Random Things

A few random thoughts and things that have been bouncing around in my head of late:

- 'Tis the season. The holidays are upon us once more. This means the return of those ridiculous TV commercials where the yuppie families buy each other cars for Christmas. Honestly, here's a $40,000 vehicle for Christmas! I'm not even on the same plane of existence as these people.

- It is time to rock. With Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band both released in the last month, there's no shortage of multiplayer gaming goodness to go around. Guitar Hero 3, while fun, is hard. Really hard. I got about halfway through on expert, and I didn't get stumped on a song, I just got fed up. While hammer-ons and pull-offs are now much easier and more fun, the difficulty has been ramped up a lot. The expert songs are chock full of 3 button notes, which always seemed cheap to me. This is not to say that GH3 isn't fun, which it is. Some of the songs are a blast to play, like Bulls on Parade, Sunshine of Your Love, Number of the Beast and Cult of Personality. Others are more fun to listen to than to play, like One, Paint it Black, Knights of Cydonia and Cherub Rock. Still, it's Guitar Hero and thus fun.

Rock Band: 4 player goodness.

Rock Band is a bit of a different story. The guitar mode is essentially the same as in Guitar Hero, but not as ball-shatteringly difficult. The drums are fun, but it's a whole new challenge. I thought being good at Guitar Hero would help. It doesn't. The vocals are also a lot fun, or so my wife claims. Hearing her sing Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills" was truly memorable. I'm looking forward to playing some 4-player co-op games soon.

- Orbit, whose rotten commercials show people eating dirt and whatnot, makes delicious gum. Their orange/mint gum may be the best gum ever.

Lady in the Water. (Not pictured: the water.)

- In my eyes M Night Shyamalan has redeemed himself in some way with Lady in the Water. It's another one of those movies that everyone hated and I can understand why, but I loved it. It's essentially a bedtime story that takes place in a modern day setting. It also stars Paul Giamatti who has become one of my favorite actors. I can't necessarily recommend it to anyone. Except maybe Couch. And BC would probably like it. So I guess I can't recommend it to Jimbob. Then again, it does have a lot of things with silly names in it. I recommend it to everyone.

- I reached 10,000 achievement points on my Xbox Live profile last night. This is a large milestone in a totally meaningless ambition. Essentially, each xbox 360 game comes with 1,000 possible achievement points, and the xbox live arcade games each have 200 possible points. You get these achievement points by reaching certain goals in the game, such as collecting all the weapons, defeating all the bosses, playing through Guitar Hero on expert with all the sound options off, etc. The one that put me over the 10k mark was called The Unrivaled Horseman in the game Gun. I got this by finding and completing all the horse challenges. That's right, bitches - all the horse challenges. Achievement points are wholly useless and I love them. For those of you keeping score at home, Jimbob has 5 achievements for 90 points: 3 from Guitar Hero 2 and 2 from Catan. Thank you, Gen Con. Thank you.

- My wife gained several cooking skill points and moved up a rank this past week when she made a delicious Thanksgiving dinner. But I still don't like yams, candied or otherwise.

- Some of the guys at work are bugging me to run a D&D game for them. They just want a dungeon crawl. I should probably do it. Dungeon crawls are pretty easy to run, I don't have to worry about story I just have to worry about puzzles, layout and balancing which I'm good at. And getting off my ass and putting it together, which I'm bad at.