fine whine

So I posted nothing yesterday; I hope that nobody has died from forsaking food and drink to continually refresh my page over and over again in fervent anticipation of further blathering nonsense. I have been busy, but that is no excuse, really. This is my blog, though, and I make the rules—I can post whenever I want. So there.

Anyway I have been doing a whole bunch of stereotypically nerdy things, at least the way I see nerds. Yesterday night I was up late, much later than my bedtime, banging out a new layout for this blog including the now cliched left top corner piece of stock photography. I mean that not as a criticism but as an observation, as I am doing mine to be cool and not kitschy or post-hip. Alas, in doing so I am hitting the wall of every burgeoning web designer, that of browser incompatibility. I developed the somewhat difficult (though simple looking) layout using Safari on the Mac, and as soon as I was happy enough with it I tried loading the same in Internet Explorer, which was a spectacular failure. Nothing lined up and the image, that for which this whole exercise had begun, was nowhere to be found. I was crushed. Expecting no better I loaded it up in Opera, which, true to form for being a sleek and efficient browser, crashed and burned before even trying to show the page. Par for the course. It loaded okay but not as perfectly in the browsers on my PC, but I'm not happy having it look bad on a bunch of systems. That said I could likely poll all three of my readers and find out what they're using and hack my CSS accordingly. So that was that.

Yesterday I also finished Michel Houellebecq's Platform (well, the excellent English translation thereof) but that it not in line with the rest of this entry so I will have to talk about that brilliant, yet disturbing book some other time. Go read it, though, it's very literary. Today I began a book based on an offhand recommendation from a website (well, boingboing) so that's pretty geeky, right? It's Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and it's really pretty interesting so far, my bias against women science fiction authors notwithstanding.

I mean no offense by it, but it seems that men write better science fiction as far as I have read. I know that there are good science fiction authors that happen to be women out there, but I haven't stumbled on them yet. I have of course run through many a bad male author, so really the problem is of bad SF in general and not gender at all. So it is with pleasant surprise that I am enjoying this book.

I am not enjoying having had another flat tire, but that too is outside the realm of this narrative and I will only talk about it once it all has been resolved. So stay tuned... but do make sure that you are properly stocked with food and water, please.

My geekiness continues with today's playing of an hour or so's worth of collectible card games and then three solid hours at the local Gameworks, which is something like Chuck-E-Cheese's for adults but they kept skee-ball. Jessica was stuck to the skee-ball and other ticket-producing machines for the whole time, but I was making the best of my company's holiday hospitality by playing all of the otherwise expensive arcade games. Generally I can only play things that involve shooting or driving, and they had numerous options for both. They had every iteration of both the Time crisis and House of the dead series so I got in a lot of shooting. I even was able to monopolize both sides of Time Crisis 2 and House of the dead once or twice so I could live out my double pistol John Woo dreams. To play both sides of TC2, including the ducking with the pedals, is truly an experience to, er, experience. Especially when somebody else is picking up the credits. Beating them brought the same satisfaction and relief I had remembered. I fared a little worse on the driving games, but my heart wasn't in them after losing a four-lap Indianapolis "500" on the last leg of the last lap. Before the party was over I also got to do several minutes of a rollercoaster simulator which was really cool but the picture was blurry, though that didn't detract from the thrill. What did, somewhat, detract was the ride's inclusion of fake "danger" elements, like a swinging blade and other pointy things just outside of where safety ends. Those didn't really add anything for me, but hey, it was free. The last game I played was called something along the lines of "vertical reality" and though it too had focus troubles it was very fun. The game is played on lifting chairs that rise and fall up to some ten or twenty feet (oh, the wonders of pneumatics!) and the premise was something about popping hot air balloons. I had never played it but nevertheless triumphed over the two small girls and one guy who played with me. I beat him by the total of the other two combined, I think, and had a blast once I got the hang of the game. That one I might pay to play, sometime. And the whole time Gauntlet legends: dark legacy sat in the corner, unplayed. Sadly, I too did not play it but really should have, as I have long enjoyed pumping quarters endlessly into the Gauntlet games in all their incarnations.

That's really not that geeky, in toto, just CCGing, going to the arcade and playing with HTML. Round that out with a bunch of Dynasty warriors 3 on the PS2 and Grand theft auto: Vice city on the PC and what do you have? Me and my long winded account of why I haven't blathered on about anything else the last couple days.

Oh, and I've been correcting my spelling a lot more lately. Between this and the book it has been atrocious lately, so bear with me if that bothers you. I will not stoop to spellchecking these entries, though I know at least one MT plugin supports that.