Tumbling Down The Rabbit Hole

I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but we’re moving.

Yeap. Moving about 2 kilometers away from our current digs. This place is just getting too small for us and we figured we loved the neighborhood and the neighbors, we did not want to move too far away. And then there’s the issue of our favorite local haunts; what would the pizza joint around the corner do without our like-clockwork business?

And what comes with moving? Packing!

I wish I loved packing, but I don’t. I’m really good at it though. I can scan a room, make quick mental inventory of the sizes of things in it, and when it comes to filling that last little smidgen of open space in a box I know exactly what fits - some would call it mad skills, but these skills truly drive me mad.

I hate packing things into boxes because I know the whole end-game is just to take them back out again. And in the mean time, you always end up needing the things you’ve just packed up… and you will never ever find it because, despite your awesome plans of inventorying every last item that goes into boxes just so that this exact occurrence would never happen, you never really did find a marker that wrote and the boxes never got so much as a “Computer Room” tag written on it… surely I will go mad!

So what’d I do? I did my best to procrastinate and tried to get the least amount of packing done. We don’t move to our new house for another good month; there’s still lots of time, right?

Oh, I did mention it’s my family and I that are moving, right? Yeah. Just us, not AGR - we’re quite comfy where we are here at AGR, thank the gods… because that move would take forever!

Sorry if I caused any confusion… I’ll just get things moving along here, so here are this week’s links:

• Mech Warrior for PC/XB360 - Ingame Footage
• Dr. Victor von Doom’s Stand Up Comedy
• … Mondays
• James Earl Jones On Being The Voice Of Darth Vader

Mech Warrior for PC/XB360 - Ingame Footage

So lemme tell ya a story folks. This takes place quite some time ago, I was still in university and the year was 1995. I remember this time with clarity, it was during stressful Christmas exams, and I had a job in the basement of the library helping people with computer-related issues in one of several of the universities computer labs.

For the most part that job kinda sucked. We had people constantly buggin’ about the dumbest computer questions… how dumb? Okay, for example… think back to the days of Word Perfect 5.1; I used to get people asking how to make the text boldface or underlined, all… the… time. Yeah, true - it was not as easy as you’d have thought, but that question got real old real fast.

Hmmm, I got offtrack there - sorry. MechWarrior. Got it. I’m back on rails.

So the one thing that kicked ass about working in a computer lab during the Christmas exam period was that as exams drew closer to the end the labs were less and less frequented, which meant we could use the LAN to play games and nobody would ever know!

Now, if you think back to the day, the big networked game was Doom and Doom II - and we used to play the Hell out of those games at the lab when it was dead, but this Christmas season was when the free NetMech addon that brought networked gaming to the world of MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat came out.

All I can say is, conference room with an 8 foot tall projector screen and Mech Warrior 2: this was like being there. I played the hell out of that game for a good 5 days, and although I have my doubts that my memory of the event is intact, I swear I never left the room for the 5 days… not once.

When my lab mates would claim it was “too late”, or that they were tired, I’d scoff and get a few single player missions played. I think I might have finished that game in the 5 days I played it, too.

I had one helluvagoodtime with MechWarrior 2 over the years, and we were still playing that game in 1999 at LAN Parties - it was a favorite of ours.

For those of you that may not remember that game, here’s some footage from the Jade Falcon mission “Arkham Bridge”:

So… did you watch the new Mech Warrior video yet? Looks a tad-bit better, no? I actually fell out of my chair when I watched this video. The fond memories of me sitting alone at 3am playing Mech Warrior 2 flooded me, and the visuals and fighting footage made me all but cry.

Looks like I’m going to be in need of a new computer in order to get me some new Mech Warrior luvvin’; I seriously don’t think my current box could handle it. *gulp*

Dr. Victor von Doom’s Stand Up Comedy

I did not expect this, but man did I laugh.

The jokes themselves are only so-so I guess, but this guy impersonates Dr. Doom as a stand-up comedian, and he stays in character for the whole gig while cranking out some great Fantastic Four jokes. I’d heard a few of them before but they were not FF-themed, and I think that Dr. Doom telling them with a Fantastic Four slant made them much funnier.

When I was watching it, I just imagined it was the actual Dr. Doom taking a stab at a new career as a stand-up comic, and it continually made me giggle. I just wish there were more vids of him doing his act though, I was hoping he had more material!

… Mondays

Yeah, thank the gods today is Friday; but this is exactly how I felt on Monday:

James Earl Jones On Being The Voice Of Darth Vader

I thought this was a good video of James Earl Jones talking rather candidly about him getting the part of voicing Darth Vader in Star Wars.

It’s fun to think that Prowse was originally going to be the voice for Vader and that, as James says… “so he [George] hires a guy born in Mississippi, uuh, raised in Michigan who stutters”… and he’s the voice of the iconic character.

Vader would just not be the same without his voice, I could not imagine Vader with any other voice, really.

Whoa… wait wait wait - did he just say that he only got paid $7,000 to voice Vader?! What?! Holy crap!