Some Free Music for your Caturday

I would like to take this moment to highly reccommend DJ Technics2000. I stumbled across this guy;s music while listening to DI.fm's breaks channel, and he has some really good mixes up on his site. People in my friends group would probably really appreciate the 80's pop tunes remix set.

Happy Saturday, y'all!

Rolling Stone on Christian Zionism

Jesus Made Me Puke : Rolling Stone:

"'In the name of Jesus Christ,' said Fortenberry, more loudly now, 'I cast out the demon of lust!'

And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I couldn't see if any actual vomitus came out, but he made real hurling and retching noises.

Now the women began to pipe in. On the women's side of the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to explain what these noises sounded like. If you've ever watched The Houston 560 or any other gangbang porn movie, that's what it sounded like, only the sounds were far more intense."

Utterly hilarious summary of a Christian Zionism retreat weekend in Texas. A good personal viewpoint to wrestle with, as opposed to the checklist of backwards thinking we normally consider with crazy right-wingers.

Here's a Daily Show interview with author Mat Taibbi:



Hat tip: Boing Boing

Holy Crapola

Wow... just... wow. Mario levels as timed to Jpop? I hadn't even heard of this. Hat tip: GayGamer.net

ACEN 08: God Len's final thoughts - Japanator.com - anime blog, anime podcast, manga, anime wallpapers, pictures, games, movies, and more!

ACEN 08: God Len's final thoughts - Japanator.com:

"If I had to give ACEN a grade, I think it deserves a C-; it was a little less then what I expected. ACEN 08 had its problems, but it comes natural when you have that great amount of people in such a small area."

Interesting article from the Japanator. Had pictures of some of the cosplayers I missed as well - like the Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles full-suit team.

Wedding Congratulations!

 

A hearty wedding congratulations to the couple pictured herein (well, behind Adam's huge head, anyway)! Travis and Claire, may your wedding be blessed with much happiness, and your life together be filled with great joy. </hallmark>

Weezer Music Video

Count the memes, baby. Hat tip: PopURLS

Oh hey, a heron!

Oh hey, a heron!
Originally uploaded by agius.

Halifax's city emotion: mild surprise. Heron was cool - he just left.
The geese hissed at me a bunch and was like "Yo, don't touch my kids,
dude!"

Anime Central 2008 Photos!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Alright, y'all, the big one! Unfortunately, because I don't have a computer of my own at the moment, this collection does not have my usual filtering for good results - there are some photos in here that are total crap, and there are many 'duplicates' which I would normally reduce ( I generally aim for 1 photo / subject ). However, quite a few of them are really good, so you might wanna check it out.

Original Photoset

Road trip home.

Road trip home.
Originally uploaded by agius.

Drove home from West Lafayette yesterday. To all my friends out there,
I will miss you. We'll always have Purdue.

Now, for a long and pleasently uneventful summer.

Back in Lafayette

Back in Lafayette
Originally uploaded by agius.

If only for a few hours. Acen was über-duper awesome, mostly thanks to
the crew I went with and the folks I hung out with. Sadly, nobody
recognized my Akabane cosplay, but I got lots of good pictures as
Frank West. More coming soon.

Quote: "I'm old Greeeeeeegg!"

Reg'd!!

Reg'd!!
Originally uploaded by agius.

ACEN badge attempt #2

ACEN badge attempt #2
Originally uploaded by agius.

They've got us parked outside this morning - dunno if that's good or
bad, but I think I've got significantly fewer people in front of me in
this morning's line.

Wish me luck!

Awesome!!

Awesome!!
Originally uploaded by agius.

So, we didn'tget badges... So what? I'm having a few good drinks,
hanging with awesome friends, watching crazy-ass fighting games. Life
is good. There will be plenty of time for the convention tommorow.

Peace & love!!

Fuck this Shit!

Fuck this Shit!
Originally uploaded by agius.

We quit. Maybe we'll get badges tommorow.

In line at ACEN

In line at ACEN
Originally uploaded by agius.

Still in line... Somebody started throwing a beach ball around, but
that was too crazy for con security. Now we have condom balloons. Ha!

photo.jpg

photo.jpg
Originally uploaded by agius.

ACEN registration is down. Apparently they have no backups or paper
systems to rely on. We've been in this line for nearly an hour and a
half. Here's hoping!!

photo.jpg

photo.jpg
Originally uploaded by agius.

Found in Borders. Really?

Guiter Hero IV: Rock Band Knockoff

This is stupid:

Guitar Hero IV will follow closely in the footsteps of Rock Band, offering new instruments including a bass, microphone, and six-piece drumset that includes two cymbals. It is unknown whether or not the Guitar Hero IV instruments and Rock Band instruments will be cross-compatible.

The only thing Guitar Hero had going for it, and Activision just has to wreck it.

Rock Band is a four-piece music game. Guitar Hero is a one-piece music game (two, if you count the bass). In order for Guitar Hero to avoid the inevitable comparisons to Rock Band, it has to differentiate itself - it must seem like a different sort of game to people, otherwise feature-matrices will be lined up, and Guitar Hero will seem lacking. I felt like Guitar Hero 3 tried to do this - maybe they didn't pull it off perfectly, but it was Neversoft's first Guitar Hero, so I cut them slack. They had three big things that Rock Band did not have - guitar battles, licensed characters, and guitar songs. The guitar battles and licensed characters didn't overly concern me, but it seemed like having guitar songs was a major point of differentiation between Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

Rock Band, being a four-piece game, has to have four-piece songs. Stuff like "Orange Crush" or "Don't Fear the Reaper" is a perfect fit for it. You cannot put "Cliffs of Dover" or "YYZ" in Rock Band, because there are no vocals. You also cannot put stuff like "Through the Fire and Flames" and "Laid to Rest" on Rock Band, because the single bass pedal on the drum kit will not support death-metal style drumming. Also, Guitar Hero 3 seemed to take pains to make the expert guitar parts unnecessarily hard - for example "The Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden. I doubt all those triplets were entirely necessary.

So it seemed Guitar Hero was differentiating by focusing on crazy-ass guitar playing, and leaving the "other instruments" to Rock Band. But now, they're stripping that point of differentiation, and making it basically the same game as Rock Band - and that makes me sad. I am not as good at vocals or drums as I am at guitars, and I liked the impossibly difficult guitar songs. Rock Band's songs seemed much more generic and pop-ish by comparison.

However, the song creator and character customization in the aforementioned article sound really freakin' cool, so it shouldn't be a total loss. Sounds like I'll buy it.

Get!!!

Get!!!
Originally uploaded by agius.

Now, the fun part.

Grad things

Good lord, there were a million Pham doctorates. I think there should
be alimit on how many names, total, you can read at one of these
ceremonies.

Dang... No shortage of Vet doc's either...

At least the speech to the candidates from new Pres Cordova was cool.
She said we were just "a picture of you in a robe with your diploma on
Facebook " away from graduating. Cute, but it does seem like she
understands the students here.

People are getting chatty here on the bleachers. Listening to names
gets tiring at around an hour or so.

Wool, graduation! After this, I'm headed to Boiler Market for a beer
and some pizza.

Sent from my iPhone

photo.jpg

photo.jpg
Originally uploaded by agius.

Graduationblogging!

Graduationblogging!
Originally uploaded by agius.

Done with school, except for the crazy ceremony. More on that live, as
it happens! Well, probably not - maybe reflection later. Stay tuned!

Downtown Chicago

Downtown Chicago
Originally uploaded by agius.

Very pretty area near Lincoln park zoo, which we visited today.

Graduation Things

Graduation Things
Originally uploaded by agius.