I'm happy to report that my mood's improved. Situation hasn't changed, but at least, I'm handling it better.

My copy of Left 4 Dead 2 arrived in the mail yesterday. It really is a sequel in the sense that it's the next step up in the series' evolution. It doesn't just feel like the first game rehashed. Two things I've noticed so far:

1) There's actually something of a narrative here, told over the game's five campaigns.

2) I suck even worse at this game than I did the first. The bridge level on the final campaign alone took me six attempts to beat. And there seems to be something about me that Jockeys and Chargers seem be attracted to.

I got tickets for the Maximum Carnage tour on February in Wallingford. The bill consists of Slayer, Megadeth and Testament. Sadly, Dexy's Midnight Runners had to drop out of the tour due to lack of appetizer funds.

"I love comics. I love the art form, I love the creativity, I love the talent pool, I love the readers. Comics is an amazing industry."

-Gail Simone

You can read this forgotten 90's "gem" online.

My favorite moment: The Space Marine giving some environmental message after coming across radioactive waste. A really out of the blue thing to have in a hyper-violent comic book with probably the goofiest dialogue I've ever read.

We had the first sunny day today all week. On top of that, it was pretty warm too. I went out to take in some of the sunshine. Those rays can work miracles for the mood!

I had a little meeting with my job coach yesterday. Or at least, that was the idea. I have to admit, I'm not to fond of this new job coach I've been assigned to. She's always late and is never organized. For our last appointment, I showed up 15 minutes before our appointed time and she was 30 minutes late.

Well, yesterday, she reached a new level of unprofessionalism that I thought even she couldn't reach. She actually forgot about our appointment. I waited over 20 minutes before she came out, telling me she was meeting with someone else. She chatted with me for about a minute and a half before sending me on my way, making me resent her for wasting my time and blowing my morning. What really irritated me was that when she asked about how my data entry job was going she made typing gestures with her hands while saying the words "data entry" and saying it like she was talking to a third-grader. It's bad enough she forgot out appointment and brushed me off like that. But how about assuming I don't have the intellect of a mildly retarded cabbage?

Today, I was reading volume 5 of Grimm Fairy Tales. The beginning of The Little Mermaid features a two-page spread of a ship crashing against some rocks during a thunderstorm at night. At first glance, I was like "Okay, I get what's happening" and was ready to turn the page.

But then I had a thought. A two-page spread obviously takes a lot of time, care and effort to draw. Maybe glancing and turning the page like that would be doing a disservice to the artist. Maybe I owed it to Claudio Sepulveda to take the time to look at and absorb every detail to honor all the effort.

Anybody else ever feel this way?

There was a discussion at a forun I occasionally visit on which gaming systems you've owned, past and present. I took a trip down memory lane and came up with these:

PC
Mac Plus
Atari 2600
Colecovision
NES
Super NES
Sega Master System
Sega Genesis
Sega CD
Sega Saturn
Sega Dreamcast
Playstation
Playstation 2
Playstation 3
Gamecube
Xbox
Xbox 360
PSP

Maybe I should write an entry on the various memories I have on each console. That might be fun!

You can put a small robot on an airplane by stuffing it in a suitcace and metal detectors and x-ray machines will never detect it.

There's huge airplane graveyard and desert in the back of the Smithsonian.

Every female college student looks like a Maxim cover girl.

College dorm room are pretty big and come with complimentary Mountain Dew vending machines.

College students can afford hi-tech computer technology.

The U.S. government can cover up giant robots beating each other up and causing collateral damage in major cities, even in foreign countries and in an era of cell phone cameras, the internet and 24 hour news networks.

You can make a movie that doesn't have one moment of silence in it.

Eating a pot brownie makes you act drunk and hyperactive.

In an action movie, it's not necessary to be able to see what's going on during the action scenes.

If two giant robots was to have a private discussion, the best place to do it is on top of a skyscraper in New York City.

Flights from the East Coast to the West Coast take about 30 minutes.

Robots have souls and share the same Heaven as humans.

All major landmarks in Egypt are conveniently located within walking distance.

If you get constantly shot at and nearly blown up in the desert, the guys will all be dirty and have cuts and bruises. Hot women, on the other hand, will still look like they just stepped off a photo shoot.

A movie can have many subplots, but no main plot.

It's possible to make an action movie that has more failed comedy that a Friedberg/Seltzer movie.

Do you think Joe Quesada and Dan DiDio got together one day and made a bet to see who could do a more efficient job of running their respective companies into the ground?

I experienced one minor consequence of watching Paranormal Activity. While I was trying to sleep, I kept jumping at any small noise I heard around the house. Didn't make for a good night's sleep.

I played the Left 4 Dead 2 demo last night. I also played it right before going to work. It was longer than I expected. The demo allows people to play two stages of one campaign. I think the demo for the first game only had one stage to play. Of the new infected, the Spitter and the Charger are the most badass. The Spitter spits out green bile that harm the survivors. They also leave a pool of green goo when you shoot them. The Charger just plows into like a linebacker from Hell. Then it grabs the nearest survivor and keeps pummeling him on the ground until he's dead. Most of the returning special infected have been given a slight makeover. While playing this morning, I got a closeup of the new Smoker and he's much uglier than he was in the first game. The Witch also walks around now. I guess she got sick of sitting around, crying and decicded to be more proactive. We also have zombies in riot gear that you can only kill by shooting them in the back or hitting them.

I tried almost all the firearms and all the melee weapons. The melee weapons are hit or miss, no pun intended. The police baton is kinda slow. I was eager to use the guitar to do a Pete Townshend impression with the zombies, but it doesn't seem to be too accurate and  you miss the zombies about half the time. The machete was neat to use, especially since killing the zombies with it causes blood to splash on the screen. The pan is kinda neat too.

Last night, I played as Coach (The big black guy) and this morning, I played as Nick (The guy in the Miami Vice suit). How do the new characters stack up? I haven't quite warmed up to them as much as the original cast. Maybe I need to play more. Or maybe their personalities come out more when you play a full campaign. They didn't seem quite as talkative and their dialogue wasn't quite as funny and snarky. Maybe it's a demo thing and this will be smoothed out in the actual game.

I saw Paranormal Activity today. Go see it! Don't read spoilers. In fact, don't read anything about it. It's best if you go in cold.

Unfortunately, the experience was tarnished somewhat by the idiots in the theater who kept talking and making bad jokes very loudly.

I finished my third day on the new job today. Five hours of data entry isn't quite my ideal job, but I'm grateful to finally have a steady paycheck again. At the end of my shift, my boss had a bunch of Halloween candy and invited me to help myself to as much of it as I wanted! I hadn't had any Halloween candy this year and eagerly snapped up anything that looked good. I felt like a kid on Halloween again.

Okay, it's been a week since I've watched Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and while I'm still licking some wounds, I've overall recovered from the experience.

Since this movie made approximately five hundred zillion dollars at the box office, naturally, a Transformers 3 has been greenlighted. And Michael Bay is gonna be directing again, whether we like it or not. The question is, will anybody heed the criticism that the second movie received or will they adopt an "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach. The cynic in me figures that since is was a massive blockbuster, they'll go with the latter. The second movie pretty much took everything wrong with the first movie and cranked all the knobs up to twelve. The thought of trying to outdo the second movie makes me shudder.

So I guess we can look forward to more useless human characters, more pointless subplots and no main plot and lots more attempted comic relief that's unfunny at best and offensive at worse. Oh, and plenty of badly shot, incomprehensible action scenes as well.

One of those things that makes you glad the days of 90's CD-ROM "interactive movie" games are over. Made all the more bearable by Spoony.