Rebarbative Rally

• I attended a corporate meeting in San Francisco today. It was an hour bus trip (one-way) with some company provided snacks of dubious quality as an incentive. Unlike the Microsoft company rallies you see in famous internet clips, this was less of a pep rally as a sort of drab, state-of-the-company report. Turns out, the state of our company is “pretty okay, probably.” Inspiring!
• I’ll count it as acceptable that the Sharks managed to draw a tie from the opening road games in their series. That basically puts them in a best-of-five with home ice advanatge. What I don’t find acceptable is the officiating so far in the series. It’s not that they call too many penalties (although I’d prefer a lot fewer, thanks) it’s more that they are so mind-numbingly inconsistent with them. Both ways. Each team has alternated in the young series from penalty box parade to getting away with murder. The series is tied but I’d basically give both games to the refs had the Predators managed to make the game yesterday even remotely interesting. As it is I’d say the Sharks were robbed of any legitimate chance to win on Friday and the Preds had the wind sucked out of their sails by a bunch of really random calls on Sunday. Going forward with the series I really hope these refs can get out of the way and let the teams decide who wins.
• I caught Silent Hill on Saturday with HB since both of us are pretty big fans of the game(s). The movie wasn’t preview screened for critics (bad sign) and got a lot of bad reviews from those who made the effort to give it a rating. I don’t necessarily disagree with some of the criticisms (bad dialogue, some questionable acting, too much/not enough exposition) but I think considering the source material games are basically incomprehensible as well and horror movies aren’t exactly the place to go to see fine Academy Award-worthy performances that it did what it was trying to do pretty admirably. At the very least I was entertained for a couple of hours. I can’t exactly recommend it, but I wasn’t sorry to have seen it. What I was sorry about was spending $4.00 for a small diet soda that tasted like regular soda that had been sitting in melted ice for about eight hours.
• I went over to HB’s place on Friday to catch the game and while I was there I tried to do a bit more work on the network I messed up. I was able to determine that their net connection was fine by plugging the ethernet cable right into my laptop so with no other troubleshooting steps revealing any useful information I diagnosed the AirPort Express as having some sort of issue; possibly a faulty ethernet connector. After we caught the movie we headed over to the nearest Apple store for our appointment at the Genius Bar to have it looked at. The Genius plugged it in and it worked fine for him which left us back at square one. I had to take Nik out to Whimsy‘s place for some tea party/Mary Kay pusher meeting so I couldn’t follow through with the new info, but HB called and said that he got home and just unplugged everything and plugged it all back in and stuff started working again so the final diagnosis is: Who knows? Man I love computers.
• We caught the end of The Next Food Network Star last night and Guy won, which is what I was hoping. The funny thing is, I don’t know that I’d actually watch his show or not because I get kind of tired of generic in-studio cooking shows, but at least that unpleasantly-shaped, uncomfortably effeminate goofball Reggie didn’t win. Seriously, dude, dry up the waterworks. Even the chicks weren’t as weepy as you.
• I picked up Indigo Prophecy for the XBox over the weekend as well. It’s a very curious game that I knew only from a comment made by a friend and the description on the back of the box so I had very few preconceptions going in. It works like an adventure game, mostly, where you wander around and try to figure out what to do. Usually it isn’t too hard to determine and the story is cinematic and intriguing enough to keep you pushing along, trying not to get stuck up in the game so the story can fight its way out. The strange thing is that all the “gameplay” elements are very abstracted from the action on the screen, such that action sequences are handled via a series of rythym game-style follow-the-leader joystick movements. In this way it’s kind of like Dragon’s Lair, which is sort of unfortunate because it kinda pulls you out of the action and forces you to think about something other than what your avatar is actually doing. It works in certain cases like when playing a guitar (the rythym element makes logical sense there) but when fleeing from a horde of mutated insects or kickboxing a punching bag it feels divorced from what the character is actually doing. Also failing in certain tasks merely ends the game forcing a restart which, for a game that is trying really hard to be an interactive movie, feels forced and simply reminds the player that—despite the sheen of freedom—they really are still on a rail. What’s almost the most frustrating is that I’m really interested in the story but I feel like I’m being needlessly thrust into interaction where it doesn’t add to the enjoyment. I’d almost rather be watching Indigo Prophecy: The Movie than guiding these characters through their morning shower routines and whatever.
• Nik and I stopped by the mall for a bit yesterday so I could look for a plain black zip-up sweatshirt now that the weather is finally threatening to get nicer. My agitation at being shut down in this endeavour has led me to a brilliant business idea: Normal Clothes. I’d sell plain T-shirts without any Socially Inexcusable If Spoken Aloud and Largely Offensive Statements Played For Laughs Because They Appear On a T-Shirt; clothing that doesn’t force one to become a walking billboard; jeans that don’t cost enough to dent the National Deficit and seasonal clothing available year-round because weather doesn’t really care about our human calendars. Okay so maybe as a business it isn’t brilliant, but if such an establishment existed, I’d be their #1 customer.
• I did find a pair of sunglasses that were relatively cheap. Of course, they were broken and I had to take them back.
• Whomever said that shopping was therapeutic does not own a dictionary and clearly mistook “therapeutic” to mean “capable of inducing suicide.”

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