Now it's time for a little braggadocio

I did something Wednesday that I didn't think I'd ever have the courage to do: I drove to a club by myself to see a concert. I just couldn't miss MC Frontalot. I mean, how often does some dude whose music you download a bunch of from the internet play a show at a club five minutes away from you? This is especially fortuitous when said music is completely awesome. It took a lot of encouragement from Mary and a lot of parking-planning on both our parts, but I eventually gathered the fortitude to drive down the street and go into a place.

I met Front almost immediately after going into the club. I forgot to get an autograph (and basically wouldn't have asked anyway), but I did have a short conversation about the tour while I purchased my selection of limited-edition commemorative tour merchandise in the form of one t-shirt. Then I hung around the 'merch area' (basically the entrance to the main room) while the first band got all their rappin' and innuendoin' out of their systems. When they left, most of the intimidating people left too, leaving only skinny ironic-shirt-and-bad-haircut types and a bunch of verifiable nerds, somewhere between 30 and 50 total.

Favorites were performed, faces were rocked, Magic: the Gathering cards were dramatically produced from pockets and thrown into the audience. I don't know how to write about concerts, so I'll just express it in Wesley Willis-speak: the band played it off; the band whooped it up. The crowd roared like a lion! The rock show was kicking a European bison's ass.

I had a good time. I may even consider going to more places to see and do things!

new posts and almost new posts

New post over at the game blog. After kind-of liveblogging E3, and enjoying it, I'm going to try to have more useful content over there. But first some pointless rambling about Phantasy Star Online. I also need to respond to Kendall about the Wii marketing stuff.

I'll post more here about other stuff tomorrow. It'll be self-indulgent and blogtastic.

free stuff day

First I got a free webpage and domain name from the Microsoft Office Live webpage beta thing. You have sort of limited design options, and only 30mb of webspace, but you get a free domain name of your choice! I figure I can either get the name to redirect to something else or figure out how to use my own code on the page and bypass their "site designer." Even if I can't, I have a jcfletcher.net domain and a jc@ email address that I haven't tested yet! I suggest everyone jump on it now and figure out what to do with it later.

And then I found a GAF thread with free magazine subscription links! I've used this Mercury site before, and I did in fact receive magazines, with no noticed upswing in spam or junk mail. Through various offers, I've been getting all of my magazines for free for the last 2 years or so. Here are the links to the latest offers for you (and no, I don't know why there are two links per magazine. Maybe there are a limited number of subscriptions?):

Computer Gaming World: link 1, link 2

Official U.S. Playstation Magazine: link 1, link 2

Electronic Gaming Monthly: link 1, link 2

e3 this week

Hey video game liking people;

If you don't feel like checking out pretty much any game site online this week for your E3 gaming news, why not visit my game blog instead, for some paraphrases of highlights from, and links to, those same sites? Just a thought.

again with the trying to sell my stuff

First, the reasons:

1. I have stuff I don't want anymore. I mean, obviously.

2. With the change in schools coming up and no idea if I'm even getting in (probably), much less if I'll get any kind of scholarship, I'm going to need all the money I can get. Oh, and also my summer funding through the linguistics department is less than I get during the year.

3. I stupidly bid on a copy of Vib Ribbon on eBay, and now I am feeling pre-buyer's remorse; it was a stupid thing to do, and I don't have the money to spend, and I have like 5 days to even see if I'm going to spend the money. God, I have bought like one thing ever from eBay, and now is not the fucking time for me to get into that habit.

So what I'd like is to somehow come up with the $20 or so I would be out if I won the auction. (SO. stupid.) What happened is that I generally keep a small fund for personal fun (i.e. games) spending, which comes from stuff like my change jar. A couple of days ago, when I placed this bid, I didn't feel bad about dipping into this fund. However, in the midst of this uncertain financial/tuition situation, I need to be a little more discerning with even that money. It could turn out to be important.

This story sounds dumb and whiny now that I'm looking at it. But it's like 1:30 and not being able to get out of this Vib Ribbon auction that I'm probably not going to win seems like a [i]huge fucking crisis.[/i] It would be nice to get rid of some of the guilt of this potential purchase, at least. Anyway, ON TO THE DEALS FOR REALS

-Dynex wireless keyboard/mouse combo: Mouse used basically once; I've been using the keyboard for about a week but I totally promise to clean it out. It's got a lot of neat function buttons like volume control, copy/paste, calculator, etc. I'd ask for I think $25 shipped. Man, I have no idea how much shipping is on this thing, though.

-Playstation 2 Eyetoy: Play game and camera. British people love this thing. It's pretty fun. Maybe like $20 shipped? Maybe even less!

-Pretty blue lava lamp on silver base. I'll let somebody have this for the cost of shipping, whatever that turns out to be. If you are local, I'll let you have it for the cost of nothing. This just needs to be out of a Kohl's sack in the closet and in a happy home free of combustible cats.

Hmm. I kinda thought I had more stuff than this. I'm pretty sure none of you are Star Wars action figure collectors. Too bad. Okay, well, I've iWhored myself out enough here on the interjunk!

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suburban robots that monitor reality

So I finally got around to checking out some Devo 2.0 songs today. You've probably heard of them, but I hope for the sake of an interesting post that you haven't. Okay, so Devo 2.0 is:

- a Devo cover band
- composed entirely of children, and
- released by Walt Disney Records.

Okay. So it's sort of like the insipid and horrible Kidzbop, except that the 'casting', production and most of the record's instrumentation were done by original members of Devo. Oh, and the songs are all great, and performed energetically and with some of the weird vocal quirks that make Mark Mothersbaugh so fun to listen to, as opposed to the shit that gets shittily covered by the shitty Kidzbop singers and the shitty production team that shits shit all over that shit.

The whole thing is so... random. Who at Disney decided that Devo was going to be the next big thing with 8-year-olds? And who decided that the only thing keeping Devo from being the aforementioned next big thing was the age of the nerds in the band?

The best part of the whole thing is... okay, well, it's that the songs still sound awesome and I love Devo. But the SECOND best part of the whole thing is the fact that some lyrics were changed to be more kid-friendly, with hilarious results. I don't remember "Uncontrollable Urge" being about between-meal snacks, but maybe I just missed the subtext in the original version.

Okay, I take back the part about Devo 2.0 being targeted at 8-year-olds. It's pretty clear that this record was made for me alone, perhaps as an apology from Disney for [i]Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles.[/i]