Plaidophile

I just opened up my feedreader and what do I find, but a new comic by Shaenon Garrity! Woo! (Well, written by Garrity and Wells.)

Only one strip has been posted so far and it's already looking quite awesome. (Hopefully Wells' writing won't get as goofy and "random" as his stories normally are, though.)

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No new ideas, but arranged in a nice, readable way.

So, my copy finally arrived today. I had a few hours to play it tonight, so I did.

Portal is a lot of fun. Half-Life 2 is also pretty good though it's making me a bit motion sick. The controls are definitely the best console FPS controls I've ever had... unlike, say, The Darkness, the controls on this actually feel natural and responsive. Not quite as good as keyboard+mouse, of course, but they did a good job of at least making moving and aiming feel somewhat natural.

HL-2 suffers from feeling very linear but also very "find the one little tiny clue needed to go forward" which is a bit annoying. Hopefully it'll get better soon. (I'm only to the part where you're trying to escape the city after the transporter fails to work right.)

Unfortunately, I have to go to bed early for an all-day "cultural training" thing down in San Jose tomorrow. Ugh.

I have a weird metabolism when it comes to alcohol. When I drink it, it takes a while to affect me, but once a little bit starts to affect me, ALL of what I've had affects me, and works its way through my system very quickly, like it's building momentum or something. Usually this isn't a problem since usually I'll have a beer or some wine and maybe a mixed drink. But last night at a party, I had something like 6 or 8 shots' worth of liquor, and suddenly I was all "ooh which way is up?" and then shortly after that "ugh I gotta go outside and get some fresh air." It's the most drunk I've ever been.

Thankfully I didn't have to puke (though I felt very close at times) and I was among friends who made sure I was okay, and as usual I sobered up really quickly, although I ended up missing both the last Caltrain so I stayed the night at a friend's place in Fremont and took BART home in the morning.

Of course right now I have an open bottle of a very nice Sousão in the fridge which is probably going to go bad since I can't apparently stomach even a small glass of wine right now.

So, I've been playing Metroid Prime 3 in fits and spurts. I play games because I want to be entertained and because I like solving puzzles and generally being challenged. I do not play games to be utterly frustrated by the challenges involving a long series of miniboss battles with no save points in between them only to culminate in an action-puzzle sequence where you have to pull four levers while fighting off bad guys who can also fly quickly and undo the lever pulling, and the bad guys respawn too quickly for you to just go around and pull all the levers before they come back.

It's not like I want it to be trivially-simple or anything, but fucking HELL at least make it POSSIBLE. STOP MAKING ME THROW MY CONTROLLER. (Especially since on the Wii you have to go to a pretty big effort to throw it down in disgust, what with the wrist strap and so forth.)

So I just took my bike on BART to visit friends in Berkeley for Hanukkah dinner. That went well. Lots of people were curious about my bike (though a few people were glarey and bitchy because OMG U HAS A BIKE ON THE TRAIN DURING THE BIKE EMBARGO PERIOD and I'm all YES BUT IT IS A FOLDING BIKE AND THOSE ARE ALWAYS ALLOWED).

All that's left is taking it on Caltrain and then I'll have completed the trifecta of use cases for why I bought the bike. (I have a stupid training seminar thing down in San Jose in a couple weeks, which seems like as good a time as any to complete it.)

I still haven't actually used Zipcar/Flexcar, either. Ho hum.

So, the bike I bought a month ago? I finally had a chance to ride it a decent amount, to go to Pat's place. It handles quite nicely. Fortunately the roads are completely flat between SoMa and the Mission, but the gearing seems to have a very nice range and hills shouldn't be a problem (at least when my lungs are in better shape due to not being, you know, still sick). It was only a mile and a half each way, and a very easy ride. Fortunately the streets are fairly well-lit here, though, since my headlight is basically just good for letting other people see me (it doesn't light up the ground worth crap).

I also definitely appreciate the bike lanes around here. It'd be nice if the one on Harrison went all the way to my apartment though. (Fortunately, the one on Folsom goes all the way home, so the return trip was actually somewhat safer.)

Also: Last Supper Club is awesome. A little spendy but very top-notch. Apparently it's even better if you have a working sense of smell! I had the ricotta-stuffed cannelloni for dinner, and a Torta di Capri with vanilla gelato for dessert.