Comments for Flock of Cats

Comment on Xbox repair service in Japan, aka awesomeness! by maria

maria — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:08:12 +0000

hey! great blog! i found you while searching for some reviews on Ibaraki beer, as I live in tsukuba.
anyway, by random chance i see you were able to repair your xbox while in japan. what was the procedure? my girlfriend bought an x box in japan, and mailed it to her brother in brazil. while in brazil it failed and then microsoft issued an announcement of a product recall. her brother sent her the x box back to japan so she could get it recalled and get a new xbox. but who to contact? now we are stuck with an x box that doesnt work and dont know what to do with it.
i will appreciate your help!
thanks!
maria

Comment on Talking Points on Health Care Rationing by Yulzopolis

Yulzopolis — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:18:05 +0000

Under the Obama health care plan:
DEATH PANELS RATION UR HEALTH CARE!!!!

Comment on Harry Potter and the Half-Assed Movie by Naftali

Naftali — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:31:29 +0000

You can complain about the 90210 aspect, and I agree that there was probably too much of it, but I’d say that those scenes showed that the three main characters are played by people who can actually act. It’s helped at least a little bit by the fact that the actors aren’t much older than the characters they’re portraying. Harry and Ron look like big, awkward dolts, and they act the part, and Hermione, well…

Possibly the reason people are picking on it so much is because there really wasn’t alot of action, at least in comparison to the Melrose Place stuff. There were a few cool zomg wizards! moments like Dumbledore AE’ing the ghouls in the cave (they have a name, I just can’t think of it right now), but by and large it felt a little light in comparison to the great set-pieces in 4 and 5. The scene you complain about at the end was, in the book, the climax of a battle through the whole castle.

*LAST BOOK SPOILERS*Will the last two be an improvement? The last book frankly wasn’t that great. The middle third approached Robert Jordan levels of nothing happening. The reason that Harry is able to defeat Voldemort comes off as confusing and contrived in the book. I haven’t the faintest idea how they’re going to manage to explain it in the movie. There will be some great moments, I’m sure, but I’m scared that they’ll just be OK, grade B movies like this one was.

Also, am I the only one who wants to read some Harry Potter books that don’t have Harry Potter? I don’t think JK Rowling realizes that people don’t really care about Harry that much. He’s just a prop that we follow around in this interesting parallel universe. There are so many interesting questions that she (or somebody she chooses) could write about, like what are wizards like in America? or Asia? How about some detective stories? Maybe a James Bond type wizard spy. These would be cool things to read about and potentially watch movies of, but we’re stuck with god-damn Harry Potter. I do like the books and movies, but I just can’t see why they have to be all we get.

Comment on Ibaraki Local Brew — Hitachino Nest Beer! by sneaky

Tue, 05 May 2009 15:30:41 +0000

I don’t think they are super-popular, but I’m sure they are known among beer fans.

It says on their website they offer tours. Maybe I’ll have to stop by.

Comment on Ibaraki Local Brew — Hitachino Nest Beer! by Yulzopolis

Yulzopolis — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:12:14 +0000

How widely produced/distributed are these beers? Do locals drink them?

Maybe you should try to go on a brewery tour! We’ve been planning on going to the New Belgium brewery up in Fort Collins one of these days.

Comment on SHOCK: George Will is a Snob! by Yulzopolis

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:01:52 +0000

the slovenly state described is from circa 2005, in my apartment in Austin, while procrastinating from grad school. When A-Yo was gone, I was slightly less unkempt.

Comment on SHOCK: George Will is a Snob! by naftali

naftali — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:43:16 +0000

“alone in my apartment,
unbathed, unkempt, playing WoW for 10 hours and subsisting on turkey
sandwiches and carrot sticks”

It’s a good thing your better half came back. Had she been gone for another month we might have lost you completely. Although I will admit that the first 6 months of WoW when that was basically my life, too, were pretty good times. Not as good as my current domestic bliss, but I did have some fun. Anyway…

George Will is a snob, obviously, and so is Roger Ebert for that matter, when he dismisses games and gamers. They can’t really be blamed for it, however. They’re old. I mean this in a completely neutral sense, however. They were adults when video games first became popular, and when they first became did they were marketed almost exclusively to children. It’s difficult to fathom that a genre whose first steps included something simplistic as Pac-Man could evolve into a masterpiece like Portal, Bioshock, or Fallout 3.

Would they “understand” what I find so intellectually stimulating about Portal or SimCity or EVE if I could show it to them for twenty minutes? Not likely. I grew up playing games, and so my mind has become accustomed to being entertained in a more active way. Movies and books and all that are wonderful, transcendent art forms, but they are essentially passive, and being able to pull the levers yourself, even if the outcome is as pre-scripted and essentially unspontaneous as a Michael Bay movie, is more interesting than just waiting for it to happen.

Comment on Blog Updates! by naftali

naftali — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:31:06 +0000

Oh, I believe you when you say the math works. I just can’t believe it would be worth wading through post-Soviet bueracracy (in Russian! have fun with that. I doubt I could do it even in French) for a Honda.
People actually do stuff like this in African countries quite a bit. A popular thing for young French hipsters going on vacation was to drive an old Renault or something down through Spain to Senegal and sell it for a profit. They’re slowly changing laws to appease the colonial bosses at the big car companies and only allow the importation of late-model cars, but it’s still occasionally done.

You would win tons of points with your father-in-law, though.

Comment on Blog Updates! by Yulzopolis

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:10:19 +0000

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. I’ll show the math later.

Comment on Blog Updates! by naftali

naftali — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:13:27 +0000

Buying a car and shipping it to KZ sounds, frankly, like far more hassle than it’s worth. Maybe if you lived in Russia or China or possibly Japan this would be efficient, but iirc there’s a huge ocean between us and Central Asia. Surely it would cost a lot to move a hunk of metal across it just to save a few bucks.