Oooooooooh. More Kool-Aid(tm) I . . . (blinks) . . . that's just friggin' COOL. It's a 802.11g router/access point, print server, AND it streams from iTunes?

Way of the Rat brings us Paper Arcade, a set of little paper-model replicas of classic 80's arcade cabinets. I'm gonna put together Robotron tonight :-)

Bwana asks for more about Disgaea, although under confused pretences. (Weezie has not played Disgaea. We had an email thread back when it originally came out where we discussed it's hard to find nature, and he talked about buying copies for later EBayage - maybe that's where the confusion arises.) Anyway, I can talk about it some more - the obvious caveat is that I haven't played through all that much of it, and so it's not a review of the whole game. It's very much a "tactical RPG" in the Final Fantasy:Tactics vein. You have a group of characters who possess various classes, stats, and skills. You equip them with stuff and then send them out into turn-based combat. This advances the story and generates experience and money to buy more stuff. Rinse and repeat. It's in 3D but you can only rotate the camera in 90 degree increments and there are two preset zooms. The camera is static enough that presorting geometry is certainly feasible - although on a PS2 I doubt they need that. The story is unusual and told with a nice touch of humor. You start out as a prince of the Netherworld who's been asleep for two years (I have no idea if they explain why later). In the meantime, the King (your father) was killed and the nobles have begun to fight for control of the Netherworld. You set out to reclaim your birthright, kicking whatever ass that takes. The story has a fair amount of snappy dialogue and even seems to have survived translation pretty well. (The voice dubbing is slightly annoying - but I've heard a lot worse.) It's broken into "episodes" (I'm currently partway through Episode 2) and my favorite bit of humor so far was the anime-style "In the next episode" teaser at the end of episode 1. I dug around on the web and found the script for that little bit. (Duh - this is a spoiler. Think people! :-)) Etna - Finally, the time has come for Prince Laharl to pay for all his evil deeds. Laharl - Hey... Etna - Now, Etna will fulfill the late prince

Note to SFFan in Nippon: Yes, I see that work has begun on a film version of Foundation. Do us all a favor: assume it's going to suck until we hear otherwise. It's likely, and if it DOESN'T suck, it will be a pleasant suprise to all. But if you go and get your hopes up . . . well "fool me once, shame on you" comes to mind.

I have to give props to whoever scheduled E3 and Memorial Day this way relative to each other. Just enough distance that stringing them TOGETHER into some road trip of unimaginable proportions is impractical - but still close enough that when you come lurching out of said post-E3 road trip you can just careen right into the holiday weekend. Hope everyone had a good one - we didn't do a whole lot, but I'm basically back on my feet and ready to make a go of the summer. :-) The TV is all fixed up, the UberRemote(tm) has learned all of the new hardware codes, I found the secret trick to having two TiVos in the same room (more on that in a sec), I've caught up my Magic Online league, I cleaned up my den which had been pretty trashed with E3 and TV issues, and I picked up a copy of Disgaea over the weekend. So a few stupid TiVo tricks of note. 1) If you look in the manual it's possible to set a "remote channel" so you can have two remotes, two TiVos, and each TiVo only talks to one remote. Then you can program those two separate remotes into an Uberremote if you have one. It's a pain, but it did work. 2) You can enable a "30 second skip" on any TiVo. Start playing a recording, and then press Select - Play - Select - 3 - 0 - Select. The TiVo will bong three times (if you have the sounds on), and the "next track" button (the one with a fast-forward symbol and a vertical line) will become a 30 second skip. It looks kind of like this >>| As for the anticipated deluge of "why two TiVos", the answer is pretty much why not. We bought the NEW TiVo because it will record High Definition TV. The old TiVo still works just fine, so why not keep it around. They can record separate programs, and it's more disk space, so there you are. Thanks go to Monte for pointing me at The Kingdom of Loathing, a web based online RPG kind of game. It's intentionally cheesy, it's funny, and it's free. I like Disgaea so far - it's turn based tactical combat a la FF:Tactics or Advance Wars (much closer to FF:T because it's an RPG mechanic wrapped around the tactical combat gameplay. It's got a neat sense of humor, and the mechanics seem pretty novel and interesting. This is an old game, but it was pretty hard to find, and Atlus reprinted it last week, so I snatched a copy. In case it's not obvious, I have a certain tendency to just mention games in passing. If somebody is curious about the title, just post a question and I'll be happy to babble in more detail. I'm also still playing Mario vs. Donkey Kong but it's gotten pretty tough. I have a tendency to play that in 5-10 minutes spurts and then move on to something else.