blah.

Worked through the weekend, so not much going on there. Got in the car Sunday morning to go to work and noticed my CD player missing. I haven't been locking my car at home because, well, who'd be stupid enough to want a seven-year-old beat-to-hell Discman that doesn't work well? Evidently someone. I was amused by the Discman theft, and mad about the CD that was inside it (Dar Williams, The Honesty Room). Then on the way to work the car started making bad noises and the oil pressure light came on. Gah. On the bright side K made me a new copy of the disc, and E & Z stopped by at work at around sixish and gave me a new Discman as part of a b-day present. It seems to be very like my old one only with electronic skip protection instead of no skip protection, and also not stolen. Haven't tried it yet because Glyndwr's been in the shop since Monday. There's been no word about it either which has me a little worried.

Anthem [hereinafter 'those pig****ers'], my health insurance company, may not be paying for my counseling sessions and is paying for even less of my dental work than I'd thought. Got this last wonderful bit of news while going in for my crown this morning. I'm seriously considering cancelling insurance altogether and not giving those pig****ers any more of my money, as I can think of better gambles to take with it than 'I might break a leg.'

The new John Cale CD came in the mail from Amazon.co.uk a few days ago. I put it in my computer this morning, figured I'd give it a listen. The first three tracks are rather good. The fourth started skipping, stuttering, and squeaking uncontrollably. Tracks five thru twelve wouldn't play at all. Evidently EMI believes that the only possible reason for putting a CD in your computer is for stealing the music that they worked so hard to bring me. Bastards. And yes, it works fine in my dedicated CD player; it's not just a bad disc. This is with malice aforethought.

I had a number of interesting links but I seem to have stupidly shut my computer off this morning while turning off lights and such. Bah.

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On the other hand, being smiled at-- by people I love, or by people I barely know-- can make things better.

YES DAMMIT I'M WEARING SHOES

It's snowing here. Dunno if it's snowing in Bleaksburg, but it's definitely snowing here. "Silent blanket of white" etc. Time to break out my boots. Sadly my moonboots have gone the way of all flesh, or at least all things exposed to the horrid salt mush of Bleaksburg snow, so it'll have to be my leakish fourteen-year-old hiking boots.

I'm pretty bad about passing news on to my players, so I'll do it now before I forget: Z has withdrawn from Changeling, citing a dislike of playing in the world (as distinct from a dislike of the world). We're still go for this Satyrday night, though, and I'll have info out by email by Satyrday noon, and probably by Friday night.

. . . yeah. I'm less upset/mad/miserable than I was last night. When you've got a minute let's meet in Crete / And we'll be doing it / Doing the thing / The thing you do in Denver when you're dead Things haven't gotten any better but distance gives perspective, and it is, in fact, only money. "We're not doing this for the money. We're doing it for a LOT of money!" Right now I'm enjoying the new Cale, about to go do the Le Guin reading for the day. When I get home I'll do a good deal of the work on my Script paper (cos, well, it's small and easy, as opposed to the ongoing hell of Shakespeare and the research-needing pain of Le Guin), and work on the Changeling write-up, and most likely play some Prime in there, too.

O yes: Metroid Prime. Wins the prize for Attention to Detail hands down. I mean, you're in a battlesuit. No big deal; lots of first-person games have at least implied that you're in a battlesuit. Prime, though, goes all-out with it. You climb out of a lake and you can see the water running down off your visor. . . in the bright flash of weapons-fire in the darkness you occasionally glimpse your reflection off the visor. . . some electrical enemies will scramble your view with static if they get too close. . . at the point where, standing near a waterfall, there were water droplets hitting the faceplate I gave up and revelled in the sheer beauty of it. Gameplay's pretty darn rockin as well.
Um. Aaron Foss has kindly made his thoughts available, and they jive pretty well with my own. Except that I don't really miss the third-person perspective, like, at all. My only gripe is that it's hard to look up at things, and I occasionally get stuck on stuff when dodging sideways. Between this, Eternal Darkness, and the goodness that is Super Monkey Ball (to say nothing of Zelda, since I haven't actually played it yet), I am quite happy with my choice of a GameCube over the other two consoles.

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cthulhia gives us Five Geek Social Fallacies, because she rocks, and also has cool dreams.

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