Anyway the 3D previews before the movie were awesome. Like, everything in the entire previews was in 3D. Very cool technology and I understand why we’re moving that direction. However, the 3D effects in The Last Airbender were so minimal, I felt cheated. Only a few effects were really noticeable – those zoom-ins of the fire-nation ships. That’s about it. Everything else was so slight in the 3D technology the effect was inconsequential. That was disappointing.

I’m an optimist and try to see the good in everything. There was good in this movie:

* I liked the boy they picked for Aang, even though I thought he should have been Asian. I also liked Katara…I think they did a good job of picking her. The guy they picked for Sokka was ok, but not great.

* I liked the landscape shots – the air temples, the water villages and ic, the detailing of interiors.

* General Iroh – not a good fit – they should have picked an elderly, stocky Chinese man.  However, the actor did a good job of making you accept him and like him, even though he wasn’t a good fit for the role.

* The Princess Yue part was done well enough. I liked that.

The things I didn’t like:

* Where was the humor? Aang was too serious. Where’s his playfulness? All this playfulness balanced the seriousness of the situation in the series. The movie missed this.

* OK I agree that Aang and Iroh were not pronounced correctly in the animation. Why did you try to force the “correct” pronunciation now? That makes it really confusing for everyone that doesn’t know how these names are pronounced.  A good director wouldn’t have forced the change on that.

* I feel that the director wanted to get his South East Asian Indian brothers in some film. I felt this also was pushed on us. Zuko is East Asian, man. So was the entire fire nation. None of these folks “fit”…not even Zuko.

* Monk Gyotsu was black?! Come on…

* They changed how things developed – i.e. how they found Aang wasn’t done correctly. How Commander Zhao was killed – not correct.  Aang never became the water beast controlling the water (which subsequently killed Zhao). Not in movie.

* They referenced Katara and Sokka’s mom were taken by the fire nation. What happened to her being killed? It’s not like the whole movie would have to be re-arranged to tell that. Don’t change the story!

* The fire nation ransacked the library? What were they thinking…Ugh. A whole storyline slashed to pieces.

There were more things I didn’t like about this movie than I did like. I can see how everyone hated it – especially the fans. However, the things I did like made it enough so that I was happy to go see the movie. That being said, can we scrap that movie and start all over again, with a new director, producer, and only keep a few of these actors? Movie producers really need to stop making movies that alienate fans. My family won’t want to see the second and third movies (even if they get far enough to make them). We’ll go back to our animated show. Thanks anyway.

I’m going to have another guest article on themes4bb posted this week. It’ll be on Evernote for the BlackBerry.

I have a lot of current things to do:

• Fix all the Sunnypad subpages
• Build up this MomGamers site
• Write regular articles for themes4bb

Some other things in the future:

• Make a BlackBerry theme (I want a custom one for my Bold)
• Write an industry book on the Help Desk
• Do some stylesheets for Fastmail.FM’s new interface

Chad from themes4bb suggested I use CaptureIt. CaptureIt is a (free!) great little tool- takes screenshots right from your menu and dumps them into your photo directory. It’s perfect! However, there was no menu seletion inside Radio Companion. So I had to find another method.

Researching takes time! I dug awhile and found BBScreenShooter. Also free! One needs to go to a bit of effort to find a Javaloader.exe file in order to get it to work. I went to the RIM site as suggested but couldn’t find the tool – it’s probably hidden in the Developer’s kit which I didn’t feel like downloading. I found a link to the file on CrackBerry and loaded it into the BBScreenShooter directory. Voilà! Great screenshot of the radio screen.

It took me a few short moments to set up my directories and to make sure I got the program assigning file names correctly. A wonderful little program.

I’m having good and bad feelings about leaving. I sent all my friends in-game mail to let them know. Here’s what it said:

~*~*~*~

Hey there!

I’ve not been around in awhile. It’s been a busy summer. I may be leaving WoW for an extended period – my sub is up in 3 weeks and I’ve had no work for over a year. I wanted to let you know. When/if I come back I look forward to playing with you again!

Please keep in touch with me.  Send me an email. You can visit my site – I’m on Twitter too.

Lisa – @gankaku on Twitter
mail: gankaku at fastmail dot fm
Website: sunnypad.com

~*~*~*~

For the guild masters, I’ve sent a similar message, letting them know I’ll be gone for an extended period and I hope they won’t kick me out of the guild while I’m gone, but understanding if they do. I mean, I might not come back. Yeah, there’s nothing more lonely than logging onto a character, finding out you’re out of a guild full of folks you used to laugh and chat with daily.  You rarely friend them all because well, they’re in your guild and your friend list can only take so many entries.

So, here’s how I’m feeling right now about my leaving.

The bad feelings:

• I have several good friends on WoW whom I can only find there. We’ve gotten to know each other and chat about our lives. Even if I don’t want to play a particular day, I can check in and see who’s on and chat. I’ve sent them my email but I don’t particularly see any of them keeping in touch with me that way much.
• WoW’s been a good distraction for me through the time I’ve been out of work. I won’t have that particular social/gaming distraction anymore.
• I’ll miss my characters, with all their abilities, mounts, pets, crafting, and hanging out in the city after a day’s leveling.
• I’ll miss the ones I’ve not started yet – sitting there, named and waiting.
• I made a new character yesterday on Ner’zhul so that I could chat with my long-time friend, who moved one of his characters over from Gurubashi.  His hunter there was Elrushbo, but he got an alliance change when he moved from Guru. He put Elrushbo on the Alli side, and named him Rodi. I was there for the rebirth. His pet Elb was still with him.  It was a poignant moment, especially since I don’t know if I’ll be coming back. Elrushbo/Rodi is only at level 70 and ZombieLisa and he played together nearly all the way to 70. *sigh*

• I will miss my other friends on other servers. Kildoor and Hrantius on Fizzcrank. Mesoevil on Gurubashi. Quasievil on Gurubashi (who had his account hacked and I no longer see his characters – maybe he deleted them!) I still have contact outside WoW with my ex-coworkers so I’m happy about that.

The good feelings:

• I can play some other games I’ve been looking forward to playing: getting back into Oblivion and checking out some of the new user mods, trying Morrowind, finishing my Zelda DS game my son’s been bugging me to finish, playing with my son more on the Wii.
• More time for exercise. Over the summer I exercised more when I wasn’t playing WoW. Good for me!
• I’m working on a small venture (more to come later), on this website, and guest blogging for themes4bb.com
• I’ve had more time to catch up on tech news and social networking while not on WoW.
• Job hunting will be top of the list and if I can start bringing income in again, that will be a great thing!

Next time I’ll post about what I liked and didn’t like about WoW. I’ll be able to look at the “didn’t like” list when I’m feeling sad about not being able to play.

I’ll be converting these pages eventually; and fixing the front page; adding back AdSense and installing some widgets.

Still wondering what to do with my haiku – dedicate a page to it, or just blog some here and categorize them as haiku. Hmmm….

I wanted this site to look neater, cleaner, and more organized. WordPress will allow me to post entries, of course, but also I can keep some static pages for the downloads that I keep on the site for folks.

Speaking of the downloads and other pages, you may still access the site’s pages if you have bookmarked the urls to those pages. If you have bookmarked the page for my Kyodai downloads, for example, you can still get to that page via that url. I will slowly be converting the entire site to be accessible from these WordPress pages. Until then, if you don’t have the bookmarked pages, and end up here on the main page looking for anything, please send me an email at this website name @gmail.com, let me know what you’re looking for and I’ll send you the link.

It’s my goal to have a fresher looking site that is more readily updated. Enjoy!