sorry goth kids, but i wanted to post over you. i kept stan, though, because he looks cool. anyway, jessica and i were discussing south park last night and she said that butters is now her favorite character because he reminds her of stuff she went through. i've liked him ever since he started getting a better role in the show. he became my favorite way early on, and i'd have to agree, butters reminds me of myself quite a bit. "i made a promise and i keep my promises....oh man, i'm a dork," he says in one episode after realizing he was the only person to show up at something (i can't remember the exact text, but i've been in that situation at least a couple of times). anyway, enough about south park...i wanted to type about some other stuff.

i played mario kart: double dash for the first time last night. i have to say, right off the bat, that the game looks nice. play-wise, it's fun. the first game was a 3-for-all battle that, while still particularly fun, was hard to see on a small television. after that was a 3 vs. race, and it was good, too. the cooler feature, however, is the cooperative option. robbie and i teamed up to drive a single kart in the races. i started off as the driver and he was the bombadier/navigator. except not much navigation was happening due to a) me not driving well and b) both of us not understanding the controls. apparently in the cooperative mode, if you know what you're doing, you can do a speed boost sometime during a power slide and blue sparks will appear. this is mainly up to the skill of the bombadier and, considering last night was the first time i'd played it, neither i nor robbie could pull it off.

as i'm going through my morning site-cullings, i just realized that there are going to be a lot of links coming up in a short time...like the next couple of paragraphs. first off, yesterday i visited orson scott card's website because i started xenocide. once again, it started off somewhat slow, like speaker..., but it's now getting into the interesting parts of the story. i like it so far. anyway, i had forgotten about a section on his site called Uncle Orson's Writing Class where he answers questions about writing and covers topics such as style, characters, dialogue, beginning a story, plagiarism/influence, if you need an agent, etc. i read some of it yesterday and found it pretty interesting.

here's a cool page regarding zelda. it's a translated version of a manga depicting the history of hyrule. i haven't read any of them yet, but it looks really nice. to further this, i came across an article on slashdot talking about how "nerdness" has become popular with video games gaining ground, movies being based on scifi and comics, etc. in this article, however, was a reply with a link to the hierarchy of geekness. it's worth a laugh.

so that's it for today. out.