• The Jaded Gamer
  (tags: awesome games)

So today’s the day, and the new Skinny Puppy album is out. I’m not going to review it - at least, not right now - but I will say that if you were wondering whether or not you should buy it, the answer is yes. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to listen to the album another five times and pass out on my lawn. (I do not have a lawn.)

• The New Yorker: Good People
  New fiction from David Foster Wallace.
• MTmaster
  Photos of people going through subway turnstiles. So awesome.
  (tags: photo newyork nyc)
• The Daily WTF: The Contractor’s Note
  (tags: funny)
• My basement Mac collection - a photoset on Flickr
  Yow.
  (tags: apple geek mac photo)

I’ve been playing a lot of Burning Crusade. Did you notice how I was posting shit pretty much every day and then the expansion hit and nothing? Yeah.

Anyway, it’s a lot of fun but I’m not going to say much more about it because I know from hearing people talk about professional sports that there are few things in the world more dull than the arcane details of a hobby in which one has no interest.

My birthday was on Saturday, so I can now officially tell people I’m in my late twenties. This is not something I ever had any desire to do so I guess it’s not really that exciting, but I’m trying to look on the bright side. I did receive a pile of extravagant and wondrous delights (phat lotos, if you will) which have helped to ease the pain a little. And I guess my age is an even number now. Being divisible by two is always a plus, right?

Right?

Do I even need to tell you what I was doing last night? I didn’t think so.

I haven’t commented on WoW in a long time, but I hope you’ll forgive me just this once. So far: Hellfire Citadel is fun (even if it does smack a bit too much of Blackrock Mountain) and instancing is a good way to avoid the crushing zone lag in the rest of Outland. No real way to avoid the 900-person queues except by logging in early, though.

After one evening playing around with the new zones, I’m only halfway to 61. This is primarily because I have no interest in zipping through the new content, but also because I have two goddamn jobs and cannot play for 36 hours straight like some people I know. Although I’m also leveling a belf like everyone else in the world (that is, everyone else who didn’t make a female draenei shaman), getting my mage to 70 is my top priority. I just don’t see the point in waiting two years for new content and then using it up as quickly as possible.

In addition, Scryers 4 lyfe.

• NPR : Saving Music One Video at a Time
  (tags: neat music radio)

The rain ended up making my weekend somewhat more movie-oriented than I’d anticipated. In addition to Dead Man’s Chest, we watched The Libertine (not bad), The Piano Teacher (required brain-bleaching afterwards), Spellbound (good but I’d already seen it) and Amélie (likewise).

In the past week, I’ve been accused by three different people of being difficult to shop for. I would strongly disagree with that assessment.

I finally got around to watching Dead Man’s Chest this afternoon. (I know, right?) I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. I guess I was expecting more of the same, but I should have realized “more of the same” meant it was likely to suffer from sequelitis - which it did. I have a special hatred for cliffhanger endings, also. But it was still good fun, if not as surprisingly fun as the first one. I will, inevitably, watch it again before the third comes out.

I have nothing to offer you today, except the best thing in the world. And that is this video of a baby sloth in a box.

For a while now, the CMOAT and I (and presumably most everyone else who lives in New York City) have been getting booklets from the City on surviving various emergencies - hurricanes, avian flu outbreaks, the rise of the ravaging undead, and so on. All of them emphasize the importance of having one or more portable survival kits in case of an evacuation. We’ve mostly ignored this stuff. After all, we live in the middle of a high-rise apartment building on Roosevelt Goddamn Island, which may as well be Raccoon City as far as any escape plans are concerned. If there’s so much as a strong breeze, we’re fucked.

However, we also watch a lot of survival reality TV, because who doesn’t like the sight of a grown man skinning a squirrel or pissing on his clothes to keep cool? People who have better taste than we do, I guess. But it’s clearly had some effect on us, because we’ve come to the conclusion that when the Rapture arrives, we don’t want to be the ones eating squirrels and smelling like piss. So we decided to pick up some basic supplies like battery-free flashlights and a couple of water bottles.

But what’s remarkable is how easy it is to get sucked into the nuttier end of the survivalist spectrum. One minute you’re shopping for water bottles, and the next you’re envisioning an apocalyptic scenario that might require both freeze-dried jambalaya and a quality set of snowshoes. We managed to escape without either, but it was a very near thing. Just think - you could use the snowshoes to beat off a mob of angry zombies who wanted your jambalaya. And your brains.