Thursday, May 28, 2009

A Collection

This is a "Free Form Jazz Odyssey" post, because I am (for once) totally tapped out today. Eli 7.9 caught some kind of stomach bug Monday night and just started feeling better today. In the meantime, he hasn't been able to sleep because his stomach has been hurting, so I've gotten about ten hours of sleep in three nights (an hour at a time, seemingly). Gloria's gotten even less.

In other words, we're all running on fumes.

On top of that, last night my demented neighbor with the giant dog didn't come home until 1:30 a.m., and the dog barked almost non-stop for four hours.

Okay, enough griping. Now, the collection.

1. Here's one of the most charming game trailers I've ever seen: Paperworld. Unfortunately, it's more of a "game concept" trailer than a finished product, but it's still quite special.

2. I forgot to mention that when we went downtown for Mother's Day, I saw a sign at a pay parking lot that made me burst out laughing. It said "DON'T PAY IMPOSTER."

3. Demon's Souls is just freaking great. I'll try to write up impressions next week.

4. A bunch of you guys sent in a link to a Malcolm Gladwell story in the New Yorker about a girl's basketball team titled "How David Beats Goliath." I really like the Freakanomics guys, and I'm a big fan of "data guys," but to me, Gladwell isn't a data guy--he's a cultural fabulist. He tells us stories we want to hear, pseudo-supports them with data, and drives an armored truck of cash back to his mythological lair. I'm going to try to get into this in more depth next week, but my brain is too foggy to do it right now.

5. I've been riding that damned unicycle every day for the last 8 days. I rode at 9:30 one night because I didn't have any other time to practice. I even went into high school football coach mode when Gloria asked why I just didn't take the day off. "You don't succeed by failing," I said.

That's ridiculous, of course. That's exactly how many people succeed, because failing is part of gaining experience. But when I'm in high school football coach mode (an extremely rare phenomenon, fortunately), I can't tolerate any shade of gray.

Like I said earlier this week, though, it's on. And even though it's killing me to ride an hour a day, I'm not taking any days off until I can ride a hundred feet. At the same time, just to clarify.

A week ago, the farthest I'd ridden was about fifteen feet. I rode forty-seven feet today, and rode forty feet three other times.

It's hard, and I'm worn out, but it's working.

6. The early reviews for Red Faction: Guerrilla look very strong. Volition is a very strong developer, and I'm really looking forward to this game.

7. As you guys have probably already figured out, I'm not going to E3 this year. There will still be plenty to write about from here, though.

8. Remember how I said my new system wasn't working well in S3 mode? As it turns out, it may not be just a motherboard issue, because I've read about issues with both Nvidia drivers and my monitor as well. It seems like a large range of hardware has issues with implementing S3 support in a flawless manner.

9. LG announced a new, 1080p resolution 3-D monitor, and it looks very impressive. Someone's going to get this right.

10. The Austin American-Statesman had a classic headline this week: Austin man arrested in death of woman found by store.

Um, oops?

If you click on the link, you'll see that they changed the headline to "found near store," but that wasn't what the print edition originally said. Outstanding.

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