Ah, how a day turns on a dime. I let an object get away from me. Figured that it was stuck in art hell, and it was, in fact, done, and supposedly awaiting alpha review. Unfortunately, because it needed some tweaks before it was finished, and because there were a number of bugs in the process, it didn’t show up as being done, and I didn’t follow up. This leads, of course, to a mad scramble, during which I uncover a bug in the tools, which takes time to fix. This just sucks. Now the project’s building, and I’ve got a couple minutes where I can’t do anything, but I feel like a tool, and have basically made my first relatively major mistake at work. Boo. *sigh*

Hopefully, it’ll be fixed by end of day today, but that still puts me a day behind.

Man. Money stress is pretty consistent these days. It’s frustrating. After getting the new job, I thought I’d start knocking down the home equity line of credit that I’ve got maxed out, due to house expenses. No such luck. Since then, I’ve had more unexpected expenses/demands on cash than I would have reasonably expected, as well as the usual crap. House insurance one month: $1000. Fence for Mobius/repair to the side fence: $1450. Other crap: Roughly $1000-1500/month, on top of other expenses. So I’ve been managing to keep up, but not building up the buffer of “savings” I’d hoped for. It’s like every month, my bank balance goes \/\/\/\/\/\. Next month, far as I can tell, I’ll just be able to start paying back stuff in earnest. Whee. Unless something comes up, which it undoubtedly will. Alas.

Fence is almost done. It actually *was* done, but the people that built it decided to use cheap shit 2×4’s instead of the redwood that they were *supposed* to be using. So in an attempt to maybe save $5 off their overhead, they ended up needing to rebuild the entire backyard fence, and a section of the front yard. Sucks to be them, but if they’re gonna try to screw me, they’d damn well better be sure I’m not gonna let it slide. Having been screwed by contractors a number of times in the past, I have absolutely no desire to deal with their shit. Whee.

Incidentally, I don’t know if I’ve bitched about it before, but the

last couple battles in Breakdown, by Namco, is one of the most phenomenally idiotic game designs I’ve ever seen, period. It takes a really innovative, interesting game, and drives it face first into the ground, where it runs over its rotting corpse with a bus. I have no desire to ever finish this game, because after 12 hours of reasonably interesting design, they’ve decided to exploit every flaw in the game’s mechanics in the name of “challenge,” instead of creating something that’s legitimately challenging. Boo.

What the fuck? Is it some bizarre cognitive disonnance that blinds Bush to the obvious, or something?

Men with boxcutters took over airplanes, and flew them into the WTC. This became the justification for needing space-based missile defense. It was basically conclusively shown that a missile defense system would be totally useless against the new model of international conflict, but for some reason, the attack that proved this to be the case was used as its justification.

Now, we’re destroying Abu Ghraib, in favor of a more modern prison. Sure, there’s a sense that this is now a symbol for both the torture under Hussein’s regime, and the brutality of US policy. But was it a lack of modernization that caused our problems there? Of course not. The problem wasn’t that we weren’t taking humiliating pictures in a modern enough fashion – the problem is that we were using basic, primitive means of torturing prisoners at the behest of the folks running the show. And now that they’ve been caught, they want to destroy the evidence. That’s it. It’s not that Abu Ghraib wasn’t modern enough, it’s that our policy was fundamentally evil. But for some reason, the destruction of Abu Ghraib will placate them, and supposedly make things right somehow. But the only way one can reach that conclusion is to either believe that people are stupid enough to believe that torture will somehow be prevented by altering the place, or believing that the destruction of the symbol will remove the image we created from the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. And to me, that’s idiotic.

What we can do to change the hearts and minds of the Iraqis will take nothing less than removing the administration responsible for this botched policy, and for the American people to show the Iraqis that Bush is NOT our elected leader, and that we do NOT endorse his policies. We must rebuild Iraq, but we simply cannot succeed at this endeavor with the leadership we have in place now. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. To say that we need a missile defense system in the face of a razor blade is just foolish.

And Bush is no missile defense system.

So… let’s say you ask me, what are your hobbies? Your interests?

My feeling is that say, seven or eight years ago, I’d have rattled off a list of a number of things. Art, cycling, videogames, comic books, regular books, music, and some other crap I can’t remember now.

These days, I feel like the only legitimate answer I can give is “video games” – partially because of work, partially because I don’t have time for a lot of the other stuff. Cycling’s hard, because I need to find someone else to ride with – I’m paranoid about riding alone. I don’t have time to swim, because the pool’s only open hours I’m at work. Except on the weekends – I legitimately have no excuse not to swim on the weekends, other than that I’m beat from the rest of the week. Comics I don’t read much anymore, largely because I’m out of the loop enough that it becomes hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Recently, the only books I’ve been reading are Foxtrot compilations and politically oriented books, like Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling. Now, that’s not so bad, but I’ve also been reading substantially less, largely because of a lack of time.

I still listen to a lot of music, but I’m definitely no longer “hip” or on the cutting edge. Most of the music I find is … through videogames. Ha. Seriously.

I’m working on a piece of art, basically Sharpie on canvas – which is strange, sure, but it’s sort of time-consuming. Which is nice, and I finished a realistic painting late last year, which was quite satisfying. I guess it was actually finished early this year. I’d like to paint more, and should probably get an easel of some sort large enough to hold large canvases, because I don’t really like painting small. 😀

But seriously? I should make a conscious effort to keep certain skills up. Practice the saxophone, clarinet, piano, whatever. Paint more. Swim some. Bike some. Hard to find time, with the dog, and the fiancee, and such, but that’s not blaming them for my own inaction. I’ve just gotta remember that there’s more to life than games, and work, and passive action. Gotta take hold of the reins.

Bleah. Sort of sucks to be sick like I was today. Felt bad enough that going to work, or doing much of anything was out, but not so bad that I didn’t feel slightly guilty about staying home. Didn’t get much productive done, except keep warm, sleep a lot, spend time with the doggius, and put away a bunch of clothes. Whee.

In a bit of a surreal moment, I spent about an hour playing NFL Street, a sort of lax-rules football game made by EA. One of the levels takes place on EA’s field, which is literally, outside my office window. So that was weird. Basically stayed home from work, and played a videogame that takes place… at work.

I imagine that probably wasn’t the most I could have gotten out of my day. Heh.

*sigh*

Not looking forward to how busy I’m gonna be to catch up from today, but also, I’ve only got a three day week this week, since this weekend I’m going to Delaware, for a friend’s wedding. Unfortunately, that means shit for sleep Thursday night, since I don’t sleep well on planes, and not much of a relaxing weekend. Dog’s gonna be with the ‘rents, though, which should be fun for him. I hope he doesn’t pee in their house… 😛

Whoo. Got my parents’ old couch, finally, in the living room. Kinda strange – we have a bunch of furniture from when we lived apart (my fiancee and I), we have furniture from my parents, and we have a credenza and a desk from my grandparents. Pretty weird. It’s nice having a real couch downstairs, though. 🙂

That was a strangely long week. Whatever it was – the post E3 thing, or the chaos of midweek, or whatever, but I’m beat. Beat. *sigh*

This weekend’s all about chores, hopefully hanging out with my friend Pete, getting some ingredients so we can actually *gasp* cook a meal or three next week, and getting some rest and relaxation.

Picked up F-Zero GX from Circuitcity.com for $15. Nice find – fast as hell, and reasonably fun. Gonna probably get in some more Rallisport 2 this weekend, and maybe give winning Breakdown a shot. Also tempted to go fly a kite, but we’ll see how that works out.

Hell of a day.

Started out alright. Walked the dog, ended up over at the neighbors’ house, talking with one of our neighbors. They’re looking to move. Just sick of renovating their house, and looking to move into something more done. Strangely enough, they’re gonna be almost done by the time they move. I don’t know. Strange. But started the day on a strangely transitory note, and that’s the way things went the whole rest of the day, in some fashion or another.

Went to work, hoping today would be pretty easy – the E3 demo is in the can, and we should be back to a sort of standard production schedule. Around midday, we got an e-mail that said one of the artists on the console team had died over the weekend, in an accident in Yosemite. Since I haven’t worked at Maxis too long, I didn’t know the guy too well, but he was one of the first people I met, who took the time to remember me, and make me feel welcome. He was a nice guy, laid back, really open and fun. And on Sunday, he died. It’s surreal. The most often asked question of the afternoon was whether it was some sort of joke. Like, we could conceive that someone would joke about someone dying, but we couldn’t conceive that such a thing would actually happen. I saw him last Friday, and will never see him again. A couple years, someone I knew about as well committed suicide. I didn’t know how to feel then, and I don’t know how to feel now. I want to say something poetic, something elegant – but I didn’t know either of them well enough to say something that I feel would illuminate their passing. I knew Jay well enough to know I’ll miss him, and that I hope he went easy.

Got home late, after trying to work out some bugs that were holding stuff up. First thing through the door, even before I could eat, was that my parents are gonna sell the house. I haven’t lived in that house in years, but it’s where I feel like I grew up. Fifth grade through the end of high school, it’s always been my house. I still periodically refer to it as my house, even though I have a house of my own. We got Sonja, our dog, in that house, not long after we’d moved in. And it looks like in a few months, someone else will live there, and my parents will live in Montreal. It’s strange. Things I thought would last a long time are over, changed forever.

And it makes me wonder, how much of what I think will last my lifetime will be gone forever tomorrow? The whole ride home, I wondered what would happen if I were killed in a car accident at that moment. Have I done the things I want to do? Have I lived the way I want to live? By and large, I think the answer is yes. I’ve found a wonderful companion I love more than anyone, I’ve resolved a lot of the problems I had with my parents, I’ve got a good batch of friends, and I’m doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, for work, and headed in the right direction. Have I changed the world yet? Maybe in some small ways, but certainly nothing revolutionary. But not in the “live each moment as if it’s your last” way, but in the “someone I know just died. It puts some things in some perspective” way, if I were to die tomorrow, I’d be sad that it would all be over. But things are good, transient as though they may be, and the changes that have come, and are coming… well, we’ll have to deal with them as they come. Not much else you can do.

I feel that in regards to the current revelations about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, there is only one reasonable conclusion to come to: People who continue to support the actions of this administration are insane. Plain and simple, I don’t think that this is terribly difficult a concept to understand. Here we have an administration that has failed at every major undertaking it has pursued, whose ideas about the economy, about foreign policy, energy policy and such have all been proven to be wrong. Catastrophically horribly wrong.

But that’s almost an aside. Let’s look at the prisoner abuse. And I’m not saying this is the world’s worst atrocity, I’m not saying that this is worse than the holocaust, or what have you. It is what it is, and by my comments, I do not want to make it any more or less than that. But look at it. Here we have a public revelation that the US, while claiming the “torture rooms” are closed, are torturing our prisoners. We have, basically, claimed moral superiority while wallowing in the same depravity we are publicly condemning. Not only that, we have an administration so fantastically incompetant that they could not, or would not surpress such behaviour on their own, and would do nothing about it until photographic evidence which would ignite a tremendous public backlash all over the world were released.

What kind of grotesque incompetance leads to such behaviour? And more over, what kind of depravity *DEFENDS AND SUPPORTS* such actions? Bush has said that Rumsfeld is an important part of his cabinet, and will remain so. Does this not strike anyone else as a complete and total abandonment of accountability? Not that this hasn’t happened before, and not that this isn’t practically Bush’s Modus Operandi. But the point, the plain and simple point, is that this administration let this happen. They let the actions happen in the first place, and they let the evidence that it was happening get out. This is a *catastrophic* failure of accountability, and of public relations, and at a bare minimum, it should be obvious that Rumsfeld, at least, should be out.

But more than that, it shows to me that for someone even marginally cognizant of our image, worldwide, this administration HAS to be upended, by the American people, to show the world that we *can* be accountable for our actions, that we *do* feel a sense of responsibility, and that we will *NOT* be overrun by tyrannical zealots.

And frankly, it worries me. Because if we do not boot this administration, in order to believe that democracy still works, I must believe that the American public, by and large, not only completely devoid of a sense of morality, devoid of a sense of accountability, but completely fucking insane. If this is to happen, my friend Alan put it really well, though he was talking about the draft – so I’ll paraphrase.

I love my country. But if Bush wins in 2004, that country will be Canada.