As heard on CNBC

"The Mother of all armtwistings" being applied to a few select congresspeople.

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
- Philip K. Dick

Prediction to check

Several heads on CNBC are recommending that the FDIC can help fix consumer sentiment by bumping up individual consumer coverage per bank. They thought going from $100,000 to $1,000,000 covered would stop the run that's happening from banks to Treasury Bonds. This is the calmest I've ever heard Jim Cramer speak.

Check back to this later to see if it happens as they supposed.

'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
- Abraham Lincoln

I didn't think it was possible, but I'm just not that impressed with the new DragonForce album.. I think there's just too much synthesizer involved now. I can accept 80s metal and a lot of new wave, but not in the same cake.

Baseball inanity

I've just got to say that it's a relief the Cubs broke their losing streak. It's kinda scary that they still have the best record in baseball even after a 6? game losing streak.

WGN did reassure me pretty well with a breakdown of the World Series winners this century. ALL of them had a bitch of a time in September. Maybe managers just aren't working their teams as hard so they save some gas for October? I can only hope that's what it is.

I'm really not happy with how the post-season ticket sales are being handled this year. Yeah, doing a lottery for tickets makes it more fair to everybody. But I was a pro at the old system! All it means is less money in my pocket. Sadface..

Hopefully they stick to the old method for regular season tickets next year. Although, win or lose the World Series, this may be the time to hop off the Cubs train. If they win, this is the best season they are ever likely to have. If they lose, it's never meant to be, because this is the best regular season they're ever likely to have.

You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.
- Sacha Guitry

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
- Thomas Szasz

In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

It's preliminary..

It's preliminary, but Google's Chrome browser has some neat ideas. Sadly I just think of them as things I'd like to see Firefox pick up.

Tearing tabs off into new windows? I've been waiting for that.

Smart new tabs that suggest based on your browsing habits? A nice extension of the Super Bar or whatever idea that Firefox has.

Maximizing vertical space? They could take it farther(further?) but it's more important to provide for this in today's freaking widescreen environment that cuts your vertical space down.

Harry Turtledove - WORLDWAR

After a grumpy morning at work, I found myself driving to Borders during lunch. I hate spending money at Borders, but I just wanted to look and browse and flip, and maybe buy a comic or two. I was sadly disappointed after browsing through but found myself turned about and there was a huge display for some new Harry Turtledove book. If the copy was to be believed, this man was THE KING OF ALTERNATE HISTORY! I poked around, read the backs of some of them and I was willing to drop my eight bucks(EIGHT DOLLARS???).

In The Balance – book one of Turtledove’s four book World War series seems written for me. It is written in a manner reminiscent of one of my preferred reading materials – 50s pulp sci-fi. It’s updated, though, with a decent assessment of physics, social interaction, and bits of believability.

The concept is World War II interrupted prior to Pearl Harbor and nuclear power by an alien invasion. The aliens are hampered by their assessments of Earth technology and capabilities being 800 years out of date. They bring a show of power that would have crushed medieval humanity, but run into tanks, tactics, and much larger populations.

The narrative is done in a hopscotch manner that keeps things moving along quickly. Characters from America, Japan, Russia, Germany, England, and other bits of Europe, as well as alien POVs lay things out well.

The one drawback, which I am easily overlooking, is the contrived nature of the story. The aliens arriving as they are any earlier or any later would have either completely overpowered humanity or been completely nuked to hell. In addition, the psychology of the aliens is exactly as is needed to be undermatched against humanity in all ways but technological. Their adaptability and creativity are almost non-existent. If they were able to roll with punches or come up with new tactics on the fly, the story wouldn’t be interesting or last 4 books. Ah well. It is what it is, and stuff blows up.

I greatly recommend it, but if you’re short on time, maybe cutting straight to Guns of the South would be better, though I haven’t read that one yet.

Williams Pinball Wii

I love me some pinball. I was exposed to arcades from a young age and I was always mesmerized by a good pinball player. It took me years to get a good feel for playing, but I stand a pretty good chance these days of scoring enough for some free credits. When I was going to school at UIC and UIUC one of the things I loved the most was the bowling alleys at each and the complement of pinball games they kept around. If I could have gotten course credit for playing pinball, I would have had a much more padded transcript than I already do.

Long story short – I’ve played a lot of pinball.

I’ve tried a lot of video pinball. Pinball for the Genesis, Saturn, Playstation, PC, etc. It has all sucked. ALL of it.

Williams Pinball Hall of Fame for the Wii does not suck. It is very much lacking in suck. It ventures very deeply into the realms of awesome.

The games? Ten boards dating from the 70s to the early 90s. I tend to pass up some of the older machines when I’ve got a chance to drop my coins into a newer machine, but all of these are great. They are extremely faithfully reproduced and the physics engine is quite great. There have only been 2 or 3 times when the ball has done something that doesn’t look quite right, but that’s probably less often than I’ve had that feeling in real life. The flippers are extremely responsive and the cameras are very smart and easy to switch.

This game is so good that I am convinced I would buy multiple other collections on the same engine if I could have home versions of some newer games I sadly do not have nearby. Simpsons Pinball Party on the Wii? Sold. Addams Family? Sign me up. Monopoly? Gimme.

I think that literally the only thing I would fault on this game is that there is no free roam examination of the different boards possible. I am used to being able to eyeball an idle machine from every angle to be able to see the nuances or read the smaller text that may be relevant to the game. That’s it. That’s my problem with it.

If you have twenty dollars, buy this game.

Gencon Indy 2008

Long overdue, but here’s my thinking on Gencon.

Sure, back when I was in high school I heard about Gencon. I even went a few times in the late 90s, but I never knew what was going on there. We’d truck up there to Milwaukee for the day and wander around the vendor area for the day. That was entirely satisfying – there were insane numbers of vendors and it was fun just to look.

When I heard that Gencon had moved to Indianapolis I was dubious. First of all, why would anybody want to go to Indiana? Second of all, what could justify a three hour drive down for just wandering around vendors? Well, I decided that now with the wedding paid off and the vacation days piling up, I could try out a Con again. Gencon it is.

To start off, I completely understand my previous self’s inability to grasp what was going on at Gencon. There were giant books of page after page of what amounted to Excel spreadsheets to pick events from. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do up there. Now, the events literally are enormous Excel spreadsheets. This is a blessing. Sean, Lauren, and I all sat down, marked the events we were interested in that were still open, and pasted them all into one document. Use that to build a weekend schedule and we were golden.

Luckily we showed up Thursday to get used to the area, figure out where to park, get our passes, and find the areas. We would have been screwed driving down Friday morning, trying to figure that all out on the fly AND get to our first event..

Getting to that first event was a huge plus – BREWERY TOUR. The Indianapolis Convention Center is blessed with three breweries within walking distance. Beer can be good, but local brew on tap is heavenly. So we get into our 10am event Friday and commence drinking. I’ll run down the beers in another post. The experience was wonderful – we got to try seven beers The Ram brewed right there. Two of the brews they had put on specifically for Gencon. Now that’s an area embracing an event. After an amazing amount of good beer for only 9 dollars,we got to do the actual tour. This sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was, because the brew area was probably about as big as our apartment, but two stories high in half of it. There were a number of large vats crammed in, not much walking space, and a single story cooling area that directly feeds the taps out front. The guy giving the talk was not the most eloquent, and he apparently had only worked at The Ram a month, but he was able to clue us into some good finds at the other breweries. Another plus – we got to taste the hops and barley that go into the beers. It definitely added to appreciation of it all.

In no particular order now – the other things we did at the Con.

The games library is an excellent resource. They have dozens and dozens of games available to borrow for a few hours at just the cost of a few event tickets. It let us figure out that Humans! was not a game to waste $35 on.

There are many small game events where you’re paired up with a group and, in the case of My Word, the winner got to take the game home. My Word is actually a very simple group game that can be taught in a few sentences. It benefits from Lauren and I being good enough at it that we got to take it home – I look forward to trying it out with others.

Unspeakable Words – not nearly as fun as My Word. Kind of contrived – possible for everybody to lose. Fits the Cthulhu mythos, but just not that fun.

Illuminati – now I remember why I haven’t played the game in years. There’s absolutely nothing to do gamewise when it’s somebody else’s turn and these people liked to think through every single possibility before acting. Even after acting! It was a fine event, and it saved me the dollars I had earmarked for picking up a copy.

Lauren is a somewhat finicky gamer. She balks if faced with knowledgable gamers who do not allow her the chance to learn. The guys running the Battletech introductory area and Grinder were exactly what Lauren needed to be comfortable and even get excited about a somewhat complex game. I hadn’t played Battletech since high school and, I realize now, I didn’t really know how to play then – I just had a good mediator. The guys running the Battletech area were excellent at giving Lauren aid and not leaving me to drown in the rules while trying to help her along. The end result was us getting in several hours in a huge melee, approval on purchasing Battletech materials, and a game we’ve played a few more times even after we got home. I really look forward to putting together some environments and diving into the source materials. If you’re reading this because you know me – let’s play!