One of my lifelong goals has been realized. I am the proud owner of a Zippo lighter! A while ago, Brandy took me to a “nameless” store, and wouldn’t tell me what we were getting. We wandered around the jewelry section, when she was about to give up her search, and there they were! Mmmm… So, I got myself a “Black Ice” Zippo. It is just freaking sweet. The sounds, the texture, the fire… It’s a beautiful thing. So, I decided I was going to start collecting them, and found out that “One in four Zippo owners consider themselves collectors.” Oh well, so I’m going with the flow. Still fun stuff. Only one problem… There’s like two stores in the area that sell them, and one of them charges twice as much as they’re worth… So I have a limited selection. But, the other day I got two more. A brushed brass, and a matte steel one. All just so very lovely. One of these days I’m going to get a titanium one as well! Brandy also got herself a slim matte one, it’s just cute.

In addition to the Zippo collection, I’ve also increased my sets of dice by 4 more… Don’t go into a gaming shop when slightly depressed and wanting to spend money. I’m working on getting some pictures of everything, hopefully I’ll have them up at some point.

So I’m still around and kicking.  Rumor has it I’m handling the whole getting laid off thing better than expected.  So, go me!  I fear I did do something silly, and as soon as I got my first check, ran out and spent a whole lot of money…  I might break parts of it down to other posts, but the biggest thing I did was upgrade one of my children.  That’s right, Betsy has hit 2.0!

Lets see… I upgraded the motherboard, processor, ram, vid card, hard drive, power supply, and case.  So currently the only things left behind from older versions are the sound card, and CD/DVD drives.  Quite a bit of improvement to say the least!  Now I’m running an Athlon X2 4200+ with 2 gig of ram (the shiny LED ram), and a Radeon 1800xl vid card.  The change has been quite impressive, games are running nice and smooth.  And well, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the past week gaming, so this is a good thing!

Went to a LAN party on Saturday with my brother, was a lot of fun playing battlefield 2 with everyone.  Once the servers started getting mobbed with clans destroying everyone one, we went back to just a local game.  By that time only 4 people (of the 10+ there) were still playing BF2, where everyone else had gone to play original Day of Defeat…  Oh well.  We still had fun.  Found a small map, and did some entertaining games with things like pistols only, grenades only, snipers only, and C4/grenade/knife only.  Was quite a blast.

More updates to come!  Has been an eventful week, it’s amazing what happens when you don’t have to sit at work all day.

And I just got laid off.  Hooray for being unemployed…

This past weekend has found me at the movies.  Twice even!  Last Thursday we caught an evening show for V for Vendetta.  Unfortunately, due to not getting out of work till 10 minutes before it started, we didn’t have the best of seats…  But oh well, as it turns out we didn’t need good seats to enjoy the movie.  It’s been a while since I’ve been so captivated by a movie from start to finish.

I feel I should point out that no matter what the marketing team tries to make us believe, the Wachowski Brothers did not direct this movie.  And it shows.  They did write the screenplay for it, and much like their earlier work they do a good job when they’re just taking someone else’s idea and making it into a movie.  The real director was James McTeigue,  and this was actually his first time as a full director.  He did a lot of work on other movies, including all the Matrix movies,  a Star Wars, and one of my favorites, Dark City.  Suffice it to say, he did a good job.

The movie itself was breathtaking.  I really enjoyed that for the most part it didn’t use a lot of gimmicks to placate the audience.  Yes, there were some scenes with CG, but unlike most movies these days it wasn’t a scene to say “LOOK!! We have CG!!”  It was a scene that said “oh btw, we couldn’t do this in real life so we had to do it with a computer.  But don’t worry, you won’t notice.”  I feel the acting was very well done.  I was afraid that having Hugo Weaving as the main character would bring on nothing but endless Matrix and LotR cliché jokes, or that I’d not be able to separate the voice from the actor (IE Liam Neeson in Narnia), but I was happy to find that while I Knew it was Hugo Weaving, I didn’t feel it detracted from the character at all.

I think another of the points of the movie that I enjoyed was that it made zero attempt to be Politically Correct.  I mean considering the current global thoughts on terrorism they took a movie and made the terrorist the hero!  There is no doubt this wasn’t made for the faint of heart.

So yeah, those are my basic thoughts.  Anyone else seen it?  Have any comments?

Oh, and the second movie we saw this weekend…  V for Vendetta.  We got seats to the IMAX showing of up, and saw it with P.  He enjoyed it quite a bit as well, and I think it was even better the second time through.  Always a good sign! And as we left, I commented on how I’m dying to see the “3 hour extended super massive version” then realized there really isn’t much more I’d want in the show.  I think they did an amazing job of getting everything you needed into the timeframe, and leaving enough un-answered questions to keep it interesting.  Bravo, good work!