Linguistic Peeve of the Moment
Linguistic peeve of the moment: People in today’s focus groups saying “artesian” when they mean “artisanal.”
Wordplay | Comment (0)Guitar Hero
And as long as I’m on the topic of video games: I wasn’t too excited about the new “Guitar Hero: World Tour”, even though, I have and love “Guitar Hero III”, because the new one is following the trend of being a game about a whole band, rather than just a guitar, and I don’t want to have three friends over every time I want to play, or buy a whole band’s worth of plastic instruments. But then I was looking at the box, and it turns out that it includes “Hotel California”, which has one of the greatest guitar tracks in all of rock and roll.
I don’t know why they’re not making a bigger deal out of this. I think they could sell a lot more copies if they did. I think they should rename the game “Guitar Hero: The One with Hotel California In It.”
So now I may have to buy it at some point. Just the disc, not all of the silly plastic instruments, and I’d still be playing just the one guitar part. But I sure do want to rock out to Hotel California.
Games | Comment (0)Resistance 2 Beta
I got into the Resistance 2 Beta! They sent me my key over the weekend.
Okay, backing up, for people who aren’t immersed in Playstation 3 news: The best game that accompanied the Playstation 3 when it first came out was a first-person shooter called “Resistance: Fall of Man”. The sequel’s coming out soon, with some innovative new multiplayer modes. To test those modes–although, to be honest, I don’t know what they’re testing exactly, maybe server load or something–they released a beta test version of the multiplayer component of the game to a few dedicated people who played the first game.
So far I’ve tried the Deathmatch and Co-Op modes. Deathmatch seems like it’s pretty much the same as the first game (which isn’t a criticism, the first game was really good, but it’s nothing terribly innovative either). Co-Op, on the other hand, impressed me a lot. I wasn’t really expecting to like it–going online just to play against the computer seems like kind of a step backwards, as opposed to playing against other people–but I was wrong. It makes you feel like you’re really in a war, instead of the smaller fights you get when you’re playing by yourself. The fact that you have 6 or 7 teammates means that the scale of the threat can be much higher–hordes of enemies, or super-powerful enemies. And there are a bunch of innovative ways the designers use to encourage teams to stick together, such as shields and the ability to revive dead teammates. So it’s not just 8 people independently wandering around the same level.
So I’m satisfied that Resistance 2 will be a worthy successor to the first one. I’m still planning on picking up Fallout 3 next, though.
Games | Comment (0)Vegas It Is
I just booked my trip to Vegas. It’s absurdly cheap; I’m very happy about that. It seems like the city is more photogenic at night, so I think my general plan will be to sleep late, stay up late taking pictures, and carry my monopod everywhere with me.
Travel | Comment (0)Vacation
It turns out I have two weeks of vacation time saved up. I keep having this problem, don’t I? I can carry over one week and use it in the first few months of next year, but the other I need to use before the end of the year or it goes away. So I talked to the people on the accounts I’m working on, and I’ve picked a week in December when it won’t be too disruptive.
I’m thinking Vegas this time. I know, I always think Vegas and end up going somewhere else, but this time I’m thinking it for reals. If I go only during the week, I can get the hotel for essentially free–apparently they need to fill rooms on weeknights. And who wants to go for more than 5 days, anyway? I suspect that even that will be pushing it.
I’m planning on going and taking a million pictures, like I did in Atlantic City. I’m sure I’ll get some good ones–it seems like such a photogenic place.
Travel | Comment (0)Sondheim Surprise
There’s a big free theater thing going on in NYC this month. A bunch of theater groups have signed up, so you can go to one website, look at all of the shows that offer free tickets, read a (very brief) description and sign up to go for free. Xena and I decided to take advantage, and one of the shows, which we just saw last night, was a “cabaret” of Sondheim love songs. She loves Sondheim, and I like him well enough, so this seemed like a great show for us, right?
What they didn’t reveal until after the door was closed and the lights were down was that this was Sondheim love songs sung by high school students. Sondheim is a rather mature composer, in content but more importantly (for this purpose) in musicality, and with a few exceptions (OK, West Side Story) should not be sung by high school students. They weren’t bad, for the most part, but they weren’t good either, and we walked out glad that we hadn’t paid for these tickets.
You’d think they’d have a disclaimer or something, wouldn’t you? The other theater groups on this website were, as far as I know, professional groups.
Oh well, it wasn’t a bad evening, and we still had some fun.
Theater | Comment (0)Christmas is Gone
I sent Christmas that e-mail. I shouldn’t have. I especially shouldn’t have sent it when I was still feeling the aftershocks of that anger episode I posted about the other day. It provoked an emotional reply from her, which provoked an emotional exchange of e-mails from both of us.
Upshot is, she doesn’t want to be friends anymore, or at least not until my anger is gone, which I believe is going to take a very long time.
It’s my own fault, I know. I shouldn’t have sent that e-mail. But I thought I was doing the right thing, and I still wish someone had done the same for me back when I was in the situation that her new boyfriend is in now.
I remember thinking earlier, when I was trying to reassure myself about her betrayal, that at least the worst was over, at least there was nothing more she could do to hurt me. I was wrong about that. Not that this hurts as much as her betrayal did, of course–not by a long shot. But it still hurts.