This review, of 300 (LInk Dead) has made me want to see it when I had no interest in the movie at all before. If the euro critics think it’s bad because it is too american and jingoistic, then it has to be good. ;)I’m sure these same eurocritics gave An Inconvenient Truth a high score solely because of its politics as well.

Only 2 weeks after finishing Suikoden 3, I’ve also polished off Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana. It’s a fun little game, but it’s also not nearly as serious as the other games I’ve been playing lately. 2d sprites, 2d backgrounds, 3d overworld maps. A very simple RPG. I got a ton of the items in the game and did quite a few sidequests. It’s worth a play if you don’t mind the dated style of graphics.

Instead of left and right media this time, it’s pro-sony and anti-sony media. Two stories that seem completely contradictory until you look deeper. In this case, it’s 2 stories on each side.Anti-sony,http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/156082/sony_playstation_3_preorders_begin.html(Link Dead)Pro-Sony,(Link Dead)(Link Dead)So, which is it, are the PS3 preorders the fastest ever, or are they very slow like the article with the snail suggests?The anti-sony articles touch on this very lightly, the second more than the first, but the real story is likely that Sony has just allocated far more consoles than either Nintendo or MS to europe.

I had a thought today when going through my email. The perfect way to pass messages undetected would be to pass them in a form that people normally delete and disregard out of habit. Spam! Pass messages by encoding them in spam. Spam already has random artifacts in it, letters altered from what they would normally be. All you have to do is find a technique to modulate those artifacts and interpret them on the other side.

Took long enough, but I finally polished off Suikoden 3. I guess it’s a tribute to my limited time that it’s taken me 6 months to finish. It was one of the first games I rented on Gamefly, and the first one I purchased and set out to complete. After doing all of the chapters with all 6 main characters, I’m sitting at 82 hours. I feel I’m missing out on some of the inside jokes in the game however.

With the fluorescent debate in another person’s LJ, I did a bit of research on if Luxeon soft-white LEDs could be an alternative to the somewhat annoying CFB’s that have been pushed recently. I’m discovering though that they’re somewhat lackluster in the energy savings and cost department. A Luxeon 3300k 1watt bulb puts out 20 lumens. According to Wikipedia, 40 and 60 watt incandescent bulbs put out 500 and 850 lumens respectively.

There was an article in Game Informer this month about how Sony and Nintendo need to add an Achievement like system to their consoles, because it’s an extremely addictive tool to keep people coming back to the console, to brag to your friends, etc. They have a point about the power of being able to show of your accomplishments to the world, but a raw scale of achievement points may not be the best way to show this off.

Found an interesting gaming discussion site on the net today. http://www.gamesey.com/why-we-re-different.htm (Link Dead, moved to www.gameslurp.com)It’s nice to find a place where I can talk about games and consoles without being constantly berated for my choice in console. Even going onto the official playstation forums there would be tons of people trying to attack whatever console I’m discussing and touting theirs as superior. This site doesn’t seem to have any of that yet.

Small political rant about the news media here.Pelosi wants a military jet to take her places. That’s perfectly fine and within the scope of the speaker of the house job. There’s lots of noise being made from both sides about this though. She wants a jumbo jet capable of carrying over a hundred people for just her and a few staff. The military has a number of planes available that are more reasonably sized for the people she wants to bring.

Hearing aids are getting more acceptable because of the proliferation of bluetooth headsets. (Link Dead) It also mentions how they have hearing aid therapies for hereditary tinnitus, something I’ve suffered from for ages. I usually am able to filter it out, but anytime something calls attention to it, I start to hear it again. (like a hearing aid commercial on the radio, or reading this article.) That’s why I usually listen to something.