Reileen van Kaile

Stuff related to Phoenix Wright, a series that I have yet to play*, but which I still know a fair amount about (without spoiling myself too badly...I think):

The Takarazuka Revue is going to do a musical version of Phoenix Wright. For those of you that don't know (including myself), the Takarazuka Revue is an all-female musical theater group in the city of Takarazuka, Japan, putting on productions on the scale of Broadway epic, with women playing both male and female roles. I...think I want to see a performance of this when I go to Japan. Tickets must be crazy expensive though.

New scans and information for Gyakuten Kenji, the PW spin-off game starring Phoenix Wright's boytoy nemesis-ish-person-thing, Miles Edgeworth. The game will come out in spring 2009 in Japan.

***

General game stuff:

Nintendo creates an ad that breaks YouTube! (Warning: The Flash may also break your browser in the process. But it's a fun time to watch.)

vyctori pointed me to this amazing remix of the Forest Temple theme from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

***

Generalities:

Randall Munroe of xkcd, the Gods bless his soul, has a rather interesting take on the financial fiasco threatening the You-Nighted Staytes of 'Merica...

Astronomers spot a bizarre "strobe light star", which they call a magnetar, which just makes me think that it's another evolution stage from the Pokemon Magnemite.

Tokyomango brings word of suicide prevention train platforms and instant ramen in a can.

And finally, the man who saved the world and yet almost no one knows about it: On September 1, 1983, an overworked and underpaid lieutenant colonel, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, kept a cool head and deduced that the things that the computer report said were missiles coming from the US, destination Moscow, were simply computer errors - and he was right. Seriously, go read this, this is amazing.

-Reileen
never did I want to be here again

---

*Lydia offered to let me borrow her PW games if I ever felt so inclined to play them. Clearly this "socialization" thing has its perks...

I was gonna post these yesterday, but I got my ass out of bed way late (4:00pm, natch) because I'd stayed up late talking to kiirobon about Gintama, Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro, and the joys of crotchbleeding (it was for something he was writing - that poor soul). Not long after waking up, I soon had to be dragged off to my cousin's graduation party. We stayed until 3:00am, which effed up a daily sleep schedule that was, for a few precious moments, looking to be a little less vampiric. I mean, I was getting up before noon, before ten o' clock for the love of Mihaele! Yeah, I ended up falling asleep about an hour after technically waking up and waking up in the afternoon, but you gotta start with baby steps.

Anyway, here we go. There's going to be another link-o-llection soon after this one, themed on Barack Obama's veeper, Joe Biden, and related things. I can't promise intelligent or well-informed commentary on my part, but I can link to where such things are taking place.

***

lwood writes about a potential security flaw in Gmail accounts and how to fix it. If you've got a Gmail account, you might want to look at this.

***

Smart Bitches Trashy Books: Go Topless:

Got plans today? Kathryn gave me a heads up (or something) that today is Go Topless’s protest day around the US, where women will gather without shirts to protest the ridiculous standards which make it socially acceptable for men to go topless, but not women. The New York City gathering place is the Merchant’s Gate of Central Park, aka the Columbus Circle entrance across from the Time Warner center. Other cities hosting topless rallies include Bloomington, Chicago, Miami and Omaha. The Denver rally will be on the 26th to coincide with the start of the DNC (Welcome to Denver! Here are our boobs!)

I think that this "Go Topless" day is probably a better idea of trying to promote the de-mystification of women's breasts than that one fiasco a while back about the "Open Source Boob Project." OSBP took place at a Michigan con (the name of which I can't remember at the moment) where some woefully misguided SF fans attempted to enable public groping (through handing out buttons that said "Yes, you may" to any woman who decided that she was A-OK with getting groped by total strangers) under the excuse of "empowering women".

There was, of course, no male equivalent to this. For reasons ranging from trying to point out the idiocy of the idea to sincerely trying to make this an equal-opportunity situation, various females tried to suggest a similar place on the male body that they could perform the badtouch on, such as the ass or the balls. But the leader of the project, theferrett, basically said OMG NO GROSSS AND SKEEVY. No irony there, no, sir!

(For the rundown - and be warned, there is a <>lot to run down, I didn't even check out most of it - check this post over at Unfunny Business on JournalFen.)

***

So we all know by now that Republican presidential candidate John McCain has no fucking clue how many houses he owns. Man, I wish I were so rich that I'd forget how many houses and condos I owned. Oh, no, wait, I don't. Mainly because I already have problems with never remembering where my mechanical pencils or pen erasers went, even though I'm holding the damn things in my hand. It's a nightmare to contemplate how I'd handle remembering houses, which the last time I checked were worth helluva a lot more than a Papermate mechanical pencil.

In situations like these, I prefer to laugh because otherwise I will cry hysterically, so have a list of "John McCain's Got a Lot of Houses" jokes:

Don't blame McCain.  He couldn't resist that "buy six mansions, get one free" sale at Countrywide.

Hey, didja hear?  John McCain has so many houses they're giving him his own monopoly board!

Seven houses?  That's one for every day of the week!  What a coincidence! I've got a 'Friday' house, too. That's because Friday's payday ... and it takes my whole check just to keep it.

Check the comments for some other gems.

***

Hallmark assimilates gay marriage into the Jingleborg! Good on them.

On the flip side, this has caused Assholes For America...I mean, American Family Association...to boycott Hallmark. Of course. Because the Gods forbid they taint themselves with TEH GHEY. ysabetwordsmith nailed the hypocrisy of this move here:

Hmm, let's see, a big company is putting out a product that allows more people to celebrate the precise type of family they are forming; and a "family association" is trying to stomp on both the families and the company. "Family-friendly" means promoting all types of families.

I'd bet my entire Bomberman manga collection that the AFA folk are also the same kind of people who can't see the logical disconnect that results from essentially whining how they don't have the freedom to suppress other folks' freedoms. ("HELPS! I IS BEING OPRESSEDED BY EXISTENCE OF GODLESS HEATHENS, O NOES!") It's like that one Gospel parable where the king pardons the servant of his debts, only to have that same servant whirl on a fellow servant and demand repayment of his debts or else. There's something distinctly ungrateful and misanthropic about the attitudes of people like these.

***

Moving onto less serious business, try catching a couple of humanified Pokemon. The humanified forms of originally non-human characters is generally referred to in anime/manga fandom as "gijinka", but here they're called "Moemon", combining the Otakunese term for describing anything that's cute or endearing and the "mon" from "Pokemon". The site I linked to is in Japanese, but you can pull up the list of Pokemon on Wikipedia and use their Pokedex numbers to look them up in the sidebar on the site. Myself, I was too lazy to do that when I was sent this site last night by a friend, so I just randomly clicked around and amused myself that way. (The Pidgeot chick is bordering on sexy badass, what. So's Mewtwo. No, seriously.)

***

There's a new Bomberman game being developed for the Nintendo DS. It is currently called "Bomberman II" and looks to be as creative and imaginative as its title. I'm starting to give up hope on Hudson Soft ever developing a single-player platforming mode along the same lines and caliber as the N64 games, but I suppose that's business, and there's more business to be had by focusing more on Bomberman's multiplayer possibilities at the expense of his single-player adventures. I might still get this game, though, because it looks to be more on the lines of the SNES gameplay than the original Bomberman game for NES, which uses a formula that bores me to death. At this rate, I'll take what I can get, although I still haven't played any of the Bomberman Land Touch sequels.

***

Not links, per se, but I've been getting a lot of spam mail lately with interesting titles, such as:

"Paris Hilton's Vagina Bites Penguin"
"Paris Hilton Sold Her Soul to the Devil, Admits It on Larry King"
"Britney Spears has Fanny Magnets Grafted In to Attract Paparazzi"
"Britney Spears' New Hair Extention are Lindsay Lohan's Pubes"
"Brad Pitt and Angelina Are Adopting Britney Spears"

I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favorite. I'm giggling at the thought of Paris Hilton having a set of vagina dentata, and the idea of using pubic hair in hair extensions is hilariously wrong.

-Reileen
it's all right to come undone

Yahoo!Video Games: British gymnast is new Tomb Raider

Move over, Angelina Jolie. There's a new Lara Croft in town, and she's a 23-year-old gymnast from South London, Tomb Raider publisher Eidos announced this week.

Ever since actress Rhonda Mitra first took on the role of Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft in 1997, Eidos has sought real-life counterparts for its acrobatic archaeologist heroine, and they've helped propel the video game series to worldwide sales topping 32 million. Up until now the British publisher's picks have tended to be models or, like Jolie, movie stars, but Alison Carroll might just be the first Croft to have the physical abilities to do her famously acrobatic opposite number justice.

She's got this ridiculous quasi bad-ass pout in the first couple of promo pictures, but I guess you can't really blame her for trying to compensate for Jolie's...er, Croft's...Lips O' Doom. She doesn't really resemble Croft, but I like the fact that she'd be able to pull off Croft's more acrobatic stunts. Out of the seven pictures this article has of her, I kinda like this one the best. Mostly because she doesn't have that over-compensating pout but still manages to look suitably badass.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry for Tomb Raider: Underworld, it actually does sound like a pretty awesome game. And it's seriously being released for PS2?! Ohh, I think I need to get my hands on this game never mind that I still have, like, God of War and Xenosaga and a couple of Final Fantasy games to work through. It'd be so kickass if I could play it on a 360, but alas.

-Reileen
still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest