I know I promised a wonderful longer post for what is now late last week, but unfortunately events have conspired to delay my writing. Marathon training has begun for me again, and being more out of shape than I thought, combined with a cold, has reduced me once again to lots of napping while I try to get my energy levels back up.

As such, I'm probably going to be both late and shorter than I intended, I will promise a good meaty blog sometime before next monday. and i'll shoot for thursday, but that depends on how fast I get over my illness/soreness.

I know that was quick...but I'm tired .

I will post a good long one soon.

Adios for now,

Good Juju

Hey all!

I'm back! After an overly, crazy long hiatus, due in part to computer failure, a HECTIC first semester (which is finally done!), and some minor (but draining) surgery...I'm glad to have the time to blog again.

I'm going to make this one a relatively quick blog, just so I'm sure that I actually finish and post it, but I'll be sure to check back in soon with a longer entry. If this entry seems a little disjointed, I blame my multi-variable calculus final. That stuff hurts the brain my friends.

Knowing I'll be pretty much WAY late on all of this, I'll give a quick breakdown on what I'm playing/watching/listening to/ lusting after, to give some idea of what I've been up to... (If you don't care too much, please at least do me the favor of skipping to the question at the end. Thanks!)

Gaming: Still running my old clunker PC (but see below!), so I haven't gotten to most of the hot new titles, but the Orange Box is still providing me with oodles of entertainment. And whoever thought of putting Peggle on the iPod owes me hours of my life. (I think I'm sufficiently late on both of these I don't need to go into too much detail).

Movies: If you haven't seen Juno yet, you really owe it to yourself to go see it. One of the funniest movies I'm seen in a while, it not only has great performances from Michael Cera and Ellen Page, but Allison Janney (C.J. from the West Wing) and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson from Spiderman) are absolutely HILARIOUS as the parents. As an added bonus, the soundtrack rocks.

Music: I've gone back to listening to a lot of The National (especially Alligator and Boxer). Those guys are definitely worth checking out for some good indie flavored urban alienation rock (yea, that sounds weird, but trust me, it's good). And, as I mentioned, I'm really digging that Juno soundtrack, as well as, strangely enough, Huey Lewis and the News' Sports album.

Lusts: The clunker rig of mine is destined for the graveyard in my basement, and I'm going to be buying myself a new laptop for use at college. I have about a $3,000 budget, and I'm looking at getting either the new Alienware m15x or the m17x whenever that comes out (and if costs are not uber prohibitive). As someone entirely new to shopping for laptops (I've always had desktops), I was wondering if any of the enlightened Gamespot readers (or at least all 2 that are still reading...) have any suggestions before I make my final choice?

Thanks to those who read this far, and I look forward to posting again soon!

Back at last,

Good Juju

One of my best buddies recently picked up a Wii, which mens I've basically permanently "borrowed" his gamecube and some of his games. This is new in gaming for me, because I've basically been a PC-exclusive gamer for a long time...mostly because I had trouble justifying spending 3 digits of scratch on something I could use only for games (maybe silly, but oh well), but also because I wasn't very comfortable with controllers. I mean, whenever I get talked into playing Halo or whatever, the whole concept of one stick for look and one for move...it makes me want my mouse and keyboard. But, admitting to myself that the Gamecube was definitely not the hot console of its generation, I've still been pleasantly surprised by my experiences with it.

The two games I've spent significant time with so far have been Rouge Squadron 2 and REsident Evil 4, and both of them have kept me highly entertained. Maybe because neither of them have control schemes requiring crazy multi button combos (something I suck at no matter the paltform), but maye also because they both have set-ups which really use the gamecube controller well, whether it's Rouge Squadrons system for commmanding squadmates or RE4's highly intuitive combat system. It still took me a while to adapt to the controller to the point where I started to feel close to as comfortable as I do on the PC (I died a LOT when I first started out in RE4), but I think I'm getting there. And while I haven;t finished either game yet (I'm on the last mission of Rouge Squadron II and about 2/3 (?) of the way through RE4), this whole experience has made me much more open to buying one of the next gen consoles...though I admit I wa already leaning towards an XBox 360 because of Mass Effect...

And in a different vein of exploring gaming history, I recently learned that GameTap is now offering Free "green" memberships that le you join up and play about 40 games for free, if you're willing to have to watch an ad before you launch them. Just for fun I went and checked out the sections of the library reserved for "gold" members, and I was genuinely surprised by what I saw: there were probably 50- games I'd always wanted to play but never goten around to. The Icewind Dales, Deus Ex, X-com, The Tomb Raiders (even legend and anniversay i think), Beyond Good and Evil, Psychonauts...the list just goes on. I'm thinking of upgrading to the gold eventually, especially since it comes with access to the new Sam and Max games...

And on a different note: the Bulls picked Jaokim Noah, and I swore that if they did I wouldn't go to one of their games...so it looks like I'm out. In the words of one Chicago sports writer "Shoot! The Bulls picked the guy who can't." Oh well. At least a certain baseball team who i will not name for fear of jinxing them is on a big time winning streak..including an awesome walk-off home run today.

And if you haven't heard of it, and you are even a mild fan of risk, check out conquerclub.com, which is an amazingly fun site that lets you play multiple games of risk online for free. The games stretch out longer b/c you have to wait for everyone to play, but it only takes about 5 or 10 minutes a day (if your as casual as I am, I guess), and the wide variety of maps and, from what I've experienced, wealth of good and friendly competition makes it worth checking out, since basic membership is free (basic just makes it slightly more inconvenient to play with your friends I think...it's not like you're disadvantaged in the games because you didn't pay).