The list of top 100 names for the year came out. Most of them are the norm, but a few really make me wonder. Here is the list if you're curious, but I thought I would go over a few.
No 2 is Madison. I guess that's a girl's name. I never really thought of it that way. Sounds more like a street to me. I mention it mostly, though, because my new neice born this year is named Madison. Just hope people don't walk all over her when she gets older. Get it? Like a street. Maybe I shouldn't start off with bad puns...
Next one I notice is number 6 on the boys list: Jack. Not too unusual, except that apparently it wasn't anywhere near that high until recently. The network execs in charge of Lost should be happy about this.
Let's see, 13 on the boys list: Caden. Really? Is that even a name? Do you pronounce that with a S or K sound? I'm honestly not sure.
14 on the girls list: Lily. No I didn't forget an L there, but apparently a whole lot of other Americans did. If I ever meet anyone with their name spelled like that, I'm going to pronounce it just how it's written. I hope they complain to their parents about it. They deserve it. What were they expecting? "We'll just leave an L off. No one will notice, and it will make it easier for her to do paperwork." I hope your daughter grows up hating you.
Now here's the other side of that convention of respelling names: Brayden. Number 22 on the boys list. I've known some Bradens in my life, never a Brayden. I was never confused by the lack of a Y. Braying is something donkeys do people. When are they going to realize that naming your child something that sounds like a barnyard animal noise is asking for the child to grow up cutting himself?
I have to mention number 24 on the boys side, not because there's anything wrong with it, but because it's the best name on the list: Benjamin. Seriously, shouldn't this be higher up? At the same time, I notice number 100 is Ben. Just Ben. Now I go by Ben 99.9 percent of the time. If I hear Benjamin and it's not in a job interview or something equally professional, I instantly correct the person. It actually bugs me to hear my whole name. On the other hand, it would seem totally wrong to never have anything more to my name. Just Ben? How boring is that?
Number 53 on the girls list and number 99 on the boys is the same name: Peyton. Two questions: First, when did Peyton become a girls name and when did it become more popular than the male version? Only thing I can think of is too many football fans are having girls when they thought they were going to have a girl. "Well honey, the baby's room is already decorated to look like a Colts locker room, might as well just go with it. Otherwise she might grow up confused." Wouldn't want that now would we?
Well the list wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Only see one stripper name this year, Destiny, and that's pretty low on the list at 93. Jenna's pushing it, since the only famous person ever to have the name Jenna is a porn star. I guess most of these kids are fairly safe from abuse. Maybe once we get rid of all the stupid bad names, we can get parents to start actually raising their children again, instead of letting the TV do it. Ha! Yeah right.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Saturday, December 9, 2006
So I bought a 360...
I was gonna get a Wii. I was thinking I'd wait on the 360. I really had no intention of buying one for a few months yet. But no, my old trusty Xbox had to start to have some issues on playing DVD's. I don't have a regular dvd player. I know, I really should. They're like 19.99 down at Wal-Mart. Whatever. I liked using the Xbox. It never had any problems with playing games, just on the movies. On top of that I realized something else. I had about 30 games for the thing, but I only played 2 or 3 on a regular basis. Two of those games have a particularly angelic cranial adornment in the name. So it just didn't seem worth it to keep the thing around. If the Wii had played movies, I'd probably have just gotten it. It doesn't. I bought an Xbox 360.
My roomate, who happens to be my little brother, also happens to work at Hollywood Video. Because of this we get any video games or movies we want for free. Can just only have 3 out at a time. I'm taking big advantage of this. So far we've had 6 games in the week since I bought the thing. Some of those games have been pretty good, some of had been so impressive. Dead Rising, for instance, was visually and conceptually impressive, but in the end flawed and boring. I can understand why a lot of people liked the game and I really liked where they were going with it. I didn't care too much for the results though. There were too many times of running back and forth between the same spots in the mall you were in. Just got tedious. I took it back after a few hours of playing.
There have been good games, though, like Call of Duty 3 and Fight Night 3. I've got quite the career going in Fight Night. I've beaten The Greatest of All Time, Muhammed Ali, and a bunch of other famous boxers. Fun stuff. Call of Duty games are always fun, if you're into that kind of thing. Good story. Great action. Really feel like you're part of a battle. I kinda think CoD2 was a little better action wise. 3 puts you as the star of the battle too often. There's nothing like the God Complex in games like that to really pull you out of the feeling of realism. Still a great game.
Now there's another game I actually bought. I had to. I shouldn't have. I can't show this game to my mom. I play this game and feel dirty afterward. No, it's not DoA Xtreme Beach 2. It's Gears of War. This has got to be the bloodiest, most violent game ever made. Not in the killing hookers after having sex with them way that the Grand Theft Auto games are. It's not violence just for the sake of being violent. It's war. It's gritty, explosive, alien, scifi, bloody war. Except for the way you can run up to an enemy with the chainsaw on the end of your gun revved up and cut them in half. That's just violence for the sake of violence. There's never a time in the game, so far that I've played, when you actually need to do that. You will if you play this game, but you don't need to. The rest of it though. The way the enemies just explode when hit with a grenade. I've seen that kind of thing in games before and it felt really campy and unreal. In this game though, it feels like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, except with aliens coming up from out of the ground. If you're trying to decide whether to get this game or not, and your stomach isn't queasy in the least, cause I'll tell you I've seen and done things in this game that make me churn a little bit, get this game. Even if you don't have a 360. Get it in preperation for getting a 360. You want to, trust me.
Oh, and the last game I tried was called Enchanted Arm. It looked alright until I was forced to put up with an ambitiously gay character for the first hour of the game I played. Look, you put a gay character in your game, that's fine. They've been in games before. At least one in a Final Fantasy and plenty I've thought might be. But when you do everything you can to shove down the players throat that yes, this character is gay. Flamingly. This is why I say ambitiously gay. It was just wrong. Much too much.
Beside all of this, the best game I have played for the Xbox 360 so far is Geometry Wars. It's one of the Live Arcade games. Costs about 5 dollars and is more than worth it. No way to describe the game. If I tried you'd probably think it sounded boring. You just gotta play it. If you've got the system and haven't tried it yet, download the demo. Trust me.
That's it from me tonight. Will try to update more often from now on. Maybe get someone to read it someday.
My roomate, who happens to be my little brother, also happens to work at Hollywood Video. Because of this we get any video games or movies we want for free. Can just only have 3 out at a time. I'm taking big advantage of this. So far we've had 6 games in the week since I bought the thing. Some of those games have been pretty good, some of had been so impressive. Dead Rising, for instance, was visually and conceptually impressive, but in the end flawed and boring. I can understand why a lot of people liked the game and I really liked where they were going with it. I didn't care too much for the results though. There were too many times of running back and forth between the same spots in the mall you were in. Just got tedious. I took it back after a few hours of playing.
There have been good games, though, like Call of Duty 3 and Fight Night 3. I've got quite the career going in Fight Night. I've beaten The Greatest of All Time, Muhammed Ali, and a bunch of other famous boxers. Fun stuff. Call of Duty games are always fun, if you're into that kind of thing. Good story. Great action. Really feel like you're part of a battle. I kinda think CoD2 was a little better action wise. 3 puts you as the star of the battle too often. There's nothing like the God Complex in games like that to really pull you out of the feeling of realism. Still a great game.
Now there's another game I actually bought. I had to. I shouldn't have. I can't show this game to my mom. I play this game and feel dirty afterward. No, it's not DoA Xtreme Beach 2. It's Gears of War. This has got to be the bloodiest, most violent game ever made. Not in the killing hookers after having sex with them way that the Grand Theft Auto games are. It's not violence just for the sake of being violent. It's war. It's gritty, explosive, alien, scifi, bloody war. Except for the way you can run up to an enemy with the chainsaw on the end of your gun revved up and cut them in half. That's just violence for the sake of violence. There's never a time in the game, so far that I've played, when you actually need to do that. You will if you play this game, but you don't need to. The rest of it though. The way the enemies just explode when hit with a grenade. I've seen that kind of thing in games before and it felt really campy and unreal. In this game though, it feels like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, except with aliens coming up from out of the ground. If you're trying to decide whether to get this game or not, and your stomach isn't queasy in the least, cause I'll tell you I've seen and done things in this game that make me churn a little bit, get this game. Even if you don't have a 360. Get it in preperation for getting a 360. You want to, trust me.
Oh, and the last game I tried was called Enchanted Arm. It looked alright until I was forced to put up with an ambitiously gay character for the first hour of the game I played. Look, you put a gay character in your game, that's fine. They've been in games before. At least one in a Final Fantasy and plenty I've thought might be. But when you do everything you can to shove down the players throat that yes, this character is gay. Flamingly. This is why I say ambitiously gay. It was just wrong. Much too much.
Beside all of this, the best game I have played for the Xbox 360 so far is Geometry Wars. It's one of the Live Arcade games. Costs about 5 dollars and is more than worth it. No way to describe the game. If I tried you'd probably think it sounded boring. You just gotta play it. If you've got the system and haven't tried it yet, download the demo. Trust me.
That's it from me tonight. Will try to update more often from now on. Maybe get someone to read it someday.
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