Starry Wisdom

I’ve been neglecting the blog this month. I don’t have any good reason besides a lack of much to say. However, now I do have a few things.

1. Rock Band: After naysaying for a year and a half, I bought an Xbox 360 last fall. This turns out to be one of the best electronic purchases I’ve ever made, considering the use I’ve gotten out of it (mostly from watching video on it – either via playon , netflix or hosted on my windows machine (which died and had to be replaced recently, which caused me much angst, but…). However I’ve played a few arcade games, and two games I’ve purchased – Bioshock and Fallout 3. The latter I played the crap out of, but its time had come to get a new game. After spending a weekend playing Rock Band in Lake Tahoe (the first time I’ve played it in a year) I decided it was time to take the plunge. So I’ve been rocking out on Rock Band 2, and will likely get the Beatles version later this year.
2. Where the Wild Things Are: I saw the second public showing of this evar last night – a benefit show for 826 Valencia, where I’ve been volunteering for the past few weeks. I won’t lie – the tickets were not cheap, but it was for a good cause, and for a movie I’d been wanting to see since I first saw a trailer. Spike Jonze, who directed and co-wrote the move with Dave Eggers (founder of 826), decided long ago that he wanted to do benefit shows at all the chapters before the movie was released (in fact the Chicago chapter had the first public showing the night before). The movie is out on 10/16 and I do recommend you see it, especially if you have children or enjoyed the book as a child. Also, I got a cool crown:
   
3. Halloween: It’s coming in a few weeks. I don’t really have any plans yet, but I do have a costume in the making. It’s a costume not quite as obscure as my Zenmai Samurai costume from 2007, but not main stream either. Most of the implementation of it is complete, but I need to buy one more piece of clothing for it to be complete. Here is a hint – if you can figure it out from it, you will get a lot of credit:
   

I, like many guys around my age, spent countless hours as a youth in front of the Nintendo Entertainment System(NES). On the NES there are three games that strike me as iconic:

1. Super Mario Bros
2. The Legend of Zelda
3. Castlevania

I owned all three of these, and of them, I finished the first multiple times (but I admit I was more amused by the turtle trick than actually finishing the game)

Zelda was a fairly easy game to finish, in that you had save games, and infinite continues to accomplish it. I will admit the first play through probably took me a couple of weeks, but mostly because of time spent trying to figure out puzzles, not dying randomly.

The final of the three, Castlevania, that was the tricky one. I never personally finished the game, and it was a good game where I made it to the penultimate boss, the Grim Reaper. I don’t think I ever made it past him, or if I did it was only a single time. I saw a friend of mine cower before and die to the mighty Count Dracula on a single occasion, but that was it as far as the end of the game goes.

Now, imagine my surprise when I find this pair of videos this morning:

Not only is the game finishable within 15 minutes, but the damn Grim Reaper is as easy as any of the rest of the bosses, thanks to the mighty holy water secondary weapon. If only i had known this then…