Kalamaf Drackonsbane

The wife rolls her eyes when I go moving things around in the living room, but with this new TV I want to get a new stand so I can get rid of this big honking entertainment unit that surrounded the old TV. Good thing I don’t have rheumatoid arthritis or anything cause moving all this crap around is hard work. The stuff is large and fairly heavy, but a nice TV stand with 6 compartments would be a perfect replacement and make the room look so much better.

So my new TV finally arrived a few days ago but you must know by now how upset I am that I’ve waited for more than 1.5 months for it. I ordered it on Boxing Day and had to spend hours hunting it down with Future Shop and when they finally made the arrangements they gave me the wrong dates and didn’t respond to my email to try and confirm it. They didn’t set it up like they promised, charged my credit card before shipping it and never responded to my emails or calls. I had to keep calling them for more info. I won’t be buying any electronics from Future Shop anymore, my money is going to Best Buy from now on. Yes I know they own Future Shop but I hear much better things about their service compared to FS.

So after waiting over a month and making several phone calls, I finally tracked down the number for Fuckershop’s head office. I called and talked to someone who said that they’d pass it on to the appropriate department and I’d hear back within 4 hours. And someone actually did call! To say the same thing I’ve been hearing over and over. Try Orange NJ invisalign, it’s great. I’m kidding of course, he told me that he was sending the case up to the person in charge of the Home Delivery Service and I should be hearing back within 24 hours.

So the next day I got an email saying that they’ve located my TV and it’s on its way to Halifax and will arrive there on Monday Feb. 5. I should be receiving it Tuesday Feb. 6. I have no idea what calender they are using because Mon/Tues is Feb. 1st and 2nd. so I hope it’s this week and not next, this has dragged on long enough. They also are refunding the cost of the shipping to compensate me for all the trouble and delays. I think I deserve more than that, but I’ll take what I can get.

Someone suggested a while back that I should order in a few boxes of hockey cards to sell in my store, so I finally got around to doing that. It’s been slow starting, but today we sold about half a box which is very nice to see and I hope it happens more often. I know as much about hockey as I do about jobs in Philadelphia, basically nothing, but I do know profits when I see them and the markup on cards is better than on computer parts, so I’m all for it!

On my 5th call to Fuckershop my ‘problem’ with my order was escalated a 3rd time. What does that even mean anyway? Escalated to what? The guy says “This time we should hear something because I’m going to be very description in my report to show just how long this has been going on and how long you’ve been waiting for an answer.” Wow. Thanks guy! That’s instills so much more confidence in me regarding the support process going on at Fuckershop!

I bet I could take that Orlando vacation I’ve been planning, come back 3 weeks later and STILL not have my new TV. Oh and get this, he says if I haven’t heard back by Monday that he will change the delivery escalation to a credit escalation so I can get my money back. Fat lot of good that will do though since it was paid mostly by gift cards, I can’t just take my money elsewhere. And now there’s also no chance of getting such a good deal like they had during boxing day. A 52″ LCD for $1199? Doubt that’ll happen again until next Christmas. Yay for me, I get to just keep on waiting!

New from the guys who will eventually bring you Duality ZF comes the hot newretro shoot ‘em up ‘Decimation X’. It’s available to purchase on the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace for the whopping price of 80 MS points, that’s roughly $1. It’s definitely worth the buck especially for people wanting a kick of nostalgia. So instead of googling random words like argireline you should fire up the 360 and spend some time blasting aliens in this suped up Space Invaders on crack Indie game. Grab some friends for 4 player bullet hell madness!

You can’t throw a dead cat in my store without hitting a zombie movie these days, they’re everywhere! Zombieland, Carriers, Zombie Strippers (rotten tits anyone?) no amount of face cream can help those poor gals out. I haven’t had a chance to watch any of the recent ones yet, having a 6 yr old girl in the house puts quite a damper on the horror movie watchin’ time. I think the last zombie flick I watched was 28 Weeks Later, and that’s been out on DVD for quite some time now! Zombie games on the other hand.. well, actually those are a dime a dozen now too but at least I do find time to play a bit when the kid gone to bed.

Be warned, this post contains lots of bad words!

God damn this shit is getting on my nerves. Much more of this and I’ll be needing a dose of anti wrinkle treatment to get rid of stress lines. And I’m generally a stress free kind of guy!

I called those fuckers at Futureshop, again, to see where my order is. I got the same answers as last time.. ‘oh let me look into that’, ’strange I don’t understand why it’s taking so long’, blah blah blah fucking bullshit. I mentioned again how my order status says “successfully shipped” but yet they told me on the phone that the order is still sitting in their warehouse. That doesn’t make sense. So the girl on the phone told me that since I’m in a remote area and need it sent by ’special delivery’, my order has been shipped from their warehouse to the delivery company’s warehouse. Thus the ’successfully shipped’ tag.

Ok, that’s fine, I thought to myself. And I asked, so who exactly is this delivery company that has my stuff? What’s taking so long? Are they waiting until more people from my ‘remote’ area place orders so they can do us all at once? “No” she assured me, it doesn’t work like that. Then she looked and said to me something like “the area on here that should have the delivery company name is blank”. So they have no idea WHO has my stuff! Unbelievable!

Now my problem has been re-escalated to their shipping department to try and find out what’s going on and I should hear back in 24 to 48 hours. Lovely.

Ever since I first saw the cover of Darksiders I’ve wanted to play it. I had no idea what the game was about, I hadn’t seen any screenshots, I didn’t even know what style the game was. RPG? Action? Hack & slash? Didn’t matter, the cover art was just really cool.

But, I’m spoiled since I own my own used game store and I just can’t pay full price for games any more because of it. Luckily I didn’t have to hold out for long as someone traded in a copy for PS3 a couple of days ago and I promptly brought it home to try it out.

So far, it’s good. The graphics are amazing, the gameplay is smooth and the sound is awesome. It’s hack & slash through and through and so far it’s everything I had hoped Brutal Legend would be. Don’t get me wrong, Brutal Legend is good and fun, but the RTS portions of it kinda suck.

Anyway, you play as War, one of the four horsemen, and once that sword starts swinging no amount of Medicare supplements are going to save the poor bastards on the business end of it. Demons and angels alike will fall to your blade as you try to find the ones responsible for setting you up and starting a war between heaven & hell that results in the extermination of man-kind.

To go along with my new TV (some day, if it ever shows up, damn you Futureshop!) I had a chance to pick up a Bravia 5.1 system. 850 watts, smaller speakers than my current setup but damn did it sound nice. And it’ll take up less room, especially the sub which is about half the size of my current one and doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall for power. If the wife keeps rolling her eyes everytime I rearrange the living room she’s gonna need some serious wrinkle serum for her forehead! The only downside with this type of surround system is that it only has a single optical input, but since the TV has several inputs and most of my stuff will be connected by HDMI it’ll be ok. The TV will take whatever sound I plug into it and send it all out through it’s single optical output, so all in all I think this new setup will be perfect. It also comes with an auto-calibration mic that will configure itself for optimum sound, can’t wait to try that out.

I really need to get my butt in gear and finish off more of these games I’ve had on the shelf for months on end. I last played Ghostbusters in Sept. 09 and after trying a boss a few times I shut it off and went to bed. This morning I finally got around to playing it again, fought that boss a couple more times and then beat him on the 3rd. Turns out it was the final boss of the game! Still have a bunch of achievements to get if I feel like it, all of the online ones of course and now it will probably be hard to find online games available but I’ll try just for the fun of it, hope the lag isn’t as bad as when the game first came out, could hardly hit anything back then.

Some of the weapons are pretty good but I find the stasis gun and the first communion invitations shooter Meson Collider are the least useful. They both overheat so fast and my aim kinda sucks since I haven’t played the game in so long. Oh well, here’s to blowing shit up!

So here we are the 16th of January. My TV has been marked as “Successfully shipped” since the end of December. And where do you suppose my TV currently is? According to customer support, it’s still IN THEIR DAMN WAREHOUSE!! I can understand that the holiday’s may have caused some delays in shipping, but 3 weeks and it hasn’t even left the building?! It’s not like I ordered Ferrari parts from Italy! I ordered a lower-end TV from a large retail chain. C’mon already, I want my big shiny new TV!

So I did a bit of shopping around and I’ve found a TV stand I like. It’s more than I was planning to spend, even though it’s currently half price. These things have gotten expensive over the last few years! It’s pretty slick looking though with glass shelves, metal posts and a mounting bracket at the back so I don’t have to worry about the TV getting bumped and falling face first onto the floor. Having a 6 year old in the house makes for worrying times when it comes to new electronics. She’s a good kid though, but accidents can and do happen!

Woot! Today I had a nice little check in the mail, just shy of $2000. It was a rebate for insurance premiums I had paid over the last 15 years for a cancer policy. It was one of their selling points when I took the policy, if I don’t make any claims on it in 15 years I get back all the premiums I paid in, so as of last October my 15 year period was up and a fresh 15 years started. Today my check finally arrived! Since it’s lower than a typical life insurance rate at only around $120 a year it wasn’t a big drain on my wallet but it makes for a nice lump sum now. Time to go pay some bills and maybe treat myself to a little something extra. A new TV stand for that new LCD perhaps!