The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

I was negligent about blogging my PAX experience last year. This year, I would like to avoid that, so before going to bed, I give you the highlights of my Friday at PAX 2009:

• Played the Batman: Arkham Asylum demo. I couldn't even hear the dialogue, and it still convinced me it's time to break down and get an Xbox 360.


• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle nostalgia tripping. The TMNT: Smash Up game was actually quite fun, to the extent I might even consider getting it, and I happily wore a TMNT: 25th anniversary pin around the rest of the day. Also, full size Turtle Bus!


• I made an impulse buy of a sanely priced, used copy of Dragon Quest VIII, but I'm not sure I'll ever actually get around to playing it.


• The following diaglouge during a discussion about cosplaying con-goers:
  
  Dave: And there was someone dressed as an Earthbound character.
  Me: Really? I don't remember seeing anything like that.
  Dave: Yeah. Some one was dressed as Paula.
  Me: Oh. Wow! That was Paula! She seems a lot less creepy now.
  
  I saw her again latter, and she actually still seemed pretty creepy.
  
  
• Race for the Galaxy is a fun table-top game.


• I participated in the attempt to set a world-record for most DSs played simultaneously in a single gathering. I made sure Suikoden got representation.


• I was sad to discover that Toho Studio lawyers finally set their guns on Seattle gaming fixture Pink Godzilla Games.


• Mario Kart 64 is still the best of the Mario Kart games.


• Skipped the Anamanaguchi concert as I wasn't very impressed with them last year. I was drafted into a game of Settlers outside the concert hall, and from what I could hear, they sounded better from the outside then they did from the inside.


• Metroid Metal rocked. I would have personally preferred something less metal, and more prog, but they gave a great high energy performance. I was actually disappointed in the crowd. If I hadn't been carrying a giant swag bag at the time, I would have probably moved forward where the crowd was getting more into the music. In any case, I couldn't stand still. I plan to pick up their album tomorrow if I can. The line tonight was too long, and it was already very late.

The main syntactic problem is to determine whether the fuck is being used as an [sic] pleonastic (semantically empty) direct object of shut or as a pre-head modifier of the preposition phrase (PP) headed by up... And I think we can — Geoff Pullum