Brawl

Looking through the official website for Super Smash Bros: Brawl, the Wii version of the wonderful game series featuring all of Nintendo's characters kicking the shit out of each other until everyone's bored. It's a good time, and I am sorely looking forward to its release. I should really just pre-order the sucker from Amazon now...

The website is high-profile video game launch marketing done right, by the way. Since the start of summer they've been adding a goodly amount of teaser material nigh every weekday, and the copy is written in an oddly charming voice of continual, stuttering amazement, allegedly from one of the game's implementors. All that's missing is an RSS feed.

They added an MMO-ey "pet class" with the "Pokémon Trainer" character, who attacks by throwing monsters atcha. This could be lots of fun. And my man Wario is there who attacks by fahtin so yeah. And there is a curry power-up.

But what does it say about me that I am sad that Samus Aran without her suit on is a generic-"hottie" skinny blonde? Who looks like she's like 19 years old? No, that is not a grizzled bounty hunter, I'm sorry. Please feel free to make her a lean, athletic woman, but I'd want to see more gamey than pneumatic. Linda Hamilton > Miss Teen Carolina. (Also, where the heck does she put her hair when her helmet's strapped on? And does she spend an hour brushing it back into shape in between bouts of mowing down space pirates? Furrfu.)

I like Zelda's character design much better, basically the same body type but somehow wearing it much better, and much less of an eye-rolling T&A showcase. See, you can have this morphology of female game character without making her into Lara Croft.

Draco Concordans

My friend and colleague Zarf (radiotelescope) released his exhaustively researched concordance for John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting, an epic and extremely twisty novel set in alternate-history Renaissance Europe. Z's effort is a sprawling, link-n-anchor-intensive website, just the kind an information geek like me likes to see. It took him months.

Not that I've read the book, so I can't speak for that angle of it. I hadn't directly heard of John M. Ford until his untimely death last year, which shocked and saddened the greater SF community. I have been exposed to some of his more lightweight work since - he was quite prolific on certain skiffy blogs - but have yet to read any of his heavier stuff. My chance of picking up this novel sometime has increased, anyway.

DDR and push-ups

DDR Supernova is nice. I was originally resistant to the notion of completing special obstacle courses in order to unlock songs, but they are clever and encourage you to explore the various song-tweaking options that have been in the games since the beginning but which I've never bothered messing with. These mostly involve ways to change how the arrows move and appear, such as reversing the flow of arrows, or making them appear only halfway up the screen, or having them move at unpredictable speeds. It's sort of a DDR scavenger hunt, and I like it.

I can do 7-footers comfortably and some 8-footers with exertion and luck. This may be my plateau.

Also, today I bought a song on iTunes because I heard it in a DDR game, which is a first for me. It is "Jerk It Out" by Caesars. Which makes me think of someone trying with violent motions to get the last bit of caesar salad dressing from the bottle, but in fact if you listen to the iTMS sample you will hear the chunkly filtered organ riff that I found highly catchy and happy and worth a dollar. Very fun to stomp arrows in time to, as well.

Have gotten into an exercise routine lately where I spend about an hour playing DDR and then doing some push-ups and other floor exercises. Though the results have been fast - I'm definitely building up strength, able to do a few more reps every day - I'm sure my form is terrible. I looked at WP's page on push-ups, which have a totally boss animated GIF of a guy doing push-ups forever, but its caption (doubtless provided by a later contributor) criticizes his bad form. Uh, and now I look at the page and the picture's gone.

This video is the number-one googley hit for "how to do push-ups". It is not how I have been doing them. I like the suggestions for making it easier, and easier again, for newbs. I remember doing the easiest kind, with bent knees, when I went to "special gym" in grade school. But today, my shoulders hurt at the bone level after doing whatever horrible thing I was doing that was apparently not push-ups, so maybe I'll try this chest-to-the-floor way tomorrow.