SameOldSchmidt

We saw Shoot ‘Em Up tonight, it was pretty rad.  Totally hilarious, it’s like Looney Tunes meets Die Hard, complete with a carrot-munching Bugs Bunny-esque hero.  I think there was supposed to be some sort of anti-gun message in there, but it failed on a few levels.  First, it’s just philosophically wrong.  Second, it’s poorly delivered; almost childishly ham fisted, sort of like “Guns are bad, mmkay?”  And thirdly, the movie’s wall-to-wall action sequences make guns look freakin’ awesome.

But I gotta get back to work… Dead Lantern isn’t going to reprogram itself!

You may want to take a last look at Dead Lantern, because later tonight I’m going to obliterate the whole site and remake it using WordPress, somewhat similarly to what I did with my blog here.  A responsible professional would set up an isolated test site and get all the details hammered out before doing the conversion, but I’m feeling lucky so I’m just gonna nuke it and then make things up as I go along.

Like this site, I had originally coded Dead Lantern totally from scratch.  I was proud of it, and it worked pretty well for our purposes.  Definitely quick and streamlined compared to some of the complex features in a package like WordPress.  The DL users will have to get used to a somewhat slower experience when they post, and maybe the pages will load a bit slower (but we’re talking milliseconds).

I think it’s the right thing to do for the site.  Dead Lantern is a great site and our small crew is awesome, and we do have a nice little following (shout-outs to all the Splattercast listeners!) but I can’t deny that other sites have better blogging features and DL ends up looking a little amateurish in certain spots.

I can’t cling to my simplistic yet lovingly-crafted code forever, I need to move DL into the modern era with reader comments, easy uploads for the posters, permalinks, RSS and all that other junk that people expect from a modern site.

I love Rush Limbaugh and listen to his show almost every day… Oops, there go half of my readers!  But then again, what’s half of zero?

Anyway, Rush just said on his show that he’s coming to Lincoln tomorrow for the big USC game, which is kind of neat.  I’m not much of a Huskers fan, truth be told, but even I can get a little jazzed up for a big game like this one.  Nate sold his ticket for a couple Franklins.  He’s been on a big scalping kick lately; I hope he doesn’t regret not going to some of these games.

Nate and I went to check out the Corrupt Officials and Awesome Dirtbike at Knickerbockers last night.  It was a pretty good time.  I had never seen Awesome Dirtbike play before, even though I’m pals with those guys.  I guess they usually have a live puppet show, which I’m sure is… interesting, but their puppeteer wasn’t available.

The Corrupt Officials are a blast.  They’ve got this rap song about the Cornhuskers that should seriously replace the lame prog-rock tunnel walk theme the Huskers currently use.

I used to have a black Game Boy Micro but I gave it away when we moved from Missouri to Nebraska back in May. Tina was kind of mad at me, but I thought I was doing something nice at the time. I gave it to some kids at church because they were into GBA, but they only had the original model, that atrocious thing with the impossible-to-see screen.

That’s how my mind works; I see the starving African kids on TV and I’m like “whatever” but I see some kids playing a first-model GBA and I feel it’s my duty to help them out. The Micro’s backlit and it’s got a built-in rechargeable battery, so they won’t have to bug their parents for AA’s all the time. As we were moving, I was on a big “get rid of stuff I don’t need” kick, so I gave away the Micro and I felt fine about it.

But just lately I’ve had an urge to play some GBA games that I never finished. Stuff like Zelda: The Minish Cap and a dozen or so others. I gave away the Micro because I have a DS Lite and I figured it would be just as good for playing my GBA games. Turns out I just don’t like playing GBA stuff on the DS, though. The main thing is that the buttons aren’t placed quite right. It would be pretty cool if you could map the DS buttons however you wanted for GBA mode (put L & R on the face, for example) but unless I’m missing something, the DS doesn’t have this feature.

So, I went looking for a replacement Micro, specifically the retro-styled 20th Anniversary one that I had seen in stores some months after I had bought my black one. The anniversary edition is meant to resemble the controllers of the old Japanese Famicom system (basically the Japanese version of what we knew as the original NES).

I believe there are still several stores that have Micro’s in stock, including the Famicom version. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them recently at both Wal-Mart and Best Buy. I decided to go eBay, though, because I have a PayPal balance and that always feels like play money, plus I could replace what I spent by selling some PS2 games. I got over $30.00 for my PS2 MGS2:Substance disc this weekend, which was more than half of the $53.95 I ended up spending on the Micro. Cool beans. My PS2 GH Silent Hill 2 only went for $8.95, though, which kind of surprised me. I mean, I have it for Xbox so I don’t really care, but… oh well.

I guess I’d say it’s an aesthetic toss-up between the 20th Anniversary edition Micro and the black one I used to have. Black is undeniably sleek and always classy. The 20th Anniversary is very shiny, in a red and gold scheme that’s a bit more “blingy” than I might normally care for, but the retro chic trumps the gaudiness for me.

I’m fooling around with WordPress, an open source web publishing platform.  We’ll see how it goes…