Christmas is around the corner, and the mornings are getting colder, and I love sitting on that cold hard cement in the morning waiting for the dog to shit.

Vacation week is this week from work, and I’ve spent most of today catching up on weekend anime, and not much else. All of the gifts are wrapped, couple more to obtain for family, got most of the cleaning done yesterday so there wasn’t much to do this week. We’re looking to do another New Year’s party this year I think, I’ve yet to flesh out the details though.

I’m a bit disappointed at The Next Iron Chef on Food Network. Iron Chef has always been one of my favorite shows, ever since FN had the original Japanese episodes on back in 2005 or so. When they brought it to America and put Alton Brown as host, it just got better and better. The Iron Chefs of the time, Flay, Cora, Batali, and Morimoto, weren’t my favorite of the lot, especially Flay, but Morimoto was a carry-over from the original and Alton really made the show stand out even if you couldn’t tell what was going on. As they added new talent in, through seasons of The Next Iron Chef, Symon, Forgione, and Garces came in and Cora and Batali went out. I haven’t seen many of the newer episodes after Forgione and Garces joined, and I missed those NIC seasons, but when they announced the fourth season of NIC would feature “super chefs”, personalities and talent that rival that of the original Iron Chefs, Japanese and American, I thought it would be damn fun to watch, especially because one of my favorite personalities, Robert Irvine, was competing. Now I’ll be fair, I didn’t expect him to win, but I expected him to go a lot farther in the competition than he did. If you’ve seen him on Dinner: Impossible or Restaurant: Impossible, he is like MacGuyver in the kitchen, it’s incredible. There was a lot of other excellent talent there though, from Alex Guarnaschelli to Marcus Samuelsson, and Geoffrey Zakarian to Anne Burrell. Many times, Alton and the judges warned the contestants, and in turn the audience, that unlike previous seasons, where some flaws could be overlooked, with chefs of this fame and skill, even something as small as seasoning could mean winning or losing a match. Unfortunately, and I think Alton discovered this late in the season, no one appreciated or enjoyed “Darth Zakarian’s” mock of the art, which in my opinion, started the second episode, where he pretty much disregarded the entire challenge theme and still slid by, where they dinged Irvine and he subsequently lost. He proceeded to mock the game for the next couple episodes until finally, he put out really good showings in the final episodes, leading to his overall win of the series. It’s worth noting that I have nothing personal against the man, I think he is an excellent chef and he’s always been especially good on Chopped, but I just did not understand the judging in this season, because it seemed like Micheal Symon and Judy Joo knew what was what, but Simon Majumdar had to go and muck it up for everyone involved, even to the point where you could see Symon object, and just facepalm away. In the end, I really think it should have been Guarnaschelli, Falkner, or MacMillan, because it’s not just about skill, it’s about personality, and Zakarian just doesn’t have the personality I think really fits ICA.

I almost ended up having to reformat my computer this week after I logged on to Steam to play Borderlands for 10 minutes while I was waiting for something on Saturday. When I got in the game, I could not move with the WASD keys, but I could use others. A few months back, I tried out a virtual controller driver to get my PS3 controller emulating a 360 controller for the game, to see how it was with a controller. I didn’t think the game would still think there is a controller still active if it wasn’t plugged in. I wrestled with the thing for a couple hours, uninstalling the software and its drivers, everything else related to it, restarting, and everything. Finally later in the evening I uninstalled one other random piece of software, set some ini variables, and tried again, and it worked. Don’t know exactly what I did, but it worked. I also somehow managed to fix the issue with Aero switching back on after closing PSP9 that had been eluding me for about a year. Not sure what I did. So minor victories.

I somehow managed to get my girlfriend interested in watching the PATV DVDs with me, which we completed the other night. It was the night after I finished all of the archive comics for PVP, which I used to read back in 2002-2003, but stopped at some point, always meant to go back and catch up, and never did. It’s remarkable how much art styles change over time, but PVP is one that I think actually manages to still be good despite many years passing. You tend to read into what was relevant in that time frame, and surprisingly there were a lot of things that he referenced in the early 2000s that I didn’t remember being relevant then, but you learn something new. Unlike CAD, which is complete garbage, Kurtz manages to execute a comic which merries gaming and geek interests with an internal story that doesn’t try to pretend that its something it isn’t. Still, anyone who bothered to do a comic on one of my favorite games during my high school years deserves a pizza trophy.

2012? Well, assuming we don’t all die from the end of the world, there are quite a lot of things to do in the new year. I’m sure I’ll care to write more about that before Jan. 1st.

For now, Steam Holiday Sale is on. Brace Yourselves. My Wallet is Coming.