Desperately Seeking Savepoints
Since about Christmas I've been playing a certain video game. It is the most recent game in a large franchise of fantasy adventure games. One where adventurers travel around a made up world, fighting monsters and doing adventurous things. Every once in a while the adventurers come upon a place where their health is restored and they have the option to save their game. Those places are of great solace to adventurers.
In the past, when I have had more time to spend, and more importantly had larger continuous chunks of time to spend adventuring, these save points seemed convenient and plentiful. Of course, that is no longer the case. I tend to spend one or two 30 to 60 minute chunks of time on games, which in some cases are not long enough to find the next save point. The save points have now become base camps that I do small exploratory missions from, and rather than being a fall back point for the worst case scenarios. The adventuring has gone from a single push alpine style to an everest style expedition.
I don't like having to run back through several map sections to get back to the save point just because supper is ready, but I should look at the bright side. This style of exploration allows the characters to become acclimatised to the difficulty of a certain area by going through the easier portions several times. Rather than just level grinding for grinding's sake. And really, I think I end up healthier by eating supper when supper is ready.
Where did you say you were from?
As much as we felt slighted when the US Marine Corps color guard flew the Canadian Flag upside down in Atlanta in the 92 World Series, at least they
got the anthem right.
In other, completely unrelated news, the Australian task force has
proposed a carbon trading scheme. It has no reduction targets. There is no cost associated with emitting, just a permit. The permits can be traded. The environment critic (and one time leader of the band Midnight Oil) has proposed that there be a real tax on carbon emissions. Here is my take: in a traded permit scheme, there would end up being a monetary value associated with emitting, just not the way the government designed it. There would be money changing hands when permits get traded. And corporations would simply take the deterrent cost of emitting more than the permitted amount into consideration and make decisions based on that. I think what we need to do is go through the pain of putting a price on emissions now, because once that link is established, we can deter emissions by changing the price. Changing the price would be a lot easier than establishing the link in the first place.
sUPER bOWEL
Stupid Caps Lock. This is the day for that. It took way too long for the coffee to clear the fog out of my head, and once it did, i realized that there was also coffee on my pants. Hopefully the day gets better from here.
I dont need to tell you that Sunday was super bowl day. And thus, super bowl party day. We put together a decent spread of beer, salty snacks, pizza and chili. The HD projector was working well, but the HD cable box started to fade in the 4th quarter. Technical difficulties drove us to other amusements (oh internet, what would we ever do without you). Of course when one of the party attendees admitted she was in a scream-core band (or some such made up genre) it prompted a my space quest and the best comment of the evening, delivered with a chuckle... "Get many Gigs?"
It was my sentiment exactly, but put together in a somewhat more tactful guise than I would have managed. But he would know. He is
in the industry.
