Wasn't in mood for playing Burnout 3 or Dead or Alive Ultimate so I decided to experiment some more at Need for Speed: Carbon. I really don't know why, but I never drived a Corvette Z06 before in Career Mode, so I've decided to buy it and slap a superb pink chrome paint, some pink rims and a pearl violet window tint - the results are superb, and even without too much tuning (only added nitrous so far) the car is really fast! Come to think about it, I also need to try the McLaren and the Dodge Challenger Concept...

I got so many things to talk about in this blog that I only can talk about each topic a little. :?

1. I just listened to the 5,000th track on Last.fm since February! Yay! :D

2. Today I've taken a trip. A trip to some relatives of mine from Eforie Sud (translated aprox. in English: South Eforie). And you know why I was so enthusiastic about this trip? Because I love Eforie Sud (so much that I would want to make a house there when I grow up) and a summer without at least one trip to Eforie Sud is a wasted vacation. I've went to beach and stayed for a few minutes in the hour, even though I wasn't fully prepared for such an attempt. I've taken my MP3 player, so I could enjoy the likes of Crustation and Canidas while enjoying the breeze and the smell of the sea... I love that place.

3. In the bus, I've heard several foreign tourists (probably German and French tourists) and there could be more (which I haven't heard though). One of the French tourists even started to talk with me and my mum, even though I couldn't understand too much. :? My mum understands the language but doesn't speak it too well, while I... I suck at both. Even though I got lots of A marks at French in school. Blame the professor.

4. On the way back, I've seen from the bus at some point a real Porsche roadster car! I don't know what model is it, it doesn't look like 911 Turbo, it's more likely a Carrera S or Gt or a Cayman... Either way, it looked superb!

5. My most recent review of a music album I posted on Last.fm, for an album called "Lushlife" by Bowery Electric, got featured on Music Advice Center! :D Isn't that great?

6.I gotta catch up with what's happening on the forums... Seeya!

Yep, I got a new profile theme! Don't worry, this will stay on the site for some while...

If you want more details: this was the theme of a invisionfree forum I moderated last summer (forum that eventually died :( ) so the other day I've talked on MSN with the awesome guy who made this theme and he agreed to let me use it. Man, he definitely has awesome Photoshop skills...

Now, if only I could get my username slapped on the images... I will talk to him about this the next time I see him online, but in the meanwhile if any of you has an idea what kind of font should I use, go on and comment! It's very hard for me to find a decent font. :?

So, what's your opinion? :D

Maybe some of you wonder what happened to me lately since I'm so quiet... Well, busy playing Most Wanted, Ultimate Mahjongg 20 (which hasn't convinced me so far :( ) and replaying Carbon (just got a totally gruesome Hemi 'Cuda - I like the way it is driven, too bad it isn't a too pretty sight...) and Burnout 3: Revenge.

Speaking of Carbon, yesterday I've handled a bit at brightness, so I guess that's the reason why, after playing the game, my desktop turned over-bright. I didn't managed to revert it to the defualt settings, so now it's pretty weird how it looks. Somehow I will manage my eyes to get used to it, but anyway, I decided to try the light background I rarely used and what can I say - many pages look white on the left side and black on the right one, almost as if they forgot to adapt for the light theme that part of the page... Man, I really would want Ice but there's barely any hope for me to get close to the TA. Gamers Instinct, I want some surveys for crying out louds!...

Oh, and yeah I switched the avatar again, this time it's the front cover of the video DVD for "Nice Weather for Ducks" by Lemon Jelly..

Music Review: "Lushlife" by Bowery Electric

Comment and eventually critique, please.

That's right. The new avatar is the extremely minimalistic cover of Supersilent's 7th album, released in 2005, simply entitled "7". Well, all their albums have simple covers like that.

About my latest weird dream... This one is pretty different from what I usually dream. Usually, my dreams resemble movies as in complexity of scenario, and are usually set during twilight or late at night. This one was set during daylight (the sun was clearly on the shallow blue sky), probably with the intention of amplifying the strange feeling that was lurking all around there... You see, there's barely anything in this dream that would resemble my other dreams - at some point, I've met a dog barking at me and even biting me, but usually my dreams end up at that point, where I got so intense feelings of pain that I immediately woke up with my heart beating really fast. This time though, that feeling of pain was only vague and after that dog bit me, he stopped doing anything at all and didn't even react when I've passed again around him... Maybe it was some sort of test...

I said all of this and I didn't even mentioned where I was. So, the first moment I remember, I was crossing a river or some sort of water (I suspect industrial waters) that was flowing so much that I'm amazed I could still walk through it. Throughout the entire dream, I feel I'm with someone but I never managed to identify that someone. Maybe I'm with someone I know, maybe I'm with the imaginary projection of myself wanting not to be alone... Like I said, I feel I'm with someone but still the entire landscape feels... weird. After crossing that river (or what it was), I'm on this weird little island (never managed to see how big it was though, but I assume it was small) that has signs of former industrial activity everywhere, yet (or maybe because of it?) it's filled with a extremely depressing feeling of loneliness like I've rarely experienced. It isn't empty (I think I've seen a man somewhere near that place with the barking dog) but it feels like it's a nothingness. It feels a bit like sea sick but it isn't sea sick, it feels like hope is no longer on the list of the emotions I could experience and the removal of it makes me feel very odd... One of the moments on that island I clearly remember is when I looked over a small post-industrial fence, I was amazed that the water (I assume it was on the lakeshore) was so close yet the shore was so dry as if that water was an optical illusion. It didn't looked like an illusion, but it definitely look very disturbing... It was still, yet it wasn't still. It seemed completely free of life, even though it didn't looked like polluted industrial waters... Also I remember saying something like "Here we're below 0 m, the sea level", which made it all seem even more disturbing.

In the end, I only remember after this that I crossed that flowing water again and seen through the trees gray towers like the one I am living it. I go there and from that point everything is very vague - I only remember that I've seen some colorful neons somewhere like the neon sculptures I've seen in a design magazine few days ago... I am still wondering how can my brain can be so creative while dreaming...

Yesterday, my Xbox finally returned from service after quite a while in which I didn't play any Xbox games. The reason why I hadn't blogged about this before is that I didn't really cared. I hadn't played an Xbox game in months, as I was totally bored with all the games I had on it. But yesterday, my father came up with the idea of getting few extra controllers so that I and and my friends could play multiplayer games with split-screen or hot seat modes on the Xbox. We already bought another controller (with a slightly different design from the one we initially had - I guess that's the more recent controller design I heard of some while ago) and this evening I invited a friend of mine to play some Burnout 3... My mum only let us one hour, but it was one totally rad hour. The Road Rage mode played in split-screen was his favorite and even though we had more modes to discover, he liked so much that he insisted to keep playing that mode. And so it went on over and over again... Even though I'm more experienced, he eventually beat me a couple of times, but in the end, I got more wins. :P It was overall a very awesome experience that justified once again my opinion. And my opinion is this -- Burnout 3: Takedown is the most awesome racing game ever and one of the best games ever to see the light of day.

Some of you already know this, but I just found out now - I've received the Top 500 Reviewers emblem. Impressive. Thank you, whoever review mod decided this. This, along with the mention in the latest ReviewSpotting, definitely encourage me to write more reviews - but still, I want to keep a certain level of quality, so no, I won't be posting 5 reviews per day like in the period when they give out Top 100/500/1000 emblems based off number of reviews.

I said in the title "New Favorite Album". Well, it's really hard for me to describe otherwise this nearly perfect album I discovered yesterday, called "Lushlife" and made by the band Bowery Electric.

"Lushlife" is a very well balanced combination between shoegaze and trip-hop that never manages to be too shoegaze or too trip-hop. Sure, the music isn't as bass oriented as most trip-hop bands, but the shoegaze elements are so... Really, I should keep this words for my upcoming review of this album. Since yesterday, when I discovered it, I've already listened to it like 6-7 times because it's simply addictive. I've tried playing NFS: Carbon with this album in the background and it's a really awe-inspiring feeling. Until my review, you should really take a look at the reviews the album received on Amazon. But, of course, the one review you'll actually read on this album is mine.

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=25842872

Remember the NFS: Carbon review I put up few months ago? Well, my bad, I only entered it for ReviewSpotting recently... And well, I got an honorable mention award! :D Not as great as the "1st Runner-up" award I got at the beggining of the year with my Gunpey review, but still great especially since the competition was strong. Congratulations to everyone, and congratulations to Oilers for making such a great premiere issue for him! :)

Like SavoyPrime said in the comments on my last blog, it seems strange is lurking everywhere near me.

Few minutes ago, I've just seen those Spiderman duplicates again and now I've seen someone running around with a belt that resembles very well those belts you see at Wrestling [insert league/championship/whatever name here. :| Spiderman costumes, I've seen a shop selling them, but wrestling championship belts?!...

I am on the point of thinking that maybe I'm halucinating - today I've seen Taxi 4/T4xi and I couldn't believe my eyes - this was actually a really good sequel. After the weak sequel that was Taxi 3, even I was skeptical that this 4th movie in the series will be good, but this time it's simply so outstanding that it instantly become my favorite in the series... after the first Taxi, of course. :P I tell you, the only thing I didn't liked about this sequel is the small amount of adrenaline-pumping driving scenes - but other than that, the scenario of the film is more creative than all the other movies in the series. Definitely mind-blowing.