An Isaac'ed weekend

Here's a head kerchief thing I knit with three different yarns from the Phat Fiber box I bought a long time ago. I tried buying one this time but kept getting errors from Etsy so I think I am done with that little experiment. :(

My brother came over this weekend. We had a good time. He arrived before I got home from work, so Abe met him downtown, where they had coffee. Then they came home and played Team Fortress together. When I got home, we went to the Phinneywood Farmer's Market. Isaac bought Strawberry wine, Tayberry wine, and Blackberry wine and let us have the remainders of the strawberry and tayberry. Unfortunately, I didn't like either, but Abe did. So he can have those and I will drink beer. That night Isaac and I played some Lego Batman and it was awesome. I can't wait for him to come down and play with me again. Abe played through it once with me and that was apparently enough for him.

On Saturday, we didn't wake up until 10. Whoops. We went to Patty's Eggnest across the street for breakfast. I had swedish pancakes with strawberries instead of lingonberries. They were pretty good. Then we rushed over to the Sidewalk sale at Acorn Street where I think we (Isaac and I) spent 2 hours or so looking at the yarn. I found this great french one that looked like fur, but I wanted to make a whole purse with it and it was $8 for 17 yards. That was way too expensive. So I bought some other stuff.

The Waikiki from Crystal Palace will some day be woven into an AWESOME scarf. I think it will be awesome. It is the Kiwis/Mangos colorway and I just love it.

The Baby Alpaca Grande from Plymouth Yarns will be fingerless gloves. They were supposed to come with a free pattern, but I didn't get it because I forgot to ask. Though perhaps it is inside the band? Anyways, I can undoubtedly find a pattern on Ravelry, my love. It is so soft, you can barely tell you are touching it. I will make the fingerless gloves and see how it wears. I might get two more skeins to make a pair of the best slipper socks ever.

Finally, there is the Noro Sukko. I think I will be making the Swallowtail shawl out of that. It is a simple shawl pattern and it appears others have done that with success and it looks nice. The colors of the yarn are black, green and brown, as far as I can tell, but I bet there are surprise colors inside too. There always are.

Then we went to the Cartoonists North West meeting where Milt Prigee gave a talk/answered questions. It was fun. He does editorial cartoons, which Abe is more into than I am. Then we dropped Isaac off at the train station to get back home to his GIRLFRIEND. :) Good for him.

Anyways, the other thing I bought at Acorn Street was a skein of Noro to make a tea cozy. And make a tea cosy I did. (I think I just heard one of the dogs fart...) So here it is in all its glory. This is a nice pattern. I am not kidding. I think the whole thing can be knit up in 4 hours (small version). If I hadn't been distracted by how much I love the first X-Men movie, I think I could have knit the whole thing Saturday night, but as it is, I sat there just holding the knitting for a fair chunk of time. So I finished it Sunday morning while I drank tea.

This week on the Ten Ton Studios Sketch Challenge, the theme was Nocturno, an Argentinian graphic novel, by Salvador Sanz. Lovely, but I can't find it in English. Anyways, here is what I drew. It is also up on the Forum.

Last week, I also started the Lilac Leaf Shawl so I will have a Nancy Bush Estonian Lace Shawl to where when I go to the Nordic Knitting Conference in October! (I am taking Icelandic Lace on Saturday and Estonian Cuffs on Sunday.) I started with the other end so that I can knit the middle until I run out of yarn or finish the pattern, whichever comes first. My skein of yarn is about 50 yards smaller than the one called for so I wasn't sure I would have enough.

One of my friends, Celina, put a link to I Write Like on her blog. So I though I would give it a shot. Here are my results. I tried a bunch of things because that is how I am.

When I put in writing from the blog, which is a bit stream of consciousness: Vladimir Nabokov. Abe was impressed.

A story I wrote in high school (which I may end up turning into a graphic novel - 'Cigar Smoke' if I ever talk about it again): Jack London.

Office Cowboy is apparently written like Stephen King. (Haha. There is a joke in that sentence if you know of Stephen King's writing style well enough.)

The water lady story is like Harry Harrison, who I have no idea who that is.

At this point I stared to think it is just completely random.

Vergamon is apparently written like Dan Brown.

A paper for a TC class my last year of college: Agatha Christie.

Hmph.

I will have pictures of my plants in my next post, maybe.

I hate titles

So, I found this article on the naked capitalism blog and I think that everyone should read it.

It blows my mind that the sheriffs office just goes and sets up an auction for whatever house the banks tell them to without checking to see if the bank that makes the request is even the issuer of the mortgage for the house, or that the name on the notice even matches the name of the owner in the county records.

The Jerks comic is coming along quite well. I'm really pleased with it. Angela's art is just getting better and better. And my stories, which began with poop and vomit jokes, are actually moving toward less potty humor which you'll see in a few weeks.

I re-started playing WoW last week after Angela and I spent an hour being nostalgic about it. My favorite feature of the game now is the random dungeon finder. It usually doesn't take more than about 15 minutes and most of the groups have been excellent; friendly people, competent playing, willing to work with the strengths and weaknesses of the group members. It's also really nice that I can play for an hour or two and actually *DO* something in that time. EQ2 has gotten to the point where it takes hours and hours to get anything done and I always logout feeling like I wasted my time.

Wow, I got distracted by webcomics there, stopped mid-sentence and just came back after like 45 minutes.

--Abe

FridayFridayFriday

Not a lot to talk about today.

I've been working on a short story to submit to the Aeon Award competition. Angela is going to give it one last proof reading this weekend and then I'll pay my fee and send it in.

I've been doing a lot of thinking and experimenting with the mechanics of how I tell the story in my writing. I've primarily written in a first person present tense style over the years but I am experimenting with a third person non-omniscient present tense these days. No one but me has read any of this yet though. Not even Angela although she will, in all likelihood, be the first.

I've been spending a lot of time in the battle grounds in EQ2 lately as well. So far I really prefer my Wizard to the other classes I have. Unfortunately my slots are all full or I'd probably make either a pally or shadowknight specifically for the BGs.

The BGs at level 90 are really brutal. There are *a lot* of people that can one shot Denaso. I was going to link you to Denasos info page on eq2 players but their search is busted atm so you don;t get to see her nerd sheet. I need to get her some more lvl 90 PvP gear and that one shotting should stop. Hopefully. I'm also going to play Eunika, my berzerker, in some BGs as well.

Anyway, off to post on the arachknits etsy shop.

--Abe

I wove

What a fun weekend. On Saturday, our house was all clean, which was a nice change of pace, Abe... Anyways, we had a nice relaxed morning with tea and stuff. Then we went to the Cartoonist NW meeting. The information was OK, about SEO, but I don't know if we will use it. We'll see. Perhaps we will start a couple of twitter accounts since people seem to like those so much. But at the meeting, we talked to the president of the group and decided we would really join and include some of our work in the art show they are having in July in Ballard. More details to follow. We even talked to some of the people in the group instead of just running out of the room. I we showed someone who is working on a new syndicated comic (or getting ready to submit it?) our Bus Stop story. He seemed to like it. I couldn't really tell. His comic was funny. Shrub - keep an eye out for it.

The mom and Jim came over for dinner. They spent the afternoon with one of Jim's professors. Turns out that professor is the dad of one of the ladies I sort of work with. So that was funny. We had a really good time. We were supposed to get a picture of mom's scarf I wove for her for mother's day, but we didn't get a chance. She sent me this "bad" picture. (haha - better than the ones I take.) She didn't want me to post it, but I have to post something. It is just too exciting.

We had some steak and corn and pink mashed potatoes. Cute. And some beer. We tried a white seasonal ale from Pike Brewery, but I don't think anyone particularly cared for it. Then we all moved on to Smithwick's, which has taken its place as my favorite. The dogs behaved OK. Mom was sitting in a chair and Nisa leapt into her lap, but mom seemed to think it was funny. She also got to try on her nearly finished Girl Friday sweater and we bought some buttons for it that should be delivered soon. I hope by the end of the week. I only have 1.5 inches of 1x1 rib left to knit and a couple ends to weave in. Then I can finish blocking it and sew on the buttons. I finally did the thing where you wrap the wet knitting all up in a towel and step on it, then block it. Wow does that make a difference. I will never look back. That is a forever thing for me now. This way it can block over night instead of waiting 3 days to a week for the dratted thing to dry. Thanks, Yarn Harlot!

Before they left, we showed them Super Rub-A-Dub, which they simply did not appreciate, and the demo of Fairy Tale Fights where you play Little Red Riding Hood in a white room and massacre other fairy tale characters. Very funny. That demo cracks me up. It is nothing like the game, so I am wary of buying the game, but we'll see.

In The Jerks news, I am now able to do the two pencils for each week's comics in one evening. If I don't wait to long to get started. I think the upcoming ones are just getting better. At least in regards to my drawing if not in hilarity. And next time I post, I will have an actual non The Jerks drawing to post. I just have to Photoshop it together since the stupid scanner is an inch too small to scan the whole thing.

Update: I posted an image at the Ten Ton Studio sketch challenge. Go check it out. :) It's not super amazing, but it has a lot of background and I really need to work on backgrounds.

Happy Friday!

Angela asked me to post today.

On Wednesday night I went to Dissonant Plane to see Thione Diop and his brother play the drums. They were totally awesome. They played for about an hour or so and they asked and answered questions in between songs. I bought one of their CDs. It's awesome.

I finished Dragon Age earlier in the week. I enjoyed the game a lot. The story was well executed if a bit unoriginal. The party characters were *awesome* though. I played a human noble lady rogue and I peopled my party with good characters; Wynne, Leliana, and Alistair. I made Alistair a shield wielding tank, Wynne in to a heal bot and me and Leliana into a dual wielding death squad. We pretty much just rolled through everything.

I wanted to keep playing after the end but, for some reason, the game took away both of my characters weapons. That pissed me off so much that I haven't played it.

Instead I went totally different and have been playing Dawn of War II, which I've mentioned previously. I hope to finish it this weekend.

--Abe

Wednesday weirdness

We don't usually post on Wednesday but I forgot to post on Monday so . . .

I spent all day working on our little surprise. It was a long and painful experience. I'll post about it in detail once the secret is out.

I've been playing Dawn of War II lately. I generally dislike RTS games because I find micro-management to be a form of torture rather than a game. However, DoWII does away with micro-management of bases, resources and resource gathering and leaves you with just managing your squads of hilariously over-the-top space marines as they shoot, hack, chainsaw, explode and stomp their way through hordes of Orcs, Eldar and Tyranids. It's a good time all the way around.

Well back to hacking away at the project.

--Abe

Friday hooray!

Hey it's Friday on a three day weekend :-)

I'm working hard on the new the-jerks.com and you should hopefully see the fruits of my work in the next week or two.

We're going to the Phinney Farmers Market tonight when Angela gets home. We're going to get some fresh veggies for dinner tonight.

Valve upgraded Half-Life 2 and Episode One to the most recent build of the source engine this past week when they released the Half-Life 2 games on the mac platform. They also added achievements to HL2 and Ep1. I'm kinda burned out on RPGs so I think I am going to replay the entire Half-Life series when I finish Dragon Age.

Speaking of which, I haven't had any time to play DA in the last few days which is kind of frustrating because my save is about five minutes into the battle of Denerim and I'm pretty sure that's the end of the game. When I finish it I will post a review and some thoughts.

I finished a short story recently. The first draft was completed a few months ago and it's been aging since then. Last week I opened it up and did a second draft. I cut about 7 pages from it, rewrote a bunch of dialog, fixed a ton of grammar and punctuation errors, fixed a bunch of consistency issues and added a ton of character development. Angela is going to hit it with the editor bat sometime in the coming week and then I'll send it off to some magazines and see if I can make a few bucks off it.

I am *very* happy with the story even though I am acutely aware of many ways that it is lacking. I've got few other stories that are ready for comprehensive second drafts in the next month or so and I'm really looking forward to finishing up my current top secret project so I can get back to working on the fiction.

Well, I'm gong to make some coffee and put on some laundry now :-) Have a great weekend.

--Abe

More Dragon Age

I played dragon age on sunday. Now that I'm into a part of the game that I haven't played before the voice acting is much less annoying. I am concerned about replaying the game though.

I had a weird situation where the game was crashing to desktop every time I killed a certain boss. It turned out that there's a big explosion with a bunch of particles and stuff that happens when the guy dies and that's what was crashing the game. All I had to do was turn off "post processing effects" and it worked like a charm.

The game is buggy as hell though. Not Bethesda buggy mind you but buggy nevertheless. It crashes to the desktop randomly which is pretty annoying. Most of the time it takes a few hours but sometimes it crashes after just a half hour or so. The one that bothers me the most is that when combat starts, the volume of the music jumps up by about 30%. So I am constantly adjusting the volume because if I turn it down enough that the combat music isn't painfully loud I can barely hear the characters talking when I'm not in combat. The other bugs I've noticed are that some quest npcs don't lose their overhead indicators when the quest is turned in.

I'm really enjoying the story though. And the characters in my party are mostly interesting and are very well voice acted. I find myself actually enjoying talking to them.

--Abe

Funny Video

This is really funny. It looks like any other pair of talking heads at the beginning but you'll soon realize that they are mercilessly lampooning the state of the worlds economy :-)

Angela went to Portland for a few days with a friend so I've been playing Dragon Age which was actually a christmas present I got for myself. I had started playing it when I first got it but I was not enamored of the party mechanics and I got frustrated with micromanaging stupid bots and gave up. This time I made a group composed entirely to support my main character who is a rogue and I'm having a great time.

I've got to say that the voice acting gets pretty tedious the second time through though.

Last I checked I had about 22 hours in to it and the game says I've completed 33% of the game. I'm doing every quest I can find and I'm exploring and talking to everyone so I expect it'll be a hefty chunk or time before I'm done with the game.

--Abe

We now resume our regularly scheduled programming

Now that Angelas vacation is over we can get back to our regular posting pattern.

Yesterday was her birthday. I got her a few cds. Far by Regina Spektor who is just Regina in our house and Laughin' and Cryin' with the Reverend Horton Heat by The Reverend Horton Heat. I chose Far because Angela loves Regina and Laughin' and Cryin' because she's been really interested in rockabilly music recently.

We listened to Laughin' and Cryin' in the car last night and it's pretty awesome. The musicianship is excellent. The music is fun and interesting and the lyrics are often very funny.

I'm hoping to listen to Far either tonight or tomorrow.

I got the first two collections of The Walking Dead this past weekend and it's awesome. I'm not usually into zombie stuff but this is more of an apocalypse story that happens to have zombies. Apparently there's going to be a TV show based on it as well. Weird.

At the end of her vacation, Angela bought herself a copy of Borderlands and we've been playing it together. It's a fun game to play alone but it's fantastic to play with a friend. I'm looking forward to a few months of good times playing it with her.

In other news, I'm still writing, looking for a job and playing the bass. Now I'm starting to try to learn to play the guitar as well.

Posty post post

We've been watching Lost on the netflix streaming thing. I'm enjoying it quite a bit more than I anticipated I would. The direction is damn fine, the music is good, the writing is excellent and the acting is pretty damn good too. We're only up to about episode 12 in the first season right now. We've been watching it more sparingly than I would like because it freaks Angela out so we have to stop a few hours before we go to sleep. She's such a baby :-P

I reminded myself why I hate linux this weekend, at least for desktop use. I won't go into the gory details. Good thing windows 7 is basically pretty darn good. And almost every piece of open source software that I would use in linux is available in windows and works as well or better anyway. So.

I'm almost done reading Wolves of the Calla which is book five of the Dark Tower series. I'm really looking forward to getting to the end of this story since I've been reading it most of my life at this point. I've been sitting on the bed and reading for a few hours most nights. The dogs come in and hang out with me. They love it but Angela feels left out because she has to sit on the couch alone while she knits.

The job search is still basically fruitless. There are *tons* of jobs in the medical field. Not a one of which am I qualified for. I'd go to one of the community colleges and get a quick certificate in phlebotomy if I could afford to, but in order to be eligible, I need to pay for one quarter of full time classes which is a bit of a catch-22.

I'm so deeply thankful for Angela. Without her I'd have long ago found myself living in a cardboard box somewhere.

One of our neighbors got a job at the new Little Caesars pizza that opened in the mini-mall next to our apartment. Funny how all the people that got hired there for jobs that interact with the public are college and high school girls. They did hire one older guy, he's probably in his 50s, to stand on the sidewalk and wave a "5 dollar pepperoni pizza" sign. Of course that's a grand opening promotion and will end soon. I feel for that guy. I wonder what he will do when the promotion is over and they don't need him to hold that sign anymore. I would have gladly taken that job.

--Abe

edit:

I thought that this post on Mish's blog was hysterically funny because I have sent my resume off to at least three local vets/kennels for exactly the job that he is talking about.

Cartoonists Northwest and stuff

We went to the Cartoonists Northwest meeting this past Saturday. It was a lot of fun. More fun than I expected it to be. We had a blast.

starheadboy gave a presentation about "street art". It was very educational. His love of his art and his playfulness was pretty inspiring.

I started reading book 4 of The Dark Tower series a few days ago. I know that "real" writers look down on Stephen King but I seriously think that 99.999% of that is just sour grapes. He's a great story teller and I'm thoroughly enjoying this particular story.

Also, apparently, there's some sort of flash game that's based on the series on his website called Discordia. It does warn you not to play until you've read the books though so I can't tell you more than I have about it.

--Abe

The monday post that wasn't

I forgot to post on Monday so I'll try to make up for it today :-)

ECCC was super fun. The part where we wandered around on the show floor surrounded by thousands of sweaty stank ass dorks was not so great but the little conference things we went to were awesome. Whil Wheaton, er, Will Weaton, was very funny.

I've been playing Torchlight pretty obsessively for the last few days. It's a profoundly simple game but it's a lot of fun. It's sort of the Quake 3 of dungeon crawlers. Like Quake 3, Torchlight is a stripped down, bare bones, just the essentials sort of game. Both take the less-is-more approach to pinnacles of excellence.

Or I might just be really easily impressed.

I'm reading Breaking Dawn right now. It's a guilty pleasure. Actually, the first two books were guilty pleasures the last two are like a clinically obese dude in a muumuu walking out of a krispy kreme with 4 dozen donuts and a 72 oz coffee.

I'm like 100 pages in to the book and there's been exactly one plot point so far and when it came, I laughed out loud. So, yeah, my goal is to get it done by Friday so Angela can read it before it goes back to the library.

We'll be having the exorcism for the house on Monday, black tie, byob, no pets, no muumuu's.

I wanted to post this video because Glen Beck is such a slimy douche and it's just fantastic to see John Stewart skewer him. Enjoy :-)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Sour Gropes
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

--Abe

Oh Oh I had to add this one because, A) It's awesome B) It's Terrifying

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Rebecca Skloot
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care reform

Oblivion part 2

So, here's my review of the sand box part of oblivion.

The fact that creatures scale to your level completely destroyed my ability to enjoy the sandbox aspect of this game. As my character leveled up, she seemed to get less and less powerful. The numbers on her gear and in her character sheet got higher and higher but she got less and less powerful in relation to the creatures I was fighting.

So, the sand box gets a big fat raspberry.

I played Torchlight last night. I noticed that they had added steam accomplishments sometime after I had stopped playing. So I made a vanquisher and played for a few hours.

Torchlight is the most fun game that I've played in forever. Within minutes of playing I kept finding myself thinking stuff like "Damn this game is so much fun!". So I'm probably going to keep playing it, ostensibly so I can get the achievements but really just because it's fun.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm glad to see that the Greeks are finally getting some air time in the mainstream media.

If you've noticed that the weekly unemployment reports are being touted as good news upon good news for the last few weeks, take a look at this which points out that the 4 week moving average is showing an increasing trend in unemployment claims since about January.

--Abe

Oblivion

So, technically, I beat Oblivion this weekend. I say technically because, while I played through the main story arc, the world remains and has god knows how many quests and stories left for me to discover and play through. So I thought I'd do a two part review. This first one will focus entirely on the central campaign of the game and the next one will focus on the sandbox aspect.

Unlike Bioshock, whose developers added the patina of literature by riffing on Ayn Rands Objectivist philosophy, Oblivion has no pretensions about itself or its goals. It's a straightforward high fantasy good vs evil sort of story that even includes such delights as people eternally burning in lava and the last minute surprise twist that the world rightfully belongs to the devil. All in all the main story was a yawn. There's an incredible amount of depth in the elder scrolls world and the main story of Oblivion basically neglected nearly all of it.

Much like Morrowind, you spend a great deal of time earning the respect of the various factions in Tamriel. Unlike in Morrowind, where this need felt strongly grounded in the story and made sense, in Oblivion it is essentially an mmo style time-sink designed to keep you from working through the story too quickly. Bravo.

My last real grievance with the main story is that, in the end, all you do is stand there and watch the climax. You are literally rooted in place unable to do anything. Then, to top it off, there's no denouement at all. The story just sort of ends and the only tangible outcome is that all of the npcs in Tamriel now want to gossip with you about what happened in the climax where you were locked in place watching events transpire passively. Oh, and you get a set of armor that you have to wait two weeks in game time to receive.

That being said there were a number of memorable characters, like Baurus, Jauffre and Martin, who weren't able to completely come to life but were life-like enough for me to develop some attachment to.

So, the main story arc for Oblivion gets a big fat "Meh" from me. There are some interesting ideas in there but they weren't developed as fully as they should have been. Graphics wise the game is great. It's beautiful to look at even nearly 4 years after its initial release. Stability wise the game is below average for games of the "AAA" breed. It's buggy. It crashes randomly. Creatures glitch out, get stuck on things, fall into pits and then climb out and twitch like fast-forwarded meth addicts having epileptic seizures.

And, after all that negativity, let me reiterate that I really enjoyed playing Oblivion and would happily recommend it to anyone that's interested in it because, relative to its peers, it's outstanding.

The second half of my review of Oblivion will be posted in a while, when I've tired of playing in the sand box and am ready to move to a new game.

--Abe

Edit:

And, in totally unrelated news, take a look at this and prepare yourself for taxes to go up, way up.

Finished Bioshock

I finished Bioshock a few nighta ago. My last save was about 90 minutes from the end of the game. There really weren't any new developments in the story or characters relationships in that time. The bad guy got addicted to splicing after finally trying it. The german lady kept on her course of atoning for her sins. The little sisters got creepier.

The game probably should have ended in Ryans office. Then the sequel could have picked up immediately after. Everything after Ryans office felt forced to me, like the writers didn't really know what their story was about for sure so they kept adding things onto the end until they ran out of time.

Then they made a warm-fuzzy montage just to be sure. "Oh, all he wanted was a family, what a nice man." Ugg. The game had pretensions of depth but ultimately it was like a mountain range reflected on the surface of a mud puddle.

The "Would you kindly" thing was a very nice critique of the gaming convention of a non-present person directing you through a radio. Those people are rarely untrustworthy in games. Although it ultimately failed because the only choice the person playing has is to either play or not play. If you choose to play then you are following the linear path, if you choose not to play, well, the whole thing is moot then isn't it? Sure, it provided an explanation for the characters experience but it left the player out in the cold. And that gets to the core problem of FPSs and RPGs, the character is neither the character nor the player but an amalgam of both and focusing on one to the detriment of the other just lessens the whole experience.

A for effort. B+ for combat. A for graphics and art design. D for sound since I was plagued by bugs, anomalies and badness through the entire game. C+ for overall rating. There are definitely way worse games out there. Bioshock desperately wants to transcend its medium, and it gets a lot of points for trying to do that, but it ultimately fails in that goal.

On to Oblivion!

--Abe

Games and stuff

So I've decided to take a break from mmo's for a bit. My play time is limited and I'm very frustrated with the 10% fun, 90% work thing that is so fundamental to mmo design.

I have a huge pile of single player games that I've never finished so I decided to make a list of them and play through them. Here's my list as it exists at this moment. I still need to dig out my big box of games from the closet so I can make my complete list. You might notice that almost every game in this list was released after November 2004. That must be a coincidence . . .

Bioshock

Oblivion

Dragon Age

Mass Effect

The Witcher

NWN2

The Longest Journey

Dreamfall

Warhammer 40K Dawn of War

Warhammer 40K Dawn of War 2

Titan Quest

Stalker

FarCry 2

Septerracore

No One Lives Forever 2

Uru

Edited to add:

Shadows of Undrentide

Mechwarrior 4

Lionheart

Vampire the Masquerade redemption

Beyond Good and Evil

Temple of Elemental Evil

System Shock 2

I started this weekend playing Bioshock.

I bought it the day it came out but, at the time, I had a wide screen monitor and the developer decided to deal with widescreen by cropping the top and bottom of the image rather than adding to the sides. This resulted in an extremely narrow field of view which gave me incredible motion sickness. I bought the game, got home and installed it, played it for about 30 minutes, turned my computer off, took 2 tylenols, laid down and spent the next 2 hours trying not to throw up.

I have a non-widescreen monitor now so I've been able to play the game without any negative side effects. I think I am about an hour from the end of the game at this point. It's *very* short, maybe 15 hours all told. The game is beautiful and is fun to play. It's pretty much Deus Ex for dummies. Although the characters, of which there are far fewer than Deus Ex, seem generally much more fully developed.

I'll probably finish Bioshock this evening after dinner. Then I'm going to play Oblivion.

I also bought Oblivion on the day it came out. I played it like a fiend for about a week. I had something like 60 hours of play on my character when the game crashed as I was zoning out of a city. The crash corrupted my save game. I'd been playing for about 8 hours at this point and I hadn't saved. When I discovered that I would have to replay the last 8 hours of the game, I deleted the corrupted saves and uninstalled the game. I haven't even been able to bring myself to look at it until recently. It came out in March 2006!

Oblivion should keep me busy for 2 or 3 weeks I figure. Then I'll head back to Dragon Age which I'd stopped playing because it got to the point where I had to micromanage my party so much that I felt like I was working rather than playing. I think I might try making a new character that's almost entirely focused on healing and I'll just stand in the background and heal the party. I'll have to do some research on that one before I restart. That could suck if there's a bunch of solo stuff later in the game.

As I write this, I'm listening to the sound track for Vanguard. The music for that game is fantastic. It's sad that single player games tend to have very utilitarian music while mmo's tend to have much more fully developed themes. There are some notable exceptions however, Arcanum has an amazing soundtrack written by Ben Houge and you can find links to download it here.

--Abe

bass

Angela bought me a bass for valentines day. The one in that picture is exactly what mine looks like. It's actually a pretty nice bass. The intonation was totally fubar though. I noticed it after a few days of playing and I fixed it yesterday. The bass sounds even better now that the notes are in tune everywhere on the fretboard. LOL

I'm really enjoying playing again. I play for at least an hour almost every day. Today I came up with this little thing that totally sounds like mid-90s emo rock to me. Still, its got a shake-your-booty rhythm thats fun to play. Now I just need a drummer . . .

There's been a lot of stuff going on in my eq2 guild. Too much to relate all of it here. The biggest change for me is that another member finally moved her inquisitor from the raid guild she was in to our guild. She plays her inquis as an actual healer (and WAAAY out gears me) so she's sort of taken over my spot in the guild groups. In the interim I've been dpsing on Dennika while I madly power level a swashy. At this point in the life of the new expansion, Dennika actually does about as much dps as an equivalently geared mage because the mages hit ratings are so damn low against deep orange and red mobs. It's damn cool to be parsing 2+K zonewide in the hole at lvl 82 on an Inquisitor :-)

My swashy is named Prentice. He's going to be a pirate. So his full name will be Pirate Prentice who just happens to be a character in Gravity's Rainbow. He's going to worship Bristlebane and I think I'm going to name his pet "Banana" if I can. Or maybe I will come up with something better once I get the pet quest done.

They added battlegrounds to EQ2 this week. I haven't had a chance to try them out yet because they were busted last night but I'm hoping to have a set of PvP gear made for Dennika this weekend so I can give them a whirl. I have my doubts about whether EQ2 PvP will be fun but I'm hoping against hope that they did a good job.

--Abe

Chocolate Bread

I made a loaf of chocolate bread today. It turned out really good. It's very subtle. I mixed the dough until the chocolate had entirely melted so the dough was this deep dark brown. It smelled so good when it was cooking. In a few minutes, when I'm finished with dinner, I'm going to slice a piece off and toast it.

The new EQ2 expansion is pretty damn good. The sundered frontier is a very nice zone with some beautiful views, good music and fun quests.

I've been playing my bass every day lately. I'm starting to get my stamina back and haven't yet had a full blown blister :-)

Well, off to EQ2. Later.

--Abe

LoTRo Fails me

So, I played lord of the rings online all last weekend and I had a great time. My other game subscription was ending so I decided to renew lotro. Only problem is that turbines billing system won't accept my card number and won't let me update the one they have on file. So, after a few days of trying, I decided not to play lotro.

The computer room looks fantastic! It's all clean and organized. There's plenty of room to walk around and the floor isn't covered in a 3 inch layer of dog hair! It's awesome :-)

I applied for a technical support job at a place up in Bellingham. I'm really hoping that they call me at least because I've sent my resume to this specific company for a few different jobs over the past year.

I don't have a lot to say today. Sorry if you feel ripped off.

--Abe