DanHagen.com

I went to a dance last Saturday, mainly because I wanted to talk to some friends whom I haven’t seen since school ended. The night ended up being worthwhile, as everything went the way I planned. Heck, there was even a generic, local band that played lame covers of old pop songs! How could it get any better than that?

So, somewhere along the way - although I don’t want to brag - we had a little dance competition. Simply, it involved standing in a large circle and allowing anyone at anytime to enter the middle, strutting their stuff. I eventually gave in and started doing some dance moves a la the robot. To my surprise - kind of - I received more cheers than anyone else.

Which is kind of sad.

Really, though: I have my own little robot technique which I’ve gradually been improving over time, but it’s nothing special. One thing I’ve taught myself is that I have to tense my muscles in order to truly imitate the movements of a machine, and hence I get tired very easily. This is probably not the most efficient way of doing it, but hey, it’s a start.

Either way, the fact that my dancing was more enjoyable than that of anyone else’s was somewhat funny. And cool.

Perhaps I’ll read up on how to improve.

The good people over at Joystiq have been doing their part to cover the E3 event in Santa Monica. From what I remember, E3 had brought news of retirement after the 2006 event, and yet, it is going again strongly this year. Have I missed something? How could E3 disappear and come back? Perhaps I shall never know.

Personally, I am looking forward to what Nintendo is doing. While many people still seem to rag on the Wii for it’s poor capabilities compared to the 360 and PS3, I’m hoping that games such as Metroid Prime 3 and Super Mario Galaxy manage to change that.

The Wii can undoubtedly render some impressive visuals if utilized right. It all depends on how developers choose to create their graphics engines, and whether or not they are actually building a Wii game from the ground up rather than from a port. Last generation, the Gamecube was just about on par with the Xbox, the only difference being that the GC was also a very optimized and efficient machine.

It’s a shame that so many Wii developers are lazy. On the other hand, I have faith that Retro Studios will make Metroid Prime 3 a top-notch game.

For the record, compared to the Playstation 3, the Xbox 360 has a slicker architecture and is easier to develop for. Any games company will tell you that (err, except for maybe Sony). Believe it or not, this is one of the reasons why I would feel more comfortable owning a 360 rather than a PS3.

Back to E3, though, I think this year’s event has definitely been a unique and interesting one. Kudos to Nintendo for the new fitness game, hahah.

Guess what? I’m going to let you listen to something special. As you may know, I was in my school’s advanced choir, and once my ninth grade year wound down to a close, our group recorded some favorite songs. Yes; that’s right, folks! A zip file of all the MP3 files can be downloaded right here.

I’ll admit, we were pretty rusty on some of this music during the recording process. It shows. Yes, it was hard to stay on tune in a few of the songs, but hey - I’d like to see you do any better.

It’s somewhat of a bummer that I’m not taking any music classes next year in high school. I certainly could have, and it would have reunited me with some good friends, but there are simply too many other things I want to do. Perhaps I’ll consider chorus as a junior.

Additionally, I have acquired some DVD’s of the stage production of “High School Musical”, in which I played a lead character. I’ll probably upload a video online for my friends to see (Hmm, I hope Disney doesn’t plan on suing anytime soon).

I think many of my readers would agree that I’ve been overdue for an upgrade. I pushed the limits of Blogger, publishing the files on my own server and integrating it with the rest of my site as best as possible. Don’t get me wrong; Blogger is an excellent service. In fact, strongly recommend it to those who are still fairly new to the blogosphere. As for me, I’m pretty happy with this new change.

As far as I know, I deleted most of my old posts. This isn’t much of an issue to me, frankly because I’m ashamed of my earlier writings. I’ll archive anything I still have. I realize that I actually could have imported them to WordPress, but I ended up deleting most of them anyway.

For now, I am using a pre-constructed template for my blog. I’m still experimenting with the design options of WordPress, and hopefully I’ll be able to muster up the courage to code my own layout in the near future.

Thanks for your interest, peeps. Check me later.

Update: Lucky ducks. You can access my archive at LessThanDan.BlogSpot.com.