... America is in deep trouble. I expect to see a lot of 9/11 repeats, record unemployment, and heavy suppression of freedom of speech during the course of the next two years, if not the next four. I also expect horrific spikes in energy prices and suffocating amounts of 'hidden' taxes.

*sigh* It is sad to see the majority of the American people being so blatantly ignorant and uninformed, if not outright misinformed. We have truly fallen as a nation.

Well, you know the old saying, third time's the charm! It's been a few months since I've updated, and in that time, several things have changed. 1) I've gotten a broadband connection that's MORE reliable than dial-up, as opposed to two previous broadband connections I'd gotten which were actually WORSE. 2) Finally got a new e-mail address, as the old one had stopped working long before I'd even realized it (I never have gotten much mail anyway, so it was hard for me to tell). 3) DAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! (I got a Wii, and Rayman Raving Rabbids! Oh, and Mario Kart too!)

Needless to say, I'm getting a good deal more excercise than I used to.

On the creative front, there's a huge help in the form of a new version of OpenFX! Finally, texturing is no longer a pain in the rear! I love the new materials management system, and some of the new particle effects options are cool too! My only real gripe is that I now have trouble attempting to produce animated textures- it'll only accept AVIs as animated textures, but for some reason when I render it I get the flat-colored untextured version of that part of the model. Also, MUCH brainstorming has been going on... but I shan't go into detail yet.

Before I got access to this 'high-speed' internet connection, everyone who'd had faster speeds was telling me I wasn't going to want to go back.

They were wrong.

Let me say, my experience with a high-speed connection has not been the blessing I thought it would be. Sure, it's great being able to download a 300 Mb file in less than half an hour... when I can get the connection to actually start downloading the blasted thing!

On dial-up, I'd run a search on Deviantart, and wait five minutes for the results to finally show up. Here, I'll run a search, and spend that same amount of time clicking refresh to get the darn thing to stop giving me error pages and finally show the blasted search results!

Hours of waiting for something to load doesn't seem quite so bad placed next to hours spent trying to get it to start loading... I'll be amazed if this journal update actually manages to make it through successfully.

Before too long I'll be heading on out to Louisiana for about a week-long trip. It'll be a work trip, but the change of scenery will probably do me good. Not to mention that where we're going I'll have access to broadband for a change! Yay!

If only I already had a Nintendo DS... the whole global trade thing on Pokemon D/P sounds fun, and I'm interested in that DS Transformers game's online abilities. And I think this is the first time that I've heard of that instant-reformatting actually sounds like a good idea, for making your own custom character. (For the record, I'm no fan of the idea of an active Transformer changing his alt-mode instantly just by scanning a new vehicle.)

And I'm finally caught up on most of what's happened in the Naruto dub. Yay! All thanks to that marathon CN's been airing the last three days.

Things are looking good on the fanfic front! With the impending conclusion of Ultimatum on Gemma's Pokemon Rebirth site, the release of the first few chapters of its first sequal, Darkness Revealed, is finally on the horizon. In addition, I've been working on the first few pages of a comic story within that continuity that I'm hoping fans of the Pokemon Special manga might like. Hopefully this trip will be full of opportunities to continue work on it!

Well, I have lost my desire to see the Transformers movie. I have a sick feeling that if I do, I'm going to end up no less disappointed than when I watched Star Trek: Nemesis. After being wowed by special effects galore on the TV screen, and the prospect of Transformers' potential as a serious science fiction series explored at last, I hear about it from those who've gone to see it, and find out there's more behind its PG-13 rating than I'd expected.

It's not that I'm squeamish about the violence- I expected it to be at least as violent as a Godzilla movie. Humans getting stepped on, crushed by collapsing buildings, blown up in exploding vehicles, car crashes... the usual things you can expect when something more than 20 feet high (such as, say, a slagging-mad Decepticon) starts stomping around the neighborhood with the intention of tearing apart everything in sight. That is, to an extent, being realistic about what would happen if Decepticons actually existed and were actually in our cities.

What isn't realistic is making the protagonist some sick little pervert with a girlfriend who dresses like a floozy, or to throw in sexual innuendos left and right like it's a normal everyday conversation topic. Or maybe it just seems unrealistic to me because all the people I have known had better things to talk most of the time (and yes, that includes the teenagers). It's also not realistic for most Autobots to imitate a urinating dog and leak coolant on someone, that's the sort of thing you'd expect out of some braindead fratboy of a 'Con, like Skywarp, or more likely, Blot. And even if it were realistic, it's completely unnecessary, adds absolutely nothing worthwhile to the story, and does nothing but give parents reason not to let their kids watch a movie that has a lot of its marketing aimed squarely at them!

Does this mean I'm abandoning Transformers, though? Absolutely not. It does mean, however, that I'll be skipping over this slag-pile and hoping that the upcoming Transformers: Animated series will prove more palatable in spite of its weird character designs. At the very least, I can hope that a censored edition of the movie will become available for viewing on TV or something, and that that one won't disgust me. If only Hollywood would learn that making something cool enough for adults doesn't have to mean making it too nasty for kids...