My love affair with Hotmail has come to an end. After years of Outlook Express access to Hotmail, the free email service, without warning, terminated the connection. Kicked to the curb. I was not able to file away my emails in Outlook Express and was forced to forward every email one by one to another email account so I wouldn't lose access to them in my mail client. With tons of emails this takes a looooong time to do.

I'm not one for mindless Microsoft bashing, but I just have to say that I am extremely disappointed with this. How can I complain about a free service you say? If you have plans to move a free service to a pay service, be reasonable and allow the people who are not interested in paying for the service a way out. If they had given even a few days notice this would be a non-issue.

Farewell Hotmail and thanks for the memories.

In an effort to make this whole site less sedgeman-y I registered pixeljoint.com for this site.

Yee-haw! Uncork the champagne and dump it on the nearest available person.

Added the Matrix ghost twins and Borat and Bruno from Da Ali G Show. Jangemesh. High five.

The largest pixel totem pole ever (probably) was apparently a pixel community contest wrapped up in July. Very cool stuff.

If you're a pixel art lover searching for a guide on how to do it yourself your prayers have finally been answered. Check it!

Well, I doubt that's how it went, but in any case Conan O'Brien will be taking over Jay Leno's Tonight Show slot in 2009 (mark your calendars).

Finally Triumph the Insult Comic Dog will be able to defecate on his victims at a reasonable hour.

Just finished putting a little smilie selector for comments/posts. Just look at the bottom of any category or icon page to give it a go.

Added an otter and a ferret to the Animals category and four emotional guys (happy guy, sad guy, angry guy, crazy guy) to the Characters category.

Added a couple of sea creatures - a dolphin and a shark to the Animals category.

Finally got off my ass and finished implementing the AIM buddy icon functionality and links to instructions for making an icon your display image in Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger.

Enjoy!

Check this out from the official Spider-Man movie site...

"For the opening title sequence of Spider-Man 2, renowned artist Alex Ross created original paintings representing scenes from the first Spider-Man movie. Now these paintings will be available in an auction, with all proceeds going to benefit cancer research (click here. for the official press release)."

Own a piece of movie AND comic history today suckas.

Added the cartoon colored bandana version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a couple of versions of Stitch (Lilo and Stitch).

The fab four are set for the upcoming Fantastic Four flick. The cast is as follows... Jessica Alba form "Dark Angel" (Invisible Woman), Ioan Gruffudd from "King Arthur" (Mr. Fantastic), Chris Evans from "Cellular" (Human Torch), Michael Chiklis from "The Shield" (The Thing) and me main man Dr. Troy aka Julian McMahon will play Dr. Doom.

Click here for more details.

CoD: United Offensive multiplayer was eating up all my time this weekend. The new weapons and game modes along with the addition of vehicles, ranking and sprinting are really well thought out.

The deployable machine guns, rapid fire rifles, satchel charges, flamethrowers and additional rocket launchers add a much needed "class" feel to the game. If you are going to mount an mg you need a homie to cover your butt while you deploy.

If you like to work as a team Domination and Assault modes are the only way to go. A steady mix of vehicles, weapons and tactics can dominate a collection of "lone wolf" type players.

Vehicles (tanks and jeeps) are quite intuitive and they're a blast to tear around in. One of the problems with the new vehicles is that there are usually too many tanks on each map and not enough room for the jeeps to roam so it can become a clunky tank war.

One of the coolest additions to the multiplayer game is definitely the ranking system. You go up in rank during a match for kills and completing objectives and with each rank up you get access to additional weapons and ammo. When you reach the highest rank you can unleash artillery. As you can imagine... watching artillery rain down on a tank column is like nerd heroine.

Good times.

Added Peter Griffin and Stewie Griffin from "Family Guy", a pixel portrait and a funky pea character.

Some foreign site has posted word that they will have a review of Half-Life 2 in their October 5th issue.

Valve just might be getting HL2 to us in the next month or so... God bless em.

See what would happen "If they mated". Based on the hilarious Conan O'Brien sketch.

Found this tidbit on the excellent ExtraLife! blog.

The AskMen.com site is loaded with "top" lists and here's one of em.

Guess who's the number one comic book character. You might find a hint somewhere on this page.

So you're sick of Internet Explorer's vulnerabilities and Netscape's slow clunker isn't doing it for you anymore? Give Firefox Preview Release a shot... tabbed browsing, built-in popup blocker and nifty extensions make it a winner.

I've been using Firefox off and on for the last year or so and I haven't had any performance or stability issues. The main reason I still use Internet Explorer is because I'm too lazy to configure proxy settings at work.

No matter how disgusted I get with Survivor (that annoying bitch Jenna winning was the all time low) I always come back for more. Damn them.

"Sims 2" and "Call of Duty: United Offensive" hit shelves today. Honestly, I wasn't really feeling the first Sims game, but I'm hoping the impressive looking sequel might grab me. As for the Call of Duty expansion? Kraut sniper's beware, there's an M1 trained in on your camping ass.

Added a little comments post section to the icon details page over the weekend. Feel free to post your favorite quotes, rehash memories, talk trash, jot down your manifesto or whatever else your heart desires.

I did notice a few of the first posts had quite a few "swears" in them. Might have to put a filter on for the major offensive words/phrases. A lot of people are pretty creative with the special characters to create new and interesting swears, so it might not even be worth the effort. Let's see if you gutter-mouthed miscreants can keep it clean.

If you have any ideas on how to improve the comments tool, I'm open to your suggestions.

I just entered my first post this morning (I'm whacka). Yay!

Added Kevin McHale (Celtics), Ozzie Smith (Cardinals), Eric Gagne (Dodgers) and Kirk Gibson (Dodgers).

Added a few sprite style ninjas.

For all you Borat fans out there, here's a massive site covering all sorts of behind the scenes goodies in addition to the rantings and ravings of a typical fan site.

A note of caution to those who have not been initiated into the House of Ali G: a lot of this stuff is extremely offensive when taken out of context. You've been warned.

Added a new alien and a new ninja to the archives.

While browsing the internet I came across some really fantastic Megaman sprites. The Capcom artists who have been putthing these little buggers together for all these years really have produced some of the finest sprites around. The original NES Megaman was so full of detail and he was just a five color (including black and white), 21x24 pixel sprite. Amazing!

Note: Sprites are the little elements placed on the stage in two dimensional games. I don't know if that's the true definition, but it's close enough.

Electronic Art's "Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault" single player demo was a mixed bag for me. Being a huge fan of the WWII shooter genre I couldn't wait to fire this baby up, but the single player gameplay didn't grab me like previous MoH titles or the superb "Call of Duty".

I love that they've taken the WWII shooter to the Pacific and the swarming banzai Japanese troopers really make the initial gameplay hectic. The brutal face to face combat is really quite a change from previous entries and it works well in a jungle setting. It was a kick watching a screaming Japanese soldier charging with his samurai sword drawn.

The main flaw with this demo is that once again your buddies seem to be nothing more than cannon fodder. This issue is most likely because of a lousy showcase level and not a reflection of what the retail game will be like. There are several intuitive controls for interaction with your squad and you can even call for a medic to patch you up. Hopefully the retail game will give you a little breathing room to get a handle on utilizing the squad interactions.

On a side note... I'm suprised that none of the WWII games coming out support a multiplayer co-op mode. The developers put so much effort into squadmate AI... why not make it so you can have your homies fill in? Get on it ya bums.

Caught the martial arts epic "Hero" today. Very "Crouching Tigery" in both good and bad ways. The colorful battle backdrops and a couple of really nifty duels make this one worth seeing on the big screen.

It's interesting that the filmmakers decided to tie such a huge fantasy to China's actual unification. It's like if a movie about the United States had George Washington catching bullets with his teeth.

There's some interesting coverage of a few comic book movie franchises.

It's interesting that there really hasn't been a cameo crossover for any of the heroes yet. That's one comic book trick the Hollywood folks should pick up on.