Monday, July 23, 2007

Now that we've run off both people who read this site with any regularity, I guess we'll be starting over.

We are still here (and by "here" I mean Kentucky and this website) and everything is fine.

I'll do some bullet point updates here:

* You may remember in my last post I mentioned the fact that Lexington Blockbusters don't take movies from the online store. Yes...well...OWND!

posted by Travis at 9:42 PM

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Sunday, April 29, 2007

Today is the one year anniversary of the day Kim and I (and an unborn baby) met some family in Las Vegas at The Venetian Hotel and got married in a boat in the middle of the mall. It was the best wedding ever. Happy anniversary to us.

We've been back in Lexington almost two weeks now, and we're pretty well settled in. Well, we still don't have our stuff yet. It is still traveling about the country in the care of strangers, but I expect it any day now. We've visited many of our favorite eateries, and seen a few friends but not many yet. Work has kept me very busy. You know those days that you go to work but you don't really do much but you still went so it counted as working? I can't do that. The only way I can get credit for working is by producing work, so it's a whole new thing for me. Don't get me wrong, I love every minute of it, but it does keep me very busy and the hours can get a tad long somedays.

One of the first things I enjoyed when getting back into town was the parking. You want to go into a store? BOOM. There's 7 spots available right in front of it. "Where are we going to park?" is no longer a concern for us. I always hated all the parking games in LA. However, I have discovered something that is extraordinarily irritating about Lexington. We use Blockbuster Online because you can take the movies from the Online store in to the local stores and get free rentals. Plus, they scan the movie as returned at the store, so you don't have to wait for the shipping to get back to Blockbuster. At least that was the case in LA. Apparently, all the Lexington Blockbusters are owned by the same greedy asshole, and he "does not participate" in the schemes of the larger Blockbuster corporation. They charge late fees. They don't take movies from the online store. Which means you don't get free rentals for said movies. The decision to allow customers to take the online movies into the local stores is what made Blockbuster stock come back up and Netflix start to take a hit. But not in Lexington. Oh no. Greedy McEvillaugh doesn't roll like that. We'll probably stick with Blockbuster Online because they also offer 2 free rentals every month through coupons and the local stores do take those. It still pisses me off, though.

posted by Travis at 10:35 PM

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Thursday, April 26, 2007

Today I've been playing around with the Saitek X52 Pro PC Flight Control System for an article I'm writing about joysticks. This is hands down the craziest joystick and throttle control I've ever seen. It's huge, all the buttons on it glow in a variety of colors (for instance when you flip up the "safe" switch the button underneath turns from green to red), and it has an LCD on the throttle.

Alas, no force feedback.

I have to say that Microsoft Flight Simulator is excrutiatingly boring, so I'm all over ebay trying to buy some classic space sim, mech, and combat sim games. Kim thinks I've lost it, but in order to test these joysticks, I need to feel them behind an X-Wing or a Mad Cat.

Click the picture for the supersized one.

posted by Travis at 1:50 PM

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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Well, my house sale closes tomorrow. Kim and Titan are on a plane to Kentucky right now while I finish up the packing and the cleaning here in California. Tomorrow the movers are coming and Friday my Dad and I are driving cross-country. There's something familiar about two people driving cross-country; one in a black sports car and one in a "truck" with animals.


I guess that makes me Snowman.

posted by Travis at 6:11 PM

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Sunday, March 25, 2007

First, here's my recent stories. Better just get used to seeing this kind of thing here. It's my job now, after all.

Top 10 Movie Fights - Pretty self-explantory
Excite Truck vs MotorStorm - I compare two racing games on two different systems
TMNT - Movie review
Comic Column - Column about the new Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic (guest starring Pajaro)
Comic Column - Column about some good comics from that week

There's a new Spider-Man 3 trailer that centers around the black costume and Venom with some new Venom footage. Good stuff. You'll have to click where it says "See the Exclusive Final Trailer". It isn't on one of the screens.

We're scheduled to close escrow on our house on April 10th so we could be in Lexington permanently that week. The escrow may be delayed a bit, but barring any problems it will be around then. Coincidentally March 5, 2007 marked our 6 year anniversary of moving out to California.

The problem with this new job is that this site may suffer because of it. We're still planning a redesign, but as far as content...well...all my stuff is pretty much going on the work sites or the work blog. I'll still post personal family stories and pictures and what not here, though.

posted by Travis at 11:27 PM

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Thursday, March 08, 2007

Here are some links to some stories I did over the past few weeks.

"Come and Take Them!" - "300" Reviewed - My review of 300
"Zodiac" Stalks But Doesn't Kill - My review of Zodiac
Vista Offers Nothing to Gamers - My tests with gaming on Windows Vista
Animating Hellboy: A Conversation with Tad Stones - I interviewed the director of the Hellboy Animated movies
Boxing Comics: Civil War Ends - My comic column about the end of Marvel's Civil War

The 300 screening that Kim and I went to on Tuesday was in IMAX, so that was pretty cool. It's a fantastic film. It was actually the first time we'd left Titan with non-family, and especially for that long. I was told that the movie was at 7:30 and we had to be there 45 minutes early. The movie was right near where I work and it takes an hour to get up there from our house, so Kim had to leave at around 5:30 to drop off Titan with our friends and get up here. I told them we'd probably be back by about 10:00, so a five hour stint with the baby was what they were looking at (they have three kids of their own). Unfortunately, the movie was at 6:30, but there was another one at 9:00. Well, our 10:00 return turned into about midnight, but both Titan and the Takahashi clan seem to have survived unscathed.

Finally, if you want to help out by doing more than just reading the stories, you could register with Digg and Reddit and start marking up articles from TwitchGuru (especially mine!). Digg and Reddit are news aggregators, meaning someone reads an interesting story and they submit it to the sites. If other people like the story, they vote for it. The more votes you get, the more time your story gets on the front pages. It's a simple enough concept, but easily corrupted, which is what I'm doing here. You'll see links at the bottom of our stories that say "Digg this article". If you have a Digg account and you've been to the site recently, it'll automatically put you to the submit form.

Anyway, those sites drive traffic and traffic is good.

posted by Travis at 2:00 PM

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Sunday, February 25, 2007

Uhh...

So I was done posting and doing some late night surfing when I saw this story about Jim Cameron announcing on Sunday that he has the body of Jesus Christ. Jim, can you wait until I get my family some helmets and into some kind of shelter first?

Now please read down to the other new post on here. Thanks.

posted by Travis at 4:19 AM

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We're still trying to get our house sold so we can move to Kentucky, but last week we had a little incident. There are many things that can lower the value of your house, and I'm pretty sure that spattering the walls and floor with animal blood is one of them. See, I was closing our front door (which sticks sometimes and requires a good hard tug) and my little dog Copper was dancing in and out of it. Well, he was in transition when the door hit the seal and clipped the very end of his tail right off. He let out a yelp, so I looked down and saw some hair on the ground, and I knew I knicked him. I initially thought I just pinched him, though. It wasn't until I picked up the hair and felt about a quarter inch of meat in there that I realized the dog was now bleeding.

So I ran and grabbed him. The problem was that he thought we were playing, so he started wagging his tail as hard as he could. Now, imagine you dipped a paint brush into a bucket of red paint and then just started slinging it as hard as you can. In a very short amount of time, me, the dog, and any surrounding walls and floor were covered with blood. Copper really didn't seem to be bothered by it, so he just kept wagging his tail. I was finally able to get a bandage on him, but I honestly thought he might bleed to death during the night. He was losing an alarming amount of blood for such a small dog. I finally just locked him in his room (which has a tile floor) until we decided what to do. When I checked on him later on, it looked like we'd beaten several people to death in there. If Grissom were to come through there with his little spray bottle, the whole place would light up pink and Kim and I would go to jail (because only guilty people have ANY amount of blood in their house).

I called an emergency vet and they said that there wasn't much they could do because the tail is the hardest spot on a dog to get to stop bleeding. It continued to bleed for another couple of days, and just when I thought it had stopped and I'd take all the bandages off, it would start again and Copper would put a fresh coat of blood all over the house. It has finally stopped, but I think the psychological effects of repeatedly cleaning large amounts of blood off the walls lingers with Kim. Sometimes she just sits and stares like those guys in those Vietnam movies.

This is one of those posts where pictures would have been appropriate if not necessary, but photography wasn't on my mind at the time.

In case you haven't been reading the sites I work on, here's what I've been doing for the past few weeks:

The Burning Crusade: 30 Days Later - a World of Warcraft article about the expansion.
"Ghost Rider" Sins Against Comic Films - my Ghost Rider review.
Boxing Comics: Spawn, Punisher, and X-23 - this is the first issue of my weekly column on comics that goes up every Wednesday morning.
Fandom Present for Gunslinger Midnight Sale - Reporting from the midnight sale for The Dark Tower comic.
The State of the Comic Book Industry, part 1 - This one I sent in right before I started working there full time.

I've got two stories and another column going up this week, as well as a possible movie review for the weekend.

Last thing, during my hour-long commute I'm privy to many bumper stickers. I see a lot of "War is not the answer," and I always thought that it really depended on the question. The other day I saw one that said, "If war was not the answer, you'd have a monarch, slaves, and no Jewish neighbors,"; a pro-war bumper sticker. That is strong.

posted by Travis at 3:33 AM

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Saturday, February 10, 2007

I completed my first week at TwitchGuru yesterday, and it's an absolutely fantastic job. It isn't all video games and lounging like you expect (as a matter of fact there was very little video game playing this week), but it is a lot of research and writing. I've had some good jobs in my day and I've had some awful ones. When working in the awful jobs I was constantly thinking, "What is the least amount of work and attention I can give this activity without getting fired?" While working in the jobs that were pretty damn good, I was still thinking, "I'm pretty good at this, and I could probably get better at it if I did some extra work, but I'm not terribly interested in it, so I'll just remain pretty good." This is the first job where my thoughts center around, "I want to do this better than anyone else is doing it." It's a strange place for me to be in, but one I'm enjoying. They hooked me up with a dual core Sony Vaio laptop with Vista to work on, and I'll probably end up doing some work this weekend.

Here is the break down of the sites. The main site is called Tom's Hardare Guide, and it has been around for about 10 years. I actually used to read THG quite a bit when I was building computers. There are several sites that THG links to through their headlines section and one of them is TwitchGuru, which is the site I will be writing for predominantly. TwitchGuru has an attached blog linked on its right side with the headlines listed, and I'll be posting on that as well.

While we're selling our house I'm going to the office in Culver City every day, which means an hour to an hour and a half commute. I get on the 170S, take it to the 101N, jump onto the 405S and then get on the 10E before I'm close to my destination. That's four highways; three of which are running in opposite directions. Will someone buy my house please so I can get the hell out of here? You LA people are probably preparing your comments with better ways to get there now, but I'll save you the trouble: this is the route I'm taking unless you can guarantee to cut 45 minutes out of the equation every day. The drive really doesn't bother me at all, and I think leaving with plenty of time to get there before I'm considered anywhere near late helps quite a bit. It is cutting into my home-time since I head to bead earlier and get up earlier, but it's a small price to pay for the eventual ability to work from home.

So start checking those sites, and you'll see my stuff popping up on there soon.

posted by Travis at 3:42 PM

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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

I don't normally comment on current events, but Kim alerted me to something that I absolutely had to touch on. Here is a story about apparent terrorism in Boston, when actually it involved Cartoon Network and Aqua Teen Hungerforce. What strikes me as odd is that people keep repeating, "This is not funny." You know what? Yes. Yes it is funny. It is funny that you basically mistook a lite-brite for a bomb, detonated it, and shut down a major city. That is funny.

I know you're still thinking that it isn't, but you're wrong. It is. It's very very funny. Sometimes things are funny at other people's expense, which is something, that sadly, is getting forgotten in this country. Politicians now have to apoligize for jokes that more than six people find unfunny. My feeling is that America wouldn't last five minutes on the playground of your average elementary school during recess. We've become a country of whiney, tattle-tale crybabies who want our mommies.

posted by Travis at 5:43 PM

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Monday, January 29, 2007

We were forced out of our home on Friday because we were having an open house to show our place to prospective buyers. We had about three hours to kill so we opted to take the baby to the mall and walk around. This was our first mall outing with Titan so we broke out the stroller for its virgin voyage.

Walking around the mall on a Friday afternoon I noticed that many people take their kids and strollers into malls on weekdays, and there are many kinds of strollers. Our stroller is what I would consider a kind of dune buggy of strollers. It is little more than a frame with wheels and a net in which to carry things. The car seat latches into the frame and you're done. There were other strollers I saw that were so large and complex that I imagined them folding out into a four-man tent with a full kitchen. I had visions of these mothers getting a 30 yard running start and hitting the stroller like a left-tackle at football practice in order to get it moving. These would be the RVs of strollers.

Kim and I are very minimalist when we leave with the baby. We have a backpack that contains a towel, an extra diaper or two, some wipes, an extra shirt for me, an extra shirt for her, and an extra set of baby clothes. Others do not take that same approach. I do believe that I saw a child playing with the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier and the entire Cobra army, all while still contained in his stroller.

On another note, many people are coming to see the house. I suppose that is a good thing, although I hate it that at any minute of any day I must be ready to meet and greet people and present my home for their judgement.

posted by Travis at 4:53 PM

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Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Well, our house went up for sale, and already people are calling and coming to see it (despite that the listing says "No showings until Friday"). My parents came out last week and helped us paint it, and then I took the pictures that are featured in the listing. Our agent thinks it'll go quick and perhaps with multiple offers to drive the price up. I hope he's right.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Can I afford to buy that awesome townhouse?" The real question is, can you afford not to?

posted by Travis at 9:09 PM

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Thursday, January 11, 2007

I've got a couple of things to announce.

First, every day Kim and I are working on packing our house so we can move back to Kentucky. It is no longer a question of "if" we are moving, it is only a question of "how much longer must I endure this existence?" It amuses me when I talk to California people about moving to Kentucky. They get this look of pity mixed with disgust on their face. Some of these guys are living in a different financial strata than I am, so it is understandable. People in California really have no idea how well the rest of the country is living on a modest income. For instance, I live in a 2 bedroom condo on a street that is regularly tagged with "gang symbols" (I think I've written before of my disbelief in the authenticity of the NoHo gang community). I will sell this place and make an intimidating amount of money. Now if I were to stay in California, I wouldn't be able to buy my own condo back. However, by moving to Kentucky, I can buy a real house with a real yard in a real neighborhood without real graffiti. You pessimists will say, "Yeah, but it's in Kentucky." Well, I am coming to the realization that Kentucky approaches a paradise compared to where I live now. I don't mean to hate on California, because I have enjoyed our little adventure out here immensely, however, all priorities changed when Titan was born. My son WILL play in a yard with his dogs, and perhaps play street baseball in a culdesac (although I will warn him that while setting the ball on fire will make it easier to see at night, it is much more difficult to catch). Frankly, these are things that Kim and I cannot afford in California, and I refuse to sacrifice them for geography. So we are Kentucky bound very soon.

Kim has been an advocate for a Kentucky move ever since we found out she was pregnant. I talked her out of it because I felt that moving across the country away from a job and health insurance was not wise. Once those things were taken from us, I became aware that the tether keeping me in California was fraying. When we found out that the home owner's association management company was dumping us, the final tumbler fell into place. I believe my sentiment to Kim upon hanging up the phone with the management company was, "Start packing our shit, we're getting the fuck out of here...now."

The other thing I'd like to announce is that I have been offered a full time job with TwitchGuru as an Editor. I will be providing content for the website in the areas of videogames, movies, comics, and whatever else they'd like me to cover. Unbelievably, this is a well-paying position with full benefits that I will be doing from home (so it is unaffected by my move to KY). As I tried to explain why someone would pay me to play videogames and read comic books from home to my father, I could imagine the stress lines etching themselves across his face. In his eyes (and many of yours, I assume) this is not a real job. Well, that may be the case, but they are paying me real money with real family health insurance and I really will be working from home. This is, outside of finding a large bag of money that isn't stained with blood, the best thing that could happen to us.

To sum up: we're selling our house, wiping out all our debt, moving close to family, significantly upgrading our quality of life, eliminating the largest generator of stress in our lives, and starting the best job I can imagine.

posted by Travis at 12:27 AM

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