This time though, they just decided to not waste all that money on previews and advertising, put it out in “limited release”, and then let us all just grab it on Netflix based on idiots like me doing their advertising. �If you didn’t deserve to see this, I would tell them to screw off, but you do, even if they don’t deserve your patronage.

No, it wasn’t full of the best special effects or stunning dialogue, but the vikings also didn’t wear cow horns on their helmets. �It wasn’t over the top and epic like hollywood seems to believe is all we want, but rather, more like a good book. �There were just enough key characters to be interesting, and just enough character development to make you care a tad bit when they get chomped. �Really though, if you are going to enjoy this movie, you are probably already sold. �If not, get back to playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

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So, how to vote?  My suggested method is as follows, after the break: 
1) If you see either candidate repeat the same pathetic line more than once per speech, put a mark next to their name on your list for every time they say it (and yes, accumulation of points is bad).  For example, John may repeat “that is not change we can believe in”, followed by a fake, awkward, and kinda scary smile while he waits for applause, while Barack will repeat the phrase “Bush/Mcain” with a smooth as silk delivery that should scare you even more, unless you like your politicians that way. 
2) If you DON’T notice a candidate is reading from a teleprompter or cards, make a mark by their name.  When they get so good at it that they look natural, that is bad.  Same with makeup.  When you stop noticing it, be warned. 
3) If someone you know is pure evil says something nice with sincere passion, go ahead and trust your gut and give their object of adoration a mark.  Think, Karl Rove or Henry Waxman.  If someone like that liked me I would be upset and strive to change my ways until I earned their displeasure. 
4) To punish exploiters of our retarded single-issue voters (like gun rights or gay marriage), add a mark next to the person who brings it up (for or against).  For example, if John talks about homo-love, give him a mark, but also do the same for Barack, cuz they are both just pandering to you on that crap.  Only talking about real issues will avoid a mark. 
5) If a candidate brings up their age or the age of their competitor, give them a mark.  John went to high school with George Washington and Barack was just starting kindergarten when Britney stopped being hot.  Neither of them is a good choice with age as a criterion.  Similarly, if they mention spouses, military service record, or their church, give them the markdown they deserve.  Yes, some of these things can influence how they will govern, but why not use their voting history and their previous actions to develop an accurate assessment instead of an implied guess of their likely behavior. 
6) Last but not least, add 10, yes 10 marks to the guy who is a member of the party you voted for last time.  This will even out any irrelevant and pointless associations that have no business in this process.  If you already knew for sure which party you would vote for before the candidates where even glimmers in the eyes of the political hacks trying to force their beliefs on you, add another 10 points to your man.  Yes, he is starting 20 points behind, but lets face it, if you vote purely on party lines, he will make it up pretty quick, as you will blindly ignore the his failings like the “enlightened” consumer of democracy that you are.

There you go!  Count who has the most marks, and vote for the other guy.  Come November when you are asked who you voted for, you can proudly tell them, knowing that you used a scientific method to make the right choice.  “But what if I don’t like the performance of my candidate if he wins” you may ask?  Don’t worry, none of us are going to be happy this time, so don’t let it get you down.  In 4 years, hopefully we will all be talking about how much better our options are and how we all learned our lessons.  Then again, we might feel so bad about forcing all of our “representatives” who had demonstrated gross incompetence to move to Canada that we will feel guilty about letting new people have a try at actually representing the rest of us.

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Recently I started driving an electric car.  I pay nothing for gas.  It has a range of around 25 miles, but round trip to work and back is only 15 miles, so I charge it exclusively at work.  It has a top speed of 35mph and is classified as a “neighborhood electric vehicle”, but I drive on the back roads to work anyways, so no big thing.  It is far from roomy, probably not very safe in an accident, but short of a box full of puppies trained to hug kittens, it is probably the best way to meet chicks I can think of.  Being so small, you don’t even need a “no fat chicks” bumper sticker, cuz they look at it and realize they would likely get stuck in the door if they were to even try to fit in the tiny little passenger seat.  Funny thing is, the hotties that flock to it whenever I park it assume I am some sort of environmentalist dipshit who wants to talk to them about how Hitlery should drop out of the race or how much money we are wasting in Iraq.  I don’t bother explaining to them that I agree completely, but that it would be best if Obama joined her, and that a few nukes would save us tons of money in Iraq.  They also all assume it is a “smart car”… sigh.

See, my little electric car looks like a shrunk down smart car to people who haven’t seen either one in person before.  That isn’t a bad thing, but seriously, what is the point of the “smart car”.  Yes, it can drive at freeway speeds, but who would want to fight with semi for a lane in that thing?  The real issue though is that the little coffin only gets  a tad bit better milage than a normal sized car, and it isn’t exactly cheap.  Really, the only reason to buy it in my book would be for the chick magnet appeal.  

My plastic deathtrap uses no gas, and did I mention that I don’t pay to charge it!  If you want a new vehicle to combat the crazy gas prices, wait until they at least get 60mpg, or buy a motorcylce, because if you are going to be unsafe and you insist on still using gas like a cave man, you can at least look cool doing it.  Trust me, nobody looks cool in these micro cars.  If you are normal sized, you will look huge in them.  If you are above average in size you will look like Andre the Giant in them.  If you are a tiny little person that is comfortably scaled to something that size, everyone will just assume you are far away and always yell to talk to you!

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I was not expecting it to be so gorgeous, and not just because you can see boobies. The youtube clips don’t do this game justice.

I was expecting it to be buggy and to have that “new game” feel, but the content I have seen so far is kicking butt. I have not yet gotten stuck, had a buggy quest, or had the game crash.

I was not expecting AoC to run as smoothly as it did, considering I am playing it on a Mac using Bootcamp, but the only thing limiting it is the steaming load that is Windows XP. I have 8 cores and 16gb of ram running on a 64 bit bus, most of which just sits there unused. I went with a slower processor and dumped the savings into upgrading the machine, but I have never used more than 35% of the CPU. The 8800GT is doing all the work, and all I can say is WOW (no, not WoW, not anything like WoW).

The fighting mechanics are still growing on me. I was one of those rare people that will admit to liking Oblivion, especially compared to the click on target mash buttons lameness that most classes in WoW utilize (sure, in raids they are now forcing you to move around to avoid hot lava, but the only reason this is hard is because many people don’t have the skills to actually watch their cast bar AND the screen). So far I have only played a barbarian, and the casting time for longer combo moves seems a bit off. Many times I think I initiated a combo, but my toon is just standing there getting beat on. Finally, the combo will pop up, and like some tard at the fair playing whack-a-mole, I excitedly mash the buttons in the order shown. Sure, I could have gone with the dance dance revolution comparison, but that would give away my winning idea of using a dance mat for controlling my toon!

Things I am not digging as part of the Early Access include the craptacular server maintenance schedules and lack of voice acting for the quests past the starting area, but maybe those will be fixed with the official launch. Of course, they are european, and expecting even half-assed customer support would be purely naive. Don’t believe me? Go try to find their phone support number…. nope, they don’t have one. Hopefully they can make up for it with adequate online GM support.

Should Blizzard be worried? Yes, they should. Not because everyone will be leaving WoW to play AoC,though some will, just for something new to do. Personally, I am not yet to the point where I am hooked, and I fully expect to go back to WoW some time before the next expansion. AoC may just delay my return for a few months. The real reason Bizzard should be worried though is that a bunch of weird Norwegians showed that WoW did not set the bar too high, and they are no longer the only real option for people wanting to get their MMO on. Two days ago I was still resigned to WoW being the best option for the foreseeable future, but now I can see that providing them competition is not only possible, but likely. This is good for gaming in general, and I look forward to seeing how the competition drives the genre in the future.

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It is to Bond what Batman Begins was to that pointless crapfest series of movies. Both movies dealt with the beginnings of their characters, not worrying so much about continuity with what had been done before/after them. This works for me. The latest set of Star Wars movies are a good example of why you don’t want to try to stick within the framework you already set up too much. Yeah, prequels are hard, but this one got it right in many ways. Is it a must see in the theater, I don’t know? If you have a nice home system you won’t loose too much, so if your schedule is full there may be other movies out this season that I would put before this, but definitely catch it on Netflix, as it really was quite enjoyable.

Problem is, I can’t exactly figure out what to say about it that is good. I have a few complaints I can start with, but I will try to come back to what is good. First, there seemed to be 4 different directors and writers, or maybe they broke up the movie between different production groups for style reasons, I am not sure Interesting, but I don’t know if it really works. The continuity between the different parts was just not there for me, and I didn’t feel like it was my fault because I am not sophisticated, but rather, I felt like someone was trying to demonstrate skills that they clearly had, but maybe they should have saved for another film. Maybe some of you smarter folks will appreciate that aspect of it more than I did.

Second, as many of you already know, for me casting is one of the most critical parts of movie making. In my opinion, this casting was brilliant…. mostly. Daniel Craig was amazing. He was nothing like any of the previous bonds, and that is fine by me. I enjoyed many of those films, but they really were becoming caricatures of themselves. The one liners and catch phrases were becoming more of what defined the movies than the story and action. This one dropped all of that (including sadly, some of my favorite stuff, but discussing that may be a spoiler to some of you purists, so I will talk about that at a later date). The few one liners where delivered with a completely different style and approach, that they actually worked. The bad guys were SOOOOO bad and the rest were all great, perfectly cast for their roles, with a few that really stole the show for a few minutes (Jeffrey Wright and the guy that played the banker both stood out to me). Judi Dench as M was superb. If she gets any better I might start developing a thing for much older women, which is good, because I seem to be aging myself for some reason. Which leads me to the leading woman, my biggest complaint. Ok, in a bond movie there are usually a few women, and there are here as well, don’t worry, but the main chick just didn’t do it for me. She was hot, sure, and seemed to be quite a talented actress, but I didn’t buy her in her role, and I didn’t feel any chemistry between her and Bond, though that may have been on purpose for story reasons that I am not smart enough to follow. Maybe she nailed her part, but if so, maybe that part needed a bit more refinement, but then again, they don’t let me make many big budget movies, so I may be missing something here.

So, what did I like about it? Well, it was just a great film. Despite its incongruous nature to us lowbrow types, it was enjoyable as hell to watch, even if you have to check your ticket to make sure you are in the correct theater. The intro was the best ever for a bond flick, in its own way. With a single exception (in my opinion) the casting was superb. The parts I missed about the old ones, I got over, and the new parts that would not have worked at all in the old Bond movies where a nice change of perspective to the series. I am truly looking forward to the next one. I wouldn’t suggest it for kids (nothing there for them) and I wouldn’t suggest it to my Dad, who is a big bond fan, but for the rest of you I would give it some witty affirmation of a positive nature.

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