It's a Mario Party!

Of the 8 variety.

Laser tag!

We just played 3 games here. I am tired.

The future is now-ish.

Air travel is about to become ridiculously practical thanks to Skybus, a new airline that's running on a self-serve model. You book your flight online, check in at the automated Skybus kiosk at the airport, and go. Not only does this cut out the hassle of flying, but it significantly lowers the cost as well. Flights start from just $10 one way. Ten freaking dollars. They also help keep costs down by only flying into smaller, less busy airports. After a few minutes of playing on their website, it looks like the further in advance you book your flight, the closer you get to that $10 mark. If you want anything extra (checking your bags, getting a meal on the plane, etc.), you can add it, but you don't pay for anything you don't need. Spiffy, yeah?

It's not perfect yet. The company is based out of Columbus, OH, so the only flights available go to Columbus, so if you want to go to any of their other destination cities, you have to go through Columbus. And right now, there are only 9 other cities, but that list is expanding, and once they get bigger, they should start offering non-Columbus flights (word from the Colorado rumor mill is that a Denver-area Skybus system is in the works). Also, you usually don't get a choice of what time of day your flights leaves, which might be a problem if you're on a business trip, or somesuch, where you're on a tight schedule. For the casual traveler like me, though, this could easily become the best way to avoid ungodly gas prices. If they just added Denver and Fort Worth, I'd be set.
Just for fun, we checked on a flight from K.C. to (you guessed it) Columbus. For two people to fly out on August 21st and come back a week later would cost a grand total of...(drum roll, please)...$81.60! Heck, that's cheap enough to fly to Columbus just to see what it's like there.

What-ball? Base-what? What-what?

Me. At a baseball game. It boggles the mind.

A new (to me) Root Beer

Mmm...Eastern Promise...

A few sequel tips

Based on my viewing of 28 Weeks Later this past weekend, here's my list of what not to do when creating a sequel to a good movie:
1. DO NOT give the camera to a seizure-prone elderly woman whenever you want a handheld shot. Despite what many directors seem to think, "nauseatingly shaky" doesn't equal "gritty."
2. DO NOT dumb down the sequel. If the first film was fairly believable (which, despite the whole zombie thing, 28 Days Later was), don't ruin it by making a sequel in which ridiculous and unbelievable things happen all the time. ("Oh crap! We never suspected the zombies would find the back door!", etc.) Also, DO NOT break the rules of your world. In the first film, the Infected came to have certain predictable behavior. We expect to see that in the sequel, and in at least one incredibly distracting instance (I won't spoil it for you, in case you still want to see the movie), the established rules are completely broken. Don't get me wrong--a sequel should do something new, but this isn't it.
3. DO NOT write a story that isn't anchored to any of your characters. We didn't really know whose story this was until the story was over. The whole experience felt like the first 30 minutes of a movie, stretched out to fill 90 minutes.
4. DO NOT waver between "decent movie" and "complete crap movie." Be bad enough that I can laugh out loud at you, or good enough that I don't feel like I wasted my money. This in-between business doesn't work for me.

I gave this a 6/10 (IMDb average: 7.9/10).