Let's put a smile on that face.

First order of business, yes, I saw The Dark Knight. Yes, we saw it in IMAX. Yes, my life is profoundly changed because of it. That's enough. If you haven't seen it, then you must. If you have, then there's nothing for me to say.

Other than that the trailer for Watchmen played before it. I am experiencing cautious optimism. (Shout-outs to my homies Paco and Heff for showing me this last week.)

Arnold was kind enough to direct me to a super-secret leaked prototype script for The Dark Knight, penned by none other than that sublime auteur, Michael Bay. Read at your own peril; that way totally radical awesomeness lies.
So! We just got back from Iowa. We went to Iowa for Nordic Fest, which is kind of like the Royal St. John's Regatta, only with a Scandinavian theme and no boats. We took lots of pictures, but I haven't uploaded any of them yet, so next time.

I have, on the other hand, finally captioned the pictures from last month of our fun trip to Niagara Falls and Dad and Liz's visit to New York. They are here. Also, for anyone late to the party, you can see older pictures from Taiwan, Cambodia, South Korea and North America by going to my gallery, here. Hualien and Kenting are uncaptioned, and may be deleted if I need the space.

Now, your dose of Mega Man.

Mega Man 9 - first footage
by rawmeatcowboy

Take two and call me in the morning.

I suppose I'll put on my serious face first and direct you to CNN for a serious story about a whack-job Republican who has rented two billboards which showcase the burning World Trade Center accompanied by the text "Please Don't Vote for a Democrat." I... I honestly don't know what to say. You either think this kind of behaviour is immoral and inherently ignorant, or you're a very difficult person for me to talk to.

Next, only slightly less serious:

I only wish I had half the time and resources required to pull this off. Look at that crowd!

My super sister Sarah (see? I did alliteration there) lives in Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories, and she recently e-mailed me a link to the weather report for Yellowknife, which featured one of the oddest weather symbols I've ever seen. The site has changed, but I grabbed a screenshot of it before it did:
Is funny, yes? Condition: Smoke. Apparently there were wildfires burning all over and the smoke was just choking Yellowknife. And hey, check out those highs and lows! It's only a little bit colder than New York summers! Weird.

Now, I never played Mario Kart 64 or Mario Kart: Double Dash for the GameCube, I jumped straight from Super Mario Kart to Mario Kart DS, but still nearly busted a gut from laughing at this:

I have no idea. All I know is that it's been stuck in my head for weeks.

Have you ever been walking in the rain, and you get attacked by ninjas? I know I have, and if I had had this bad motherfucker right here, I would have been able to kill them a lot faster:

Well, now you all know what I want for Christmas.

Okay, there's no easy way to say this, so I'll just show you the picture and type the words.
There's a game called Fat Princess. I saw it, and I loved it. I love it now. I want to go buy a PS3 just so I can download it and play it. It works like this: you need to rescue your princess, while the opposing team tries to rescue theirs from you. The mechanics at play are twofold, send enough guys to go pick up their princess while feeding your princess enough shit and garbage to make her too heavy for your enemies to lift.

This game is the very definition of creative. Of course, not everyone sees it that way. Needless to say, there's been a lot of back-and-forth on the topic recently, so it basically falls to everyone to read it and make up your own mind.

Something, that you will not, however, be permitted to make up your own mind about is Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. A three-part internet-only musical by Joss Whedon starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion? You have got to be shitting me. Now, when Katie and I watched it, it was streaming free off of the website, but after a few days of being free, they started demanding that you buy it from iTunes for $3 an episode. I can only imagine that several of the internets cried foul, which resulted in it being restored to the website.

Also, you can embed it on any website, so that's what I'll do. It's 42 minutes long all together, so go get some chips and a beer before starting it.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

A website called Peaceful Rise has discovered some new signs in China pertaining to the upcoming "Olympics." The signs help Chinese nationals figure out what they should and should not say and do around waiguoren (i.e., foreigners). Helpful hints include such nuggets as "when chatting with athletes who are paraplectic in their upper body, do not say things like “It’s behind you.”" I cannot wait to see how this turns out.

You know who Bill O'Reilly is, right? Sure you do: he's got a no-spin zone or something. Anyway, he used to work on Inside Edition (of course). Here's a nice little fluff piece about videogames:

From 1988, no less! Fuck, 20 years ago. I was ten. Damn.

Well, that's all I can handle for today, kids. I super-promise to get the pictures from Iowa up before my next birthday, plus I plan on tackling the "YouTube Problem" this week, as well. We've got Jamey and Christy coming up for a visit this weekend (for fuck's sake! I'm just going to go ahead and install a goddamn revolving door in the apartment), so that should be a nice laugh, too.

I'll leave you with a quick story and an even quicker video. When I was in university at MUN, I used to watch Pokemon with Jessica and Rebecca. At every commercial break, the TV would shout, "Who's that Pokemon?" with an accompanying silhouette. When they came back from the commercial break, it would shout, "It's Pikachu!" or "It's Dodrio!" or "It's Snorlax!" or whoever the fuck it was. By the end of it, I got quite good at recognizing the original 150 Pokemon (151 including Mew.......... I can't beleive I just remembered that... ). So anyway, this very short clip caused me to fairly scream with laughter.


Now fuck off.

Love, Adam
Ah... I'll buy it at a high price.

Well, slap a carrot in my mouth and call me Wilbur.

I'm not an unlucky person. I have a nice job that pays almost enough to live comfortably. I have a nice, clean, cozy apartment. I live in New York City, so there's always something to do. I have a caring family and rock-solid friends that all live very far away from me. I have a Wii, a PS2 and a Nintendo DS. I have lots and lots of little robots to look at. I have a wonderful girlfriend who makes every day more fun than the one before it.

That said, I've never been particularly lucky, either. Not in the way my stepmother is lucky. Liz wins things like it's her job. A new kitchen. Several trips and concerts. Liz calls the radio station, and she wins. She's a lucky fucker.

Well, some of that luck must have rubbed off on me, quite literally, when she was here visiting with Dad. While they were here, we made a trip into The City to go to the Build-A-Bear Workshop on 5th Avenue to get one of the fantastic new Tropical Hello Kittys for my sister Rebecca (who has apparently abandoned 57.1% of the letters in her given name and now goes by the curt moniker "Bee"). While there, of course, Katie simply had to pick up a couple of $2 shirts for our regular, snow-white Kitty.

Jolly good. So while we're waiting in line, Katie sees some sweepstakes entry box thing and says, "Fill out two of these forms." I sigh and do it without really paying attention.

Flash forward to yesterday afternoon. I've just gotten home from a long day of dealing with this bloody Scott Foresman-Pearson Spanish Science B-Printing. We have guests. Josie and Andrew are in town from Des Moines, Iowa for a few days. I'm drinking a rum and coke, and we're all sitting outside on our steps (which is apparently the done thing in our neighbourhood). The FedEx man walks up to us. I'm so used to getting FedEx packages at work that I'm momentarily taken aback, like walking into your favourite bar only to find that your grandmother has made friends with all the bar staff while you were gone.

"Adam Hunt?" he asks. I take the envelope and sign. I examine the label. Build-A-Bear Workshop? Double-you-tee-eff? Kindly scroll back up to the beginning of the post to see the contents.

Apparently I won the 'grand prize', which consists of four tickets to a Mets game next week. Huh. I'm quite sure that it was sheerest coincidence that I won these on an excursion with Liz. Has to be.

My favorite part of the letter is the opening line: "Cubgratulations™!" They actually trademarked the word cubgratulations. LAWLZ.

Other things:

I really really really want this game to end up as fun as it looks. Pretty please?

I love the way the webbing looks, all squiggly.

Now, I don't know how much you know about Spore, but the game has me so excited. It's designed by Will Wright, the super-genius who created SimCity as well as the best-selling PC game in recorded history, The Sims. Basically, in Spore, you start off as a unicellular organism (like in Jenova Chen's free and fantastic flOw), but then you evolve to play as a bug, or whatever, then evolve and take control of your tribe, then civilization, then galaxy. It sounds fantastic. ANYway, Maxis have released a Spore Creature Creator, which allows you to play God and craft new organisms that could potentially eventually populate the game world when the full version of Spore releases in September. Needless to say, the basement-dwellers have used the Creator to create hordes of eating, shitting, running dicks, but the cleverest among them have fashioned reasonable replicas of creatures from other corners of the nerdiverse. Such a one is 'sylphx', whose blog showcases various beasties from the Final Fantasy pantheon, Sporified. Bravo, young man, bravo. (Edit: here are links to his Cactuar, Tonberry and Lavos creations.)

A lovely somebody named Lee Vidal (I presume) has created some fantastic backgrounds for your computer desktop over at deviantart. The ExciteBike one is on our iMac at home, and I have the colour Advance Wars one on my work computer. LOVE 'em.

Jamey and/or Christy were kind enough to send me this very entertaining flash animation about flash animation.
Quick! No cheating! Can you name the game pictured above? Trickier than it seems, huh? Well, it's not Mega Man 7 or 8, because they feature the new, slicker Mega Man. It's not Mega Man, Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3, because we all know those games off by heart, right. So it must be 4, 5 or 6, right? Yeah, no. Motherfucker is a screenshot from Nintendo Power's big reveal of... wait for it... Mega Man 9. Now that's what I'm talkin' about. Paco sent in a link to this guy's website, which features a nice side-by-side comparison of 3, 8 and 9. The best part? Kotaku, Joystiq and all the rest have confirmed that Mega Man 9 will be released exclusively on the Nintendo Wii's WiiWare service. Bloody superb. Plenty of screenshots here. Man, my thumbs are starting to ache just thinking about it...

Okay, that's all you get. If you want to say hi or cubgratulate™ me on my awesome grand prize win, you can do it in the comments.

Now fuck off.

Love, Adam
K: Adam was raised Catholic, so he doesn't take the Lord's name in vain.
A: Yeah, I just say fuck, shit and cunt a lot.

BLOODY. FUCKING. DISGUSTING.

A woman died on the floor of a an ER in a Brooklyn hospital.

She had been waiting for 24 hours.

She collapsed and twitched on the floor for an hour.

A security guard saw her and walked away.

Tell me now the American health care system isn't fucking broken.

The link below takes you to the video on CNN. It's bloody disturbing, so don't watch it if you're easily upset.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/07/02/waiting.room.death/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

Adam