At the moment, all I can really say is that I'm really quite glad that the list is finally done. I've gotten some really awesome feedback and comments from a number of people, and for the record, if you'd like to reproduce the list on whatever site you may currently be running, knock yourself out. As I've said to others, the only thing that may anger me is if you replaced my name on the articles with "Derek Smart" who is, pretty much, the black sheep son of Mephistopheles. Word on the street is that Dr. Smart was born, good 'ol Meph looked down, and decided that the closet was the right place for him. He's been there ever since using the Internet as a preying ground for his trolling antics.

Ah it feels good to get the rambling going again -- oh, how I missed it... Yeah, yeah, I know you probably haven't so much. That's just something you and I will have to work through while we take classes in "Back-Alley Brawling 101." I'll be the really scrawny kid sitting in the back corner hiding behind the dumpster.

I recently finished reading a book called War with the Newts (no, I'm not kidding). Here I was thinking that the title was just some sort of clever marketing ploy and that the book actually had nothing to do with newts whatsoever, but I was so very wrong. The book is actually about a war against newts (mankind versus the newts), though the war occupies a very minimal part of the book. For the most part, the fairly long book details the discovery the newts (they're about four feet tall), the taming of the newts, and the gradual enslavement of the newts for the betterment of mankind -- something that mimics the African slave trade of the seventeenth century right down to the methods used to get the slaves on boats for trading. After this, the book took a number of pages to detail the slow integration of the newts into various societies across the world, along with newspaper and civilian responses to it. It is a fairly hilarious satire about a number of different topics, including Nazism which, given that the book was written in 1936, was just maybe a fairly pressing topic. Don't let the humor of the book fool you though, as it's still a very dark and fairly disturbing book on the whole.

Over the last few days, I've been greatly enjoying Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War (gallery here). I bought the game the week it came out sometime last year (or the year before?), but after having my campaign progress wiped by an unexpected hard drive crash, I never bothered to play it again. So now, almost randomly, I picked it up and am really quite enjoying the game a lot -- despite the fact that each campaign mission takes me about two to three hours to beat on hard difficulty. I'm going to be picking up the expansion pack when I head to the mall tomorrow and maybe, just maybe, Devil May Cry 3 as well. I think I'll also work on picking up a gift for that special Valentine... Oh, wait. Hahaha.

As was just pointed out to me, this page is approximately fun for about two minutes. On the first question my response (don't read this until you do it, if you have interest in doing it) was "fruit" and I only had three Fs for the second. According to the site, I'm both warped and stupid. Makes sense.

This weekend I have plans to write a bit more on the first chapter of Paradise which is... Fun, I guess. I mean, it is fun, but I'm not really sure what else there is to say about it at the moment. As a side note of interest, I did use the introduction and the draft of the first chapter in my thirty-page portfolio for my Undergraduate Creative Writing Program application, something I'm quite a bit nervous about to be honest. I'm not quite sure when (and if) I'll hear any kind of response about the application, but I'm still keeping my hopes up? Getting my fingers crossed? Whatever.

Let's also not forget that both Star Wars: Empire at War and Galactic Civilizations 2 are both due out within the next couple of weeks. I'm not generally a huge fan of the Star Wars universe as a whole, but Empire at War simply looks amazing. And, well, I need not explain myself on Galactic Civilizations 2; the thing, at my last testing time, played like a heavily upgraded version of the first game with a create-a-ship feature and better graphics... I mean, it's hard to go wrong with a formula like that. I'll have quasi-reviews for both of these games within a week after each comes out. I'm also planning on writing a fairly comprehensive preview for Armada Online which is currently in alpha testing (gallery here).

Other than that all that, I simply have a crap-ton of writing and reading to do for school as well as my now-3.2 mile runs in the snow every night. If you've never ran twelve straight laps around a frozen track before let me tell you something: it ceases to be about stamina and starts to be a lot more about whether or not your legs can tolerate the slipping-and-sliding for twelve laps. By the time I was done, I was actually wondering if I was beginning my evolution into a transformer and my legs were planning to turn into mini-tanks of their own. I mean, after all, I'm quite certain I have some kind of biological connection to Optimus Prime (Jewish or not -- I don't discriminate).

That sounds about good. I'm going to try getting back into the habit of writing these little rambling messes of unrelated content every two-three days again now that the top-ten list is finished. Don't hate me if I fail though. Well, I mean, you can, but I'd prefer a valentine card with a sappy message from an early-nineties ninja turtle.

Speaking of memories... Is turns out that the original pink power ranger is now a porn star? I've heard rumors of such a thing, but hearing it brought up at our not-so-little Super Bowl party turned this dirty, dirty lie of a rumor into something a bit more palpable. Say it ain't so, Universe. That's part of my childhood you be messin' with. Sadface.