I’ve really got to get off my lazy ass and fix my links sidebar one of these days. I keep finding great new sites that I intend to link to, but my sidebar is broken, so I can’t. It’s probably just a single line that needs to be corrected too…

Well, for now I guess I’ll just have to settle for embedding a great little video from Loading, Ready, Run which parodies the recent Fox “news” story about Mass Effect‘s racy sex scenes.

…but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.

We went to Quiznos to grab subs for dinner the other night and were greeted with a very strange sight.  The trees in front of the Holiday Inn next door were absolutely full of crows – hundreds of them.  The trees were literally black with birds.  It looked like something out of a Stephen King book.   After a while they got bored and took flight, which was even creepier – a winged wall of birds blotting out the setting sun.

Times like that make me wish I had a camera-phone…  I would have loved to get a few pictures of those birds.

It was raining this morning when I woke up…  Fairly warm out, snow was melting, looked like it was going to be a fairly nice day.

The temperature has plummeted since then, and now the wind is howling.  It’s absolutely horrible out there.

Finished up Jade Empire the other night…  Good game, thoroughly enjoyed myself.  It got a bit repetitive towards the end…  Some sections where I really did not want to fight yet another ghost/assassin/golem.  The final showdown was kind of disappointing, I was expecting quite a bit more…  But it was really pretty decent.

I’ve been playing more Jade Empire…  Finally made it to the palace and confronted the Emperor.

Turns out the Emperor is now a god – he’s stolen the Water Dragon’s power for his own and he’s obscenely powerful.  There was a fairly tough battle sequence…  Had to kill wave after wave of henchmen, then take on the Emperor himself.  That was honestly the first fight that really gave me trouble.  I just barely managed to kill him.

So I defeated the evil God Emperor and rescued my beloved Master Li – generally this is where most games would call it done and start rolling the credits.  And, if you consider how short games are these days, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised if that had been the end of it.  Actually, I was a little surprised that it wasn’t the end.

In typical computer RPG fashion there’s a horrific betrayal – my beloved Master Li uses some secret technique to kill me pretty much instantly and take the Water Dragon’s power for his own.

Most games pretty much end when you die.  Sure, you’d wind up reloading from a save and trying to survive…but the game is generally over when the main character dies.  Not Jade Empire though – I’m now a ghost.  I had to battle my way through the spirit realm to find what’s left of the Water Dragon, who then took me to Dirge to restore the temple there, so that she can return me to life, so that I can go after Master Li and try to reclaim the Water Dragon’s power.

That’s right – I’m dead and the story is just getting started.

I was stumbling around the other night and happened across a very interesting blog post about atheism and anger…

I’m honestly not a big fan of blogging. Yeah, I know, I’ve got my own blog that I write in fairly regularly… But that’s not really for anyone else to read. I have absolutely no illusions about how interesting my writings are for other people. I write in here because I enjoy it – it’s kind of like keeping a journal, except in a massively public way. And some of the comments I’ve gotten have been very interesting. So, while I do write a blog myself, I generally find other people’s blogs about as interesting as watching paint dry.

But, there are some very interesting blogs out there, and Greta Christina’s blog is one of them. Lots of very interesting stuff about sex, atheism, politics, writing, and all sorts of other things. I actually found msyelf clicking through the archives, reading old posts.

And then I noticed a link pointing to the Blowfish Blog. I’ve been a big fan of Blowfish for quite some time. They’ve got a great selection of toys and an unashamed presentation that doesn’t make me feel like some kind of pervert for shopping for sex toys. But I never realized they had a blog. I’m sure I’ve seen it mentioned somewhere before…I get their weekly mailings…but I guess it never registered.

So now I’ve got two genuinely interesting blogs to read… Where before I’d pretty much written them all off as the same kind of self-centered tripe that I write. Will wonders never cease?

Saw some interesting previews for upcoming movies when we went to see Cloverfield over the weekend…

Iron Man looks like it could be pretty good…  The preview consists of little more than seeing Iron Man stomp around and blow stuff up, but it doesn’t look obviously painful.  I’ve enjoyed a lot of the recent movies based on comics, but there have been plenty of flops as well…  I doubt if we’ll go to see it in the theaters, but it’ll probably show up on my Netflix queue.

There was also a trailer for a new Star Trek movie, apparently directed by J.J. Abrams – the guy who just did Cloverfield.  The trailer itself was really more of a teaser…  Just showed some guy with a welding torch working on the Enterprise.  And I know absolutely nothing about J.J. Abrams or what his vision for a Star Trek movie might be.  But I’m hopeful that someone who can come up with Cloverfield might be able to breathe some much-needed life back into the Star Trek franchise – it’s been stagnant and dead for entirely too long.

There was also a very cool looking trailer for a new Hellboy movie.  I’ll be the first to say that Hellboy really sucked.  In was slow, awkward, and uninteresting.  I really had a hard time sitting through the whole thing.  Sure…  There were some entertaining moments and some good fight scenes, but that was really about it.  Absolutely no substance to it and horrible acting all-around.  Which was odd, because Perlman can usually act pretty well.  The new movie looks pretty surreal…  It’s being directed by the guy who did Pan’s Labyrinth, which was a great movie.  And Perlman is back in the role of Hellboy.  Hopefully this time around it’ll be watchable…  Again, I’m not certain that we’ll go to the theater for this one, but it’ll probably show up on our Netflix queue.

The last trailer that looked interesting was for something called The Ruins.  A bunch of tourists wander off the beaten path and wind up at some kind of ancient ruins.  Turns out there’s some kind of nasty critter/bug/disease in the ruins that starts killing them.  Looks pretty creepy, but not terribly exceptional.