“So, if monotheists can believe in the Big Bang, can polytheist believe in a Gang Bang?”

— Trail Mix on FARK

Ugh, I feel like shit.

The trip to Chicago was a great deal of fun. This weekend was much less so, but that was mainly due to the work I had to do with the videos I took at the Chicago event. As for now… I’m not really sick per se; I usually have allergy issues whenever I return to Houston from far out of town. Also, the fact that I vacuumed the upstairs (which hadn’t been done in a while) exacerbated the problem. So, I spent most of the night snuffling and sniffling and being absolutely miserable. I’m still achy and have a stuffed up nose, and it’s not likely it’ll clear up anytime soon. *sigh* Fun…

Anyway, Thursday morning I arrived in Chicago to find Scott Howell already at the gate waiting for me. We hopped a cab to the Chicago Peninsula hotel, only to find our rooms weren’t ready yet. So, we just waited around the lobby until the Midway presentations started. I got video of several presentations, including those for Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, L.A. Rush, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, and Blitz: The League. After the presentations (at which I got a nice sports windbreaker with the Midway logo on the left breast), we went and finally got our rooms. DAMN, those rooms were nice… everything was button controlled, the bathroom had separate shower and bath (which had its own TV), a minibar, a fax machine, a safe… we were quite content. :-)

From there we went to House of Blues for a few hours of gameplay. I’ll admit… as much as I wanted to try L.A. Rush and Blitz: The League, all of my gameplay time went to Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. I also got to speak to a number of MK team members, including Ed Boon, Shaun Himmerick, Steve Beran, Tony Goskie, and Mike Taran. One of the highlights of the night was when Scott and I were playing ko-op mode on the X-Box version of MK:SM; suddenly, we noticed a commotion at the PS2 next to us. We turned, and saw a blind teen being led to sit down next to Ed. It turned that this was Brice Mellen, who had made national news recently with his ability to play fighting games. So, I quickly grabbed my camcorder, and had just enough tape left to film three matches, all of which Brice won. The final tally was Brice 4, Ed 1. :-)

After House of Blues, Scott and I returned to the hotel to drop off our equipment, and then wandered the city briefly trying to find the Sound Bar where Midway had a room set aside for drinks. We got there, and stayed for a half-hour… and realized it wasn’t our thing. So, we went back, and worked on videos, images, and updates.

The next morning we got up at about 9 AM, did some more work on the site, and then headed to the airport at about 11:30 AM. We had lunch at Chili’s in the airport, and then headed to our respective flights. I got back in Houston around 5 PM, and from there went to Denny’s for dinner. The weekend itself was slow, and I spent it getting the videos I took ripped, watermarked, and encoded, and also giving my impressions of MK:SM.

If you want to see the videos I took, well…

• Mortal Kombat Online: Midway Chicago 2005 Shaolin Monks Presentation and Photos!
• Mortal Kombat Online: Midway Chicago 2005 MK: Shaolin Monks Impressions and Videos!
• Got-Next: Midway Gamer’s Day 05 Videos

And now, well… I’m going to get back to work here. Fun fun… I might post back later with a couple of pics of goodies I got at Gamers Day.

I’ll be back sometime Friday evening.

I’m posting this link and the relevant part of the comment from it simply because it reminded me so much of someone I know. Said person will remain nameless, but a number of people who read this blog (whether on darquecathedral.org or LiveJournal) know who it is.

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158566&cid=13283316

Bad Guys are Shmucks.

Bad Guys don’t like to fix the problems within themselves, because that’s hard and scary work. So instead, and this is what makes them Bad Guys, they pretend that they’re perfect and that the world outside them is imperfect. This is much easier to do, probably because it doesn’t actually change anything. Changing things takes work. Wishful Thinking only takes Wishful Thinking.

Where it gets ugly is when the world says, “Uh, no, actually. You’re living in an illusion and you’re the ugly one. Sorry, but that’s the objective reality of the situation.”

When faced with this, the Bad Guy has a problem; S/he has to either fess up or fall into even more aggressive denial of the subject in order to placate themselves. Fessing up gets progressively more difficult to do as you train your brain to work in certain ways; those synaptic pathways get wider the more you use them. So typically, the classic Bad Guy will then villainize the people or things which are telling them how things really stand. And in the end if it goes far enough, the Bad Guy will actually go out and try to destroy the things or people which are making them look stupid as stupid as they are. –Usually while crying, “Evil!” or some such clattering nonsense.

The fascinating thing about it is that the Bad Guy has practiced hard at pretending fake realities into view while deliberately not seeing what’s right in front of them. They are adept ignorers, and thus have horribly atrophied senses of awareness. This is they miss the obvious, like embarrassing code in their own products while hypocritically crying foul. The more Bad a Bad Guy is, the more incredibly stupid and weak-minded they become.

But even more interesting is the fact that when faced with evidence of such blatant crimes, the Bad Guy is no more able now than before to fess up to the fact that they are Bad Guys. They’ll try to rationalize, and indeed lie outright that they are the ones being maligned.

Well, I’d like to say it was an eventful weekend. Turned out it was and it wasn’t. I got stuff accomplished, mind you, so it wasn’t really a waste. The only problem I had was the fact that I had planned on getting my computer desk area cleaned out and never did. Oh, well…

Friday night was actually pretty uneventful. I spent most of the evening watching Sci-Fi Channel’s Friday lineup, and then after that did a news update for MK Online. Then, right before I went to bed, I set up the Powerbook and had it start the process of encoding the video of Louie’s party and burning it to DVD. The first master disc I had made of it ended up badly encoded, with the audio being out of sync in places. This new disc had no such problems, so I made two more copies for Louie.

Saturday morning was spent getting a donation in to Demmie’s blogathon, and then getting ready for Dave to come around. He did, we had lunch, played videogames, discussed movies, and so on and so forth. Then, around 6 PM, Louie showed up, and we all came up with a plan: Italian for dinner, then billiards, and then maybe bowling. So, we headed off to this nearby Italian restaurant called Lasagna House III which had a pool hall next to it. We ate dinner, and then walked over to the pool hall… to find it packed. A check of another nearby pool hall showed the same thing. So, we found the nearest bowling alley… but before we went there, we stopped in CompUSA (where I picked up the DOOM 3 expansion and Dave picked up Grand Theft Auto III), and then hit Barnes & Noble for a bit. Once done there, we went and bowled for a couple of hours, and then headed home.

Sunday was pretty much uneventful, other than doing some maintenance and checks on my Powerbook. I made sure the camcorder worked well with iMovie HD (seeing as I had never used the two together before), and also cleared off the iMovie project of Louie’s party, thus reclaiming about 15 GB of disk space. I also found the lenscap for my camcorder (which I hadn’t even realized I had in the first place), and gathered the cables for it in one place.

As for the rest of this week, well… I’m taking a couple of days off later this week and will be going out of town, so I need to make preparations for that. I’ll have to dig up my digital camera as well, and make sure all of my rechargable batteries for it are fully charged. The camcorder will be coming as well, but I don’t know if I have any empty MiniDV tapes. So, I’ll have to go to Fry’s and get some, as well as a double-CD jewel case for this new Overclocked Remix site project that’s going to be released tonight. Fun fun…

Well, enough of this… time to go make the rounds and see what the current issues out there are right now…