I got caught on the freeway during a hailstorm. I got a broken windshield, broken turn signal lens and multiple dents. It sucked. :(

I bought Brain Age for the DS the other day and have been “exercising” my mind. It’s really fun, although my brain age was rated at 70yrs old! Gotta get exercising!

I thought this looked like a neat game when I saw the previews of the Japanese version. I didn’t think it would ever come to the US, but, just like Electroplankton, they are porting a lot of cool games for the US market. The DS (and Nintendo in general) is a great platform because they seem to encourage really original ideas for games.

Firefox’s tabs made me chuckle today with this fine example of concatenation. Another good one that I remember is the Puffy AmiYumi song “Teen Titans Theme”, which on my mp3 deck in my car concatenated the title right in the middle… you can guess what it said.

I finally got to watch The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe the other day. Actually, I haven’t finished watching it because I found it so boring. The first time I sat down to watch it was with my brother and my mom, who were visiting from California. I fell asleep about half an hour into it. Then last night I was watching it on my iPod and turned it off and watched some video podcasts instead. 

After reading some of my friends’ reviews of the movie, I was fully expecting to be totally into it, especially because I read the books when I was a kid and really enjoyed them. But the movie is not at all compelling or interesting to me. It starts off ok, but the kids, with the exception of Lucy, are so whiney that I just could not get any kind of good feelings towards them, especially Peter. I just wanted to punch him. Plus their reactions to everything that is going on seems so unrealistic. Sure, the world of Narnia is not very realistic, but don’t you think that you would be at least a little suprised at talking animals and frickin’ centaurs? I mean, the situations are so incredibly fantastic, but the kids don’t really think much of it. And the kids are instant royalty? Don’t you think you would freak out a little bit about that?

Also, the whole scenario seems to be just readymade, and things are already in place with not much backstory. Aslan’s army is waiting, the prophecy is coming true, etc. I guess I contrast it with Lord of the Rings, where the backstory is very extensive, maybe a bit too extensive. This comparison might not be so valid, though, since the audience is very different. I don’t know… maybe the C.S. Lewis books shed more light on this and I need to re-read them, and then watch the movie.

I wish there was more background into the characters. So far, the characters are “just there” and there is no indication that we will get some kind of information as to their histories and motives. There’s a witch, and she’s bad. There’s a lion, and he’s good. There are four kids who have no idea what’s going on. It seems like there could have been a lot more dialog between the kids to explain their feelings and motivations and make them more interesting.

A couple parts have left me shaking my head. First, the whole Santa Claus scene was just bizarre. How often do you get a cameo by St. Nick? And then the “fight scene” between Peter and the wolf (like that?) was so anticlimatic, I turned off the movie at that point. There was some good build-up to it, with some verbal posturing and Aslan saying that the fight was Peter’s task. It seemed like it was a significant moment where Peter would become a man or King or something epic and it would get your blood pumping and adrenaline flowing. I think of scenes like when the Riders of Rohan charged into battle outside of Gondor, or when Eowyn fought the Nazgul king. But in Narnia, there was no such fight. Peter held out his sword, the wolf jumped on it, duel over.

I find myself comparing the movie to the Harry Potter movies, which I find very interesting and fun. The first movie was a bit blah, but with each sequel, things get more and more interesting. The characters have interesting facets to them, the most obvious is Harry’s background and the mystery surrounding his relationship to Voldemort. But also Hermione’s mudblood complex, the Weasley family dynamics, Snape’s evil background, etc. I am hoping that we get to know more of the Narnia kids’ characters in coming films. I really want to like the movie, honest!

I guess I will try watching the rest of the movie, but I am so uninterested in it at this point, it seems like I am just watching it to get it out of the way. So, do I need to read the books again first? To be honest, I was rather underwhelmed with the first Harry Potter film when I saw it, and it wasn’t until Bay took interest in it and I saw the second and third movie that I really became hooked. I guess I just need to give Narnia a chance!

First I stayed up too late on the computer, ripping CD’s and adding album art to old songs (I wish iTunes would automatically do that like MusicMatch does), and then when I finally did go to bed, I finished watching ”Undercover Brother”, then after that I watched some movie trailers, some of G4’s X-Play and then when I was about to watch a little Arrested Development I glanced at the clock and it was 3am… which means I got two hours and forty-five minutes of rest last night. I’m tired. I also blame my run-on sentence on this lack of sleep.

I was listening to Derek Lowe getting shelled by the Braves batters yesterday and thinking that this is going to be a long season. But then when I saw this photo today at Yahoo! Sports, I realized that his poor pitching performance can be blamed on him wearing pants that are four or five sizes to large.

[AP Photo/Francis Specker]

Bay is taking the Gigglebytes computer class at his school. The other day he said that RAM is the one who always forgets, and ROM is the one who always remembers. Amazing! He then showed me the pictures of RAM and ROM, which were two little cartoon characters that look like computer chips.