Cho Aniki Zero to be released in America for the PSP.

Thank you, ADTRW. Thanks also to Winamp for hilariously inappropriate music.

Went out to retrieve sunglasses, enjoyed bonus sports argumentation, then went down to College Park and wound up at the Silver Diner in Laurel with therevdrnye discussing our vile, treacherous friends among many other subjects.

Along the way I came to the conclusion that I should probably resign myself to the fact that I no longer have the desire to sketch out and run a full-fledged RPG campaign under any set of rules, for the simple reason that it's a hell of a lot of work if you want to do it right. Which I would; there's not much point to running a campaign half-ass, and if you're not running a campaign, then there's really not going to be a good story at the end of it all, and the kind of players who are into that kind of gearhead gaming (which is closer to the old-style board wargaming anyway) are going to be off playing WoW or some other MMORPG that's going to give them immediate gratification.

Anyhow, good conversation went on until 0430 (augh) but I got home ahead of the rush hour traffic and crashed hard until noon. Still not sure whether I need to go out for anything this evening or whether I should just go back to bed in a few hours. Lord, I am so tired...

And speaking of wargaming:

Making OGRE counters with Shrinky Dinks. (Boing Boing)

First of all, since we don't get the National Post down here, you should go read beatonna's Canada History Debate comic.

Yesterday I got a fair amount done despite sitting on my butt for most of the day. Got my doctor's appointment scheduled for next month, got out and finished grocery shopping, and did some cleaning. Also got the date, time, and location of next month's DC Goonmeet nailed down. (How the hell did I wind up as social secretary for the DC goons?)

Also realized I'm missing a lot of the background stuff I had bashed out for Blood Red Skies, which I apparently left in my other pantscomputer along with the PDF files of my transcripts. Which latter makes applying for Federal jobs a pain in the ass since half the Civil Service jobs out there want a copy of one's transcripts along with the resume. brian_edminster thinks he may have the problem with the Failbox nailed down, which would be good; even if he hasn't, I'll be on the road to Frederick today since I need to have those files and would prefer to just pull them off onto the new thumb drive instead of having him burn them to CD, put CD in the mail, etc. Besides, it's a nice day for a drive and I need to get out of the apartment more often anyway.

Last night I learned Rail Baron at the hands of the Dunhams and therevdrnye. If you haven't played Rail Baron, it's sort of like Monopoly except instead of plodding around the board in a circle one does runs across the nation (for which one is paid, and has to pay track fees to the bank or to other players) to generate money. This money is spent on the aforementioned track fees and for buying railroads large & small; the railroads allow you to collect track fees much as one collects rents in Monopoly. As usual in Monopoly-style games, I got my head handed to me and finished fourth, but that was mainly due to bad luck in destinations: I was forever getting sent to Philadelphia and Sacramento, which couldn't be reached without going over other peoples' railroads. So it goes.

I also got patiently schooled in the ills of Metro, where Dutch is working as a consultant. The problem with Metro, dating back 40 years to when WMATA was formed out of what used to be DC Transit and the proposed Metrorail system, is that it relies for funding on DC, Maryland and Virginia; it has no revenue source to call its own except for the farebox, which never covers operating expenses (much less capital investments). From this all the other problems arise, and lord God, are there a lot of problems. :(

fsf_rapier is thinking about putting a league together - no cash involved, just the satisfaction of having beaten the others in the league. Anyone interested?

Man, I hate when I'm playing Civ 3 and I can't get at the damn iron. It's just a matter of time before you lose when that happens.

For the benefit of those folks on my f-list who likes them some reading, I submit a couple of reviews:
( Cut to spare those who don't )
I swear, the Moody Blues' adaptation of The War of the Worlds doth suck greatly. I don't think even acid would improve it; quite likely it would make matters worse. Thank goodness they're playing some Oingo Boingo to cleanse the aural palate.

BTW, I haven't forgotten that this is Pearl Harbor Day. I do have to say, though, all those deaths in 1941 matter less to me than one death eight years ago tomorrow.

Especially since my sleep cycle is so badly screwed I'm not coherent enough to discuss it; somewhat surprised I made it home okay from Rockville.

Rainy and cold today; truly, winter is here. So it was a good day to go up to Rockville, visit the Dunhams, and play games.

Two games of Kingmaker with therevdrnye and all three of the Dunhams; surrendered the Lancastrian cause in the first game after Henry VI had been deposed and killed in battle outside London. (I had Edward, Prince of Wales, but the Yorkists had all the bishops, and 0 Bishop = 0 King.) In the second game, I again quickly obtained Henry, and after most of the Yorkist heirs died of plague or famine, I was able to send Neville and the King to Calais (of which Neville had lately been appointed Captain) where they quickly expunged the last traitorous claimant. Now, in theory the Dunhams and therevdrnye could have chased me to Calais and elsewhere in order to wear my faction down and expunge the King in favor of the Queen, but nobody was much interested in that since it promised to be dull, boring, and worst of all time-consuming. (There was some grumbling about how I always seemed to wind up championing the Lancastrian cause.)

So we played a couple games of Chrononauts, which is kinda cool. Won the second game of that, too. After that we broke for dinner at a local Greek/Italian restaurant that was okay, and on our return from dinner chatted a bit before therevdrnye and Mason went back to College Park, and I went home.

...and so to bed.

( You don't want to read this. Go read something fun. )
Wasted half an hour of my life watching the HALO 3 rollout party on G4. The number of people to be sent to the Arctic death camps when I become Supreme Warlord has jumped by a couple of dozen. Yes, it was that bad. I learned absolutely nothing about the game that I han't read on Wikipedia. General consensus among reviewers is that the game itself is a dog, but all the deathmatch improvements are awesome. What say, stuckintraffik?

Other HALO-related stuff: Joe Staten is working on HALO: Contact Harvest, which looks good; this, on the other hand, sounds like crap. Did Brian Nylund get burned out or something?

So gret is the angre and the bittre sorwe that ys in my soule...

Master Chaucer bonds with his son by playing on the Exboxe CCCLX.

(Ayyyy!)

Cobb has a jones on for Halo 3. I don't blame him in the least: I badly want to know how the story ends, but not from some clip on YouTube. If I weren't in Enforced Minimal Spartan Living Mode right now I'd give serious thought to running out and getting an XBox 360, but even if I were to do something that stupid, where the hell would I put the console and the TV? Well, no big deal - the console and the game will certainly still be on the market when I eventually get a full-time job and a place of my own, and there'll be time enough to waste on it (and Bioshock) then.

Meanwhile, excitement will be overflowing at the ancestral digs tonight. After I do a little shopping for sandwich stuff on the way home (including some tuna) I'm going to settle down and do laundry. Woo woo.
( Last night at the buffet... )

Chillaxation accomplished! I can now has restful sleep, and a tour of the Museum in the morning.

Before I assemble my nose hose, set the alarm, and turn in, though, behold these items of interest found at Rachel's blog:

Arthur Miller "the great American moralist"? Don't make me laugh.

The History Channel is hella popular and military history books sell like hotcakes. So where are all the military history college courses? Victor Davis Hanson has part of the answer; Bruce Bawer has the other part.

Geoffrey Chaucer? He can hath cheezburger too.

Finally, on the off chance that he's taking a break from his PC to do something other than eat, sleep, excrete and strengthen the marriage bond: Yo, stuckintraffik, how's that Bioshock working out for you?

(With no apologies to Dominic Behan or the Dubliners)

Well, that wasn't too promising. As I write this, I'm sitting in my room at the Days Inn of Evansdale Iowa, warm and dry for the first time since I left Chez stuckintraffik this afternoon at 4...yes, I know I was supposed to be on the road three hours earlier, departing from Inver Grove Heights after picking up a revolver for P, but what with the crappy weather it would have made not a damn bit of difference. It rained steadily all the way down from Minneapolis to the Iowa border (briefly changing to torrents in Rochester), and just south of Charles City lightning entered the mix. I was able to put up with that until an hour after nightfall, but my eyeballs are too old and weak to stand God's Flashbulbs going off every couple of minutes, and I threw in the towel just outside Waterloo when I saw a Days Inn advertising FREE HIGH SPEED INTERNET.

So what held me up? Well...Bioshock, for one thing. stuckintraffik is pretty fired up about this game, and I can see why. This game combines hard-hitting action with a genuinely creepy story ripped from the pages of Ayn Rand's worst nightmares: imagine, if you will, a utopian undersea community of Objectivists that gains the ability to rewrite their own genetic code so as to give themselves telekinesis. pyrogenesis, and other powers. What happens to Rapture, the city I've described, makes the noir horrors of Dark City look mild by comparison. The demo must be played to be believed, and the possibility of all those alternate plot lines in the story makes me eager to try this one out too.
( Which reminds me... )

In the meantime, I have the box set of Ai Yori Aoshi to keep me entertained. I'd been wanting it for a while, and when Best Buy put it on sale (with the "Enishi" second season DVDs included) I snarfed it up.

One last trip outside to the Sportage for razors and Diet Coke (seems dumb not to make use of the fridge) and I'll call it a night.

jamestrainor and I hauled the new futon up to the apartment this afternoon after stopping on the way out from Depth of Field to do lunch at the New Century. It was more awkward than heavy, as I had expected, though JT strained his right arm helping get the thing out of the basemnent storeroom at DoF. It wasn't too bad, I guess, since he declined pain pills.

I filled a large garbage bag with various items that needed to be chucked, including the plastic wrapper the futon came in, and got rid of that on the way over to visit stuckintraffik, who was chained to the pager this weekend. We fooled around with LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, which contains most of the important scenes from the first three movies done with LEGO characters. They're sidesplitting, and I can see why there's no "Play All" option - nobody would ever watch Lucas' DVDs again. ^_^ Also seen were short films Schwarzfahrer (Black Rider), Movie Club, Evil Hill, and George Lucas In Love, the last of which puts a really creepy (but amusing) spin on "writing what you know".

Still on the to-do list for tomorrow are the remaining bookshelf, dishes, cleaning the bathroom, and some final tidying up in the bedroom. I'm also thinking of going over to IKEA or Pier One for some candle holders. I have a metric buttload of votive candles that I got for some now-forgotten reasona few years back, and it seems stupid to just let them sit around unused.

Well, time to wash the socks out and see how the futon is.

Me and Jello Biafra, yeah.

I managed to enter and verify the rest of my box o'work last night, finishing up around 0130 this morning. I sent the resulting file in, and chose to drive up to North Minneapolis to turn in the box because I knew if I waited until later in the morning after I'd gotten 5-6 hours of sleep I'd be trying to fight my way downtown through unfamiliar streets or get logjammed on I-94, and I didn't like either of those two options. Got back home and into bed by 0230, which means I'm minimally functional today...and that only because I used up one of my emergency cans of Boss Coffee this morning. Aggghhh. At least I have a better idea how long it takes to whip out a box of records now, so I shouldn't have to pull another late night blitz like this again.

On the to-do list: finishing up my apazine for the collation tomorrow and getting a full night's sleep so I can crank on the data entry in the morning before I head over to David & Judies for the ritual assembly of the disty. This will be StippleAPA 215, and it gives me a warm feeling to know that I've been there for most of it.

I also need to pack up the CDs and the copy of The Sims Deluxe Edition that sold on eBay this week, as well as throw some more stuff up there. I'm seriously considering selling my copy of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which seemed to lose its freshness fairly quickly in terms of game play...while it had similarities to the Civilization series of games, having to work within the constraints of each faction's political/social/economic system became very frustrating very quickly, so I can't say I'll miss it a lot. As it is, the net from this week's auctions ought to keep the Kia in gas for the next week, especially since I'm not planning on driving around a whole lot.