I was buying groceries the other day, and I came across Star Trek cereal. Of course, every movie is whored out like that, but I thought it was ineresting.

So today I played Wii Sports and Wii Fit. When I stepped onto the Balance Board, it told me that I was overweight. Fair enough. Still, it was kind of a slap to the face when my Mii got all bloated after it told me.

Slightly disheartened, I switched to Wii Sports. I was still good at Boxing, but other than that, I failed, especially in baseball. My swing is fucked.

Every year on the third week of May, Port Townsend holds the Rhododendron Festival, encompassing three parades, a bed race and a marathon through town. Funtastic Carnivals also rolls into town during this weekend every year. Thursday is the cheap night, $15 for seven rides and $8 for twenty game tickets (Which is bullshit, but what are you going to do). I beat those son-of-a-bitch carnies, though. The card they gave me that held the tickets stopped functioning. I went to Customer Service and for some reason I was given a replacement card that held four tickets, instead of the two that I had left.

I just got back from seeing Star Trek at my local cinema, and it was incredibly badass. I'm not even a fan of Star Trek and I loved it. The characters were well-developed, the action was crisp and fluid, the story felt original and the effects were seriously great. I mean seriously great, and I don't say that very often about movies anymore. I really do love this movie, and its nice to see the first release of this year that was genuinely enjoyable (Watchmen notwithstanding). This is one film that truly lived up to the hype. Gene Roddenberry would be proud.

When I first came to Newgrounds in 2005, it was a much different place. Viewing Flash movies in the old pop-up format sometimes crashed my browser upon closing the window and listening to audio submissions required you to wait for up to 15 seconds, in my experience, to listen to a song and featured no way to skip to certain points in the song. But above all, the community seemed harsher back then. Maybe it was because I was younger, or maybe it's because I am so used to the ins and out of Newgrounds that I now know how to not piss off other users. Whatever the case may be, now many people seem genuinely friendly at times.

My header image, as you can see from my previous news post, was crafted with love by SuparEFG a few days ago, and my signature picture was created hours ago by Spartan204 of the Newgrounds Sig Makers, after I posted my request again a few days later because it had been missed. Soon, the artist apologized for having forgotten about it and gave me my wonderful new sig!

The forums, as I remember them, were less "civilized", with flame wars being much more common and they had a generally unfriendly vibe to them. But now, the forum seem to be teeming with people who wish to kindly and helpfully respond to your threads and dedicated mods, effectively weeding out the unsavory users.

Newgrounds, bottom line, is an art community, minus the pretentiousness of deviantART and that's what it's always felt like to me.

YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace are all quite faceless, but not Newgrounds. It's always been Tom Fulp's baby, realized by the dedicated staff. The history of Newgrounds is there for all to see. Can you say the same thing about MySpace? No. And who exactly is MySpace's enigmatic Tom? His messages state that his name is Tom Anderson. What the hell kind of generic name is that? That's Neo's real name in The Matrix! Newgrounds also features the kind of quality control that YouTube so sorely needs. Two second videos, stolen videos, racist and derogatory comments roam YouTube like a plague.

To conclude my polite rant, Newgrounds has been my home for four years, and will be my home for many more.

Today is the four-year anniversary of the creation of my Grounds Gold account. I don't expect anyone to jump up and cheer, but I thought that I would post something to commemorate the occasion.

I realized that I have never used this feature before, so I decided to make a generic post. Isn't technology wonderful?