Penny Arcade linked to this – it’s fascinating and terrible.

I don’t know why, but when I get really bored at work and there’s nothing to do, I feel like hitting myself on the head. I have no idea why – maybe it’s just that I want some sort of stimulus.

I feel like banging my head on the desk a lot these days.

*sigh*

So, spent the better part of the weekend cleaning out and rearranging the garage. Whee. Fun. The point is to make space to do rust repair and repaint the roof of the Mini. So, having now made 90% of the space to actually put the car in the garage, I figured I should take it out for a spin.

Put air in the tires (one of ’em has a leak), washed all the pollen and spiderwebs off (yeah, poor thing’s been sitting there for way too long), and took it out for a quick drive. Damn, that’s a fun car to drive. It really is like a little go-kart.

Problem is there’s something funky with the clutch, and I’ve gotta get it looked at – after the car warms up, the clutch starts to slip when going uphill (maybe downhill, too, but I can’t tell). Supposedly, it’s a degrading tube between the master and slave cylinders, but for the life of me, I can’t get to it to replace it. I’m just not small enough. Maybe I’ll get Ei-Nyung’s little brother to do it while he’s here! Ha!

Seriously, though – I’ll just take it to the British car repair place in Oakland, and see if they can figure out what’s wrong. While it’s there, I’ll probably also see if they can replace the plate that holds the shift linkage down, as that thing’s screwed together after having been broken in two. 

So, there’s been a reasonable amount of controversy over this game. I picked it up this weekend for a couple trades, and am really happy with it, despite the fact that I completely suck at it. In Q&A form:

1.) How’s it use the license? Honestly, I can’t say. I know this is going to be blasphemy, but I never played the pen & paper RPG. In terms of how does it take a setting with various metahumans and squish them into a world infused with magic and technology in a Brazilian slum, I’d say “surprisingly well.”

Thing is, it’s not a game where the story’s the key – what they’ve done, as far as I can tell, is they’ve taken all the trappings of the Shadowrun environment, and used those to provide a setting and a series of widgets that are consistent(ish) with the Shadowrun universe. What that’s allowed is surprisingly deep, flexible gameplay in a novel setting.

2.) But the character designs are terrible! That’s not a question, but yes, I agree. The trolls are hideous, the dwarfs look incredibly goofy, and the elves look sorta dumb. That’s fine. They’re very easy to distinguish at a distance, and though I wish there was some form of customization to differentiate me from someone else, knowing exactly what kind of character you’re fighting in this game is incredibly important, and the visuals remain in service to that goal, which is good.

3.) $60? Yeah, it’s a bit much. This is the current crux of the developer’s argument in a recent podcast on OXM, and while I agree that hour-wise, I’ll get a lot out of this game (more, perhaps, that in comparable single-player only games), the problem with Shadowrun is that its existance as a game depends almost entirely on the community. While I can play Halo’s campaign any time, I have to essentially work to find a community of like-minded gamers to actually have a good time with the game.

Still, the game itself is excellent, and it’s a shame that it’s priced higher than most people are willing to tolerate. It’s also a shame that the review scores are getting lowered because of the perception of value.

4.) Should I pick it up? If you’re looking for something you’d traditionally get for $60, provides a compelling and interesting single player experience, contains some measure of narrative, and blah blah blah, then no, you shouldn’t. If you’re willing to realize that $60 will get you a very interesting well-balanced shooter that’s different than most games out there, you’re not too concerned with the Shadowrun license being used to its fullest, and you have a community of like-minded gamers to play with, then yeah, it’s absolutely worth the dough.

So, picked up Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason from Amazon, and it’s quite good. I’m only a couple chapters in, and it’s sort of strange – it talks about the media, how television changes our perception of the news, drifts off a bit into neuroscience (which I think is where a lot of people will go “zzzzzz…”), and back to the media.

So far, it’s *excellent*, but it’s also sort of tragic. Reading this book makes me wonder what it would be like to have a President that’s this articulate, passionate, and intelligent. Bush would never write a book like this – he simply couldn’t. He uttterly, totally lacks the mental faculty to *create* something interesting, and it boggles my mind *every god damned day* that this fucking moron’s the “leader of the ‘free’ world.” It makes me want to vomit just thinking about it, and thinking about what could have been.

So, in an effort to clean up the garage, I’ve decided to hang the bikes from the ceiling. Drilled a couple holes in one of the ceiling joists in the garage, and hung up Joe’s road bike and my Cannondale. While I was down there, I cleaned and fixed up an older Specialized Sirrus that I’d cobbled together from a bunch of old parts, and Ei-Nyung’s Trek, which she hasn’t really had the opportunity to ride very much.

The Sirrus is a fine bike – a mix of older Dura-Ace and 105 parts on a reasonable, if older frame. There’s nothing particularly *wrong* with it (aside from the blown front tube). The problem is, it’s really difficult to ride, because it’s *old*. Yeah, that sounds ridiculous, except that in the time since the parts on that bike were made, *all* road bikes changed from downtube shifters to brakelever shifters. Using downtube shifters while knowing that brakelever shifters are available is terrible.

It’s less safe, it’s much less comfortable, it’s more difficult, and a huge pain in the ass. The problem is, to upgrade to brakelever shifters basically means replacing the *entire* drivetrain of the bike – shifters, derailleurs, the rear wheel (hub + sprockets), and pedals/front chainrings. Which essentially costs as much as a new bike. So, I’ll just stick with the old-school components, I guess. I don’t do much road riding anyway.

It’s pretty impressive how much space four bikes can take up. It’s even *more* impressive how much space SIX bikes can take up (Joe’s old Softride frame and various components, and the Bridgestone RB-2 frame I scavenged for components (a better frame than the Sirrus, but the wrong size for me).

Unfortunately, to hang up the other two complete bikes, I’ve gotta move a giant stack of boxes. Probably what I’ll do Sunday morning, as I moved a whole crapload giant boxes the other day to make the space I used for these two bikes.

I’m pretty psyched, though – I’ll have to take some pictures, but the garage can almost house the Mini and the scooter. It’ll be close, sure, but I think before the end of summer, I’ll be at a point where I can start working on the Mini’s paint. Awesome!

…at least that’s what they say. But I signed this anyway, because I can’t believe that having a mastectomy as an outpatient procedure is reasonable. I’m sure I need to know more to make a genuinely informed decision, but as for what I would want if I were in the subject of the operation… yeah.

I bought this from Amazon. I know it’s silly, but since the Transformers movie’s coming out soon, it got me thinking about Transformers. A while back, I’d seen a really cool-looking “new” Transformer – an Impreza that looked like it was actually really neat – a nice looking car, and a cool looking robot, to boot.

Ei-Nyung had offered to get it for me, but for some completely idiotic reason, I passed. I ended up looking up the toy, and yeah, it looked pretty awesome. In fact, the whole *line* of toys – Transformers Alternators – looked awesome. All the cars looked like great models, the robots looked really well articulated, and well-designed.

So, I picked up “Ricochet” on Amazon – it was the only one I could find that was both available, and not too expensive to gamble on. It arrived today, and damn. It’s incredible.

The car’s incredibly cool – the front wheels link so that they steer in sync by a bar that connects when it transforms via MAGNETS. How cool is that? The tires are rubber, the hood, doors, and trunk open, and when the car’s in robot mode, a whole mess of stuff is articulated – elbows, shoulders, fingers (a single “claw-hand,” but still), hips, knees and feet. The head even tilts on a ball, so it can look in any direction. Great stuff.

I’ll be looking for more of these things. If I can find ’em, I know they’re high-quality.

For $22, you should definitely get this. MI-5’s first season is some of the best TV I’ve ever seen. Haven’t watched all of the second season, but the first season pretty much stands on its own.

List 10 things you like, but don’t have enough time for – or certainly not as much as you’d like. Simple.

1.) Cooking elaborate things
2.) Painting
3.) Mountain biking
4.) Day long gaming sessions (not videogames)
5.) Lying in the hammock
6.) Recreational driving
7.) Playing with Mobius
8.) Traveling
9.) Having people over for no reason
10.) Working on making the house/garden better

Bonus!
11.) Painting the Mini
12.) Photography
13.) Designing and building furniture (not something I’ve ever done, but something I want to do)
14.) Playing music (clarinet, piano, saxophone)
15.) Re-learning Japanese
16.) Learning Finnish
17.) Training, in earnest, for Ninja Warrior

Now, the question is, how much do I enjoy those things, and how much time do I have *really*?