That is, unless you are a Sony or Nintendo fanboy.  Since I don’t own either a wii or a PS3, that makes me an Xbox fanboy.  For those of you like me, the winner, it’s we.

The big 3 console vendors have each had their E3 moment in the sun and one thing was clear, Microsoft has deep pockets.  Nintendo had little, if any, things to shake a wii stick at.  Sony is trying hard to catch up to Xbox Live and boy, the PS2 is sure doing well.  Microsoft on the other hand, dropped all sorts of bombs.  Some of which probably caused Sony to drop some bombs as well.  Mostly of the F variety.

The first shot was the news of previously exclusive Playstation developer Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII coming to the Xbox.  Not really sure if I care much about that since I’ve never played an FF game, but it’s still a huge blow to Sony.  If MS would get their heads out of their asses and release a Blu Ray addon for the Xbox they would crush the PS3 for good.

The second shot was the official announcement of the Netflix streaming movie collection becoming available through the Xbox to Netflix subscribers.  While the news itself is something thats been rumored for awhile, it was also something most expected to see on both platforms.  The news here is that it appears to be an Xbox exclusive deal.

The third big Xbox announcement was the news of a dashboard update and this new avatar concept.  From what I’ve seen so far, they can keep em.  I’ll take the current blade system and my gamerpic.  The proposed new interface looks underwhelmingly unispired and the avatars look like bad mi clones.

Overall, I’m still glad I have an Xbox, even despite it’s hardware deficiencies (when compared to a PS3).  Hopefully some worthwhile game news will continue to come out of E3 the rest of the week.  Meanwhile, the Bungie countdown continues to work towards 7/16/08 07:07:07 GMT.  Please be something other than Halo 4…

[Update] Bah.  The Bungie reveal was squashed by Microsoft.

It’s probably a bad thing if, when you are driving down the road, you see the painted lines and your mind is trying to figure out how to play them on a Rock Band guitar.  Not quite as bad, but equally sad, as when any song you hear is now being broken down into various green, red, yellow, blue ( + orange if you’re leet) color combination’s.

Hi, my name is Brian and I’m a Rock Band addict.

What do you call it when you are doing air guitar of a Rock Band guitar?  Besides the obvious things like sad, pathetic, or a cry for help?

On a mostly unrelated, although probably eventually related when more Rock Band 2 info comes out, note.  If you are a gaming freak like myself, but just came out of cryogenic stasis, E3 is this week.  For the unaware, E3 is like a week long Christmas for gamers.  Except instead of presents you get information about things which may or may not ever come out.  Ok, bad analogy.  Think of something awesome.  Now trust me when I say E3 is like whatever it is you just thought about.

Hopefully E3 will help remove the sad face I’ll be having once I return Rock Band to my friend Dave on Monday.

I love my job.  We are having a Rock Band, Battle of the Bands competition at this years departmental meeting thing.  The winning band gets $100 for each member and the copy of Rock Band used for the competition + the instruments.  Sadly, the winning band will probably split up shortly after the competition due to fighting over who actually gets the game portion of the prize, since there is only one copy.

I had never actually played the game before, but luckily a room in our office has been turned into the Rock Band Studio for people to come and practice or whatever.  Our band has been holding “band practice” every day at lunch, as well as various other times of the day.  It took me a whole one song to realize that this game shizzles my nizzle.

In the highly probable event that I’ve improperly used the phrase, “shizzle my nizzle”, then substitute that with “pwns me like something that pwns things”.  I don’t know what the hell it is that’s so good about the game, but it probably has something to do with the fact that you feel like you’re Jack Black in Tenacious D.  You probably look like an idiot to anyone who’s looking, but you are melting faces none the less.

The downside.  My friend Dave was kind enough to let me borrow his game and equipment over the weekend.  As a result, my daughter was up till midnight with me while we took our band on a world tour.  She is on lead vocals while I am shredding guitar.  After she went to bed I stayed up for another 3 hours rocking my solo tour, playing some 30+ songs.  My son then woke me up 4 hours later so he could play “Wock Band”.

On top of that, my pal Carpal Tunnel called and said he’d be over on Sunday.

My daughter has been a Simpsons fan since she was 3.  I recall at the time thinking, “she shouldn’t be watching this stuff”, but if you see the crap kids watch nowdays, the Simpsons might as well be the new Sesame Street.

Over the years we have accumulated the entire Simpsons DVD collections and while there are untold numbers of excellent episodes, it was only just recently that I realized the genius that is Season 5.  From top to bottom I don’t think any other show has ever had as good a season as that 1993-94 season.  For what it’s worth, season 4 did have Mr. Plow, which I consider to be the greatest episode of all time, but Season 5 was 22 episodes of comedy gold.

Here is just a smidgen of the funny: Methuselah’s rookie card.  Cape Fear.  Chocked full of heady goodness.  The all syrup Squishy and Ernest Borgnine.  Think unsexy thoughts, think unsexy thoughts.  Mr. Burns, germs, and the Sproose Moose.  The Inanimate Carbon Rod.  The nacho hat.  Precious antique cans.

Epic win.  The likely reason for this uber season was that most of the writers for the previous four seasons had left the show and Season 5 was a whole new team of writers.  Whether these guys were just that much better than the previous guys, I dunno.  Maybe they were just in the right place, at the right time, doing the right drugs.

As the previous post no doubt indicates, I’m having a hard time coming up with something worth a damn to comment on.  As such, I’m forced to do something somewhat drastic.  Be prepared to endure a little something about me.

But not here, in this post, that would suck for everyone.  The info about me can be found in the frequently overlooked About page.  Note that the term frequently overlooked is a relative term.  A frequent overlooked page on a normal site means it’s at least seen occasionally.  A frequently overlooked page on a site that is itself frequently overlooked means the frequently overlooked page has probably never before been seen by human eyes.

In the event any of the 10’s of people who visit this site might have accidentally stumbled into that section before, and lived, it has actually been overhauled a bit.  Hold onto your potatoes because it now contains:

• The complete history of mimicvii.com - From it’s humble beginnings to it’s humble, now, times.
• A blurb or two about real life™ me - As opposed to something about the super cool, interweb version of me.
• An explanation for what the hell a mimicvii is - Finally, one of life’s great mysteries explained!

And by cowboys, obviously I mean comedians, because whats funnier than a cowboy?

Maybe I’m just out of touch or something, but I’m not sure I could even name any current comedians.  To make matters worse, when I do remember people that used to be funny, they are either dead or not funny.

Eddie Murphy, not funny.  Mike Myers, not funny.  Phil Hartman, dead.  Richard Prior, dead.  Chris Farley, dead.  George Carlin, dead.  Steve Martin/Chevy Chase/Dan Aykroyd, slow painfull death.

It’s gotten so bad that I can’t even find the funny anywhere in this God forsaken post.  I’m not sure why I even bothered.  I miss Dr. Katz.

Decided to pass on the Will Smith, 4th of July movie this year and opted instead to see James McAvoy in Wanted.  I don’t know who that guy is either, but not only does it have that guy, you get to see Angelina Jolie’s butt crack and hear Morgan Freeman say, “mother fucker”.  How could this movie be full of anything but win, amirite?

Wanted combines the ultra cool fight scenes of The Matrix with the style and blood of Fight Club.  Instead of kung fu, they use guns.  Instead of bullet time, they curve bullets.  Instead of moral fiber, they have fabric that decides who dies next.  Most importantly, instead of Keanu, they have actors.

Maybe not Oscar material here, but a fun, adrenaline-rush-action-romp of a movie none the less.

P.S. I am aware that neither The Matrix nor Fight Club contain any moral fiber.

Something horrible happened to me the other day.  The batteries for my Logitech Harmony 670 remote died and we were out of spares.  Trying to switch from the TV to the Xbox and back actually required my ass off the couch, a handful of remotes, and an Xbox controller…like in the cave man days.  Oh the humanity!

If you’ve never had the pleasure of a Harmony remote, then the above will sound like an over reaction.  If you have used one, you understand fully.  If you have one, but it’s a newer model with a recharging station, I hate you.

For the unknowing.  Imagine all 40 remotes in your house combined into one.  Imagine this one remote was intelligent enough to properly turn on all of your devices for any given activity and have them set to the appropriate inputs automatically.  Imagine you buy a new device, but you don’t have to worry about trying out various codes because the software which configures this remote has access to an always updated database of devices.

Now imagine an army of these “super remotes” and cringe in fear, while I for one welcome our new Remote Control Overlords.

Fingers.  Check.  Toes.  Check.  Eyebrows.  Check.  Groin.  Check.  Yay, another 4th of July survived.  More so than blowing stuff up, I enjoy the 4th because it awards me the luxury of reciting the tale of the “Firecracker Dog” to my children.

When I was a kid, there was this neighborhood dog who, for 364 days of the year, was a nice, normal dog.  On that one day of the year however, as soon as the sounds of fireworks started, he went freaking ape shit.  Not ape-shit-I’m-gonna-bark-at-you-cuz-I’m-scared-of-the-sound, but ape-shit-I’m-gonna-run-into-the-middle-of-whatever-is-exploding-and-try-to-eat-it.  If you tossed one of those chaingun-like, strings of Black Cats on the ground, this dog would be in the middle of it, chomping like mad, trying his best to experience gun powder flavor country.

To coincide with this dog trying to take Pop Rock candy to the next level, he had no teeth.  We only ever knew the dog sans teeth, so the cause -> effect was always just a part of our mythology.  In our minds however, the myth was busted, the reason for the lack of teeth was pretty obvious.

I don’t know what ever happened to Firecracker Dog, perhaps he ate one M80 too many.  Either way, his legacy will live on forever.

After a couple of days fighting with the Fotobook plugin for WordPress, I am finally victorious.  As it is now my vanquished foe, it is required to do anything I wish.  Unfortunately, all it seems willing to do is fetch my Facebook photos, but it does do a well enough job of that.

The fighting was based upon the fact that the 3.1 version just wouldn’t work for me.  I dug through the code, reset/re-installed the plugin, tried a little voodoo, nothing worked.  As I was about to give up, I decided to give an older revision a try.  Luckily, the 3.0.7 version appears to work flawlessly.

The whole reason I even bothered with any of this is because the Fotobook plugin allows me to easily import photos from my Facebook albums directly into this site.  As such, I have now replaced the old gallery I was using with this one, which can be accessed through the Photos page.