I strung up the outdoor Christmas lights, but if you wanted to hear about boring-ass slice-of-life e/n crap, you're at the wrong weblog. Once the decorating was complete, I spent the afternoon/evening playing Rock Band and Pokemon Snap. Being home alone is a golden opportunity to play drums and really turn up the volume. I played through about 2/3rds of the Easy solo campaign. I'm getting high-90s every time, but then, again, it's Easy.

Then on to Snap, which I dutifully downloaded Monday night. I also grabbed the Photo Channel 1.1 update because I wanted to have one of my photos as the channel icon. I know there was a lot of teeth-gnashing about 1.1 removing the Photo Channel's ability to play MP3s (replacing with AAC files), but who the hell cares about the ability to play MP3s in the Photo Channel? And guess what, I changed my iTunes over to AAC as the default format long ago.

Got my PKMN Photographer card. I promise to not lose it.

By the way, John O'Hurley from Seinfeld, Family Feud and Dancing With The Stars is so completely Professor Oak. They even talk the same.

How much longer do we have to wait before unjustified nostalgia sets in and we get a kickass live-action/CG Pokemon movie like Transformers or Speed Racer?

So the big enhancement for this Wii VC edition of Pokemon Snap is the ability to save your photos to the Wii, to be mailed out for your friends. Presumably to limit friends spamming friends, you can only save one such photo per day. That pretty much sucks. Although I think I see their point; I probably would have sent out a dozen photos to everyone I know by now otherwise.

It would have been great if Nintendo had re-jiggered Snap to use the Remote as your camera control. Seems like a natural fit. Hopefully a million billion Wii owners will download Snap and Nintendo will get off their money-butt and craft a proper sequel for Wii.

I have some kind of sick determination to see how close I can get to an Electrode. I can't not take photos like this.

And of course, a Meowth getting its criminal ass kicked by a pair of Pidgeys.

After I unlocked the ability to throw apples, I put Clark in charge of tossing food to the pokemon. He really enjoyed it and proceeded to chuck them in every direction, often knocking various critters on the head. Of course, the showstopper as far as apple-throwing goes is the Charmander plateau in the volcano level. That right there is constant entertainment. I'm sure I'll post more Snap pics soon.