Bradley Online

Bottom Line: Not worth it

After recently being besieged on all sides for praise of the Twilight series, I decided I probably should check it out. After all, this was the same way I found myself introduced the Harry Potter series, which despite it’s flaws was something I rather liked. Even when the characters let you down in some way the world is still charming enough to keep you reading. I though perhaps Twilight would be a similar experience.

I was decidedly wrong in my assumptions. I knew going in that this was considered to be some sort of amalgam of romance, horror and thriller. However I had let myself believe that these components would be in somewhat equal parts. However the horror and thriller make up approximately 10% of the total package, and the romance part is uninteresting drivel.

The story follows Bella, a girl recently moved to the couldy town of Forks to live with her father, Charlie. After settling into a routine, she finds a couple friends (made up of girls who are jealous of her and boys who are already making half assed attempts to date her, despite her obvious non-interest.

She soon meets Edward, who apparently reviled her initially, but it turns out he was just trying really hard not to eat her. Bella, who was apparently born under the Die, Bella, Die zodiac sign has several near death encounters that Edward, using his special vampire powers, has to save her from.

The problems really begin here. The reader, we assume, started out knowing this was a book about vampires. The revelation that Edward is a vampire will come at no surprise to us. Yet the book insists on dragging out Bella’s discovery of this fact, and does so in the least interesting way possible (A local native american dude heard a story about the cullens being vampires).

After this revelation, and another rescue from Edward, the two begin dating (and Bella doesn’t feel weird about the fact that a 104-year-old decided one day “Hey, I’m going to go to High School”), and spend most of their time discussing how bad Edward is for Bella, and how Bella doesn’t care because despite the fact that he might go crazy someday and, you know, eat her, for now he’s on a animal diet. They discuss this a lot, almost all of their conversations revolve around it.

There is no real plot here to speak of. There is no conflict between Edward and Bella, who take up center stage most of the time. She meets his family, and almost all of them like her. They decide to take Bella along when they go to play Baseball. It’s exciting times.

With a hundred pages left to go, the antagonist finally shows up. Some other vampires are passing through forks, and they are still on a human diet. The leader decides he’s going to go to great lengths to have Bella, and the Cullens hatch an elaborate plan to keep her and her family safe.

The bad vampire tricks Bella into ditching the Cullens, traps her, and goes in for the kill. Bella passes out, and wakes up later after she’s been saved. Bella sleeps through the only interesting scene in the book. She’s semi conscious when Edward stops her wound from turning her into a vampire,and then wakes up for real in the hospital, where the Cullens have come up with a vampire-free cover story to tell her family.

In the final chapter, Bella asks Edward to turn her into a vampire, because it seems to be pretty rad for him. But he refuses,presumably because it’s awesome and the more people that are vampires the more it diminishes it for the rest of them.

Ultimately, it took me a month to wade through this book. I actually stopped halfway through and read a much better book (Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsey, which I recommend heartily). I’m having trouble placing who this would be a good book for, but obviously it’s someone because these books are crazy popular. I’m getting conflicting reports on how good the later books are, but I doubt I’ll find out for myself. If you’re way into romance novels, and think that having a vampire family inserted into that context sounds like the best thing ever, then by all means, pick up Twilight. Otherwise, just see the movie. I hear they at least show the fight scene in the movie.

So, I’m checking out my facebook feed today and I see someone I know is attending something called A Day Without Gays, which is, essentially, a one-day boycott scheme calling for gay folks and their straight allies to call off gay for a day and not consume anything.

These sorts of things were pretty huge when gas prices were pushing $4 a gallon. People thought that by not purchasing gas on a specific day, they could somehow force the price down. The problem is these one-day boycotts don’t really call for any change in behavior from the participants. The folks participating are still consuming, they’re just buying their groceries a day earlier or later and still spending the same amount of money. A boycott can only be successful if it’s a massive long-term movement where the particpants go without whatever product for a long period of time.

So how do you make straight people give a shit about gay rights? I think, as nothing more than a political ploy which is designed to be defeated, we should look at getting a issue on the ballot which abolishes straight marriage the way gay marriage was abolished by California Propisition 8.

Think about that a moment.

I think you’d want to do it on a Presidential Election year, to avoid it somehow passing notice and getting passed without anyone realizing it, and again, this would be nothing more than a political ploy, not something designed to pass.

The truth is, I think most folks who voted for Prop 8 probably aren’t really biggoted at heart. I think it’s more that they hold some emotional connection to the word marriage and they think it should be a certain way. If pressed, I don’t think most of them could give a reason why they’re against gay marriage, they just feel like it shouldn’t be around. These are the kind of people who have never had the harsh ray of discrimination pointed their way (which, hey, me either, unless being overweight counts, but I err on the other side where I think people should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want as long as they’re not hurting anyone).

I think if suddenly all straight couples were implicated in the same way gay couples were, maybe they’d understand a little better what it feels like to have what you can do with your life decided by the population at large, and I think it’d be a lot more effective than protests or one-day boycott schemes.

-B

For work, I was required to read Brag: The art of the Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. While the general message of the book is true, if obvious, that being that you have to promote yourself in an office environment because you can’t count on others to do so for you, it was a pretty dull read. In addition to reading it, every associate in my work group had to complete the books “Take 12″ list of 12 questions. What follows is my answer to question two: What are the ten most interesting things you have done or that have happened to you?

This was difficult, because the 10 most interesting things that happened to me were not necessarily work safe. I for instance, couldn’t expect my boss and his boss to find a terrible amount of amusement in a story of the time I tripped over a room mate having sex on the floor of a dark room while I attempted to retrieve my clothes hamper. I think, however, I’ve come up with 10 reasonably interesting things.

All these things happened as presented, at least as well as I can remember them.

1. The Bridal Show

On a Friday of no particular importance, I decided to head to Easton Town Center to kill some time. I had entered on the second level of the parking garage, intent on going to a shop on the top level. As I approached the main staircase, I become aware of some fancy food sitting around on trays, free sample like, on the middle of the walk way, but without anyone attending them. It looks free, but I decided not to partake, because it looked really expensive. Anyhow,I continue on my way.

But I run into a problem fairly quickly. There is a large black curtain blocking my way across the walkway, and from behind this curtain comes an attractive mid-twenties girl in a wedding dress. I stop, because this is clearly out of the ordinary. I can very well charge through this curtain if they’re trying on wedding dresses or whatever. So I glance down the main staircase, my eyes traveling over the food court below to the escalator in the back. It looks like the path from the escalator to the shop I wanted to visit is unimpeded, so I take a few steps down the main staircase.

There is a gentlement to my right looking at me nonplussed, wearing a tuxedo and clutching a microphone, which he covers with his hand and says to me “What the hell are you doing here?”

I think I managed an “Uhhh..” in reply.

So I glance down at the food court. Upon looking at it closely, I see that it is not shoppers arranged around various tables as it would normally be, so much as a hundred person-strong seated audience staring at me with rapt confusion. I then glance at the gentlemen in the tuxedo and then back up at the girl in the wedding dress and come to the realization that I’ve just happened onto center stage of a bridal show.

I waved, walked back up the stairs and tried to go down the back staircase when a security guard stopped me and asked me what I was doing. Interestingly enough,he didn’t realize the other direction was completely uncovered.

2. Columbus Geeks Charity

One year I ran a technology themed Toy Drive for Columbus Children’s Hospital which raised a thousand dollars worth of toys, video games and books. I chose not to continue this in subsequent years because we found out that it might have been illegal to do so. (Soliciting donations without proper licenses and such, even though we had permission from the hospital to do so)

3. Locked Out

When I was still a new associate, I was locked outside Plaza 3 at 2 am on a production activity night, and had to figure out a way to get a security guard’s attention (it escaped my notice that there was a button I could have pressed to do just that). I instead tried knocking loudly on the plaza 3 windows on the skywalk hoping to gain the attention of a night watchmen, started down to Plaza 1, noticed a security guard on the bottom level, doubled back to Plaza 3 to get to the ground, started walking over to plaza one again, dropped almost everything I was carrying, and as I was picking it up, noticed the security guard back up on the skywalk escorting someone to their car (presumably because there was some nut banging on the windows of Plaza 3) and then eventually waiting for him to come back to Plaza One, clutching my torn backpack.

4. Amal, The Jabbering Indian

One evening, sitting outside with a friend after a particularly late running poker game, a young man approached us asking if he could borrow 5 bucks. His sister had been in a car accident of some sort, and he needed a little cash to get a taxi to OSU Medical Center. Thinking that $5 was a fair price to have him move along, I coughed up, and after he bummed a cigarette off of my friend, and then broke her lighter, he moved along.

When I was in my car pulling out of the parking lot later, I was waved down by a smattering of my friends, standing with this same guy. He approached me and said that his sister wasn’t at OSU, she was at Doctor’s West, which was just down the street. He wanted a ride, and desipte that being a terrible idea, I agreed and he got in the car.

As we drove down broad street, he proceeded to talk my ear off, commenting on who he was, asking about the girl I was sitting with when he first came up, talking about his sister, all sorts of things that were pretty far removed from the uncomfortable silence one would expect in this situation. My friend who I had been sitting with , called me as we drove down the street, shouting paniced into the phone that she thought he was crazy and I needed to get rid of him as soon as possible, which with my phone volume cranked rang through the momentarily silent car. I meerly faked “Interesting! I’ll think on that and get back to you! BYE!”

He then asked me to turn down a dark side street, because that’s where his Grandma lived, and he wanted to tell her what was up. HE pleaded with me not to leave. I watied, car in drive and my foot ready on the pedal should anything weird happen, but he came back down gingerly and got back in the car, with some bad news. “She’s not at this hospital.” Making this the second change in venue in a few minutes. “She’s at Riverside.” I told him I was not driving him all the way to Riverside, sir.

But fortunately, he had gotten ahold of his uncle,just around the corner, and just needed a lift there. I did so, again the car filled with inane jabber during what increasingly felt like the worst idea I ever had. He got out at his uncles house, thanked me, assured me he’d stop by later that week to thank me, or whatever and headed inside. I left promptly.

Though I never did get back the $5 I gave him for a Taxi. I to this day don’t know where I acutally took him. Though my friends who I was hanging out with that night told me he turned up again a couple weeks later. Asking for, surprisingly enough, to borrow $5.

5. The Semi

When I was sixteen and had just started driving, I was infused with the same sense of immortality that inhabits all young people. I also had almost no common sense.

My car at the time was a 80-something Chevy Nova. It had a funny habit of fogging back up in the winter time despite your best efforts to clear it off. Being 16, and by extension, an idiot, I decided to go forward, being that I had to be at school early to make up a test I missed while out sick.

Naturally, something wen wrong. As I turned onto a street, partially blinded, I went left of center and hit something. Something big. I look out my window and, holy crap, I just bumped into the tire of a Semi Truck.

Obviously, it didn’t even notice and carried on, so I did too. My friend in the car with me informed me that there was a cop behind me.

The cop, fortunately, did not see me hit the semi, just driving with the fogged up wind shield. He gave me a ticket and sent me on my way.

The next day, I’m in choir class when the Principal comes into the room, asking to see me in the office. I happily follow him there, and ask what’s up. “A couple of detectives are here to see you.” I’m immediately terrified, while at the same time thinking “I know this is a small town, but seriously, detectives are investigating traffic accidnets now?”

I go in there, they show me their badges, and they say “We assume you know what this is about.” Nervously I say, “It’s about… what happened yesterday?” They exchange a signifigant glance and ask what happened yesterday.

Obviously they were trying to get me to just fess up to leaving the scene of an accident or whatever, right? So I reiterate exactly what I was cited for “Clear View to the Front” and offer not additional information.

They start laughing. “Oh no, you’re not in any trouble! We’re here about the Gregalonis Homicide”. There was a big scandal in my town that year where a guy in my school had, allegedly, murdered both his parents. But the thing was I don’t know the kid. If he was sitting right here with me I wouldn’t know it was him. Someone else they had questioned had mentioned after they had seen Brandon they went to the school for Band Practice and subsequently saw me there. So they decided to question me in case I knew anything else.

6. Canada, On a Whim

My group of friends and I used to play Poker almost every weekend. One night when it had run particularly late, some friends and I decided we should take a road trip. It was around 5 am and we decided it would be fun to drive to Chicago. So we started grabbing our stuff and loading up the car, when one of my friends, Jess, had reminded us she had to be back by six. This posed a problem, as Chicago is a six hour trip. We were looking at 12 hours in the car and less than one in Chicago itself.

So we decided somewhere local would be fine. How about Cleveland? There had to be something fun in Cleveland. So we started on the road, when it occured to me that for not much longer in the car we could get to Windsor and hang out at the Casino for a few hours.

While this worked great in theory it did pose one or two problems. The most signifigant being getting across the border into Canada. At the time you only needed a Birth Certificate, but I was the only one who had one, since I had a Birth Certificate card made which at the time resided in my wallet.

We get up there, and get a telling to by the border guard who does eventually relent and let us cross. This may have been a pretty big risk, because even though we got into Canada, there was no garuntee they were going to let us back into the USA. Regardless, we blew a bunch of money at the Casino for a few hours and then headed back considerably poorer, but having had a load of laughs, didn’t mind to much.

The guard on the way back into America didn’t even look at us sideways.

7. Bradley, Professional Wedding Date

There was a period a few years ago where I went to like 10 weddings in one year. These weren’t all friends of mine persay, but I was the wedding guest of more than a few folks. It got to a point where I was considering starting a professional “Wedding Date” service. “Don’t want to go alone? Call Bradley, it’s -slightly- better than going alone! Ask about our Open Bar discount! If you need a date, Bradley owns a suit.” I think it would have been a big earner.

There were a couple of weddings where I didn’t really know anyone. This became particularly pronounced at the last one I went to. My friend Katrina had just broken up with her boyfriend, and needed a stand in date for this wedding she was going to. I was asked to go a week prior to the acutal wedding. I was going to mostly be on my own during this whole thing since she was a bridemaid. To this day I don’t know why people who are in the wedding party bring dates who aren’t their signifigant other.

Anyhow, I am nearly late arriving because I have some difficultly locating the church, but get there shortly before the service starts. It quickly becomes apparent that this wedding will be different than all the others I went to that year, because it was a Catholic wedding. I’d never even been to a normal mass before so the experience was somewhat jarring. Most of the other weddings I went to were about 30 minutes max once the ceremony got under way. This one was a full blown church service that just happened to include a couple getting married. Then of course there was loads of kneeling and standing that I wasn’t prepared for, and communinion. Back when I went to church, communinion plates were passed around with the little shot glasses with grape juice in them, in this everyone just sort of rushed up to the front to the general bewilderment of me. Oh and when the time for songs came, it wasn’t “turn to page 329 in your hymnal”, it was we’re singing “Oh the lord art awesome” and everyone there just knew it.

But while bemusing, the wedding wasn’t the really bad part of the experience, just sort of different. The info I had told me to go to the reception hall right after the service. When I get there, there isn’t a single other person around. I go in and one of the staff approaches me, saying “Can I help you?” I explain I’m here for the reception, and he goes “Uh, it’s not till 4.” (It was around 1 at the time.) I had just planned on having lunch at the reception, so didn’t really eat all day. So I end up going to Steak and Shake in my suit, then walking around best buy for a couple hours to pass the time.

I return around 4:15, but still, no one there. I decide to just have a seat and wait for others to show up. Unfortunately, there is a problem: Seating chart. As a last minute replacement date of a bridesmaid, which I’m sure did not rate on the priorities of wedding plans, I’m no where to be found. And there doesn’t seem to be any empty spaces on the seating chart for me to insert myself, so I’m sort of stuck.

I had pretty much no idea how I’m supposed to act where I don’t know anyone and I’m not really even supposed to be there. I mean, the movie Wedding Crashers hadn’t even come out at that point. So I settle myself at the open bar and make sort of a business about drinking a glass of wine. (Which is sadly, bargain merlot instead of something more interesting) Hoping to not look too out of place until Katrina arrives from wherever the wedding party is.

Eventually they arrive, and before I can even say hello to Katrina, the lot of them sweep right by me go into a private back room and close the door. I get out my phone and send a text message to Katrina, asking what I should do, but never recieve a response. I am standing around, occasionally making small talk with folks I don’t know for around an hour, before someone comes on the P.A. and says “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you will please take your seats, we’re going to introduce the bridal party.

I go outside. Trying to decide if I should just leave or what. I settle on waiting it out on the outside, and once the bridal party is seated at the place of honor I approach and ask what I should do, since I’m not on the seating chart. The bride,who was very nice to a complete stranger, had me sit with some friends of her and the groom’s from college. Eventually Katrina came by and vistied for about 20 minutes and mentioned I didn’t have to stay late if I didn’t want to. I think I more or less immediately left after that.

8. The Rest Stop of Broken Dreams

I currently live with a room mate, and while the previous year we had made plans to live together, we had a disparity of a few months between the time our leases ended,with mine ending first. So for a few months around the end of last year/beginning of this year, I lived at home in Kenton, OH, which is about an hour / hour and 15 minute drive from Columbus.

This meant spending quite a lot of time on the road, as I was still working here in Columbus, but it also meant any time spent with friends had to be carefully planned. As I either needed a couch to crash on or I had to drive an hour or more very late at night.

On one particular night in the middle of winter, I was feeling tired and left a party at around 11 pm. It was a bitterly cold night, with the wind chill taking the temperature well below zero. On the way home I decided to kip out for a little bit at a road side rest stop on I-33, since I was extremely tired from spending the whole day apartment shopping.

I had done this a lot during my various traveling between Columbus and Kenton. Generally I just take the keys out, lean the seat back and nap until I wake up or it gets too cold to stay asleep. On this particular bitter cold night the cold won out and I went to turn the car back on.

I turned the ignition and nothing happened, the battery was completely dead.

I get my phone out. The battery was almost dead on that too. I start typing out a text message to my friend Erik, who was only 20 minutes or so away, asking if he can come give me a jump. Before I can press “Send”, the phone goes dead.

But I have my spare charge cable with me in the car, having retrieved it from the office earlier that day, knowing my batter was getting low. However, it turns out there isn’t a single public outlet anywhere in the heated restroom building at the road side rest. It does, thank god, have a pay phone. However, in my now seemingly crippling dependence on my cell phone’s address book, I call the only number commited to memory from a simplier age, my parents. I ask them to send a tow truck my way, and then I start the waiting game.

I had my sketchbook, but a heated restroom building in the middle of nowhere on a bitterly cold night offers precious little in the way of artistic inspiration. I amused myself for hours reading various Rest Area pamphlets on the natural wonders of Ohio, and folded a giant paper crane from a massive road map of Ohio. Other folks who came in now and then just looked at me strangely, though the odd trucker would stop for a few minutes conversation. Before heading back out on the open road.

Eventually my parents turned up, deciding to just come give my car a jump themselves rather than worry about getting a tow truck. Ended up getting home around 4 in the morning, still clutching my giant road map paper crane.

9. Of Broken Windows and Cold Nights

During the same time period where I was living at home, on another bitterly cold night, I was spending the evening in the company of a few friends who I don’t get to see too often. They wanted to go to the High Five Tavern, at the corner of High and 5th in the Short North. There was precious little parking in the lot of the bar itself, so I parked along a row of houses in view of Skullys. It was pretty well lit, and wasn’t too bad a neighborhood, so I figured all would be okay.

I left my book bag, which contained a book I was reading, my wireless mouse and my work laptop in the passenger seat. Thinking that there was no reason to suspect that my rucksack contained anything other than books to look at it, so it should be safe sitting nondescript on the floor on the passenger side, and thinking if I was observed moving it to the trunk, it would take away any doubt that it contained something valuable.

I was only at the bar for around 45 minutes. We were going to proceed to someone’s home to hang out, and after getting some clumsy directions, I went back to my car. It did not immediately register that something was wrong. I got into the car and stared it up, before noticing the cold. I look over in horror to see the pasenger window smashed in, and lunge in futile hope for a rucksack that was not there.

I get out and swear loudly, trying to decide what to do. I had to call the police obviously, but I didn’t know the normal number off the top of my head. Someone from a nearby house comes out to ask what’s up, and I relay that my car was robbed, and I wasn’t sure if it was OK to call 9-1-1 for something like that. They said they thought so, so that’s what I did.

9-1-1 relayed me to an automated report system, which asks you a series of questions to record responses, and then tells you to move along. Basically small claims stuff like this doesn’t rate an actual police visit, mostly because there isn’t much chance in ever catching the guy who did it.

So I move along to my friend’s house with no window, on a bitterly cold night, and it becomes quite clear that this is a terrible situation. I am looking at an hour and a half drive home with no window.

I decide to wait out the morning at my friends house, hoping that the sunlight will return a modicum of warmth to my car. This did not happen. I went to a Wal-Mart before seting out in earnest. I had,of course, seen various vehicles with a grabage bag affixed over a broken window with duct tape. However, my car at the time proved to be strangely impervious to this. Despite my best efforts, the duct tape refused to stick, it would hold for a few moments and then slip off, utter non sticky.

I stopped the car several times attempting to restructure the whole thing in some way that would hold, but it would always break free after a few moments of driving, billowing loudly in the wind, so it was both nonfuncitonal and extremely loud. I ended up having to make my peace with dressing with a hoodie, a coat, a hat,gloves and a scarf wrapped around my head like some bizzare Head Shawl, and an emergency blanket thrown around my shoulders like a cloak, all trying to fight off the bitter cold. The drive home never went slower.

10. A Race Against a Marching Band on Crutches

I’ve only ever broken one bone in my life, and it was during high school. I was involved with our show choir all four years. The first two as a crew person, and the last two in the Jazz Band which also accompanied the singer/dancers.

During the second year as a crew person, during practice, there was a bit where we had to move a couch and some other props onto the stage. The Band and Choir Practice rooms were next to each other, and were connected by a narrow hallway lined also with various storage rooms and loads of iron uniform racks bearing the marching band uniforms.

I was the only crew person in the choir room, and while I probably could have handled the couch by myself, likely at the expense of back pains later in life, there was more than just the couch needing moved on and the director would probably get upset if she had to wait on the crew for something like that.

So, knowing the rest of the crew were in the band room, and not able to wait on them to turn up any longer, I darted down the side cooridor to go get them. However, someone had spilled something in the hallway and had not bothered to clean it up or put up a warning sign of any sort. I slipped, fell, slid and rammed my leg directly into one of the iron uniform racks.

To thunderous laughter from the folks in the band room, of course.

After hopping on one foot down to the pay phone and calling my dad, hopping on one foot back to the band room to collect my things and then hopping on one foot all the way out to my ride, I proceeded to go to the hospital, where they said it was a bad sprain, and I’d have to wear a protective boot for a few weeks.

Fast forward to just before Christmas, and our marching band is participating in the Christmas Parade in Chicago, something everyone was looking forward to. The weekend before the trip, I have my followup visit at the hospital where they decide that whoops,it turns out my leg is broken, hairline fracture, and I’d have to be on crutches for weeks. This presented certain problems for the parade I was preparing to march in.

I decided to go to Chicago anyway, and I just wouldn’t go on the parade. I mean, it was already paid for anyway.

So on the day of the parade, I’m standing around on my crutches with some friends when the director stops by to tell me I should probably get on the bus, since they were going to start the parade soon. I walk over the bus where the driver tells me, “Uh, we’re not coming back here, so you might want to ask the diretor again. As I’m doing so, the bus drives off. The director, somewhat amused, tells me I better start walking.

So, I’m on crutches, charging down Michigan avenue trying deparately to stay ahead of a marching band. Which, in and of itself, has several complications. The most pronounced being that there are several places on the sidewalk running paralel to the parade in progress which has large barriers erected, meaning the only way to continue following the parade in this unfamiliar city is to dart down alleyways and go around large buildings to try and get around the barricades. I also met a friendly homeless man, who thinking I was in some sort of plight, offered to help me get some food, and assured me that God had a plan.

I ended up reaching the end of the parade route moments before the marching band. A friend of mine who was pulling off her plumed hat as they reached the end said to me “You’re so lucky you didn’t have to march.” I resisted the urge to give her a good strong poke with one of my crutches.

-B

I finished Disgaea 3 last night. Well, finished might be too strong a term, as there is a respectable amount of bonus content to work through whenever I get aronud to doing the appropriate power-leveling.

So how was the game?

I’ve heard it said that gamers generally play their expectation for what a game is going to be, and how well they enjoy that experience generally can be measured by how well the real game meets that expectation (or, every now and again, exceeds it). In the case of Disgaea 3, my expectations were certainly met.

You play as Mao, who, like the Original’s Laharl, is the son of the Overlord. However, rather than running around smashing demon lords to claim the top spot as Overlord, you’re entering your first year at Evil Academy, the school in the Netherword. Mao is the top Honor Student at the Academy, which, for an evil school means he doesn’t give a piss about class and has never shown up to the school at all, deciding instead to spend all his time reading comic books, watching anime and playing video games.

Mao is a mad scientist of sorts, and likes to do experiments on subjects he collects. He has a sort of fascination with Heroes and, in retaliation for his dad smashing his favorite video game console, decides to become a Hero in order to defeat the Overlord (because, well, that’s what heroes do). Hijinks ensue.

The story is still told though voice-acted slide shows of the characters in a few different positions, and a lot of the time the potraits aren’t shown,leaving you to watch the sprites on the screen do a few different animations. There’s been a lot of big complaints about how little of a graphical leap the game has made with the transition to the PS3, but I can’t say I was honestly bothered by it. Everything except the sprites looked great on my 1080p monitor, and when the sprites are in motion doing ludicrous over-the-top attacks, it’s hard to be too bothered by them.

The voice acting in Disgaea 3 is top-drawer, with a lot of familiar voices from anime and video games. Mao himself is voiced by Vic Mignogna, who voiced Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist, and his servant, the Fake Hero Almaz, is voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch from Trigun, Bleach and a fuckton of other anime and games.

The story itself was very entertaining. Maintaining the silly tradition of the games before it, but peppered with serious moments. It revels in anime cliches and tries not to take itself too seriously. The humor hits more often than it misses, and I laughed out loud more than once. It’s more of a swing back towards the tradition of Hour of Darkness, without being a re-codification of the original story. Cursed Memories main failing seemed to be that they leaned too heavily on Etna and Laharl from the original, and didn’t give the majority of their characters all that much personality. Mao, I’m happy to report, is his own sort of cool and develops as the story goes along, unlike Adell who never really changed throughout the plot of the story.

At first glance, it would appear to be a much shorter game than the last two, weighing in at only 8 episodes. However the episodes are considerably longer, and often hop around to many different locations instead of being a 4 related maps, ending with a boss map endeavor.

Combat wise, there are a few upgrades which make things interesting. Geo Symbols are now stackable blocks, allowing you to produce an interesting variety of effects. There is also a newly introduced ability to link special attacks together,producing a Chrono Trigger-esque ability to have Dual Techs, creating a new attack stronger than the sum of it’s parts.

There are some other new things like the Class World, Evilties, Clubs and Homeroom Teachers, but I think you get the idea. This is probably the best version of Disgaea we’ve had yet, and thankfully it has a fun story to go along with it.

If your a strategy fan, and graphics aren’t a dealbreaker for you,I’d say go out there and get it at full price. If your just curious about the series and don’t find anime style stories annoying, gamefly it and check it out for yourself.

Like most big companies, my place of employment has all this mandatory health activity bullshit. One of the things you have to do every year is have a health screening done by the company or your doctor, or else your benefits skyrocket.

Today was the day of the Health Screenings in the Tuttle Area of Columbus. Around 1:30, an email comes through to all associates in the tuttle area (we’re talking hundreds of people in several different buildings), stating that the amount of walk-ins exhausted the supplies they had for the health screenings, and that there would be times next week downtown when folks could go and have their screening done.

This sucks, because it’s pretty far out of the way and you’d have to drop $5-$8 on parking just to go down there for an hour or two. But that’s not what the story is about.

It all starts with a few people who have questions, concerns and suggestions about how to handle this situation. But rather than email health services their comments, they just use “Reply to All” on the email client, so all these hundreds of people get an email about whatever thoughts they have.

Eventually, someone gets annoyed at the extra email, and, using Reply to All, asks that everyone stop using reply to all.

Like minded folks then use Reply to All to thank him for his insight on the matter.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. We start getting reply to all emails about how funny it is that asking the cease of replying to all generated a tangential thread about thanking someone for asking for a cease of replying to all. We then have another group of folks who decide to go whole hog and start having unrelated conversations for the full view of everyone in the company, like this were twitter or something.

The Buckeyes chances this weekend were discussed at length, what one individual guy was going to do when he got off work, people correcting other people’s goddamn spelling.

Eventually it crashed to an end when a manager stepped in and said “that’s enough of this bullshit” and recommended other managers have a sit down with their team about proper business use of Reply to All, and, after it all had stopped, someone had notified the thread that was 75 emails strong that they forwarded it to ethics.

I resisted the urge to reply to all to say Oh, snap

I’d like to start by doing a little site whoring.

Some good friends of mine have started blogging recently, and you should probably check out their unique take on things.

Additionally, if your into podcasting, swing by E.A.R.F. for one of the most entertaining video game podcasts out there. If your looking for straight up news, maybe joystiq will be better. But EARF manages to make me laugh almost every episode I listen to.

Okay so a few comics have been posted. I’m starting to see things I should do differently. Currently the method I am using is sketching in Autodesk Sketchbook, though, technically, I am using an older version when it was still owned by Alias. After getting the sketch done, I open in up in photoshop and lay down the inks. I’m getting faster at the inking part, which took hours the first time I tried, and I’ve learned to tweak the settings how I like them to get a clean result.

How I’m drawing the characters themselves seems to be what I dislike about my own comic the most. The joke in today’s comic might be somewhat hard to get, because the shirt is hard to read at the size the characters are drawn. Need to start zooming way the hell in.

I’m hoping that I have enough of a handle on how to produce these things now that I can start getting them out conisistently every Friday, and maybe go up to two a week in a few months. Again, the point of this isn’t to replace my day job (though, hey, that’d be swell) it’s to draw and write and get better at both. We’ll see how I do.

-B

I’m really quite terrible at fighting games.

I picked up the new Soul Calibur last weekend for the PS3. (I went with the PS3 over the 360 for a couple reasons: 1. My Live subscription is up, so playing online would have cost at least another $8 there, 2. Darth Vader is cooler than Yoda, but from what I understand this distinction will not matter soon and 3.The PS3 is hooked up to my 1080p monitor, while the 360 is out in the living room on the SD TV for better Rock Band access.)

There are a couple things about Soul Calibur that, no matter how I try to rationalize it personally, I cannot stop beign annoyed by. These are things that have existed since the series’ inception, so I’m not sure why on iteration 4 (5, if you count Soul Edge in the same line) I am still bothered by them. The first being Ring Outs. I understand they are a legitimate win condition, but far too often I run into folks online who use this as their only tactic. It doesn’t seem fun to me. It’s be better if it was more complicated than walking to the edge with the Secret Apprentice and executing a basic throw to ring someone out. Or a Talim player doing some bullshit where they execute a repeated, uninterruptable aeral combo that drives me all the way accross the ring and fall off the edge.

It just doesn’t strike me as fun to miss blocking one attack and suddenly you’ve lost. I’m sure I should just quit bitching about it and accept the mechanic or even utilize the mechanic, but I just can’t.

The other big annoyance is a fighting game moor of sorts: late hits. Like 80% of the folks I’ve played online insist on hitting you as many times as possible after getting a KO. Effectively desecrating your fallen corpse. It’s just unsporting, and has the effect of making the person doing it appear to be a complete dickwad. I know I’m not all that good at the game, I’m trying to get better, but playing online loses it’s fun quickly when all you meet are folk who can’t just muster a pandering “Good Match” and go on to the next round.

I’ve been doing character roughs most of the afternoon since I’m starting this whole web comic thing. These aren’t necessarily final, or terribly representative of the real people the characters will be based on, but more of a exercise in getting going with this comic.

Whatcha think?-

-B