11:11 AM  
"Let me explain. No, take too long--let me sum up."--The Princess Bride
"I apologize for not writing less, but I didn't have time."--Oscar Wilde

After the last post below, I went to bed, hoping to catch a couple hours before hitting the road for my folks place in the Twin Cities.

The ringing of my cel phone wakes me up, and I sit up in the darkness wondering "Who the hell is calling me in the middle of the night?" But it's my cel phone, a number I only give to friends and family, so I figure it must be important. I stumble out to the kitchen, glancing at the microwave--5:15. I pick up the phone and answer; it's my dad, asking, "So, are you coming up tonight?"

Maybe you're ahead of where I was at the time. But I stood there in the dark kitchen for a moment, in a barely-awake stupor, and ask the question: "Um, is it 5:15 A.M., or P.M.?"

That's the kind of question you only ask when you think you know the answer and your subconcious is hard at work preparing a stupid-and-ignorant defense. Yes, it was indeed P.M., and the sun had zapped across the sky while I lay comatose. So I got to make the drive to the Twin Cities in the dark.

(I enjoy driving at night with family and friends--I've had many good discussions late at night. But I hate driving long distances by myself at night. Though I get to play whatever music I want, as loud as I want, and sing along, I find that being alone allows me to fixate on how much I hate how bright headlights have gotten in This Modern Age, and I begin plotting hood mounts for a sniper rifle so I could shoot out each and every Xenon bulb that crests a distant rise. But I digress.)

Eventually I arrived in the Twin Cities, and after the prerequisite crap about irregular hours from my folks, they went to bed. I waited up for a while until my sister got home from work, and we chatted for a while until she crashed. Then, though I contemplated just riding out the night with my parents' cable and my own PS2 (brought along for this very potentiality), I went up and tried to catch a few hours of sleep.

A few was all I got--I woke up at 5:30, completely rested, and all I could do was go downstairs and quietly wait for the world to wake up. It was a strange reversal of the way my world normally works.

But now the family has awoken, fast has been broken, and I am showing my sister the Blogger ropes. Later today, it's over to my mom's side of the family for the Thanksgiving feast. I'm already looking forward to trying to explain what I do at work. I'm tempted to lie--it would shut them up faster to just say I'm a programmer or something they expect might be involved with game creation--but I like what I do too much not to try and explain it. Sigh. I suppose I could be trying to explain the finer points of plumbing, or something, or just bitching about a crappy job. So maybe I'll wish you all a happy holiday and shut the hell up until later.

Happy holiday--eat up.

Until later--

5:29 AM  

A slightly snarky reaction to the ending of MGS2 (realy only a spoiler to MGS3 in the sense that the line of dialogue after the credits of MGS1 was a spoiler for MGS2):

Our view is blurry as the game begins, fading up from black to white, to a first-person view of a bucolic meadow. Off in the distance, we can see Confederate soldiers on the run from a giant, steam-powered Clockwork Gear.

SNAKE (VOICE OVER): Uhrm....I need a cigarette.

CODEC! CODEC! Please press Select!

OTACON: Snake! Are you there?

SNAKE: Yeah, I'm here. Where am I?

OTACON: Well, Snake, as it turns out..

((NOTE: Please have voice actors improvise about ten minutes of dialogue here on the general topic of Emersonian responsibility.))

OTACON: Well, good luck, Snake. Call me if you need help. My frequency is 867.5309.

Pull back out to rear view of Snake. Something's not quite right, but the camera is too close for us to see just what it is. As Snake stumbles toward a stream, he reaches in the general vicinity of his spine and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. Putting one in his mouth, he crouches to splash water on his face. The ripples on the surface settle, and a cigarette falls into the water...from the mouth of Jack.

SNAKE: Oh boy.

BEGIN SAGA SELL:

"Theorizing that conspiracies exisited beyond their lifetimes, Solid Snake and Doctor Hal Emmerich led an elite team of scientists into the desert to develop a top-secret project known as Quantum Gear."

"Pressured to start making sense of an endlessly twisting story or lose sales, Solid Snake prematurely stepped into the project accelerator....and vanished."

"He awoke to find himself in the past, unarmed except for the cigarettes he always kept up his ass and facing a mirror image that was that of his one-time protege Jack. Fortunately, contact with his own time was maintained through CODEC conversations with Hal, the project observer, who contacts Snake in transmissions only he can see and hear."

"Trapped in the past, Solid Snake tracks one clone of Big Boss after another, destroying Gears that should have never existed, and hoping each time that the next plot twist will be the plot twist that takes him--home..."

BEGIN TITLES

METAL GEAR SOLID 3: QUANTUM GEAR

Okay, okay, I did like MGS2. But they were throwing some pretty loose threads around near the end, and that's the reaction I had to one of them.

4:38 AM  
Metal Gear Solid 2 complete. I'm hauling my PS2 off to my folks' place so I can muck around with it and MGS2 for the weekend (and, of course, get in some quality time with my neglected GTA3--um, and my family and friends, of course), and I'll make a report on Monday.

I will, however, tell you that I have been given the codename JAGUAR by the game and it's kinda useless site.

2:37 AM  
WARNING: The crazy man has figured out how to post to Blogger using nothing but a laptop and celphone.

The mindfile has been pretty quiet for the last few days. I did, however, see JP hard at work installing Win2K on his work machine today, so unless a Blade Runner starts poking around the office, I think it's safe to assume he's okay. He has yet, however, to show his face since I invoked him in the name of pictograms on SA.

Cel phone transfer rate tops out around 14.4; don't think I'll be image-surfing on the road anytime soon...

1:10 AM  
Archive is now working, if by "working" you mean completely fucked up. Perhaps it will get fixed over the next few days by either me or the Blogger Fairies. Personally, at this point I'm hoping for the latter.

'Night, all.

11:08 PM  
What? Someone quoting one of my SA posts?

Yes, all you ex-SAers, I know that the fact I care has moved me one step closer to my inevitable burnout. But allow to bask in the fucking moment, okay?

In other news, today I drove to the Twin Cities and back. Tomorrow, it's back to the Twin Cities again to join the sister and folks for Thanksgiving (though I hope to post to OD from that remote location--those of you homebound should check this page on an hourly basis and email me at my mobile email address.)

Why would I do fifteen hours of driving in two days, especially when that's mainly the same trip twice? A good question; for not-getting-my-ass-sued reasons I can't reveal much of the details, but I got to go along and help/observe the pitching of one of the Head's projects to a potential publisher. 'Twas fun, educational, and we got a pretty good reaction--though you can probably guess how much a good reception at a pitch may or may not mean until ink is spilled in signature-shaped blobs at the bottom of a contract-like document. As a bonus, I got out in the sun for a day, and tracked down a copy of the out-of-print Rune Strategy Guide. K'nifty!

Think I'm going to try and wrap things up here at the office, then go home and try to finish MGS2 and pack for tomorrow's journey. If I don't talk to you all before, have a good Thanksgiving. If you don't eat turkey, at least enjoy a turkey substitute and a good nap.

11:47 PM  
Okay--new cam, as promised. Sadly, it turns out I have a day-long road trip to make tomorrow, so I will not be able to get the archives up as promised. Instead I must go sleep. The cam will reveal why, even if I were not on the express to Dreamland, I would probably have not gotten the archives working anyway.I know, I know--in the big sceme of things it hardly matters, since nearly everything is here on this page, but you know that I don't like to lie to you, Gentle Reader.

See you Wednesday.

5:41 PM  
First car payment in the mail. One down, 59 to go...

In other car-themed news: (some of) the music from GTA3 is now available for download!

4:04 PM  
Okay; weekend recap begins:

FRIDAY

After a workday of cleaning up the detritus of the week (not all, though--I still owe emails to Travis, Mike Ryan, and a few other folks--sorry!), I had dinner with some folks from work, plus Don Perrin (of novel, game, and miniatures fame) and fusion toaster master Kevin Tritz. Good food and good conversation were had. Afterward, we came back to the office and Kevin and I decided to check out the XBox and the co-op mode of Halo for a few minutes...

Nine hours later...co-op mode complete.

My opinions after that marathon on Halo and the Big X:

1) The biggest things Halo has going for it are co-op play and the vehicles. If I had been playing on my own, I think I might have played for an hour or two before setting down the controller. The combination of help and competition that comes through co-op play kept me going--and going. And then there were the vehicles, especially the dune buggy with machine gun Warthog. At first I felt screwed in the driver's seat...and then a half hour passed while I got the hang of the controls, and I never left it behind if it could possibly be avoided. We drove the truck deep into tight enemy complexes rather than leave our source of unlimited ammo and unlimited fun behind...

2) Anyone bitching about the controller hasn't played with it enough. Though I mourn for the loss of two shoulder buttons (or rather, their movement to above the right diamond as the tiny black and white buttons), the triggers rock the hiz-ouse, especially for FPS's.

3) Who cares how big the xBox is? We played for nine hours, and never once did it leap up from the table and crush us under its burdensome size. "But what if I want to carry it to my friend's house?" you ask. I retort: When's the last time you unhooked your Playstation and hauled it somewhere? For most of you, never. Either your friend has their own PSX, you're damn lazy, or you're in the .00001% that has a 'special excuse'. So shut up.

Halo definitely is a title that will sell some xBoxes. But it does have weaknesses that keep it from being a classic in any terms other than 'one of the original launch titles'. First, the textures are pretty darn plain. Worse, geometry is used over and over to the point where Kevin or I would turn to the other and ask, "Have we been here before?" The story, while okay, gets a little overambitious in the third act and might have been better if kept tighter (to be as spoiler-free as possible, just the planet and not the galaxy.) Also, the animations just suck. They're like badly-done QuakeIII engine anims, with footsliding and everything. For as long as it's been in devlopment, the game cries for better animations and better-tuned cutscenes (in addition, in co-op the cutscenes couldn't decide whether to acknowledge whether there were two people around or one.)

SATURDAY

Thought about sleeping in, until my friend Andy Trabbold (check out his awesome online portfolio) called and we went to breakfast at THE CURVE EAT, a greasy spoon near my house so old and in-your-face that there is no web link appropriate and the name has to be put in bold caps like that. Grease, eggs, ham, and grease were ingested, and then I returned to my house and spent the afternoon alternating between cleaning and napping.

That evening, I went to the latest Wisconsin Goon Meet; burritos were eaten, pictures were taken with the most digital cameras I've ever seen at one table (edit to add a link to more pictures), and (since it was clean anyway), everyone came back to my place for some good old fashioned GTA3 mayhem. It was a good time. It's nice to put faces and voices to people you might otherwise only know online--it makes the whole online community thing a little less creepy and a little easier to explain to everyone. Somewhere along the way we lost Chen Kenechi, but reports say he's okay and surprsingly unpissed for someone who drove up from Chicago and then was accidentally ditched.

Took DeathBucket on a fruitless journey in search of Visine or something that would rescue him from his eyes-about-to-burst-in-a-bloody-mist appearance before dropping him off at his car. Then I went home, fully intending to sleep.

Four hours later...Metal Gear Solid 2 had sucked me in completely. I only meant to play for a few minutes, but.... More on MGS2 after I've finished the game.

SUNDAY

Slept for a while, then got up and finished cleaning. Trabbold came over for a little while, then took off just as I made my way over to the regular Sunday night D&D game. The crazy stuff I had injected into the storyline was neatly set aside without being dismissed (thank you, Glenn), and we had a good time--even if I did level and then almost get the level taken away by the undead. More MGS2---about three more hours than I intended--a few hours of sleep, then back to work and almost up to date.

A new cam photo is coming yet today, and I hope to get the archives up and working. Later, skater.

2:32 PM  
Spent the weekend away from the computer, so there were no updates to OD. Expect a flood of posts on a variety of stuff over the next few hours.

First, a complaint: along with my car payment came a little form allowing me to opt out of the program via which the company shares my personal information. Great. However, to get out of the program I need to fill out a form that gives them not only my name and account number, but also my address, home phone, and social security number. Let me get this straight: to not be hassled, I need to give them all the information that would allow them to be a real pain in the ass? That's like saying, "Please don't shoot me; here's bullets for your gun." I never give out my home phone number on forms--I even lied about it on my passport application, for crying out loud. Mail me or email me all you want, but don't call me. If the phone rings, I want to know that it's either a)family, b)friends, or c)somebody working their way through the phone book(and I have no problem being an ass the last (so far as my understanding that they're just poor schlubs in a crappy solicitation job will allow.))

I have no doubt that sending in the form will require them by law to do what they promise, but the means by which I am allowed to crawl through their provided loophole rankles me a bit.