Ohhh my gosh.

Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End...

If you haven't seen it yet for any reason, you need to simply drop what you're doing and go see it. At first, I was debating on whether or not it was better than the first, but now I'm convinced it is, especially after getting my hands on the soundtrack and reliving the entire thing.

It's sad and epic and insane and hilarious and definitely lived up to all my expectations. I don't get why people don't like it. I mean, unless they don't like the actors, then I can understand. But the movie is just so incredibly... FUN. It's not supposed to be taken seriously. (I mean, duh, Davy Jones squid-face?) But you'd be surprised how many people expect it to... Like, be a definitive pirate movie. It's NOT. It's fantasy, and it's one of the best movies out there if you can just sit back and enjoy the thing.

It definitely gets a 10/10 from me. Ranks up there with Chronicles of Narnia and The Black Hole as one of my top favorite movies. It's so high-paced... There's seriously no down time. Like some Digg comments said, there was simply no time to take a bathroom break because you'd miss something!

That, and the music is incredibly amazing.

Okay... Minkata was finally released... The verdict?

Storyline: Still needs some work, I'm afraid, but hey! At least there's a story again, and, for that, I'm very happy. Although the new episode format really doesn't help scheduling at ALL. You still have to wait around in laggy, public areas in a vague attempt to maybe see a DRC member's name appear on the KI list. If the story's going to unfold like it has been in the past, you need to let players interact with you a little more. Right now, it's a movie that's really hard to see. Not only do you have to keep letting the lucky few tell you what they saw, but there's no... feeling of participating in the active storyline. Sure, you've got your little groups that influence things in the off-time. It's like letting 50 people watch a blockbuster like Spiderman and then having them tell the rest of the world "yeah, it was intense... they wouldn't let us help, but I saw everything on my KI".

You should bring back those random Age excursions like Uru Live Prologue... Remember when Phil Henderson randomly appeared in someone's Eder Kemo? Yeah, that needs to happen again. Give yourselves the power to travel to any active instance of a personal Age and... Make random encounters! That's letting players experience the story. But for the first major story development? It was pretty darned good. Cyan's a smart company. They'll learn and adapt and only get better.

Anyway, next up, the new Age: Very lame at first. I was growing more and more disappointed by how... obscure everything was. Whatever happened to being given a bunch of junk to play with to figure something out? Remember Myst? Anyway, TW, Edrick and I spent all night last night running around, copying the clue book, and pounding out theories... from 12 midnight to about 4am.

Then, today, I played about an hour by myself, just running around and thinking. Then TW got online and told me he'd made a breakthrough, but I had to go work on my Explorer. But when I got back at about 5, we started working from 5 to about 1am, and we finished the thing. 12 hours of working on an Age... DO YOU THINK I'M HAPPY??? You better darn well think I'm happy. This was the very first Age that we didn't actually look up anything about how to finish the thing! Well, we tried, but we didn't find anything so early, so we still did everything ourselves.

Lemme tell ya', there was nothing better than to hear that triumphant Badlands music while successfully working the puzzle. We three were having a blast and I felt like we were actually playing what Uru was meant to be.

The one thing they need to work on, though... Rewards. Honestly, who wants a floating rock donut after working so hard on a puzzle? I was really hoping for something useful. In every other Myst game, the puzzles DID something. They mostly gave you solutions to other puzzles, but you were rewarded with something. I really don't want spinning donuts, Cyan. A journal would have been especially nice. Come on... Drive the storyline with the puzzles! Don't have the puzzles amuse us while there's NO story... Make the puzzles PART of the story.

All in all, it looks like I'll be keeping my subscription. This little experiment has paid off for me at least. It's actually fired my interest in Myst again. Oh, and keep those Relto pages coming! Them thing's are awesome... Except I need that one from Eder Delin... Could you let us have access to those again, pleeeeeease.

Also, whoever's responsible for server stability? You reeeeally need to make sure that the crashes that happened last night don't happen again. Honestly, to be perfectly blunt, it doesn't matter if it's something hard to fix that's being put off, or maybe something that cropped up and just screwed everything up (because that's what technology likes to do)... It's not good for MMOs to just die like that. Whoever's responsible for it needs to fix it. Current information leads us to believe that it's Gametap's responsibility for providing game accessability and stability. But whoever's responsible... Get to being... Responsible for it.

Okay, not really Uru Mario... But you'll see why I picked that!

So I'm actually trying to keep up with the new Uru storyline Cyan's got going. The whole premise was kind of cliche, you know, the whole: "The D'ni Restoration Council (DRC), often criticized for being "overly cautious," is stunned when their caution and control is unable to save the life of someone very close." Yes, as if killing a loveable character isn't something everyone does already? It sounded kind of lame. "Look! Even though you're so cautious, they still died, shame on you."

But enough of that! I've been following the story using the page on MystLore. I have actually been rather enthralled and obsessed with refreshing and reading all the related articles to get the big picture. I wasn't expecting anything else "major" to happen lastnight, but they proved me wrong. Still, I'm very much looking forward to the Age being released tomorrow more than anything else, and will be the deciding factor on if I keep paying money for Uru (since I don't use GameTap, I'd rather play games off the CD). But I think the story's actually starting to shape up into something worth following!

I also wish MystLore would have a sort of RSS feed that'll tell me about every article that's been modified. Sure, there's the news feed thingie, but that doesn't look like it's updated with everything. Something like this wouldn't at all work with Wikipedia, being so gargantuan, you'd kill your connection with RSS updates... But a specialized wiki like MystLore or Memory-Alpha, I could use something like that! Dunno... Maybe someone'll figure out how to do that. It would be the ultimate way of keeping up with Uru story, since even though they're releasing content as episodes, there's still nothing for it but to sit and idle in the cavern all day, waiting for something exciting to happen, and I'm not going to do that. Someone else with time to kill can do that.

And speaking of story, remember Super Paper Mario? That game the UK peoples were importing to play on their modified PAL Wiis and blew them up? Well, people are whining about it again, only this time, about the game itself.

Paper Mario used to be RPGish. You know, turn-based combat and a storyline. Well, this time, Super Paper Mario is more like... 3D platformer with a storyline, only this time, people are complaining that there's too much reading. Haha, excuse me? Too much reading? Like, are you serious? You realize it is DESIGNED to be like a book, right? The whole PAPER thing? Chapter 1? Chapter 2? Honestly, if you don't want to read the storyline, fine, don't read it, but if it's really bothering you that much, then maybe Nintendo isn't right for you. Nintendo likes to focus on story and gameplay. Might I suggest some action-thriller movies for those of you who despise storylines? I hear the movie Stealth is particularly thrilling with no story. Or maybe Doom? Yeah, see, there's plenty of nasty, awful stuff out there for you unintellectual types. Stop whining to people who don't care and just go away. Not everyone is entitled to hear your opinion with such depth and contempt. You don't like the reading, fine. Wonder if you've made it through any classic novels before.

So here's the Nintendo modding fiasco all over again... Only, not quite, but it's still similar in principle.

People mod their Xbox against Microsoft's warnings because "durn it, its my console and I have a right to do what I want to it lolol". Microsoft bans said Xboxes from Xbox Live because they have modified consoles. Maybe because Microsoft has a right to ban you when you break the rules you were supposed to read and actually agree to? Hmm. Novel approach.

Some people are also ticked off that Microsoft banned the actual console and not the Xbox Live username. Well, duh? Why ban the name when people will just sign up under another name with the same console? It's not the name that's broken, it's the console.

But come on, Xbox Live has always been crazy with modded Xboxes! When I did some research and modded my old Xbox to run Linux, it was posted all over the place that Xbox Live didn't LIKE you doing that and that you shouldn't play Xbox Live with a modded console! So when I signed up for Xbox Live, I UNmodded my Xbox. Been perfectly fine.

This is just one of those "duh" things people are upset about because it somehow infringes on their constitutional rights or something like that... It's like trying to play a game with a no-CD crack applied! You just can't play online. Sometimes you can, but mostly you can't, and it's just an accepted fact that you don't try. (If you do, bad things can happen, especially if there's a subscription involved.)

Honestly... these people are smart enough to mod their consoles without destroying them (except in the case of the Paper Mario thing), but they thought they were safe using Xbox Live? Heheh...

Man, there's a lot of news flying around that involves stupid people, isn't there? Stupid people blaming the company for what they did without regard to warnings.

Vista sells 40 million licenses in 100 days. [newlaunches.com]

Guess it's not doing nearly as badly as Slashdot and Digg users like to tell you. They also try to bring up the fact that might only be OEM licenses or bulk academic licenses for 6000 when the colleges only install maybe 100, and that retail sales aren't being released because they're not worth releasing. Pfft, whatever.

40 million licenses is 40 million licenses whether you use the license or not. Even if you go back to Windows XP, you still bought Vista, making it the fastest selling OS in history... silly anti-Microsofters.

Why Doesn't Microsoft Have a Cult Religion? [slashdot.org]

Apple has one. So does the Java community, Oracle, IBM, and Google. ... But does anyone really worship the Gods of Redmond?

Why? Because we're not insane.

So Microsoft is trying to make a service called "Windows Live" that is basically Xbox Live on Windows, providing a common platform for games to use for multiplayer. Microsoft is charging for this service. People are in an uproar because they're too stupid to go through all the facts properly... This is probably because Microsoft is involved.

Windows Live is going to provide, from what I can determine, a in-game messaging service, like Xbox Live, a gamertag system, like Xbox Live, and I'm sure will be used for automatically updating your games and possibly downloading demos and videos like you can on Xbox Live. In fact, it seems to be taking a lot of things from Xbox Live.

In fact... it IS Xbox Live! It's Xbox Live on Windows... It's not a separate service like everyone thinks it is, it's pretty much just access to the Xbox Live system from Windows and it supports PC games.

And guess what? You only have to pay ONCE. That's right! If you're already subscribed to Xbox Live, you automatically get to use Windows Live. Don't have a subscription to Xbox Live? Sign up for Windows Live and you automatically get Xbox Live! For 50 bucks... for an entire year. That's around 5 dollars a month, which you could probably save by not eating at McDonald's for one day every month. (I know it might be tough, bu I know you can do it.)

The point is... Stop crying about Windows Live's price. If you have Xbox Live, good! You'll have Windows Live, too, without any extra cost! If you don't have Xbox Live, you probably won't care about Windows Live in the first place. So seriously, folks... shut up. You're making yourselves look like uneducated, ignorant dorkwads.