As most of you know, today is Super Bowl Sunday. I neither care, nor wish to pretend to care, about football. What I have always found funny is that most people who watch the Super Bowl do not watch it for the football portion. Everyone knows this because if you took all of the Nielsen viewers who watch every Monday Night Football showcase, then doubled it, you would not equal one-tenth of the viewers that the Super Bowl brings in. I don't know if it is the commercials, the movie trailers that are promised to premiere, or the hope that Fergie's nipple will make an appearance, but most of America will be glued to their television sets, watching one team of pituitary cases bash into the more hated pituitary case clan. There may be even more people tuning in, waiting for the new "Glee" episode to come on!
Unfortunately, while I've been managing to avoid it post-high school, I have a friend who now throws a Super Bowl Party at his house annually. So, I will be bringing a bottle of Southern Comfort and drowning my hatred for the sport. It may just be easier to lose this friend.
Despite the Comic-Con International/TicketLeap team-up being an internet travesty to all us geeks on Saturday (2/5/2011), I managed to get my badge for the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con! It took 3+ hours of me hitting refresh on the site and ignoring the TicketLeap site saying that all of the 4-day passes were sold out [Comic-Con International's Twitter page continued insisting that there were plenty of passes left] but I did finally get them around 3:06pm EST (tickets went on sale at noon).
Comic-Con International has been trying to get its proverbial shit together since the site first crashed a few months ago in November 2010. They tried again a couple weeks later, the site crashed. They did a test where they only sold 1,000 passes in January (using a new system), and the tickets all sold within 60 seconds. With all of this happening, they should have prepared to have many extra servers on deck just to handle all of the traffic that they had to know would be coming to TicketLeap's site. It genuinely is not difficult to prepare your hosting service for the flood of internet-enabled geeks, clicking furiously, credit card in hand. Granted, the site would probably still crash a number of times, but it would not take one person 186 minutes just to purchase one 4-day pass.
Next year, Comic-Con should drop TicketLeap for dropping the ball on such an important task. While I do not wish for them to start using a service like TicketMaster (who would charge an extra $15 to your passes as a service charge), they need to find a company who is willing to go the extra 7 miles to guarantee satisfaction on the one day that probably brings them more than 10% of their annual revenue. And I feel that that is a generously low number. After all, has anyone ever purchased tickets to an event using TicketLeap?
I started re-watching "Battlestar Galactica" with my father, who has never seen the show. So far, obviously, he is enjoying the frak out of it! He used to watch the original series, but never liked it, citing that it was trying too hard to be Star Wars. When watching a few early season one episodes last night, my father mentioned how much he liked Billy, President Roslin's aide. I didn't have the heart to tell him not to get too attached.
My friend, Danny, posted this New Yorker profile on Guillermo del Toro on Twitter. It is a long, but great read. I always thought the man to be brilliant and this is a great insight into the mind of one of cinema's wildest imaginations. Give it a good read.
On Monday, January 24th, for the Xbox 360 Kinect, I bought Your Shape Fitness Evolved
. One thing that I enjoyed about it was that it really did work! However, the one and only thing that I did not enjoy about it was that it really did work. I was sore for days! I used it for three days straight and could barely walk. Then when I had to crouch down, I had to hold onto things to balance and ease myself down. And getting up from said crouch was no picnic either. I decided to stop using it until my muscled relaxed again. After about five days, they were relaxed, but I was afraid to start using it again. What I will probably do from now on is use it every other day.When I was beta testing the Kinect for Microsoft a few months before it came out, My one big complaint was that it had no software support behind it. That is still my big complaint with the device now. I have met with a Microsoft representative at work and he tells me that in the coming months, there will be more games coming out for it. But, in a country full of obese children who grow up to be obese adults, the Kinect is a good device to fight that. I quite enjoy both Kinect Adventures
and Kinect Sports
, and Dance Central
may be a game that I won't play if anyone else is in the room, but I will still play it. And while I don't like my video game console tricking me into exercising, it may very well be the only form of exercise that I will actively take part in. After all, I started playing video games as a way of avoiding exercise as a child. That young lad is now 22 and his metabolism is now realizing that a bad diet should cause some form of bad features. Plus, since I was diagnosed as a Type-1 diabetic at 17, every doctor told me that I should exercise. It's been five years, maybe I should give them a listen...
