ACY

Have you ever woken up from a dream and been really disappointed that it wasn’t real?

Last night, I really liked where my dream was going. It started out with some kind of crazy canoe trip on a river, I think, and then I was sleeping in a co-worker’s laundry room, I think… You know, random weird dream stuff. But then after that, it got good.

I was walking around a small town in the middle of the night, and I came to this strip mall with a few big box stores and an office building. None of the doors were locked, so I was wandering around inside, looking at things.

I went into the office building and climbed the stairs to the top floor. (I don’t think it was a super tall building.) To my surprise, there were lots of people in various cubicles, working away as if it were the middle of the day. There was a cute girl with short hair working at a computer, and she said hi to me, and somehow we got into a conversation. I noticed that she had some orange and navy blue clothing folded up on her desk, and discovered that it was a Naruto costume. She also had a Hinata costume.

So that sparked a conversation about anime, and we were chatting more and I was starting to get really interested, like maybe there was something worth pursuing here. Then her boss came over and told me I had to leave, and that the girl had to get back to work. That was fair, so I gave her my phone number (I don’t know why I gave her mine instead of asking for hers; it was a dream, ok?) and I reluctantly left.

Then I was somehow at the LoadingReadyRun office, and most of the LRR crew was there, and they all seemed to know who this girl was, and they were excited for me. I think we were anticipating that she was going to come to the office so we could see each other again. I was getting really hopeful that she would be a Christian, too, because I won’t date someone who doesn’t share my beliefs.

So there was all this anticipation and excitement in the air… And then I woke up.

And there was no cute, anime-loving, short-haired young woman for me to be excited about.

And I have a runny nose.

I hate dreams.

Have you ever had someone recommend a classic video game to you that you missed out on, then tried that game and, despite the fact that they claim it’s one of the best games of all time, and they still play it weekly, you found it completely terrible?

Have you ever gone to a movie that’s a remake of an old franchise from your childhood that you never paid attention to, and your friends, who loved it as kids, say the movie is AMAZING, but you find it mediocre at best?

For me, the best examples of this are the original Diablo and the new Transformers movie. Diablo got rave reviews and is still pretty heavily populated on Battle.net, for a game that’s twelve years old and counting. I was too young for it when it first came out, but I got madly addicted to Diablo 2 and played it online for years. After playing Diablo 2 for a while, I figured it made sense to at least give Diablo 1 a shot, because I had heard it was a really solid game in its own right. But when I booted up the game, I couldn’t stand the archaic controls, the outdated graphics, and the primitive style. I didn’t have any nostalgia for it, so I wasn’t able to get past its age. I gave up after only a couple of play sessions and went back to Diablo 2.

As a kid, I had no real access to Transformers, though I did own a couple of the toys at one point. We lived in a tiny little town and only got three TV channels, so I never had the opportunity to watch or follow the show. So when I watched the new Transformers movie, I found it interesting and entertaining, but not amazing. The concept was kind of cool, but it didn’t stir up any primitive emotions for me or anything.

On the other side of things, I still boot up StarCraft now and then and run through a couple of missions or play some LAN games with friends. I played StarCraft a lot as a kid, and I remember how awesome it was to me then, so even though it’s old and outdated now and its presentation doesn’t match up to today’s games, I still find it fun to play.

I think I have kind of the same situation with superheroes, actually. I never watched any Spiderman as a kid, and today I don’t find him that cool. My dad had a few old comics for The Flash laying around the house when I was younger, though, and today The Flash is my favourite superhero. (And he is so much more awesome than Spiderman, by the way.)

The new GI Joe movie was recently announced, and I think it’s going to go the same way as Transformers did for me. I had a couple of the GI Joe toys, but it wasn’t a very big part of my childhood, so I don’t have much nostalgia for it. I doubt I’ll find it all that great, if I even end up seeing it.

What franchises, TV shows, and games were big in your childhood? Do you still go back to the well every now and then? Have you ever tried delving into a classic you didn’t have nostalgia for?

Twelve little bunnies hopped out of a hole
Some white ones and orange ones, some brown and some black
I thought they were cute, so I took them all home
They peed on my couch, so I took them all back

8:00 AM
It’s a foggy morning. Not a pea soup fog–more like cream of broccoli.

8:16 AM
Drive to work was smooth. The few other cars on the road were going the other way.

8:17 AM
The lights are on at the office but there’s no one here. Fine by me. I like it quiet.

9:03 AM
The water fountain by the bathroom smells like iron today. I’m not drinking out of that.

10:02 AM
Still haven’t seen anyone else at the office today. I’ll see if they’re at coffee now.

10:22 AM
No one in the breakroom either. Is there a holiday i don’t know about?

12:04 PM
Have you ever played the game where you see how long you can hold your poop in?

12:05 PM
Because I am about to lose that game hardcore.

12:12 PM
Hoooooooly crap.

12:14 PM
I think i just found a corpse… I think it’s somebody from the warehouse.

12:18 PM
There’s blood everywhere. The cops think there’s a cougar in my building. I gotta get out.

12:19 PM
There’s something freakin’ huge banging up against the door! That is NOT a cougar.

12:24 PM
The banging stopped but there is no way i’m leaving this bathroom.

12:31 PM
I called the cops again. They’re sending two guys with a dart gun.

12:31 PM
Apparently they sent one hours ago but haven’t heard from him.

12:35 PM
I think i hear voices. I’m saved!

12:37 PM
Oh man, i think it got them. Something loud just happened and now it’s really quiet.

12:39 PM
The bad news: that thing can’t be from earth. The good news: i have a dart gun now.

12:47 PM
I’m making a run for it. Wish me luck.

12:51 PM
I made it. Well, most of me did. It has teeth in its tentacles. I have eight fingers now.

12:57 PM
I guess it’s ironic that i’m hiding from a man-eater in the lunch room…

1:01 PM
It poked a feeler through the door and i pegged it. It hasn’t made any noise since, but i don’t trust it.

1:36 PM
I can’t wait any more. Either it’s tranquilized, or i’m going to die. I’m heading for my car and getting out of here.

2:04 PM
Made it to the car. No sign of the thing. It must’ve crawled off somewhere and passed out. Just have to start the car and drive away.

2:07 PM
My gate key. Is gone.

2:26 PM
My office is inside a barbed wire fence. I can’t climb it. I think i need to drive through it.

3:24 PM
It came back before i could ram the fence. It’s been chasing me around the building in my car for twenty minutes. I’m almost on empty!

3:33 PM
Screw this. I’m running this sucker over or dying in the attempt.

3:52 PM
And NOW the cavalry arrives.

3:59 PM
So apparently aliens CAN be harmed by small-arms fire. Who knew?

4:00 PM
THE END

I have kind of an odd habit. Whenever I send a file to myself via email, I put some kind of simple insult in the body of the email. For example, I might need to pass a Word document from a friend’s computer to mine, so I pop into gmail, address a message to myself, attach the file, and add a comment like, “Here’s the recipe you wanted to try, Mr. Ugly.”

(Like I said, simple insults. I don’t get too creative.)

I don’t know why I do this. I think the first time I did it I thought it would be kind of eccentric, and that amused me. Since then it’s just become a ritual. Not attaching an insult would feel kind of… strange.

It’s not like I’m some kind of subtle masochist with veiled self-deprecating tendencies. In fact, I’ve found that I have a distinct and (arguably) well-deserved superiority complex. (And when I say “arguably well-deserved”, what I mean is that I think I deserve it, but everyone else would argue that I don’t. But everyone else is stupid, so what do they know about my superiority, anyways?)

I’m a self-labelled extreme underachiever. Deep down inside of me, I am completely convinced that if I only cared enough about someone else’s area of expertise, I would know it better than them. I could be in the NHL if I had decided as a kid that I wanted to be. I could have a PhD by now if I had cared enough to study for it. I could be better at Sudokus than my dad is if I only cared enough to actually do them.

It’s not true, of course. Intellectually, I know this. But I think my heart still believes it, and besides, if I actually cared enough about developing my intellect, it all probably would be true!

When I was a kid, I loved Lego. To be honest, I’m still a big fan of Lego, but I think what I love now is not necessarily Lego itself, but rather an idealized, nostalgia-fueled image of Lego’s essence.

I’m thinking about this because a couple months back I was browsing a garage sale and spotted a small Lego set of a knight and skeleton jousting. It had a black skeletal horse. That thing is amazing. It’s like there are certain Lego pieces and figures that just exude awesome. When I was a kid, the monkey was one of the figures. The dragon was up there, too, but unfortunately we lost the tail to mine and had to cannibalize one from the crocodile…

Anyways, I bought the set and took it home. When I opened the box I was mildly disappointed to find all of the different parts already assembled in a Ziploc bag. It wasn’t really a big deal, since there isn’t a whole lot to build with a set like that, but it made me realize that it isn’t the monkeys, the dragons, the skeletal horses, the weapons, or the spacesuits that make Lego great. It isn’t the jail blocks, the pirate ships, or the castles that used to get me so excited about a new Lego set. No, the true heart of Lego is not what it is, but rather its potential to become something else.

Oh sure, the first time you open a Lego set you’re going to follow the instructions and build it the “right” way. But how long does that last?

Personally, I rarely ever “played with” Lego. I always had more fun taking the parts and constructing something new and original out of them. I want to take the submarine and the spaceship and mash them together into something beautifully chaotic–and look, this part opens up and you can sit two astronauts in it! I want to take that big gray square Lego mat and make a whole city on it. I want to take the foundations of the castle and build a massive tower with a trapdoor powered by the string I got in my Wild West set. I want to start from the simple chassis of a car and start layering on pieces in random symmetry until it’s bigger than my head, and not figure out what I’m building until it’s finished.

I still have that desire to create things, only now that drive manifests itself through this website, or the webcomic I did for a whole, or the research I do for school. My creativity is a really important part of me, and Lego is a really important part of my creative history.

These days, when I pop into Toys ‘R’ Us to check out some Nerf guns (what?) I often take a stroll down the Lego aisle, and I have to admit that I’m often disappointed with what I see. In the past ten years, Lego has moved its focus farther and farther away from its generic “styles” of pieces–like the Castle sets, the Space sets, the City sets, the Wild West, the Pirates, and so on–and has thrown its energies towards partnering with the almighty franchise. Star Wars is the first big Lego franchise partnership I remember, and probably still the most successful, but there’s also a fair amount of Harry Potter, Batman, Spiderman, and plenty more.

To be fair, there are still plenty of “generic” Lego sets on Lego’s website, but those aren’t the sets you see on store shelves. And even the “generic” sets have gotten more specialized. The parts are harder to generalize to other “genres”; many of the pieces can’t be combined with other styles without seeming out of place. This really reduces the amount of creativity kids can have when it comes to doing their own building, and that’s a shame.

Anyways, this is probably just an Old Man Rant, and I’m too young for those. I can’t help but feel that Lego is just another area where kids are being fed pre-packaged entertainment instead of the tools to entertain themselves. We’re “giving them fish,” so they can play for a day, rather than “teaching them how to fish,” so they can play for a lifetime.

What do you think? Did you have Lego as a kid? Did you spend more time playing with it, or building it? Has Lego changed, or is it essentially the same with different pieces? Leave a comment or discuss it in the forums.

The heifer chewed her cud. It was thicker than yesterday’s. Oh, what was that? There was something crunchy in her mouth. Cud wasn’t supposed to crunch. Had she eaten something unusual this afternoon? The heifer couldn’t remember.

In the farm house, George softly rubbed his bandaged stump, already plotting revenge.

How many people own a digital camera? Do you get much use out of it?

My video camera doubles as a still camera and does it pretty well–ten megapixels and all that. It’s a little unwieldy for casual use, though. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring it along unless I know I’m going to be filming something specific.

I do have a digital camera for work that I sometimes get some use out of. A lot of the pictures for my plogs are taken with that camera while I’m doing something at work.

So, photographers, I want you to share about your cameras on the forums. Share some pictures, too; you can upload images from your hard drive by clicking “Additional Options” underneath the typing area when you post. Pictures can be up 1 MB each.

I’m hoping to get some more use out of your photographic talents with something new that I’ll hopefully be launching in the next month or two. Stay tuned for news!

And don’t worry; this isn’t today’s official update. Just a heads up.

For a long time I’ve felt that the XBox 360 should have an external Blu-Ray player similar to the HD-DVD player that was available until Blu-Ray won the format war. I was going to make this a blog post complaining about Microsoft’s resistance to releasing this particular piece of hardware, but while writing the first line I changed my mind.

What would an external Blu-Ray player for the XBox 360 do that any other normal Blu-Ray player wouldn’t? Developers aren’t likely to put games on Blu-Ray, since that would limit their installed base of potential customers to people who own the Blu-Ray hardware. That would be commercially suicidal. And there isn’t really any argument that the higher capacity would improve the quality of the games anyways, because it’s few and far between that anyone needs multiple DVDs for a game. I’m sure that scenario will pop up at some point, but probably not until the next generation of consoles comes out.

Besides, people can stream HD movies over NetFlix now, and streaming/downloading seems to be the technology of the future, if the continuing success of Steam, iTunes, YouTube, and other digital platforms are any judge.

So I can understand Microsoft’s hesitance to put out an unnecessary hardware add-on like a Blu-Ray player for their console. It’s easy to complain about it, but in the end it does actually make sense.

I don’t own any Blu-Rays, and I doubt I’ll buy into the technology for another few years. I figure I might as well wait until it hits mainstream a little more solidly and the players drop in price. Or I could just buy a PS3… Heh. PS3.