What an awesome day! Of course, it's never boring hanging out with icklefirsties, vahlere, and Antimere. What started as simple plans for early lunch and a peek at March of the Penguins turned into an all-day affair. March of the Penguins, by the way, is gorgeous and sad. Morgan Freeman does a magnificent job narrating---no surprises there---but there is a limit to the number of times one can hear the words "but not all will survive". Overall, I suppose it could have been presented more savagely , but its depiction of nature at the edge of the world is a fine balance between the beautiful and the brutal.

A quick sniff past Borders yielded the newest issue of Under The Radar, featuring a huge article on the Tears and a 10-years-on retrospective of the 90's Britpop movement. This volume was made for me. It even features a great little article on Menswe@r and a full page on Sleeper, but it doesn't delve too heavily into lesser-known acts or the hangers-on and wannabes. Still a delicious piece, and of course it makes great mention of the usual suspects: Blur, Oasis, Elastica, Pulp, etc. It's a pretty long piece, but I've seen not one single sigh about Echobelly, my personal Britpop heroes. I won't let it piss me off too much though. Is the time for full-on Britpop nostalgia now?

We trekked back to Mongolia (or Lewisville, I'm not sure there's much of a difference for someone who keeps mostly to the central regions of Dallas) and met up with Antimere. More Haunting Ground shock and terror (sorry, Kate, but thanks for being a sport and indulging us), then dinner, another trip to the bookstore (albeit a different one, natch), and back to Antimere's once more for my (at last!) first taste of Katamari Damacy. I want a PS2 even more now. I have put it off for too long, really, and if I wait too much longer I will have more games to catch up on than is humanly possible.

Back home again, and now I'm wired from too much caffeine and my insane addiction to RE4. Yes, yes, I am playing it again, again, again. But the Pro mode calls to me, and I must finish it to feel the satisfaction of completing such a daunting task. That, and there's not much else left to play on the Gamecube (at least until the new Zelda is released).