So I was at the bookstore at ASU in Tempe picking up the book for my only good class, and I ran into my screenwriting instructor, James, from last semester. He was with his little girl, whom he had talked about all semester. Adorable! Anyway, it definitely made me realize how little I'd been working on my story. I mean, I'm constantly thinking about it in one way or another, but actually constructing something has been quite a challenge. I also talked with my film instructor tonight. They had a meeting about the possibility of a film major in the fall. He said something will definitely happen, in one form or another. Excited! I really like being in Tempe, but there's nothing wrong with ASU West, now since I have a car and all.

I'm dead tired. Today was the first day of class this semester. My schedule runes from 9 am to 9 pm! This random memory came back to me today. I was in 6th grade or so browsing a Fry's grocery store as my mom was picking up food. Fry's has always had a little corner with a video rental place, magazines, books, all of that. They had a rack of 5 dollar B video games, one of which caught my eye. Now, keep in mind, while I loved such instant classics as Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64, I still was a sucker for bad video games. I grabbed one and instantly ran to my mom. It was "Extreme Paint Brawl." Yes. "Extreme Paint Brawl." I don't think I need to say more. We returned it a few days later, and I thought I was going to have to fudge up some excuse about how the game was defective. The teenager working at customer services routinely scanned the item and refunded my mom's money. Years later, I found that IGN had been a "fan" of sorts of the Extreme series, mocking it to the living end. A few years after that, I was at my friends house having a LAN party, and we found a copy of the game in his closet. The game gave way more enjoyment that night that it had any right to.

Remind me why when someone does something famously offensive it happens to be replayed and thoroughly beaten into the ground by the media. Since I'm still recovering from my wisdom teeth operation, I've been watching a lot of CNN and other news channels. Not exactly the most entertaining stuff, but hey, at least it's not MTV. So I've seen several freak outs by the media so far within the past few days: 1) Mickey Rooney's ass. 2) Some random NFL guy's *pretending* to moon of the crowd. 3) Harry the Nazi! Not only has CNN been relentlessly reporting about how offensive each of these are to their various demographics, they insist on replaying and and constantly showing the images from these incidents! The point being, these aren't big deals to begin with. The reason why they got attention is because they got widespread coverage to offend enough people in the first place. This is where the media steps in and decides to bombard us with these "offensive" incidents. WH3rz TeH NEwz! How about covering the real issues. Let's just pick a random one. Oh, say. . . the search for WMD's in Iraq is failed and cancelled? CNN is now just one step above MTV in terms of mind numbing programming for the masses.

So I'm still on my mission to beat Metroid Prime 2: Echoes before I return it on Friday. I'm at 50% of the scans, but I'm not sure if that really means anything. I hope I at least get to see a cool ending other than just the standard one. Echoes has kind of been disappointing me, though. If it weren't for the light / dark world, I don't think the game would be as interesting. Metroid Prime had the joy of discovering all the old Metroid elements brought to life in the polygonal world. Echos however, tends to be formulaic and not as fresh as the previous Prime. I'm still enjoying it, and I didn't want Metroid Prime to end. The environment and the world of Tallon IV was also just so captivating and interesting. Echoes feels like actual levels, however. There isn't really anything that's a large improvement over the gameplay of Metroid Prime. It just feels like more Metroid Prime, which isn't a bad thing, it just leaves room for a lot. However, with that said, it is a very cohesive game, and the parts of it fit together just perfectly. I just hope I can finish the damn thing in time. Tomorrow, I go to get my wisdom teeth removed. Not exactly the highlight of my winter vacation. I'm not supposed to eat or drink anything 8 hours before the procedure. It's killing me because I'm starving right about now, and I'm very, very thirsty. I guess they have you do that so you don't vomit all over the place when they are trying to operate. Eww. After I'm feeling better from the wisdom teeth, and once I get Echoes returned I'll make it a priority to rent Resident Evil 4. Even though I've never played any of the other ones before, I still want to check it out and see what all the fuss is about. Anyways, I made a sig which I really like, but I want to make more of them now, maybe change it up every week or so, who knows. And back to my mission of Metroid Prime 2.

Well, it was fun watching the System Wars board become progressively more stupid as the night went on until the "big announcement" of the 9.6 Resident Evil 4 rating was posted. Then it was a sudden explosion of threads with users claiming to have pwn3z0rd the "sheeps," "lemmings," "cows," "hermits," your mom, my mom, self ownage and John Ashcroft. All in all, people have been arguing about a game they haven't even played yet. This is like getting everyone's review of a blockbuster movie and going on foaming to the mouth rants about it before anyone has seen more than a few seconds of it. Not that I've ever done that, of course. . . *Star Wars fanboy* *twitch twitch* Anyway, its really frustrating still being a "n00b" even though I've been active on GameSpot for over a few years now. I just want to use HTML and post pictures, dammit. But alas, I just started posting on the forums the other week. So, I have to wait until I have over 200 posts, which is becoming more challengning than I thought, due to the massive amounts of retarded threads. Hmm. . . I wonder if this counts towards post count. . . *ponders*

Just testing out the journal feature. I wonder if I'll be able to delete this later. . .