To Make A Meme

Random question: is there a prinny meme out there?

I feel like prinnies are funny enough and random enough that they would fit the bill for a meme. After spending about fifteen minutes on the meme generator, I could photoslop something together.

I'm thinking something simple, like: "Dood! Yeah, dood!" This first one is positive, paired with a happy/excited prinny. The second one is negative: "Dood. No, dood." Pair this with an angry/horrified prinny.

The meme generator was helpful, but mostly a distraction. The socially awkward penguin stood out as a possible template. However, I'm seeing this as a corner-comment in a larger image of Barack Obama or Scarlet Johansson. Maybe that's too much work.

One of my favorites is the Philip J. Fry (or Futurama Fry) meme and it comes with an image and a formula: "Not sure if X" at the top followed by "or just Y" at the bottom of the image. The formula for a stand-alone prinny meme is the complicated part. Maybe it's not so complicated: "Dood! (something awesome)" at the top followed by "Yeah, dood!" at the bottom. Let's try it out.

EXAMPLE: Dood! ScarJo pics are real. Yeah, dood!

OR: Dood! My office power is out. Going home early. Yeah, dood!"

Yeah, Dood! I like it. I threw it into quickmeme. We'll see how it does.

Everything is Better with Dinosaurs

Sometimes I go out into the wilderness of the internet specifically looking for something. Hunting, if you will. Sometimes I head out there just to see what I can see; this is the 'just a walk in the park' mentality. In either case, one thing will always stop me. Dinosaurs.

Lately, all the hype associated with dinosaurs has been surrounding the new sci-fi television gambit Terra Nova. However, I don't watch that much television. But I do play los videojuegos. And video games with dinosaurs will stop me in my internet-surfing tracks.

It all started with this article about the blu-ray trilogy release of Jurassic Park and the girl who played Lex in the amazing film (and it's craptastic sequel). She and Timmy were the best parts of the movie, besides the dinosaurs, that is. Anyway, allow me to map out this discovery in a series of links:

Jurassic Park Blu-ray Trilogy Article (includes video of grown-up Lex)
Famous Kitchen Scene on YouTube
Trailer for Telltale's new Jurassic Park Game
Spinosaurus Boss Fight from Jurassic: The Hunted
New Spino vs. T-Rex Video - What is this?
It's called Primal Carnage. It has dinosaurs.
    Hrm. Looks pretty, but what is Primal Carnage?
Holy Crap! You can play as a Tyrannosaur and eat people!
Awesome. Raptors. Team Dinosaur vs. Team Human.
    Who would play as a human? We're so lame.
Going to the real website now...
Play as a raptor, in the jungle.
    I want to attack, not from the front, but from the sides.
What is Primal Carnage really about?

Or, perhaps: "Shut up and sign me up for the beta!"

Wow, that's all I have to say. Just wow. I've loved dinosaurs since I was a kid. Little Foot and the Land Before Time. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. Turok. Trespasser. Dino Crisis. This is all in-addition-to Michael Crichton's amazing books and the movies spawned from them.

Bring on the Primal Carnage! I can't wait to play as the raptor.

On Dragons

Welp, the two week hiatus is up. I'm ashamed to admit that I'm not yet in the post-game of Disgaea 4. Have I failed as a Disgaea fan? Maybe, but I'll keep chugging along. My army of gunners and skulls is not going anywhere. I do admire those of you who have obliterated the game already; kind of wish I had that kind of time on my hands.

Unfortunately, I don't. And I won't have that time until the end of September. Then I can really game it up. It's terribly disappointing that the folks at Nippon Ichi Software didn't have the BYOL (levels) feature enabled right out of the box. Still pissed that I couldn't build right away.

Remember the pre-order goodies?

In crazier news, I played in my first official MTG tournament with surprising success. An ultimate victory it wasn't, but three rounds of defeating my opponents in two games (we played best two out of three) can't mean I'm horrible. I made a fatal mistake in the first game of the fourth round; suffering from blood-rage, I swung at my adolescent advisory with all my creatures, leaving none behind to block. Dumb-da-dumb-dumb.

The tournament was a variation that I hadn't heard about or seen before, but I'm fairly new to competitive MTG. It was always goofy friends doing goofy things with fantasy cards; we didn't try to kill each other like in Monopoly.

Everyone in the tournament started with a booster pack and three of each colored mana. Without looking at our booster packs, we opened the booster and shuffled in the mana. That was your thirty card deck. You played round one without knowing what was lurking in your deck as well as your opponent's. If you won your round, you were given another booster pack and had to construct a forty card deck. The more rounds you won, the more booster packs you were rewarded. But you couldn't go over the forty-card limit.

I'd like to take a moment and give special thanks to my partner in a three-round winning streak: the Volcanic Dragon. He was, by far, the best card I unwrapped out of all three booster packs.

All my rares sucked; plus, this dragon reared his hot little head and helped me win four out of the six games I won.

Getting Back To It

Puzzles. I like puzzles, especially the complex ones that challenge me to understand the how and why something works. If it’s extremely complicated, I love sifting through instructions with detailed explanations. Anything from simple Lego instructions or cooking recipes to how-to hacking guides or circuit schematics (which still look like weird little maps to me).

The challenge has always been the draw for me. Can I do it?

Under normal circumstances, the answer is yes, but with a little help. I'm ok with that, which is why I love sites like gamefaqs. Their all-text guides and forums are usually my go-to-place for videogames that have me stumped. Similarly, instructables is a great place for DITY guides and advice; I turn there for ideas on how to do anything and everything.

The puzzles that have confounded me the most as of late have been the hacking of current and recent game consoles. The long gone, but not forgotten, Sega Dreamcast was my first successful excursion into the world of console modding. Not sure why I held onto that old girl, but I never traded in my Dreamcast nor my three favorite games: Code Veronica, Jet Grind Radio, and SW: Demolition. After finding a boot disc iso and the right burner program, my library of DC games went from 3 to whatever the internet has to offer.

High off the fumes of success, I turned my sore little fingers (from hours of button mashing through Marvel Vs. Capcom 2) to my phat PSP. Hacking that little bugger was much more difficult, even with the guides. After two weeks of step-by-step trial and error, I finally bricked my PSP-1000. Eighty bucks down the drain. I did buy it used, but I was still pissed. Eighty bucks is big money to me.

Failure is part of life. I still have that bricked PSP as a friendly reminder.

The next target was and still is the Xbox (the first one, the old one). Why the Xbox? Well, I was initially going for the XBMC set-top box. That was the goal when I started. Now, the ultimate achievement is XBMC with retro gaming functionality. I’m talking emulators and roms from NES to N64, maybe some PS1 (if that’s even possible).

Using the Splinter Cell and Action Replay dongle softmod trick I installed/accessed the replacement dashboard Evolution or Evox. Success, right? And I stopped right there, not wanting to screw something up.

Therein lies the greatest barrier: I had to be willing to fail and completely destroy my Xbox. At the time, coming off the PSP disaster, I wasn't ready to brick another perfectly functional console. Frozen and afraid to try. Afraid to continue. It's basically the same as failing. So, time to get back to work; I found a good place to help pick up where I left off.

I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.

~Michael Jordan