I slept too long and woke up with a headache that hasn’t gone away.

Smashers from Illinois (Big C, infernohit, Princess Aura, and others) were over last night for a tournament today that I couldn’t/didn’t really feel like going to. Ugh, I felt so reclusive because I HAD to work on homework today and my sleeping schedule isn’t inclined to staying up late…but apparently it has gotten relatively used to people smashing ’til 4 AM while I sleep.

College football hasn’t been even competitive today and not worth watching (unless you count the ridiculous Cal Poly/Wisconsin game…how does a kicker miss THREE EXTRA POINTS). The “game of the year” isn’t looking too close after the first quarter, either.

I have video shooting ALL DAY tomorrow. I mean, it should be interesting and I am PRAYING we get all of the shooting done for both projects being due 12/9 (among other shit for other classes), but I don’t have a weekend anymore because of it. Stupid Thanksgiving.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, it will be great and all, but I have a lot to get straightened out before I leave. I’m worrying about registering for classes, how it will all fit in, the requirements I’m filling in, everything. And I have a stupid situation that needs to be resolved regarding declaring for my major. That’s a rant for another time. Basically, time is running out before I REALLY WANT TO GO HOME FOR BREAK and I need to get it off my mind.

I have to apparently have my Dad come out to Ann Arbor sometime to co-sign a lease for another apartment for next year. It pisses me off that on-campus housing has to be decided in November/December.

…Money. There are always money problems for any college student anywhere.

I need a blanket. It’s really cold out and I need to just lie under a thick comforter.

This thread put me in a bad mood. I don’t care if it will get you laid, but WTF waste of bandwidth.

And to top it all off, we NEED to decide Show Me Your News stuff for next weekend, but Panda’s at the aforementioned tournament and my schedule isn’t looking too friendly tomorrow.

Let’s just leave it at a great big DAMMIT.

As for a Youtube video, the Verizon Blackberry Storm commercials have been playing all day long on ABC. Guess the voice actor!

FIRST OFF, a Little Saw may have been born yesterday. The SMYN community wishes Sugarpoulty and TheBuzzSaw well on the birth of their first child, a girl. Although I haven’t heard yet if the baby was actually born yesterday, I’m sure all went smoothly and that the happy couple is deservedly relaxing. You two will be wonderful parents!

While Buzz was waiting in the hospital with its gimpy internet restrictions, I noted that if in fact the baby was born today (the 19th), her journey towards being gamer was starting off on the right foot. The Wii turned two years old yesterday and Half-Life became a decade old. A good day to be born as a gamer, indeed.

Now, the New Xbox Experience (NXE) launched yesterday…and it’s…meh? Haven’t tried the feature of downloading a game to your harddrive yet – I’m sure it works really well, although it’s supposedly slower if you load Halo 3 from a harddrive, so don’t do that! Netflix isn’t AS wonderful as originally promised – you can only play movies/TV shows on your 360 that you can directly stream on your computer if you have a Netflix account. In fact, this selection of titles that can be added to your “Instant Queue” is rather limited, but you can obviously still do the whole DVD-through-the-mail thing on top of it all. We’ll see what happens after the two week free trial, it’s at least worth THAT to check it out.

Now, avatars…Mii, yes. A little new, yes. Pretty useless? …Yes. It helps to give gamers a “face,” but the overall use of avatars appear to be rather limited. Maybe they’ll expand on it more in the future, but it’s just this tacky addition at the moment. Nintendo definitely implemented their Mii system far more from the get-go than Microsoft has with their Avatar system.

If you want to see your friend’s avatar, assuming they’ve made one, it’s pretty simple. You just have to know their gamertag, and follow this link, replacing GAMERTAG with well…their gamertag.

So who are these fine-looking individuals?

Now it’s off to finishing a script for our final German Film project. I’m partnered with the only other film student in the class and we’re supposed to make an “artsy” film. So we’re going to write something about suicide, self-hatred, and screw with the sense of time in the film. It’s going to be pretty amazing compared to everyone else’s project, considering they don’t really know what they’re doing when it comes to making videos. I’ll see if I can post the script here somewhere when I finish it so you can be depressed. Or something.

Tonight is Survivor. Go watch it – 8 PM ET on CBS! And our comments as we watch it on Stickam probably around 10 PM ET…ish. I say Randy gets the boot…which is sad, because he brings so much…bitterness to the show?

I’ll try to add some more blogs this weekend, detailing some of my video shooting experiences. After all, today is a crapton of class, tomorrow we finalize my production video idea (which will be basically a portrait of sound in the world), Saturday we SHOOT said video idea, and Sunday we shoot the German film. Damn, what a crazy weekend…

First off, before I get into the point, NXE launches tomorrow for the 360. Impressions on it tomorrow.

Now, for those of you outside of America, it might be best to disregard this, but we’ll see if it makes any sense. But it’s time to give my opinion on something I find very perplexing in college football in the state of Michigan.

The top few teams in the Big Ten conference – Penn State, Ohio State, and Michigan State – all have one loss in the division with one game left to play in the season. The team that wins the division, tiebreakers included, goes to the Rose Bowl game, which is one of the top four games to play in after the season, not counting the national championship game. These four games are called the BCS bowls and they carry a lot of prestige in college football.

The University of Michigan has had an abysmal season. It’s true, it’s been very difficult to watch our team at times. On Saturday, the end the year with the school’s main rival Ohio State. OSU is a very strong team again this year and we haven’t beaten them since 2003. While Michigan State is a significant rival, being in-state and all, Ohio State is the major game on the calendar and the U-M/OSU rivalry has been ranked as one of the top rivalries in ALL OF SPORTS.

Michigan State hates U-M’s guts. They are often seen as the “second banana” and it really bothers them. However, they have had a strong year and their coach Mark D’Antonio deserves all the credit in the world. He has brought respect back to their football program and they are now focused on beating Penn State in the last game of the season.

So here’s how things can break down:
MSU at PSU
and
U-M at OSU

If PSU beats MSU, they go to the Rose Bowl automatically.
If MSU beats PSU (would be a significant upset), a couple situations are possible:
– If OSU beats U-M, OSU and MSU are co-champions, but OSU has the tiebreaker because of their matchup earlier in the year in which OSU put the beatdown on MSU.
– If U-M beats OSU (highly unlikely), MSU GOES TO THE ROSE BOWL as Big Ten champions, their first BCS bowl ever.

Now, this news story broke today.

I totally understand Mark D’Antonio wanting to focus his attention on his game and controlling his own destiny, but you could just STAY NEUTRAL in the U-M/OSU matchup. I also can understand NOT rooting for hated rival Michigan, but to actually say “Go Bucks,” referring to Ohio State? This means that Michigan State’s coach is ROOTING TO NOT GO TO THE ROSE BOWL.

Does this make any sense? For a coach to make a decision that not only goes against the best wishes of his program, but to put it on the fact that “ohhhh, my friends and family will disown meeee”? It’s a selfish, “dick” move which put what he wants in front of the university’s goals. Mark D’Antonio has done some great things for Michigan State University, but WOW, this is not even CLOSE to one of them.

Meanwhile, it will likely be a tough Saturday to swallow as a Wolverine student. Yeesh.

Many thanks to Buzz, our wonderful webmaster, for getting this up and running.

I guess I’ll be most my ramblings here over time. It’s a Youko blog. Cool? I thought so.

So what’s this one about? Ummm…podcasting with Egoraptor and TomaMoto was pretty damn cool. I don’t know if internet-idol is too much of a stretch for how I perceive Ego, but wow, that was a thrill. It was almost intimidating and I didn’t think interviewing him would be so difficult. I guess people say I did well, but I dunno, it’s gonna be one of those podcasts where I’m gonna have a very hard time listening to myself in the future. You are your own worst critic, right?

But holy shit. The intro is now TOO awesome with the line Ego recorded and Toma mixed. It is TIGHT, if you haven’t listened to it yet.

Been playing through Halo 3’s campaign with SwordHunter. I guess we’re kinda near the end, just starting the mission where you save Cortana, but DAMN, I am NOT that good at FPS games. Maybe it still takes more practice – I guess I’ve gotten better since I picked up the 360. I’m mostly still really PUMPED about the NXE on Wednesday with Netflix. WHO KNEW NETFLIX HAD THAT MANY ANIME DVDs? Like…if I want to reminisce with Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and all that old school shit and more, they have it all ON TOP of all the movies. For $8.99 a month! Wow…

So I should be watching this movie – Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Fat Years Are Over…in German). I have flag football tonight indoors at the facility where the UMich football team practices…I dunno, that was really cool back in the day, but it’s lost a lot of its luster this year. I’ll TAKE IT over playing in snow, though.

I dunno, I like doing this. We’ll see if you guys actually care enough (or see if this even exists). I’ll leave you with the scary TV spot for LIPS for the Xbox 360, which was advertised at E3 ’08. Um…yeah, all I can say is wow.