Went to look at a new apartment complex today. If I decide to take an apartment at this place it looks like I'd get to choose between a monthly savings of twenty percent, or an extra 400 square feet in the form of the addition of an extra bedroom and bathroom (for the same price I'm paying now). Is there anything about this housing crisis that isn't awesome?

My laptop is reaching the end of its lifespan. The hard drive and DVD drive both appear to be suffering intermittent issues, and despite its long years of steadfast service it's starting to show its age. Visions of new laptops have begun to dance in my head.

Immediately after buying my laptop I had a chance to use a tablet for a while and I loved it. I don't know if I could articulate exactly why I loved it, but I thought it was the cat's pyjamas and I regretted the fact that I had just spent a bunch of money on a laptop, robbing me of an excuse to pick up a tablet. I decided that my next portable-type computer would be a tablet.

Now that that is becoming a real possibility, I am having to balance my continued enthusiasm for tablet computing with my opposing desire to buy a computer that isn't a piece of shit. I'm intrigued by the idea of multi-touch computing and would like to pick up one of those, but...Jesus. It's like they're specifically pricing these things so that nobody will want to buy them.

"But Graeme," no doubt the computer manufacturers would protest, "even a pen-based tablet screen is expensive! A multi-touch capacitor costs almost $500! We're losing our shirt selling these things!"

By my calculations that means that a multi-touch laptop should cost about $500 more than a normal laptop. And yet the ones I've looked at are smaller (in terms of screen size), with fewer features, shittier hardware, and are fucking twice the price of much, much better computers. I was astounded at how much hardware I could drop into a custom laptop and stay under twice the price. What I'm basically saying is, throw a multi-touch capacitor in a laptop that's worth buying and jack up the price and I'll definitely pay you for it. And also, stop shackling tablets to your trash.

"Why don't you just buy both a tablet and a decent laptop?" asked a ghostly voice in my head. "OooooooOOoOoooOOOOoOOOO!" It was scary stuff.

Once I had calmed down, I said "Wow, that sounds like the best of both worlds. But wait...I'm...I'm sure there's a reason I don't need to buy two laptops. There's gotta be...hang on, what am I saying? I'm not in school anymore; I can do whatever I want. This will kick so much ass."

I've also been noticing that my desktop is starting to thrash a little bit. Maybe I can find a manufacturer out there somewhere with a three-for-one sale. This is going to be the best July ever!

Jenn emailed me on Friday last week. "Hey, if that wasn't just a fun story on your blog and you actually couldn't get your hands on wings, I can pick some up at the market when I go this afternoon and bring them with me."

"My 'fun story' had a happy ending," I pointed out. "I got all the wings I needed. The fact that they were attached to chickens is a technicality." But I grew concerned. It seemed almost like she didn't know that the whole thing was a...well, for lack of a better word, let's go with 'lie'. She didn't seem to know I was lying. I took pity on her and admitted it. "Yeah, it was just a fun story."

When she arrived at my house that night, she marched purposefully up to me and stared me in the eye. "You didn't really throw thirty whole chickens in the garbage, did you?"

I glanced uncomfortably around the room. I had already admitted that it was just a 'fun story'; was this some sort of...escalation? Was I now engaged in a battle of wills? Did Jenn selectively read my emails? I noticed Sarah was listening quite intently, so I answered honestly. "No, Jenn, I assure you, no chickens got thrown in the garbage."

"So you didn't...okay, good," she said, and walked away satisfied.

Later, after a couple of drinks, Jenn asked "So what the hell are you going to do with thirty chickens? Can we look forward to a roast chicken night sometime in the near future?"

I had a similar moment of internal silence wondering if I was being led subtly into some sort of verbal trap, but concluded that at this point it was far more likely that she was, in fact, just concerned about the waste of food. "Jenn, there are no chickens. The whole thing was a big lie! I admit it, okay? I made it up because it was a far more interesting story than 'I went to the grocery store and bought wings and then came home, curled up in bed and cried myself to sleep.' I was just spicing things up."

The room was silent for a moment.

"Jesus, Graeme, why do you have to lie so much? Why are you such a liar? What the hell, man, we trusted you!" I pressed my fingers to my temples and went back into the kitchen. Jenn scrambled up from her seat and followed me. I glared at her when I noticed her there, but she looked at me sympathetically and tried, even though she's short, to put her arm around my shoulders.

"Hey," she said, "do you want to talk about what's making you cry yourself to sleep? I'm here for you."

She looked so serious that I struggled not to laugh...which is not to say that what I did instead was in any way appropriate. "Goddammit Jenn, what the hell! I made that up. It was just in there for effect. You don't have to believe everything I say! Half of it's untrue! More than half, on a good day."

Looking rebuked, she went back into the living room. I felt guilty for a minute but then I had a couple of wings and they were really good, so I felt better.

I prefer the term fiction to lies, by the way. It makes me sound less like I enjoy deceiving every female I know (along with most of the males) and more like an auteur.

I'm doing Wings Night II tomorrow with a potentially improved cooking technique brought to you by Alton Brown. I went out tonight to buy the wings and hit a problem.

"Hey, can I have, like, a mess of wings?" I asked the butcher.

"Chicken wings? Sorry son, all sold out. That man over there bought the last of them." He pointed at a thin, crooked-looking man dressed in black with a thin moustache and a top hat, whose shopping cart was overflowing with enormous packages of chicken wings.

"Mwa ha ha!" he snickered, and slithered away.

"Fuck!" I said, offending a nearby woman carrying a baby, who shot me a dirty look. As I snuck out to the parking lot to key the word 'Fuck' into her car, I had a minute to think about what to do now that a supervillain had made off with my plans for tomorrow's dinner. I returned to the butcher confident.

"Sold out, eh? Okay, gimme...let's see, ten times twelve over four...thirty chickens."

"You...want thirty raw chickens? Are you sure?"

"Absolutely." I was sick of my Friday night plans getting screwed up by supermarket stocking issues. It was time to own the means of production.

It took a few minutes to wrap them all up and put them in my cart. When we were finished the butcher turned to the customer waiting behind me, who was eyeing my cart skeptically. "What can I do for you?"

"Uh, yeah," he said, his eyes still on my cart, "can I get a chicken?"

"Oof, sorry, son, we're all sold out. That fella there just bought the last thirty."

I seized the moment. "Mwa ha ha!" I said, twirled my moustache, and dashed for the checkout.

You win.

Warning: If you are expecting rapid progress (say, on the order of an entire project in two weeks) you are going to be disappointed, and yes, I'm talking to you, Sam. I have to figure out how to write (or port) a LUA/XML parser, a quadratic solver, and a matrix math library before I can even start remembering how much I forgot about how to intersect with a sphere. In school, we started with a fair amount of sophisticated (or at least confusing) code and I either have to find reasonable substitutes or rewrite all of it. I don't expect it to be THAT hard but it will no doubt be kind of a pain in the ass, and I do have other things to do. That said...

( Step 1 )

I am inexplicably pissed off.

I've gone back to lying a lot in this journal, because God knows people don't need to hear the exacting details of my life. Life is no longer as interesting now that I am not in school, where there were wacky hijinx waiting around every corner, or at least a soul-crushing amount of work I needed to be doing at any given time that I could bitch about to get away from. These days it's all accidentally sleeping in, staying at work late because I slept in, coming home and eating whatever's in arm's reach, killing time on the internet, watching TV, forgetting to pay a couple of bills and going to bed. And tonight I am inexplicably pissed off.

I want to buy a tablet computer, write a ray tracer and a stock tracker, start a webcomic, write a book, appear in a TV show, take a vacation to California, New Zealand, Las Vegas, and assorted points in Ontario, start a company and sell novelty t-shirts, open a bar and franchise the hell out of it, get back in shape, get paid to make video games.

In the last year of school, a bunch of people got really, really into climbing, to the point where they never spoke about anything but the new shoes they bought and how much I would love it if I would just agree to go with them. We were sitting around talking one day, by which I mean we were sitting around, they were talking about climbing, and I was listening to them talk about climbing and surreptitiously rolling my eyes.

"You know," Keith said, "it's a pain in the ass to have to drive to Guelph to climb. Half the people at that club are based in Waterloo and nobody likes driving out there. We should open a climbing gym out here."

There was general agreement that that would kick ass.

"I saw a building on the other side of town with available space, I'm pretty sure I can get the money for a couple months' rent, and..."

"Whoa, whoa, hang on," I said, suddenly shaken from my reverie by his apparent intent to actually follow through on what was, to me, clearly an insane fucking plan. "You can't actually do that."

"Why not?" he asked, looking at me with that look people get on their face when they're totally convinced that they've come up with an awesome plan. You know the one. I'm sure you can recall plenty of times you've seen it on me.

"Be...because..." I realized that I had no good answer and was going to have to wing it. "Because shit like that doesn't happen in real life. You're describing the plot of a fucking daytime TV movie. I bet there will even be an evil corporate bastard that wants to turn the climbing gym run by the kids with a spunky can-do attitude into a McDonalds knockoff, and they'll nearly succeed until you stage a huge climb-a-thon and the citizens of the city all rally behind you, and you win, only without an evil corporate bastard to rally against, public interest eventually wanes and your gym is forced to take out loan after loan until finally it's reposessed by the bank and then it sits empty for a year until it burns to the ground and nobody bothers rebuilding it, and you're forced to take a job bussing tables in the Evil Corporate Bastard headquarters cafeteria to pay off your horrific debt load. That last part never makes it into the movie but that's how it happens in real life."

By this point I had everybody's attention. I had gone a little red in the face and was speaking a little frantically. "Uh, are you okay?" Keith asked.

"I'm fine," I insisted. "But that's why you shouldn't open a climbing gym."

"Well, that's a stupid reason," he said with his trademark directness.

I have spent every waking moment of my life since that day trying to answer the question "If you want to do something, why the hell shouldn't you?" There's always a reason to do it: because you want to. The reason not to usually boils down to answers like "Because that's insane," or "Because life doesn't work that way." I either have to come up with a better answer or start shopping, coding, drawing, writing, acting, planning, designing, scouting locations, working out, and...making a video game (that one's hard to verb).

I know you're all burning to know how my cupcake dilemma turned out.

( Yeah, or not )

Last week was the Game. I'm not at liberty to say much about it except that it was really good. I was on team "We'll do it live!" and let me tell you, did we ever do it live. Fuck it! Fucking thing sucks!

Most importantly, I forgot to bring a hat, and nobody brought sunscreen. And then I hung around outside all day, in the sunniest day Seattle has seen since about last August. By the end of the day I was feeling a little bit sunburnt.

"I need to get out of the sun," I said around 5:30pm, a little bit choked up, as I muscled my way into a seat in the van. I hadn't spoken in a while and this drew the attention of my teammates, who all expressed themselves at once.

"Holy shit, man, your head is purple."
"People shouldn't be that colour."
"Your head is some sort of medical mystery!"
"Get in the van already! Holy crap!"
"Fuck it! We'll do it live."

"I know, I know, I'm getting in the van! Dammit, guys! I'm getting in the van, and I'm doing it live."

It was okay for a few hours because it became night time, but if the next day was equally sunny and gorgeous I was going to have serious problems. I wore my hooded sweatshirt for the first half of the day, but as occasionally happens on extremely sunny days it started to get a little bit scorchingly hot. Fortunately, being an extremely hoopy frood, I had come prepared; I had brought my towel. I wrapped it around my head and secured it with an unfolded paperclip I had found on the dashboard.

"...this is your solution?" Sarah asked, observing me skeptically. "You MacGyvered yourself a...burka?"

"It's not a burka!" I insisted. "It's a ninja hood!" I dove and rolled behind a nearby rock to illustrate.

"...a blue fuzzy ninja hood?"

"Yes! I solved the hell out of this problem and I did it live."

"Goddammit Graeme will you stop saying you'll do things live."

"No!" I tried to think of a way to work in the phrase "Fucking thing sucks!", but I couldn't come up with anything so I just stared at her with great intensity. Eventually she scoffed and walked away, and I chalked it up as a total victory. Point: Graeme.

----------

I finally got sick of going to the grocery store. I hate walking around, putting things in my cart and so forth. I hate it so much that I almost never do it, which means a lot of the time I end up with no food, and completely unmotivated to go get more, which means I end up eating a lot of things which would not normally be considered meals. I decided to start ordering my groceries again on the offchance that not spending all that time wandering around the grocery store might get me to eat something worth eating.

It's my birthday next week and I am making cupcakes to take to work on Tuesday. I carefully ordered everything I needed, meticulously compared the order to the recipe, and immediately after clicking Confirm remembered that I don't have any little paper cupcake cups. I screamed with the agonies of the damned: I was going to have to go to the grocery store, and pay the delivery fee for most of the groceries.

No. Wait. I don't accept this. Fuck going to the grocery store. I'll figure something out, and I'll do it live. Fuck it!

Has it been a year since the last beta of The Game?

Oh my, it's been more than a year.

Well, it's time for this year's, and I'm pretty sure this is the year I get my ass kicked. Wish me luck! I'll see you in 48 hours.

I consider most facets of a bachelor party to be optional. You don't need strippers or road trips or abductions. One thing I'm unwilling to compromise on is alcohol. Alcohol has to flow freely. I implemented this idea to great effect at Colin's bachelor party. Unfortunately it happened that the bachelor party was the night before the wedding, which I consider to be the ideal night for a bachelor party but does cause some logistical problems the next day. For instance, I spent most of the cab ride to Seattle trying to remember which side of the body the liver is on, and wondering whether the stabbing pain in my side was a simple side effect of drinking Jägermeister or whether I should be consulting a doctor about my tragic case of Escaping Liver. As I cradled my aching head in my hands and cursed myself for not drinking more water before going to sleep the night before, I found the energy to speculate about how Colin was feeling. Probably not so hot.

That might be trouble.

I admit I was expecting a certain amount of good-natured animosity due to the sheer volume of alcohol I poured down Colin's throat the previous night, but I was unprepared for the incredibly violent sentiments hurled my way every time Colin so much as thought about me. As the abuse continued, I began to feel a strange sensation...I felt guilty. Colin verbally lashing me was not unusual but usually I was able to take it in stride. It felt different this time. Maybe it was because this time I couldn't hit back (it would take a lot more abuse to convince me to spar with a man on his wedding day), or maybe it was because this time he really meant it.

The ceremony was beautiful, Colin looked about as nervous as...well, a man who's about to get married, but Jenn looked like she was about to burst into laughter and/or tears. I thought he might let up on me after the ceremony concluded successfully (and - it bears repeating - beautifully), but Colin continued to try to explode my head with telekinesis.

"Dude," I couldn't bring myself to say at the reception, "if you're actually angry at me," (I couldn't tell if it was some kind of twisted facade - if he was just trying to make me feel guilty, mission accomplished!) "...do me a favour and don't read the card until you've cooled down." Instead I apologized again and slinked quietly out of the building. Rather than contributing to their happiness, the wedding had apparently succeeded despite me...not a feeling I found I enjoyed. I had become some sort of comic book villain, The Devourer of Happiness, Destroyer of Weddings.

I laid awake for several nights, expecting any minute to hear the rumble of the mail truck heralding the arrival of a small white envelope with a tiny card inside: "You're dead to me. -Colin" Or simply a knock on the door to reveal Colin himself, who would step inside before taking his well-earned swing. Maybe Jenn would come too, and watch and laugh. It was no more than I deserved. And what if one of their parents got their hands on my card before Colin or Jenn found it and destroyed it after reading as instructed in the message? There were simply too many doomsday scenarios to contemplate. People excuse my normal tomfoolery in the course of our normal lives but there was context here. Tomfoolery around a wedding ruins what should be the best day of someone's life. I had gone too far.

As I sat fully dressed in the dark on my bed at 3:00am on the fourth night, sweating and shivering, I suddenly realized that this was ridiculous. A huge effort of willpower stopped the chattering of my teeth and I tried to rationalize to myself. Colin and Jenn are the most stable, loving, trusting couple I know. I could have driven a bulldozer through the church in the middle of the ceremony and it wouldn't even scratch the surface of the deep affection that those two feel for each other...although I might get some stern words from God. Who the hell was I to think that I'd ruined everything with some alcohol and some bad jokes? Assuaged, I lit some candles, put on some soft jazz and took a hot rose oil-scented bath and went to sleep.

I got up the next morning and found that someone had posted some pictures of the wedding. Apparently my fly was open for a nontrivial chunk of the day.

"Goddammit, why didn't anyone tell me?!" I yelled.

Moral: Don't even bother trying to count the ways you screwed up, cause there's at least one you don't even know about.

I saw Star Trek today.

It was good, but I don't feel great.

That's it for now. Same old story otherwise.

Hoo boy.

Got good and drunk for the first time in several weeks.

Why the hell don't I do this more often?

Colin's bachelor party. We went to Coyote Ugly. I bought Colin...four shots of Jaegermeister? Was it five? I don't remember. I owe Dan ~$100. Something like that. This is where I would tell you what Dan's Coyote Ugly name is but the Coyote Ugly name generator seems to have been removed from the internet for some reason. What the hell, right?

When we got out of the extremely loud bar a man approached me insistently asking for something. I didn't hear what, but I assumed it was money.

"Sorry man, I've gotta give like all my money to my buddy over there." I pointed at Dan, hoping to persuade the man to go ask Dan instead of me.

"Man, when the fuck did I ask you for money?"

"Oh. Sorry, I'm having trouble hearing you, it's fucking loud in there." I gestured toward the Coyote Ugly club from which we had emerged hoping he would understand. "What were you asking?"

"Can I write a poem about your name?" I belatedly noticed that the man was holding several torn bits of paper and a Bic pen at the ready.

"Oh. No. Thanks though," I slurred. He moved on to someone less drunk and/or more accommodating to his mission to write poetry based on the names of people emerging from a bar without ever asking for any money.

"What the fuck," I said, when we were two blocks away. "Why does everyone in Seattle want to write me a fucking poem?"

"Totally," agreed Jesse.

I seem like a rational guy to most people, so sometimes they wonder why I can be skeptical of global warming after all we've heard about how terrible it's going to be. I mention to those people that I was shown videos in elementary school that threatened that acid rain was becoming such a huge global problem that it was causing our very umbrellas to melt away from overtop of us as soon as we step outside the shelter of our homes, and yet here I am, fifteen years later, still flaunting my fully extended umbrella at the sky and daring it to do its worst. Kids these days are being shown videos where their dogs are burned alive in a spontaneously combusting doghouse because they demand that their parents drive them to school. In fact, I saw an article today that claimed that global warming would cause the oceans to rise by 2-3 ft by the year 2100 (but I'm too lazy to look up the link; don't try to tell me you haven't seen these articles).

"Wait a minute," I said, "that sounds like bullshit. Aren't the oceans really big?"

"Yeah," said someone walking by, "I think I read that you could fit like five Texases into the ocean with room left over for, like, all of Canada."

"Dammit, this is serious," I said, and turned back to my computer and started typing furiously. He walked away dejected; he was just trying to help. But I had no time for his foolishness. Something had to be done about this before my umbrella caught fire while it was raining. I like that umbrella, and I'm not about to say goodbye now.

The area of the earth covered by oceans is 361 billion square meters. For the ocean to rise 2.5 ft (0.762m), 275 billion cubic meters of water would have to come from somewhere. I brainstormed for ways that could happen. Everyone in the world could drink 21000 2-liter bottles of pop and then all pee in the ocean simultaneously, but I didn't see how global warming was putting us in any immediate danger of that happening. A few thousand bottles of icy cold pop is refreshing on a warm day but not everyone lives close enough to the coast to make it practical.

Realization hit. They meant the ice caps! Not the ones from Tim Horton's (though that would be around 52900 each, by the way) - the ones on the arctic and antarctic. So all I had to do was figure out how many ice caps you could make by chopping up the ice caps, and I'd know how far the oceans would rise. I went back to Wikipedia.

Bingo. The Antarctic ice sheet, the biggest in the world, contains 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. That's not even enough to make seven thousand ice caps for every person on earth! And that's not even taking into account that ice is less dense than water! That doesn't sound so bad. We're talking about like twenty centimeters of ocean rise, tops. Everyone who lives twenty centimeters from the ocean is fucked but the rest of us should be okay. I breathed a sigh of relief and dipped my fists in broken glass to prepare to write a scathing comment questioning the author's manhood.

Hang on though, the wikipedia entry says that there's enough ice in Antarctica to cause the oceans to rise by 70 meters! I rushed to the lab, poured smoky fluids from beakers into plastic Tim Horton's cups, ran expensive Tim Horton's physics simulations on the supercomputer cluster, and absentmindedly drank a thousand liters of caffeinated pop as I paced the lab going "How can this be?" (sorry, people who live 0.01 millimeters from the ocean, I really had to pee afterwards and the lab is right by the shore). Look at that picture comparing the ice sheet in 1957 to 2006; it's lost like thirty percent of its surface area. Does that mean the oceans have risen 20 meters? Are we all underwater right now? The only plausible explanation was that the world had been replaced by some sort of massive distributed robot-driven simulation to distract us from the fact that we are all underwater. The supercomputer cluster whirred and beeped and confirmed that this was the most likely scenario.

After several hours of meditation attempting to break the fiendish hold of the machines and wake up to take my first glimpse of the real world, my eyes flew open. "Wait a minute," I said, "The people responsible for telling us the earth is fucked are all climate scientists, and they insist that the only way of saving the earth is years of intensively funded climate research!"

Suddenly it all made sense. Like when I met that pig farmer who claimed that the first recipe for bacon was taught to man by God and was known to cure cancer and give people great skin, the climatologists were trying to use my fear of drowning to convince me to hand over my wallet. But how had they found out that I'm terrified of drowning?

I was down the rabbit hole now.

Hilariously, Tony deleted his original comment agreeing with me when linking to Jake DeSantis' letter in the New York Times. It's a very nice letter. Here's Zack Parsons' response on SomethingAwful, a comedy website, in which he calls for a mob to burn wall street to the ground and murder everyone responsible. When you read that letter in the New York Times it's hard to keep in perspective that so far, millions of people across America have lost their jobs, homes and families, and compared to that, an AIG executive quitting might not be such a tragedy. Zack's response restores that perspective somewhat.

People are commenting on this thing left and right. For those who may not be familiar with the situation, the government recently provided AIG with an additional 30 billion dollars to keep the 120 billion they'd already been awarded company. As part of a contract that was drawn up well in advance of the economic crisis, AIG awarded $165 million in bonuses to the department responsible for fucking their company over to the point where they need 150 billion dollars to stay temporarily afloat.

A surprising number of people have come out in support of these bonuses. They cite reasons like:

• The bonuses account for 0.01% of the total bailout money
• They're under contract, so their hands are tied
• The workers are going to leave in a huff if they don't get their bonuses
• Their workers deserve compensation, because bonuses are a big part of how these people get paid

I wondered on Twitter a while ago about how much was too much to spend on a keyboard (here referring, of course, to the kind of keyboard you type on. This had come from a discussion on a distribution list that day at work where a guy was talking about how he would never understand the IBM keyboard cult, meaning people who prefer the olde-tymey Model M clicky keyboards. This caused a huge outpouring of overt support including links to ebay and stores that specifically deal in these keyboards. A guy said he bought a bunch in bulk once.

A couple of weeks ago when clicky keyboards also came up (apparently some people really do go on about these things), someone mentioned Das Keyboard, that stupid keyboard that came out a while ago with no letters on the keys, prompting everyone to immediately go "Why the hell would I buy a keyboard without any letters on the keys, especially when it's so expensive? Why wouldn't I buy a goddamn $5 keyboard and spraypaint the keys black?" Apparently these people think that painting letters on keys makes up most of the cost of a keyboard or something.

I reversed their logic. "Why would I need letters on a keyboard when I can just buy a thing of white-out and a really thin paintbrush?" I posted to the DL: "Has anyone actually used a Das Keyboard?" Nobody had.

"My firm belief in the value of experimentation has persuaded me: I'm going to buy one of these crazy ass clicky keyboards. And since there's no point in doing an experiment only halfway, I'm going to buy the retarded one with no letters on the keys. Take that, guy who hates the IBM Keyboard Cult!" He was suitably humbled.

It came today. It is nice to type on. Only time will tell whether I find the damn clicking annoying after a while after so long on non-clicky keyboards.

A guy at work today linked us to Broken Picture Telephone, and I called him a monster. I accidentally spent much of the day giggling maniacally at some stupid website. The idea is so simple I should have thought of it myself, yet so endlessly hilarious that even if I spend all night participating in games and reading through the archives, I doubt I'll be bored of it by tomorrow. Which is bad.

Anyway, you should all sign up. It's funny stuff.

Update: By the way, my profile is here if you want to see my fabulous artwork. (Warning: artwork may be less fabulous than advertised). It includes a picture of a brontosaurus puking on his birthday, Broccoli raping a Tomato, a cat giving a talk about how trees shouldn't smoke, and the village people attacking a pool.

My dad called tonight. Apparently he does that all the time and I never pick up, which is news to me, but might be explained by the shitty reception in my place and also the tendency of my phone to run out of batteries. I don't know why I'm so terrible at owning a phone.

Anyway, my dad called.

"How do you like Seattle?" he asked.

"It's pretty good," I answered.

"Pretty good? Pretty good?! I love Seattle."

"Then why don't you marry it?" I quipped, throwing myself a quick high five.

My father wisely ignored me. "It's right by the ocean, and there are mountains everywhere, there's lots of awesome stuff to do in Seattle. Son, you need to get out and start enjoying your surroundings more."

"See," I said, "I know people that like Seattle because there are bars and concerts there, and I don't care about concerts or the outdoors."

"Then what makes it any good?"

"There are cool people here. What I really care about is meeting interesting people and spending time with them. I only care about where I live for its potential to serve as a backdrop for hanging out with people worth knowing."


I realized a couple of days ago that I had owned ninja gaiden for months and had never so much as put it into my xbox. I remedied that and I have no idea why I wasn't playing it all along. Slaughtering hundreds of enemy ninjas in kickass ways which inexplicably result in massive limb loss after which they keep trying to kill you, instead of screaming and then dying like most people would, is surprisingly awesome.

I also bought Dawn of War II which I am disappointed with. I enjoyed it a lot while I was playing it but upon reflection it's just a three-quarter camera Diablo-style RPG that aspires to be Starcraft, only without any of the good parts of either Starcraft or Diablo. There are some cool story things going on, as there usually are in Warhammer games, but they didn't hold my attention long enough to drive me to play it that much more. Maybe it would be better in its co-op mode, which would be really handy if I knew anyone with the game, which I don't. A box of chocolate bars would have given me just as many hours of enjoyment, only I wouldn't have felt like a dupe for buying a box of chocolate bars.


I need to buy a poker set and have people over.

I can never remember which stories I've told on here before. I lost track of the times I'm certain I've never told a story on here, only to dig through the archives to reference a post I made a million years ago and find it in one of the many untitled posts I've apparently made. So I apologize if I'm boring you, but here we go again.

When Margaret started organizing weekly writing sessions, I figured I'd attend because it sounded like a good time, and once we moved toast talk to Monday, I had nothing to do that night anyway, so why not? The exercise was, you're given the first sentence, and starting with that, you have 15 minutes to write a story with whatever comes to your mind, and then you sit in a circle with everyone else and read them out to each other with opportunities for suggestions, critiques, and/or discussion.

( Where are you going with this, Graeme? )

I logged on to Steam today and checked out the New Releases section and there was a sale on indie games. Five indie games, normally ten dollars each, being sold as a bundle for ten dollars total. "Sweet," I said, "I like indie games, and two dollars each sounds like a pretty good deal...but maybe these games are crap?" I checked them out and most of them sounded pretty cool, and it was only ten bucks, so I grabbed my credit card.

Results:

• Trials 2 Second Edition: I watched the video of this game and it looks like some sort of stupid motorcycle thing. I immediately wrote it off as a game I wouldn't care about. I am satisfied with four games for $10.
• Eets:I had played this game before, and it's a puzzle game that's essentially a cross between Lemmings and The Incredible Machine, which are both games that I enjoy. I downloaded it, loaded it up, and it's a lot of fun! A bargain at 80% off.
• Multiwinia: This is the multiplayer version of Darwinia, which I played the demo for and thought was pretty cool. I installed it on my desktop machine and it is completely broken. It loads and either flashes epileptically, or gives me a black screen with a weird sound on a loop.
• I-Fluid: This is even more broken than Multiwinia. I start the program and Steam shows the Loading Program box and then nothing happens. It doesn't even fork any processes. And this is after it getting permission to do a bunch of administrator stuff, installing some DirectX thing, a C++ runtime, and a physics engine.
• Grativtron 2: This is the only game in the package that costs $5 on its own, so it's really only half off. It's also the only game with no video. It started fine, and I got into the game fine, and it turns out that instead of not working, it's just really shitty. I played for two minutes and gave up.