I'm cancelling my gamefly account today. I was planning on cancelling it anyway, because my gift certificate is running out and I'm busy, but now I'm cancelling it early because gamefly seems to have decided to stop sending me games. My account has sat since Monday at "You have no games out. Add titles to your GameQ now!" Meanwhile my queue has 8 games on it, two of which are listed as "High availability" and three of which are "medium availability". Either they have grossly miscalculated all availability indicators, or they're somehow holding out until next month when they get to charge me $16. Or maybe they have the games tiered somehow so that they'll more readily send you less popular games. (I have noticed that they'll jump to the last game on my queue if it's an unpopular one.) But I'm not adding throw-away games to my queue because I don't want to play throw-away games. I don't have that much time. Thumbs down.

For my future reference: my list of games to try is Punch-out, Fight night round 4, infameous, prototype, batman arkham asylum, and tekken 6. (Also on my queue were Madden 10 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, but I'm not really very interested in either of those.) Tekken six comes out in the end of October, hopefully it will be awesome. Please no more extended juggle sequences.

Today I work. Next week I move! Whoa! I'm thinking of putting my current ikea dresser out on the curb when I move and finding something better at for me new place. This dresser has never worked well. The drawers don't come all the way out, and then they don't go all the way back in again. I think it was pretty cheap when I bought it, and I've been using it for years. If only good dressers didn't weigh like 200 pounds. Someone should work on that. I'm willing to pay more for a dresser if it's light. Maybe some kind of rebar skeleton with a thin fake-wood shell?

(from a Dungeon Crawl forum, about this character's death)
AlStar: However, that's not the main reason I'd annoyed at losing this guy: First off, he got thrown into the abyss by a Zot trap, and, through a combination of Yred's damage mirror and lots of greater heal potions, killed an executioner and made it out. You just don't see that often from a level 12.

But mostly, the thing that pisses me off is that I found GOLD DRAGON ARMOR, just sitting on the ground on level 9 of the dungeon. There's absolutely no chance the random number gods are blessing me like that for another thousand games.

Hello everyone. Often I find myself writing here for a few minutes, really working myself into a fury, and then realizing that I've got better things to do but nothing has been concluded, so I delete the whole thing. The time it takes to write a post is not at all proportional to its length. I don't know how Leslie does it. The only way I will survive this post is by keeping the paragraphs about completely separate topics.

Oh, I skipped our last kickball game because I wasn't feeling well. I was all achy, though I'm feeling better now and a real sickness never seemed to develop. There are two equally unlikely possibilities: that drinking a lot of tea and taking vitamin C when you're starting to feel ill will cure you before you actually develop a sickness (though I tend to believe that the reverse is more likely- that taking medication will facilitate a sickness), or that I developed a psychosomatic illness after going into the office and worrying about touching the same doorhandles as a bunch of unhygienic engineers. Anyway, supposedly I'm better off having missed the game because the other team were super competitive trash talkers. Hmmm, I would transition here, but I can't think of a good concluding sentence.

Also, I got a new apartment. This basement is too cold for spending another winter. My next apartment is part of a large building out in Mt Pleasant. It will be my first large apartment building since the dorms. I'm slightly worried that my couch and bed mattress won't fit in the elevator and we're going to end up dragging them up the stairwell to the 4th floor. And by us, I mean the movers I'm going to get, but I feel for them too. I move at the end of the month.

I'm watching Fired Up, which is much funnier than you'd think. It's sort of like She's the Man, where they set up a semi-ridiculous premise, and then throw in mostly plausible characters. The dialogue is well timed as well. "That's a joke! But it really happened!"

(review of the trek episode "Best of Both Worlds")
Even Troi, who the writers always seemed to have trouble using, mixes it up. Wesley is also there and they managed to give him lines that don't provoke immediate visceral hatred. Will wonders never cease?

We had our first kickball game yesterday and totally kicked ass! Kate plays a mean third base, and we have three ex-army guys who are good at kicking the ball far. The other team also didn't seem to understand about tagging up on a fly ball, so we had more than a few double plays because of that. We're in the same division as the real world. They were at the same bar afterwards, but I didn't talk to any of them. If something dramatic happens when we play them in kickball, it might end up on tv! I'll aim for the pitcher's face when i'm kicking. (I won't really, and if anything does happen and someone gets hurt, know that this was an empty boast. I don't scheme very often.)

After yesterday's NSFW xkcd, which wasn't funny, I'm switching the link to xkcdsucks, which I have found to be more funny on average than the recent xkcd comics. And I'm removing the link to the dominions forum, because that game is like crack for me and I spend way too much time reading about its strategies.

(from xkcdsucks about this older XKCD comic)
Oh and come on: Icarus's problem was that he used wax, which melts at a fairly low temperature. Hot glue is hardly the same - sure, it can melt, but if you've ever used a hot glue gun and accidentally touched the hot part you know just how f***ing hot it has to be, and how at that heat Our Hero has bigger problems than falling a few feet, like having his skin burn off. God knows how Mr. Hat is surviving operating what is essentially a small star.

Today was Kate's birthday (Happy Birthday Kate!) so we saw an early showing of Paper Heart and then went out to thai food.

Before the movie the theater was empty except for about a dozen people in line for a free screening of Worlds Greatest Dad. It was a very unusual crowd. Like all the literature and movie nerds took the afternoon off to go see a movie, while bringing a book so they wouldn't have to talk to each other in line. I talked to one guy for a few minutes while kate was in the bathroom. He was like a movie encyclopedia! The old guy next to him looked up from his manuscript long enough to say "What movie is he seeing?!?" before he decided I wasn't worth his time.

The movie was entertaining. It had funny parts but it wasn't really a comedy, and I sorta felt like the romance was very one-sided. It was kinda like 500 Days of Summer that way. It was about one person, and that person's experience in a romantic relationship. The girl kinda reminded me of Jamie, not just because they're both asian, her mannerisms were also similar. Like, for example, the way she squints her eyes. Ha, just kidding. (Editors note: that joke is not funny upon re-reading.) Michael Cera played himself. Or the character we always see him play at least. Kate finds him endearing and I'm pretty indifferent. As the movie nerd informed me beforehand, it was a good movie, but definitely a chick flick.

We went to a thai place out on 6th street in Chinatown and it was just okay. My fried rice was a little bland. (I'm a fried rice expert.) Kate got something more intricate (she's a thai foodie) and reported the same thing. Lately I've had a problem figuring out whether, when I order my fried rice with pork, if they've really given me pork or chicken. It always tastes very similar to chicken at least. I should go back to that place I used to order fried rice from on U street. They do a good pork fried rice. Also I tried a thai iced coffee for a change. It was similar to a thai iced tea, but with a weak, super sweet, coffee flavoring. I guess that's what I should have expected, but I'd never had one before. Stick with the teas.

shihonage: Things grew complex enough so that I have to think seventy times, cut once. Run code in my head before I write it, complex code. I can't cut more than once, because I have severe dry eye syndrome which makes every minute of looking at text into a rationed resource.

ps. Adding a link to Sean's blog. The kid was my best friend in third and fourth grade before he moved to Montana. And I'm reordering the blogs by update frequency.

It's a good thing chevy chase bank is so convenient. I was just looking over my account history and they charge me $2 each time I use a different bank's ATM. This is in addition to the $1.50 or $2 that the other bank charges you to use their ATM. Freshman year I accused the NIHFCU of stealing for doing something similar.

I just got the toxic avenger musical soundtrack in the mail. The evil dead soundtrack is pretty great, so I have high hopes.

(from a star trek: voyager episode review)
Rocket scientists of the week: Kim and Torres, with their brilliant deduction that if you connect the stars on a starmap, you get a flight path. It's hard to think of a Voyager scene that's makes a character look any dumber, and that's saying something.

Last weekend I saw Inglorious Bastards with Matt and Lisa, and then saw 500 Days of Summer with Rachel, Peter and Kate. It was a movie weekend.

Inglorious Bastards was very entertaining. It alternates between tense scenes, funny scenes, and then extreme violence. The premise was a little absurd. It was also a bit disturbing to see people in the audience clapping while watching a man get beaten to death with a baseball bat. I guess anything goes when it's a Nazi. Brad Pitt was pretty good, the actor who played the villain was quite good, and I was surprised to see little Sam from freaks and geeks playing a soldier. You didn't see much of him during the film though.

500 Day of Summer was good in a tragic and uncomfortable sort of way. Kate told me that the first scene is meant to throw you off and think that maybe their relationship worked out in the end, but about a third of the way through the movie I knew there was no way it could end well. Relationships don't work when one person is obsessively passionate and the other person can't make on their mind. I think I was at a disadvantage during the movie because I don't look for rings on peoples fingers (which was a key story element in this movie) and I have a hard time keeping track of a timeline when the it's just a jumbled bunch of numbered days. And at the end I interpreted the next girl being named Autumn to mean that the poor kid was doomed to go through a cycle of obsession and was about to get his heart broken again. (It's tough being a passionate man.) Kate thought it meant that he was moving forward with his life and that things would be different. I guess we'll never know.

(betting whether the 2008 Casino Royale was a remake of an earlier Bond movie)
Puja: If I lose, don't tell Sunjeev.
me: Why not?
Puja: He won't like that I bet so much money.
(brief discussion about whether $20 is really so much money)
me: But if you win we can tell him?
Puja: Yeah, then it's okay.
me: Won't he know that you'd been betting anyway?
Puja: Yeah but then it will be like I was really certain and I just bamboozled you.

I just got back from Rachel and Adam's wedding out in San Diego. It was lots of fun. The sun was a little hot but in general the weather was quite nice, and the wedding appetizers were a little strange (there was some crazy octopus gazpacho and I accidentally ate some kind of duck liver sandwich) but I wasn't bothered by it.

There's something wonderful about being at a wedding when you're unrelated to the couple. It's probably one of the happiest days in their lives, and they didn't have to invite you along but they chose to anyway. I don't know Rachel and Adam all that well so I felt really privileged and I loved everything about the event. Also, everyone ended up being so cheerful, even Adam's step-mother who supposedly got a little angry or Rachel's dad who tells strange nomad-stories just seemed like quirky pieces of a beautiful larger picture. I really had a fantastic time.

Oh, and I saw strippers.

(blog about quest grinding in World of Warcraft)
When WoW implemented daily quests, I realized the industry was really going in the wrong direction. Daily quests are hardly different than a list of chores for some kids living on a farm. You login, you load up on your "dailies", and you grind them out for money and reputation. People do these exact same quests hundreds of days in a row. To make things worse, the culture of the game has devolved such that people averse to grinding out their dailies are called lazy.