San Diego
Cowboy opens this weekend in San Diego — I will be there for the Dec. 1st and 2nd shows. I’ll be doing a Q & A after the Dec. 2nd show if you want to stick around and grill me.
This should be a pretty great production — there was a preview article about it in the Union Tribune this past Sunday, and I really like the company that’s putting it up. Also, I haven’t been to SD in a really long time. I might hit up the zoo before the Sunday show, feed some animals!
Six Hundred Pounds of Man
Today’s true American hero is this angry Texan who called into the Jimmy Dean Sausage complaint line to yell at them about reducing the portion of their sausage roll from 16 ounces to 12 ounces while still charging the same price. Here is a quote, although you should really listen to the audio on the link too:
“I don’t mind paying you more money for your 16 oz. roll of sausage, but you don’t have it anymore. You’ve got a 12 oz. roll. And you got three men that weigh over 200 pounds apiece, a woman that’s a little plump Scotch girl and a daughter who’s thirteen, and you’re gonna try and take a 12 oz. roll of sausage and a couple of dozen eggs and feed that? It ain’t gonna work.”
This guy is great. And he has a point. Why should we have to pay the same amount of money for less product? If you need to raise the price, go ahead and do it — but don’t downsize the product. Especially when you consider that a lot of recipes call for a pound of sausage. What are you going to do — buy two rolls and split them up?
But all this is beside the point. On listening to this audio I realized I had never had Jimmy Dean sausages before. Note that in the audio he says that he loves their product and is just angry over the switch. So if someone’s this passionate about these sausages, they must be good, right?
So I bought some. Jimmy Dean regular breakfast sausage in the 16 oz. roll (we still have them in 16s in blue state California) — the regular kind because the maple and sage are for northern folks to eat. Cut three patties out of the log and cooked them up.
They’re fantastic. They’re so good. The kind of food you know is really bad for you, which makes them great. They burp well. They make you feel all warm and sleepy, and they’re so tasty. I am now a fan. I too would be pissed at Jimmy Dean for downsizing my sausage.
Maybe the angry Texan thing is really just a viral ad designed to get us to buy Jimmy Dean sausages. It worked on me!
Wrecking Ball
There’s a new Doughboys in Hollywood a few blocks from my friend’s place. We went there last night.
The place is known for its comfort food — I had the Beefy Mac and Cheese, which is kind of like a really good Hamburger Helper. Then I ate a mini red velvet cake. Those are the specialty there, and for good reason. There was an instance where I went to DBs and had one of these cakes by itself for lunch. They are crave-able.
Capsule Review: Mass Effect for the Xbox 360
I’m a huge sucker for Bioware RPGs. KOTOR 1 and 2, Jade Empire, these were must-plays for me. Why: Open-ended world, lots of branching quest lines. Mass Effect is the clear successor to both these series — the standard Bioware touches can be found throughout.
There are some neat technical advancements here — really good facial animation for the talking heads. They got the embarrassed WINCE down. The visuals are pretty amazing, although the combat doesn’t seem as tight as the previous Bioware products. Doing ranged combat in an RPG is a tricky venture.
There are also quite a few bugs — freezes, a LOT of texture pop-in, and some odd moments where your character stops moving and you have to reload the game. The industry is getting into Patch Mania — allowing some bugs to slip through the release with the intention of patching them later. I do understand though that as games get more complex, this becomes more of a necessity.
Some neat trivia: The voiceover work is phenomenal. Keith David, most recently known for narrating Ken Burns’ The War, does a great job here. That guy has one of the best voices I’ve ever heard — full of gravel and character. Seth Green from Family Guy is in here along with Mila Kunis. Yes, this is the lady that does Meg’s voice on Family Guy. I have no problem with this but it’s also kind of distracting in a humorous way. Especially when the character she voices is so completely different.
More later on all of this once I get deeper into the game.
Looking at the LA Animal Shelter’s Adoptable Dogs web site is like flipping through pictures of really, really happy people. Sadly, ironically happy. And every eighth or ninth photograph is the concerned, worried face of someone who really knows what the hell’s going on.
Currently Reading
Currently Reading: (Because it’s about time I got around to it)
On Kindle, Amazon.com’s new electronic book device: An ominous paragraph exists in Kindle’s Terms of Use:
Information Received: The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device).
In other words, the device will tell Amazon.com what you’re reading off of it. Are you kidding?!
I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with letting a giant corporation know what I’m reading. You could say, “Hey don’t be paranoid, they have to know what you’re reading if you’re buying stuff from their service.” Fair enough. But this thing’s also supposed to read uploaded files, newspaper articles, blogs, websites. Does Amazon get that wonderful demographic data out of you too? And the books I do buy off the service — it seems pretty clear that they’re going to be keeping a paper trail of your usage of them. What you bookmark, how fast you read, etc..
Sure, I let you all know what I’m reading right here, but these are book recommendations that I want to share with you. There are certain items on my reading list that I want to keep hidden. Like this book I have that’s bound with human skin and filled with evil incantations.
I’m a gadget freak, but this one paragraph is a deal killer for me. Also, I feel like books shouldn’t be electronic. They should have a physical form unto themselves. They should outlive their original owners. Ideas should transcend time, and I think when you make them so disposable it cheapens the , well, idea of them.
For a long time I thought that electronic books would be great because you could do instant searches. But now I think that’s not such a hot idea. If you’ve read something and want to find an idea in it, maybe you should revisit the whole thing. And if you haven’t read it first, you damn well should.
Kindle: For now, thumbs way down.
My Glacier Melted
Currently reading:
This is the sequel to Old Man’s War. I bought it on Friday and I’m already 70% of the way through. Fortunately there’s a third book in the series.
If you’re me, you’ve gotta make time for hard sci-fi. I like the world that the author has built here — one which is the polar opposite of Roddenberry’s altruistic Trek universe. In this one, most of the galaxy is openly hostile toward the human race, and the survival of the fittest is being played out among the stars. In addition, the military planners of the human race are actually fairly crafty. That’s a nice change of pace when it comes to any military-based fiction, most of which is based on FUBARisms.
Last night I spent a few hours reading about Autism. I was technically supposed to go running, but was weighing whether to go. I run every other day — this provides enough exercise and allows enough recovery time. So I was supposed to run last night, but I had also run two nights in a row prior — on Thursday and Friday. So technically I didn’t have to go last night, schedule-wise. I hope that makes sense.
But fuck it, I did. It was already pretty late, but if your mind really doesn’t want to go then that is the time to go. Especially if you start reasoning and deal-making with yourself. That’s when you have to say “FUCK YOU SELF, we’re goin’.”
It was cold for the first time in a long while. The streets were deserted. These are the types of runs I like the best — when it feels like you’re running through a long, dark tunnel with no one there but yourself and your thoughts. The air was crisp and freezing, easy to devour.
Big changes come in small increments made consistently over a long period of time. That’s why I think I like running so much — you know that you’re at work making a change. The long, dark tunnel is leading to another version of you that is stronger, has greater endurance and energy, has conquered physical pain. And you are working toward it. I like that. I like it a lot.
I’m With Stupid
So I’m getting word here that the young female college student who posed the “Diamonds and Pearls” question was actually forced to ask that question by CNN. Apparently she gave them a list of five questions she had crafted, four of them being useful and the fifth being the diamonds/pearls bit, and CNN wanted to end on a lighthearted note.
Okay, you can’t take yourself seriously all the time. But diamonds and pearls? There’s no other question that could be posed to ALL the candidates, be informative, and also be lighthearted? Like “what is the one thing you would say to all the children of America about the future?” Perhaps something a little more concise, but you get the picture.
According to the article CNN is trying to put the blame on the young female college student, saying “HEY YOU WROTE THE DIAMONDS AND PEARLZ QUESTION!!” Yeah, but you people chose to use it. If someone gives me the opportunity to write five questions that would be asked of presidential candidates (oh, and one can be sort of cute and off the cuff — don’t worry about it), I might write four useful things and a fifth asking them if they like big butts. If you make me ask Dennis Kucinich if he likes big butts, I’ll do it. But you’re still culpable.
CNN has been committing a lot of stupid moves lately. Everyone in the organization needs to put a Post-It on the top of their monitor that says DON’T BE DUMB. And before they send any email, save a Word document, or say “GO” on the phone, they should look at that stickie. That’s how I roll.
I finally updated the Short Plays section of this site with… One item. But it’s a start!
So all of you that keep clicking there and keep finding nothing now have something to look at. Hurrray..?
Reverse Engineering
Warning — Nerd Content: When we were kids we used to cheat at Bard’s Tale for the Apple IIe by using a hex editor.
What is a hex editor? Well, back then we had floppy disks. 5 1/4″ floppy disks. Data from saved games would be written onto the discs in tracks and sectors.
In order to cheat at an RPG like Bard’s Tale, you would locate the specific track and sector where your characters’ saved data was written, then use a program called a hex editor to actually change those values and rewrite them to the disk.
When you loaded your game you would see that you had a bazillion more EXP or HP or whatever.
This took a lot of trial and error work. For instance, if your STR was 16, your INT was 14, and your DEX was 17, you would be looking for a string like ’100e11′, which is 16,14,17 in hexadecimal. Hexadecimal is, of course, base-16 numeration from 0 to F. So 255 would be ‘FF’, as anyone who has ever worked with HTML colors knows.
So you’d try to find those values in the hex editor, change them, boot up the game, and see if your changes took. You could change lots of little things just by tweaking the data at the hexadecimal level. Items, gold, etc..
I think I spent more time tweaking this data than playing the actual game. Because once you had super-strong characters it was pretty easy, and tweaking stuff with a hex editor was more interesting.
I love taking things apart. I take stories apart like this. I watch them or read them carefully, write down what happens, the cause and effect.
Sometimes I have a question or a problem I’m trying to figure out, so I write it down. Writing things down, taking things apart, seems to help me problem solve. Once something’s on paper it feels more concrete. The details are more available. Things are easier to connect.
I think once you take something that is seemingly magical and monolithic and break it down into its base components, its bricks, you see even more going on. You see behind the wizard’s curtain. You see the possibilities, and what you yourself can do with these bricks.
I like the idea that behind all of these extremely complex things are minute sets of rules and numbers.
My Work in Print
Year Zero
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.com
Cowboy Versus Samurai
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.comFor a complete list of books containing my work, please click here.
