If only the jackasses in Congress cared as much about…

…WMD, as supposedly, they do steroids.

…our troops dying in Iraq, as supposedly, they do Terri Schiavo.

…Kenneth Lay, as supposedly, they do Martha Stewart.

…the Environment, as supposedly, they do “Clear Skies.”

I could go on and on, but basically, I wish Congress would care about things that matter, instead of the trivial, inane versions of the things that matter.

It always strikes me as odd when Congress does one of these things like the baseball steroid thing, where they blah blah blah about how bad performance-enhancing drugs are, or when Bush talks about what a plague steroids are, etc. It just seems to me like finding a big problem, and grandstanding while going after the most pointless, petty incarnation of it.

Are drugs a problem? Yes. Are our nation’s problems with drugs going to be solved by going after these people? No. Hell, are BASEBALL’s problems going to be solved by this? Absolutely not. Yet, you get a bunch of Congress-people who can say that they were tough on drugs, blah blah blah.

I sometimes wonder how people can be so disengaged from our political process that they wouldn’t even bother to vote. I wonder why people have no faith in the system at all, then I see bullshit like this. Who fucking *cares* about this crap? If a bunch of people want to inject steroids into their butt so they can bulk up, I could care less. What I care about is that we have giant musclebound idiots playing a kids’ game, and getting paid millions of dollars to do so while teachers have to buy books for their classes, because the state can’t fund them anymore.

Then, there’s the media. I wonder if any of them remember 9/11, and how serious the media was taken then. Now? Michael Jackson all the time. Robert Blake. Scott Peterson. No one gives a fuck about Al Qaeda, bin Laden, Iraq, the war, the Middle East peace process, domestic economic woes, etc. Hell, even Bush’s Social Security bullshit is a smokescreen for what our real problems are, and a means to address a public, simple-minded non-fix to a real problem that his tax cuts have created.

Oh, and fuck you, Alan Greenspan, you miserable partisan asshole.

Hrh. So the Orkin guy who came out to give me a quote a week ago was a bald-faced liar. He told me that for the quoted price, that Orkin would take care of “proofing” the house, and getting rid of the rats. Instead, it turns out that Orkin simply tells you what you need to do, and you do it youself. Quite different than what he’d said, and I have no desire to pay $600/yr to have someone just set traps and empty them. If that was all I need to do, I’m glad to do that my own damn self.

Gah. So, fortunately, the guy who came out this morning was honest, told me what they would have done, and pointed out where the rats are coming in and out. So, Rod’s coming by Sunday to close up the roof vents (I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to inadvertently create a leak), and I’m gonna spend today plugging up some stuff in the crawl space, and setting traps. Fun. And by that, of course, I mean, “Not fun.”

Hm. How odd. So it turns out that the person who hit my car was an 80 year old friend of one of my neighbors. That’s good. She says she’ll cover the damage, which is even better.

Hey. You. Yeah, you. The guy who hit the burgundy Mini on the street, and caved in the driver’s door and rear quarter panel. I’m talking to you. Why’d you hit my car, then not leave a note, you fucking worthless piece of shit?

Fuck you.

holy shit. It’s like the fucking walking dead, today – my allergies have hit me smack in the face with a goddamn sledgehammer. My head feels like it’s full of cotton, and I can’t keep a single train of thought in conversation for more than like, five seconds. My nose is constantly running, and there’s a pressure behind my eyes that feels like it’s eventually going to pop them out of my head. Strangely, when I’m sitting in front of a computer, my train of thought remains relatively stable, but when talking to people, it’s like I keep restarting a conversation, and have to figure out who the heck I’m talking to and why…

Enough already.

A conversation with some friends triggered this phrase as a description of how I feel about meeting new people. I have a lot of friends – good friends. More than I get to see on a regular basis while still being employed. I’d like to see theze people, but if I’m honest, the problem is that there’s either some hurdle to doing so, or having not seen them in so long, I wonder if they still have any interest in hanging out.

Which is sad, in some sense, but I hope that it’s not that we’re drifting apart, so much as simply don’t have time. Which is also sad, but somewhat less so.

It reminds me of how a couple people kept telling me I should go to my 10 year reunion, because I might get back in touch with people. I don’t *care* to get back in touch. Even if I like the people, they’re people that I only know because circumstance forced us together – if we weren’t in high school, I wouldn’t necessarily have cared. The people I still keep in touch with on a regular or semi-regular basis are the people I *chose* to keep in touch with, for some reason or another. Why would I need to give someone I didn’t choose to keep in touch with, or chose not to keep in touch with me, another chance? Where would I fit them in?

So now I sound like some sort of bizarre, reclusive hermit, which is not so – but I think that honestly, the point is that I don’t need more friends, or even really want more. I just don’t have the time.

Work:

Things felt a little insane this afternoon. Because of some personnel shuffling, I’ve basically absorbed the work of one of the designers, while still retaining ownership of the design stuff I was working on, and the scripting tasks I’d already had on my plate. Basically, I’ve now got the work of two people. The designer whose work I’m now responsible is still here for the next two weeks, mind you, and so it’s not like I’ve got *all* of his work on my shoulders, but he’s definitely more checked out than checked in. Not that I mind – I know how it is once you’ve decided to leave a place. I know he’ll close up shop properly, but I also know that he’s not at 100%.

So, though I’ve hit a roadblock in the scripting process (waiting on other, as-yet unavailable resources), and the design work on my section is more or less complete, I had a moment of panic where I thought that I was going to be responsible for the designs I’ve now been made responsible for (as of basically this morning) in the huge design review meeting tomorrow. Now that I think about it, I’m actually fine, because everyone *in* the review meeting knows the status of the transfer, knows that it happened a day ago, and knows that we’re good. So that panic was largely unwarranted.

What *is* worrying me, though, is that the lockdown for the design is coming up very shortly, and there are actually some rather major points that I disagree with the previous designer on, and think that if we’re going to change things, we have to do it soon, and do it decisively. The problem is that with all the other stuff that I’ve gotta review, and understand, before I sign off on it as its owner, I’m not sure I’ll be able to fight the proper fights. Thing is, this is one of the major changes in the game this year, and the predominant opinion seems to be, “It’s gotten this far – let’s not change it now.”

And maybe they’re right, because we are working on tremendously limited resources, on an extremely short development cycle. But the problem to me is that this is one of the central – if not *the* central mechanic in our game, and I don’t like the way it works at all. It doesn’t make sense to me, and my feeling is that when it actually is put into practice as the central mechanic of the game, it simply won’t work. It’s one of those things that on a micro scale seems ok, but when you realize this is an extremely widely used, repetitive system, every little bit has to make perfect sense, and right now, it works fine when used once, but fit into the larger picture, I don’t see how it’s going to work at all.

So, my feeling is that I have to come up with an alternative that is figured out down to the smallest detail, and present another completely fleshed out, substantial alternative that can be perceived as trivial to implement. Because the development of that mechanic has only gone through some previsualization stages, I think it may be possible, but time is of the essence.

Definitely got my work cut out for me.

Well, it’s offical. This year, I’ll have a hybrid Game Designer/Object Engineer credit. Nice.

So, two out of three ain’t bad, I guess. Only one window still leaks. I have some really minor suspicions about the window by the door, but it was bone-dry – colder in some spots at the top than others, which made me suspect maybe it’s not 100%, but no moisture, which I suppose is what the point is.