So I just got back from seeing Half Blood Prince.

It was AWESOME!!!!!  :D:D

but....
( SPOILAS )
Okay sleepy time is now.

Yeah, so it's FAFSA time. These things are really boring to fill out, but at least now you can do it in stages so you don't get totally overwhelmed, so it's fairly bearable now.

Trying to hook up with some buddypals to see Half Blood Prince tomorrow at midnight. My local ultraplex (literally, its the main theatre for virtually my entire county) is having showings at 12:00, 12:05, 12:10, and 12:15, so essentially four midnight screenings. Most ususually, you can't score the tickets to the midnight Potter showings online as one might be inclined to attempt, so it's probably going to be a matter of me and my friends showing up early and hopefully scoring some tickets.

I saw Horton Hears a Who yesterday, better than I expected, and probably one of those DVD's I'd just pop in when nothing else is on, and yet I don't feel like properly "watching" a movie and just need something playing in the background while I mess around on the computer.

Since today is Railway Footage Monday, and the new Harry Potter comes out tomorrow, here's a video of the "Hogwards Express" on tour in the UK. In real life the engine is really a Great Western Railway Hall Class built in 1937, and would normally be painted green.



I broke the 100 page mark on The Motorman yesterday. I don't expect this story to be more than 250 pages long.

So I went to the supermarket hoping to find some frozen Belgian waffles, but they only had Eggo, so I got a box of waffles and some strawberries and whipped cream, and basically I'm going to go nuts and have some waffles.

And best of all, Mythbusters is on.

I finally reached Violet town in Gold, after 6 hours of gameplay getting my party up to Level 9.

Getting my Zubat was up to level 9 was mostly a matter of deliberately running her out of PP and having her use struggle, because at Level 9 Leech Life is nearly useless and Confuse Ray works well, but takes forever.

I updated The Site today. I really aught to get to doing more of those golden compass chapter thingies because they're some of the most popular features on the site.

Alright waffles ahoy, but first I gotta cut strawberries.

It's that day isn't it.

Here's some footage someone took in the UK back in the 80's.

All those locomotives running around pulling coaches, it's almost kind of like a "railway" isn't it?

From what I understand not a trace of this nice action exists nowadays, as the tracks now are dominated by faceless, plastic looking "unit" trains with no locomotives.

I believe all the diesels in this footage were old enough to have worked along side steam engines in the 50s and 60s and are now all vintage themselves.

So the Independence Day yesterday was awesome.

My uncle came over a few days ago and since he's come we've done fun things like get decent furniture for the patio (an umbrella and picnic table).

He's been playing a lot of Link's Crossbow Training, and since he's playing Wii I started playing Super Paper Mario again which I got the week it came out and never beat.

Honestly, the mountains of dialog in Super Paper Mario are almost atrocious, and this is someone who's never in their life complained about "drr theres too much talking this game is boring" in a game before.

I probably would not mind as much if Super Paper Mario were a true RPG, but the game is so much like a classic platformer that when the action SLOOOOOOOOWS down for five or ten minutes of textual plot progression I get all frustrated and just want to get back to playing the game.

Yesterday for me was a lot of Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Sapphire being played while listening to chiptunes and Raymond Scott music.

Seriously, I'm going to miss being able to play Pokemon on my TV once I get to palying the DS Pokemon games. I haven't even looked at the DS pokemon games yet, but I swear there's so much information that needs to go on that second screen that means flipping through a bunch of menus in Sapphire and if they don't use the second screen to its full potential I'll be dissapointed to say the least.

I need some cereal.

This week it's the Vale of Rheidol Railway, which I think may exist in some kind of rift in the fabric of time because somehow it managed to survive the end of steam in 1968 and exist as the only steam operated line on British Railways for 20 years until it was sold off as a private enterprise in the late 80s.



My Youtube channel is becoming more and more frequented. All my recent videos are basically just an ad for my site anyway.

WEEK WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU??

Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Micheal Jackson, and now Billy Mays. ONE WEEK.

WHAT THE HECK.

I already liked Billy Mays, and was interested in marketing and copywriting, (fydk copywriting is a totally different thing from copyrighting) Pitchmen was my second favorite show on TV second only to Mythbusters and get to liking Billy Mays more than ever before, and then BOOM totally random out of nowhere he's dead.

Too bad.

Not to minimize the people I've mentioned, but they are people I look up to/fanboy over I'd be far more emotional about "losing" that I'm just going to be thankful that they're still around now.

The first response I read on the news site where I found out about Billy Mays was some right wing nut talking about how Billy Mays was a "conman" and that got was punishing him for taking advantage of people and how Billy was "just like Obama and stealing from the american people" and so on.

How stupid do you have to be to call Billy Mays a conman for SELLING THINGS. Sure they may be thing you personally don't want or find useless, but that dosen't make him a "conman". He'd have to be lying about his products or selling deliberately defective merchandise for any of his pitches to be "cons".

Also, right wingers in my experience are laissez faire capitalists, so this position that Billy Mays or television advertising in general is somehow a "scam" or "unamerican" is especially stupid and nonsensical.



I edited together the remaining segments of me and Rob watching Nintendo's E3 09 conference. I'll post another tomorrow and then probably post one every other day until they're all uploaded.

I found a site that sells vegetarian MREs. Maybe some time I should get a pack and take videos of me trying them out to put on the site or something.

My Pokemon Pikachu 2 is hula hooping. *gives some wats*

No it aint.

So, I did something pretty uncommon for today's site update, I actually made a webpage about the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway.

HERE IT IS.

(note to self: writing "here it is" does not magically create a link to what I am talking about)

I kind of want to throw it in the direction of The Railway and see what they think of it, but that would just make me nervous of somehow embarrassing myself, though I'll likely do it anyway.

I'm down to a cough and very occasional runny nose.

Money from AdSense seems to be at a standstill, I've been frozen at $1.11 lifetime earnings for a while now. :|

Mom showed up in the middle of the night and gave me a shot of cough medicine a couple of nights ago. I forgot all about it until I found the teaspoon in the sink the next morning. Thanks Mom. :3

So I got a brand new Pokemon Pikachu 2 off ebay. I have one, but it's impossibly lost in a place in my room I can't access.

I have 3574 Watts at the moment. I mainly got this to give myself bonus items in Pokemon Gold.

I finished mowing the lawn early yesterday. I thought it was raining, but it turned out the tree I was working underwas hawking loogies at me.

Seriously, the leaves all around are covered in loogies it looks like a truck load of people just came and spat all over it. it's disgusting and fascinating at once. I'll take pictures.

I'm still sick, but now I can speak, and don't feel like I have a sea urchin my throat and can walk without feeling like I'm being assaulted in the head with cinder blocks.. I have runny/stuffy nose, and a slight fever, which really isn't that bad compared to the throat pain of the other day.

The fever caused me to want to dress in a sweater for warmth, while also sitting under a fan with the window open to cool me down, with the fan and window going on and off at random and frequent intervals.

So right now I'm laying in bed trying to keep still and get back to 100% with lots of fruit juice being consumed.

I was well enough to make a video about certain alleged actors and their accusations that Wii owners are "fake gamers".

If I had made this video the other day, I would have sounded like Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Seriously, through all the pain, the night I couldnt  get any sleep, i was saying "ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?" and laughing histerically even though my throat felt like it was bleeding.




I'm watching the Clifford cartoon on Kids 13 right now. Seriously, why the heck do all the other kids put up with Jetta?

Pikachu is now taking a shower.

It irks me when i hear nonsense from anti public transit groups about how "trams/light rail are 19th century technology and have no place in a 21st century city".

So, trams are 19th century technology huh?

You know what else was invented in the 19th century?

THE FREAKING AUTOMOBILE.

Just because GM Order 66ed America's streetcar lines in the mid 20th century does not mean that trams are obsolete. That would be like judging all video games based on the Atari 2600 and then trying to argue that video games are obsolete.

Sheffield Supertram, ACTIVATE!



This makes me want to work on The Motorman even more than I normally do.

I updated the website.

I added a chapter 15 of that Golden Compass thingie, and much more importantly, I added a feature to the games section in which I discuss my experience with the growing up with the Game Gear and all the games I had for it. LINK HERE

Me and mom saw UP today.

Below is cut for spoilers, but the long in short of it was that was pretty good.


( Up spoilers )


But yeah, great movie.

My mom has sickle cell anemia.

For the most part Mom has always been in the best possible health despite this, but there have been many bad times and scary moments where
none of us are sure if she would even make it to her next birthday, but each time she's made it through no matter what and the family always emerges stronger and more appreciative of our good fortune.

The United Nations has designated June 19th 2009 as the first Sickle Cell Disease World Day, which will fall annually on June 19 from here on out.

This is especially awesome because June 19th is Mom's birthday.

Happy birthday mom.

We went to the florist and got mom a flower bracelet thingie that I don't remember the proper name for. Then we went to the Indian restaurant.

We intend to go see Up soon.

Site update tomorrow. I primrose.

Some morons are trying to milk the work of the late Adrian Jacobs by suing Bloomsbury, claiming that "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" infringes the copyright of a 36 page booklet published in the 80's called "The Adventures of Willy the Wizard-No 1 Livid Land".

To quote from the press release prepared by Jacobs' estate;


...Both books describe the adventures of a main character, "Willy" in Jacobs' book and "Harry Potter" in Rowling's, who are wizards, who compete in a wizard contest which they ultimately win... ...Many other similarities are described in the Claim filed by the Estate, which include the idea of wizards travelling on trains, famously referred to in Harry Potter as the Hogwarts Express...


Basically, the copyright infringement claim, and the website they set up for "Willy the Wizard" make it out as though anything in relation to the concept of "wizardry" from chess, to schools, to trains, to contests, and pretty much anything else you can think of were invented by and are the sole property of the Adrien Jacobs and that anything remotely similar MUST be plagiarism because ideas like there being a school for wizards or a contest for wizards are so unique and exclusive to Jacob's work that only someone who read "Willy the Wizard" could have thought to use them in their own stories.

This is about as crazy as if Frank Baum's estate sued Phillip Pullman for "His Dark Materials" by claiming that his books are a ripoff of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" because they both involve a girl traveling to another world and making friends with a talking carnivorous animal. It would be like Tolkien's estate suing Nintendo over the "Legend of Zelda" games because they are elves and dark lords and battles using swords and bows. It would be like the guy who made "Dexter's Laboratory" suing Nickelodeon for making "Jimmy Neutron" because they both involve boy genius inventors. It's just totally absurd.

Bloomsbury is ready to rumble and has already released their own press release asserting that the claim of Jacobs' estate is total garbage.

In cooler news, check out this moth I found resting on the garage door in my backyard.



That pattern is awesome and beautiful.

Okay, back to work on the next site feature for this Saturday.

Good morning. Monday Gratuitous Train Video time.

60163 Tornado is a brand new Peppercorn A1. Seriously. Brand freaking new. They completed it no more than a year ago I believe.



Speaking of about a year ago, I had some sort of gland infection a year ago that me and my doctor nuked with antibiotics. It's come back, I need to go to the doctor again.

So, apparently you can put any one of your Pokemon from Heart Gold and Soul Silver on this gadget called the PokeWalker and walk with it to help it gain EXP and play mini games and stuff. This is TOTALLY AWESOME.  Now I can take Autumn with me anywhere.

Better yet, I now hear that in the game, you can have ANY ONE OF YOUR POKEMON follow you like Pikachu did in Pokemon Yellow. This is very, very awesome.

My one complaint though, why no color screen on the PokeWalker? Even the Pokemon PIkachu II had a color screen and that came out a decade ago. I wish I could find my Pokemon PIkachu II. That thing was awesome, but the PokeWalker is awesomer because I can put Autumn on it. I can't get over how awesome that is.


Also.

I MADE 53 CENTS ON MY WEBSITE TODAY! !!!! :O :)

dfsdfs this is incredible. i made perhaps 13 cents on my site over the last year, but i now I have a whole dollar and eleven cents in my site's adsense account only a day after putting banner ads on most of the pages.

I've gotten a total of 15 clicks in the last 24 hours, which I really almost can't believe.


I played Pokemon Sapphire, ordered Dominos for me and mom for lunch/dinner, and took screenshots of old Game Gear games for an upcoming site feature. I also spent a lot of time playing with the dogs in the backyard and  for the last hour or two I've been watching Mythbusters reruns.

I'll probably train my team a little in Pokemon Gold before going to bed.

I woke up this morning to discover that my front yard has magically been transformed into The Magical Meadow of Cats.









Seriously, the way many cats carry themselves and go about their business is so uncannily human.

There were these two cats at my college I'd pass every evening. I think they were mates.

Sometimes they would be walking down the sidewalk together, sometimes they'd be laying all curled up in a tuft of grass, and I'd walk by and one of them would give me this look like "what the hell are you looking at human? >:("

If I was still fourteen I'd probably be tempted to write a story about the cats, but my Richard Adams wannabe phase fortunately passed long ago.

I saw something else strange today.

I was leaving the supermarket and was stopped at a red light. I could see a public bus driving down the cross road next to some woods, and then I noticed the bus pulling over and then the bus driver got out and walked toward the woods.

I guessed that the bus driver was about to pull down his fly and take a wiz on the trees, but instead it turned out that he was picking wildflowers of all things. I wonder why.

What a quaint image, a bus driver pulling over to stop and pick flowers.

You know, I've lived across the street from a bus stop since 1996 and I've never once actually used it for anything.

If it were a trolleybus I probably would have used it because it's easy to tell exactly where trolley buses run because of the overhead wires.

If it were a tram I would probably ride it at least once a week just for the gimmick of it and because trams are awesome.

And finally, it's Saturday, so....

StupidTrainStationH.com SITE UPDATE!!!

I've now added banner ads to most of the pages of the site. I really don't feel as bad about this as I thought I would. If anything they add to the "90's" feel of the webpages. Hopefully I can get some money to go to Britain from this.

I've got a date with some Japanese food and Pokemon Gold and Sapphire lined up tonight.

I got the Sixth Badge in Sapphire today. The tree city place is cool.

I got a Pokemon Table and a Pokemon Chair for my secret base. I wish there was actually something useful you could do in your Secret Base, because there's really not much use for them. I remember me and my "friends" had a secret base in the woods. Good times.

The Eragon movie just came on ABC Family and I have it on. This is total crap, and I know it, but Eragon just seems like one of those movies where whenever I turn on the TV, while occupied, and there's nothing else on, I'll turn to Eragon because I can chuckle at how much it sucks as I focus most of my attention on something else I'm doing like LJ posting or whatever.

Only Profectors of Universe sucks more than Eragon.

I swear if I was allowed to put out the novel I would have put out when I was fourteen I'd have no hope of a writing carreer today.

Just before typing this sentence, I finally successfully intercepted the Mr. Softee truck for the first time this year. Now munching a vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles.

This week's Gratuitous Monday Train Video is from the long gone Hayling Island branch line of the former British Railways, featuring the famous Brighton Terrier tank engines.

I'm guessing this was taken in the late 50s. The cool thing about this footage is that at the time it was taken, there was nothing particularly novel about a branch line train pulled by a steam locomotive, just everyday business as usual.

What's really impressive is that by the time this footage was taken, the A1x Terrier locomotives were getting to be around 80 years old and still with many in regular service. Note how the coaches dwarf the locomotive itself.

The Hayling Island line actually reminds me of the A line on the NYC subway, with the bridge and the island and everything.

So, after I beat Red last week I got straight to work on Pokemon Gold, which I've yet to legitimately beat.

This is going to be my third major playthrough of Pokemon Gold.

The first was in 1999 on an imported copy of Pokemon Gold form Japan, which I got stuck in about two thirds through in the Team Rocket base where you meet Lance due to me not being able to read Japanese.

My second was in 05/06 on a US copy of gold I picked up from Gamestop along with a preowned Pokemon Red. 

I played normally up to Victory Road, but for some reason I was so obsessed with getting to Kanto that I traded a friend's level 100 Arcanine made with the Rare Candy cheat in Red and used him to plow through the Elite Four and then reach Kanto, where I got a couple of the Kanto badges and then lost interest for a month or so, and came back to find that the save battery was dead. Seems that Pokemon Gold and Silver save batteries die earlier than other Gameboy game save batteries due to the battery having to keep track of days of the week and time as well as the save file.

Anyway, i got one of those special screwdrivers to open the cartridge up so I could replace the battery, and I used a wad of paper to secure the battery in place isntead of sodering it into place, but I did some "abuse" tests and it turns out this method stands up perfectly. 

So, fresh off of Pokemon Red and with a fresh save battery, I begin a new playthrough of Pokemon Gold.

I forgot the sense of "reality" that you get when you turn on the system at night and it's actually dark in the game. Very cool.

Right now I'm hanging around Routes 29 and 30 between Violet City and New Bark Town leveling up my newly captured Pokemon.

I'm somewhat "rebuilding" my team from my last gold playthrough, but I'm training new Pokemon as well.

My team right now is...

Avis, a female Pidgey at Level 6

Daganya (lol), a female Sentret at Level 5

Charlotte (lol), a female Spinarak at Level 3 (haven't worked at training her yet)

Quake, a male Cyndaquil at Level 9

Ratter (lol), a male Rattata at Level 4

and Morning, a Level 3 Caterpie who I just captured today.



As far as this bunch is concerned, I'll be getting them all up to about Level 9, which shouldn't take long at all, and then I'll go in to Sprout Tower and the Violet City Gym.

I also find it funny that searching Routes 29 and 30 for berries every day has become a morning chore for me.

I get a lot of joy and nostalgia out of playing Pokemon Gold. Pokemon is one of the few RPGs where I really feel like I'm invisioning myself in the game world as I play, which is what an RPG is supposed to be about to begin with.


Much more going in in Pokemon Sapphire, which I'm still on my maiden playthrough of. I'll maybe discuss that next time.

So, I've started updating that website again.

I took an intentional vacation.

Take a look at what happens when you type the phrase "deliberately worthless" into Google.

Cool huh?

The Motorman is coming along well. Got about a page done today. I can't express how much fun it is to be writing about Doorworms as though they were real.

That video of me and Rob watching the Metroid trailer now has nearly 1200 views.

I've started editing the vlogs me and Rob made on 6/7 and uploading them to YouTube. Here are the first two parts. I'll work on getting the rest up soon.





I'll be spending the rest of the night playing Pokemon Gold on the Gameboy Player.

Next post will probably be a bunch of nonsense about what I've been doing in Gold and Sapphire lately.