The Cloverfield Creature

So, I watched a few theories on video on YouTube, and while some are interesting, they still are somewhat off the mark as what the Cloverfield monster looks like. The only thing everyone is certain of is that it's huge. For some reason a lot of people are comparing it to the new Godzilla, not so new anymore of course, with Matthew Broderick from some years back, but after looking at the clip over and over, and in hd from the movie site, I don't think their theories are correct.

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of monsters to compare it to because of it's size, and from what I've read so far and seen on YouTube, it's not a Godzilla or Zilla as some are saying, movie. It's said that Abrams did give the hint or someone did, that it is perhaps an alien creature of some sort, but I'm not sure as I couldn't find any official interview to confirm this. And from the trailer, it is much scarier than any Godzilla movie! The scene where the silhouette of the woman being held by 2 men and then seemingly expanding like she's going to explode is creepy!

There's also the http://www.1-18-08.com/ site that has a few clues it seems. You can move the pictures around, but more than that, you can flip them over if you shake the pics! Dunno what the clues are but it is interesting. Oh, and if you leave that page on in an extra tab or window for a while, go back to it after maybe 15 or so minutes later. I don't wanna give away everything, you'll just have to be patient and do it!

Oh, and I also doubt it is Ctthulu as the tiny scene doesn't appear to have all the tentacles, though it is hard to tell for sure.

And before I forget, it appears another clue is Slusho! It is creepy in and of itself for a web site! However, it gives a big big clue as to what may be going on in the movie! Not only that, but Slusho! also has made an appearance on Heroes! Someone also made a reference to a creature on the comic books used in the series that might be a clue. Check it out! Just another update for you!

Steamed

I love all the games from Valve, but one thing that bothers me is how buggy their Steam client is. Rob was telling me that he couldn't pass a particular level in EP2. They just released a new update that fixed a similar issue, I wonder if it's the same one Rob experienced...

Updates to the Source Engine have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Source Engine

Fixed a crash in Half-Life 2: Episode Two when exiting This Vortal Coil

Gal Sone

While watching some Japanese programs on YouTube, I came across a very unusual J-Pop singer and competitive eater named Natsuko "Gal" Sone. Wired magazine probably has the best article on her currently. The Gal Sone vs Presley video is a good example of what she's capable of.

This video helps explain why she's able to eat such enormous amounts of food in one sitting. Basically, she has an enlarged and expandable stomach/small intestine combined with an abnormally high metabolism. This means that most people who try to challenge her- guy or girl- don't have much of a chance. My favorite comment from the YouTube community has nothing to do with her eating but rather her looks:

Anyone else disturbed by the lack of the whites of her eyes?
-SukiChan

Black Friday

Well another Black Friday is almost upon us and all the ad's are already out in today's newspaper. I haven't looked through all of them yet but I'm sure there are some good deals if you are looking for electronics/games/movies/etc... that we all love. Annel mentioned that there was already a line forming at BestBuy from the front door to around the building at 8:00am this morning! Talk about crazy!

In any event have a great Thanksgiving everybody. I'm including some links for Rob in case he wants to see the ad's before he comes over to mom's house today.

HT Guys summary of Black Friday deals on home theater gear.
BlackFriday.info
BlackFriday@GottaDeal
BlackFriday 2007

Cloverfield Trailer

I'm sure Rob's already seen this since he's always combing the Apple Quicktime site but the official Cloverfield trailer has been released on the web. This is the same version that moviegoers first saw when watching Beowulf at the theater.

Magic Mountain

I'm at Magic Mountain right now with a friend and waiting in line for Tatsu, their newest coaster!it's a long enough wait that I can actually do a short blog on X.

What a ride! X is not a typical coaster, boasting of it's uniqueness. They're right! You start off seated, then it pivots you on your back, which is relaxing, and start moving... backwards! After youake it to the ramp, still going in reverse, you go down the ramp and pick up lots of speed and then do something incredible: your going forward without knowing it! It then proceeds to switch back and forth untill the ride ends.

It truly lives up to the experience!

...And to say that Tatsu is a great ride is an understatement! What a great piece of work it is! If you haven't been to MM in a while, go now! These 2 rides are well worth the trip.

Episode Two Achievements

I was talking to Rob today about how the concept of game achievements brings a new level of game play to titles like Half Life 2 Episode Two. Normally I would just play the game once before moving on to the next big thing but since Valve includes a commentary track, I ended up playing it again. Now that they included Xbox Live! style achievements in EP2, I'm playing it for a third time.

I'm almost done with getting all the achievements except I only got 322 of 333 total grubs killed so I'm going to have start again to get that last one. I promised Rob to send him this link which describes how many grubs you should have killed in certain points of the game in order to successfully get all 333.

Besides trying to crush all the elusive grubs, my favorite achievement was called "Little Rocket Man", which involved dragging the garden gnome found in the beginning of the episode almost to the end where the rocket blasts off. There is a blog of someone that describes his experience doing the same thing. He uses a bit of harsh language in it but it's still a funny read, especially his comments on the posted pictures.

Attack of the Games

Feeling a bit overwhelmed with the number of choice 3D games hitting the shelves this holiday, I created a list (for PC releases) this past summer so I would know what to expect in the coming months:

BioShock - August 21, 2007
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - October 2, 2007
The Orange Box - October 10, 2007
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - November 6, 2007
Gears of War - November 9, 2007
Crysis- November 13, 2007
Unreal Tournament 3 - November 19, 2007
Assassin's Creed - Early 2008
StarCraft II - ?
Rage - ?

Enemy Territory didn't make the cut after I downloaded and played the demo. I absolutely loved the previous version - Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and played it to the point of obsession, but Quake Wars was just not as fun. With Wolfenstein, you're at least able to win the objective on your own, (or at least with one other person helping) even if the rest of your teammates are noobs. In Quake Wars, teamplay is essential and finding a server where a majority of the players know what they are doing was difficult.

With the Crysis demo, the game and gameplay are amazing but unfortunately my computer isn't what it used to be. Sadly, I have to tweak the visual settings down to where it doesn't even resemble the awesome screen shots that I see online.

I'm curious to know what your guy's personal gaming lists are. It would be fun to see Krudd's impressive library and learn how he juggles it all. ;)

Star Wars HD Comparison

In what is probably the worse example of showing off the benefits of HD vs DVD quality, someone has posted a website that shows the differences using the classic Star Wars films. Although the HD shots look more detailed, he shows each shot with the same image size, which gives the illusion that DVD res (720 x 480i) will fill your display the same way as full HD (1920 x 1080p) would. Also the colors are brighter and the blacks darker in the DVD shots while the HD versions looked washed out. To most people this makes the DVD examples look better than the HD shots. I had to mouse around a few times to see which was which.

A matter of time

So, I finished playing Timeshift on my iMac, yes, it plays wonderfully with Vista on Bootcamp, and it was a fun game. However, don't expect anything revolutionary from it if you get it. If you have played or seen either F.E.A.R. or Prince of Persia, then you'll see the similarities with the whole slow mo and time shifting abilities.

The story isn't bad, but again, nothing original imo. The gameplay is fast and furious, so you will definitely need to timeshift in order to win the game. As far as first person shooters go, it's pretty basic. Standard movements, no surprises.

Graphically, the game is different. It sort of reminds me of a stop motion animation for some reason. I'd say you'd know what I'm talking about if you saw it in action. I did like it though, it was unique. There are some nice visuals with effects, such as the perspective option which if checked, blurs the surrounding visuals like a camera lens, only focusing on the target in your sights.

It is a high quality game, fun to play, good music and sound efx, but all in all, nothing revolutionary, imho. I'm glad I did get it for one reason though: I got to test out the capabilities of the full version of Bootcamp to see how Vista does with games on my iMac! Plays great, runs smoothly! And if you hadn't seen or read yet, G4TV had a small segment about Vista. Research on the best way to run Vista wasn't on a pc built machine, it was on a Mac using Bootcamp! Apple FTW again!

Goodbye Sawtooth...

As you might already know, I finally upgraded the Power Mac after an amazing eight year run. Why so long of a wait? I would say it was a combination of the longevity of the Power PC chip, the resourcefulness of every impressive OS X upgrade and periodic storage and memory upgrades. Additionally, Rika switched careers in the later years and no longer needed a workstation for graphic design but rather a computer for simply e-mailing and web browsing. 400MHz is fast enough for that.

But with the recent release of Leopard and the aluminum and glass iMacs still just three months old, I felt the timing was right and pulled the trigger on a 24" model. I couldn't be more pleased with my decision to purchase this instead of the 20". What was I thinking? The screen is simply stunning.

I'm most happy about finally getting rid of the enormous boxes taking up so much valuable closet space, as well as reclaiming the space from the desktop. I took a few pics to illustrate the difference.

I was planning on either recycling the G4 or donating it since I haven't seen much interest in machines this old on eBay, but have instead decided to post a $100 offer on Craigslist to see what happens first. I mentioned to Mark that I paid $1900 for the tower and $1500 for the monitor back in 2000. (I later upgraded the peripherals to the Apple Pro keyboard and Apple Pro mouse, added an additional 768MB of RAM and replaced the 10GB hard disk drive with a 120GB one.)

Waiting so long between upgrades has made me appreciate features that other modern Mac users have probably become accustomed to. Burning CDs or DVDs is one example. Lightning fast Cover Flow scrolling, 3D enabled user switching, and A/V Chatting would be others. I can't praise the new "scissor-switch" keyboard enough - it rocks. My horrible mistyping that I'm becoming famous for in iChat has improved tremendously since using it.

The killer app that has instantly changed how we use the computer though is one little stand alone program that gets lost in the 300 new features of Leopard. That app is Front Row 2.0. I had no idea that this would be the answer to solving my problem in watching downloaded DivX/Xvid encoded HD videos on the couch. After giving up on transcoding these AVI files to MPEG-2 for DVD playback (as well as creating the DVD menus screens), I had to find a better solution. I considered options such as purchasing Vista with Media Center along with an XBox 360, stand alone media extenders, DVD players with Xvid support, and even the Apple TV. But with Front Row, the included remote, and the built-in HD display I decided to forgo watching downloaded video content on my dated 27" Sony TV and watch them straight from the iMac. (Thanks to Mark for tipping me in the right direction.)

FWIW, Leopard is unable to play back DivX/Xvid encoded videos out of the box (same as Windows XP) but Perian came through to save the day with the necessary QuickTime component support. Open source FTW!

Mark questioned my Samsung SCX-4500/XSS purchase, but it turned out to be a great find. I had no idea this printer existed until I was at the checkout. Apple apparently has an exclusive deal to sell this multi-function unit (along with a print-only version) until early next year. They are also offering a special $100 rebate when you purchase a computer and a qualifying printer such as this one, so it was a no brainer for me. The Samsung is pretty basic as far as features go but it's whisper quiet and looks stunning IMO, even in piano black. It would perfectly complement your Samsung TV Mark! It does have cutesy sounds and touch sensitive sapphire blue LED displays that remind me of unrestrained electronic gadgets from Japan (or Korea in this case), but I can live with it. Not to keep praising the brilliance of Leopard but as a side note, setting up the Samsung to print across the network was a breeze. Apple purchasing CUPS was a very smart move. In comparison, I could never get the Epson Stylus Photo 820 to network print in Tiger.

Mark had asked how long it took for my computer to ship. I placed my order on a Monday but had problems using the Juniper card because I forgot to register the shipping address. Once I squared away everything by Wednesday, I asked for two day shipping and Apple customer service offered it for free. Both the computer and printer arrived at my work the next morning- less than 24-hours later. Rewarding negligent behavior- Apple deserves an award for that!

Gears of War for Windows

I'm sure you guys are aware of this but what's up with Circuit City leading the way with discounted first rate PC titles? Now this week it's Epic Games long anticipated Gears of War. Not that I'm complaining of course! This will be my third title from them after BioShock and The Orange Box.

More than any other title, this was the game that made me envious of every XBox 360 owner, especially after reading Krudd's review. It's just a visually stunning game that somehow broke the mold of the overplayed marine in space/fighting aliens genre. After reading this preview article I don't feel so bad now for not purchasing a console.

I'm assuming from the specs that it'll play just as fine on my machine as BioShock did, considering that they are both based on the same Unreal engine. The nice thing about GOW though is that it will finally ship with the Unreal 3 editor. Time to revive our Disneyland project!