May 2003 Archives

Back in St. Louis. Had a great time in Florida. Details to come.

I meant to post before I left St. Louis yesterday... Anyway, I've made it to Florida safely, afet a long day's drive. More later.

I haven't been watching coverage of this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, but there is one newly announced game that has attracted my attention. Apparently, Evil Genius will take the base-building genre back to the seventies, to let players establish a complex from which to take over the world. Are you pondering what I'm pondering? Deathtraps. Henchmen. Cloning chambers. Shrink rays. The works.

In another twist to play on the humor in the game, you can actually become a more famous evil genius by doing the cliché things we've all come to expect from evil geniuses. For example, your notoriety will increase if, after capturing an enemy agent, you go and spill your plans to destroy the world and walk away before you see his ultimate extermination.

I'm stroking my, umm, long-haired white cat just thinking about it.

I've been stressing out at work, and I need a change of scenery. Fortunately, I've been able to schedule some vacation time, so I'm leaving on a road trip to Florida in a few days. It's a long drive for a solo trip, but the way things have been going, I want to see a bit of America along the way, just to make sure it's still there. (Watch enough news, and you can start to wonder.) Once I get down to Tampa, I'll be able to spend some time with my cousin and his family, and maybe catch a little bit of sun by the Gulf. I doubt I'll be posting much during this trip, but maybe I can recharge enough to start posting a bit more regularly once I return; maybe I'll even have a few pictures to post.

I just got in from seeing The Matrix: Reloaded (wearing a brand-new T-shirt for the occasion), and I'm still trying to decide what to make of it. My initial impression is that it was well worth seeing, but still a bit unsatisfying. This may be by design; after all, this is in many ways just the first half of a movie to be completed in November, and I should be better able to judge the work as a whole then. In the meantime, I enjoyed the new movie, but probably not as much as I did X2. I'll try to post a bit more about the movie tomorrow in an extended entry; watch this space.

So let me see if I understand what happened in Monday's terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. In a coordinated attack, three groups of terrorist gunmen attack security checkpoints at three different compounds in a relatively small area. The purpose of each of these attacks is to clear the way for a car bomber to blow up a specific building.

This sounds so much like a typical Command and Conquer: Generals level that it creeps me out.

It's kind of odd seeing so many actors from a couple of my favorite cancelled SF series turning up on the handful of other shows I watch. I guess it's not too much of a shock that after Joss Whedon's Firefly bit the dust, he'd find places for his stars on his other shows: Mal Reynolds as a supervillain on Buffy, and Zoe Warren as the "big bad" on Angel. I don't know who's running a jobs program for former SF actors on CSI: Miami, though. I'd already noticed Firefly's Jayne Cobb and Simon Tam on the show. Tonight's show not only featured Farscape's John Crichton, but a character named DJ Scorpius. How's that for an in-joke?

I still resent shelling out my own money to see a movie, and then, being advertised at in the theater. It's not the trailers I mind so much (although they do seem to be balooning out of control), but the true consumer product commercials. Any way I could just pay the actual price to see the movie instead of being sold to the advertisers as well? That being said, the Powerade / Matrix crossover ad shown before X2 last night is pretty damn funny.

Maybe, after a couple more viewings of X2: X-Men United, I'll find something to criticize, but after seeing it last night, I was completely blown away. At the very least, I'd have to say that it was one of the very few sequels which (like Aliens or The Road Warrior) makes a dramatic improvement over an outstanding original. I can't judge how well it will appeal to non-X-fans, and quite frankly, I don't care; this movie was made for the fans, and made well.