Enoch

Our car is still fed noise alternately by FM radio and a CD changer. I threw Speaking in Tongues in there for our drive to my parents house and back this weekend, as it's a solid road-trip album. Consequently, I was singing this to myself all weekend. It was a good visit.

Visited with my parents over the long weekend, and there was a shootin' stuff outing. My brother-in-law and his dad are members of some backwoods hunting club, which has a rudimentary spot set up for target shooting that members and guests can use. I've handled shotguns and rifles from time to time growing up-- some hunting with my grandfathers when they were still spry enough. (Bird hunting was lots of fun but logistically challenging. Deer hunting was boring, cold, and, in the event that you got one, a revolting bloody mess. Powerful and worthwhile educational experiences, but not something I'd set out to do as an adult of my own initiative.) Anyhow, this was my first experience in firing a handgun. And it was rather fun. I can't recall the makes and models, but I know I fired a couple of 380s and a 9MM (the last of which kept throwing the brass back at my head for some reason). There also may or may not have been a military surplus firearm that my grandfather has owned since the '60s and that is most likely now flagrantly illegal in the state in which he lives. Were it present, that gun would've been a hell of a lot of fun to fire.

A buddy of mine has a koi pond and he had to drape a net over the water portion to prevent hawks from stealing all his fish. My dad has this problem, but with herons. He uses a net in the fall/winter to keep leaves out, but in the summertime he mostly relies on the pond being deep enough at one end (probably 4-5 feet) that the fish can be safe there.

I've long been of the opinion that the bulk of the Tales of the Sword Coast content is fun only to AD&D savants and masochists. To this day, I've still never gotten more than a level or two deep into Durlag's basement. Repeated "HaHa Deathtrap" gameplay is simply not how I like to spend my free time. Collect the WIS book and the magic scimitar from the tower, farm some XP to get to the BG2 import cap, and get the heck out of there.

Eh. If I were contemplating a BG replay, I'd certainly look into the EEs. If one install can cut out the hassle of disc-swapping and mod acquisition for basic stuff like widescreen support, that'd be worth some cash to me.

Emptied the gutters and raked all the leaves on the front lawn today. I'd have done it weeks ago, but the neighbor's ginkgo tree had held on to its crop unusually late this year, and I didn't want to have to go through all that twice. All the while my nose was running like a spigot. Were it not so late in the season (and if a cold front weren't forecasted to roll in tonight) I'd have bagged off the chore due to illness. But we got it done. Now I'm inside, full of pseudoephedrine, and pondering what I can make for dinner without leaning forward too much.

I always find the Mexican food to be one of the best parts of visiting California (which I do somewhat regularly to see my wife's family).

A great-great grandfather of mine fought in the Boer War. Cornwall Light Infantry. Not an officer, though, so the silver spoon probably wouldn't fit. He and his son, however, were the most recent immigrants in my ancestry. (He moved to Ontario in the nineteen-aughts, re-enlisted to train recruits during the Great War, and them moved his family into the States in the '20s. My great-grandfather was born in Canada.) My father's side came out of a mix of Irish and German (or perhaps Danish) Catholics who settled in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania sometime in the middle 1800s. Others ancestors, via my maternal grandmother, have British-sounding surnames and have lived in central NJ for as long as we can trace. So I guess the proper six-word response I'd give is: "New Jersey. **** you for askin'."

I have to honest I have never really got into baking, its something I intend to rectify. But I always use pre-made pastry Pie crust is not difficult, but it does make a mess and works out best if you let the dough chill overnight before rolling it out. If I know I'm going to be making a bunch of pies, I'll generally do several batches at once and freeze them myself. I view the stuff you can buy in the supermarket as adequate for a weeknight egg-pie supper, but I wouldn't feel comfortable passing off a pie as homemade if I hadn't made the pie crust myself.

What system are you playing on? What difficulty setting? On the easier difficulty settings, you can tell when the knife attack is coming by the big yellow lines above the attacker's head. Even on tougher difficulties, if you can avoid the first one, you can time the next two. Usually that's what he'll attack with, three swipes. PC, default difficulty, KB/M controls. (I mixed the mouse-button settings up a bit to move the "click middle button" functionality to one of my mouse's thumb buttons, but otherwise I'm using the default layout.) Yes, I see the little lightning-mark warnings. But it seems to require greater precision than a standard melee counter (based both on the description in the 'combat abilities' screen and on actually trying to do it), and I have yet to get it right. I guess I could try to practice by winnowing a brawl down to just one knife-dude and me, but my standard instinct is to take out the more dangerous mooks first. And the game affords me sufficient other means to deal with knifers (mostly, jumping over them and punch them in the back, but also cape-stuns, gadget attacks, etc.), so I manage okay without countering.

Alternating between Civ5:BTS and Arkham City. AC has gotten better since I progressed enough to unlock all the Riddles. Although I still find myself bothered by how on-rails the plot is. I'm still fairly early, though (my save says I'm 21% complete), and I'm mostly having fun. The next time I successfully counter a knife attack, however, will be the first. I have no idea how the player is supposed to figure that timing out.

After about 7 weeks, I'm finally actually happy with the appearance of what began as my furlough beard. For quite a while, I was mostly enjoying the feel of it and merely tolerating the appearance. I'm not an especially hirsute fellow, and the coloration of my facial hair is somewhat inconsistent-- it tends to come in blonde in the moustache and the bits directly below the mouth, but brown (or occasionally white) elsewhere. (I was quite blonde-headed as a child, and my hair does lighten a bit if I spend appreciable time in the sun, but it's mostly a medium brown these days.) I've finally got sufficient length to make my Junior-High moustache and the sparser patches along my right cheek/jaw look at least a little respectable. One consistently age-affected patch behind the back of my right jaw confirms what I have suspected for a number of years: as I get older, my hair is going to go white, rather than grey. This makes me strangely happy. I'll be a higher-ranking wizard! My better half, on the other hand, is less enthused about the beard project. She thinks I look like a leprechaun.

Made a quick quiche this evening. Wilted some spinach, and used the hot pan to re-heat some sauteed mushrooms (with garlic) that I cooked earlier in the week. (I only needed enough to top 2 burgers, but cooked all the shrooms I had because they were getting a bit past their prime.) Those veggies, plus eggs, cream, salt, pepper, thyme, and cheddar cheese went in the quiche. I did use a pre-made frozen pie crust. I am ashamed. Ate it with a good splash of hot sauce. The wife preferred it unadorned.

Hey, in the States, there's virtually no such thing as a Doctoral-level degree in law. Technically a JD is a "Juris Doctor," but that's the threshold requirement to get licensed to practice at all in most States. You get one typically via a 3-year course of study after getting your undergraduate degree, and there is no serious research/thesis/dissertation element. (There are persuasive arguments that this could easily be shortened to 2 years, but those go nowhere because law schools want the additional tuition money and state Bar associations want the additional barriers to entry in the field.) Some lawyers get an LLM ("Legum Magister") after that, but that's a 1-year course of study dedicated to a specific legal field. (And the only field where an LLM gets you any kind of respect is in Tax law.) That's really it. You can find the occassional law professor who has a doctoral-level degree in a different field, but the majority of them just have a JD, or a JD plus a Masters-level degree in a different field (usually either an MBA or a situation where somebody got a Masters in an impractical field before "selling out" and going to law school).

Ehhh, i think I'll give it a miss. However good the game may be, '90s-era 1st-person 3D most likely means that I will find it unplayable due to motion sickness.

It's the coldest day of the season thus far, so, naturally, my building had an evacuation drill scheduled.

Well, I probably should have added that the somewhat-geographically-similar nations of Indonesia and Malaysia both invest a far higher portion of their GDP in infrastructure projects. I skipped that point, as I didn't have any data on relative disaster preparedness. There may be some studies related to that tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004 (or perhaps that tsunami is *why* that country now spends more on infrastructure?), but I haven't looked into it. I'd argue that certain types of preparation-- such as having a decent number of ships and aircraft ready to help move food and clean water to affected areas afterwards-- would be making an appreciable difference right now.

The Phillipines are one of the more hostile environments out there with regard to the construction and maintenance of infrastructure. Being made up of hundreds of islands, many of which are hilly or mountainous, with high rainfall (meaning high erosion) and rich volcanic soil (meaning abundant flora that can quickly reclaim cleared land) poses all kinds of challenges for communications, transportation, power, public health, sanitation, governance, etc., that most other places don't have to deal with. Determined and well-funded government efforts would have a shot at overcoming these obstacles and mitigating disasters like this, but the rule of law is shaky enough that long-term planning becomes a luxury that the folks in charge can't afford.

Land Rovers are really rare around my parts, I've only seen one, and it was modified for extreme terrain driving and used as an tractor more than an car really. I live on the countryside and the most common car here is just a normal roadcar, the only exception is my uncles King Cab. To be clear, I mean this kind of Land Rover: Not this kind:

Really? Over here, the Wanker factor is universally the highest amongst Porsche owners, then it moves down to Audi/BMW tie, with the SUV owners being the king of the hill of the respective brands. Merc owners are owners of pizza shops here, and they're pretty nice guys actually! I should say that my impression is based primarily on the degree to which drivers pay attention to pedestrians while in a relatively urban environment. Highway behavior might well be very different. The Land Rover drivers that I most often find myself at odds with tend to be trophy wives looking for parking spots near the nail salon.

It does work fairly well actually. You can be pretty certain that a person driving a Porche Cayenne is one MASSIVE wanker. They seem to act like they own the road because they're in a Porsche SUV... As somebody who lives in a town inundated with luxury vehicles*, it is my opinion that the Luxury-SUV-Wanker-Factor is highest with Land Rovers. Particularly Land Rovers with "Diplomat" license plates. * I have, at various times, tried to make little metrics of this, for example, by comparing the number of Mercedes versus the number of Fords I encounter while walking home. Another shorthand illustration I use in making this point is that my house is within walking distance of a Bentley dealership. P.S., I drive a 2001 Corolla. And the most lesbian car is a Subaru Forrester.

I tend to follow that eating etiquette as well. For example don't go to good seafood restaurant and expect killer spare ribs. Wouldn't the correct analogy to Guard Dog's situation with a seafood restaurant be "If you ever go into a seafood take out joint and there are no seafood working there, just turn around and leave"? A spare rib analogy would be "Don't go into a BBQ Rib joint if there are no pigs there". That only makes sense if the Chinese take-out food you want is made of Asian people. The correlary I swear by is: Never order a "Philly Cheesesteak" from somebody who can't give you directions from 30th Street Station to the Walt Whitman Bridge without looking at a map. (Alternate tests of Philly authenticity: Sing the Action News theme song; Spell "Schuylkill")

I'm getting around to reading Crime and Punishment for the first time since I was about 19. (And a far more reputable translation.) I am reminded and continually amazed by the ways Dostoevsky manages to inject so much humor the small details of such a serious story. The characters are so fiercely defined that each little iteration of their core traits becomes humorous. Even so early in the story, the reader already understands Raskolnikov so well that, when reading the letter from his mother, we're already picturing the ways that the supposedly good news contained within is going to throw him into impotent rage (followed quickly by resignation and despair). It's funny in the same way that, say, George self-sabotaging everything potentially good that happens to him in an episode of Seinfeld is funny.

Just a nit-pick, but which IWD are you talking about? Because In IWD1, the attributes do not affect spell-level acquisition... for any type of spell caster. Ditto with all the IE games, save for IWD2. And even IWD2 made it a point to remind the player in the load screens, and the manutal, and the character screens, that he/she needs high attributes to cast high level spells. It was definitely the first one. And, as I said, it's been a while.

My grandfather really enjoys fantasy CRPGs. The early Wizardrys and Might & Magics; the Gold Box games; the IE games, etc. He's not a stupid man, but the details of game rules systems are not a strongpoint. I still have nightmares about looking over his party when he told me how impossible he was finding some of the late stages of Icewind Dale. Several characters using weapons they weren't proficient with; a cleric with a WIS that limited him to 4th-level spells; carrying the wrong ammunition for his ranged weapons, etc. I would very much like to give him a copy of Eternity, and I hope that the game would be a little less easy to screw up, mechanics-wise. This is really the sort of thing I mean. I've seen many intelligent, enthusiastic people attempt to play AD&D games and become mired for reasons very, very similar to those experienced by your grandfather. People who came into the IE games with an extensive knowledge of AD&D were at a big advantage because the IE games often don't give prominent feedback on a lot of these issues. Thank you. (And thank you for not pointing out that my example regarding WIS and spellcasting doesn't make any sense in an AD&D context. It's been a while. Upon further reflection, I think that the problem-- among several sub-optimal attribute allocations-- was with his Wizard's intelligence, and was probably at a higher spell level.)