Not to say that Sony’s baby-doll PS3 ad aired during the World Series wasn’t fucked up — it was — but it wasn’t blatantly sexist and pandering to mindlessness.

Edit: It’s a fake. Oh well.

I won’t question the wisdom of using “Mad World” by Michael Andrews (as heard during the ending sequence of Donnie Darko) for the Gears of War cinematic trailer, but I doubt anyone expected me to laugh.

I wonder if it’s possible to drop airplane engines on people in this game.

The best Bunnyvision movie yet: Fight Club.

I’m taking next week off, starting Sunday. Got lots of stuff to do, including actually learning how to make mods in NeverWinter Nights, after everyone for some reason is all-fired ready to abandon it for NWN2. It’s for class, so I kind of have to. My mod is sort-of titled “I Hate Elves” with the subtitle, “The Good-Looking Corpse.” This is what I come up with when I’m not answerable to anyone and my teacher used to work on content design for latter-era Ultimas and thinks I’m funny.

Well, she does.

Anyone on my IM list will know that I’m still alive and foisting links on people, so I’m out of habit with posting them here — and I still haven’t got around to rebuilding my permanent list of links. I only just noticed Sara Jensen has a blog. She got married, to Damion Schubert of all people, and posted pictures, mostly of Damion eating. She posted two photos from her actual wedding, and you can see me in both of them, which is really freaking weird.

Speaking of Damion, he beat me to posting about the latest PS3 commercial featuring an inexplicably creepy and apparently possessed toy baby, which is apparently the target market for Sony’s new, overpriced game console. Destructoid, which might just be my new favorite game commentary site, posted the video (which ran during the World Series, woo) and offered this quip which Brian said was much better than the video:

While their stab at pretension might have 15-year-old philosophers abandoning their Donnie Darko DVDs and Mars Volta albums in a mad rush to explain to the girl down the street how “deep” and “meta” these ads are, the rest of the world is busy readying our pitchforks and vials of holy water to stem the tide of Demon Babies Sony is bound to launch upon the world with their PS3 system.

He might be right about that.

Ian Frazier, quoted as Tiberius Moongazer, was the project lead for Ultima V: Lazarus, was interviewed by the newly-reformed RPGWatch (RPGDot’s editorial staff decided the management sucked and decided to bail.) What isn’t pointed out is that Ian works at Iron Lore Entertainment and was a designer on Titan Quest.

Perhaps the greatest surprise for me was the sheer amount of people who actually downloaded the final game—by the last estimate, somewhere in the vicinity of 60,000 people downloaded Lazarus. For a 500 MB download, which mostly only appeals to veterans of a now-long-dead game series, which requires a 3-year-old game (Dungeon Siege) to even run, I was astounded by our success. It was certainly good to see!

I think he’s being conservative on that estimate, because that was BitTorrented a whole lot, and those are harder to keep track of.

I’m fairly well cheered up by now, but later today I’ll be heading in to Austin for several events tonight and Saturday, one of which in particular hasn’t been brought up on other Web sites yet, so I’ll not bring it up here — at least not right now.

Also, in regards to Cory Lidle, the best baseball-fan tribute has to be this one.

I’ve not entirely abandoned the notion that I need to drop my game design class. Not because of anything the instructor said or did, except the part more or less confirming the part about me never going to have the opportunity to apply anything I might learn in class, no matter how much I might want to know it just to know it.

This is just to say, because I admit (and to the many I’ve bothered about this little whine over the past few days, I’m sorry) I can’t imagine myself blowing the class fee on something I won’t see through until the end. It’s just going to be a fight to get myself to feel like I belong there, because I’m probably never going to think I do. Thinking is rational, and this is a wholly irrational pursuit of knowledge.

That said, the feel-good album of the year has to be The Sunlandic Twins by Of Montreal. That’s the one with the freaky-ass cartoon video with cute woodland creatures doing cute acts of not-cute violence to each other, that got re-recorded with new lyrics for an Outback Steakhouse commercial. I don’t listen to a lot of tenor-voice synth-pop art-rock, but this is definitely the kind that puts me in a good mood, the way music rarely does.

Certainly the feel-bad movie of the year is one that few will have the opportunity to see, that being the ultra-indie movie version of David Mamet’s play, Edmond. The Alamo Drafthouse got it for a one-week engagement for whatever reason,
and I naturally assumed that it was an opportunity to infuse myself with Culture in a way I hadn’t for a while. I can report to readers that under no circumstances save the perceived need to punish themselves should anyone go see this movie, and for those who don’t know what it’s about, the Wikipedia article on the play tells it well enough. There’s some extra symbolism and iconography in the movie that closeups can provide but plays on a stage can’t, but that’s pretty much it.

I saw this after my class on Tuesday night, and I’ve been vaguely wondering why I might deserve what I got. Maybe this was a penance for some neglected sin.

Maybe it was pride.