December 2005 Archives

Here's what it looks like when you reunite the lost kitten with her equally lost mother. Grant and I were happy to arrange this delightful scene, although it didn't net us any super-rare Lost Kitten furniture series or anything. The next day, I received a Lily Pad Table in the mail, which was about the third most common item back on the GameCube.

I wonder how often this is set to happen. I've been meeting up with people online pretty often, and I would hate to have to go through this every month, despite it being really cute.

Other notable ACWW news: Nook continued his fast-paced upgrade schedule and I am now at the Nookington's level. This Nookington's is about twice as big as the GameCube Nookington's, plus it has a hair salon in the back. The building is gigantic, towering over the Able Sisters next door. As if Sable didn't have enough of a complex!

My first haircut was terrible. My second haircut was okay. My third haircut is a blue DBZ number that is probably as amazing as it is likely to get. (Here's a haircut cheat sheet that shows all the options.)

Had a marathon Open Gate Night tonight (three hours!), featuring visits by Cutter, Champtim, Marci, Kevin, Boney and Matti. I believe I have formed my first Open Gate Night rule: if you chop down a tree, you get un-Friended. Maybe not forever, but there is definitely to be a penance period.

Boney stopped by with an armload of awesome headgear and accessories to share, including the King Tut Wig that I was drooling over when I saw it in the Nintendo Power ACWW writeup. Maybe someday someone will turn up with that million-bell crown or me to briefly touch.

Later, after I closed the gate, I caught a dung beetle... and I ran into Harriet (of the hair salon) enjoying a late night coffee at the museum cafe. I wonder if other daytime characters appear there in their off hours!

Blanca was in town again today, and she had what I thought was a rather nice face. It was created by Asia of Meadows (whom I have never met). From now on, if I have my camera nearby, I'm going to snap shots of the Blanca heads I see. Nice work, Asia!

I have now purchased THREE forged paintings from Crazy Redd, which amounts to almost 10,000 wasted bells. I can't believe Nintendo found a way to make this guy suck even harder than he used to. His new Members Only password scheme is obnoxious too (although I am glad that the passwords now come in the mail rather than having to ferret it out of a random villager conversation.)

The Blathers Saga has continued, much to my surprise. He recently told me about how he can't take Celeste camping because of his bug phobia. I've heard that several other characters have hidden Sagas... like Brewster and Harriet, so I'm talking to them now as well. By the way, the finale for the Sable Saga ends with her giving you a different happy response for every day of the week, which is a long way from the ol' brush-off she gives you before you start her Saga.

Hey Clark.

This is what happened on your "Adoption Day," the day we formally and legally finalized your place in our family. Yes, you've been our son since June, but America and Korea have to do a little political handshaking to finish things up. It's really for their benefit; your mother and I have considered the deal finished since we first saw you.

We all had to get up and out the door early, because it was a two hour drive to the courthouse where our ceremony was scheduled. You actually slept until almost the last possible moment to get us out the door on time. Mom gave you your breakfast in the car. Once you had eaten, you slept until we got about twenty minutes from the courthouse. Well done!

When we got inside, we saw lots of other kids like you, here to officially finish their adoptions. The judges like to schedule a bunch of these in one day, because it is convenient and fun for them. I would think it's a nice change of pace, since most of the time they're presiding over divorces and civil disputes and delinquent teens. We saw some families that Mommy recognized. You were happy and giggly the entire time, even though your nose was running like a faucet.

We had to wait until it was our turn, then we entered the judge's chambers. Along with him and the three of us, there was a representative from our adoption agency, a stenographer, a police officer, and some other officials from the court. Most of us sat at one big table with the judge at the head. Mommy and I promised to speak truthfully and the judge started asking us questions. Most of it was like "is this document you submitted correct in what it says" or "do you accept and understand what I'm telling you." We each said "yes" a lot.

The judge told us that from now on, you have all the rights and privileges just as if you had been biologically born to us. This means you will now legally inherit my comic book collection and stack of PS1 memory cards, among other things. You are also now an official United States citizen, so you'll probably soon be receiving the form where you decide whether you'll be a Democrat or a Republican for life. We'll throw that away when it comes.

The judge posed for some pictures with us, and then it was all over! The doctor visits and the meetings and the forms and the home studies and the autobiographies and the waiting and the waiting and the waiting. All over.

By this time we were all hungry, so we went to a gigantic mall. You ate your lunch in your stroller at the food court, another mealtime first. Mommy and I shared some of our vegetable lo mein and spicy tofu with you, since you're starting to eat non-baby food now. Then we shopped.

It was probably kind of stupid to go to a mall just a few days before Christmas, but you liked it. You liked being pushed around in the stroller (this was the first time you stayed happy in the stroller indoors for any length of time, come to think of it) and you liked looking at all the people and decorations. We sat you with the mall Santa for pictures, but you didn't consider that something to smile about, so we have another Stunned Baby photo for the pile.

We went to the Discovery Channel Store and wondered why they can't just make a freaking Paz Penguin stuffed animal. We get that they want to showcase educational toys, since it's a Discovery property and all, but come on. Slapping Paz stickers on a plastic instrument set is nice, but all we wanted was a little $5 Paz beanie to take home. Maybe with a sound chip.

The Disney Store was having a sale on their stuffed animals. Now there's a store that knows how to market! It was a good sale: we're talking 20"ers for $8 apiece. I would have bought an armload at that price, but I limited myself to just one: a super-cool Uncle Scrooge stuffed animal. You'll get that someday as well. (Later, a four-year-old boy asked us why we would buy him, the old guy from the Christmas story with Mickey, when we could have had a Mickey.)

The Apple Store was so packed with people buying iPods that we could barely see anything. I was looking for the iPod video cable and Mommy wanted a nice iPod carrier/protector. They were sold out of the cables and the case selection was no better than the junk we had previously rejected at our local Target. Big strike-out at the Apple Store.

But the only really lousy thing that happened was when you soaked through your diaper and grenaded your entire outfit. Not your fault; it happens. "It was EVERYWHERE," Mommy told me later, because this mall didn't have co-ed family bathrooms. We headed for home pretty quickly after that.

And that was December 22, 2005, your Adoption Day. Now the entire United States knows what we already know: that we love you and will care for you, and that you have made us into a family.

Every day I talked to her, I got a little closer to Sable. When you first enter the Able Sisters tailor shop. Mabel does all the clerking while sable just grunts at you. She's busy, she doesn't mingle with the customers. Gradually, you can get her to open up... and she tells you about the difficult time the Able girls had growing up.

It's an unexpectedly sad story. Sable shares some maudlin memories and winds up treating you quite a bit nicer since you're such a good listener.

I only made three custom patterns, so I'm reasonably sure this is attached simply to your efforts to communicate with Sable.

The Able Sisters' backstory was in the GameCube Animal Crossing... but I think the psychoanalysis of Blathers is new to Wild World.

I'm not sure what triggered it, but I walked in on Blathers in a reflective mood one morning. Normally, the dude is asleep when you enter the Museum in daylight hours... but this time he was clearly down in the dumps. I talked to him and received a strange conversation about why he hates insects so much. The exchange ends with him more or less upbeat about his phobia, so I don't think it will play out as long or as thoroughly as the Sable chat.

And then there's this little darling: Katie. She's been in my town for two days now, just standing in a tree grove crying. She wants to be back to her mommy in Anima, the town I entered last Thursday to visit Grant. When I talked to her, she followed me around for a bit, in anticipation of me heading out the gate to go to Anima. Unfortunately, Grant didn't have his town open when I tried, so Katie is still lost with me in Adamsvil. Grant, I hope I run into you again - and I hope Katie sticks around until I do - because I want to see what amazing thing happens when I reunite her with her mother.

There's no better way to celebrate the Christmas season than by slapping a group of self-righteous tyrants right across the puss.

As anyone who has spent five minutes studying Constitutional law can tell you, the judge in the Dover School Board case has decided that teaching Intelligent Design in a public school science class is unconstitutional. Note the clauses... you could still discuss ID and any other wacky theory you like in a philosophy class or a religious studies class. Just don't pass it off as science and don't denigrate scientific study in the process.

Predictably, whiny babies all over the country are outraged and vow that "this is not over." No doubt Bill O'Reilly and Pat Robertson will figure this decision heavily into their regular frothing rants so they can keep their fanbase agitated and angry.

It's not often that I'm proud to be a Pennsylvanian. V-D Day is truly a day to celebrate.

I had a Disney DVD in while Clark and I were playing this afternoon. One of the metal tin series, the Silly Symphonies one. I thought Clark might enjoy seeing some 80 year old cartoons, I guess. When it was over, I parked the PS2 on that goony screensaver dealie it has on the options screen. Mainly because it makes a pleasant ocean waves noise, like it's some kind of relaxo thing, which is preferable to cable TV by any measure.

And I just then realized that the stupid star shape there is supposed to be a clock. It simply never occured to me before. I thought it was just some meaningless "The Future Is Now" 3D shape that everybody thought was the shit back in 2000.

Huh.

Can't wait to see what Amazing Future Clock we'll get with the PS3.

Related: Does anybody know what causes the number of blocks you see when your PS2 starts up? My PS2s have maybe ten blocks apiece, while all my friends have, like, fifty. I'm so much cooler than they are, so I can't imagine why they have more blocks. Is it connected to the number of movie DVDs you play?

When I drove back from picking up this week's comics, all I could think was "I'm about to read a new Zoo Crew story."

I was a huge Zoo Crew fan; hunting down the issues I had missed consumed a lot of my first trips to the comic stores in the region. I know this won't surprise anyone, but I have some notes about a Zoo Crew card game locked up in my brain attic.

So I was really excited to see news about the return of Captain Carrot tucked inside all those convention panel discussions on Infinite Crisis. And it was scheduled to appear inside the current Teen Titans book, which is classically appropriate since the very first Zoo Crew preview pages were in a random issue of New Teen Titans. This interview with Zoo Crew papa Scott Shaw! tells much of the story behind this surprise resurrection.

The platform was probably the biggest question. Will these funny-animal characters interact with the modern Titans? Will they be drawn in a contemporary fashion, perhaps anime-ized to appear more visually compatible with the hip Titans artwork? Is this actually a part of Earth-2 Superman's Infinite Crisis plan? (The Zoo Crew's adventures were on Earth-C and they were occasionally visited by Earth-1 characters, making them a canonical part of DCU history... and it's been widely assumed that Earth-C was an unseen casualty in the destruction of Crisis.)

So I was slightly disappointed to see that the "Whatever Happened to Captain Carrot" story is only four pages sprinkled amidst the main Titans tale. It is wholly separate from the A story; it's framed as if the Zoo Crew stuff is a comic that various Titans characters are reading. Nobody ever mentions it, it's almost a very intrusive background element. (The good news is that this means we get Scott Shaw! doing the art, which is a pleasure.) And it's a two part story, so we're looking at merely eight pages of new Zoo Crew.

This raises the question: Why pretend to integrate it into the Titans book at all? It could easily be a bonus feature tucked in the back, even stuck inside several DC books. No, by making the Titans subliminally aware of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, they have got to be setting up something larger - if anybody gives a damn, that is. Part Two doesn't show up until next month, but hopefully it leaves the door open for some kind of new Zoo Crew appearance. Presumably with the Titans (at least Changeling, come on!) but dare I anticipate a new solo book?

Here's my conspiracy theory. DC is big into animation these days, far above any other comics company. I present to you that this teeny tiny Zoo Crew tale is returning the characters to the public eye (it's been over 20 years since they last appeared in comics) so that they can become the next big cartoon production from Warner Bros. We're in another super-hero media boom at the moment (Justice League, Teen Titans, Spider-Man, Batman Begins, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Incredibles, Smallville, Superman Returns) and with Cartoon Network recently opting not to renew the Teen Titans cartoon (WTF?!), I'm thinking this has left a hole in the animation development schedule.

If single copy sales of these Titans books is higher than normal, if it spawns enough excited retro-chatter in comics fandom, if the focus groups and the venture studies and the media marketers think kids are ready for another comedy-action super-hero show... well, this is a property that DC has been hiding for an entire generation and it's high time they gave it a shot. And if I know my CCAHAZC history - and I do - turning these characters into a kids franchise was always part of the rubric. That's why, in 1982, they had to change Captain Carrot's original secret identity - Roger Rabbit - to Rodney Rabbit... because should the irons strike, they didn't want any confusion between their Roger and a certain other Roger who had just started big-screen development over at Disney.

Pie-in-the-sky dreams aside, the four pages I just read are a great extension of the original series. Now, original Zoo Crew was full of silly animal puns and a lot of Silver Age adventure sensibility, but it was still a solid, at times serious, super-hero action title. One of the reasons why I liked it so much was because it had that depth... it wasn't as depressingly shallow as the Super Friends cartoon, despite the kid-friendly approach. And although it was often a parody of the super-hero genre, it didn't dip down into anything mean-spirited, gross-out, or overly caricatured in the MAD Magazine style. The Zoo Crew did time travel, dimension hopping, team in-fighting, secret identities... they even ended their run with an "event" miniseries, the Oz-Wonderland War (although that was originally intended as a major six part storyline inside the ongoing title.)

The new stuff updates their world but keeps their pastiche going. We don't know how many years have passed since their last appearance, but since then the Zoo Crew has fallen apart. Captain Carrot has retired in scandal. Yankee Poodle was framed and imprisoned for an assassination attempt. Fastback is missing. Pig-Iron and Rubberduck have become underground vigilantes. Ally-Kat-Abra has re-invented herself as a celebrity. Little Cheese is a hotshot district attorney uncovering a major case... but gets murdered for it.

There's shades of Kingdom Come and Watchmen (and probably more to come) in those four pages. The modern world - the one that has Earth-2 Superman so fired up! - has gotten to the Zoo Crew as well. And yet, except for Little Cheese's death, it's not that spiritually removed from the kind of stuff the Crew did back in the early '80s. Especially since it all unfolds under Scott Shaw!'s Hanna-Barbara touch. This could quite legitmately be issue #21 of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew. If only it had been issue #200!

I knew there would be trouble when the DVD began with John "Pixar" Lasseter eagerly telling me how much I would like this movie. This wasn't in any bonus feature, this was chapter freaking one of the movie, popping up as soon as I clicked Play... Mr. Pixar gushing about how he thinks this is "[his] friend Miyazaki-san's" best work and that I am really lucky to have the opportunity to watch "Spirited Away."

What the hell kind of desperate hard sell is that? Dude, I already bought the damn DVD. I listened to him for about twenty seconds and then said "You know what I don't need? You." and clicked to the next chapter so the movie could start. I really did say that.

Spirited Away is a critically acclaimed film, has all kinds of awards under its title, including the Japanese Best Picture Oscar-equivalent. Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are legendary names in the animation industry. But I didn't get this film.

Which is crazy, because I "get" a lot of asinine batshit stuff. I can talk for hours about social structures in the Pokemon universe. I've been emotionally involved with Kingdom Hearts. I'm willing to take some pretty big leaps when something catches my fancy. I was completely unprepared for the idea that something like this would escape me.

I felt like something was happening every fifteen minutes that I wasn't allowed to see. From what I've read about the movie, it was cut down from three hours to two... which is not uncommon at all in film production. But usually, what's left makes sense in and of itself. In Spirited Away, I think they cut out all the answers to the questions they left in, and left in answers to all of the questions they cut out.

I did some research and found a site with a nice thorough synopsis of the movie. I'm going to quote it here and explain what I saw instead. Don't go any further if you wish to avoid spoilers.

Chihiro, a ten-year-old girl, sulks in the back seat of her parents� car. The family is on its way to a new home in a new town, and Chihiro doesn�t want to move. When her father gets lost taking a short cut, they discover the entrance to an abandoned theme park. The parents investigate and find a deserted stall piled with food. They start eating, and soon, they�re both pigging out. They try to make Chihiro eat, but she has a bad feeling about it and refuses the food. Chihiro wanders away by herself. While she explores, a boy appears and warns her to leave before dark. She runs back to the stall, only to find that her parents have turned into pigs. As night falls, shadowy spirits fill the park, and Chihiro starts becoming transparent. The boy appears again and coaxes her to eat food from the spirit world, which will keep her from disappearing. He then leads her to a busy bathhouse, negotiating her safely through a phalanx of spirits who aren�t happy about having a human among them. After getting her to safety, he gives her detailed instructions on how to get a job in the spirit world, which he says is the only way to survive. He says his name is Haku, and that he has known her since she was very small.

OK, I'm with it so far. The whole parents-in-danger bit is a well-established plot point. The transparency thing is completely forgotten after that scene. This website claims that Haku casts a spell to "keep [her] strength up," which I remember but did not associate with the rule that she has to keep eating. It sounded to me like he was just helping her not be tired.

Chihiro first goes to the boiler man, Kamaji, for a job. Kamaji tells her that the enchanted soot creatures provide him with all the help he needs. As they talk, Chihiro rescues one of the soot creatures. A girl named Lin arrives and is shocked to discover the human everyone is looking for. Impressed with Chihiro�s tenacity and kindness, Kamaji lies and tells Lin that Chihiro is his granddaughter. He bribes Lin to take Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse, to ask for a job. Yubaba initially refuses, but gives in when Chihiro persists. After Chihiro signs a contract for the job, Yubaba steals several of the characters that make up Chihiro�s name, renaming her Sen.

"Impressed"? He's telling her to get lost in one sentence and then fondly naming her as his granddaughter in the next. Kamaji is one of many, many characters who are mean to Chihiro at first and then inexplicably become her friend. It's almost a running gag, except that it doesn't make any sense why they start to like her. It's not like she's a Pollyanna-type character; she's more naive/determined than sweet/charming.

The soot guys are really awesome. They are one of the flourishes that make Spirited Away worth watching.

The next morning, Haku takes Sen to see her pig-parents, who no longer remember they were once human. Sen tries to remember her real name, and almost can�t. Haku warns Sen that he no longer remembers who he used to be and that if she forgets she�ll never be able to get home. Returning to the bathhouse, Sen looks back and sees a white dragon in the air. She knows the dragon is Haku.

On Sen�s first day of work at the bathhouse, she encounters a silent, white-faced spirit called No-Face, for whom she kindly leaves a door open. She also cleans a stink spirit, which turns out to be a polluted river spirit. The river spirit rewards her job well done with a magic herbal cake. No-Face becomes obsessed with getting Sen�s attention. The next day, Sen awakens to find everyone gone, and No-Face, who has gained a voice by eating a frog worker, is causing an uproar by creating gold out of thin air.

Okay, by this point the other characters - particularly Lin - get highly obvious about throwing suspicion on Haku. It is said that he just does Yubaba's dirty work, and the aspersion is cast that maybe he was playing Chihiro so she would become another of Yubaba's staff members. Oddly, Chihiro doesn't seem to ever react to this. She maintains a deep trust of him even though he A) delivered her almost directly into Yubaba's clutches and B) never discusses how they can save her parents. As a viewer, you feel like you're getting set up for a big surprise: that Haku will turn out as a villain... but that never happens, so all of this foreshadowing is simply a ruse.

The stink spirit scene was great... but I had no idea that the turd it left behind was a "magic herbal cake." Would it have killed somebody to say "Wow, Sen, that's a magic herbal cake. What a fortunate gift!" Because I had no idea what it was and therefore couldn't anticipate its use later in the film.

And why is No-Face obsessed with Chihiro? Is that just something he does? Is his appearance - a dark blobby thing with a white mask - a visual reference to something folkloric that Japanese audiences would understand immediately? Like how Kapp'n in Animal Crossing runs a boat. Kapp'n is a direct nod to an ancient myth about a turtle demon (a kappa) who lives in a river. Japanese players catch that ref, but to American audiences he is just a bald turtle man with a rowboat. The difference is that I don't need to know about Kapp'n's ancestral inspiration to enjoy the game, but I would like to understand just what causes No-Face to turn crazy gonuts all over the bathhouse. I thought that No-Face was trying to lure Chihiro close so he could eat her as well. It never even occurred to me that he wanted to thank her for leaving a damn door open. (And why? Because when he gets inside, all he does is trail Chihiro and then start eating people. It's recursive: he wants to thank her for leaving the door open so he could thank her.)

Outside of the bathhouse, Sen sees the white dragon, Haku, being attacked by birds. She opens a door for him and he flies through, followed by the birds, which are made of paper. In agony, Haku flies to Yubaba�s rooms on the upper level. Knowing he�ll bleed to death without help, Sen runs to find him. One of the paper birds hides on her back. As Sen runs through the bathhouse, No-Face sees her and tries to give her gold. She refuses it and runs away. Angered by her refusal, No-Face starts swallowing the staff and causing a panic. Arriving at Yubaba�s quarters, Sen finds Haku unconscious. The paper bird that has been hiding on Sen�s back seems to turn into Yubaba, but actually it�s her twin sister, Zeniba. Zeniba has followed Haku because he stole her gold seal. Disgusted by Boh, Yubaba�s giant baby, Zeniba turns him into a small mouse and turns Yubaba�s pet bird into a fly. Thrashing around, Haku smashes the paper bird, and Zeniba disappears.

The paper bird attack scenes are really great. I also enjoyed the DePalma-esque blood splatters that Haku leaves everywhere.

The twin sister thing comes out of nowhere. Yet another moment that should have been set up earlier in the film but instead we're wasting time with non-essential, ignorable information like the eating/transparent thing. Yubaba and Zeniba are obviously meant to invoke a duality theme (even I got that one), but it is confusing just what the duality is, since both sisters are evil in one scene and good in another. It's more like quadality.

Chihiro accepts the transformation of the baby and the bird without skipping a beat. All of a sudden, they're her new sidekicks, like Meeko and Flit in Disney's Pocohontas. It's weird.

Haku and Sen fall down a dark shaft into the boiler room. Kamaji tells Sen that Haku is bleeding from the inside, so Sen gives Haku part of the herbal cake the river spirit gave her. Haku vomits up the gold seal and a slug, which Sen squashes. Haku turns back to his boy form, but he is still very ill. Sen decides to go to Zeniba in an attempt to convince her to cure Haku. Kamaji gives Sen train tickets to get to Zeniba. On her way to the train, Sen confronts No-Face, who is still terrorizing the bathhouse. She gives him the rest of the herbal cake that she�s been saving for her parents. He begins to vomit and becomes angry at Sen, chasing her through the bathhouse. As he runs he vomits up all the people and things he�s eaten, getting smaller and smaller until he�s back to his normal size and meek demeanor. Sen, the Boh-mouse, the Yubaba-fly, and No-Face leave together for the train. As the group makes its way to Zeniba�s, Haku recovers. He leaves the group and goes back to Yubaba, promising to return Boh to her if Yubaba will send Sen and her parents back to their world.

In the sick Haku scene, Kamaji says that Chihiro's selfless act to save him is because she loves him. Really? Where do we get that idea from, even if we construe it as purely a sibling-type love? When in the movie so far has either character showed anything that would make us believe that? Haku's motivation for helping Chihiro is still a mystery; at this point I guess it could be love but it seems more likely that he's Yubaba's evil toady since we just caught him red-handed stealing from Zeniba. And Chihiro "love" is really just naive trust. Again, it feels like we're not being told the whole story. Like we're watching selected edits from the movie instead of the entire thing.

I would expect Chihiro to save the bathhouse from No-Face, but his actions still make it seem like he's a major character and he's not. Chihiro suspects that being indoors has made him crazy, but what does that mean? Whatever makes him turn into the Incredible Hulk, eating of the turd cures him even better than it cured Haku. Then No-Face tags along on the ride to Zeniba's hut, which is supposed to illustrate how forgiving our Chihiro is, but instead just seems like a stupid decision. Suppose he flips out inside Zeniba's house? He has been reduced to Sidekick #3, right after the transformed mouse and fly duo.

I love how the synopsis says "As the group makes its way to Zeniba�s, Haku recovers," because that's about as dramatic as it happens in the movie. The train ride to Zeniba's swampland is sold as dangerous, and then as soon as they venture off, Haku wakes up and removes any need to risk it (especially with a monstrous bipolar blobfreak in tow).

When Sen arrives at Zeniba�s, she asks Zeniba to forgive Haku for stealing the seal and apologizes for killing the slug. Zeniba explains that Yubaba put the slug in Haku to control him, and that Sen has already healed Haku with her love. Haku arrives in his dragon form, and Sen climbs on his back so he can fly her, the Boh-mouse, and the Yubaba-fly back to the bathhouse. Sen remembers that when she was very young she fell in a river. Instead of allowing her to drown, the river carried her to safety. She had forgotten the river�s name, but now remembers that it was called the Kohaku River. Sen tells Haku she thinks he was the river. Upon hearing his true name, Kohaku River, Haku�s dragon scales fall away and he turns back into his boy shape. They arrive at the bathhouse, and Haku reminds Yubaba she promised to free Sen and her parents. Yubaba says Sen must first identify her parents from a group of pigs. Sen looks over the pigs and declares, correctly, that none of them are her parents. Her contract dissolves and she again becomes Chihiro. Free at last, Chihiro finds her parents, and, as they drive away, Chihiro assures her parents that she can probably handle a new home and school.

And then when they get to the hut, they find that Zeniba - who was last seen trying to kill Haku to get her thingy back, and turned a baby into a mouse - is as sweet as sugar candy. WTF? Maybe this is a Fight Club kind of thing and Yubaba and Zeniba are actually the same person.

The big Haku reveal was another curve ball, although the bit with the scales was really nice. There are some scenes of Chihiro's buried drowning memory previously, but having her come to the conclusion of "Oh! You're a river spirit!" inside of three minutes is just too pat.

When Chihiro beats Yubaba's Kobayashi Maru (Yubaba suddenly acting the villain again) it shows how she has grown in confidence and ability. Earlier, she has a nightmare where she can't identify her parents among the pigs. It would be a nice enough bit of character development if it rang true, but it feels too by-the-numbers. For one thing, we don't see enough of the supposedly immature Chihiro in the first act. She is definitely grumpy and pouty to her parents (pre-pigged) and she is confused and reliant on Haku's questionable advice when she first hits the bathhouse. That's it, and it's not enough to set Chihiro up as the spoiled, unappreciative, lazy brat that the movie's press release thinks she is. As soon as she lands her job, she becomes determined and able. Right away. She vows to return her parents to normal. She single-handedly takes care of the stink spirit. She administers a magical turd without anybody telling her what it is or what it does. She ups No-Face's meds and finds him a home where his sewing skills make him useful(!) If, when she rises above Yubaba's final trick, this is supposed to be a watershed moment, it doesn't play as dramatically as I think the movie would hope because Chihiro just hasn't travelled that far along her path of self-improvement.

John Lasseter says this is Miyazaki's finest film, but then again he works in a cookie cutter factory.

I'm sure I'll watch it again, because there are plenty of bits and pieces that are lots of fun and visually impressive. I just wish I could have seen all of it!

Thanks to Nook's stupid pigeon brain, he chose Adamsvil's first Open Gate Night to renovate his store. I really hate how fast Nook goes through his store upgrades. At the least, the progression of Nook's Cranny to Nook-n-Go to Nookway to Nookington's should run over a couple months... not two weeks. His upgrades are triggered by how much you spend, which must not be much because I haven't been buying him out every day. I would have added a time frame requirement as well, like you have to have each Nook variant around for a full month before it accepts the money trigger. Everything else in Animal Crossing takes an eternity to happen, so it's weird that Nook barrels through his subplot in record time.

Therefore, I had the unfortunate task of telling all of my guests tonight that Nook was closed. Jerkstore.

The guestlist tonight included Eli, Cutter, Grant, Gregory, Marci and Mr. Snap. That's Cutter, me, Grant and Gregory in the picture. Cutter was building a fort in Adamsvil's little south-central island, hence all the holes you can see in the screenshot.

Marci brought me a Big Bro's Cap... better known as a Mario hat. She also unknowingly gave me one of her constellations! That must be another WiFi feature that just happens.

We did a lot of drop-picking, where somebody lets you temporarily borrow their gear. The way Animal Crossing works is that once you touch an item, it is unlocked in your Nook catalog so you can order additional copies of that item at any time. When somebody lets you touch their cap or shirt or whatever, they're essentially unlocking the item for you, free of charge. Through a twisted little exchange where everybody stripped down and dropped items everywhere for some quick drop-picking, I scored a Li'l Bro's Cap, which is obviously Luigi's hat. Then everybody gathered their own belongings and proceeded to goofing around.

EVERYONE has the shyness emote... how can that be?

Had a couple lag-outs, where somebody's WiFi breaks connection and grenades everyone's game. It forces a restart and your character reverts to the last save when it happens, so I was doing a lot of saving while I had a posse of folks running around. Around 9:30pm, Adamsvil crapped out so I went to see the towns of Grant (Anima) and Gregory (Tuck Bay) after the restart. Then a little later I opened my gate again to see if any West Coasters were about, which is when Mr. Snap showed up... only to find that stinking Nook was closed.

ADAMSVIL, ANIMAL CROSSING - Intelligent Design proponents in Pennsylvania have launched a new campaign to get the controversial theory "equal time" in the county's education system, this time targeting the Adamsvil Museum's fossil exhibit.

Members of the former Dover School Board, recently ousted by a meager majority of voters in the November election, have formed a private citizens' group in order to further their message. Having been forced to abandon the struggle in the Dover school system, the group has now turned their attentions to the Adamsvil Museum, a popular field trip location. The Museum became a target shortly after Joe, a relatively new resident in the community, unearthed and donated a fossil of the prehistoric human known colloquially as "Peking Man."

Blathers, the Museum's longtime manager and archivist, was reportedly ecstatic with the donation as almost all fossils of this type have been located near Beijing, China. That a Peking Man sample could be found in Adamsvil - and so near to the surface as to be uncovered with a simple garden shovel - was "astonishing," according to Blathers. "Hoo hoo! Adamsvil is fortunate that we have many eras of the fossil record available for our study," he continued. "Why, almost every day the Museum receives fossil donations for our exhibit! It's enough to make one quite giddy!"

Blathers's archival comments on "Peking Man" specifically addressed the connection "between ape and man," as he quaintly put it. "Peking Man" is commonly cited as one of the evolutionary steps that led to human beings as we exist today. Evolution, a scientific theory first investigated by Charles Darwin in the 1800s, suggests that organisms pass on certain traits from generation to generation that affect the overall population and may result in the emergence of new species. Intelligent Design, in contrast, states that organisms are too complex to have developed naturally over time and must have been created by a guiding, intelligent force. This "force" is often understood - but not necessarily named - to be God and critics of the theory say efforts like the Dover School Board's are simply an underhanded way to get religious messages into the classroom.

The Board has long been suspicious of the Adamsvil Museum's scientific bias, as the dinosaur wing plainly and matter-of-factly discusses Earth's age as measured in billions of years... not the 4000 to 8000 years usually quoted by theologians. The Board's spokeperson also pointed out that Blathers gained his fossil-identifying skills through a correspondence course and that he is therefore suspect in his scope and accuracy.

When asked for comment, local businessman Tom Nook expressed his outrage at the Dover School Board's "obvious agenda of narrow-minded, ham-fisted tyranny."

"Not only have they built their platform on the shallow ravings of the 'Left Behind' pop-theology set, and sought to demean a universally accepted and researched theory and by extension science in general, but they also want to cast aside one of our nation's most hallowed traditions: that the state shall raise no religion or philosophy above any other... because in America, all schools of thought are welcome, yes?" Nook said. "Quite frankly, I'm annoyed that these masters of loopholery didn't put their energies towards something blatantly abhorrent, like the Neo Nazi convention that blows through town every so often. Where were these 'guardians of common sense' back when York Mayor Charlie Robertson was getting off scot-free in the Race Riot case? If you're going to attack the Constitution, you might as well pick on something that everybody already hates, like the free speech and assembly of bigots, instead of parading against the sum knowledge of our world's most learned men and women. Talk about the emperor having no clothes!"

Dora, an amateur gardener browsing the Nook-N-Go for new seed packets, added "And in the end, it's not really about making sure kids have equal access to lots of different theories, is it? It's just that the one theory they like - and let's call it creationism because that's what it is, you don't see them out them championing any Hindu theories about the world being balanced on the backs of elephants, do you? - it's that the teaching of evolution just cuts their beliefs right off at the knees. They've probably spent their entire life gritting their teeth because their kids learned one thing on Sunday and then an entirely different thing Monday through Friday! This is just a childish, mean-spirited attempt to change the rules of a game that they aren't even smart enough to play. Squeaky!"

"And besides," Nook continued, "It's not like Blathers couldn't include a religious studies exhibit someday. Just separate from the fossil wing. Although I hear he's pretty strapped for funding since that silly telescope went in, not to mention the coffee bar. And if that's not good enough, there's always, for crying out loud, the six billion private schools all over the state, you see? Where does the Dover School Board get off acting like they're the ones with their backs to the wall? Two thousand years of oppression says otherwise!"

At the moment, however, Blathers has no plans to expand the Adamsvil Museum, and says the actions of the Dover School Board are not of great concern. "We are, ah, woefully underdeveloped at the moment, with a desperate need to complete the exhibits we do have, let alone adding new ones," he stated. "The fault seems to lie in the fact that fishing lures always float south while the fish always float north, and that there is no longer any way to tiptoe and 'hold' the bug net in place high in the air so as to get the drop on an errant insect! Nasty creatures, I say! Wot wot!"

As I mentioned last time, I've been getting into seeing how I can get ACWW to pimp my website. So this morning I thought I'd try some more custom patterns to advertise the various goings-on at fourhman.com. First up: Fatal Frame: the Card Game. I chose one of my favorite shots from the game, a big frightened closeup of Mio, and got to work.

I first heard about this waaaaay back on IGN's Animal Crossing board... when some guy posted a couple of great screenshots of his own picture used as an in-game pattern. I was annoyed I hadn't thought of it myself, since I'm in Photoshop all the damn time. The trick is to take an image and get Photoshop to pixelate it until it hits that 32x32 resolution and grayscale it so you can use AC's grayscale palette. I suppose you could have Photoshop approximate one of the other palettes, but sticking to grayscale is far easier. I believe that somebody eventually created a Windows app that does the same thing, plus that gave online AC user groups an easy way to share the pattern design ideas.

Here's what the image looked like in Photoshop. I got the image close enough to 32x32 to work, then set down some guiderules every 5x5 square. You need to do something like that to keep from going insane. Then I indexed the colors and opened up the Color Table so I could see the exact 16-pixel spread from white to black, with all the grays inbetween. Using the eyedropper, I clicked on a square on the image, and the Color Table showed me which of the 16 shades to use.

Back in Wild World, I started with a black background and stepped off white dots every five pixels. Then I filled in one 5x5 square at a time. I used the stylus to select colors (based on Photoshop's Color Table) and I used the d-pad and A button to lay them in, one dot at a time. For precision work like this, you have to use the d-pad. The stylus is great for freehand but it's not suited for pixel-accurate designs. The pixels are simply too small, unless you have a supremely steady hand.

The only problem I encountered was that the AC palette uses 15 shades and Photoshop was showing me 16. So I cheated on the white end of the spread, but it is impossible to tell in the finished product.

I put the finished pattern up in Mabel's shirt display, even though it makes a lousy shirt. However, now anyone who visits Adamsvil can grab a copy of it! (And if any wiseasses try to delete it, I'll always have the original in my own personal inventory.)

I placed it on the ground by the Town Gate, where I eventually may stick a TaleSpin image to balance out the promotional set. It looks really nice in person!

The whole project took about an hour and a half, most of that being the laborious process of clicking on the Mac and inserting the proper colors into ACWW. I can tell you I am now pretty damn sick of the French cafe music that plays while you're in the tailor shop.

Incidentally, Sable is now totally crushing on me. Maybe I'm working up to a discount or something.

I was never into the Narnia series. By the time I discovered it, I was already old enough to realize when I was being pandered to, and anything that held the theme of "small children escape from the adult world and accomplish great and amazing things" was very easily dismissed. I was the kind of kid that thought Jungle Book would have been a much better movie without Mowgli in it.

If I had been of age when Batman introduced "the sensational character find of 1940," Robin, I would have felt the same way. Oh, so because I'm a kid I'm supposed to care more about Batman because now he has a kid like me hanging around? Wonderful. I didn't like Robin until DC grew him up and took him away from Batman.

So I'm not interested at all in the new movie, and even less so now that the fundies have latched onto it as a propaganda tool. While it is true that C.S. Lewis specifically wrote the Narnia series as a Christian allegory, it is also true that he masked it well. Most kids reading those books don't make the connection at all, unless they are told to, and that it stands as just another low-end fantasy story. I've read a ton of low-end fantasy stories and I can say that most of them contain the same kind of themes that Lewis included in Narnia, but were not intended as hardcore religious peaching and were not co-opted by latter day conversionists trying to present them as such. It's just good storytelling: heroic figure sacrifices self for others. You can find that simple message in millions of stories, and only a fraction of those would have any religious connection. I think Goose from Top Gun is a Christ figure.

It is disgusting how Disney has actively persued the "Christian market" to promote the film, as they seek to duplicate Mel Gibson's Passion success. Not that I would expect anything altruistic from a major American corporation like Disney, just that the company hasn't been doing that well in recent years and they quite plainly backed a project with the style of Lord of the Rings but the potential bank account of Passion. That's what is sad. Disney hand-picked an entire religion to act as their safety net should the movie not perform. They won't do as well as Mel, simply because Narnia is too fantastical and that the most fundy of the fundies will still take umbrage to Lewis's childlike concept of "Christ does D&D." You can't get those people into a movie theater under any circumstances and Disney knows that.

No, Narnia is targeted towards the casual Christian, particularly the bubble-family who considers themselves to be out there against the wilds of temptation with naught but VeggieTales DVDs to safely entertain them. Like Lord of the Rings, Narnia has that visceral CG action but also can promise a good message. It's the blockbuster movie experience the kids want, wrapped around what parents can be assured is a nugget of wholesome Jesus teachings. You just have to walk into the theater accepting that Christ is a lion. Finally, a movie that makes it obvious enough! Although I'm sure Disney's church-specific press releases helped.

Which, of course, is ridiculous. If the books can hide the metaphor, the movies will do it doubly so. Or at least the movie will come off as no more overtly religious than Star Wars, LOTR, the Matrix or Harry Potter. It's there if you're looking for it - and definitely there if you're actively creating a discussion of it - but you could still see a good movie for a good movie without it. It's that hypocrisy that grinds me... the idea that somehow this stupid fantasy CG movie is better for kids/families/humanity than any other stupid fantasy CG movie. Most US movies are made by Christians, and lots of movies contain elements that could be inspired by the Christ story. Only because C.S. Lewis wrote a couple of rambling, blatant "I'm a humble Christian" books does this movie get the big seal of approval. If J.K. Rowling does the same thing in her golden years, we'll get a whole new reading of the Potter books, believe it.

By the way, Narnia's opening weekend take - $65 million - is just under the opening weekend take of another highly successful, critically lauded and universally praised feature film: Rush Hour 2.

Started Fatal Frame 3 tonight. Already severely creeped out.

I've had the game since the day it was released, but just didn't have the right time to start it. It came out too close to Trapt (stupid Tecmo!), so I had that locked up in the ol' PS2. I usually only like one game on deck per system. Trapt is now a thoroughly cooked goose, having been through the storyline several times... so now FF3 gets awarded primary status.

The Fatal Frame games are also a highly personal experience for me, which means I need to choose my time investment very carefully. I know that this game will haunt me - I want it to haunt me - so I like to finely tune the environment for maximum impact. To begin, the game is always played at night. It has to be so quiet that I can hear Annie snoring in the kitchen, and so dark that the shadows of the house around me almost seem as part of the game. When I quit for the night, I want to still be jumpy and sensitive. I also don't want any other serious gaming distractions, hence the recent polishing-up on Trapt and Gun. They are out of the way now. Playing Fatal Frame concurrent with something like GTA would be unthinkable. (Only Animal Crossing: Wild World, a game about as diametrically opposed to Fatal Frame as possible, remains... but AC exists on its own astral plane.)

If you'd ever want to seriously fuck me up, ring my phone at about 2am when I've been deep into Fatal Frame for a couple hours.

I'm at the first break, where you get to hang out in Rei's apartment a la the level interludes in Silent Hill 4. The apartment (right now, anyway) is a safe zone where you can talk to Miku, do some research, and look at Rei's pet cat. This is also when you start to see how FF3 intends to connect the dots between all the Fatal Frame games, which is going to be super-cool.

The cutscenes are beautiful. I hope there's a movie viewer that can be unlocked somehow.

One item to note is that the FF games like to include ghostly children. Kind of a series tradition, because the only thing more poignant than a tormented-and-confused spirit (Fatal Frame's stock and trade) is a child's tormented-and-confused spirit. So when Clark moans in his sleep in my shrouded Fatal Framed house, guess what he sounds like?

That ass Redd sold me a forged painting!

Tonight I saw Redd's tent for the first time. (It seems like every day you get one of the wanderers... so far I've had Lyle, Shrunk, Redd... and Blanca three times, more about her in a bit.) Redd's joint is now members only, so you have to figure out his password from one your villagers, which is a pain. Inside he had a desk lamp, a fire hydrant, and a famous painting... the one that looks like the Mona Lisa. I bought them all for about 1500, 2500 and 3500 bells. I don't know which, if any, are Redd exclusives, because I'm trying to avoid online spoilers and strategy guides for as long as I can. (Took about two months on the GameCube version. Frowny.)

So I'm kinda excited about the painting, because that's the first one I've seen and I'd like to donate it to the museum. But when I take it down to Blathers, he informs me that it is a fraud! Like, Shroud of Turin fraud! He refuses the donation. And now the painting's title in my inventory comes up "forged painting" instead of "famous painting." I decided to display the contraband in my house - the knuckleheads who live in Adamsvil won't know it's a fake - but I wonder if Nook would spot that it is phony and deny me any good money for selling it. I went back to Redd to bitch, but he wouldn't talk about it, the lying thief.

Speaking of money, I went to visit Biff in Megaton tonight and his tailor shop had a crown on sale for 1000000 bells. A million bells! Now that's status.

Somewhat relatedly, I'm making sure I talk to Sable every day, so I can crack her surly shell. In GCAC, she would eventually get to like you after weeks of brushing you off. Then she would talk about how her and Mabel's parents died and how tough they had it growing up. Maybe we'll get a similar soliloquy in ACWW.

Now, about Blanca. Instead of meeting her randomly on the train, Blanca now just shows up, presumably as randomly as Wendell, Redd and the rest. What's cool is that she always has a new face designed by somebody out there in the Wild World (unless the game is completely misleading me.) The faces I've seen certainly look like silly handmade work, anyway. Plus, she always names the person and town who made it, and it's names I've never heard before (and not obvious Nintendo-planted names like on the default patterns at the tailor shop.) She also recites a word that was given to her by that person. I've had her three times now, and each time I've sent her back off into the internet with a red and green Dred head icon and the word "www.fourhman.com" in her vocabulary. I'd love to know where that ends up.

And speaking of viral marketing, ACWW has a new form of mail called bottle mail. It is special mail that you jam into a bottle and set adrift into the sea on the south end of town. So I've been writing letters that say "To Some Stranger: www.fourhman.com <-- my ACWW diary and more! Email me when you receive this bottle! (MM/DD/YY) Joe@fourhman.com" I've done this a bunch of times as well. I'm not sure if the bottle transfers to anywhere across the planet like I think Blanca does, or if it only goes to players you meet during travelling or while in tag mode. I'd also like to know if opened bottle mail can be tossed back out, so that anybody who gets my bottle could read it and then send it on again. And I've made my letter signature "Joe@fourhman.com" so the animals I write will have my email on any letters they show to other players. However it all works, it would be fun to get RL email from strangers who have seen my website/address from inside Animal Crossing.

I was completely expecting this game to suck: WizKids' High Stakes Drifter. But ever since Doomtown, I've developed an affection for Wild West gaming of all types. So Mike and I checked it out. He expected it to suck as well.

It's a betting game, which is damn close to me calling it off entirely. A betting game? Who thinks that makes a fun CCG? You start the game with $100 in poker chips, which you use to buy various dudes facedown. Then you choose an attribute (there are three - smarts, skill and luck) and you issue a challenge. Everybody antes in, and then you go through betting rounds where you toss in chips based on what you know about your (secret) dude and what you think you know about your opponents' dudes, based on what they bet.

There's no story, no board gamey specific table zones, only three card types, and most of your cards are facedown for the entire game. So it's not the sort of game I like. At all.

Here's where I throw you the big switch and say "Wow, damn, I really liked it!"

But not really. I don't really like it, it's only okay. It's not the Next Great CCG, it's something I may buy a bunch of once it fails in the marketplace and the price drops. So right there that makes it better than that Inuyasha game.

Two problems appear as soon as you open the starter deck: the rulebook is a mess and the card template is awful.

The rulebook's issue is that it tries to be one of those "Quick Start Rules Followed by Advanced Rules" deals. You can always translate that into "Horribly Crippled Tutorial Rules Followed by Real Rules." Every time I've tried a Quick Start game, I end up having to un-learn a third of it because it gets counteracted by the real rules. I say, get straight to the real rules. If your game's real rules can't be understood relatively quickly, then go file that bankruptcy claim now. And learn how to write your rulebook.

The card artwork looks really nice at first. Every card has actual Olde Americana photography, which is impressive and cool. When the game uses a real person's name, you're looking at a picture of that real historical dead person. That's only slightly creepy.

But after sifting through the deck, you can see that all three card types look exactly the same. The only visual difference to denote a Dude versus a Gear versus a Fortune is an icon in the top left and a lightly colored band behind the card title. The card types ought to be more distinct, so new players get an easy start and experienced players can more quickly analyze their hand.

As somebody who does work like that on occasion, the identical card frames and Wild West photography just look lazy to me. Sure, it took some time to visit the National Archives and gather all that historical imagery... but is that beige texture deal the best they could do with it? I can see the Photoshop file now: one overlay with a million photograph layers under it. Those photos are a great resource, one they didn't have to pay a bunch of artists to create (it's common knowledge that one of the reasons behind the death of Doomtown is that the last few sets didn't even make enough money for the company to pay off the teams of card artists!) I just think something much more interesting could have been designed around that photography. That one template is nice, but it's not nice enough to grace every card in the game. My guess is that they were trying to maintain an "old card deck" look and feel, but I also guess that it took one guy about one weekend to create.

The gameplay. Like I said, it's all tied up in betting and bluffing. Since your active dude is facedown, nobody knows how big a number he has in the attribute you're playing. You make a dude more of a threat by giving him gear cards, but since these are also played facedown, they could all be junk gear that you're stacking just to make him look impressive. Also, the money that you use to pay for cards gets stacked on the cards themselves... and gets tossed into the ante pot as the betting unfolds. So you can dump a ton of money on crappy cards just to make them appear bigger. Although in practice, Mike and I tended to not bluff much at all and only build up dudes who were legitimately awesome in one of the three attributes. Which, of course, meant that when one of us would walk our mega-dude into the Town Square for a challenge, the other would simply pass out and avoid the conflict. Not very climactic, that.

We did one-on-one matches since I only bought a starter and two boosters. It's probably a much different game with more people - since more players would consider themselves contenders on any given attribute - but where are we to find anybody else who has invested in High Stakes Drifter? My comic store has had the same untouched starter display box out since the game debuted, and I'm the only guy who bought one. Maybe we'll sign up for a multiplayer demo at Origins.

Veteran Animal Crossing players know that nothing stays the same. "Everything changes," as the song goes.* So since my Nookstore is closed for remodeling today, I thought I'd snap some pics of Adamsvil in the early days. Maybe I should have sepia-toned them, that would have been funny.

So here's my modest home with my custom icon doormat. That's me in my current favorite gear: cow skull + SARS mask + poncho. That jerk Lyle is walking around; he ambushed me as soon as I walked out of my house this morning. He claims to sell insurance, but he wouldn't say exactly what the insurance means, and his name makes me think I shouldn't trust him. He initially asked for 6,000 bells, but he cut it down to 3,000 bells a minute later. Unfortunately for him, with Nook's closed for the day, I don't have any way to generate that kind of money. (I travelled to see John H. in Beantown, but even his Nook's was closed today!)

Lyle's dialogue is actually pretty darn amusing.

You just don't get much space in these starter homes. You do, however, get like 90 storage slots for your home once you find a dresser. These slots are shared for all dressers you own, sort of like the inventory boxes in classic Resident Evil. I wonder what happens to your stuff if you pick up or sell your last dresser?

I think the coolest bit of furniture I own is that Lucky Cat. Somebody in town gave that to me.

Do you like my Mario moustache? It's pretty swanky with that outback hat, I know. Want to wager there's a Mario cap in the game somewhere?

Here's a shot of Nook's Cranny, since tomorrow he'll have changed it into something else. Eventually, I'd like to see Nook merge with the tailor shop and make a mall. And where's the movie theater? I seem to recall the villagers begging for one back in the first game.

That's the triangle glasses and the witch's hat. WEASLEY IS OUR KING!

Here's my town map, in case you never visit. During the Kapp'n taxi ride, I told him that I liked shopping, so that's why my house is so close to Nook's. Not a bad position... Nook's south, town hall north, museum west. I also like having an island down by the river delta.

The map lists villagers according to when they moved in, so, as you can see, Dora, Blaire and Rod are my first three. On the GameCube, animals moved whenever you travelled to another town... thankfully that doesn't seem to be the case in Wild World, or I'd have an entire new population by now. The animals all have hobbies now as well, so maybe they stick around longer so you can indulge their personal interests better.

*The song being "Everything Changes" from the album "2BA Master, Songs from and Inspired by the World of Pokemon." If you listen with a critical ear, you can see how they use pokemon evolution as a death metaphor for kids. SPOILER.

I discovered three new cool things today about ACWW. Plus I had some fun using the game's online system.

1. I don't know what kind of creature Dr. Shrunk is supposed to be, but he reminds me of the Heffalumps from Winnie-the-Pooh. He's a random visitor, like Saharah or Wendell (how are we supposed to know when these folks are showing up?!) and he gives out emotions. Today, I received shyness.

What that means is that your character can perform the same silly visual emotion animations that the animals can do. I hope that you can eventually get some of the cooler ones, like the horwf-horwf-horwf laughter or the bit where the single leaf blows across their heads. Compared to emotions like that, blushing isn't that impressive.

2. Villagers will walk into your house. I was talking to Pinky, a recent addition to Adamsvil and she said "Hey, I'd like to see your interior decorating." I said "Sure," figuring she would cop out, as they did every time something like this came up in the first Animal Crossing. (Remember "Let's start a soccer team!" followed by "Gosh, I'm not really that good at sports..." thus dashing all hopes of a surprise soccer minigame.) But instead, Pinky asked for a specific time she can come over and the screen changed to an interactive clock! So I told her to come over in an hour, she would refuse anything sooner than that.

And in an hour, there was a knock on the door and Pinky walked in. (I made sure I was in my house at the time.) She talked about how much she liked the place and then meandered about aimlessly. It got awkward after a couple minutes. I was guessing she would give me something awesome, a rare item, so I was waiting for something to happen. Nothing did, so I left and she got pissed. Still not sure if I bungled that one or not.

3. You can send letters to yourself in the future. Weird. On your address list, it says "future self" and when you send that letter, the Post Office staff asks when you would like that letter to be delivered. I chose a year from now. So next December, I'm going to get a dopey letter from me. I even attached the cheapest seashell I could find.

Multiplayer went better than I thought. I exchanged friend codes and set up a time with two other guys, Mr. Snap and Johnny. Once you and your friend(s) have registered each other, then the systems look for each other's availability online. The only snag is that you should arrange who is hosting, because it's two different menu options to "visit elsewhere" or "allow visitors here." If you want to travel out of your town, Copper opens up a window that I assume is constantly refreshing as it looks for open towns. While this is going on, you can't do anything else. However, if you want people to visit your town, you just tell Copper to throw open the gate. This does not freeze you in place, so you're able to continue whatever you were doing. When a friend sees your open gate (they have to be in waiting-to-travel mode), they can enter your town and you get a happy warning when they walk in.

I first travelled to Johnny's village, Pickles, where I took a handful of pears and sent some letters to a couple of his villagers. Then I went home and opened my gate, and Johnny and Snap soon joined me. There was general amiable chatting, some oohs and aahs over our clothing and items, and they managed to buy most of Nook's (and the Able Sisters') available wares.

I noticed some slowdown (!) as all three of us ran around, particularly on the tool actions like digging or picking something up. Snap warned me that the online mode can sometimes lag out and force a shutdown, so it's wise for the host to save often. And sure enough, a couple minutes after I saved, we hit a bad lag patch and the fun was ended. Anything that happened after my save was lost, so hopefully the guys had grabbed their Adamsvil Home-Grown Oranges in time! ACWW doesn't seem to want to penalize you for a non-saved shutdown in the way that the GCN version did, although Mr. Resetti does appear on the "Oh crap you lagged out to all hell" bluescreen.

So I'm officially starting a players' group. I'm going to open my gate every Thursday around 8pm EST, and all mutual friends are welcome. Right now, nobody has much to do, but once people start figuring out what furniture they're looking for, it should be more interesting. Since you can potentially hook up with a ton of fellow players, I think the average gamer has a shot at completing the catalog this time. Plus we could use it to arrange Mario Kart matches.

"But you know what the funniest thing about Animal Crossing: Wild World is?"

"What?"

"It's the little differences. A lotta the same junk we got in the GameCube version, they got in Wild World, but there it's a little different."

"Examples?"

"Well, in Wild World, you buy your shirts at Able Sisters'. And I don't mean the borrow/make-a-pattern stuff, I mean they sell shirts and Nook doesn't. In Wild World, you can even buy headgear, like hats and glasses. Also, you know how you identify fossils in Wild World?"

"They don't have the Farway Museum?"

"No, it's not in your mail list, they wouldn't know what the Farway Museum is."

"So how do you do it?"

"Blathers can identify them himself. Took a course."

"Blathers took a course. What about the fish list?"

"Lots more fish to catch. Last night I caught eight new ones in a row, no repeats."

"What about the bugs?"

"I dunno, Nook hasn't sold a bug net yet. But you know what Kapp'n does instead of running the boat to your Game Boy island?"

"What?"

"Drives a cab."

"Dang!"

"I seen 'im do it. He drives you into your town and does the initial player setup instead of Rover."

In the day-and-a-half that I've had ACWW, I really haven't done all that much. Which is classic Animal Crossing; you can't do much at once. I've done the Nook tutorial chores, bought a fishing rod and a shovel, experimented with the new ways to use patterns, found a handful of items old and new, and tore down Tortimer's flag and turned it into a hat. That last item is about as disrespectful as you can get.

I'm a little iffy on stylus control. It's great for inventory and menu uses and it greatly speeds up all the text conversations... but it's kinda gimpy in the exterior view. Through clicking and dragging, you can pick up stuff on the forest floor, shake trees, talk to villagers... but it's more likely you'll just walk in place or trigger your tool accidentally. And you definitely don't want to use the stylus if you intend to fish, because it's easier to run under stylus control and we all know what running does to nearby fishies. Thankfully, the game lets you use both stylus and buttons simultaneously, so it's no big options-setting deal if you want to switch around.

Of course I had Copper assign me a friend code:

While I was there, I checked in with Booker's lost and found (and got a pack of SMB3 Paper!) With no police station, you don't have the big tables full of stuff to browse. I guess the new lost and found is hidden in Booker's pocket. Similarly, there's no junkyard, so there goes the usual Animal Crossing career path of dumpster diver.

I'm willing to entertain all visitors who are interested, so send me your friend codes or post them to the message board. Both parties (you and me) have to enter the codes in ahead of time before we can visit each other's towns. My town (Adamsvil) has oranges as the native fruit, so stop on by to ward off the scurvy.

I'm standing in line at EB at the local mall at 1:30pm. There are three of us there and only one clerk. It's the manager and she knows her stuff, so I don't mind the short wait. Better than waiting in line because one of the goths who usually mans the register is making weekend plans with the Hot Topic staff across the hall.

In front of me is a 18-25 year old male, dressed in what I would consider the Winter Thug Collection. Wool hat, big puffy jacket. All in dark colors. Stocky dude, mumbles his way through his order.

Behind me is a picture-perfect modern yuppie. Long black overcoat, coiffed hair. Slacks. Probably on a late lunch, or maybe between sales calls.

Then there's me. Messy hair, light fleece jacket, perennially in Casual Friday jeans.

All three of us asked for Animal Crossing: Wild World.

More to come.

The teaser for X3 is out, and I'm going to run a little mini-review here as I did with the teaser trailer for Fantastic Four.

That initial FF trailer was the big sucky, although it did do a great job of lowering my expectations enough that I actually enjoyed the movie. Man, what a terrible trailer.

The X3 teaser is not so terrible, but still offers plenty to get snarky about.

This is Item One in the much-disputed Halle Berry X3 Contract: Halle walks in front of all other cast members at all times.

So, out of all the major X-Men as yet unseen in film, can you name one that has a more ridiculous looking mutant power? We comics fans have been swallowing our disbelief on Angel for over 40 years now. I don't know who the actor is portraying Richie Rich here, but in the trailer's quick closeups he looks like that Kirk the Jerk guy from Judd Hirsch's "Dear John" sitcom.

What do you know. Something big gets thrown at the camera.

Ladies and gentlemen, the New Brotherhood. And Juggernaut doesn't look half bad, although I hope they ignore the "Charles Xavier's half-brother" bit. It's another silly soap opera coinkidink moment and I still have nightmares from that X-Men cartoon with Juggy going "Dear BROTHER" all the time. I don't see the Blob in this shot. That will probably be fine.

This li'l chunk o' drama will probably be retouched for the actual film, because Cyclops's fillings are distractingly obvious.

Speaking of distractingly obvious. Dark Phoenix wears short shorts when in the X-Infirmary.

If you have a problem... if no one else can help... and if you can find them... maybe you can hire: The X-Team.

Judging from the nonsense Halle Berry put us all through in the Catwoman movie, I'm wondering if she didn't get her claws a little too deep into modifying the X3 effects script. Because what we see here is Storm doing a terrible spinning cyclone move to whisk Wolverine out of danger (which, as usual, consists of something big being thrown at him.)

You know what I see when I look at this image? From left to right: Somebody who isn't Beast, Beast, Somebody who isn't Beast, Somebody who isn't Beast, Somebody who isn't Beast, Somebody who isn't Beast.

I'll tell you, that right there is why I'm going to see this movie. Frasier as the Beast. I hope the casting office didn't have to work too hard on that day.

I stopped caring about Anna Paquin about thirty minutes into the first movie. They took an awesome character, a fanboy favorite, a superhot megastar of the team... and turned her into a whiny teen goth with all of Kitty Pryde's plot beats. Awful.

There's the adamantium-is-metal trick again. When they did that in the comics, the entire fan world let out a collective "Duh." I completely forget: did they do this bit onscreen already? I'll have to ask the guys at work.

Here's that stupid tornado move again. Halle's contract must be ironclad, because there's no reason to showboat this embarrassment twice in the same trailer.

OK, seriously. I am totally over everybody milking the Fastball Special. I know I hoped for it in the last movie, but I am older and wiser now. It's been animated, it's been in card games, it's been in tabletop games, it's been in video games. It's done. I am rolling my eyes right the hell now.

I do like that logo. X4 will instead be the solo Wolverine movie and this logo sets us up for an instant visual connection when that movie hits.

Ultimate Fantastic Four is a title on the bubble. I'm really closing to dropping it. The recent zombies storyline did nothing for me and now we're in the middle of introducing Ultimate Namor, who, shocker, may not actually be identical to Regular Namor.

Part of the problem right now is Greg Land's art, which is stunningly good. It's far too good for this sort of work, which sounds like a stupid "comics-is-lower-art" type of condemnation. The issue is that, because of his soft, photo-realistic style, the characters never seem to interact on the page. Everybody looks like he used an issue of Cosmo for photo reference. They're all pin-ups. Land is an excellent pin-up artist, but not a convincing sequential art artist. His characters are all impossibly beautiful (even Reed!), so beautiful that you get lost in a sea of good-looking faces that reduces down to visual static. Drawing gorgeous faces all the time makes it difficult to portray a wide variety of expressions, which is where Land's skill truly falls short in a comic format. His characters look great when all they have to do is pose for a cover. For comparision, Alex Ross paints in a photo-realistic style using plenty of live human references, but he can pull off the subtle characterization that Land lacks. Not that I'm putting Ross on a pedestal, because I think that guy is criminally over-exposed these days. All things being equal, I'm glad to have two such gifted artists working full time for "our side," rather than doing commercial art hackwork in a greeting card chopshop somewhere.

But take a look at Dr. Storm, supposedly Sue and Johnny's long lost mother. Does she look old enough to have raised (partially) the two children flanking her? More importantly, do Sue and Johnny look like children if we accept the MILF there as the age/looks ratio baseline? To further dissociate the reader's reality from the comic's reality, Young WB Namor refers to Dr. Storm as a "wrinkled old trout." Not on this artist's watch, she isn't.

My other problem with Ultimate FF is that it's not different enough from Boring Old Marvel U. Now, I don't mind that the entire title has been an excuse to "update" the entire FF pantheon without treading on the sacred continuity of the original series, since that one is still being separately published. (Which is, more or less, the mantra of the entire Ultimate Marvel line... great for new readers and all that.) It's not like I particularly care about the Ultimate Universe; I'm not following any other Ultimate book. I just like the Fantastic Four and it is kinda cool to revisit the classic Kirby/Lee concepts. Are all the Ultimate titles just an ongoing retread of 40-year-old storylines hipified for OC fans?

The original concept of the Ultimate FF was to turn them into Power Pack. IE, they're all considerably younger than the "real" Four. And a lot of how they set up the title in the early issues makes a lot of sense... as compared to all the junk science of the 1960s FF origin with space planes and cosmic rays. But, bottom line, the only character changed for Ultimate purposes was Reed. You could take artwork of Ben, Johnny or Sue from any issue of UFF, place it side-by-side against art from regular FF or Marvel Knights 4 (the two canon FF titles) and nobody would know the difference. Because, as shown currently by Greg Land, those kids is damn hot. He's not entirely to blame, because the supposedly older versions running around in the other books are always drawn damn hot as well, especially Sue, as is the lot of female characters in comic books. Doesn't matter how many children she has or how many wedding anniversaries she and Reed celebrate, Sue will remain untouchably hot.

But Reed? Ultimate Reed is a geeky, gawky teen, glasses and all. And unlike the other three, he is definitely drawn to look different from classic Reed. They are, visually at least, two distinct characters. I'm sure this was done to try to make Reed Richards interesting... because as writer Peter David astutely noted, no one ever likes Reed.

I'm equally as sure that when UFF was born, the book was under strict orders to keep the Thing looking like the Thing. When it started, the big Fantastic Four movie was well underway, and today's comics are very keen to avoid confusion between characters and their licensed, merchandised and adapted counterparts. Why do you suppose DC re-launched the Titans book with almost exactly the same team as the Teen Titans cartoon?

One thing is keeping me on Ultimate FF: Galactus. They're coming around to doing an Ultimate Galactus story very soon and I have to assume that UFF will be a big part in it.