While driving on the 110 this weekend I saw a sign on an overpass that read “$5 a Gallon Bush.”
Then, while walking home home from work today, I witnessed attendants at the Arco station I buy most of my gas changing the price of regular from $3.98 to $4.02.
Draw your own conclusions…
A great NYC story waiting for the subway late at night with a bunch of strangers:
After a few minutes a very tall girl with long brown hair […] broke social convention, turned to her fellow benchmates, and said, “My God, wasn’t today beautiful.” At first she just got a few quiet affirmations,”yeah, gorgeous”, “best day yet” etc, but then a young woman in a business suit again broke social convention and revealed personal information: “It was so nice, when I woke up I decided I didn’t want to feel miserable about anything, and broke up with my boyfriend. I ditched him at 7:30 in the morning. He didn’t know what hit him.”
I miss a lot about NYC; particularly riding the subways and how there are still lots of interesting people out at all hours of the night.
(Link via Kottke, post title inspired by LCD Soundsystem.)
Not too much blogging going on this summer because I’ve been somewhat living out of boxes suitcases and adjusting to the working life and being back in LA. The former changes tomorrow with my new apartment (check here for the new address if you need it). The latter, well at a certain point I guess it won’t be ‘adjusting’ anymore and instead I’ll have the ‘grind’ (or some other depressing term).
Things are fucking great down here in LA though; I feel like I’m just peaking at the top of the big hill of a roller-coaster and now I get to enjoy the ride down.
What I really want to say is thanks to everyone who helped me climb that hill and get here. I appreciate you more than I let on. So here’s to some great years in LA and the end of the NVinNYC.com URL (I’ll be moving the blog to a new one as soon as all the details get sorted).
I played a Wii for the first time last week, and I’ve been mulling over my reaction and after much though it could really be summed up rather simply:
“Meh.”
I mean, I only played Wii Sports, but I really don’t understand what the big deal is about. I see Wii like computer solitaire: a complete waste of my time. Are people that hard-up for simple games? (Answer: yes, apparently so, because the casual gaming market is in the middle midst of an explosion.)
Yes, the motion controller is kind of cool. Yes, it does bring some new dimension to the games. But no one seems to realize there is a trade-off that comes from this controller. Designing a game around the motion control means you leave the traditional schemes behind, and with that you sacrifice a lot of depth because the Wiimote is not really a precision input device like a button. Sure it makes a great pointer but so does a mouse (plus, a mouse is hundreds of times more sensitive). So you loose a lot of accuracy from the motion control and this means you have to make your game ‘looser’ to compensate.
It’s akin to the difference between playing Halo with your Xbox controller joystick or playing with the mouse a keyboard: when you play with a joystick the game takes this into account and gives you a margin of error (auto-aim). On the flip side, mice are accurate to the point that an auto-aim feature in a shooter would be considered kiddie mode or outright cheating. The difference between the Wiimote and a joystick works on the same level. The game has to make assumptions that you’re doing the right thing as long as you’re close enough even more so than a the joystick. This makes the experience feel sloppy to me and it ruins the whole illusion that “Wow, it’s like I’m really swinging the bat.”
So yeah, I’m done with the Wii at least until they get the next Super Smash Brothers out (which I’ll be playing with a GameCube controller anyway).
Disclaimer: I’m a mouse and keyboard PC gamer (I’m lumping Macs with PCs here). I was raised on the likes of SimCity, Civilization, and WarCraft. My favorite games are mostly hard RPGs (D&D) and real time or turn based strategy games. I like games where there is a lot of tactical decision making, where you have to think a lot, and where you have to work the math and numbers on your units/characters to succeed against your opponent. I’m exactly the wrong type of gamer for the Wii I think.
But honestly, if I really wanted to bowl, I would go bowl. At least then I would feel like my physical actions were having a strong impact on the outcome of the game.