Jones and I hung out this afternoon. Around 4:00, we got some Subway and went to see The Prestige. After getting disillusioned by The Illusionist (rofflecopter), I wasn’t super excited about seeing another turn-of-the-century magician movie. And for the first forty-five minutes or so, I thought my fears had been confirmed. But then brilliant things started happening — I was glad to have someone with me for the car ride home because there was so much to talk about. Even hours later I’m still thinking about the film. There’s some terrific foreshadowing and metaphor in it, plus (very surprisingly) a not-insignificant amount of ethics and philosophy. Great movie.

Terraforming Earth is turning out to be a quick read. As I’d hoped, Williamson doesn’t obsess over Lunarian minutia. But this seems to come at the cost of leaving out real world science almost entirely. It’s weird to read this fantastic style that doesn’t concern itself with physics or chemistry after spending so long immersed in hard SF. And where I was afraid the book might begin to ape Robinson’s Mars trilogy, it seems Williamson only wants to use the bizarre setting as a vehicle to tell stories about a half-dozen kids who have adventures on alien worlds. (Granted, those “kids” are actually multiple generations of clones and the alien worlds are all Earth, plus n million years.)

Well, time to watch some Studio 60 and drink a Fresca before bed. Man, this place sure is exciting.

I’ve decided that what the Tri-Cities needs, more than anything else, is a GameALot. And a decent movie theater wouldn’t hurt either (the ones here haven’t gotten Borat yet — it’s been showing in Auburn since Friday). But it really bites not having a place to go to meet other gamers.

I found myself with nothing to do again last night (Beefy being in Portland, Jones a bit too melancholic to be up for socializing), so I went to the 9:45 showing of Man of the Year. Didn’t care for it. It probably would’ve been decent if it included more stuff from the lead-up to the election and Tom Dobbs’s (Robin Williams) campaign, but instead it focussed on the adventures of Dobbs’s love interest: an annoyingly whiny, indecisive twit of a woman involved in a conspiracy to hide the truth about defective voting software. Louis Black was good, but they gave him very few lines.

I finished The Gods Themselves earlier today. I was a little disappointed with the third section of the book; it didn’t compare to the first two parts. Plus, I was annoyed that the humans never made real contact with the “para-men” from the other universe. The first part was (loosely) about a scientist trying to communicate with these extra-dimensional aliens who help Earth develop free energy; then the second part was basically the same story from the point of view of one of the aliens with whom he’d traded messages. But the third part doesn’t further that storyline at all. In fact, it doesn’t even feature any of the previous characters. And the loose ends from the alien story ever get tied up.

Tonight I’ll start reading Terraforming Earth. After all this 30+ year old stuff, I need some recent sci fi. I’m getting a little tired of stories set on Luna though, so hopefully this one won’t spend too much time there. (Or, if it does, maybe it can at least avoid the constant stream of trivia about 0.16 G adaptation that Heinlein and Asimov were so obsessed with imparting to their audience.)

During a particularly boring stretch of afternoon yesterday, I flipped through my dad’s parallel bible and spotted an interesting passage. (A parallel bible, BTW, is basically a book with four different versions of the bible displayed side by side for easy comparison. This one has King James in one column, then New International in another, then Living, then New Revised Standard.) The text from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 gave me a weird feeling of deja vu. After some thinking and a quick google search, I realized it was nearly identical to The Byrds’s Turn, Turn, Turn. Isn’t it strange to think that, at some point in time, a song made up almost entirely of scripture was number one in the US?

Well, this killed some time. Guess I’ll go get a Famous Bowl and watch the new Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror XVII on the DVR. BTW, speaking of Famous Bowls, I just found this sweet 2-for-1 coupon on the KFC web site.

Well, I’m in the Tri-Cities now. On Wednesday I did a sort of one-on-one focus group thing at Gilmore Research for Sterling Savings Bank’s new web site. It was pretty fun, only took an hour, and they paid me $75.

Yesterday I was really bored. Beefy and Jones didn’t want to do anything, so I went and saw The Departed at the Carmike 12. It was very good, but the twists at the end weren’t of the magnitude I’d expected. Some of the dialogue was a little hard to swallow when delivered with that heavy Boston accent. Maybe it was accurate, but to me it sounded silly. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief and accept that people who talk like that could actually be competent detectives.

I set the Moxi DVR over here to record some shows for me. In addition to the lack of a 30-second skip button, the machine lacks another critical TiVo innovation: It doesn’t warn you of scheduling conflicts. It just overwrites pre-existing recording slots without telling you (whereas TiVo throws up a window when a conflict occurs that shows what programs will fail to record if you confirm the action). Oh, and apparently you can’t pause video indefinitely — it resumes on its own after about 15 minutes. I ended up missing The Office because of that “feature” — I kept pausing the playback and when I finally hit play it had replaced the stuff I thought I was saving with some game show (Deal or No Deal or something lame like that). Now I’m going to have to BitTorrent the episode and install the proper video codecs on this machine.

Doesn’t look like much’ll be happening today again. I’m probably just going to run errands for the clinic, get some fast food, and buy some kitty litter. Maybe I’ll install MTGO on a computer here and participate in a Time Spiral booster draft.

Just got back from the Seattle GURPS game. Got to meet the new player, John. He’s pretty cool — more into the in-character role-playing than the rest of us (which is a good thing; you get more out of the NPCs that way). Like Torsten, Kristian, and Martin, he’s Canadian. Anyway, we were fooling around with the grail stones in Riverworld and the gods (Alien overlords? Enlightened spirits? We’re not sure what they are.) showed up and decided to boot us to another parallel somewhere beyond the reach of Homeline (and, presumably, accessible by Centrum). We tried to get some information from them about the “Riverworld experiment,” but they wouldn’t tell us much. Most of our questions were met with answers like “It’s beyond your comprehension.” My best guess at the moment is that Martin’s Riverworld (by his own admission it’s not entirely canonical) is a sort of forum meant to give every incarnation of a soul a chance to reach enlightenment without having to reincarnate multiple times. Of course, that assumes the Riverworld gods were being truthful with us (and we’ve already seen proof that they’re not as perfect as they claim).

Much to my chagrin, Martin wouldn’t reveal his campaign secrets even after the session ended (on the basis that we might still have further interaction with the Riverworld parallel). It’s a little like being one of the characters on Lost. I was actually contemplating having my character commit suicide just before we were exiled to see if the Riverworld gods would use their “soul catcher” on me (and, thus, give me a peek at the inner workings of their cosmic laboratory). But, obviously, it would have been an overly risky wager.

Man, I don’t know why, but I can barely keep my eyes open tonight. Got plenty of sleep last night, but I’m completely bushed at the moment. BTW, it’s freezing here. Below freezing, actually. I am not looking forward to walking the dog in a couple minutes.

I got a couple presents yesterday, which was kind of weird (but very appreciated). Keith gave me the Spycraft sourcebook for helping him move a couple months ago, and Anthony gave me this really fancy leather deck box for helping out his business (i.e. buying Magic cards and playing games there all the time). Pretty cool. Incidentally, when I was there playing Magic last night (after the d20 game), I got a look at this new scary deck Garret made. It’s a mono-red that uses Sneak Attack and Gratuitous Violence to put out tons of huge, hasted dragons very quickly.

Also, I did my absentee ballot today. I think it’s dumb that they charge you $0.63 in postage to send in the darn thing though. I mean, the tax payers already pay for the printing and distribution of the ballots; why not go that tiny bit further and cover the return?

Oh yeah, and I’m going to be in the Tri-Cities from November 2nd through the 12th. I’ll have my BlackBerry with me the whole time if anyone needs to contact me.

I started reading The Gods Themselves. It’s pretty good for an Asimov book. That is, I love his short stories but most of his novels just don’t do it for me. The only one I’ve really enjoyed was The Positronic Man; the others I’ve tried (a couple from the Foundation series and Nemesis) have been overly dry. Anyway, so far Gods Themselves seems to be a fairly straightforward indictment of organizational apathy. Had the book been written more recently, I might have assumed Asimov was also commenting on global warming. But in 1972? Had anyone even thought of it back then?

Looker got fleas last week. They came on very suddenly –really bothered her. I got my parents to FedEx me some Advantix and I gave her a bath with flea shampoo which helped until the medication arrived. The Advantix is really effective. You just squeeze a few drops onto four points on the back and it kills all the fleas in less than 24 hours.

About that same time last week, Brett and I went and got haircuts from Min. I got mine a bit shorter than usual, but I like it.

Gas sure has gotten cheaper lately… when I filled up Saturday night it was only $2.27 per gallon.

Been playing a lot of Magic at Game-A-Lot with Charlie and the guys. I’ve made three new decks; a red, a blue, and a black. The red one works by putting out death-resistant creatures (e.g. Darksteel Gargoyle, Rukh’s Egg), then Jokulhaupsing the board. The blue one is all about redirectable color-hate, a la Distorting Lens + Blue Elemental Blast (usually imprinted on an Isochron Scepter). And the black one uses a Crypt Rats combo for massive life gain. They’re a lot of fun to play, but Charlie’s new decks are pretty tough to beat. He has one that uses a Quicksilver Amulet to put out huge, expensive creatures like Mindleech Mass. There are other terrible combos in that deck, but that’s the one that really hurts.

Speaking of Charlie, I went to his and Ashlee’s Halloween party on Saturday. Lots of fun. We watched 28 Days Later and The Count of Monte Cristo. The latter turned out to be surprisingly good. Normally I avoid those sorts of Napoleonic-era movies — they’re usually slow, boring, and feature a lot of dull sword fights. But this one was really great. My only complaint was that I think the story would’ve been better if Dantès had lost in the end. Charlie, Janelle, and I had an interesting discussion about it after the movie.

Um, what else… I found out the tailor on the corner will sew pant buttons on for only $1.50 each. Pretty good deal — I’ve gotten two pairs fixed.

A couple pictures before I take off here: The first is the board at the end of a Carcassone game between me, Charlie, Anthony, Garret, and Nolan. We used two games worth of tiles for that one. I think Anthony won with something like 230 points. The second picture is from the Halloween party. I think everyone was kind of caught off-guard by the flash.

Been fighting off a cold the past few days; it started out as a little congestion and a mild fever, but got worse. Normally, I try to avoid bringing up indelicate things in my blog, but I just have to mention this sneeze I had in the shower this morning as the volume of mucus unleashed was truly staggering. There must have been at least 10 cubic centimeters of the stuff. Anyway, I think I’ve gotten through the worst of it–should be back to normal by Monday.

We’ve had some interesting Carcassone games lately; last week I bought a second copy of the game and mixed all the tiles together so we could create larger countrysides. It’s worked out pretty well, but now the game seems to focus on farms too much. I think the additional tiles require a new rule to keep the game from degenerating into “farm wars” — like, farms should be reduced to three points per completed city instead of four.

Not much else to report. I’ll have some more gaming pics later, but for now here’s a screenshot from an MTGO game I played last month where my mono-white Isochron-Soldiers deck made an impressive comeback.