Food:

Made some rosemary/bacon/cannellini bean risotto last night, to go with some tri-tip, and a weird little bruschetta explosion salad that Ei-Nyung made. Had a bunch of friends over, and much fun was had.

Games:

Finished a pair of games – kill.switch (xbox), and Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II (gc). I’m tempted to go pick up Rebel Strike, just for kicks, ’cause Rogue Leader was relatively entertaining, if not the greatest game. I think Rebel Strike is something like $15, so it’s definitely in my price range. kill.switch was only $10, and I picked it up on the recommendation of a friend of mine who worked on the game. Turns out to have a much more interesting storyline than I’d thought, and the game mechanics work very well. Apart from a very small number of awkward camera positions, the game was a blast.

Other:

Been looking at getting a second, smaller dog, to keep Mobius company, and to have around. Went to the SPCA and an adoption fair over the weekend, but everything that was suitable (and there were a few really nice, sweet dogs) were too big. Something like a Shiba Inu, a Finnish Spitz, or a Jindo would all be perfect, and strangely, also account for dogs from Ei-Nyung or my ethnic heritage. Strange.

Work:

Getting 10 days of comp time from work now that the project’s done. That’s awesome, but it leads straight into:

House:

The idiot contractor that did a lot of the major renovation on the house plumbed the water heater wrong, and now maintenace on it is *impossible* because the cover can’t be removed, due to the gas line that runs right in front of it. Hooray. And since the water valve is sticking, something needs to be done. This means that I’ve got an appointment with a plumber, who will be here Wednesday to replumb the gas line (should be relatively quick), and maintain the water valve on the heater. Hopefully, it’ll run less than $300, but I kinda doubt it. ARGH. Even almost a year since I swore I’d just deal with the crap he fucked up, Mike’s still haunting me. Bastard.

Anyway – all in all, things are pretty good. Can’t complain too much.

Sort of a weird couple days. Little sub-teams have formed to start brainstorming designs on Urbz2. ‘course, I’ve been working on an idea for months, so I’d had some ideas. Ended up being able to present my idea to the team, and it looks like we’re running with the core concept behind it. Be interesting to see how it plays out between now & Friday.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/15/cf.01.html

Jon Stewart = my hero

Oog. Home sick today. Woke up with some sort of stomach bug. Ick. Appear to have it mostly licked, now, though, which is good. Spent the early part of the day sleeping, and taking care of the effects of the upset stomach, then decided since I was gonna be home, I might as well cook something that takes a long while. So, Beef Burgundy, for dinner tonight. Ended up taking about an hour of prep time, but that wasn’t the idiotic part. The idiotic part was that I locked my scooter key in the trunk of the scooter, which meant that it’s now sitting at the Rockridge Safeway, and I had to get a ride home from my mom. And my other keys are at work. So a co-worker’s bringing ’em home with him, and I’m gonna pick them up from his place later tonight. Whee fun. Hopefully, it doesn’t get stolen today.

Picked up Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, in exchange for a PSX, and five games I haven’t played in at least three years. It was only supposed to be $35 for the trade-in, but the guy gave me $50 for it, which was pretty crazy. With no controller or A/V cord, to boot. So Paper Mario cost me a whopping $3.99. I also picked up a program called Yourself! Fitness. It looks to be a workout/meal plan program, that takes into account a whole mess of stuff, and walks through workouts for you. It appears to be like a computer generated workout tape, thus containing a lot more content than your generic workout tape/DVD. Looks pretty good so far, and I’m hoping to be using it regularly. ‘course, that’s up to me. But it looks interesting.

Anyway. The beef’s stewing upstairs. Should be ready in another… three hours or so.

Oh! My mom brought onigiri when she picked me up. How cool is that!?!?

Work:

Kind of strange. Most of the team is still here, and most people haven’t started on next year’s game, and or they haven’t moved on to other teams yet, so we’re just sitting here, waiting whether there’ll be some quality control issue or not. Nothing work-related to do, other than give some thought to next year’s game, or otherwise occupy my time. I’ve spent a couple hours brainstorming, some time watching Cosmos, some time playing Gungrave: OD, and some time playing Crazy Taxi 2, on my Dreamcast.

Gungrave is definitely “cheap” – the controls are unsophisticated, the character models simple, and the storyline and “animation” less well made than in the first game. Reasonably fun, but not as compelling as the first game, even as short as it was. Worth $15? Sure, if you like shooters. But not worth it to most people, I would suspect.

Cosmos is really, really impressive, given when it was made – just as compelling now as ever. The DVD actually has Carl Sagan, much older, giving updates to certain parts of certain episodes at the end of their original content. Great stuff.

Still – running out of sort of “passive” stuff to do. Went for a bike ride this afternoon, which was fun – good to get exercise, and get out of the office for a touch. But it’s strange – just as with The Fox Group, even when I’ve got nothing to do, I feel guilty about being away from my desk. Even though sitting at my desk requires me to do nothing. Nothing. At this point, I’m basically being paid to be bored, and keep my chair from floating away.

*sigh*

Because of certain conditions, I can’t even use this time to do what I want to do, in terms of creating a prototype for a design I’ve been working on for the last few months.

DVD:

Watching Cosmos at work, while waiting for the game to finish up its quality control review. Not a lot to do, so a DVD’s perfect. I’ve had Cosmos for a year or two, now – a gift from eingy for Christmas or my birthday a while ago. I’d only watched the first episode, ’cause I’d wanted to watch it with her, but we hadn’t had the time. Anyway – I’d read Cosmos a while back, so much of the material is familiar. But the issue is that Carl Sagan is really quite good at communicating to a reasonably educated audience. I suspect that without any context, it would be somewhat more difficult to follow, but he does have amazing skill for making complex issues quite easy to understand.

I wonder if there is a modern version of Carl Sagan. The only name that jumps to mind immediately is James Burke, but he’s almost more of a contemporary than a successor, and he’s more focused on the causality of history than say, communicating pure science to the masses. I wonder if you could put Adam Savage & Jamie Hyneman into that category. Their show, Mythbusters, is about debunking urban legends, but they do a great job of communicating the application of scientific principles and critical thinking in an entertaining, and easily-digestible way…

Food:

Gonna try to make Boeuf Bourginon (sp?) this Saturday. Probably gonna take on the order of eight hours of prep time (~4 hours of cook time, ~4 hours of marinade/prep time), but it should be worthwhile. I hope. We’ll see. Gonna get a good chance to use the giant stockpot we’ve got, and see if the burners can easily maintain a simmer. Man, I’m boring.

Games:

Looks like SVC Chaos and Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders are both off the “buy” list, and on the “maybe when they’re $10” list. Both were on the OXM demo disc, and both were so bad, they were almost unplayable. SVC Chaos just lacks any sort of the fine polish that’s absolutely necessary in a 2-D fighting game. The graphics suck, to boot. I’d much rather spend $20 on Guilty Gear X2 #Reload, and deal with the stupid title, and idiotic metal-inspired character design in beautiful 640×480 than deal with the SVC sprites, some of which date back to 1998, and are rendered at what appear to be Game Boy Advance levels of resolution.

Kingdom Under Fire is just garbage. It controls like crap, the writing is *painful*, and basically, it looks like a great concept whose execution was just completely mangled. Definitely an instance where something that looks good in screenshots looks utterly, totally awful in motion. Couple that with an awful Yu Suzuki quality musical score, and you’ve got a game that I’m not gonna touch with a 10 foot pole. Sneh.

So, of the original list, I’ve picked up Sims 2, Gungrave: Overdose, Katamari Damacy (finished), Gradius V (finished), DDR:Extreme, Donkey Konga, and finished The Urbz. Next up would likely be Def Jam: Fight for NY, or Dawn of War, which I’m pretty excited about (but reluctant to get, ’cause I’m out of HD space).

Work:

Better adjusted at work these days. It’s weird, though – there’s almost nothing at all to do, other than “look into” various issues. I’ve submitted a short design summary of an idea I’ve had since I first set foot at Maxis. We’ll see what other people think, but I’m gonna try to get a working version of it hacked together once the content is locked up for the Urbz, and I can start playing with stuff locally, and not risk screwing up the live content. Whee!

food:

Tonight, I roasted a chicken – a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s first book. I’ve done this a couple times, both in the oven, and on a rotisserie. Tonight, we didn’t have any lemons (I just assumed the lemon tree would always have lemons. Oops. There are five on the tree, but none ripe.) so it was just rosemary, garlic, some lemon juice (poor substitute), salt, and pepper, with enough olive oil to turn it into a slurry, after mashing it up in a mortar & pestle. Good, but not *nearly* as good as it is with fresh lemons. Alas.

Last night, I made some mushroom & parsley stuffed chicken breasts wrapped in puff pastry, from Mr. Oliver’s third book, from which until this night, I’d cooked exactly nothing. This actually turned out quite tasty, but I botched the pastry rolling the first time, and as a result, the butter in the dough melted, and it became very hard to roll it out thin enough to cover the whole chicken breast. Ended up with exposed ends, which dried out more than I’d have liked. Still, ended up with very tender breast meat, a good mushroom stuffing, and a nice crust. I’d like to make it again, but will definitely have to be more wary about the pastry.

I’d like to cook some home-made pasta next, I think, but will wait until I can find some semolina – something none of the local grocers seem to carry – even the boutique places. Strange. Maybe make some ravioli next weekend as part of a potluck or something. Last time I tried that, it took about five hours to make the ravioli (I was still getting the hang of the pasta maker), but it turned out quite well. I suppose it ought to have, given that four people’s worth of ravioli was $40 in just the ingredients. 😛

Man, the new stove is nice. Makes a world of difference in how satisfying it is to cook. Now, if only I had more time during the week, in the evenings. Alas.

Debate:

One thing that strikes me is that Bush is actually hurting from his all-supporters-all-the-time faux-town-hall style of “meetings”. The problem is this: In these scripted, fake events, he’s being asked by supporters to reinforce their idiotic beliefs. So when a person gets up and asks, “Have you made any mistakes in your administration?” his answer is, “No.”

That’s fine and dandy, in front of a room of zombified dittoheads. But when someone whose agenda you *haven’t* written comes up and asks you, “Have you made any mistakes so far?” it’s poor debate strategy not to realize that this is a loaded question. This person has the opportunity to ask you anything in the world they want. There’s a reason they’ve asked this question. They know you’ve made a mistake – they’re wondering whether *you* know you’ve made a mistake.

So when Bush gets up there and says that his worst mistake is, “appointments,” when there’s the war in Iraq, and the so-called catastrophic success, or his admitted miscalculations, or any number of other things, he sounds stupid. Stupid to the questioner, stupid to the rest of us. The only people he doesn’t sound stupid with are the people stupid enough to believe him, and those are stupid people, indeed. Kerry at least understands this dynamic, and understands how to address it.

So it weirds me out that a lot of insta-polls are calling this one a draw. I’d expected that Bush’s “nothing’s wrong here,” responses would have shone some light on how delusional or propagandistic he is. I think Bush got walked all over tonight, and Kerry’s really shoring up the notion that he is as “Presidential,” as anyone, and far moreso than the Chimp-in-Chief. I’ve rarely seen a worse debate performance.

Oh, and this is a brief note to Bush – in regards to your timber company? You’re *fucked* sucker.

Politics. Wow. What is there to say that www.dailykos.com, atrios.blogspot.com and www.talkingpointsmemo.com haven’t gotten to already? Or that doesn’t have to do with me being really, really sad about the state of ignorance among most of the American public when it comes to analyzing the veracity of the candidate’s claims? The fact that Rove’s smear tactics, and the repetition of talking points over the course of the last few months has had any negative impact on Kerry is quite disheartening, but I suppose it’s counterbalanced by the fact that at least at this point in the cycle, the momentum is on his side. Given that Bush is an incumbent, and nothing he says is going to surprise anyone at this point (except for “We’ve captured Osama bin Laden,”) things seem to be in Kerry’s favor. The exposure from the debates has won over some of the undecided, and hopefully, Friday, he’ll continue to do so.

There was an article on www.salon.com about a person who’d gone out to volunteer for the Get Out the Vote efforts in Pittsburgh, and their conclusion was that undecided voters were “simple, honest” types who voted with their gut, and that they were the “demo” in a democracy. I wrote them a letter basically telling them they were full of shit. I can kind of imagine someone being undecided, legitimately, given the media’s coverage of Kerry’s side of things. Maybe they haven’t heard enough. But to say that if someone votes from their “gut” or “just because they like the guy,” doesn’t make them simple, or honest – it makes them stupid. It makes them gullible tools of the marketing machine. They don’t know Bush, or Kerry, they simply know the image that’s been presented to the public. Voting on a “gut” feeling about something like that is just a horrific abdication of one’s responsibility as a citizen in this country.

Bleah.

Even the well intentioned, sometimes, can be pretty damned stupid.