Today's interesting article is all about the politics of video games. The central point it makes is that video games are increasingly including more and more 'real world' modeling in their game play. The question the author asks is whether those models end up with a certain political slant. Of course, other forms of entertainment have certainly made political statements. Theatre, movies, music, TV and certainly the radio all have overtly political examples, but thus far video games, being a relatively new medium, have escaped that, but for how long?
My interest in this topic is two-fold. First, there's the part of me that's less interested in the how video games might reflect the 'real world' but how the 'real world' is reflected in video games (a point the author also touches on). Particularly in the arena of the massively multi-player genre, game designers are finding that economic laws, societal interaction, law enforcement issues and the like all translate surprisingly well from the real world to the virtual -- although often with a twist. In the real world, scarcity is very often the controlling factor in economics; in the virtual world where anything can be created with a few lines of code, it's more often a problem of over-abundance.
Secondly, as virtual worlds get more and more 'accurate,' it may be possible to study things which are impossible to study with live subjects or on a sufficiently large scale or without violating standards of political correctness. Which takes us back to the subject of politics. So much of the political rhetoric is based on fairly shaky, if not non-existent facts and statistics. Take the Bush tax cuts for example: did they stimulate the economy? Did they pull us out of a recession? Personally I'm inclined to think they did, but there are so many factors involved in the economy of the United States that it's difficult to tell with any certainty, and any figures we do collect are only on what did happen. It's exceptionally difficult to get any hard numbers on what might have happened.
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Ross
Earlier in the day I thought of something to write about, but now that I'm actually sitting here, I can't for the life of me remember what it was. I seem to remember that it was pretty good, an idea that would practically write itself. But after wracking my brain for about a half an hour I can't remember what it was. I guess we'll just have to chalk up one more loss to the literary canon and move on... Having lost my masterpiece, I guess I can talk about the play I saw last night: it was Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it kind of sucked.
The acting, the direction, the lighting, the set design and the costumes were all great -- it was just the play itself that wasn't that good. Which is surprising; generally if the play/musical is popular enough to be produced (some locally written tripe being an exception to this rule) then generally it's pretty good, but not Evita. The music was often atonal, the singing cacophonous rather than harmonious and dialogue which should have never have been set to music, was, which resulted in laughable delivery. Now this isn't just because I don't like musicals, though I don't. Actually there are quite a few musicals I quite enjoy, Monty Python's Live From the Hollywood Bowl is first rate, it really wasn't that enjoyable.
It's still ticking me off that I can't remember what I was going to write about and am thus forced to write about a musical. It doesn't get much worse than that. I did see an interesting article on the ESPN website where they ranked 60 sports in order of difficulty. I was a little disappointed to see that Cycling was only ranked 20th, but what are you going to do? I think it would be interesting to see what the results would be if they ever ranked sporting events by difficulty. I think at that point the Tour would rank fairly high, but then again there are some idiots out there who solo sail across the Atlantic...
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Ross
City of Heroes was released today. Yet another entry into the massively multiplayer arena. Though it is somewhat unique, it's not only the first superhero MMOG, it's quite possibly the first Superhero CRPG of any type. I have an evil co-worker who's been hyping it for awhile and he sparked enough interest on my part for me to check it out. It actually looks pretty cool, and as such has become one more enticement to compete for my limited amount of time. I haven't bought it yet and I'm thinking that even if I do break down, demonstrate my weakness and purchase it, that I'll probably wait a little bit until the release day rush dies down a little bit. That, or I may pick it up on my way home from work -- it's hard to say, I'm pretty spineless.
The game is set in Paragon City, which I guess is suppossed to be New York, I'm not entirely certain. But thinking about superheroes and New York reminded my of a story from when I was about four or five. See, my father had gotten a job offer in the Big Apple. Presumably he considered it seriously enough that he mentioned it to me. Obviously, like many children I had no desire to pack up and move thousands of miles to the other side of the country to some city I knew nothing about. In other words, I was not excited. I must have made my displeasure known because my Dad, in an attempt to cheer me up, mentioned that New York was where Spiderman lived.
Well, that changed things. I began to imagine myself riding along in the car looking out the window and seeing Spiderman swing by going from one skyscraper to the next. That seemed cool enough to offset the other trials of relocation. I'm not sure when (though I don't think it was very long) I realized that, yes, Spiderman did technically live in New York. It was a fictional New York, one I had almost no chance of actually moving to, but what my Dad had told me was technically true, even if it was border-line child abuse...
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Ross
My job has destroyed my will to live, which I guess isn't too surprising, given the soul-crushing power of a cube absent any other additions. However, for the last two weeks, it's been one continual crisis, broken only by occasion smaller crises. But in one of the cruel ironies, life is so full of, it's actually made me less eager to actually leave my job. Because located somewhere within my will to live is my ambition and it's been destroyed as well.
Perhaps "destroyed" is too strong of a word since I'm reasonably confident that both my will to live and my ambition will return in time. I guess this is as good a time as any to mention the countless people who are convinced I never had any ambition to begin with. Which is obviously untrue. On countless occasions I've demonstrated my ambition to be idle, to make money without any effort, to spend hours doing things which are enjoyable but of zero long-term value.
We'll that's as ambitious as I care to be for today, though in the interest of being fair and balanced I'll leave you with a link to a story on another anniversary to conteract the D&D link from yesterday.
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Ross
Well, D&D turns 30 this year and the BBC has done a little story on it. What is more interesting to me than the story is the selection of comments the BBC included after the story. It's actually kind of heart-warming to see so many people speak so affectionately about the game. Being a D&D geek can sometimes be hard. It's like one of the commentors said, "Everyone needs to escape from reality sometimes and D&D is cheaper and more readily available than Class A substances. Though not as socially acceptable."
That's one of the reasons why I love going to conventions. In some respects, it's analogous to a Jew returning to the Holy Land. After being persecuted for so long to finally arrive in a place where everyone is of a similar "belief system" is pretty nice. (Yes, obviously it's a stretch comparing the suffering of a typical geek with that of an historical Jew, but bear with me). I guess having mentioned the comments on the article I should actually make some comments of my own:
For me, D&D and role=playing games in general are a great way of getting together with your friends. There's conversation, the opportunity for great stories, it's an excuse to have tons of snacks and most of all it's cheaper and oftentimes much more enjoyable than a movie. It's fair to say that most of my friends are my friends because we played D&D or something similar at one point. I hope that when another 30 years have passed and I'm 63 that I'll still be playing.
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Ross
Last night I figured that my only hope of finding the disk was the possibility that I had given it to my boss for safe keeping. He normally shows up by 8 am, but he was out sick yesterday and when there was no sign of him by around 8:20, I panicked and went and talked to my boss' boss, the CIO -- partially to check and see if my boss was coming in, and partially to get permission to ransack his cube if he wasn't. Well, getting permission to ransack his cube required telling the story, which of course prompted him to say that all software should be stored in a central secure location. Just as I walked out of his office, my boss walked in (at around 8:30). Talking to him, I discovered that he had given all of the CD's to another manager, who doesn't show up until 9 (he actually walked in about 9:15). In an attempt to cover all my bases, I talked to yet a third manager (four if you count the CIO) to see if he might have ended up with the software. Perhaps you can see where this is going...
When the second manager finally arrived, I checked his stash and struck out. At this point I'd pretty much looked everywhere I could think of and I had started working on trying to figure out why the version on my desktop computer wouldn't talk to framemaker. At that point, having looked everywhere I decided I might as well completely exhaust that avenue and completely search my cube. Starting from the entrance and working in I went through everything with a fine-toothed comb. I opened and emptied all software boxs, checked every CD case to confirm there was only one CD in it, opened every CD-rom (I have more than you might think) and went page by page through every stack of papers I had. It was while doing this, that sandwiched between a stack of Open Source documentation (right between the mod_ssl manual and the tomcat 3.1 faq), I finally found the CD. Had I done this yesterday I might have avoided looking like an idiot in front of three managers and the CIO.
So, obviously things could have been a lot worse, though I'm still not out of the woods. This particular piece of software is notoriously tempermental and I still have to get it working again on some machine, though having an install disk and a licence key will go a long way towards helping with that. Also, this wasn't an easy project that turned difficult; this was a difficult project which almost turned impossible. As it is, I'll still, barring a miracle, be in here tomorrow assuming I can get through the perimeter Salt Lake City is throwing up around the city for tomorrow's marathon.
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Ross
Yesterday it finally looked like the sun had come out from behind the clouds and that I might have a few days of sunshine. Then, while walking to the breakroom to get a drink, I overheard some people talking about the Hotline, and I realized that there was another Hotline on Monday. Of course at this point you're wondering "What on Earth is a Hotline?' Well it's that magical time once a quarter (more like every other month recently), when I get to republish two enormous books that sit on the website. This particular Hotline is bad for several reasons, none of which are really good things in disquise, like being forced to hang out with supermodels for a week.
The first bad thing is that there are vastly more changes than normal. The second bad thing is that I'm pretty burned out from the last big crisis and summoning the enthusiasm for more late nights is proving very difficult. The third bad thing, however, dwarfs them all. See, one of the two books is composed as a framemake document and I have a program (Webworks) which converts the framemaker source into HTML. Awhile back I was having problems with the program on my computer, so I decided to try a clean install on another computer. That fixed the problem beautifully, and ever since then I just did the extraction on the other computer. Well that other computer just happened to be the one which I struggled with all last week, the one lost to us forever because we forgot the admin password...
This wouldn't be so bad except I seem to have lost/misplaced/played frisbee with/'traded for a pack of smokes/bought my brother's birthright with the install CD. Which means that I may be doing the conversion entirely by hand. Which is akin to the difference between photocopying 100 pages or transcribing them by hand... I spent most of today desperately searching for the disk, trying to get the restored copy on the new server to work, finding a warez copy (yeah framemaker converters from 1999, that's a hot piece of software) and trying to resuscitate the copy on my desktop. The latter actually looks like it might work. Although at this point, even the most pathetic partial conversion would cause me to break into song.
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Ross
I was just about to go to bed when I realized I hadn't posted anything. Which is weird, after doing this for a year, you'd think I'd remember it...
My wife has been gone the last couple of evenings, so maybe that's it. What's really weird is that without her in the house, I've managed to get all of the kids asleep by 8:30. I'm not sure what I'm doing that's having this affect, but my wife has decided that she is going to leave every night.
As a last note, here's an interesting article on the Planetary Protection Officer. Definitely an interesting read.
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Ross
I forgot to mention as I was writing last night that I had taken my family to see Home on the Range. Looking at the reviews, I expected it to be okay -- not great, but palatable. Instead, it was appallingly bad. I never actually laughed and I only smiled once (when one character called another a "philistine"). My kids seemed to like it, so take that for what it's worth. (IMHO very little, they all fell asleep during The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.)
In an amazing display of stamina, today was yet another crisis-filled stress-fest. I'm almost as sick of writing about it as you are of reading it, so rather than cause us both a lot of pain, I think I'll just end here.
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Ross
After being put through the ringer last week, I went home early on Friday and took a nap. By the time I woke up it was time for the family campaign, so I never got around to posting. I considered posting on Friday, but in between taking the kids to gymnastics, going into work for a little while, taking the kids to get a family picture and cleaning out my DireKobold E-mail (oh and finishing Knights of the Old Republic *sheepish grin*) I didn't get the time to post on Saturday either. Okay, that was pointless, but it did get me through one paragraph.
I left early on Friday because I figured I was basically done with everything. Unfortunately, today proved me wrong in more ways then I thought possible. Not only were there the lingering problems left over from last week (which I made worse on at least three seperate occasions while trying to fix them) but there were problems with other systems as well. Someone yanked the fiber connection between the DMZ and the core router. So there we go, two paragraphs down, three to go. Stick with me, we're almost done.
Jerry Seinfeld was on the Daily Show pimping some new internet commercials he did for American express. Normally I wouldn't be that excited about this sort of thing, but they co-star Superman (superlatively voiced by Patrick Warburton) and the one they have out right now is pretty freaking funny, though to be candid I think the funniest thing I ever saw that had Seinfeld's name attached didn't even have Seinfeld in it. It was the trailer for The Comedian. If you haven't seen it, you definitely need to.
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Ross
Yesterday was the one year anniverary of the blog. I remembered that fact on Tuesday (and planned to write about it on Wednesday) but on Wednesday there was so much else going on (server crap plus a good friend had just returned from South Africa) that it completely slipped my mind. When you think about it, a year is at least moderately impressive. On the other hand, doing something mediocre for a really long time doesn't somehow make it great. Or does it?
Looks like the server issues I've been dealing with at work may finally be coming to a close after a really bad week. One of the last pieces of the puzzle was the password to the backend database for our learning management system. In what is now a recurring theme, we tried several different possible solutions, but in the end we had to crack it. Fortunately, the hash they use for the SQL passwords is nowhere near as complex as the hash they use for Windows passwords, nor was the password as strong. Of course, while I was in the DBA's cube talking about this, his computer blue-screened, which I think was the final piece necessary to convince me that I'm carrying a malignant computer aura with me where ever I go this week.
The Apprentice finale is tonight. I still have to switch the new server with the old one this evening, so hopefully that won't take too long and I'll be home in time to see the finale. Generally speaking, it's considered fairly plebeian to actually enjoy reality TV. But as the Boston Globe points out, "It's the reality show you don't have to be ashamed to watch." That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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Ross
I realize that posts from the last few days have been pretty boring, but since I've basically been doing nothing other than trying to fix the damaged server, I don't have much else to write about. I did start reading Atonement yesterday. So far it's reasonably interesting, though for some reason the writing style reminds me of the female half of that old team writing humor piece. In any event, it's very, very introspective but written in the third person with multiple view points, the combination of which gives it a certain surreal quality. I was going to read Atlas Shrugged as my next book, but I admit that I've always been a little daunted by its 1000 pages.
Okay, so that's really all I can write about which doesn't have anything to do with my dead server, or as we like to call it, my 'super-secure' server (it's so secure that no one can get on it). I was here last night until about ten trying to recreate the server on another machine. At one point in the evening, one of my co-workers deleted the tape-backup of the server and it looked like we were really screwed. Fortunately it only deleted the index, not the actual data, and we were able to recover it. Once the restore was complete we found that none of the database (ODBC) connections to other servers worked and that additionally no one knew the passwords necessary to establish those connections (this has been a bad week for passwords). By ten o'clock all we had was a new server with less functionality than the old server, and no way to get the information necessary to make it any more functional so we called it a night.
This morning we were able to uncover all of the necessary passwords and we got one of the applications up and running without a hitch. That's when we discovered that the other password we had didn't work, even though everyone from one end of the company to another was convinced that this was in fact the correct password. So as of this afternoon I have one server which mostly works but is completely unaccessible otherwise and one server which is accessible but doesn't even work as well as the one we're trying to fix. Fortunately, we have gotten to the point where the problem is no longer in the '16 hour days until it's fixed' category, but rather the 'as soon as possible,' which means I can actually go home this evening.
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Ross
The pain continues today. The password cracker we ran overnight failed to come up with the password, so tonight after everyone has gone home at five we're going to wipe out everything on the server and rebuild it from scratch. Fortunately, we do have everything on a tape back-up, which is the only reason I didn't quit yesterday, but there are still a lot of things which could go wrong. We're taking a couple of steps which we hope will minimize the chance for further damage, but at this point I'm not holding my breath.
In other news, one of my friends wants to start running a Champions campaign. For those of you who've never played using the Hero System rules, allow me to try and give you a bit of a feel for the system (for those who have never role-played at all may the Lord have mercy on your souls). I'm going to compare building a character in a role-playing game to building a desk. One way to build a desk is to go down to your local Office Max, wander around until you find one that looks good, buy it, take it home, follow the instructions and assemble it. That's what D&D and the majority of RPG's are like. Building a character in Champions (or more specifically the hero system) is like designing your own desk, picking out the wood, buying individual screws and nails, sanding everything down and putting on the finish yourself. It takes a lot longer, but the final result is much closer (if you're a good craftsman) to your perfect desk; you're even able to put in special features like a bed underneath the desk or a secret drawer to hide money in.
To give you an idea of what a Champions character looks like, check out this thread. As you can probably see, everything is broken down into points and everything has been broken down into components. Overall, it's appealing for someone who really wants to dig in to the nuts and bolts. On the other hand, it can also be cumbersome, but isn't there always a trade-off?
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Ross
Well, today illustrated why Monday has such a bad reputation. I was woken up around 5 am by a call from my work telling me that one of the webservers was down. I restarted it from home, but I probably should have just gone into work since I didn't really manage to fall back asleep. Then shortly after I did get into work, something else broke. Our intranet server acts as the gateway for about a dozen or so other programs and one of them was hanging. This has been happening with some frequency for the last week or so, and every time it's been a different program, so rather than fighting the symptoms I determined to stamp out the disease. As usual, it was my hubris which ended up destroying me.
Looking at the server, it seemed to be having some problems communication with the Domain Name Server. Talking to some of the hardware guys, they mentioned that they had seen this problem before and the fix was to delete it from the domain, reboot it into local mode and then re-add it to the domain. Since I had to reboot the server anyway to fix the symptomatic problem, this seemed a good time to do it. So we removed it from the domain, rebooted it in 'local-mode' and went to log on, only to discover that we didn't know the administrator password. I hadn't set up the server and as a matter of fact, we couldn't find anyone who remembered setting it up. We tried every single password anyone could think of and nothing worked.
Fortunately, even though the server didn't think it was part of the domain, everything else did, which meant that mostly things were still working as they should. In fact, the problem which had started the whole thing had even been fixed. Over the course of the next few hours, we were able to mostly fix things so that externally the intranet looked pretty good, but of course internally it was still very, very sick. We tried selectively restoring files and directory from back up, we tried a couple of password crackers (neither of which could see the SCSI raid). We brainstormed like madmen, but it seemed like there was nothing to be done but start from scratch. Eventually, we did find a password cracker that 'works' -- the only problem is that it's estimating it's going to take 21 days in order to brute-force the password... I'll keep you posted on what happens.
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Ross
Well it's Friday, and I'm not looking forward to the weekend as much as I normally would. You see the town that I live in does a spring (and fall) garbage pick-up. Take your trees, your old mattresses, your junk of every stripe and set it out on the curb. It's nice, because then you don't have to make a trip to the dump. However, they are on a schedule, so if I don't get my crap out on the curb tomorrow it won't get picked up, so that's why I'm approaching the weekend with a certain amount of dread, because I'm lazy.
I did manage to finish Life of Pi today (this Review is pretty close to what I thought). It was on a page/day basis a considerably faster read than Undaunted Courage, though that's hardly surprising; word count (though not page wise), it was considerably shorter. Fiction always reads faster (at least for me) than history and biographies and such, and finally I think I'm getting back into the groove, which I think is probably a good thing. Now I just have to decide what to read next. I probably should dig out some old classic that I've never read, like Ulysses or War and Peace or maybe Moby Dick which has a story of it's own, but that will probably have to wait for another time.
One final humorous story, about a Japanese tattoo artist who got tired of putting Japanese characters on college students who didn't know what they meant. Taking advantage of this fact to express his anger he started putting characters that meant something entirely different, like prostitute instead of princess. He defends himself by claiming to provide a public service by labeling all the stupid people. A great idea; I just wish he labeled them in a language I could understand so I could take advantage of the label and avoid those people. I mean how hard is it to look up some characters before they're permanently inked into your skin?
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Ross
I will confess that yesterday's entry was a little disjointed, but it was nice to see that it elicited some great comments. As far as the conention that I was smoking the grass I have to confess that I've never even had a drink (of alcohol obviously) let alone smoked a joint, though I do have a pretty funny marijuana story:
Six or seven years ago I was at a work party and after starting at the local pizza place we had retired to one of my co-workers apartments. Another co-worker had recently returned from Amsterdam and had some pot (or possibly hash, like I said I'm not an expert) and they started passing ajoint around. As I mentioned rather than partaking I spent the time asking those assembled what my legal exposure was should the cops come crashing through the door. In any event at one point someone asked the provider of the pot how he had smuggled it back from Amsterdam. The provider hesitated for a minute before saying I smuggled it back in my butt. Immediately my friend Brian, who had the joint at the time threw it down and said, "Homie don't smoke ass!" Though if you think about it I bet that a substantial percentage of pot comes to America in just that fashion.
In other news the much-delayed Midnight adventure had been edited and sent to Greg Benage over at FFG, for final vetting, but the wheels are turning. In other news apparently there is something freaky going on in Sicily. Apparently stuff is spontaneously combusting at an alarming rate and so far though the theories range from demons to military testing, no one has been able to figure out what's going on. Apparently the people over at Slashdot have it all figured out so if you're in the mood for speculation you could head over there.
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Ross
You may have heard that the mainframe turned 40 today. This is somewhat sobering, since as you probably know, I recently turned 33. I'm not sure why it's sobering. I guess just the fact that anytime I realize that people get together and say stuff like "No one ever expected it to last this long." And it occurs to you that this thing they're talking about isn't that much older than you are, it makes a guy think.
You know people talk all the time about having a mid-life crisis. I think my problem is that in general I have a direction of life crisis about once a month. I think it's a variation of the 'grass is always greener' syndrome, only much more severe. It's not that I think the grass is greener -- on a sub-concious level I know it is, and the desire to find this green grass is so all-consuming that I just about starve because I don't even have enough time to eat the grass I do have.
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Ross
Well, the Life of Pi arrived yesterday which is good, since I had just finished Undaunted Courage and needed something new to read. So far I've enjoyed the writing enormously, though not nearly to the same extent as my wife. Before going to bed (at lord knows what hour) she managed to read the first 193 pages. I should mention that she didn't even start reading until about 9 or 10 last night. Speaking of books, some of my favorites are being made into mini-series by the SciFi channel, including The Wizard of Earthsea and Ringworld. They both sound quite enjoyable and the other stuff on the list doesn't sound too shabby either.
My daughter's science fair is tonight. It's always interesting to go and see an elementary science fair. There's a certain innocence you don't see in later grades. My daughter's project was all about skin sensitivity. She had nine different grades of sandpaper and she had people try and put them in order based on grit and then recorded the results -- not bad for someone in first grade. Other than that, things are pretty dull right about now so I think I'll sign off here.
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Ross
Well, if any of you remember (I'm too lazy to go back and find out), way back, I think nearly a month ago, I said I was going to start reading a Lewis and Clark biography by Ambrose. Well, yesterday I finally finished it. I can say that it saddens me to have taken so long to finish a book, but I guess having read one book in the last month or so is better than not reading anything. It's kind of funny, because I remember hearing that Lewis had committed suicide (actually as part of a program that was suggesting that he might have actually been murdered) but I had forgotten until I was pretty close to the end of the book (by that time the foreshadowing was so thick that my 7 year old would have figured it out). Kind of sad, really, to have this monumental victory and then just a few years later to be so depressed that you decide to take your own life.
Well after that cheerful beginning, I'm not sure where to go. After playing Knights of the Old Republic for the last week or so, I figured that it was time that my kids actually watched Star Wars, so I dug out my videos. My son, who is constantly watching me when I play, initially didn't want to watch the movie, but I told him that he needed to stop whining, sit down and be quiet: I was doing this for his own good. Of course, not more that ten minutes in and he was completely hooked. I think I was right about his age when I watched the very first one. At the time I didn't realize how whiny Luke was.
Now the question is: do I let him watch episodes one and two? (The Slate Hellboy review has a great section on why that latter Star Wars movies are so bad). First off, I don't own them so I would have to purchase them or rent them; secondly, I'm sure that if I did let him watch them that would be just one of the many sins I would have to account for in the afterlife. That being said, for all of it's failings (which are legion) I imagine that my son would really enjoy Episode One. Certainly I would have loved the pod race when I was his age, and I imagine that *shudder* he would probably really like Jar-Jar as well. But that may be a risk I have to take.
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Ross
I mentioned earlier that I had gone on a diet, and I guess it must be working. Today is payday and traditionally a group of guys goes out to for a steak lunch every payday. I figured I'd been pretty good up until this point, so I decided to tag along. I ended up getting a 9 oz. filet mignon. In my 'past life' I would eat 24 oz. porterhouses without batting an eye, but today that little filet just about did me in. Now I admit to having a couple of pieces of bread and a bowl of clam chowder on top of that but still, if anything, I should still be hungry, but instead I'm stuffed to the point of being a little queasy. I'm hoping that's a good sign. Maybe my stomach has shrunk...
A possible contributing factor is probably that I'm sleepy. I stayed up too late playing KOTOR; I would have gone to bed earlier but I had to win this damn swoop race (one of the mini-games in KOTOR). There were three tiers to the swoop races: the first one I passed without any difficulty, the second was hard but eventually I finished the course with a time of 22:44. For the third tier I needed to beat a time of 22:51, having just done that I figured no problem. It may take me a couple of times, five minutes at most. Over an hour later I was still at it. I had read all the pointers on the internet. I tried different shifting styles and time and time again I would miss it. The key to the swoop races are these booster pads. Fly over them and your speed dramatically increases. I noticed that when I was in the highest gear these booster pads no longer worked. I figured that you were already going as fast as possible, which seemed to make a certain amount of sense.
Yeah right... My son begged me to play my game for five minutes before I left for work this morning, so I thought I would give it another shot. Lo and behold, it was a bug. After going all the way to my ship and returning, it turns out that the booster pads do still work in the highest gear, which was obviously the key I had been missing last night. I'm guessing the bug crept in between the second and third tier. If that was the only bug I wouldn't be so mad, but it's been crashing on zone loads and kept sticking me in an empty room every time I tried to go to Tatooine. Still, it's a lot of fun I'll have make sure to avoid it long enough to finish my Lewis and Clark book and send the edits on the Midnight adventure to Greg at FFG. I know I missed a link yesterday, so I better toss one in.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross
Well, it's April Fools' day, and to be honest I think it's gotten a little out of hand. It seems that every single website on the internet has to run some kind of April Fool's joke, to the point where it's actually just kind of lame... Particularly since some are so obscure that you're not even sure what the heck they're talking about and all the rest are so blatant as to be childish. That being said, I had planned to play an AF joke on one of my friends. See, he's leaving for South Africa on Saturday to visit a girl he's enamoured with. So I thought this would be an ideal time to somehow convince him that his trip was in jeopardy. Actually, it's not that difficult since I could get access to his mail server. My first thought was to forge a letter from the girl in question, but I decided that was too vile...
Proceeding along the lines of forging e-mail, I thought I could find out who he booked through and then have them send him an e-mail. There were a couple of problems with that. First, his mother actually bought the tickets for him (don't ask) and he would just immediately try and book a seat somewhere else. I needed to not just take out his flight, I needed to take out every flight. So I came up with the idea of telling him that a plane had crashed into the Sears Tower. I think that was the point where my reach exceeded my grasp, though not by as much as you might think. See, he doesn't have TV or radio; the internet is his sole means of getting news. And while it was more difficult to mess with his internet than his mail, it still seemed feasible. I even toyed with the idea of making mock-ups of some of the major news sites.
In the end, a combination of four things kept me from carrying out my plan. First off, I was dead tired last night. Secondly, one of my key accomplices didn't get back to me. Thirdly, the whole thing was too complicated. And finally, as I mentioned above, 15 minutes of web surfing this morning and I was completely sick of the day. So once again, my lack of follow-through kills an otherwise promising project. Ah well, what ya going to do?
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross