I forgot to check for the May video game play times before it was too deep into June, so I lost my FFX playtime.  The others are pretty accurate.

Final Fantasy X - finished the game.  Review here.

Portal 2 (3 hrs) - finished multi-player game with Dan.  That game is AWESOME.  I was only bummed that the puzzles never truly got hard.  There were only 3 (max!) that left Dan and I scratching out heads for a long time.  Perhaps they wanted to make sure everyone finished the story events and so they didn’t make it hard.  Or maybe they had as hard a thinking with four portals as we did when we were first getting used to it.  I can’t wait for the DLC as I hope we get some more challenges.  Heck, we didn’t even have any white gel in the multi-player games.

Entirely separately from my recent reintroduction into the traditional comic world, I’ve been into graphic novels, as you’ve probably read on this blog.  An article I read on Cracked brought The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LoEG) back into my consciousness and then I read the [non-comic] books The Map of Time and Dracula.  So I was primed for another story that takes its literary cues from the Victorian Age.  The only other Moore books I’d read are Watchmen and The Killing Joke.  I enjoyed them both and so I looked forward to this one.

Start s off with Towel Day, in memory of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and ends with a bike ride on the BWI trail.

note: this was written on 1 June then put into my blog queue

I don’t remember exactly what made me decide to check out some new comics, but I think it was a mix of inventorying my comics and clicking over to the Whiskey Media site, Comic Vine.  In the reviews for May’s comics, two books sounded interesting: FF and Gotham City Sirens.  I went to my local comic book shop, Comics to Astonish, and also ended up picking up a bunch of issues from the old Harley Quinn book.  As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was always into Marvel so I surprisingly chose to read Gotham City Sirens (GCS) as my first super hero comic since 1997.

Here’s today’ Top 200 Photo.

photo #104 is:

Of all the children born in the Year of the Pig, I’ve seen Nam the most. He only lives two houses over and, until he was old enough for daycare, Danielle’s mom took care of him every day. This photo is from before he was old enough to be scared of me and my photography. It’s one of my favorite photos in which he is the subject. I think it’s because we always see babies as innocent and he looks so sly in this photo.

Conceptual photo for today’s Top 200 Photos.

photo #105 is:

In October of 2005 I was a on real surrealist bent. This photo is one of the results. I know some of the others will also appear on this list.

A car-related Top 200 Photo

photo #106 is:

My parents’ neighbor likes to build cars from the scratch. Of course, he doesn’t build the frame, but he buys it separate from the engine, seats, etc. He explained it to me once but I think it stems from some US regulations on what your car can be capable of and how emissions regulations are affected by custom-built cars vs dealer-bought cars.

Staying at Cornell and adding a bit of celebrity for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #107 is:

Bill Nye got his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University. In an example of the awesome professors you can have at Cornell - one of his professors was Carl Sagan! Cornell has a program that invites alumni to come back once a semester and teach a class for a day. Here Bill Nye was teaching my Physics 213 class. My wife had alumni and former attorney general Janet Reno teach one of her classes. Anyway, I knew Bil Nye both from his appearances at the end of the animated Back to the Future show and from his show Bill Nye the Science guy, which I used to watch religiously.

And we bounce right back to Cornell for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #108 is:

It’s a shame that we go to school in the winter instead of the summer. I know it has to do with our rural past and having to help out in the farm, but it’s extra annoying at Cornell. Summer is really the best time to be there. It’s so pleasant and awesome. The campus is huge and has lots of greenery and it just feel so much better to be there during the summer. I think Cornell should be the first northern university to buck the trend and have school during the summer and no school during the winter.

Back to England for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #109 is:

Since I was going to the middle of England for work, I decided to fly into Manchester instead of the insane Heathrow in London. Then I just took the train to my final destination. It was great. I snuck in a five minute nap here and there, but mostly I looked at the British countryside. This photo is from the suburbs of Manchester and it reminds me a lot of the way Brooklyn is laid out.