There's a shocking revelation I'm about to reveal. Are you ready? I'm a consumer whore. A recovering consumer whore. As part of my effort to buy less crap I'm going to try to force myself to talk about the various junk I end up picking up. I can't very well list everything up to this point. There's not enough words. But I'll start backwards.

Alter Ego - Avatars and their creators

I picked up this small coffee-slash-art-book for $30 +tax at Books Inc. in Mountain View. The link I gave you is to Amazon for $20. What a bargain! It shows side by side a real-life person and their online MMO avatar. It's both hilarious and intriguing. On dead tree you get to progress through some genuine, current day recorded cyber history. Did you know there are nine invalids that play a single character collectively on Second Life? For $30 I wish this was a bit more meaty, but I'm impressed at the lengths to which Robbie Cooper and his crew tracked down some of these avatars (included is the guy who spent $100K on a virtual space station).

INTERLUDE: there's a Six Flags commercial on right now and it is being subsumed in my brain almost entirely by Robot Chicken's happy fun times. Haha, let's party!

Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition

I bought this for $27.01 (including tax and shipping) from Outpost.com, which was bought out by Fry's a million years ago and took 2 weeks to be delivered after it was released. If you add up that timespan that's 2 million years + 2 weeks. That's pretty cosmic. It retails for $30. Almost $3 in savings!

The game is excellent. Some of the best zombie extermination you can come by. I started playing it on PS2 but then found out a Wii version was coming. I immediately discarded that slop (well, not really, it's sitting in a box) and waited patiently for the third incarnation of this highly acclaimed freak smackulator. I finished it and have started a second game with infinite machine gun bullets and a pimp 30s zoot suit. Pucka pow pow.

LCD Syoundsystem

$15 (now $17, damn the mysterious AMZN price fluxes). It's not bad music, not great. Techno poppy dance stuff, which for me has always been great tunes to work to. Mindless, repetitive, catchy. Daft Punk is in mah house. It's two discs so it's a lot of tunes for the price. This group just came out with another album that I'm tempted to pick up.

New York Times Crosswords

$25 (now $30, got the pre-release discount). This is a great game for Nintendo DS if you like crosswords. I'm only adept up to about Weds after which my poor brain thrashes against the arcana for acrosses and downses. The interface for a game which could easily be a throw away thanks to the namebrand is really well done. After suffering through some clunker crossword games, this one is tops.

I was anticipating more disgruntled consumer-based tongue lashing, but I guess the last few things I've picked up recently aren't heading to Goodwill any time soon.

TOTAL DISCLOSURE: the links to Amazon are me trying out the "associates program" which is short to say if you actually buy any of the crap I've bought via those links I'm whoring you out for a 10% gift certificate. Sorry?

Damn, that Six Flags commercial is on again...

Tags: consumerwhorism