Dell Dimension Deceased
A moment of silence, please, for my Dell 486.
While my new copy of Vampire – The Masquerade: Bloodlines was installing last night (thanks Pooch!), I decided to slap the old Dell 486 back together, plug it in and see what would happen. I disconnected Phobos and moved it out of the way, then brought in the lidless Dell Dimension 486 DX/2-66, which has no name. (Somehow, it seems pointless to name machines that can’t be networked.) Reassembled the drive bays, hooked up all the ribbon cables, plugged in the peripherals, and pressed the magic power button…er, stud, since the button had broken off.
WOOOOO…BOO BOO BOOOO…CHRISTMAS MORRR-NING!
God, you knew I couldn’t resist using that as the title of today’s post, right? I mean, it’s just tailor-made for the wackiness that naturally ensues when one gets out of bed at 3:30 a.m. on Christmas morning, goes to his computer and starts blogging quotes from a story he wrote about ten years ago. Yeah, I couldn’t really sleep tonight—I feel wide awake. It’s not like I’m expecting to wake up to a boatload of presents tomorrow—I’m not even opening any until Tuesday—but I think I’ve figured out what’s going on. I’m just genetically hard-wired to be…well, wired…each Christmas Eve, to the point where sleeping really becomes an exercise in futility. But it’s all fun and games anyway. Might as well enjoy y’self.
So I’m playing beach volleyball earlier tonight, finished my 14-day vacation as Lei Fang, and decided to play my next trip as Tina, the blonde bimbo wrestler from America. I’m not very fond of Tina, but I’ve only played the game as her once so I decided to try again. Besides, I’m on this kick lately of trying to mix up the swimsuit inventory a bit by giving them away to other girls in the game, so they’ll have them in their inventories later. Anyway, I like Kasumi, and she needs some new swimwear bad, so I decide to partner up with her. Now, the personalities of these two are diametrically opposed, so I had to butter her up with gifts before she would accept. Shortly thereafter she had mucho music notes floating above her head, which indicates she’s fond of you. Okay! Let’s team up. “We’ll be the best team ever!” Tina shouts boorishly, waving her boobs around as usual. “I hope I’m good enough for you,” mumbles fragile Kasumi meekly. Ohhhh boy. This will be a vacation to remember.
Okay, so we get out on the…court…er, beach…and start PLAYING to WIN! Aw yeah! …Except we’re barely winning. In the very first game of the vacation, in which the opposing team is always easy to beat so new players don’t get frustrated, we allow the enemy team to score 4 points. WTF is this? We finally come out in the lead and take the trophy. Or the ZackBucks, as the case may be. Fine, fine. I buy Kasumi some kind of pink thing to cheer her up. Pink canvas sneakers, I think. She loves them. (“Waah—! Arigato!”) However, during our second game, she starts acting like she’d rather be off clipping her toenails. She won’t pass to me. She keeps trying to return the ball from stupid places on the court, oftentimes hitting the net. She’s standing right in the ball’s path as the opposing team spikes it toward us, and she just stands there and lets it hit the sand while I come diving in, trying desperately to save it. OKAY, WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM, KASUMI?
Lah De Dah Delightful…
Last night was my company’s Christmas party. I usually attend every year, although I am not really a party guy. (Okay, let’s face it. I just plain don’t “do” parties.) But we have a pretty small company and there are a number of people here I get along with pretty well, so there’s almost always somebody I can hang around and chat with for the evening. I don’t partake in alcohol, not so much by choice but more because I can’t stand the taste of any of it, so usually I’ll hang around with somebody else from Michigan or another car buff who I can talk shop with.
Anyway, this year we had our party at the fancy-schmancy La Playa resort right on the beach. I decided to really outdo myself so I put on a black button-down shirt, black pants and a pewter jacket. Normally I don’t do formal, either, but I thought I’d try something different. So anyway I drove down to the club at 7:00, bumping Knight Rider tunes in the ol’ Pontiac, and promptly discovered that if I wanted to go to this shindig, I would have to valet my car. Okay, six and a half years of ownership and I have never let a valet touch the Trans Am. Worse yet, I had no cash to tip the guy with. But I left it in the kid’s “capable” hands (praying to God he’d remember to release the parking brake before driving off) and went on in.
The setting was really quite nice, I must say. The evening began with drinks on the terrace, which faced a small inlet from the gulf. Across the water you could see these multimillion-dollar houses all lit up. It was pretty cool. During drinks one of the waitstaff knocked a table over, spilling drinks all over my friend’s feet and breaking about three wine glasses. Yeah, okay. Shortly after that the food was served, so we went inside.
Retro Game Review: Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare
For my second installment of Not-Quite-Retro-Gaming-Month™, I was going to reinstall and play Gothic, a medieval RPG that I thought was a major bore back in the day (but which a friend thought was quite fun), but I really wasn’t in the mood to install and slog through an RPG just yet.
Anyway, in lieu of the Gothic experience, I decided to have another go at an older game that I actually liked the first time around (who knows…maybe I’d think it was trash now). The game I chose? Well, as the title of this post indicates, I chose Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare, which I guess is rather fitting, since there’s apparently an Alone In The Dark movie coming out (directed by Uwe “I Only Make Shitty Movies Based On Videogames” Boll—honestly, look at his upcoming slate of films: Bloodrayne? Far Cry? Jesus.).
Getting back on topic, though. I’ve never actually played any of the first three games in the Alone In The Dark series – though Sparse tells me they were a lot of fun back in the day. Indeed, it could be argued that the Alone In The Dark series was the first of what became known as the “Survival Horror” genre, which gave us such gems as the five trillion Resident Evil games, as well as Silent Hill. Of course, while both the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series are both well known for their dark looks and overall atmosphere, Alone In The Dark was very bright looking in comparison—something which the makers of Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare seemingly had in their minds when they went about making their game. Indeed, Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare probably took a lot of its inspiration for its updated character designs from games like Resident Evil, ironically enough—now Edward Carnby (the series’ main character) sports shoulder length black hair and a long trenchcoat, as well as a double-barreled pistol and a triple-barreled shotgun. Yeeeeah.
Freedom Force: Still As Boring As Ever
Yeah, I know – March was Retro Gaming Month. Well, excuse me for not having posting privileges then.
And now it’s time to feeeeel the flaaaames!
Ahem. What I mean is, I think I’m one of the only people on Earth (along with Sparse) who didn’t like Freedom Force when it came out. I mean, yeah, the premise was awesome (playing as comic book characters? Sweet!), but the presentation seemed rather lacking. But the game was a critics’ favorite, as well as a fan favorite. So after taking all of this into consideration (not to mention the fact that the passage of time can do wonders for one’s opinion of a game, and I hadn’t so much as looked at Freedom Force since I initially uninstalled it off my computer back in 2002), I decided to give the game another chance; maybe there was something I overlooked the first time around (something like what happened to me regarding Oni – despite it’s flaws I really liked it my second time through after not touching it for two years)…maybe this time, I thought, things would be different.
Uh, no. Sorry. Still can’t stand the game.
Gradoop Gradoop!
Well, even when it comes to random installments, it seems I can’t get my butt over to the Oddball control panel to actually input anything! Well, no matter. I’m here now, so stop yer bitchin’.
What a week! I should have known something was amiss when I managed to completely eliminate the backlog of messages in my inbox on my first day back from vacation. It turns out that everyone was hiding the rest of the work from me, and waited until I got settled in to dump it on me. In the end I guess that was considerate of them, but it didn’t make this week any less crazy. I’ve even been bringing work home, something I don’t usually have to do. At least I’ve been lucky with my job in the sense that I can usually “leave work at work,” as it were, meaning that when I get home I’m free to occupy my brain completely with my wife, a computer game, or HOW REALLY STUPID the season premiere of Enterprise was.
Eh? Did I just unwittingly segue into a new topic? Seems I did. Clumsy me. Anyhoo, as long as I’m discussing it…Enterprise! God, the season premiere sure was a letdown. I mean, after all how absolutely great the last six episodes of season three were, and after all the dramatic (if not a bit hackneyed) build-up with the anonymous Alienazi at the end of the final episode, the payoff certainly wasn’t worth any of it. Perhaps the scariest thing is that last Friday’s episode was the work of a brand new writer, Manny Coto, who was hailed as being the cat’s meow compared to Berman and Braga, who have “taken a step back” from the show this season (likely because they realize it’s a sinking ship that UPN is not going to be courteous enough to renew for a fifth season).
Anyway, it’s ENT season four and also quite possibly “season last,” and so that puts us… checks watch …yep, right on schedule for the creators to start trotting out the guest star of the week! Just like every Trek series before it! VOY season four brought us Seven of Nine, and ENT season four brings us…Brent Spiner! That’s right…Data.
Doing Things Out of Sequence
It occurs to me that I should be posting here more often. Posting stupid crap. I mean, why not? It’s why I have this site, right? When I first acquired this domain and slaved away for a week to put this design up, I intended for the site to house my more random, spur-of-the-moment thoughts. For a while, it worked. I had something to post almost every day. Now…well, just thumb the calendar back a few months and notice how much I’ve been posting. Like, basically nothing. And the reason is because I’ve been feeling lately like I needed to come up with some nicely-written, sagely constructed piece of goddamn poetry before I could even think about starting an entry. Like I had to have a theme, and a complete thought, and wrap it up with juicy proverbial Nostradamic wackjobbery. But I’m sick of that! When an idea strikes, I want to just post it, not think about how to turn it into a newspaper article.
I’m too logically constructed for my own good, and my right brain just declared mutiny. A rousing chorus of “We’re not gonna take it” is echoing through the halls of my mind at this precise moment. I’m only writing this because my left brain can’t stop it, I assure you.
I’m listening to the old Quake II soundtrack right now. “Rage,” to be precise. The volume’s cranked up on my Klipsch satellites and this place is ROCKING. I even lined it out to my stereo system and let it join in on the fun. The people who share the other half of our duplex seem to have dropped off the face of the earth, been eaten by Species 8472, or joined a traveling circus. Either way, they have either not been home since Hurricane Frances, or simply don’t care that their garage-mounted lanterns are hanging ludicrously upside-down due to the windstorm. I prefer to side with the former theory, so, since my wife’s at work, I’m pumpin’ the bass. No, not the iron. It should be the iron. But that’s too much work. Bass it is. I’m a hedonist, maybe that’s it.
What Time Is It? What Day Is It?
My wife and I are just back from two weeks in Thailand! What a great time we had. Took millions of pictures (okay, more like four hundred, but who’s counting). Saw all kinds of fascinating stuff, enjoyed some truly beautiful places, and now we’re both dealing with the rigors of jet lag. Like, what day is it? What time is it? Should I be going to bed or just waking up? My circadian rhythms haven’t got a clue either, and so I’ve been nodding off at 8 in the evening and waking up at 6 a.m. Last night I actually dozed off at the computer!
The fact that I woke up insanely early this morning—feeling perfectly rested, I might add—allowed me to get out to the garage and spend two hours cleaning up the Trans Am. That car had not been washed thoroughly since mid July, I kid you not. I’ve just had too much to do, and a hurricane coming every week—it never stopped raining here in nearly all that time. I do not get much enjoyment out of driving a dirty car, so the task of driving has been just that—a task—for months now. Well, in Thailand I obviously didn’t do any driving, and by the time we got home I was DYING to get behind the wheel again. So I cleaned and detailed the T/A, swapped out the restrictor plate in the Borla for a beefier sound, and fired her up.
OMG YES. I promptly flung her out onto the road and launched my way to 70 miles an hour. Following that was a trip around town that definitely put the “joy” back in “joyride,” let me tell you. And I was pleased to see that my new BFGs had not lost even a pound of air.
I’ll have much more to tell in the coming days. Indeed, before I do that, I have an email to send out to a friend with many more details, which I’ll wrap up about as soon as I can shake off this jet lag. My parents are in town this weekend too for my dad’s birthday (happy birthday, Dad!), but I expect to be back into my usual routine by next weekend.
Finally – More Knight Rider Music!
It’s finally happened. After years of stonewalling, Universal has given Don Peake the go-ahead to release a new album of Knight Rider music. Shown here, this special limited-edition album (of which only 1,000 copies were made) is a special gift to German fans of Knight Rider, who are arguably even more rabid (and more organized) that fans here in the United States. On the disc are 70 minutes of selections from six episodes, including “White Bird,” “Let It Be Me,” “Mouth of the Snake,” “The Scent of Roses,” “Junk Yard Dog” and “Halloween Knight.”
I can tell from that list that this is not going to be another simple album of incidental music; all of the above episodes contained special cuts of unique and stylized music, beyond the usual Knight Rider theme. The only downside to that is that there may be a distinct lack of “traditional” Knight Rider cuts, in other words, tracks containing samples of the theme and its mainstay accompaniments. But since the cover art says “Volume 1,” I’m hopeful we can expect at least one follow-up album. Personally, I’d like to see a disc containing the best of Knight Rider’s chase, action and suspense sequences!
These discs will be available exclusively at the Knight Nationals in Vandalia, Ohio next weekend, at least until Don Peake is able to put together an American release. I have at least one source who has agreed to pick me up a copy of the album. I anxiously await this new treasure—and hope it will be as pleasing to the ear as Don’s last soundtrack collection!
