Vegas Baby!
Honestly, my week-long trip to Vegas has little to do with this site being so infrequently updated. I'm just busy and/or lazy. But yeah, last week I headed off to Las Vegas for the second time in six months, and just as it was last time, it was on the boss's dime for a work-related Con. This was my first trip to GAMA, the game industry trade show, and I'd been primed to expect something huge. What I got was indeed big, but when you've been to a half-dozen San Diego Comicons, you have a certain expectation for the phrase "Big Con" that GAMA didn't really meet.

Which is good, because had it been any bigger I'd be exhausted. The show was a lot of work, both in terms of the amount of walking and the amount of work involved. Some of it was a loss (the first day seminars were almost universally awful, saved only by Joe Field's engaging panels, and even those were aimed surprisingly at newer retailers, when you'd expect most of the folks at GAMA to be retail vets) but I got to see some cool new games (the Spycraft CCG is going to be great, the D&D Minis Titans of Legends are amazing looking and the Nocturnals book from Green Ronin looks terrific as well) and take in a bit of Vegas as well (love those Bellagio water shows).

In other news, right before Vegas, I discovered my favorite new show of the season: Wonderfalls. I'm not a fanatical follower of AICN (although I do read the @$$holes Talkback reviews religiously), but I do occasionally check in on Hercules' Coaxial side of the site, and it was his constant badgering about how good Wonderfalls was going to be (along with Firefly/Angel vet Tim Minear's name) that got me to check it out. I'm so glad I did, because the show is quirky, snarky and hilarious, with a great cast and smart writing. While it reminds me in tone of Dead Like Me and my late lamented Cupid (the one with Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall, not that reality shit), it is very original and unusual.

It is also probably doomed. But I continue to hope that Fox will realize they've got something special here and move it from the self-fulfilling prophecy Friday death slot into a better place. Not to mention marketing the thing more effectively. I don't watch a great deal of TV commercials these days, it's true (thank you Tivo!) but still... I didn't see a single ad for this new show.

Video (Games) Killed the Radio Star (And All My Free Time):
Been playing some video games lately. I got the Warcraft III expansion for X-Mas, and since my computer had crashed last year, I had to play through Warcraft III original flavor to get back to the point where I could play the expansion. I just finished it recently and have installed (but not played) much of the expansion yet.

And that's because I got a subscription to Gamefly, a Netflix-like service for PS2 (and XBox and GameCube, but I don't have those) games. Since then, I've been spending way too much of my not-too-copious free time playing these rented games. Loved SSX 3 and Need for Speed: Underground, had fun playing Burnout 2 and returned both R: Racing Evolution and NFL Street within minutes of opening them and playing them.

The really fun find, though, has been James Bond: Everything or Nothing. 3rd person James Bond game that feels like a modern Bond movie. Has its quirks, like a slightly off-kilter auto-targeting system that sometimes has me popping caps in a wall while some nameless mook shoots me in the back (not very suave, that), but is generally a blast to play. Such a blast, in fact, that I play too long, and since I've got the unfortunate physiological quirk of becoming nauseous when playing videogames (almost immediately with first-person, takes longer with 3rd), sometimes I wind up having to turn off the TV, etc. and lie there, wishing I had stopped playing the game about fifteen minutes earlier.

Given that I love videogames, I'm very annoyed by this particular physiological quirk. But not as annoyed as I am with myself every time I push the limits too far. But even knowing it might make me feel like vomiting, I love this game. How many reviews of a PS2 game are you gonna read with *that* qualifier?

Priorities? What are those?
McSupersizes to be phased out - Soldiers are still dying in two countries that we invaded, a shockingly large number of people in the country think gay marriage should be outlawed, the Catholic church is still fondling little boys like it's a national sport... and *this* is where the public pressure is?

I swear, these days I just want to throw my hands up about the American public, and maybe humanity in general. Perhaps we're all too stupid to live. C'mon... eating McDonald's every day is bad for your health? Are there actually people out there who don't know that, who need a documentary or a lawsuit to clue them in? If so, I think being fat is the least of their problems. Fat and stupid and skinny and stupid really isn't that far apart, in terms of quality of life.

Something for the Fourth Rail fans:
It's something we've gotten many requests for, and something I always kind of liked the idea of, so I've spent some of my rare spare time in the past few months putting together an alphabetical archive of my Snap Judgments reviews from when we started the site (in 2001) to the last complete year in the archives (2003). Two and a half years of reviews, all listed alphabetically within each year.

Now, it's still not perfectly searchable, and it's certainly not done for the whole site (this page is sort of a beta test, the final version should have Critiques and Features as well and will take me a while longer), but for those who haven't been able to find stuff in the Snap Judgments archives easily enough, hopefully this will help out.

My Thoughts on Gay Marriage:
Since nobody asked, here they are. I've been reading more than a few threads online following Bush's inane notion to ban gay marriage in the Constitution (finally, someone has come up with something more moronic than the flag-burning amendment! Congrats, G.W.! You continue to excel in stupidity!) and every time I see someone responding with their reasons why gay marriage shouldn't be allowed, I keep wanting to respond in detail. But who has that kind of time? So let me just lay it out plainly.

If you oppose gay marriage, I think you are either a bigot, a moron or a politician. You can give me all the religious bullshit you want, you can give me all the "separate but equal" bullshit you want, you can give me all the "marriage is fer makin' babies" you want, you can even give me the "insurance system can't handle gay marriage" bullshit you want. It's all bullshit. The notion that two consenting adults in love can't get married is stupid enough... the notion that such a rule should be written into our national code of laws, the very thing that defines our nation? That is unpatriotic. It's the secular equivalent of blasphemy against everything this nation is supposed to stand for.

My Baby Girl Can Bend Metal, Apparently:
They say the first casualty of war is the truth. Apparently the first casualty of Katy is my glasses. For a long time now, my little girl has had a fascination with my glasses, grabbing at them and often pulling them off my head. Tonight when she did so, I heard a loud "pling!" as part of the right temple assembly went flying off behind the couch, never to be found, and discovered that she hadn't just knocked a pin loose, but had actually broken the thing.

So for a week or so, until I get a replacement for this part, I'll be doing the geek thing with tape on my glasses. Oh, well, at least she didn't poke my eye out while she was at it.

Star Well, Who Really Gives a Damn:
There was a time when I would have been thrilled to hear today's news, confirming the rumor that the Star Wars Trilogy is coming to DVD. Hell, given that I just watched the Indiana Jones DVD box set and found it to be pretty good this weekend, now would have been a great time for it.

Unfortunately, the "Special Editions," while improved in some regard, mostly contain what I consider to be stupid and unnecessary changes, and the whole reason I'd be getting Star Wars at this point is for nostalgia's sake... and nostalgia doesn't work if it's aimed at where I was in 1997 as opposed to when I was a kid. I'm sure the DVDs will do just fine in sales without me. More the pity... if the set came out and flopped, I think there's a slight chance Lucas would reconsider his decision and put out the original on DVD.

But hey, more importantly... when the hell are we gonna get Seinfeld on DVD?

Soundtracks:
You know, why is it that whenever you watch a movie (or lately, play a videogame) and think, "Wow that music is great, I should get the soundtrack" almost none of the music you really wanted is on the soundtrack? I mean, practically I know that it's down to licensing concerns, but I was really ticked to find out that neither The Italian Job soundtrack or the SSX3 soundtrack featured "Go" by Andy Hunter, though both featured the song in prominent roles. It's even more irritating that I can't get the song on iTunes.

Don't get me wrong... the Italian Job score is good, and the SSX3 music selection decent as well (although I'm bummed that I bought "Mas" on iTunes only to get it months later on the SSX3 soundtrack as well), it's just that the music in the original video game or movie was so good, and the soundtracks don't have that full effect. And this seems to be a pretty common thing.

Iron Chef:
Don calls this my "What you're watching" blog, so I figured I should add some other things I like doing. For example, eating. For the past few months, whenever Suzanne and I have driven home from visiting my parents in a different part of town, we've seen the Iron Chef restaurant and wondered if it had any connection to the show and, either way, if it was any good. Finally, I decided to look up some reviews and learned that it does indeed have something tangentially to do with the show (the owners are fans and named it after Iron Chef for some attention) and it is indeed quite good.

I haven't had enough variety in Crab Rangoons to really think there's much difference between them, but Iron Chef's Crab & Shrimp Rangoon appetizer was pretty tasty. For my entree, I got the Butter Shrimp... it was sweeter and much lighter than you'd expect of a dish that includes Fried Shrimp in a butter sauce. I was surprised that I didn't really taste the butter, instead it was like a lighter sweet and sour sauce. I tasted a bit of my dad's Golden Duck (which was really good) and my wife's Orange Peel Beef (also surprisingly light given that it's fried beef in orange sauce), which is quite possibly what I'll get the next time I go there.

Dinner prices were about $12 an entree average, and the portions were very good, such that my dad had enough of the Golden Duck left over for lunch tomorrow, although both Suzanne and I polished off our entrees just fine.

Pixar Leaves Disney:
That hammering sound you hear is another nail in Disney's coffin. Congrats to Pixar for getting while the getting is good, and I'd be very surprised if they don't wind up with a really excellent deal elsewhere. At this point, I would categorize every single film they've made (short or feature length) as really good, with the majority of them falling into the excellent category.

Web-buying:
So I just recently ordered a couple used items from Amazon and when I was looking around in my account, realized that you can go back and look at invoices from when you first started using them. Or at least, pretty close. And it turns out that I've been ordering from Amazon since 1998, at the very least, meaning that I've been using them for over 5 years. I still do, moreso now that I can buy stuff used (Last Boy Scout DVD for $8, including shipping - that's a good deal!) and now that I have a credit card that gives me a reward certificate to spend at Amazon when I use it, and I get more credits if I buy at Amazon.

I've also noticed that since I signed up for iTunes, I'm buying a lot more music. I mean, I used to buy a CD maybe every 3-4 months, now I'm buying the equivalent of a CD every month, only every track is one that I like. I'm a little bummed that I can't find all the music I want, like the Foo Fighters' "Darling Nikki" or most of the music that was in The Italian Job, but I'm hoping that as time goes by we'll see the selection increase as record companies give in to inevitability and realize that song-by-song, downloadable is a way that a lot of us want to buy music.

Oh, and I looove Netflix. Been using them for a year or two now and have no plans to stop. Even though some months I only watch one or two DVDs, most months I watch a half-dozen or more. Just signed up for Gamefly, a similar service that deals in PS2 games (actually, X-Box, Gamecube and Gameboy Advance too, but I only have PS2). I don't play PS2 all that often, but if I have a rotating pool of games to play around with, that may change.

No real point to all this, just random meandering on how cool I think shopping online has become. I think I did 95% of my Christmas shopping online this year and it was so much easier. Maybe it's ironic that I'm a big online shopper and yet I work in brick-and-mortar retail? I dunno, maybe so, but with comics retail there's still something to be said for that in-person experience or, as my friend Don was so fond of saying when we worked at Psycomic, "People want to touch the books."

2004:
Well, another year down. This was a pretty good year for me. Though I'd like it if I had a job with more of a future and a little bit more money, it was kind of nice working a job where I felt like what I did made a difference, like I was good at what I did and I actually liked going to work. I don't know how long I can keep being assistant manager of a comic-book shop without feeling like I've wasted both my college degree and all my youth on a job with no future, but I'm hoping to hold out at least one more year.

No moves or surprise surgeries or anything like that this year, which was nice. We started in Austin, we stayed in Austin. In fact, the only really major upheaval was a positive one, because this is the year my daughter Katy was born. Everything you hear about "it will change your life" is absolutely 100% true. But not in the way you expect. My routine, dull as it is, remains pretty much the same. Reviews on the off-time, work, weekly gaming with friends, the occasional movie... but every single thing I do now, in the back of my head, I'm doing it as a father. There is not a moment that goes by that Katy isn't in my thoughts, and it's kind of amazing.

The other big moment that sticks out for me in 2003 is San Diego. It was a blast getting to hang out in person with Don again, and for that matter getting to reconnect with all the people that I know in and around comics. There are so many negative things about this industry, and so many people (including me, on some days) are cynical about the whole thing, saying that the industry needs to die for the comics medium to survive... but I can't help but remember how much fun I had at San Diego, and how much of that was down to the community that sprung up in this industry, and I still think the positives outweigh the negatives.

My predictions for 2004? I don't have any, really. I have hopes (I dearly hope someone else is President-elect after November), I have plans (alphabetical archives for The Fourth Rail, even if it kills me to do all the hand-coding), I have guaranteed moments of joy (Katy learning to walk, and *maybe* saying her first word?)... but no predictions.

Finding Nemo DVD:
So my Christmas was really good, and most of my gifts were of the DVD variety. (Which was fine by me.) I've been spending some time recently watching some of them, although I'm not even remotely close to getting through them yet. I'll probably still be watching Christmas DVDs when my birthday rolls around in April. So far, I've watched the movie of Pirates of the Caribbean, the first disc (cartoons only) of the fantastic Golden Looney Tunes collection and, as the title of this post would indicate, Finding Nemo. In addition to rewatching the film, which *might* be my favorite Pixar movie ever, I just watched the "visual commentary" tonight.

This is the kind of thing that makes DVDs worth buying. There are three voices on the commentary track itself, but using seamless branching technology, the film breaks off between 5-15 minutes at a time and shows little bits of behind-the-scenes, ranging from a video of Ellen Degeneres speaking whale to CG animators talking about a particular technique. The result is that you feel like you're taking part in an intelligent and thorough discussion of the making of the movie, even as you can compare what they're talking about to the finished product. It might be the best commentary I've ever seen.

Along with the Behind the Scenes featurette and the general quality of Pixar movies, it just reaffirms something for me: If everyone put the same amount of passion and hard work, and had as much fun and investment, in making their movies as Pixar does, there would be no bad movies. Also, I've decided that I would like to work at Pixar when I grow up. Shame I have absolutely no skills that would be applicable to such a job, huh? ;)

Celebrity Poker Showdown:
I am completely addicted to this show on Bravo, and owe a big debt to James Lucas Jones for mentioning it to me and sparking my interest. I'm actually shocked that I'm enjoying it this much. The players are mostly actors I really like, but I really don't know poker at all. I played a few games in high school and college at various parties and I suuuuucccked at it. Watching Celebrity Poker Showdown, though, I find myself wanting to get a game going with my buddies.

Fortunately, not enough to actually do it, because who can afford to lose that much money? At any rate, Celebrity Poker turns out to be a blast to watch, and a nice balm for the somewhat dead new TV season, especially during these lean months between sweeps.

The New Place:
Well, after a couple weeks of being mostly static, thanks to a catastrophic computer crash and then moving Internet/phone/cable providers, Inside Joke Theatre is back online.

Cue crickets.

At any rate, this is the new address, and while I'm not crazy about having to put the ~ in the address, otherwise this is pretty much exactly what it used to be. A place for me to store random thoughts, updated whenever the mood strikes me, that I'm amazed anyone would actually read.

Ascending From Hell into Purgatory:
$200 dollars later (and there go my plans to buy a DVD burner for the computer), my computer is working again. Mostly. I had some frustration getting it to recognize the sound card, and the monitor is still reading as Generic Plug and Play, but everything is working, and the random lock-ups seem to be (knock on wood) gone.

Now begins the arduous process of putting all the programs and data back onto the system. Which includes rebuilding a long-standing address book from basically nothing. So if you are someone who has regular contact with me and you want me to have your email address or other contact info, it might not be a bad idea to email it to me again.

Also, we're moving ISPs in a day or two, so this site will no doubt move. Not exactly sure what the URL will be, but it should be on www.grandecom.net. Probably. If you're really curious and can't find it by searching on Inside Joke Theatre, drop me a line at randy@thefourthrail.com and I'll hook you up with the new address.

Absolute Total Hell:
A little while back, I wrote about a condition in which my computer was randomly locking up. I thought it might be a virus, or a damaged hard drive, or something else. So, when Suzanne and I ordered our videocamera as an early X-Mas present to ourselves, I decided to upgrade: Got a 120 GB hard drive, planning to use it as the new base drive.

After a tortuously long attempt at installing said hard drive, which wasn't helped by a manual for another hard drive that turned out not to be my old one, we finally got the jumpers set right and the master/slave thing worked out and the whole thing up and running. Except: It still locked up at random moments.

Oh, how I miss the halcyon days when that was my computer's only problem.

Through a series of misadventures involving reinstalling Windows XP, changing display drivers and other such things, I eventually found myself with a computer that wasn't even remotely working. Desperate, I called Computer Nerdz here in Austin, they sent someone out, he gave me peace of mind by assuring me that he would have done the same types of things I was trying but much less peace of mind when he couldn't fix the computer any better than I could, at least not without a big huge tech support bill that I couldn't afford.

So it was decided that I would do a clean install of Windows XP on my old hard drive, use the new one as a slave. Except that now the computer was locking up every time I tried to load up Windows, such that it took over two hours just to get it started on the installation. I went to work, hoping Suzanne would be able to keep resetting until eventually the computer would fail to lock up and Windows XP would install.

It did, but then Suzanne ran a virus scan (understand, I'd had McAfee for as long as I'd had this computer) and found a virus. Which might also be the cause of the random lockups. Long story short, my computer is now practically useless. It has Windows XP on it, but it goes about 5-15 minutes between locking up. It has either: A) a virus B) bad memory C) a bad motherboard or D) all of the above. Frankly, I'm at a complete loss. And speaking of loss, somehow the computer managed to lose all of my saved email and my copious address book, neither of which was backed up as most of my data (which it *can* still find) was.

Now I'm working on my (much slower) laptop until I can figure out what to do. One thing's for sure... I'm looking much more seriously at getting a Mac the next time I buy a computer.

The Many Sins of ABC Chapter Six-Hundred and Twelve

Everything that is wrong with television is encapsulated in this story about ABC and Karen Sisco. They plan to change up a critically-acclaimed show by changing one of the very things that made it so interesting (they're going to ditch the hapless, Elmore Leonard style bad guys for something more "dangerous" i.e. "ripped from the headlines?"). I want to give them credit for not giving up on the show, but when the article ends with "We don't want to do anything without everyone being enthusiastic about it" it's hard not to be a bit cynical.

Really? Anything? Yeah, that's definitely the way to create edgy, must-watch television, by making sure that everyone is enthusiastic about every single thing you do.

Karen Sisco:
So AICN is reporting that Karen Sisco has been yanked by ABC. Supposedly, they're going to "relaunch" in March in a new timeslot. Which will no doubt conflict with something else I'm watching.

The only good show to come out of the new season is now gone, 24 is hugely disappointing in Season Three, no new Shield until January... man, it's a good thing I don't have enough free time to watch much TV anyway.

Although I am still *loving* Alias. Wish it wasn't on ABC, given that they've killed so many good shows before their time. And the last two episodes of Angel (the Mexican wrestling episode and Wes's dad) have been pretty good, with my biggest complaint being that I still hate Spike and don't want him on the show.

Las Vegas:
So I went to the Las Vegas Comicon and Diamond/Alliance Retailer summit last weekend. The Con was a bit of a bust, and I would have been pretty pissed if I'd spent my own money on the plane (as opposed to just blowing the cash for the hotel.) It was a good effort, but the organizers wanted to be too big too fast, and it felt very much like one of those "done in 10 minute" small Cons. Still, I got to see a lot of folks who I might not have seen if I went to just the retailer summit, including Bendis, Eric Shanower, Alex Robinson and Kristen Siebecker (of BOP fame), Chris Staros (of Top Shelf), and the Diamond/Alliance summit itself was really well done, even if you did have to walk an enormous distance to get from registration to the events themselves for no readily apparent reason.

Oh, and I got to see several of the water shows at the Bellagio, which were pretty impressive.