Plaidophile

If you liked Rez, you will probably love Child of Eden, which just came out two days ago. It's a prequel to Rez (inasmuch as Rez even had a plot to begin with), and the music and gameplay are fantastic. The first level has a very strong resemblance to a lot of the stuff in Rez, but after that it diverges quite a bit.

However, I do have to question Tetsuya Mizuguchi's sanity and/or intentions based on the PS Move controls. Remember the infamous Trance Vibrator? Well, when using the Move, the way you fire your weapon is by thrusting your purple-tipped rod forward in a rhythmic undulation.

(It's a pretty good workout, though!)

So I was doing a Google search and the damn thing started pointing me to the "+You" button like it was the end of the world if I didn't click on it. So I clicked on it, just to make it shut up, and signed up for Google+ again from my one and only GMail account (that I have only for my Android phone and YouTube account at this point). I figured I'd make a token effort at filling out a profile and adding suggestions to my circles, and at least reconnect to the Song Fight friends on there.

It was, of course, taking those suggestions from my email address book, and after all the people in my address book who are already on Google+, it also asked me to add/invite everyone else in it too. And then it kept on making suggestions on the feed sidebar. The top two suggestions were myself (via the name and email address that had gotten banned to begin with), and my grandfather, who as previous readers of this blog know died a bit over a year ago.

There was no way to opt out of this.

Stay classy, Google.

After going disc-only on Netflix I decided to go ahead and turn Blu-Ray discs back on, since a significant portion of my queue is actually in that format now. I have very quickly learned to loathe Blu-Ray's advanced "features," which are of course being used for nothing but advertising now.

For example, in Where the Wild Things Are, there are about 15 minutes of unskippable, un-fast-forwardable trailers for other movies. Any attempts at getting out of those and into the movie are met with the trailers being completely restarted from the beginning. (This may have also been because it was the "rental edition" of the movie, which had no extra features.)

Next, The Blues Brothers opens up directly to the main menu — which doesn't load until it downloads a bunch of content from BD Live. All ads, of course. Until that happens, you're stuck with a repeating montage of the key scenes from the film. At least on my BD player it's possible to get past this by pressing "disc skip," but then as soon as the BD Live content finishes loading, it boots you back into the main menu. Absolutely irritating, and completely pointless. The BD Live content it was waiting for wasn't even anything related to the movie — it was all banner ads for other things coming out on Blu-Ray.

As always, piracy is the more consumer-friendly option.

I haven't worked on comics in a while and I feel like I should be doing them but I'm just not motivated to. I have a few Unity stories on the backburner but none of them are really exciting me (two of them are pretty depressing, and one of them isn't really gelling into a story yet although maybe it doesn't need to either). I also have a bunch of journal comics that I sketched out but never finished (and none of them are at all timely anymore), and neither of my other ongoing series-ish things (Pernicious or Womble) really appeal to me right now either.

I feel like I should maybe just come up with a new set of characters and series to get things flowing again but nothing I can think of really feels like something I want to develop at all.

Maybe I should work on something collaboratively with someone else. Let someone else do the writing for a while, maybe. I mostly just feel like drawing without having to come up with stories to draw.

It doesn't help that Photoshop CS4 doesn't run very well under Lion, CS5 is just a glitchy and unstable pile of poo, and I still can't find any other drawing apps that are worth a damn. Maybe the trick will be in working in the constraints of some crappy drawing app though. MS Paint Adventures certainly doesn't suffer for it, for example.