Newses:
The only really significant news is that my 200 gigabyte hard drive is acting up again. Data read errors, Cyclic redundancy check failures. That sort of thing. I have discovered that there is software for dealing with this sort of thing, which seems a bit strange as it's a hardware problem at the core...but what the hell, I've downloaded it and will see if it helps as soon as I get my 100-pack of blank CDs in so I can burn it as it requires. Keep in mind that this isn't 100% new. This isn't quite the same as I've experienced before, but the drive has some sort of fault in it or *something*. I've had corruption followed by complete data loss more than once in the past. Sooner or later I will replace it, but I'm going to have to have a full set of larger drives in before it will be practical to do so, and right now I just have the one 300 gig. After the data loss it usually runs just fine for several months. It's a pain in the ass, but it's survivable.
Saw Superman Returns yesterday. It wasn't as bad as the third X-Men movie was, but it was meandering and pointless, with no real tension and not much plot. A lot of visuals and moments were kind of silly. Superman is all stalkery several times. Really, the main thing I liked was Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. He wasn't given much to work with, but he sold it. Which is more than I can say for anyone else in the movie. This was pretty much as I expected. I wasn't even going to bother seeing it, but we went to the movie theater intending to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and it was sold out, so we settled.
Finished Battle Royale today. 600+ pages of brilliance, mostly in concept. It's really a horrifying setup and as events stalk inexorably onwards and the body count rises...man do you feel bad for the kids involved. Some of them are a bit stereotypical, but when there are 42 characters to deal with, some of them inevitably have to get shorted. You don't feel any less bad when they meet their ends. Conceptually, my only gripe is that a few of the characters were a bit too out of the ordinary. The point is the concept of regular junior high students being forced to kill each other down to the last survivor, and when not all of them are regular teenagers, it weakens things some. (The bad girl, for example, suffers from an amazingly lengthy history of abuse, and while I know there are people out there that have had to deal with such things, the chances of such a person being thrown in with all the other people...well, it stretched my credulity. And that's just an example, there are others.)I do wish I read Japanese, because the translation, while perfectly competent, didn't really work for me on an artistic level. Some oddities in dialogue and poor phrasing, that sort of thing. All in all, read it. You won't regret it. If you like the concept but don't want to deal with the possibly questionable translation of the book, there's always the movie, which preserves almost all of the main scenes with astonishing fidelity, while leaving out or altering most of the backstory and characterizations. (Which is unfortunate, but certainly reduces the translation issue.)
The only really significant news is that my 200 gigabyte hard drive is acting up again. Data read errors, Cyclic redundancy check failures. That sort of thing. I have discovered that there is software for dealing with this sort of thing, which seems a bit strange as it's a hardware problem at the core...but what the hell, I've downloaded it and will see if it helps as soon as I get my 100-pack of blank CDs in so I can burn it as it requires. Keep in mind that this isn't 100% new. This isn't quite the same as I've experienced before, but the drive has some sort of fault in it or *something*. I've had corruption followed by complete data loss more than once in the past. Sooner or later I will replace it, but I'm going to have to have a full set of larger drives in before it will be practical to do so, and right now I just have the one 300 gig. After the data loss it usually runs just fine for several months. It's a pain in the ass, but it's survivable.
Saw Superman Returns yesterday. It wasn't as bad as the third X-Men movie was, but it was meandering and pointless, with no real tension and not much plot. A lot of visuals and moments were kind of silly. Superman is all stalkery several times. Really, the main thing I liked was Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. He wasn't given much to work with, but he sold it. Which is more than I can say for anyone else in the movie. This was pretty much as I expected. I wasn't even going to bother seeing it, but we went to the movie theater intending to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and it was sold out, so we settled.
Finished Battle Royale today. 600+ pages of brilliance, mostly in concept. It's really a horrifying setup and as events stalk inexorably onwards and the body count rises...man do you feel bad for the kids involved. Some of them are a bit stereotypical, but when there are 42 characters to deal with, some of them inevitably have to get shorted. You don't feel any less bad when they meet their ends. Conceptually, my only gripe is that a few of the characters were a bit too out of the ordinary. The point is the concept of regular junior high students being forced to kill each other down to the last survivor, and when not all of them are regular teenagers, it weakens things some. (The bad girl, for example, suffers from an amazingly lengthy history of abuse, and while I know there are people out there that have had to deal with such things, the chances of such a person being thrown in with all the other people...well, it stretched my credulity. And that's just an example, there are others.)I do wish I read Japanese, because the translation, while perfectly competent, didn't really work for me on an artistic level. Some oddities in dialogue and poor phrasing, that sort of thing. All in all, read it. You won't regret it. If you like the concept but don't want to deal with the possibly questionable translation of the book, there's always the movie, which preserves almost all of the main scenes with astonishing fidelity, while leaving out or altering most of the backstory and characterizations. (Which is unfortunate, but certainly reduces the translation issue.)
madae:
Hah, I probably won't get the job.. as cool as it would be. 
I meet the requirements and more; I could play all the TES and Fallout games blindfolded, I'm a pretty good writer when I set my mind to it and I have experience, but... who knows, I'll just say that.
I meet the requirements and more; I could play all the TES and Fallout games blindfolded, I'm a pretty good writer when I set my mind to it and I have experience, but... who knows, I'll just say that.