The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

I just had a pretty decent game of Supreme Commander with Ryan… us against two Supreme AI.  We got creamed in short order the first time, but got our revenge the second time, with the assistance of T1 bomber-rushing on one of the two AI to take him out of the running early.  The rest of the game amounted to us stalling the other AI with suicidal base attacks while teching up, taking his infrastructure apart with T3 artillery, and striking targets of opportunity with T3 strategic bombers and T3 gunships.  We may suck (especially me) compared to serious SupCom players, but it’s fun for us!  I managed not to let my base stagnate this time around… usually I start forgetting to build upon reaching T3… I’ll set a bunch of things with long build times going, and then I’ll forget all about my base and run around like a maniac with a small group of units, get them killed, get my base attacked, and sit back until I die or Ryan saves me.

The Transformers trailer… wow.  It looks like it’ll be a fun action movie (as expected of Michael Bay), with no substance whatsoever.  And forget about adhering to the source material… Megatron isn’t a gun, and you can’t even tell what any of them are supposed to be when they’re in humanoid form.  Half the fun of the old Transformers was that you had a robot with distinctly recognizable car (or whatever) parts as arms and legs.   Bumblebee as a new Camaro, though, I can live with that.  And Megan Fox… I’d like to have a relationship all over her face.

The Alvin Maker books (Orson Scott Card) are pretty good, as expected of Card.  I’m going into the fifth book (Heartfire) soon.  My favorite character so far has been the judge who presided over Alvin’s trial… pity he didn’t get a bigger part.  Judicial pwnage ftw!

It looks like we’re not having that comment contest, since nobody seems interested.

Oh, and I’m now officially enrolled at Wyotech, in their chassis and powertrain program.  I start in October.  Nine months of eating and breathing cars, and doing terrible things to make them go faster.  You can bet Faye won’t come out of it stock.

So far today, I’ve spent about 4 hours playing Titan Quest.  I think my slow-gamer-ness is showing itself again, because in those 4 hours, I only got through about 1/3 of an act, and only a few levels.  Warfare/Defense has lots of tasty skills, and in the low-mid 20s, I’ve only just maxed my masteries, with some of the more basic Warfare skills decked out.  It looks like this character’s going to go with either sword/shield or mace/shield, although later on I’ll probably really want to throw some points into the dual-wield skills.  We’ll see what happens!

Giving pills to a cat is Serious Business.  Except when it’s not.

I’ve got a large stack of magazines on my desk from the past three weeks or so… mostly car mags, with a couple of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics type mags thrown in the mix.  I will attempt to carve through this stack in the next few days, and would like to chronicle my efforts.

Under the Tuscan Sun is a good read so far, 30-odd pages in, but I think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has spoiled me for sheer solid meat.  It’s hard to imagine another narratively-framed book that could have the same kind of tangible intellectual substance to it… excepting The Sparrow and cyberpunk.  Back to chasing Stephenson, I guess.

I really want Guitar Hero 2 for the XBox 360.  And two controllers.  ROCK!

I am no mad-eyed prophet, and that makes me kind of sad.

I really wish I had a garage.  Or at least a driveway to work in.  Le sigh.

I was reading some stuff on the Interbutt last night about XCOM and XCOM 2: Terror From The Deep.  It made me all nostalgic for those two games, as well as Silent Storm.

Parts of my thighs are pretty sore from squatness (didn’t manage to hit up a second set yesterday).  Sooo out of shape… but that’s the point of this, stemming the downward slide and getting back into it, right?  ROAR.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a fabulous book.  You should all go read it right away.  It’s long, though, and fairly heavy.  And it’s not really about motorcycle maintenance at all.

How is it already noon?

…was bloody awesome!  Pics tomorrow.

I think I’m fairly useless today. I’ve been strangely emotional all weekend, and reading about this, this and this didn’t exactly help. I tried to write a better post about what’s been on my mind, but it’s too fleshy for my scatteredness right now, so I scrapped it. Whee!

• Taboo, which I had never played before Saturday night, is fun. Oh, and vulva.
• The goal this week is to get back to waking up at sane hours. There’s too much to do in a day, and starting at 10 or 11 isn’t cutting it, especially since I can no longer just stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning.
• Gaming became a chore at some point, and I need to figure out how to turn it back into a hobby.
• Alice’s mom got us some new cookware for Alice’s birthday, specifically a stainless/aluminum-bottomed saucepan and a set of three Pyrex dishes with covers. Woo!
• I need to upload some damned pictures.
• Picnic Day was mostly a bust for me… tiredness, coldness, headache, and biking around in heavy rain don’t usually equal a good time. The animals were cute, though. I want to adopt every cat!
• Maintenance.

Good night!

The DMV’s web server must be borked… whee!

Chaos being okay might mean just focusing on one thing at a time (for the most part) and ignoring future plans (to some extent).

I have lost interest in both Dark Messiah and Command and Conquer 3.  Dark Messiah was just getting annoying, in that the tasks involved were getting both boring and somewhat frustrating.  Command and Conquer 3’s campaign ran me into a defense mission that proved beyond my meager RTS skills… I ended up resorting to a trainer to break the mission, and haven’t been able to go back to the game since.  Like all Command and Conquer games have to some extent, C&C3 really just makes me miss the old days of Dune II.

Being unable to wait another month for Forza 2, I’ve been poking around Forza again, and messing with the paint/vinyl/decal system.  It’s amazing how much satisfaction you can get out of such a little thing as having your own custom visual scheme on a car you’re racing.  When Forza 2 finally drops, I’m going to take it, a wheel, and this, and disappear.  Until then, I have to decide which of the myriad other games I haven’t finished playing yet to start or revisit… maybe Twilight Princess or God Hand.

One thing I’ve always had to work on was not putting things off.  Even the smallest task that comes up, I’ll tend to procrastinate on, even if it’s just for a few more minutes of clicking idly around the interweb.  That applies to posting blog entries about things that happen, too.

Alice and I spent our Sunday in San Francisco, poking around Chinatown and the Embarcadero, joined partway through by Ryan and Dani.  We got some pretty awesome pictures, especially in the Best Pet Store Evar.  We also hit the Stinking Rose restaurant, a garlic-oriented place on Columbus that was fairly awesome.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bust out the camera inside there.  Boo Eug!

I got my new motorcycle boots today… track boots by Gaerne.  Now I have no further excuse to not get out there and ride!  It’s time to FINALLY begin the process of slowly getting miles and experience under my belt, and move on from the plateau of “new rider” that I’ve been sitting on for a year.