PocketWatch Romances

Archive for May, 2008

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Strategy game; came out in 2007.

Amazon’s price: $28.99 (a savings of $1.00).
EA Store’s price: $49.99 (not only do you not save anything, it’s an increase of two-thirds!).
(Actually, $29.99 seems to be the median/average price for a copy of C&C3TW, judging by the Google Shopping search results.)

EA’s site doesn’t enumerate the extras you get for the twenty bucks, so I have to think that, well… you don’t get any. Irksome.

Well, technically, it’s visual discrimination. Unique is a simple flash game that asks you to click on the circle that holds an icon that’s not like the others – unique, in other words. There are 50 levels, and the faster and more accurate you are, the better your score.

Not to bra- Oh, who am I kidding? I beat all 50 levels without a single error. This doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park — I’m a very visual person, with pretty decent visual discrimination, so I’m kinda built for this sort of game. Now, if it were an auditory thing, then I’d probably be far less proud of my wimpy score.

I’m on one, kinda. Another post up at Dirty Sheets; it’s over there for bad words, mostly. It’s Finch/Herbert.

They’ve been really loud the last few days, which is great. I’m gonna take a little break, now, and then see about writing something else. More F/H? I dunno. We’ll see.

From a spam I got:
Women will lust over your man meat like bees to honey.

I…don’t really know what to say about that. Wow.

Wormtooth Nation: live-action steampunk serial, based loosely on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (so far the only connection I can see is that some of the characters are named after the players — Bottom and Francis Flute [the bellows-mender; I played him in a school production. woo.].) I’ve only seen the trailer and first episode, so far, but it’s good.

Yes, it’s time for another rant about people with death wishes!

Inspired by the lovely Sarah over at Can We All Just Agree?, who wants everyone riding or driving to please be careful:

cyclists, wear your helmets. every single time. they don’t always save your life every single time, but neither do seatbelts or airbags, and they’re still worth using, every single time. look for drivers. run a brake on your fixed gear. you don’t have to use it (i rarely use mine), but you should have it. ride predictably. use lights when you ride at night, a red blinking one on the back, and a white one on the front (blinking or not.)

What she said.

Plus:

Hi. If you’re riding your bike in the street, YOU HAVE TO OBEY TRAFFIC LAWS. THAT MEANS YOU, AND THAT MEANS STOPPING WHEN YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO STOP (i.e. red lights, stop signs). Just because cops don’t seem to find time to ticket cyclists (at least not in Seattle or Anchorage) doesn’t mean it’s NOT illegal. In Washington state as in Alaska, if you are on a bike, in the street, you are required BY LAW to behave as if you are driving a car — signals, traffic lights, and all. If you don’t know the hand-signs for turning, stop by the DMV or DoL and pick up a Road Rules booklet — they’re free and helpful!

Don’t drink coffee and ride in heavy traffic. Don’t text-message your friends in heavy traffic. Don’t lane-split in heavy traffic, particularly if you’re drinking coffee or texting. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS, STOP RIDING LIKE AN IDIOT! I swear to God that if I have to watch you get run over because you’re being a nimrod, i’m gonna administer first aid in between rounds of kicking you in the head for your stupidity.

This has been another PSA from your friendly neighborhood crank.

…I miss my scooter!

I don’t know her name. It might be something like Alimah, or maybe Asima, or perhaps Bashira. Her parents discussed it for weeks, before she was born, debating the merits of Zahira and Yasmin and Thurayya. Her father’s mother suggested Latifah; her mother’s sister voted for Halimah. Who knows, maybe she even had a western name, like Elizabeth or Joan or (God forbid) Wanda.

The day had been long for the family — it was hot and she was cranky; hungry and tired and it was past bed time. She’d almost fallen asleep, listening to her parents talking in the front seat. Her siblings had already fallen asleep, sandwiched in between Auntie and the door.

Then there were lights, and shouting, and then loud noises like the world ending — she wasn’t hungry, not any more. She was no longer tired. She was terrified, and the car was moving strangely; daddy never drove like this and Auntie was screaming, too, and the car was full of strange smells the most obvious one like money, or like daddy’s keys…

And then the car stopped, but the bright blinding lights still hurt her eyes and now Auntie was being dragged away, still screaming and big hands, a man’s hands, were yanking her out of the car and she couldn’t understand a word they were saying. She kept screaming for mommy and daddy, trying to wipe the nasty sticky red stuff off of her hands, and the only people that responded to her were the big men she could not understand.

—

I don’t know this girl’s name. I don’t know where she is now, or if she has nightmares, or if she’s even still alive. I don’t know how many siblings she had, or aunts and uncles, or cousins. I don’t know if her grandparents are, or were, still alive.

All I know is that that little girl looks like me, and she looks like my mother, and my aunts, and my step-sisters and my female cousins and my grandmothers. I know that what happened to her, and her family, was a tradgedy that I can barely comprehend.

There are people in this country who think that, due to her place of birth and her family’s faith (if they were faithful; and faithful to the tenets of the ‘wrong’ religion), that she does not deserve to live. That she does not even deserve the dignity of a name. I bet that, no matter what her name actually is, that her parents called her Habibah, Hadiyyah, and Farah. She is someone’s baby, their gift, their beautiful darling.

This little girl, covered in blood, screaming in terror, is a human being. She is a casualty of this stupid “war” as much as if she’d been killed outright.

How can you have children and look at this picture and still support bush and his “war”? Tell me, you brain-dead 28-percenters. I fucking DARE you to justify this. How can you have enough imagination to come up with “terrorist” scenarios that make you wet your pants in a panic, and NOT ENOUGH imagination or even basic fucking DECENCY to imagine yourself in this girl’s shoes, or to imagine your OWN child in her place? Tell me, God damn you, because I really don’t fucking get it.

My youngest step-sister graduated into the Marines last month. I am terrified that she will have to go over there, and that she will never come home; or if she does come home it’ll be in a box, or broken and strange and haunted. My father and I do not agree at all on political issues, but despite my desire to twit him (see my ACLU crack), I don’t want the reality of the occupation in Iraq to come home to him through the agent of my step-sister’s death or dismemberment.

I would rather have him see this picture, side-by-side with the picture my mother took of me at about the same age, and have the light blind him that way.

Perhaps I’ll find that picture and scan it, and post it for everyone.

Currently listening to The Slip from NIN (get it free, here). Interesting — classic NIN, with a somewhat different sound. I like it so far. As a bonus, it’s given me a Finch/Herbert song: Your Discipline. (Okay, it’s mostly a F/H song… The bit about not knowing “where I stop and you begin” doesn’t really fit them, but, eh. It’s a start.)

And Poets, And Anyone Else That Thinks That ‘Modern Life’ Makes For Trenchant Writing Material:

Yes, okay, it can. Yes, we’re are heartily fucking SICK of God-damned viagra and cialis commercials (men’s obsessions with their dicks is another rant entirely). YES, there have been people given prescriptions that they didn’t actually need. HOWEVER.

“Prescription drugs”, in general, are NOT responsible for as many of the ills as you and all of your like-minded friends think they are. I doubt they’re even as widely abused as the DEA freaks out about on TV.

So, in short, those of us that benefit from being precribed drugs? Would like you to shut the hell up. Or at least sing about something ELSE. There’s this little conflagration in Iraq that could use some attention…

1) I fixed the previous-posts link, so now if you wanna go backwards, you can. It was really simple — I just took the URL out of the ‘blog url if different from the installation directory’ box. I’m not sure why I put it in there in the first place, but who knows.

2) In Titan Quest (and TQ: Immortal Throne), there’s the potential for Nicostratus/Tellis ‘fic. I don’t know if I’ll write any, but it’d be a very very small fandom… But on the plus side, there’s no worrying about canon!