Back in March, I did two entries on our basement renovation. I'm finally ready to post some pictures of the finished product!

That's the view from the landing at the bottom of the steps. Future Big Ass TV area is currently filled with a Small Ass TV and an awkward shelf of PS2 / GameCube / DS games. The silver slimline PS2 is hooked up as a DVD player. That tube TV there is old enough that it doesn't even have RCA inputs. I had to dig up one of my old RF connectors. One of my.

It happened last year, and I had no doubt it would happen again.

The Club Nintendo Platinum.

Tony got it this year as well, which means he was also a buyin' fool.

This is only the second year Nintendo has offered the Club, even though you can see on my card that I've been a member since the days when Mario Sunshine was considered a good game. Heck, back then, we only had four Mario Party games!

You get 50 points for each Wii game and 30 points for each DS game, so it's not like it's a great feat to reach the minimum 600 points required for Platinum status for the year. Of course, the point system doesn't apply to absolutely every single Wii/DS game out there; it's just first-party stuff (Nintendo: Capcom and Ubisoft and EA say "Hey.") You also get points for WiiWare/DSiWare stuff and for completing surveys. Even free things like Photo Dojo and Flipnote Studio can get you points.

Arrival of the ginyu force - New Dub (YouTube)
A little different from the original, but still ridiculous. The best part is the cut to Frieza at the end, doing the ol' Unimpressed Wind-Blowing Anime Symbolism thing.

The Good and the Bad Regarding AT&T's New Data Plans (Daring Fireball)
Nice outlay of the new AT&T plans. Conceptually, the idea of limited data totally sucks, and nobody trusts AT&T to do anything other than find ways to pump their bottom line, but Gruber's bulleted list doesn't make it sound that bad.

ABC has a medium on staff (Skepticblog)
The comment section devolves into an argument about ABC the Network vs. ABC the Local Affiliate.

Cartoon Network recently launched a new logo, although the evolution is nicely subtle so it may take a few commercial breaks before you notice:

Here's what has gone before:

As you can tell, even though they're sticking with a nice, simple CN acronym, the network still has to confront the problem of defining what it means. Nobody calls the channel "C. N." and nobody ever has. So the subtitle text kinda has to remain... even though other acronym networks do not have the problem (MTV just lost their own "Music Television" subtitle, despite the channel being uber-commonly known as M. T. V. for decades.)

Clark and I finished the original fourteen Oz books a few weeks back, so I'm awfully behind on keeping you updated. Since then we've finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (The movie made me forget: Charlie never did anything bad on the tour.) And now we're halfway through the first Harry Potter book.

As promised, let's get to what has to be the weirdest corner Baum ever wrote himself into. BOOK 12!

The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918)

One of the key utopian ingredients to Baum's Oz is that nobody ever dies. Seems pretty basic for a fairy tale universe designed as adventurous comfort for children at the turn of the last century. Baum, however, didn't really get into that notion until several books in. After he had already established the Tin Woodman's origin.

Multiple times, Baum points out that Ozites can't be killed (this protection does not apply to immigrants such as Dorothy or the Wizard) but they can be cut into little pieces and every one of those little pieces would still be alive. Characters typically refer to this as being "destroyed," and this loophole leads Baum into a very gross bit of retconning for the Woodman.

Because we already know that he became tin after his enchanted axe started cutting parts of his body off. So now, many books later, Baum has been telling us that such parts would remain alive... so if, eventually, Nick Chopper became wholly of tin, what became of his castoff meat bits? In "Tin Woodman," Baum directly tackles that philosophical paradox.

Rock Band 3 - Exclusive First Look! (YouTube)
Wow. This one is definitely coming our way. This video shows off the piano gameplay. Check the fonts in the onscreen demo; no way that is final font usage.

Wonder of Wonders: The Lasso is Infinitely Elastic, The Stories Don't Have to be Too (Comics Should Be Good)
I often think it would be nice to have more shorter stories in comics, because you do sort of forget discrete events when everything melds into one gigantic story. We've been making comics more like TV for decades, but has it helped get more people into buying them?

GEOFF JOHNS AND HANK KANALZ ON LAST NIGHT'S FRINGE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE COVERS (DCU Source)
Nice propsmanship. The Fringe TV show went to an alternate universe where even the DC Comics were different.

It's not the kind of thing anyone would enjoy discussing, but I feel if I don't address it, I'm going to feel terribly stupid when I resume posting obnoxious entries about video games and cartoon logos next week.

We had to cancel our second adoption. The little girl we were matched with developed serious medical issues. It's nothing that was anticipated. It just happened.

I'd rather not talk about it, sure. I'd rather it all go away. I'd rather it have never happened and right now we would be a family of four getting to know each other on these hot summer days.

Our lives just changed, again. We have been working towards bringing this baby into our family for over eight months. We rearranged the house, made plans for the future, got Clark good and excited about being a big brother. Now that all has to change.

It is not a death, but we are in mourning. We know our pain will fade, and new joys will eventually rise, but right now it's a medley of crashed expectations and tidal emotions. We have to tell people and face their reactions, re-living the disappointment and shock and emotion every single time. Keeping friends and family informed in the year 2010 means posting to Facebook and Twitter, clawing through email, and updating a weblog. But that's life, and I believe that Social Media 3.X has to reflect the good and the bad, or it is not genuine. It can't all be about FarmVille.

Because here's what's going to happen. Clark and I are going to the Philadelphia Comic Con tomorrow. We planned this weeks ago and we're not going to spend the weekend looking at a empty kid's room and wishing things didn't work out the way they did. Tomorrow Clark gets to ride a train and see people in ridiculous costumes and get free stuff and hopefully have a great time doing something special. He deserves it.

Yes, you heard me correctly. Red Dead Redemption is the first game I can think of that bothers to render out ants.

It was at the beginning of one of the raid missions, maybe the raid on Fort Mercer? I forget. Anyway, I was standing by an archway and noticed some movement by my feet. I looked down and noticed ants crawling around the ground and the base of the wall. It even looked like the had AI. Like, they were crawling quasi-intelligently around the environment.

Avert your eyes at this screenshot... the in-game newspapers are a chance for Rockstar to exercise those familiar GTA social parody muscles.

I've encountered some bugs of a different type, the kind of thing that the internet has already documented to exhaustion. Like floating corpses and flying deer. Last night when I walked past the Blackjack table in Blackwater, the players were all sitting two feet away from the table. Looks like there's some things Rockstar just can't fix.

No, it was me.

And it wasn't a mess, it was cleaning.

I finally got around to organizing several boxes worth of magazines. Mostly solid runs of Nintendo Power, EGM and OPM... but also Wrapped in Plastic, Mental Floss and The Duelist.

I ended up with one box of mags to trash/recycle, including half a year's worth of Maximum PC. Geez, in the year 2000, what in the hell was I getting out of reading Maximum PC? Every issue cover features something stupid like heat sinks and USB port types.

How do you hold a comic book convention in a major US market and not get DC or Marvel to attend?

What the hell, man? Why were there no corporate panels at Wizard World / Philadelphia Comic Con? No DC Nation, no Cup o' Joe with Marvel. Who at Wizard pissed everybody off?

What kind of comic book show claims the Microsoft Kin as a major sponsor?

So that was the big sucky moment of last weekend's con, realizing that there would be no panels and the entire show was pretty much a vendor hall and the chance to talk to washed-up wrestlers.

Typical cosplay mash-up. Although Stormtroopers were a dime a dozen, that group of Batman villains was outstanding. They could not walk from one booth to the next without getting stopped and asked to pose.

Kirby's Epic Yarn Trailer (YouTube)
Man, I kinda don't care about Kirby... but this looks fantastic. Great art direction makes all the difference. If this was typically video gamey, like New Super Mario Bros Wii or Donkey Kong Country Returns, I wouldn't even give it a second pass.

More Looney Tunes character designs (Cartoon Brew)
Wow. These slightly redesigned Looney Tunes makes me wonder if Warners can't finally pull off a revamp.

Liveblogging The Karate Kid Remake With Jen's Hardass Asian Mama (Disgrasian)
Hilarious summary of a movie we all knew would be terrible. RELATED OPINION: The original movie was terrible as well.

I found this "Adventures with the DC Super Heroes" magazine as I was going through some boxes of old mags. It's from 2000 and was produced as a free giveaway if you bought two gallons of milk. Inside, among all the typical kids mag mazes and dorky articles, is two pages of terribly unfunny comic strips. Well, unfunny in the way that 90% of all newspaper comic strips are unfunny. I don't blame writer Chris Duffy and artist John Dulaney. Much.

That's one of six. You probably can't wait to see the next one.

I made it all the way through the Career mode in ModNation Racers. Although MNR still has that cheap kind of opponent AI that makes Mario Kart so frustrating at times, I believe ModNation is substantially easier. Even in the last few levels, I only needed a stab or two to get to know the track and place in the top three. On the very last level, you HAVE to come in first, but even that was not a massive deal. I can't help comparing that the to Mario Kart's Rainbow Road, which usually requires an hour of starts and restarts for me to get through it.

ModNation Racers is definitely the only kart racer I've played that puts together a good run at being on Mario Kart's par. I like the turbo system better, having no love for Mario Kart's asinine left-right rocker method for building up a charge. The MNR sideswipe move is great, and of course the creation tools continues to drive home the point that Nintendo has done jack shit with the Kart franchise in a decade.

The LittleBigPlanet world in PlayStation Home is pretty cool. A little cramped, but packed with highly recognizable LBP elements.

Kind of a shame that it is overrun with charmless, vacant-eyed Home avatars.

It's E3 in Bizarro Land! I think you could take the bulk of Nintendo's yucky Wii Fit / Wii Music E3s, change all the nouns, and you'd have half of Microsoft's 360 Kinect show.

Is Microsoft trying to build an empire on brand names that begin with "kin"? I'm sure somebody in marketing is nuts with glee over that.

There was a clip at the beginning of the Sony conference with Kevin Butler saying "Who wants to pretend their finger is a gun? What is this, third grade? Pew, pew, pew." And then he laughs dismissively under his breath. Not that PlayStation Move is much better... but at least they're already actually talking about games that use Move (even tossed a bone to the shooter crowd with 3D Move-enabled Killzone 3), and not just a bunch of Wii rehashes. Come on: a kart racer that you play using your hips? Are you fucking kidding me? That is going to be substantially worse than Wii Wheel Mario Kart.

Batman: The Brave and The Bold Wii Gameplay Ftg (E3 2010) (YouTube)
Every sign says this game will be well-produced goofy fun. Just like the cartoon!

Disney, These Are Amazing Controllers (Kotaku)
Nice Epic Mickey paintbrush controller! I can't believe it's taken this long for game-specific, high quality Wii controllers to show up.

DC Comics Launches Digital Publishing (DC Comics Source)
I am keeping my eye on this, for sure. Although I am not sold on the digital version costing the same as the paper version for new comics, I can see picking up older titles a discount. And just maybe, that could lead to me trying out me stuff. I'm sure I won't fully embrace it until I get an iPad, because the iPhone screen readability is sort of silly.

I found this "Adventures with the DC Super Heroes" magazine as I was going through some boxes of old mags. It's from 2000 and was produced as a free giveaway if you bought two gallons of milk. Inside, among all the typical kids mag mazes and dorky articles, is two pages of terribly unfunny comic strips. Well, unfunny in the way that 90% of all newspaper comic strips are unfunny. I don't blame writer Chris Duffy and artist John Dulaney. Much.

That's two of six. You probably can't wait to see the next one.

Last week I started playing AR Monster on iPhone. It's a dead-simple RPG by our old pals at Hudson Soft. It's currently free, which is why I got it.

The gimmick is that the game uses the GPS and camera to make the monsters appear all around you.

 

As you move the camera around, the monsters flit around, kind of half-assedly tracking along with the view. So if a monster is generally located north of you, it will float in that zone even as you pan the camera. I've seen monsters suddenly shoot across the floor, but I'm never sure if that's an intentional "animation" or if it's just a result of the camera tracking skitzing out.

I mean, wow.