PixlBit

Good morning Pixlbit, how are you today? I know you good people are excited that it is Friday and the weekend is hours away. I spent the earlier this morning doing my usual of beating my alarm by an hour, and watching local news while reading Twitter. Exciting isn’t it? I just finished editing some photos so why not start this week’s Quick Hits!

Update on Lego Dimensions: So as of today I’ve decided to just get a couple of the Level packs and wait on the game. I’m going to gamble on that there will be a price drop on the main set. I do want to have the level sets just in case plus I do like Lego Minifigures. I’m looking at Back to the Future and Portal first, and then getting Simpsons. Simpsons I’ll wait a bit seeing that each level pack is $30 bucks. It seems like a lot but if you compare it to Disney Infinity those level packs were at the same price point, if not a couple of dollars more.

 

Chris Watches…

 

 

This season of Big Brother came to an end and the person who I thought would make it to the end came in 3^rd. I thought Vanessa has the skills to win it all, but at times she got too emotional and took the game personally. I didn’t think Steve would win because he seemed to float around. Liz was just lucky to be there. The one houseguest who came out looking like a complete ass is Austin. I didn’t care for his act inside the house, hovering around the twins, dumping his girl while in the house, always talking about his alter ego “Judas”, and being annoying. He kept with his annoying attitude when Vanessa got kicked out. I don’t know if he noticed but it’s a game, and stop being so butthurt.

Survivor: It started up again and we shall see if this one is interesting. The cast is made of former contestants and we shall see if I stick with it this year, or lose interest like I did last year.

WWE: I’ve had a lot of wrestling over the past couple of days because my Grandpa is watching a new WrestleMania everyday. He’s getting more use out of the service than I am because I only fire it up on Wednesday for NXT and the Pay Per Views. I will watch their new show, which is like Hard Knocks. That should be interesting.

 

This past week there was a shakeup in the Divas (ugh! Just call it the Women’s Division already) Division. Paige turned heel (went bad guy) on Charlotte (Ric Flair’s daughter…WOOOOOO!) and Becky and had a “pipebomb” promo where she called out everyone in the Divas Division.

I wish they would run this Division like they do in NXT where they promote quality matches. There are a handful who can wrestle, and are more interesting than some of the mid card matches they throw out on Raw.

 

Apparently The Voice is back which means I will watch a lot of the drafting of teams, but then lose interest during the battle rounds. The Voice also means that I’ll probably buy one or two songs, not like previous years where every week I bought Danielle Bradbery’s and Cassadee Pope’s singles.

 

I really liked Ivonne Acero’s version of Taylor Swift’s Style. The song of the night has to be the Evan McKeel when after he got picked the judges asked him to sing another song and his version of Overjoyed was awesome!

 

If this was the single The Voice was selling I would have bought it. Its starts around the 2 min mark

 

Chris Listens To…

I’ve been listening to random albums who have not been played in my iTunes Library. I noticed I have three different versions of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons which is odd, but not surprising considering I got over a 150 CDs from my uncle awhile back which would explain for the overlap. I’m still on my quest to listen to every song I have in my library. My goal of doing that before the year is up is going to be tough

 

I have roughly 44 days worth of stuff I haven’t listened to and rated yet. I doubt I can get to it all before January 1^st.

I’m still in the process of trying to make the perfect playlists for my iPod. Playlists where I don’t want to skip songs. It’s a lot harder than I thought but at least having the Smart Playlists speeds things up because I don’t have to search through the entire library. Instead I just see the songs that are rated four and five stars. We shall see how that goes.  

 

Chris Takes Photos

The first photo I took is in front of the local “International” (one flight to Mexico, and one flight to Canada per day) Airport.

 

I was sitting on a bench waiting for my ride while on hold with Priceline. While sitting out here I saw a girl that was at my gate who was trying to get to Wisconsin for a wedding. She was headed home which looked like her plans were cancelled. Man everyone on my flight seemed to be going to a wedding.

This next photo was taken when a late summer storm was rolling in. Nothing fancy, just your typical humid weather with a bunch of clouds starting to roll in.

 

The final picture I’m sharing this week was taken with my phone while coming back from grabbing something to eat

 

The photo doesn’t do it justice but it was a really nice sky and if I would have ran into the house to grab my camera I would have missed it.

 

Thanks for looking at my pictures!

 

Randoms:

Today Amazon is offering Prime for $67. Its still a little steep for someone like myself who doesn’t order a lot from Amazon. The music service is nice, especially at a little under $6/month, but the main question is will I get the full use out of that $67 dollars? I already have Netflix and WWE Network that I spend $20 a month on that covers my video needs, and I really don’t order a lot from Amazon. The only thing I would get some use out of is the streaming music/download songs to listen to offline, but the library seems small especially compared to what Spotify offers.

 

I went to Walmart to buy some ice cream and maybe check out the latest offerings in the Clearance Toy Section and this is what happens when I stroll through the Hot Wheels aisle looking for the Hot Wheels Homer’s Sedan, and the flying DeLorean from Back to the Future II

 

Apparently my local Walmart now stocks the new Star Wars Hot Wheels. The Target effect is starting to happen at Walmart. I go in for one thing on the way home, leave with a bunch of other things.

 

So currently GameStop is having a Buy 2 Get 1 Free on PS3/360/Wii games and my new thing is to find a bunch of $1 games I find remotely interesting and add them to my shopping cart.

 

So far I am at 20 games at $18. I need $25 for free shipping. Will I buy these games? No idea, but its fun to window-shop and then forget about it.

 

Pickups!

Games

So remember when I said I like to window-shop and then forget about it on the GameStop website? Well GameStop is currently having a 75% off PS2 games and I had a cart full of them including a couple of memory cards. After sorting through my cart I decided on a handful of games instead of just trying to stockpile a bunch of games because they were cheap. My order was split up into three different packages. The first two came from Santa Monica California and from McHenry Illinois. Oh you know the store managers packing these packages were like WTF! Anyways thanks guys/gals for the quick turnaround on these (got them a day after I ordered them)

 

The Santa Monica games came in generic Blu Ray cases

 

So I ordered two copies of Tony Hawk Project 8 by accident. I didn’t notice until I got my conformation email. The positive is that one of them actually came with the bonus disc, which is good. I’ll keep both copies because it really isn’t worth returning a game for .70 cents.

 

I’m a sucker for rhythm games and I don’t think I ever owned In The Groove.

 

Test Drive was one of the first games I beat on the original X-Box. I know I have a new rule about not buying the same game on multiple consoles but I wanted to give this version a try on the PS2.

 

The final game from this pack is Top Gun: Combat Zones

 

I miss the blue bottom discs. I wish Playstation had kept this look for all their disc games.

 

The next package I got yesterday from Dublin California (I might have actually seen this store when I stopped in Dublin on the way to San Francisco a year ago)

 

Yeah not gonna lie, I’ve wanted to give this a try for awhile now.

 

I was shocked to find that I didn’t own Jeopardy on the PS2.

 

I don’t remember anything about My Street but I tossed it in the cart, and it made the cut.

 

In total I think all those games came out to like .70 cents a game and I’m happy I have them in my library. I’m bummed they are not complete but if anything they can be placeholders in the library until I can find replacements at the swap meet.

 

Music

So the day after my cancelled trip I visited a Best Buy to check out their Android Tablets, and maybe look through their bargain bin full of CDs. I picked up a couple to add to the library

 

 

Nothing fancy here just adding to my Rap library

 

 

I’m not really a fan of Destiny’s Child but a lot of their singles remind me of certain times, and they fit into certain playlists. There are a couple of Eric B & Rakim singles on here that I do not have. The best part is this CD is the same price as the digital version on iTunes.

 

 

Michael McDonald is kind of a running joke around the house, his songs are good but it all started while watching 40-Year-Old Virgin (the Yahmo Be There scene). Now I have a copy of his singles.

 

For you folks who like freebies, Google Play has Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album as this week’s Freebie Album.

 

I’m not a big Pink Floyd fan but you can’t go wrong with one of their albums especially if it is free.

 

Toys

So yeah I bought those Star Wars Hot Wheels at my local Walmart

 

The hardest one to find was the Storm Trooper Impavido I. I think there were maybe two in the bin, so I’m glad I got there early before collector/reseller guy showed up.

 

These two cars were found at Toys R Us and Target

 

Technically the Enterprise isn’t a car, and doesn’t have Wheels (is it still a Hot Wheel?) and the Ice Cream truck is just cool looking.

 

The last car I found with my Star Wars cars

 

It’s a DeLorean but isn’t the one I wanted. I might give it to my younger cousin to play with.

 

So the final pickup is the reason why I actually ordered those PS2 games. On Tuesday on Slickdeals there was a posting about GameStop blowing out Tablets for $40 and $50 dollars. Since I was in the market for a new Android tablet and was waiting for the $50 Amazon Tablet this was a must buy because of the price. I read online that GameStop quickly sold out on these tablets but I got a confirmation an hour after putting in my order.

 

I went with the Asus MeMo 8” tablet for $50. Looking back I should have ordered a 7” too and gave it as a Christmas gift but I missed my shot. Anyways I went with the two-day shipping and it was sent from a GameStop in Grapevine Texas.

 

The design is similar to the Nexus 7 because Asus was involved in both product lines. The differences is that the charge port is on top of the tablet and the volume rocker buttons and power buttons are reversed so at times when I got to turn off the screen I turn down the volume. GameStop only offered a 16GB model so I bought a 32GB stick from Walmart the day before

 

I have the same model in my little Asus Mini Laptop. I’ll give more of my thoughts about the MeMo next week when I have some time to play it. I’m excited that I can play my Android games again especially my small library of Humble Bundle games.

 

Before I got I saw this on Reddit and wanted to share with you folks

 

 

Have a good weekend Pixlpeeps!

 

That’s all for now, more later!

-Chris

 

For my song of the week, this is a song from Empire Records.

 

This song is different from the soundtrack version because it doesn’t have Renee Zellweger singing but its still a fun song. It came up on my iPod while walking to my gate last week. This is one of my favorite soundtracks and I bought it in High School, on cassette.