I don’t know where I even saw the advertisement for Desert Punk, and no one I know had seen it. But somehow, since I’m on a run for short series, I watched it because it was only 24 episodes.

The basic premise is that the guy is a mercenary in the desert far far into the future after nuclear war has destroyed the Earth. He’s this shrimpy guy but also somehow totally awesome. So the show follows his exploits as he does various jobs.

The show starts out pretty great and is very entertaining for a while, then at the point I hit the ending it all goes downhill. The show goes through what I now call “being Kenshin’ed” as apparently the show diverts from the manga and ends in a way that doesn’t make sense what-so-ever. Characters change radically in 6 episodes and the ending is just so horrible that I would only ever recommend the first 18 episodes and maybe try to read the manga, though I have yet to do that yet to see if the manga ending is any better.

Perhaps calling it Kenshin’ed is too harsh since the filler to Kenshin was just boring and not a horrible rewrite of all that I loved about the show.

Anyway, the show’s first 18 episodes are good, the last 6 are terrible. If you’re really bored you could watch it but without a true ending the show isn’t as memorable as the last few series I’ve been watching (Gurren Lagann and Last Exile).

Well I was supposed to be using Last.fm at work and Pandora at home, but I’ve since just stuck with Pandora. The simplified interface makes it much easier to customize stations whereas in last.fm it’s a bit more complex than it seems like it has to be, certainly when compared to Pandora. Maybe I’ll give last.fm another shot, but Pandora’s simplicity seems like it’s too hard to beat.

I think the RSS feed cheats and gives the full story anyway.  Spoilers below though and if you’re reading on a feed just skip past.

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Rock Band adds some bands you never heard of and you end up loving them. Last time with the Lochley pack it totally ruled. This week they’re adding in a band I’ve never heard of but the first song sounds great! Can’t wait!

Street Fighter 4 fever is making full swing it’s last week before it hits shelves. This trailer has me at the edge of my seat. Kind of wondering what the opening theme will be for the American version though. I do like the catchy Japanese one.

I was very resistant to watching this series because of the lack of Kevin Conroy voicing Batman but I finally relented.  To me, that is the absolute voice of Batman.  It’s like recasting a part that an actor had for 30 years for no reason.  Anyway, the premise is simply Batman + obscure DC hero fight obscure DC villain.  By comparison, Batman The Animated series focused on Batman and more of his detective like abilities.  This show highlights sort of the antics of Batman as a crime fighter fighting zany villains.  By just that description, you could say it’s worse and maybe geared for a younger audience, however the series isn’t so bad.  Maybe after watching so much Smallville and not seeing epic superhero fights, this is the balance.  I’d say it’s worth watching, but not taking seriously. Though I do wish there were more Green Lantern.

I grabbed the new Xbox Live Experience (XBLE) this Wednesday fairly late.  I wanted to avoid the potential problems that may crop up with billions of Xboxes try downloading at once or if there were any major bugs to avoid it until they were fixed.  Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft did a great job with distribution and the only bug I know of is some units won’t play sound when hooked up through HDMI which doesn’t concern my unit at home.  I take an HDMI cable to travel with my Xbox though so I’m not sure if it affects me when I’m at my parent’s house or at a friend’s playing Rock Band.

I have to say, I enjoyed the blades a bit more, there’s two menu options that feel completely useless and can clutter up the new menu system.  You can get rid of one, but you still have to deal with the other which is basically just XBL online video stuff.  I was greeted with the avatar creation system and made a fairly close looking guy to myself.  It felt very mii-ish but had a bit more customization.  No chance to see what the point of the avatar is yet since I don’t own any games that use them, but maybe they’ll be cool.

I installed Rock Band 2 to the hard drive.  It takes a bit.  I loaded it up and didn’t notice any phenomenal loading time difference.  I won’t say I didn’t notice any difference, it did seem a bit faster, but it won’t make the songs load up in 2 seconds or anything.  I did notice that the Xbox itself is very quiet, which is a huge plus when it used to be an annoying background noise.

Now based on this great Lifehacker article I installed TVersity onto my desktop and was able to stream all my video files except for .mkv extensions without any trouble.  I’m sure there’s a way to get those to stream but I haven’t messed with it yet, either way, I’m loving the new streaming options.  I even got some classic Star Trek up on the TV.

There’s one glaring issue with the Xbox and it’s unrelated to any new change and probably won’t affect people with new widescreen TVs.  But I have an old 4:3 HDTV.  So the Xbox setting for high def pushes it to 1080i mode which is fine, but when displaying content in 4:3 it should revert to 480p automatically like my DVD player does.  Now when watching 4:3 content, I get in in this centered little window on my TV and it’s annoying to manually switch.

Overall, the changes are kinda minimal for such a long wait for this update.  The best feature is installing to HD, but some games are hit and miss.  Halo 3 doesn’t like being installed for instance by design.  I’m dying to know how good the Netflix thing is because I kind of want to dumb regular cable for Netflix since I don’t end up watching a lot of TV anymore.  There are some things that I might really have a hard time not occasionally watching (Adult Swim/Globe Trekker/Food Network) so it’s a hard decision.

Brightening up your post-mid-week boredom I present a catchy tune:

The Cab – Bounce
Metallica – The Unforgiven III
Metallica – The Day That Never Comes
Mute Math – Typical
Coheed & Cambria – No World For Tomorrow
Coheed & Cambria – Gravemakers & Gunslingers
Coheed & Cambria – Once Upon Your Dead Body
Fall Out Boy – The Take Over The Breaks Over
Yellowcard – Lights And Sounds
Fall Out Boy – Fame Infamy
Tonic – Jump Jimmy
Sixto Sounds, Zircon – Lunatic Moon
Bang Camaro – Night Lies
Orange Range – Thank You
TiA – Ryuusei
Gorillaz – 19-2000

Through some curse I always manage to destroy a set of headphones.  Maybe destroy isn’t accurate, but they always seem to stop working through what I consider no real fault of my own.  I didn’t want to use the white iPod earbuds and advertise “Hey, I’m like everyone else with an iPod!!” So for a while I used these headphones that came with my laptop.  The coolest part of those headphones was inline volume control.  However, one day they just stopped producing sound unless the cord was in just the right position.  I had to go back to the iPod earbuds.  I was ok with this for a while until I noticed one day I’m having to keep the iPod cranked to full blast just to hear at a reasonable level.  I almost thought I was going deaf until I realized that I can still hear everyday things just fine.  I looked at the earphones and the connection at the iPod was looking like it was being ripped right out of the sleeve.

So it turns out there are 2 types of headphone connections, you have the straight in type, and the L shaped connection.  The way I wrap up my headphones when not in use really stresses out the straight in connection and I think that’s basically what happened with the first two headphones.  Now this wasn’t really my focus for my new set of headphones.  I was looking for a good set of noise reducing headphones which means that unless I want to have this battery pod on my cord, I have to go with canalbuds.  I wasn’t a big fan intially because the idea of jamming something so deep in your ear just seemed gross.  But I didn’t want to go to over the ear or clip ons.  So I settled in on these Sony Behind the Neck Ear Bud Headphones.

Overall, they’ve been pretty good.  I had to turn on the equalizer to treble boost and they sounded terrific.  I swapped to the large fitting and they do a really great job of muffling exterior sounds.  The reviews speak for themselves and I agree with most of the things they say.  They have a really short 1 foot cord with a 1 foot extension so if I ever got an armband the cord length would be awesome.  Otherwise 2 feet is plenty long enough.  The only downside is now I can’t pocket the headphones, I just have to take them off and put them around my neck.  On the plus side, it has the L shape connector so wrapping it around the iPod should hopefully not kill them.  That’s only on the extension though, the short cord has a straight connection.

Some other things I need to pick up for my iPod are a waterproof kit so I can listen in the shower and a car connection kit.  I think a waterproof speaker was only around $20 but the car kit is around $120.

Blizzcon 08

I have other far darker pictures (stupid no flash) that I’ll look at brightening up to see if they’re passable for posting.