Goodreads | Mxmlln Montgomery (Sherman Oaks, CA)'s review of Battlefield Earth

Finally finished Hubbard's Battlefield Earth after exactly one month. Definitely recommend it and even might watch the horrible movie again...

Twilight, MoneyBall

Saw two movies Sunday and Monday, Twilight and Moneyball respectively.

Twilight, of course was magnificent, though the story was definitely different than usual. Critics gave it a 7.5, but I'd give it at least an 8 / 10.

Moneyball was a very interesting sports story with compelling conflicts, a strong 7. Nevertheless, the plot did seem to recycle the same conflict repeatedly and the characters simply responded by keeping to their faith. This was a strange experience, but didn't take too much away from the film. The worst part were the dumb scenes when Billy Beane was driving around in his car, presumably burning off steam and obviously a whole lot of gas.

A strong movie weekend...

FINISHED Tiger & Bunny, ROD: Read or Die The TV

via hulu.com

Finished two more shows on Hulu, both good.
Hulu is the best legitimate source for Anime on the internet: They don't restrict access for Anime like they do for other shows. So instead of having the most recent 6 episodes available, every episode of every season for each series is available on demand. It really is a great time to start watching this genre.
However, free anime is getting harder and harder to find since I've watched nearly everything on Hulu. For each twenty new shows that are added, probably only one will be in a subgenre I like. Nevertheless, compared to Netflix's Anime selection, Hulu is far larger.
Check out what I've seen so far: http://www.hulu.com/profiles/mxmlln

Time's 100 Best Pop Songs of All Time

I was interested in who made up the list: http://entertainment.time.com/2011/10/24/the-all-time-100-songs.

However, Time created it over the course of 100 different webpages, making a quick view nearly impossible. No one seemed to have created a good playlist for it, though I'm not sure if searching playlists is a feature Spotify supports and the two Grooveshark playlists only had about 50 songs on them. I figured it wouldn't be too much extra work to create the playlist as I went through the entries: All-Time 100 Songs

 

In Time (2011) - Reviews on RateItAll

http://www.rateitall.com/i-6533414-in-time-2011.aspx

Added a few thoughts on Timberlake's new role "In Time".

Music Simulator Playlists: Rocksmith & Rapstar (On Grooveshark)

Occurred to me that I had not checked out Rocksmith's song set. This is the latest music simulator, the first where you can literally use any electric guitar as a controller, and the second where you can use an actual guitar as a controller (Rock Band 3's guitars were proprietary). Despite not being interested in learning the guitar at all, I am definitely getting this game once I'm settled in Europe, though hopefully someone (like my sister or Italian friend) will lend me a guitar. So I listened to the playlist to see what I'm in for.

What was interesting was that non of the songs were terribly familiar. A significant problem with this Rhythm game genre is that most games use the same exact songs, making it sort of annoying to buy from different developers or across instruments (karaoke to guitar, for example). Luckily, Rocksmith is really trying to differentiate itself. A lot of the songs weren't terribly good, but I'm sure they'll grow on me as I progress through the game.

Hopefully, a keyboard or DJ simulator will come out before I'm settled and I can avoid learning the guitar altogether.

I also listened to DefJam's Rapstar by Konami. It's a karaoke game devoted to hip-hop and rap. Although previous games have used different interfaces for spoken word sections of songs, this was an interesting breakthrough. I listened to playlist to see if I could put up with this genre of music enough to enjoy the game. Though there are a lot of classic tracks and the list itself sufficiently covers the history of the genre, most of the songs are not fun for me. I won't be able to get this game and will have to wait for Karaoke Revolution 2 to come out, though no one knows when that is. 

I should probably start listening to some news during work, now that the two-hour commute is gone.