I still haven't managed to pick up a Wii. I called around to a couple of different stores (Yeah, I used a phone, I'm desperate). The person at Target seemed annoyed that I even bothered to ask. The person at Wal-mart told me that they would have systems on sale at midnight on December 6th, which is the same thing I was told when I was in the store. The thing I noticed in the store was that they had replenished their supply of remotes which most likely means that they also got systems at the same time. That means that they are purposely holding on to systems so that people will have to line up at midnight again. I don't get it, it's been a week and a half since one of the most successful video game system launches in history (maybe THE most successful) and Wal-mart still wants up to line up to get one. What a bunch of ass-hats.

In other interesting Wii news, there appears to be at least two groups working on getting Linux running on the Wii. Wiili is trying to create a live Linux CD that will allow the Wii to boot into a full blown Linux Desktop without requiring hardware modification. So far they've managed to get a Wii remote to interact (at least partially) with a PC. You can see the video here. I have to think that's a big step in the right direction. The other group is Wii-Linux, which isn't so clear on their plans. I have hopes that at least one of these groups will succeed and allow users to play Xvid on a TV while streaming the data from a PC. We'll see, I guess.

The people who will have the most success getting Linux on to their consoles are PS3 owners. Sony specifically allows for running other operating systems on their machine. Within a few days of launch one person even had a version of Fedora Core 5 running on his PS3 before Sony even released their version of Linux for the system. I'm willing to bet there will be some pretty killer media center programs out for the PS3 soon. I also have to think that this will lead to a lot of people pirating games, which is bad news for Sony since it looks like they will have to sell something like 30 games per system, just to break even.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is my favorite in the LoZ series, and one of the best games ever made. The level of interactivity with the world was amazing for it's time, and in some ways, still is. There is one thing that has bugged me about it for a long time, though. Near the beginning of the game there is an old wall that looks like it could be blown up by a bomb, but there is no way that I know of (aside from hacking) to get bombs that early in the game. Well today I decided to find out what was behind that wall…





Somehow this looks exactly like what I expected. The middle treasure chest contained 300 rupees, the right chest contained 10 arrows and the left chest contained bombs. I would really like to know how they expected people to get in there without using cheat codes like I did.

You can read about it here.

Apparently whether or not Peter Jackson will be directing the movie is still up in the air. The interesting piece of information is that they're talking about doing a movie that would bridge 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings'. I have no idea what that movie would be about or based on. 'Unfinished Tales' has a small section on the Third Age, but not nearly enough to make a movie out of. 'The Simarillion' certainly has enough material, but it wouldn't so much bridge the gap as be a prequel to both. I really don't know what they're thinking…

In the absence of Lost, I've been watching NBC's new hit show, Heroes. I could go into a whole discussion on the show, but suffice it to say that it's good without being great. Hiro looks to be the most interesting character, and the more screen time they give him, the better the episode. I was a bit disappointed to find out that Heroes, like Lost, will being going on hiatus until next year, but I guess that's pretty standard.

The reason I bring all of this up is because of something one of the characters said. It was in last week's episode, “Homecoming”. Claire, the one that can heal rapidly like Wolverine, was coming to terms with the fact that she is different and her friend said to her, “The only thing you'll regret is denying who you really are”. The statement struck me as a little bit strange, as it's not, at least on the face of it, in keeping the with what I use as a standard definitions of right, wrong and guilt. The reason I find it significant, and maybe even sinister, is that it's not the first time I've heard this type of statement.

Probably close to a year ago now, I was attempting to look up a word in the Urban Dictionary. I apparently had not setup a keyword for the UD search and ended up stumbling upon this post. As I read through the post I began to stare at the screen like Richard Dreyfus over a plate of mashed potatoes. This means something! I thought, at first, that I could use the post to alleviate my confusion over the principles of liberalism (are there any?), but upon further readings I realized that it was just the mad ravings of a disaffected child grown old. Even so, there are bits of interesting information to be extracted from the post, including this quote: “Sin is being distant from true yourself. And your responsibility to God is to be your true self.”, which at this point, sounds rather familiar.

Now you might think me a bit crazy for thinking there's some evil correlation between the two statements, but I've had an experience that puts me on guard for these sorts of things. When I was a freshman in college, Anne Foerst gave a talk at Saint Bonaventure on whether or not robots could have souls. It was very strange to me, because she used a definition of 'soul' that I had never heard before. She said something to the effect of if you have stories told about you, you have a 'soul'. At the time I joked that you could just as easily have called it 'Bob', as her definition of soul had nothing to do with the traditional definition and thus her answer to the question was useless. The whole point of her talk didn't make sense to me until much later when I was talking to Jenny about her experiences with liberal professors. It was then that I realized what Foerst had been doing. She was redefining 'soul' so that people who are alive and well have 'souls', but people like unborn children or the sick who are in vegetative states don't and thus killing them would not have the same moral repercussions.

It seems to me that the Left likes to do this same sort of thing in more circumstances than just the abortion debate. They redefine morality so that they get the same answers in everyday circumstances like straight forward murder and thus don't upset anyone, but in the extraordinary cases like euthanasia or abortion they get answers that are ambiguous if not outright contradictory to true morality. Now in the episode of Heroes that I was talking about, the character making the statement was gay, so it seems obvious that to me that this sort thing is being used to advance the homosexual agenda. My question is if people accept this sort of crap, how far down the rabbit hole does this take us?

I was playing Mario Party (5 to be exact) with the usual crew and Gareth brought down some generic Teddy Graham cookies. I ate a few and then ran across this one:

My first impression was that he was flipping me the bird, but then I realized he only has two fingers. You know, I was kinda disappointed that I didn't get a PS3 to sell on eBay, but maybe this will make up for it.