Sven and I decided to go camp out at our neighborhood Target to purchase Wiis…or does it not have a plural…we’ll say Wii. Two Wii. Anyway, I think that the entertainment provided by the system was definitely worth the several hours of freezing my ass off on the concrete waiting in line to get it.

So this isn’t going to be a review of the Wii, since there are plenty of those out there already and this isn’t a game review site. I will however strongly endorse said Wii. There are a lot of people who will complain that the Wii-mote is just a clever gimmick to get people to play and that it won’t really catch on in the long run. With the way everyone I’ve demoed the Wii to, I’d say that the Wii-mote is an excellent attention getter. And as my English teachers in every level of education relentlessly pounded into my head for 16 years, attention getters are the key to getting someone to delve deeper into a body of work. The Wii-mote does work superficially on that level, but when you finally get down to using it you’ll find it to be an extremely functional peripheral which adds an entirely different, dare I say physical level to traditional game play. Physical activity would typically be a game geek’s kryptonite (save for those DDR kids but they’re a different breed altogether) but Nintendo successfully integrated it into gameplay. I’m perfectly alright working up a sweat beating the hell out of an opposing Mii in Wii Sports boxing, or almost bringing myself to aneurysm milking a cow in Rayman: Raving Rabbids. You can even do realistic lure fishing in Legend of Zelda, where you use the nunchuk attachment as the reel to land an Ordon catfish in the Hyrule fishing hole.

I feel a bit of resentment towards developers who are unwilling to work with the technology. Koji Igarashi, creator of the Castlevania series of games, has shown disdain for the “gimmicky controls” and doesn’t see a Wii Castlevania anywhere in the near future. Maybe he’s just not up to the challenge. Furthermore, if the controller is so gimmicky then why did Sony decide they needed to attempt to copy it with their useless sixaxis system? Questions abound.

Other noteworthy observations about the Wii include an estimated 30-hour battery life for the Wii-motes (I played a lot of Zelda) and a system crash that occurred when I was exiting the Wii-Shop earlier this morning, almost exactly as the Wii in this video did. It scared me terribly since unplugging the system and plugging it back in once seemed to not fix the problem. Thankfully a subsequent power cycle brought it back to life.

Oh, and future Wii purchasers might not be stuck purchasing the Wii-Sports bundle. That should make some people *couCHUCKgh* happy. Although I have to say I’ve probably clocked only slightly less time in Wii Sports as I have in Legend of Zelda.

In summary: Wii FTW

Lately I’ve been finding that the places I dream myself to feel more solid than the one I wake in. My dreams have so much more substance to them than my actual life that it starts to become somewhat depressing to awake and leave them behind. In dream I’m always working toward some definite goal, the details of which become swept away on my return to conciousness. I’m not entirely sure what happened while I was sleeping last night, since after what felt like several hours of trying to cure a plague that threatened humanity I woke up to see that I had slept little over an hour.

After I dozed off again I was then trying to prevent reality from unravelling, the secrets to which were held in books written by a certain family. The visuals, as I look at them with my awake mind, now simply appear to be work related, rifiling through books on endless shelves. But I was also doing something else with those books. There were wishes, or hopes, something of the sort written inside them, which I would respond to. It was like doing patchwork on a world that was falling apart, until I could find the real solution. Easing the pain of the world kept it from tearing itself apart.

I woke up again and struggled to get back to it, feeling the horrible anxiety of having involuntarily abandoned a universe in peril. I couldn’t get back, failed to even fall asleep again.

So here I am, awake an hour earlier than I had planned, writing about what did or didn’t happen. I still can’t decide which is which.

So as I was coming home from work today (a little after 7am) I got out of my truck and almost bumped into one of my neighbors who seemed to pop out of nowhere as I hopped my way onto the sidewalk. I was mildly surprised but managed to croak out a well-meaning “good morning” which is strange because I don’t usually take the initiative in pleasantries. Her response was fiercely eyeballing me like I was some kind of drunken vagrant, turning and continuing to walk, then looking back intensely again, a kind of “fuck you” look in her eyes, and then walked quickly ahead of me and loudly slammed her door as she retreated into her apartment.

She must not be much of a morning person.

I’m not sure if I had ever actually posted anything about it here, but I had launched Pulp Heroes v2 at pulpheroes.net a while ago. It’s in enough of a functioning state to be considered launched anyway, and I’ve even managed to post a few comics in the month of October. Bizarre comics, but then again I wouldn’t have it any other way. The old site is still around at ComicGenesis but I haven’t been updating it. I might just throw up a link to PulpHeroes.net there as a redirect so any rogue readers that might have been visiting it can get the new ones. In fact I think I’ll try to do that before the sun comes up.

Additionally, if you take a look at my sidebar you’ll see that I’ve got some flickr links. I finally got around to uploading my Gil Mantera’s Party Dream pics from their Record Bar show back in September that I had intended to upload, well, probably some time in September. While it was only two months ago it feels like it’s been forever since I’d taken these photos, but there are a few that I really love. Gatherings of the eccentric really make for good photo ops. In there you’ll find the elusive Shorts Girls, some shots of Gil’s Ass and the attempted assassination of Ultimate Donny’s pecker. Since I’d never uploaded anything to Flickr before I wasn’t prepared for the extensive naming/description/tagging options that are thrown upon you when you send a batch of photos up the pipe. It’s the kind of thing I could go apeshit about for hours but luckily I’m in the groove this evening. Enjoy the madness that you’ll find there. Perhaps more normal fare will be available in the future.

Creativity juices are running high right now, with ideas of world-building as the foundation. I feel a big failing of getting my ideas to really coalesce is that I don’t flesh out the universe that they’re living in. I’ve got not much more than just the creative spark right now to back up my ambition, but perhaps a mere spark is all I need to burn the world down and let my new one rise from the ashes. Ooh, that makes me all goose pimply. I’m also going to try to write out some stories, maybe bad ones, definitely short ones, but my talent has been called out and I feel I need to back it up. If anything interesting comes out if it, you’ll hear it here first.

I’ve also been doing some experiments with my PPC ever since my new cell phone helped me remember how useful of a device it can be. Did I say cell phone? I guess I did. By the way, I have a cell phone now and if you’d like the number feel free to ask.