first “legitimate” 100% on Expert vocals. What does “legitimate” mean? Does it mean I’ve gotten previous 100%s by cheating? Well no, but let me explain. In the original Rock Band, there were two types of phrases–singing phrases, and what have come to be known as “talkies”. The singing phrases are self-explanatory: The game detects your pitch (It doesn’t care about pronunciation) and compares it to the correct pitch, and awards you points accordingly. Talkies are essentially the opposite: The game it looking to see how well you pronounce the words, and doesn’t care what pitch you’re pronouncing them at. You see a lot of these in rap songs, and some of the metal tracks that aren’t “sung” so much as “growled” or “shrieked” or what have you.

Thing was, the talkie pronunciation system was pretty much broken on certain phrases–it became impossible, even on easier difficulties, to figure out just what in the heck kind of diction the game wanted on certain phrases. So for Rock Band 2, Harmonix tried to compensate for this…and went way too far in the other direction, to the point where the talkies no longer care about pitch or pronunciation. As long as you’re doing anything at all with your voice during talkie sections, you’ll get credit for it, even on Expert. This is best illustrated by this video of someone getting a full combo on the Beastie Boys’s “So Whatcha Want”….via reciting the Declaration of Independence. So I had gotten a couple 100%s on songs like this, but last night I actually sang my way to a Full Combo on Nirvana’s “Drain You”. It’s a pretty easy song to sing, but it still felt good to exhibit something resembling actual skill in the game, as opposed to just reciting stuff and getting rewarded for it.

A few “U Fail It!” awards to hand out today.

First, a “U Fail It!” to Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama for insinuating that John McCain would be the Robin to George W. Bush’s Batman…and thereby playing right into McCain’s hands. The implication, as the link says, was that McCain would be another four years of what we as a country have had since 2000. Only problem: As this comic points out (And as anyone who even watched the great Batman: The Animated Series would know, let alone anyone who’s a hardcore comic fan), Robin actually does get mad at Batman pretty frequently–one Robin actually quit entirely and went on to become Nightwing. Whoops! Barack Obama: Wrong on Batman, failure at analogies.

The second “U Fail It!” probably marks the start of my descent into becoming a Stop Having Fun Guy, but oh well. It concerns my recent obsession, Rock Band, and more specifically, the album version of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” that you can buy at the XBOX/PS3 store. Suffice to say that roughly half the bass notes (On Expert) are simply missing, and the ending is, as a result, a lot easier than it would be on an actual bass (Which is something I have some experience with, both in a general sense and in the specific case of “Tom Sawyer”). Granting, Harmonix have said before that they place “having fun” over “100% musical accuracy”, but considering how utterly ridiculous some of the Expert charts are for other songs, would it have killed them to get this right? I submit that it would not.

Closed-down gas stations are an interesting thing. They fascinate me more than most defunct businesses because, unlike most others, you can generally still see the price of the various types of gasoline they offered just before their closure–for whatever reason, the big signs right outside the stations themselves aren’t usually taken down. To me, it’s really interesting to see precisely how much gas was going for when a given station went belly-up. This is even more true now that the price of gas is down a buck a gallon or so from its all-time high.

For instance, on Wolcott Road in Waterbury can be found the remnants of a gas station that was selling gas at $1.62/gallon when it closed. This seems ludicrously low nowadays, though it was bit less so for awhile after it shut down. My cousin and I noted that if it were open (Even when gas was at $2-something/gallon), the lines for it would surely be around the block. At the other end of the spectrum is a closed-down gas station somewhere between Southington and Naugatuck that was selling regular unleaded gas at $4.39/gallon when it closed. There’s a “CLOSED” sign outside of it and everything, which seems odd now–why would anyone pay that much for gas nowadays?

I’m an hour or two into Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and it’s occured to me that, essentially, this game is going to be Diablo II set in the Marvel universe. I don’t have a problem with this, by any means, but I found it amusing.

Heeere we go!

• Leading things off is this fun Rock Band video. There are a lot of “Full Combo” videos out there, but this one is a cut above the rest–clearly, much more work was put into it than just “film the screen” like lots of other videos of its ilk.
• Living right next door to a Dairy Queen cannot possibly be good for my waistline. It’s a wonder I haven’t already gained back the 15 pounds I worked to lose for six months or so from February to July of 2007 (Amazingly, I’m holding pretty steady where I want to be weight-wise).

Yeah, it’s been slow here.

Woo-hoo!

• I’ve been listening to Boston‘s 1976 self-titled album almost constantly over the last few days. This was partly Rock Band-inspired, yes, but the album itself is…well, popularity isn’t necessarily synonymous with quality (See the diamond albums recorded by various boy bands of the late 90s), but 17 million people have it right in this case. Thinking about it some more, I came to the conclusion that bands like Avenged Sevenfold owe more to Boston than they would probably admit. The harmonic guitars and vocals of Avenged Sevenfold? That’s all Boston right there.
• I played Guitar Hero III for the first time in quite awhile today, essentially because I don’t own Rock Band. I began playing on Expert, and 5-starred the first tier so far. I know it’ll get harder quick–I never actually finished the game on Hard yet (Stupid last guitar battle).
• Michael Phelps is fairly good at swimming

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I wonder if “Asian” languages–that is, languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and others that use written symbols to represent words as opposed to letters–have their own version of “lolspeak”. I posed this query to myself after looking at a Starcraft-related motivation picture that I, of course, can’t find now.

Hmm.

This video will be of no interest to you whatsoever if you don’t play StarCraft. It’ll be twelve minutes of overenthusiastic Koreans shouting things as someone gets destroyed in the game. Nonetheless, I’m going to attempt to give it context anyway.

Imagine if, in Super Bowl XLII, rather than merely defeating the mighty juggernaut that was the New England Patriots in the last minute or so of the game, the New York Giants (Whom you may remember had “no chance in hell whatsoever” of winning that game according to the blantantly pro-Pats media) instead humiliated them from start-to-finish, running up the score on them to ridiculous levels and continually going for two just to humiliate them. Now imagine you got to see this carnage from the view of one of the Patriots players. That’s essentially what this video is in StarCraft form; it’s from the point of view of a player called “sAviOr[gm]“, then considered the best StarCraft player in the world, and it’s game 3 of a 5-game final in one of Korea’s major StarCraft leagues. In this particular series, his opponent, a then-unheralded “Bisu[Shield]” (Who would himself ascend to the title of “Best StarCrafter in the World” for a time), has already won the first two games by essentially showing sAviOr a gameplan he has never seen before, and that sAviOr either can’t, or stubbornly refuses to, adjust to. The third game plays out pretty much the same way, as you get to watch Bisu make sAviOr look like a complete chump through sAviOr’s eyes.

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, skip ahead to about 11 minutes in when you hear shrieking that seemingly rivals that of a Beatles concert. Completely insane. Also note the final insult to injury as the game for some reason refuses to allow sAviOr to save the replay.

Yep. I’m working my way through the campaign mode, again, and saved once in the middle of Terran Mission 9. After realizing that my previous strategy wasn’t working out (Hooray running out of minerals), I re-loaded from the save and tried a different tactic: Mass Battlecruisers. I managed to have just enough resources to make 4 Battlecruisers, which got me just enough land to grab an expansion that formerly belonged to the computer-controlled Protoss. I then lifted off my command center to the area and dropshipped my SCVs there to get more mineral collection going, made more Battlecruisers, and completed the objective.

It’s funny that most of you won’t know what I’m talking about, and those that will no doubt agree with the topic title. Oh well.