I was all ready to do a victory dance, to smirk and to act smug. To point out the superiority of my navigational skills, to heap ridicule upon the practice of turning left on an unprotected traffic light. I could feel my impending win as I slipped the vandalized Cobra into 3rd and felt the tingly sensation as the engine did its gurgly growly testosterone thing. I felt manly, firmly gripping my stick shift whilst acceleration pushed me back into the seat, throwing the stick back into 2nd gear position and delighting in the comfortable pull back from speed. I could see it happening, slipping lithely behind the car in front of me, the light would turn green and then we would speed silkily towards the parking garage.
Ten minutes and two light cycles later I was questioning the validity of my faith and certain fundamental universal truths. I should have known better than to get all uppity like that, I know that the Powers That Be will jerk me down from the high horse every time I get so bold as to ascend to that mighty saddle. As I sat there behind that pretty silver car, a Malibu, I couldn’t help but notice that the person piloting the contraption wanted to make their faith very obvious to the outside world. It made me think that this was a person committed to compassionate driving, safety was paramount in their day-to-day operation and I wanted to respect that. I really did.
My self imposed competition, that of getting to my parking space first, ahead of my diminutive Mexican girlfriend made me ponder some impending realities. Especially since I was made astutely aware that I was being forced into humility by a very God fearing individual. Because here I was and there she was, defeating me handily and not even aware of her overwhelming victory. What could it mean? Here on my own turf, were my gods loosing their power to those of a foreign land? Or could it be that the Mexican gods hold far more sway from their mountain top in central Mexico? Perhaps they are gorged on the passion of their patrons as they unite to overturn the vile wickedness of the White man’s treacherous government?
This immediately brought up bigger issues. What was all this talk of gods and parking space races? I don’t know, but it seems like the immigration policies of our great nation are all of a sudden coming quickly to a head. And past time I think, there are a lot of very hard working individuals filling pivotal jobs that all of us depend on day in and day out. They deserve to be treated fairly and to not be treated like criminals. Sure you can ballyhoo and harrumph all you like, nitpick on technicalities, but you can’t dodge the issue that the situation is what it is and needs to be dealt with carefully and with an eye towards practical problem solving.

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I found this while reading SEB, it’s a few pictures comparing our classic video games that we grew up with in the 80’s to today’s modern graphic monsters.
It’s interesting, to me anyway, to think how I used to sit in front of my Commodore 64 and then my Tandy 1000/TL2 (can’t believe I still remember the model number) dreaming about what games would look like one day. While spending countless hours of my youth playing M1 Tank Platoon, F-19 Stealth Fighter and Apache AH-64 my imagination would churn out images of picture perfect landscapes and photo realistic details. I remember watching it as it happened, as games got more and more detailed, getting so excited as we looked at screen shots in the gaming magazines.
I played a lot of “adventure” games back in the day, predominantly produced by Sierra On-Line. Starting with Leisure Suite Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards, then Space Quest, Police Quest and Kings Quest, where the graphics were pretty much 8-bit magic and your character was, more or less, a block with wavy lines. It’s funny how most genre’s got better and better as graphics and hardware got better, but the adventure game genre kind of petered out. There were a few valiant attempts by LucasArts to keep it alive, but even those didn’t really hold a candle to the old classics where deciphering the syntax of commands to type into the action box was as much a part of the game as solving the puzzles.
This is what getting old does to you, it makes you think back to the crappy ass things you used to do, but you can only think about how great they were.

My hunger for WoW has come back, but it still manifests itself as altaholism. I create new toons, play them until level 15-20, and then start over. I’m still refusing to push my level 55 druid to 60, I’m sure this says something about me, but it’s what makes the game fun for me, so I guess there’s no harm in it. In somewhat related news, I know that I don’t really want to play Dungeons & Dragons Online, but every time I see the TV commercial, or a banner ad, I admit there is a certain level of salivation.
Now that the great flood of ‘06 is over I find that I’m beginning to feel a little puny. The urge to get sick is building and I’ve upped my intake of vitamin C in an attempt to shore up the defenses. Looking back at the weekend, I spent not an insubstantial amount of time wet, damp or somewhat moist, so it’s not too surprising that I’m feeling a little woobly. It stands to sound logic that after 9” of rain things tend to get soggy, even places that never get soggy will get soggy when so much rain falls it begins to reshape the geography of your region. Now it’s getting cold. I don’t approve at all of this turn of events. I was ready for heat and for humidity.