Curses, foiled again

I have nothing of great interest to pass along. Lovely wife has been tooling around town some with her early birthday present - one of those cruiser style bikes. I find them to be difficult to turn, but she's getting a kick out of it and can go on bike rides with the kids. So there's that.

I suspect the kids are ready for school to start up again. They're starting to go a little nuts around the house. We try and throw them out every day, but they keep coming back. No idea what that's about. If nothing else, I'm ready for the kids to go back to school again. Although lovely wife would probably disagree when factoring in carpool and increased after school activities again.

Wizards of the Coast is trying to take my money with the recently released Dungeon Command. Turn based card driven combat with cool minis?! What's not to love there?

We're on the final season of Avatar and it's been quite good. Not sure what we'll latch onto next. Lovely wife's been trying to interest the kids in some old TV show called Voyagers. I only vaguely remember it. Not sure I watched that one much. I've heard good things about Gravity Falls over on Disney. May need to find a way to check that one out. Twin Peaks for kids or an animated Eerie, Indiana are the two ways I've heard it described. Again, what's not to love there? Maybe I should start tracking down Twin Peaks...

We've had some rain lately so the lawn is doing its best to demoralize and kill me. It's succeeding.

I dunno . . . stuff

Honestly I don't know that there's really anything worth rambling on about. I'm getting some enjoyment out of the Tomb Raider Trilogy currently out. I'm playing through Anniversary at the moment as I wanted to see how they handled the remake of the original game. It's fun. And far easier to play in parts than the original was. Which isn't to say it's without fault. The camera in this game is downright swimmy. I actually can't play too much at a time or it just leaves me with a headache. It's too loose or something. Not entirely certain how to describe it. And there are still some needless deaths due to not being able to quite line up. That's one thing I like about Uncharted. For the most part it knows where you're jumping and just lets you do it. Occasionally you'll be a little off, but not nearly as badly as here. Look forward to the other games.

I picked up Dungeon Hunter: Alliance as I wanted a fun little hack and slash game. It's just now out on PSN. If there are any other dungeon crawling dudes out there that want to co-op through the game, let me know. (And the Might and Magic demo is pretty cool too...)

A Happy Birthday goes out to little sis. She claims to be getting old. I roll my eyes at her. And her comments about getting close to 40. Close. Ha. I'll show her what close is in November. And then start the slow march to the top of the hill.

The lawn seems to think it needs to grow. I'm unimpressed with this notion.

Rumor has it that a family picture is being taken this week. In order to make sure it is as interesting as possible, G decided to throw his chin at the concrete steps in front of our house. He is patched up now. And insists on being called Indiana Jones as he now has a scar on his chin. Well, at least, that's what lovely wife claims. I have yet to find any ancient artifacts or dead Nazis, so I'm a little skeptical.

Subtitled for your reading enjoyment

It's been Foreign Film Week in casa del 'd'. (This means subtitles oh favorite niece. You gots to read those movies. Because they're awesome. And not in English. You could turn the subtitles off, but unless you speak Cantonese or Swedish it's just a whole lot of pictures at 40 frames a second. Or whatever that film speed is.)

We started off with Hard Boiled. Mostly for historical and completist sorts of reasons. It was interesting mostly for those same reasons. Although anything involving babies, cotton balls, or fire extinguishing was awesome. And hilarious. I think this film is best described as a reverse classic. It's easy to see now how other films have built on or ripped off this one. Sometimes to better effect (Infernal Affairs comes to mind), sometimes not. So it is a genre building/influencing sort of film, but mostly it's interesting to see where things went. John Woo wasn't quite the master of choreographed bullet play yet and there were no doves to be seen! Shocking.

Next up was Let the Right One In the good vampire film from last year. That happened to be from Sweden. It was an interesting coming of age sort of tale that left you not really wanting to be a vampire. At least not one stuck in a twelve year old's body. Although she was quite adept at dropping from trees and killing people. Lots of practice I suspect. There were some good creepy moments and some nice nods to vampire lore and there was NO SPARKLING. That's always a sign of a good vampire movie. In fact sunlight managed to do exactly what it was supposed to do in a rather nice scene featuring a rather distraught character.

Cutthroat Caverns needs to be played by probably at least 4 people and several of them need to not be me. I actually really like the game (despite what you may hear from those in attendance at the game last night). Yes, yes, take things too seriously, get stuck on things too easily. These are not new comments in regards to my gaming personality. The point is, it's fun. It's mean on occasion, but still fun. Now if we can just get McK to realize how some of the cards work and that hoarding doesn't do any good.

G has managed to make a gamer out of my wife. He's been wanting to play through Zelda: Twilight Princess which means my wife gets to play through it for him. She's actually quite close to the end. Truly amazing. A feat not even the letter 'r' has managed to accomplish yet. I am quite proud of both of them for rising to this occasion. Brings a tear to my eye it does. Good on ya G.

From Hell is a dark book. And I don't mean in just subject matter (that was a given). The artwork (on purpose I suspect) can be pretty difficult to discern. This made reading it a chore. I've technically still got the annotations to go through. We'll see. Mostly it made me want to poke around other things dealing with ol' Jack.

I'm not prepared to deal with Spring and a lawn that wants constant attention again. I think we need to turn the back yard into one big gardening experiment... Wife disagrees. Must look into means of remedying that. Hmm...

And on a final note I do not recommend falling down the stairs. It's not pleasant. Nor is it fun. And now I have to get back in the habit of exercising in the morning as well. Stupid stairs.