Trendsetting?

Like some people, I’m a pretty big fan of Twitter. Like a far greater number of people, I’m not a very big fan of doing laundry.

Let me share a story that manages to connect the two.

When I started college, one of the many new things I had to get used to was doing laundry. I’ve since gotten over it really being any sort of a hassle, but somewhere along the line, I managed to draw a new personal tradition out of it. For whatever reason, every time I’ve done laundry, I tweeted something about it that included the word “fucking.” Now, granted, this is not a very nice word. Most people should not say this word or should at least take some care in using it because a) most people don’t find it particularly amusing, and b) that pesky roughly age 13-17 demographic finds it entirely too amusing. But I felt like the daunting task of having to do laundry did something to deserve it. Sorting colors, waiting for a dryer to open up, swiping your ID or procuring an obscene amount of quarters. Not pleasant stuff. Of course, now it’s just funny. Especially in how a few of my friends have adopted this habit as well. I can earnestly say that nothing warms my heart in quite the same way as seeing someone else tweet something along the lines of “Time to do some fucking laundry! #fuckinglaundry”

Yes, that’s right. It even has its own hashtag now. It’s perfectly acceptable either to throw it in at the end, or to just incorporate it into your tweet, like one of my friends did rather expertly with “What time is it? #fuckinglaundry time!” Those are the rules. Either syntax is perfectly acceptable! Why would I tell you that they’re the rules? Because this is obviously a thing that needs to catch on on a larger scale! True, my blog doesn’t really get enough traffic (at least outside of you know what) to start a social revolution (Twitter revolution?), but it’s as good a place as any to get the word out! Or, worst case scenario, to share an amusing anecdote to serve as a filler post.

Now go. You know what you must do. Unless you don’t have twitter, then you should maybe click on a bunch more of my posts and bump up my stats a little bit to make me feel better.

Technical Difficulties, Part 2

Today’s post was originally written as a satire piece for a currently unpublished issue of my school’s alternative paper, but seeing as how 1) it elaborates on my last post, 2) I’m reasonably certain I can use it both on my blog and in the paper, 3) it’s styled like something I’d write here anyway, and 4) it provides a little more clarity into why exactly I’m not updating very much right now and why you should never EVER buy a Dell, I’m posting it here. You kids have fun.

- – -

Thrilled as I am that I’ve made it through my first month in college, the same can’t be said for my laptop. Last week my barely three month old Dell Studio 15 laptop decided that turning on was no longer something it was particularly interested in doing, and after another week of Dell sending a tech guy (twice) to ultimately not fix my laptop and then sending me an empty box, vaguely symbolic of my faith in the company, to send it back, it’s now sitting in the mailroom where FedEx picks it up the next business day and Dell probably fixes it in 2011.

It’s fitting how Dell’s commercials for their Studio series are lollipop themed, since the one they sold me was a lemon.

But as much as I’d enjoy bashing Dell for its incompetence (the Styrofoam cutout in their box didn’t even fit my laptop – learn the dimensions of your own products!), I’m much less thrilled with Dell’s inconsideration. They’re perfectly content letting their customers wait 8-14 days for repairs and playing that damn lollipop song while you’re on hold for half of the two hours you spend on the phone with tech support, but do they understand how inconvenient this is? I mean, sure, I can just go to the library to print out my homework and write papers and such, that works just fine, but going to the library ever other day to read the new XKCD? The new Penny Arcade? Clearly no one at Dell understands what a hassle it is to keep current with Questionable Content every day without your own computer you can read it on without feeling vaguely self conscious reading a giant, occasionally risqué comic in the library.

Now, sure, webcomics are one petty complaint, but then you have your tv shows. If you miss the new Office episode and don’t have access to Hulu or a sketchy Korean Youtube-knockoff to make up for it, then how are you going to be able to complain about how much worse the show gets every season? Not to mention how you’ll also have to do this in real life too, where you usually have considerably less anonymity.

It’s not even the absence of the internet that complicates matters, because even without it, you’re still going to have procrastinated enough to have to walk over to the library at 1 a.m. to check for that email your professor sent the class about what to bring to class tomorrow or to write up that paper or alternative newspaper article you put off to the last minute, and then when you suddenly have that internet access you’ve been cut off from all day, you know you’re just going to be on Facebook the whole time.

Oh? That’s right. The thousand pound gorilla in the hypothetical room. Facebook. I went there. It’s no secret we need instant access to Facebook nowadays. If you can’t constantly check Facebook to see if you’ve been tagged in any new pictures, then how are you going to know what you did last night? How are you going to write yet another status update complaining about how much work you still have to do or how you want to strangle whoever’s blasting “Boom Boom Pow” at this time of night? How are you going to play Farmville? Does Dell have any idea how many damn people are playing Farmville? Eight to fourteen days, my ass! I need to start playing Farmville!

It’s readily apparent just how great student need for a computer is, and if you don’t have your own, you either spend seven hours a day in the library, or you’re going down that proverbial creek without that proverbial paddle, or, worse still, you’re typing up your alternative newspaper article on your friend’s MacBook that half the people who listen to your story about your broken laptop inform you that you really should have gotten instead. In other words, don’t get a Dell, because Dell clearly doesn’t care about you getting to play Farmville with your friends.

Wii Sports Resort or Wii Resort?

I finally got around to installing The Orange Box and am currently waiting for what seems like five hours of updates to download, so I figured I could do something somewhat constructive with this time and write one of the handful of blog posts I thought of, went “that’d be a good idea!” and promptly got around to never actually writing.

Today’s culprit actually isn’t the new (as of two weeks ago – shush) Wii Sports Resort, but more so for the peripheral that’s presumably making more people buy the damn game than would have otherwise: the Wii MotionPlus. Personally, I only bought Wii Sports Resort because apparently Wii owners need to get the MotionPlus peripherals to fulfill the broken promises Nintendo made when they revealed the Revolution controller (remember that? Nostalgia sucks!), but does it? It’s hard to tell. The device of course, works easily enough. Just pry the MotionPlus out of the giant dildo Nintendo seems to think people want to keep their Wiimotes in, clip in into place at the bottom of the controller, and bam! Two and a half years and $40 per controller later, the Wiimote almost works like it was promised to when it was revealed four years ago!

Almost. The game starts with an unnecessarily lengthy and unskippable instructional video explaining how to clip the MotionPlus on to the controller (pro tip: at the bottom), then goes into a sky diving minigame, which, honestly, really does showcase just how well the peripheral can make the controller work. You can twist and tilt the controller and watch your Mii and the encasing transparent shell of a Wiimote twist in 1:1, and it actually works. Then you get to the rest of the games and see where the obvious issue is. Naturally, although the MotionPlus can make the remote work like it’s supposed to, it’s prey to the games that use it. Admittedly, I haven’t played everything in the game yet, but most of the minigames don’t really feel like they’re making the most of the technology.

This is where I start to complain against Wii Sports Resort itself. Despite all the sports and modes for each sport crammed into it, everything feels exceptionally shallow. It’s easy to get bored of the game because even the best games in the pack do very little beyond feeble attempts to cover up their monotony. So far, my personal favorite game is swordplay, and it comes with three modes: a one-on-one duel, an accuracy competition, and, the closest thing Resort has to any sort of adventure mode, something most easily compared to a rail shooter, except you’re swinging a sword at a swarm of Miis that all seem to have it in for you or something, possibly (because you keep crashing into them during the flight simulator mini-game). I played the one-on-one matches to pro level, and didn’t play many beyond that, did the accuracy one once, and have played the adventure-y one to the point where the levels you unlock are just the old ones in reverse. While this is pretty entertaining a shows some potential for an actual adventure game where you run around swinging a sword in 1:1, the actual presentation here gets pretty stale once you unlock the 10 almost carbon-copy levels and realize the game’s pulling a Mario Kart on you after that.

The same combination of hinted potential but lacking depth carries through in every other minigame. Although there are plenty of modes to unlock and Achievements Stamps to get for pulling off different flavours of feats from simple to tedious, it doesn’t feel like there’s any real incentive to do so beyond the fact that it’s there.

Now, just because you can’t get very far with some, the games themselves are… okay, they’re hit and miss. Like I said before, swordplay is wonderful, and archery (though a little buggy with its 1:1) and table tennis are great as well. Bowling’s exactly the same as it was in Wii Sports, except there’s an automatic option included for people who found the “let go of B” concept too challenging, and I’d assume golf’s largely the same, though I haven’t actually checked yet. Wakeboarding is all right, but, again, stale, and easy to tire of whenever it proves more frustrating than fun. I can’t get Frisbee mode to work at all, but then again, I can’t throw a Frisbee at all in real life, so for all I know, it could be perfect. I briefly checked out air sports today and was actually pleasantly surprised, as I was initially with canoeing until I quickly realized that, having actually taken a canoeing lesson a couple years ago, paddling actually leaves some to be desired, and the actual modes it gives you to play with (so far) are a joke. I’ve yet to touch power cruising and cycling, because, well, cycling looks stupid and, like I said, the game’s so shallow that despite the amusing mechanics of gameplay, it doesn’t take long to turn it off.

Basically, although the game and MotionPlus are supposed to revitalize the Wii experience, the whole thing actually feels more like Nintendo resting on its laurels. It took me a while to get talked into pre-ordering the game at all, because I’m still fairly unconvinced that MotionPlus is even going to go anywhere. The Wiimote by itself was, although not perfect, still vastly underutilized, and I doubt that MotionPlus will go too far to move the system past its “waggle to win” reputation. In so many words, we can maybe expect the next Zelda game to finally utilize the system okay enough, but far and few games between will probably actually use the damn thing to create that immersive experience people frothed at the mouth over when we saw the Revolution controller so many casual gamers ago.

I’m On To You… Gmail!

Usually, whenever Google does anything, I have little reason to complain. I’ve been using gmail for two years and it’s fairly wonderful. But I’m not going to talk about gmail itself, it’s been around for a while and I don’t really have anything to add in the praise department except for one small convenience that has now effectively been removed that I’m talking about instead.

So, yes, today, I write a proper rant.

One of my favorite things about gmail is in addition to how well it works, it’s a free service. It used to be fairly simple to create a new gmail account for, say, a band or some other sort of side project you’d want an independent email address for (i.e. dinosaur blog), but gmail has added a new step to its account creation process. It asks you for a cell phone number. I don’t recall the specifics of why it needs to do this all of a sudden, something about account verification and just being yet another way to prevent spammers from creating swarms of accounts, by limiting the number that can be made with one cell phone number.

This is stupid.

What’s with the fascination with putting every service available through a cell phone? There are plenty of people who, believe it or not, only use their cell phones as phones, of all things, and don’t care to, or even can’t, run all kinds of account activation crap through their phones. I was perfectly happy directing people to gmail before because of how easy it was to create an account, but now asking for a cell phone number? I don’t care what their terms of use and privacy thingamajigs say, that just seems like an invasive use of technology in a way I’m certain a good number of people won’t care to use it.

As much as I don’t like this, I’m not sure if there’s really anything I can do about it. If anybody finds anything that can be done, let me know. Ironically enough, my google searches for anything haven’t gotten anything useful.

My E3 Nintendo Thoughts That You Were Probably Dying To Hear, And Are Fortunately Only Kind Of Delayed! Yay!

Although I wanted to write up a sort of “Here’s What Nintendo Did At E3″ or “Yeah, We All Know About the new Metroid, But Here’s Some Stuff You Might Have Missed at E3″ or “Damn, Is This A Clever (And Short) Title For a Blog Post About Nintendo’s Activity At E3 Or What?” post since E3 actually happened a week or so ago, I simply haven’t felt like it at all. Like most of anything related to Nintendo as of the past console generation or two, it’s hard to get excited about much of it, and I’m not just saying that because I’m still bitter about Mother 3 not getting a North American release (I mean, there’s a patch now. It’s their loss.)

In typical Nintendo fashion, the biggest reveals that anyone cares about were hardly revealed at all, and even the ones nobody cares about weren’t spared the usual iron box of secrecy. Take a look at the announcements about Metroid: Other M, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and even the stupid Vitality sensor. That’s literally all we know about them. We saw a trailer for Metroid and Galaxy, but when asked how exactly the games are played, Nintendo quickly shut up. The video game industry have been doing this for forever, but it still feels kind of lame that we’re supposed to be all excited about these games, yet we know nothing about the actual, you know, game part.

Now, to be a complete hypocrite, man, I’m curious about the new Zelda. Yes, there’s a new Zelda for the Wii. Doesn’t that say something? The only thing we’ve seen about that game is a piece of concept art that was only shown behind closed doors to the select few. Regardless, as annoyed as I might be with Nintendo for any stupid reason (“Hey, they’re making a multiplayer side-scrolling Mario?” “Yeah! You can play as Mario, Luigi, other Toad, and other other Toad!” “What about… normal Toad?” “Hey! Vitality sensor!” “What?” “Metroid!” “Oooo…”), I’m fairly intrigued with this whole “not holding a sword” business:

Shigeru Miyamoto: Well, the story setting for this Zelda is, of course, in a completely different era and Link is older than he was previously. More approaching adulthood. There is one hint. Maybe from the art work you can see that he’s not holding a sword.

IGN: Has he lost his Master Sword?

Shigeru Miyamoto: [Laughing] I just wanted to make sure that you understand we are making it. That’s all I’m going to say on that subject.

More recently, Miyamoto has announced that the new Wii MotionPlus will be “required”. Given how MotionPlus basically just lets the Wii do what it was supposed to do was back when this thing was still called the Revolution (remember that?), this next Zelda had better be good. I’m not really worried about them experimenting with the series a little, since I was really hesitant about Phantom Hourglass’s touch controls, and I wound up putting more effort into that game than Twilight Princess, which I actually haven’t finished yet, not because it’s hard, but because I rarely feel like playing it. I’m certainly not saying it was bad, but when a series that good starts to feel a little stale, well, that’s where you gotta let Miyamoto do his thing. Which occasionally might be Nintendogs, but it’s all well and good!

And in all honesty, I can’t remember anything else that I wanted to talk about from E3. I don’t follow Sony and Microsoft, not owning any systems from either of them (although I wish I did just for that Beatles game. I watched the videos of that in action, and talk about your heart going boom when you cross that (figurative) room!), and, as you might have guessed, I don’t remember a whole lot of offerings from Nintendo that really grabbed my interest (at least not yet. Who knows? Maybe when we see the actual game parts!), except IGN’s been raving a bit about Scribblenauts, and I’ve watched some of the gameplay, but I’m not sold quite yet. I like the general idea, but based on the levels they showed us, if the levels don’t use the concept well, that’s going to ruin the whole thing. Watching the E3 walkthrough (yes, the “God on a skateboard with a shotgun” walkthrough), it seems like the idea is better suited for a sandbox game than a generic “collect the star-shaped-not-a-star-to-progress” game. And if there really is “nothing you can’t do” to solve the puzzle, then how is the game going to present any challenge? How can you have a difficulty curve when you can do anything conceivable, say, God on a skateboard with a shotgun, to do something that could be done just as easily (or at all) with a simple axe? Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty cool that you can supposedly do “literally anything”, but I don’t think we’ve quite seen the point of it yet.

And I suppose that’s all I can think to talk about. Whoop.

EDIT: Once again, I had an idea of what I wanted to do and Yahtzee did it better. As is life.

Science!

I’m going to write a bit about the Nintendo stuff at E3, being the accidental and self-loathing Nintendo fanboy that I am, but since I graduate from high school in about nineteen hours, I don’t really feel like writing about that at this particular moment in time. Instead, since I spend so much time linking my readers (you do exist, right?)  to blogs my friends start and then never update again, I figure who am I to go against tradition?

Taking a look at what I have linked you guys to, there’s already some social commentary, some instructional running in circles, some DJ-esque chatter, someone who addresses the readers of their four short posts as “Ron”, and some kids who think they’re dinosaurs, but clearly my recommendations aren’t educational enough.

Fear not, for a remedy is at hand as one of my good friend is perfectly willing to inform you about Science! (Or “Science.” as the case may be) It’s all still fairly new, but all quite promising, and maybe this time the blog I’m linking to will actually continue updating once I do so! To get a general idea of what this kid’s up to over there, here’s an excerpt from one of his first posts, the origin of which I was actually present for, and was subsequently terrified by (in a good way!):

Basically, we’ll look at the chemical energy content in our food, and calculate the speed of a nine-pound-baby (chosen for the sakes of universality and oddity)  with an equivalent amount of kinetic energy (energy of motion).

So, looking on the McDonalds website, let’s take my standard food item of choice- A Big Mac.  McDonalds puts its calorie content at 540Calories. Now, remember- the food industry uses capital-C “Calories” as “kilocalories” so that they don’t have to explicitly admit that a Big Mac contains 540,000 calories of chemical energy.  You may recall from chemistry class that a single calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree.

This 540,000 calories is actually an archaic unit- let’s switch over to the SI unit Joules by multiplying by 4.184; yielding that the one Big Mac is roughly equivalent to 2,259,360 Joules.

The equation for kinetic energy is KE = (m * v^2)/2

So our roughly 9ish pound baby- approximately 4ish kilograms, then (divide pounds by 2.2 to get the kilogram equivalent), with 2,259,360 joules of kinetic energy, would need to be moving at:

2,259,360 = (4 * v^2)/2

v = 1062.86 meters per second.

For reference, the speed of sound at room temp in air on the earth’s surface is 334 m/s.

Now how can you not want to read the rest of that juicy morsel? Go stalk him!

The Procrastinator’s Rant: Centennial Edition

It’s a sign of the times, folks. The Procrastinator’s Rant is officially one year old. Or, rather, it was about a week ago, since I miscounted, thus ruining my idea to do a combined one-year-old/100th-post super post of awesome to celebrate. So it’s just my 100th post, not both that and the one year mark. I know. Lame.

Although on the other hand, this frees me up to do something else. For whatever reason, hitting that 100th post just doesn’t strike me as as big a deal as the one year mark, so I don’t have much interest in making a grand spectacle of all that happened during Procrastinator’s Rant’s first year or making a grand thank you, the latter because I do that in every other post anyway, because I’m thrilled people are actually reading the words I put on the internet. Really, on a serious note, given how a little over a year ago my only real outlet for my thoughts and humor was just whenever I hung out with my friends, the fact that there are actually people from California to Wisconsin, Illinois to Ohio, and more who not only read what I have to say, but do so willingly for entertainment is still pretty thrilling, and I of course need to thank everybody who does for doing so, and these are just people I specifically know about. During the first three months of Procrastinator’s Rant, I got 400 hits, which I now get on a monthly basis, and that’s not counting that day I got stumbled and got 600 hits overnight for that post about AP Biology ruining Pokemon.

And last, but not least, within that first year, I’ve become Google approved:

Yes. When you search for my blog on google, it is the first thing that comes up. Tight.

Anyway, like I said maybe two paragraphs ago, the fact that I totally didn’t spend any time on this post revelling in how eventful the blog’s first year was frees me up for a feature I’ve wanted to do for a while, and the 100th post seems like as good a place as any, since it’s sort of like that aforementioned thank you to everybody who made this possible, but in a different manner.

In other words, I’m going through and making fun of all the bizarre ways people have found this blog.

WordPress lets you see who referred to and what search terms led people to your blog, and although most of the time you’ll get fairly normal searches like, say, “Procrastinator’s Rant”, sometimes you get the unusual, the interesting, and the fairly unsettling. So I’m going to share these with you, the reader, and since most of the time they definitely did not get what they were looking for, I’m going to fix that and offer up the top five right here! Think of it as giving the fans what they want!

How else would I mark this milestone? Really?

1) Procrastinator Poem/Jokes About Procrastinators/How To Tell If You’re A Procrastinator/What Does The Word Procrastinator Mean?

First, let’s start with the only slightly misled. They were searching for something about procrastinators, and technically they got it, although my blog doesn’t really have a single thing to do with that. I already made fun of the “How To Tell If You’re A Procrastinator” guy, but the rest are newer to me.

Technically speaking all the poems on my blog would qualify as procrastinator poems, since I was almost certainly supposed to be doing something else whilst writing them, but if you want a poem strictly about procrastinators, here’s a limerick:

There once was a man from the equator,

A notorious procrastinator,

Who decided to wait

And postpone ‘til late

On that literature essay that’s due tomorrow and totally going to kill your grade if you don’t do a good job on it oh snap. Ator.

And, um… a joke about procrastinators…:

How many procrastinators does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

None, because a procrastinator is one who needlessly defers the performance of anything, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness, so they probably wouldn’t be very well suited for actually carrying out the task.

Oh, hey! Two birds with one stone there! Moving on!

2) Watchmen Joke

This one actually had me fairly confused for a while, because it’s been pulling in a lot of hits, especially since I didn’t remember any actual jokes from the movie, aside from how silly Malin Akerman’s acting was (zing). So I actually, believe it or not, had to google this one to see what people could possibly be trying to find, since I doubt there’s such a high demand for knock knock jokes about The Watchmen.

So I think I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities. One being The Comedian’s tearful realization that life’s a joke (and if that’s what was being searched for, well… that’s the joke! Life! =D ), and the other was Rorschach’s, well, joke:

“Heard a joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, ‘Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.’ Man bursts into tears. Says, ‘But, doctor… I am Pagliacci.’ Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains. Fade to black.”

Hahaha!

And then on that third possibility you actually were looking for a joke about The Watchmen:

How many Watchmen does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Depends. The Comedian will screw anything that moves, Dr. Manhattan will make as many of himself as said screwing requires, and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre will do so in an awkward, lengthy, slow-motion scene that takes place in a flying submarine or something.

Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains. Fade to black.

3 )Magikarp When I Evolve/Making Fun of Magikarp/Magikarp DUR/Badass Magikarp

For whatever reason, people love coming to Procrastinator’s Rant for all their Magikarp-mocking needs. Well, what’s that all about? Really, we’ve all known Magikarp’s sucked for at least ten years, and we’re perfectly aware that he’s going to evolve into Gyarados, so clearly people are more than willing to put up with it. And how come nobody gives Goldeen any crap for being useless in Super Smash Bros.? It doesn’t do or evolve into anything useful there, how come it gets off the hook?

Who am I kidding? Magikarp jokes!

How many Magikarp does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Water Pokemon are weak to electricity! THAT’S A TERRIBLE IDEA!

4) Earthbound Haiku

Again, there’s two things people could be searching for. There actually is a haiku in Earthbound, which serve as Everdread’s last words after he falls out the building (spoiler):

But if you’re actually looking for a haiku about Earthbound, well… I’m sure I can think of one:

Funny and charming

Together on our journey

Ness Ness Ness Ness Ness…

And here’s a joke!

How many Nintendo of America executives does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Who knows? They’re too busy screwing over Earthbound/Mother fans!

5) Starmen.net Jerks/Starmen.net Sucks

Okay, seriously? Why are so many people searching for this? What did Starmen.net ever do to you? Those guys have been keeping the Earthbound/Mother cult fanbase alive for easily a decade, since Nintendo of America clearly has no desire to do so. Really? Did they steal your lunch money and call you fat or something? They seem like pretty nice fellows over there. I have nothing against them, and it’s kind of weird how all these searches lead to my blog…

So… that’s basically it! Although I’m sure this will be wildly unpopular amongst my raging fans, there really isn’t much material to make a joke about that last one.

Bah:

How many Starmen does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

I don’t know, but it takes like a kajillion before you find the Sword of Kings because only one out of every 128 have them and IT TAKES FOREVER!

Jumping On The Bandwagon Like Scientology Pretends It Isn’t A Cult

Fact: Twitter is stupid.

Fact: Twitter is fun.

It works like this: Have you ever seen a really stupid movie, but for whatever reason, thoroughly enjoyed it anyway? Of course you have.  Take Saving Silverman. It was a terrible movie, and for that reason, I thought it was a lot of fun and enjoyed watching it. In that sense, Twitter is like Saving Silverman.

Now, I’m sure I’ve just scared off half the people reading this, but think about it. The vast majority of the criticism towards Twitter fits a general idea that it’s a stupid waste of time, but so are a lot of things, and that doesn’t necessarily make them any less fun. So what makes Twitter any different? Sure, the idea of a microblogging social network sounds like it invites a lot of idiots, and it does, but the joy of common sense is that you don’t like it, then you don’t have to do it! If someone uses their Twitter for this:

…then don’t follow them! Twitter is just like anything else on the internet: it’s a way for stupid people to say a lot of stupid things, and for witty people to say a lot of witty things. If it was around back then, Oscar Wilde would probably have been a very entertaining Twitter…er for this very reason.

Around a month ago I joined Twitter after months of debating whether or not to do so on a trial basis, and, like I’ve been talking about, think it’s just as entertaining as it is stupid. The trick is that what you get out of it is what you put into it, or, and possibly more likely, what your friends put into it. I’m fortunate enough to have some rather witty friends that can usually think of something interesting to reflect on a few times a day, and when they can’t, there’s a handful of famous people, internet-famous people, and The Onion to pick up the slack.

Really, the only thing about Twitter that I actually have a complaint with is that in order to tweet something, you have to go tweet something. Which can be awkward depending on what else you’re doing, and I can see how it would be really annoying if someone, say, whips out their phone or, worse, logs in on their friends computer (sorry guys) repeatedly or at some otherwise inopportune moment.

So since wordpress recently added a Twitter widget, I’m going to go all out here and actually put my twitter on my blog. Yes, Mr. President, you heard that right. It’s my real twitter. Temporarily. I was initially going to set up a second twitter just for this blog to let people know when I’m going to post and whatnot, but realized I was starting to do that anyway, so now you get to witness my Twittered hilarity and be up to date! For now. I could still decide that’s a little too creepy, so I’ll see what happens.

So, in summary, this post in a noun, verb, and three adjectives: Twitter is stupid, fun, but probably not for everyone.

Okay, two adjectives and an adjective clause. Whatever.

Aforementioned Procrastinator’s Best/Worst of 2008: In All Its Properly Skewered and Debatably Relevant Glory

As much as I would like to do one of those predictable Top Ten things for 2008, I really don’t do enough to have a particularly meaningful one, nor would it really be of any significance, since I doubt your average Bartholomew would really care how I feel about the year’s best music, games, shows,  and whatnot.  (Note: not that there’s anything wrong with “average Joe” so much as “Joe” being overused as a name synonymous with the common man, and no, this isn’t a shot at “Joe six-pack” or anything else from the “Oh God are they over yet?” elections. I have a friend named Joe who I’d struggle define even remotely as “common.” I saw the man front-flip through the chains on either side of a swing. Um… back to my point?)

So instead I’m going to take a page from Zero Punctuation and make a filler-y Year in Review that’s basically all about my blog. I mean, you’re caring enough to read my blog, so I’m assuming that’s pretty much what you’re here for. So it’s only fitting that this blog’s version of a Best of is the Best of whatever happened on this thing I added to my hobbies some months ago. Revel in the nostalgia! So without further ado, the best and worst of The Procrastinator’s Rant in its first year, 2008. Excerpts from my favorite and least favorite posts, and some themes built around them.

Best Title: Japanese Scientists Invent Magic!

There was no other way I could explain this one, which I tried to do in the article, and halfway through writing it and realizing I could only sort of explain the science behind it, basically said “well, let’s just go link to youtube…” (A favorite method of mine… SHHH! TELL NO ONE!)

My favorite part of the report is that the team is already talking about using the technology for video games. That’s progress, right there. Seriously though, think about how cool this could be for a pet simulator or something… although if it’s anything like Nintendogs, it’ll probably just lead to everybody punching the air in front of them if the voice recognition still can’t figure out the difference between “sit” and “beg” and, actually, just about anything else… So maybe not a pet simulator then…

Worst Title: Nananananananana Nananananananana Batman!

I think I’ve figured out why nobody read my Dark Knight review…

Going into the theater, I had pretty high hopes, since I consider Batman Begins one of the best superhero (or really, really rich hero, as the case may be) movies ever made …

Honorable Mention – Most “Look At My Awesome Vocabulary, Guys!” Title: Trying to Avoid Saying Something Like “Lost is Getting Lost” or Some Similar Platitude

Clearly I’m moving up in the world of blogging… before I know it Terry O’Quinn will comment on this post with “Yeah, I know, man! Locke was in the coffin! How weird is that?!”

…And how weird is it when a show introduces a time-machine and it’s still old-hat?

Best “People Are Noticing My Blog!” Moment: Maldroid Sans Smoke and Mirrors – Not Bad!

Maldroid themselves commented on my review of their debut album? I’m invincible!…

Worst “People Are Noticing My Blog!” Moment: 123456 Pokemon!

…or… not… This doesn’t have to be my most viewed post by an embarrassingly large number… Please check out a post I actually wrote something in!

And as an added bonus, you can download the song for free from his website! Now you can listen to it on your iPod when you run around a lake in gym class. Like I totally haven’t done.

Honorable Mention – Most “I’m Probably Not Offering Much Incentive For People To Notice My Blog, Am I?” Moment: Excerpt From a Real Conversation I Had on Facebook

At the time, I thought it was… okay,  “funny” isn’t the right word in that context either…

…in the pilot episode of Macguyver, that “rocket thruster” thing was just stupid. He could have just jumped off the cliff and it would have accomplished the same thing.

Best Words of Wisdom: Ah, Irony

According to the stats page, someone found my blog today by searching for “How to tell if you’re a procrastinator.” Well, I don’t actually talk about procrastinating in my blog and it’s just part of the name, but I feel like helping out anyway:

If you’re taking the time to google “How to tell if you’re a procrastinator”, you’re a procrastinator.

Worst Words of Wisdom: Haiku 5

question. answer? no!

i need more karma practice.

is it cake time yet?

This is also a good candidate for worst haiku ever written ever, but in my defense that was the point.

Honorable Mention – Best Words of Wisdom About Words of Wisdom: Avatar: The Last Hurrah

And this is a complaint not just against Avatar but against television and movies in general, don’t use voice altering effects that make everything as unclear as Power Ranger’s Zordon! Really, when Aang asked for the lion turtle’s help and it answered, it could have recited the theme song to Fresh Prince and I wouldn’t have noticed, it was so unintelligible. It really kind of takes away from the effect when the dialogue basically sounds like:

“I need your help, lion turtle! I need to save the world by killing the Fire Lord, but I’ve been told not to kill people! What should I do?”

“BWAAAAAAA! GWAAAAAAAA! WA WA WA WAAAAAAAA! GLURRRRRRRRRGH!”

“Thanks, lion turtle!”

Stop doing that!

Best “In Which I Rip On Nintendo”: Nintendo’s New DSi’d-rather-not

This is probably the most scathing post I’ve ever written… although I still think it’s pretty funny.

Two years later, Nintendo releases the Game Boy Advance SP, which not only has a much more aesthetically appealing folding design, but comes with the long-rumored, never-seen (except on anything but a Nintendo product) backlit screen! With Nintendo embracing Thomas Edison’s scientific breakthrough a mere 220-ish years after its initial discovery, this was certainly an upgrade worth having, no? I mean, come on, it’s the future! Then another two years later, even though the DS was already on shelves released a year before, Nintendo released the Game Boy Micro, which was yet another redesign of the Game Boy Advance, except Holy iPod Generation, Batman! that thing was tiny! So forget the fact that there are three separate systems (four if you count the GBA player for the Gamecube) that can play these games, you can probably fit like five of these things in your back pocket!

Moving on past the GBA innovation, Nintendo released its next handheld, the dual-screen, touch-screen, Nintendo DS in 2004, a system so much more advanced it launched with a port of a seven year old Mario game! And Ping Pals! And then Nintendogs came out about a year later! Seriously, tons of potential right here!

But once again, Nintendo’s two-year cycles of ADD kick in and in 2006 they release the Nintendo DS lite, a redesign of the system with brighter screens, bigger styli, smaller size, fewer calories, and Atkins Diet approved! This was reportedly pretty awesome, because now you could play all those awesome DS games with a system that suddenly realized it was kinda sorta a little important to try to look pretty cool too.

Worst “In Which I Rip on Nintendo”: A Prelude to a Denouncement

Also in which I write an introduction to a post I never get around to caring to write. Let’s just… move on…

Honorable Mention – In Which I Seriously Drop the Ball on Ripping on Nintendo

Yeah, I never wrote a post about the Mother 3 translation patch. To sum it up, Mother 3, and the Earthbound/Mother series it’s part of, is Nintendo’s big “screw you” to the States. The patch was a “screw you” right back. The series is incredibly underrated, and some of the best games ever made. They’re funny, they’re moving, they’re simply beautiful, and Nintendo has ignored America’s pleas for a translation and release anywhere but in Japan. Despite the fact that basically everybody knows Ness because of Super Smash Bros. and they could very easily re-release Earthbound on the Virtual Console at little to no financial risk, they’ve refused to. In doing so, Nintendo hasn’t given America a chance to show revived interest in the series, so they didn’t translate Mother 3. So the fans did it themselves. Nyah!

Best Filler Post: Why I Don’t Play Minesweeper

I hate that game.

Also, one of the most hilarious comments I’ve ever gotten.

Worst Filler Post: Excerpt From a Real Conversation I Had on Facebook

Just ignore this…

Honorable Mention – Best “This Isn’t A Filler Post?” Post: Haiku 6

I like this one.

let’s go blow bubbles

like survivor’s guilt except

nothing has happened

Best Search That Led Someone to Procrastinator’s Rant: guitar hero character customization serj

Serj in Guitar Hero… that… that game would be glorious… Although I don’t think I actually talked about this..

Also, someone else searched for “I hate Word 2007″. I hear you, man…

Worst Search That Led Someone to Procrastinator’s Rant: starmen.net sucks

False!

Honorable Mention – Most WTF Search That Led Someone to Procrastinator’s Rant: spore creature sex

o.O

I know I never talked about that…

Best Post of 2008: My Wall-E Review

This is still my favorite post I’ve written. I stray from the topic a little, but that’s what makes this fun.

The mere fact that Madagascar is evidently good enough to warrant a sequel is a truly terrifying notion. Even more terrifying is that this means that as far as animated pictures go, it’s supposedly one of the best. Really now? Wasn’t that movie mostly a kid-friendly rave scene fueled by that “I Like to Move It” song for what had to be around 50 minutes, which must have led to an epidemic of people’s ears bleeding?

So, I think those are the highlights of 2008, in terms of this little area of the interblag. If you think I’ve missed anything, well, I’m flattered you like my blog so much! I look forward to entertaining everybody and hopefully doing a better job of it in 2009! Happy New Year!

Also, I totally thought it already was 2009. Imagine my surprise.

Nintendo’s New DSi’d-rather-not

Nintendo has this nastly little habit of redesigning its handheld consoles every few years or so, yet unlike Apple’s similar practice of making only very subtle changes to its iPod lineup every year, Nintendo manages to do this in a way that makes their new devices seem like essential upgrades.

Let’s go back to 2001 for a moment. Nintendo releases the Game Boy Advance, a 32-bit handheld video game console unlike. It was pretty awesome. Two years later, Nintendo releases the Game Boy Advance SP, which noy only has a much more aesthetically appealing folding design, but comes with the long-rumored, never-seen (except on anything but a Nintendo product) backlit screen! With Nintendo embracing Thomas Edison’s scientific breakthrough a mere 220-ish years after its initial discovery, this was certainly an upgrade worth having, no? I mean, come on, it’s the future! Then another two years later, even though the DS was already on shelves released a year before, Nintendo released the Game Boy Micro, which was yet another redesign of the Game Boy Advance, except Holy iPod Generation, Batman! that thing was tiny! So forget the fact that there are three separate systems (four if you count the GBA player for the Gamecube) that can play these games, you can probably fit like five of these things in your back pocket!

Moving on past the GBA innovation, Nintendo released its next handheld, the dual-screen, touch-screen, Nintendo DS in 2004, a system so much more advanced it launched with a port of a seven year old Mario game! And Ping Pals! And then Nintendogs came out about a year later! Seriously, tons of potential right here!

But once again, Nintendo’s two-year cycles of ADD kick in and in 2006 they release the Nintendo DS lite, a redesign of the system with brighter screens, bigger styli, smaller size, fewer calories, and Atkins Diet approved! This was reportedly pretty awesome, because now you could play all those awesome DS games with a system that suddenly realized it was kinda sorta a little important to try to look pretty cool too.

Just last week, Nintendo continued its pattern of making itself obsolete every two years by announcing yet another redesign of the Nintendo DS, the DSiPod Touch at the Nintendo Conference with an announcement that went something like this:

Fanboy: “Why, surely there isn’t that much room for improvement! How could Nintendo possibly top itself again?”

Nintendo: “Fear not, kind fellows! For the new DSi is 12% thinner than the DS lite!”

Fanboy: “So it ain’t so! Now we can fit more Nintendo products in our pockets!”

Nintedo: “And you’ll have too, because we’ve removed the GBA slot!”

Fanboy: “Shock and awe!”

Nintendo: “And that’s not all! The DSi also has two .3 megapixel cameras (and that’s not a typo!) and an SD card slot so you can view pictures and listen to AAC music files (only!)”

Fanboy: “It’s a technological marvel!”

Nintendo: “It also has a built-in web browser, internal flash memory, and its own online store!”

Fanboy: “The innovation is blowing my mind! When does it come out in the United States?”

Nintendo: “Next April, after the holiday season, because we still can’t make up our mind on whether we want to actually try to make money or not!”

Fanboy: “Hooray!”

Whoo.

Seriously, I can understand Nintendo’s philosophy behind this, in that it didn’t set out to make the DSi the best MP3 player or web browser (which it did very well, by the way), but simply to add extra features to the DSi. Well, that’d be nice, if these additions weren’t so gimmicky. The two cameras (one facing forward, one facing the user) aren’t a terrible idea, but the camera qualities sure are, and how the closed unit looks uglier than the DS lite because of the eyesore-tastic camera location. The larger screens are nice and the web browser could actually be a little tempting (I admit it would be nice for those times where I want to check something on the internet in the middle of the night and I don’t want to wait for anything that can do so to turn on), as are the flash memory and possibilities with an online store with $8, $5, $2, and free games, but overall, the additions don’t make for a very convincing package.

The DSi is region locked. Its battery life is shot (3-4 hours on highest brightness setting). The online store’s point system uses the same points cards as the Wii’s online store does, but the points themselves are not interchangable between the two stores. The exclusion of MP3 compatability makes the music player nearly useless.

The problem I see with the new DSi is that for every new feature it adds, some of which I admit are pretty fancy, they manage to feel somewhat underwhelming (like the .3 MP cameras). I have no doubt that the online store has tons of potential (and missed potential, just like the Wii’s online store) and that Nintendo will think of great uses for the cameras, which begs the question of just how shafted are those people with DS systems sans camera. Not to mention that the cameras just make the system look ugly now.

I’m still using my original DS I got about a month after launch. I didn’t upgrade to the DS lite, and don’t see myself upgrading to the DSi either. If the new features sound good to you though, then I have no doubt that the DSi would be a nice investment. For me, I’m having a hard time even caring.