Short thoughts on books and music

1) I'm almost done reading "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?" by Tom Holt. I finished "Expecting Someone Taller" last week. (Been reading them on the bus to/from work.) Short review: Who's Afraid of Beowulf is much funnier, but it's got a sort of disjoint plotline, and waaaaaaaaay too many characters, so it's been tough to read on the bus, since I do around 30 pages a day, and have to remember what the heck was going on. Expecting Someone Taller was cute, but it kind of fell apart at the end -- other than that, it was enjoyable as a bus book, I didn't have much trouble remembering the context next time I picked it up, etc. They're both worth reading, not that I know of any other Tom Holt fans reading this journal except cellio and I'm sure she's read those both.

2) They really should have put "Ballad For You" in DDR Extreme. Not only would it get another "From IIDX" credit, and it's Thomas Howard, but... remember that Byul Maniac is one of my favorite songs in DDR to play - and I bet they could do more creative stuff with Ballad For You than they did with Byul! Yay for slow songs.

3) Harry Potter Book 5 is being announced all over the place as out on June 21st. My officemate and I were betting on how long it'll be before you can preorder it here at Amazon. I was like, "I'm betting they just need to get people to update the Harry Potter Store!" and he's like "No way, I bet they're trying to come up with a special deal for free overnight shipping like they did with the last one!" Either way, we're excited about it. And what's up with the next movie not being until June 2004? Bleh. IMDB said they cast Gary Oldman as Sirius Black though, and that's AWESOME. I've thought he's awesome ever since seeing Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead.

First Wednesday since Sept 4th that I was in town and not at IZ :(

The ending of Who's Afraid of Beowulf? was sadly disppointing, although it was still cute.

Tonight I went to Megan and Josh's and tried to create a character for Josh's Aberrant campaign. In the meantime, Farren went to IZ and said it was great, not crowded at all, lots of time on the EX machines. I hope I can switch back to Wednesdays. :) Hm. I got Justin's PS2 memcard, so now I can continue playing FFX with the 30 hours I had logged on it back in August... assuming I can remember what the heck I was going.

I'm gonna go play some videogames and maybe backgammon. 'Night for now.

OH! One more cool thing I did today. I found out you can order blank printer sheets of Apples to Apples cards, and started working on actually inputting all of my card ideas for Bemani Apples to Apples. (I tossed this idea around a while ago and had come up with a bunch of words, but never did anything with it.) Hopefully I will get the cards AND be done designing 200-300 cards by next weekend. :) I've got some great ideas for cards. For example:

Coin Lines
"That's how it used to work, but... look at all that stuff! There's
a Safeway Club Card, a penny, and... I think it's a button! I'm paralyzed. What
should I do? What if I put up the wrong thing?" - Gabe, Penny Arcade

Whee, this is going to be awesome. And yes, I'm going to make adjective cards out of Simple, Moderate, Ordinary, Superior, Marvelous, Genuine, Paramount, Exorbitant, and Catastrophic, if they're not in the real game already :)

EDIT> In playing IIDX, I got my third 6-star 7-key song -- Estella. Whee.