So, naturally, there’s plenty of inventory for me to like at the iOldies Music Store, which recently contacted me to ask if I’d take a look at their site. They bill themselves as offering “Boomer Music”. Which is funny, because that would be my parents’ generation, not mine. Still, ever since I was a teenager I’ve been far more likely to spin records by Genesis, The Beatles or Billy Joel — almost all of it pre-1990 — than anything my peers cared about. In 1987 I didn’t care about Def Leppard, in 1993 I didn’t care about Beck, and now I don’t care about pretty much any modern music. Whether it’s metal, prog rock, pop or whatever, give me the old stuff.

iTunes may appear to have an iron grip on the music market, but there are alternatives — and my recent rants about putting all your eggs in one basket (by getting all your online services from the same provider) should make it clear that I like alternatives. The iOldies Music Store is laid out like a juke box and is obviously going for lovers of ’50s and ’60s music with its visual style, which frankly is kinda hard on the eyes, but once you start searching it looks like they have a pretty large catalog, including eclectic material and albums from foreign bands. Interestingly, not all of it is old, either — although some of these recently-dated albums might be compilation discs of older material from bands I’m unfamiliar with.

What’s interesting about iOldies Music Store is that they try to amalgamize a variety of music formats in a single store. So you can get songs as downloadable MP3s, or order CDs, et al. Some of these options may not be available for certain songs; I think we’re all familiar with the minefield that is digital music licensing these days, so this should not be surprising. They have a “Retro DVD” section too, which includes stuff like Soupy Sales and a motley crew of other oddities.

I haven’t actually purchased anything from the iOldies Music Store, but it doesn’t look like their digital tracks are DRM’ed in any way, which is a minimum requirement for me when buying music downloads. I do have some gripes, though, in that the site is a little difficult to navigate as it does not seem to use pages in a traditional way, and the UI is often slow to respond. The iOldies store appears to be in beta for the moment, though, so some of this stuff could be a work in progress. If they can iron out the issues, they might have a future as an alternative to the big music store players.

Although I am an avid video gamer, there are two things I rarely do: 1) finish a game, and 2) start a second playthrough of a game (and never one that I have just finished). Two weeks ago, I did both. The game in question is Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Forgive me, for I may be about to gush. I absolutely adored this game. Deus Ex is perhaps the most memorable game that I have played on this generation of consoles. Although there are many games vying for that title, in particular any of the Mass Effect series, I think I may have found a definitive winner in Deus Ex.

The Setup

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is in actuality Deus Ex 3, the third game in a series that began on PCs way back in 2000. In terms of the narrative, it serves as a prequel that takes place before either of the first two installments. Admittedly, it is neither as deep nor awesome in scale as the original game seemed, but in my opinion it comes very close and is, in fact, even more thought-provoking on a social level.

Set in a not-too distanct future between our present day and the original Deus Ex game, the story revolves around the concept of biomechanical human augmentation. With advances in technology making it possible for us to improve ourselves in nearly every physiological regard — mechanical limbs, enhanced vision, etc. — society finds itself in the ultimate war between the haves and the have-nots. In addition, those humans who choose to become augmented are stuck taking anti-rejection medication called Neuropozine for the rest of their lives, adding a layer of complexity to the social equation. Are you really so blessed if you’re a slave to a pharmaceutical lifeline?

As usual for a Deus Ex game, the plot is nowhere near that simple, and it isn’t long before layers of conspiracy theories and Illuminati world-domination schemes start to creep to the fore. You, playing the role of the hyper-augmented superhuman Adam Jensen, are tasked at first with a seemingly benign assignment which quickly turns into a question of how deep the rabbit hole goes. There’s even one particular moment where you are rewarded handily for displaying a healthy sense of paranoia earlier in the game; the look on your opponent’s face when she realizes you didn’t fall for the ruse is priceless.

For all that, the plot isn’t really charting any territory that a typical political thriller hasn’t already covered, and never quite reaches the level of intrigue that the original Deus Ex did (the endgame revelation about Hugh Darrow’s motivations was less shocking to me than I imagine it was meant to be). Nevertheless, the adventure is an exciting and memorable ride throughout.

This lab's so-called security is really pathetic.

The Presentation

What really has me so taken with Human Revolution is its presentation. Be more specific? I really can’t, because literally everything about the presentation, from the sounds to the graphics and the UI to the thematic use of color are all completely brilliant. This is one of the very few games that I’ve seen use the color yellow in a sophisticated and classy way without stooping to gaudiness. In fact, the developers have really woven the color into the very fabric of the game, creating a real theme around it in both the user interface and the game world. And yet, it never seems cartoony or unrealistic.

Speaking of realism, I was again quite taken with this game’s visual presentation. Characters move in a smooth and lifelike way and their voice acting is pretty good (well, a lot better than the first Deus Ex at least — especially the Chinese accents), weapon animation is superb, but more than anything else, the game world is so intensely detailed that I was completely immersed at nearly all times. Level design is also quite good, with the exception of some early parts of Panchaea (the final mission) which I thought had badly-designed lighting. All of it is combined with just enough near-futurism to make the style believable. It’s a game world that I want to live in and experience again.

It helps that Human Revolution is near and dear to me in two ways, just by virtue of what it is. It plays directly to my hyperactive nostalgia gland by being a direct prequel to one of my favorite PC games of all time. Additionally, a good portion of the game is set in Detroit, the city whose shadow I grew up in, and the game world is thus filled with fun and familiar references. (Hey, there’s a sign for Grand River Road! Hey, there’s a reference to Mexicantown!)

This level of immersion continues with the audio side of the presentation, as you’ll be beset by top-notch foley, weapon and even UI sounds, well-done voiceover (for the most part), and one of the most stunning soundtracks that I’ve ever heard in a modern-day videogame. Seriously, composer Michael McCann’s musical score for Deus Ex is so fantastic that it is worth listening to standalone. It has a modern-futurist electronic style with uniquely recognizable themes, and some of the greatest electronic ostinatos since Stu Phillips penned the theme for Knight Rider. And even here my nostalgia is tickled, for McCann reprises some of the most memorable themes from the original Deus Ex, including my absolute favorite classic tune, “UNATCO”. Listen to these samples, one of “UNATCO” from the original Deus Ex, and the other of the reimagined version from Human Revolution, to see how the theme has been skillfully updated.

UNATCO – Deus Ex (2000)

Sarif’s Theme – Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)

I’d also like to specifically single out Human Revolution’s inventory system, because I feel it is the absolute pinnacle for item management on a game console. This game proves that you can have a PC-style, grid-based item management system on a console, and do it in an accessible way that is still fairly easy to manage with a controller. The fact that the game automatically rearranges, rotates and moves items in your inventory to make room for new stuff is the key to making it work without having a mouse handy. Compared to Skyrim’s terrible inventory system — although granted, Skyrim has a lot more items in its world — Deus Ex just plain walks away with the prize.

Jensen finally got fed up with the biased reporting at Picus.

The Gameplay

The game isn’t really a role-playing game, despite its RPG-style inventory system. While you do get to make choices about how to upgrade your character’s augmentations, I found that I always had enough Praxis Points to upgrade everything I wished. Note that this does not translate to everything, period. But if you’re choosing to play as a stealthy character, or going for the Pacifist achievement, you’re not really going to have much use for the Typhoon Explosive System, are you? Likewise, if you like to shoot your way through situations, the stealth augs aren’t as valuable. Just know that if you do all the side missions and buy all the Praxis kits at LIMB clinics, you’ll have all the augmentations you’ll ever need.

As for the augs themselves, many of them are really quite fun to play with. There’s a whole suite of hacking upgrades that I found invaluable; stealth upgrades that allow you to see through walls and monitor how much noise you’re making; leg augmentations that let you fall safely from any height or run silently. My favorite was the CASIE mod, a “social enhancer” that analyzes the personality of the person you’re speaking with and offers hints on how to manipulate them. It can also emit pheromones to help you convince those people to do your bidding, but only succeeds if you can correctly identify their personality type. I particularly liked how certain game characters were aware of it; one woman said to me, “Don’t you dare use that CASIE mod on me, Jensen.” (Oops, too late.) Another guy had been augmented to the point where the CASIE mod simply didn’t work on him, and he said so laughingly when I used it, making me look like a buffoon. I love this kind of stuff.

Speaking of stealth, the gameplay mechanics are another great part about Human Revolution. It is a perfect mix of Metal Gear style stealth, Mass Effect interactive story and modern FPS shooting. The game lets you play as stealthily as you like, which might mean “not at all” if you want to go in guns blazing (though you will get significantly more points for imitating Solid Snake). Stealth, which is often frustrating in more punishing games including the Metal Gear series, felt very accessible while still offering a challenge; it’s “just right”, in the words of Goldilocks. I enjoyed sneaking about so much, I want to go back and earn the “Foxiest of the Hounds” achievement (which you get for completing the game without setting off a single alarm).

Besides just the main game, there’s also a hacking minigame that will come between you and various locked doors and computers scattered throughout the world. Unlike the original Deus Ex, where hacking was simply an intrusion time limit that lengthened as you raised your hacking skill, Human Revolution interposes a full-fledged “virtual filesystem” where you interactively capture, fortify and infiltrate various nodes on the network. Make too many risky moves and the system’s counter-intrusion software begins tracing your path, simultaneously fortifying nodes and slowing your hack attempts. Fail, and you don’t gain access to the system. Fail too many times, and the system locks down and alarms go off, summoning guards to your position. Both nerve-wracking and fun, this is in my opinion the best hacking minigame ever conceived.

"The guy coming up the escalator with an SMG? Nah, I'm sure he's harmless."

The Missing Link

Aside from a couple of minor enhancement packs, there is one major piece of downloadable content for Deus Ex: Human Revolution: an entirely new add-on mission entitled “The Missing Link”. Set between two of the game’s latter chapters, it fills in about three days of missing time during which you previously thought Adam Jensen was asleep in a stasis pod, having stowed away on a cargo ship operated by an enemy organization.

“The Missing Link” details how the sleeping Jensen was actually discovered by enemy guards, revived, tortured — and then allowed to escape by a double agent. At that point you take control and begin to unravel the mission’s own complex conspiracy-espionage plot, which ties into the main game while also serving as its own arc. It’s six chapters long (for reference, the main game has 15 chapters) and will take you a goodly number of hours to finish, which I found extremely satisfying. I played it in the correct chronological sequence before finishing the main game, and found that it really enhanced the main plot — in fact, the story of “The Missing Link” has direct bearing on the ending of the main game. I highly recommend that you pick this up for the full experience.

The Verdict

I’m already playing through Human Revolution a second time, looking to pick up the achievements I missed the first time around. I’m using the hardest difficulty setting, selecting only non-lethal takedowns and weaponry, looking for all the eBooks, and so on. With so many unfinished games in my backlog, it’s nearly inconceivable that I would choose to spend my limited gaming hours replaying a game that I just finished. That simply speaks to how profoundly I was affected by Deus Ex and how much fun I had with it. I didn’t want it to end, so I’m not going to let it.

Oddball Verdict: An Epic Win.

My faithful Logitech MX400 laser mouse recently started acting up, failing to register a left-click every so often. Because this is one of those problems that becomes über annoying über rapidly, I ordered a replacement. I was going to simply get the MX500, essentially the evolution of my current mouse, because I use one at work and like it. But the day I went to order it, Amazon was sold out and reporting 2 to 5 weeks to ship, so I instead decided to take a chance on a wireless mouse: the Microsoft 2.4GHz Wireless BlueTrack Technology Laser Explorer Mouse (model 5AA-00001).

Normally, I distrust wireless peripherals. I had a really terrible experience with a wireless mouse way back in the early days of such technology; it was laggy and imprecise and generally unusable for Photoshoppery. However, the notebook-sized Bluetooth mouse I use with my Vaio F12 works just fine, and the tech has clearly come a long way. Microsoft’s description of their BlueTrack technology on Amazon’s product page sounded intriguing, and the mouse was less than $30, so I decided to go with it.

When the mouse arrived, I unpacked it and set it up. This particular BlueTrack Explorer mouse is actually an older model; unlike its replacement, it comes with a charging base and a rechargeable AA battery. The base itself is not so much a base as a “foot pedal” sort of thing; it’s about as deep as the front third of the mouse, so that it can just reach the conductive contacts on the bottom of the mouse itself. The recharging base is USB, naturally; I plugged it into a powered hub so that the base would be powered whether or not my computer was turned on. Wireless communication on the 2.4 GHz band is facilitated by a small USB dongle, looking not unlike a thumb drive, which I plugged into the back of my PC directly.

The instructions indicate that the battery ought to be charged for about 15 minutes at a minimum the first time you use it; this is supposedly enough to last you through a day until you can do a full recharge, which takes about two and a half hours. So I dutifully put the mouse on its charging base for about 20 minutes or so, then started using it.

The BlueTrack tech does indeed seem to make for highly accurate tracking, and it works well on a surprisingly wide variety of surfaces. Precision is excellent for a wireless mouse and there didn’t seem to be any lag. Some reviewers on Amazon complained that the buttons require a good deal of effort to click, but I had no such difficulties whatsoever. The scroll wheel has no detents and simply spins freely, which in theory I thought I would hate, but in practice I found convenient. Compare this to the Logitech MX500, which, although equipped with a switch that toggles the wheel between detent mode and freewheeling mode, is oversensitive and twitchy in the latter. Despite the mouse’s relatively bulky size, it’s very lightweight and easy to move without overexerting your hand or fingers.

Speaking of that bulky size, though, it really is massive. You need to have fairly big hands to feel comfortable using this thing; mine are apparently not big enough, for I continually felt like I needed to stretch my fingers to get a strong enough grip on the thing to do precision Photoshopping. The recharging base is too small to be stable beneath a mouse this size, and every time I put the mouse on it, I felt like it wasn’t properly seated. Additionally, the pointer movement is wildly sensitive, and I had to dial back the pointer speed a couple of notches in Windows’ control panel. On a related note, the “enhance pointer precision” option seems to have less of an effect than it did on my Logitech MX400. When making precise movements with the MX400, the cursor slows down almost to a crawl. Not so with the BlueTrack — I routinely “overshot” the area I was trying to click on and wobbled back and forth like a drunken sailor a few times before homing in on it. However, I’m sure this is something I could eventually adjust to.

What I could not adjust to, however, was the fact that the mouse would not even last through a single day without running completely out of power. On the first day, I charged it for about three hours — more than enough for a full charge, according to the manual — before taking it off the charging base. I used it for maybe two or three hours total, the rest of the time leaving it on my mouse pad, where it goes to sleep automatically after a minute or two of disuse. By the end of the evening, the mouse’s red LED was pulsating to inform me that I needed to recharge it. Are you kidding?

OK, I figured maybe I should leave it on the charging base overnight. So I did. The next day, after a solid 10 hour charge, I again took the mouse off the base and did some light computing for an hour before I went out for the day, leaving the mouse to fall asleep on my mousepad as usual. I then returned to the computer around 8:00 in the evening and started working on a Wolfenstein level. After about two hours I started noticing that my clicks weren’t registering, and looked down to find the mouse’s red LED again blaring that the battery was dead. What a crock. I had to go get the old MX400 out of the closet where I had mothballed it.

After this incident, I took out the BlueTrack mouse’s battery — a 2100 mAh rechargeable AA supplied in the box by Microsoft — and popped it into my handy La Crosse BC-700 battery charger. I also added two known-good Powerex AA rechargeables that I’ve had for a while, so that all three could charge up over night. Not only would my charger tell me if the Microsoft battery was bad and unable to hold a full charge, but I could also test the mouse using my other batteries to see how it fared.

The following day, I came home from work and checked on the charger. The Microsoft 2100 mAh battery had only been able to take about 400 mAh worth of charge before reporting “full”. OK, so it looks like this battery is hosed. But my Powerex batteries reported good numbers, so I took out both of them and tried one of them in the Microsoft BlueTrack mouse. The mouse powered up — and immediately the red “low battery” LED started pulsating. [!] This is ridiculous. Out came that battery, and in went the other Powerex AA. This time, within two seconds of powering up, the mouse flat-out died without even doing me the courtesy of flashing a red light. Completely non-responsive.

That’s when I went back to Amazon and initiated a return request.

Alas, I apparently wasn’t finished getting fucked on this day, because I discovered that the mouse had been sold and fulfilled by a third-party vendor, not Amazon. This third-party vendor not only wasn’t going to cover the cost of return shipping, they were also going to deduct $8.30 from my refund to make up for the free shipping they gave me when I ordered. Altogether, that means I’ll only get back about one-third of the price I paid for this heap of slag. What a hose job!

As a final insult, I see Amazon has the Logitech MX500 back in stock today and ready to ship via Amazon Prime. Hardly the “2 to 5 weeks” they estimated a week ago.

Let this serve as a warning to Amazon shoppers. My wife actually ordered the Microsoft BlueTrack mouse for me at my recommendation (because she was ordering some other stuff from Amazon that day already). I emailed her a link to the mouse I wanted, and at the time I did, right there in my web browser I saw “ships and sold by Amazon.com” with Prime qualification. But when my wife browsed to the same link, Amazon chose to offer her the product from a third-party vendor instead. This was probably done because the third-party vendor happened to have the absolute lowest available price at that particular second, although the difference was clearly less than one dollar. My wife didn’t notice this, however, and placed the order despite the third-party vendor’s comparably awful return policy. Lesson learned, I guess.

In short, the Microsoft BlueTrack wireless mouse (5AA-00001) is a neat bit of tech, lighter than it looks and nicely equipped, but in the end the battery life was an absolute killer. I actually am returning it as defective, since I refuse to believe that this kind of battery life is indicative of normal operation. On top of that, the mouse had some physical blemishes (light scratches on the bottom consistent with mousing on a hard surface and a sharp edge that kept catching on my mousepad) which lead me to suspect that the unit I received was not even new at all. Another potential caveat of third-party sellers.

To anyone considering this mouse, I suggest you take my experience as non-indicative of typical performance for this model and consider the possibility that I received a lemon. This seems especially likely when you consider the glowing reviews for this thing that you can find floating around the web. However, if you do decide to order one for yourself, make sure you get it from a vendor with a good return policy — such as Amazon themselves.

Oddball Verdict: Fun Fling, But Too High Maintenance. Going Back to Wired.

Supplement: While packing up the mouse last night in preparation to return it to the seller, I discovered some pretty strong evidence that the mouse had been previously opened: the blister pack had tape on it to hold it together. Combined with the scratches on the bottom and the uneven edge, it looks more and more like the vendor sold me a returned or floor-model unit as new, which makes it even more galling that they’re charging me a “free shipping offset” penalty to return it. Bunch of ball-washing bastards.

Most of the pages are filled with talk of whatever computer-related technobabblery I was into at the moment, all of which now dates itself horribly as you might expect. In one entry, I complained that I couldn’t insert both a color and a grayscale photo into my document, because not only would that make the file size balloon to a ridiculous 800 KB (well, in the days of 400 MB hard drives, that was a lot), the photos wouldn’t display properly anyway because Windows 95′s 8-bit color depth would cause palette-swap problems when trying to view both color and grayscale images! God, the shit we had to endure. It’s no wonder we put up with such godawful page designs in the early days of the web; we were all too busy being impressed that there were any images there at all.

By far, the most conflicted period of my life’s history has to be my high school years. Despite being filled with enormous exploration and learning of new technologies (all on my own time, of course), those years were harder on me, emotionally, than any other. I’ve always hated school, mostly because I loathed its awkward social aspects and resented its trumped-up authority structure. But my hatred sank to all-new depths once I got to high school. The administration’s ultra-conservative approach to discipline, combined with their abject inability to communicate anything effectively, meant that despite my Herculean efforts to follow the rules and remain inconspicuous I routinely ran afoul of badly-written or miscommunicated rules. This landed me in all kinds of awkward and embarrassing situations, which to me are like pyschological Kryptonite. I started to feel persecuted and become paranoid that my every step, sentence or breath might be the next one to get me in hot water with someone. It was years before I was able to get past this, and I feel like a part of how I interact with people even today is defined by what I experienced in those years.

But a lot of time has passed between today and the 1990s, and increasingly, when I look back at high school, I am of mixed feelings about it. Or at least, I start to see things from an angle I didn’t have the capacity to perceive back then. I read about some of the agonizing high school situations I was going through in the pages of my old Oddball Updates and I wish to God I had a way to communicate with my past self, because it’s clear from some of the things I wrote that I was in serious, desperate need of lightening the hell up. Even my mom seemed to recognize this; I distinctly remember her suggesting not-so-subtlely that a girlfriend would take my mind off the stress.

Now yes, we were commonly loaded up with assignments that had unreasonable deadlines and placed in high-pressure situations that required a great deal of stress and effort to extricate ourselves from. But that’s life, and I would have taken it in stride if we hadn’t so routinely been deprecated and treated like feckless idiots by so many of our instructors, many of whom were so disorganized that they would never have stood a chance in hell of completing the tasks they set out for us. I have never had an easy time respecting authority just by virtue of its station, preferring instead to have a reason to respect that authority. Most of my high school teachers provided little, and the school as a whole seemed to treat the notion of positive reinforcement as ridiculous, so I largely turned in efforts commensurate with requirement and not enthusiasm. There were even a couple of classes for which I routinely did not bother to even do the most trivial assignments, in some form of misguided silent protest. This only caused me to feel worse later, as wilfully failing on the job was not something I had ever done before, nor did I feel proud of it.

With the wisdom of experience, though, comes the belief that at least some of this hell that I went through was self-inflicted. Although I may not have had any other way to perceive my situation then, I would love to have been able to have to foresight to realize that absolutely nothing that occurred in high school was worth worrying that much about. I would have tried to spend less time worrying about what people thought of me and overanalyzing a teacher’s barely-concealed derision. I would have summoned up the balls to have words — and if that failed, fists — with the handful of asshats who occasionally used me as a butt end for their jokes. And I would have been more vocal, earlier on, about asking for help during those times when I felt I was losing grip of the situation.

If I had a hotline to 1995, I also probably would encourage my former self to ask a girl on a goddamn date, and not to be concerned that it was only gonna last a few months, if that. During my time in high school there were at least three girls who gave me clues that they liked me, but I was too fearful of rejection to pursue them. That, and I had an idealistic definition of a relationship as something you had for life with your soulmate, which disqualified a fling you might have for six months with a girl in high school. I can say for absolute certainty now that if I had had a girl to think about instead of how pissed off I was at school, I would have spent a lot less time agonizing over the school’s stupid bullshit. Thankfully it all worked out in the end; by the time I got clear of my high school “sentence”, I went looking for the woman of my idealistic dreams — and even more thankfully, it wasn’t long before she found me. (I’ve been married to her ever since.)

However, before this turns into a happy little rose-tinted look at how one man has come to terms with the perceived injustices of his former life and learned to move beyond them, let me state that the flipside of the coin — the one where my school contributed a great deal to the issues I had back then — definitely existed as well. I was reminded of this today when I found an old audio recording that I made on May 29th, 1996, in which I recapped with great detail the math class that I had sat through that morning. Truly, it was the perfect example of instructor mindfuckery.

Back then, it was the final week of the school year and whatever chapter of our trig books we were dealing with, it was giving many of my classmates (and myself) a great deal of trouble. However, given the fact that our teacher had previously demonstrated a vast impatience with anyone who didn’t understand everything perfectly the first time, no one was bold enough to ask any questions as she start going over the previous night’s assignment.

After a while of this, the teacher angrily asked if any of us had even done the assignment, since no one was asking anything about it. Not wanting to be thought of as slackers, a few of my classmates worked up the courage to ask about certain problems that they had had difficulty with. Each time a student asked for help with a particular problem, the teacher asked if there was anyone in the class who could go do the problem on the board. Usually everyone was too shy to respond to this, so when that happened, the teacher would just pick someone and draft them into doing the problem on the board against their will. Well, on the morning of May 29th, no one volunteered for any of the problems, and as it happened, everyone who was drafted was unable to complete the problem either. It seemed that the class was having a lot more trouble with the concepts from the chapter than you might think — almost no one had successfully solved those problems.

When the teacher saw that the students she’d drafted were either not solving or only partially solving the problems on the board, she became irate, threatening that “You people better start doing this stuff!” and demanding “Did you guys not do the homework, or what?” I was sitting there quietly stewing, wondering why she never seemed to look at the possibility of students not understanding stuff. If any problems weren’t done, it had to be because we were lazy slackers who blew them off. Y’know, it’s tough to ask questions when you’re so lost that you don’t know where to begin — and it’s especially tough when the teacher is sitting there constantly griping and belittling the class as a whole for every perceived mistake. Not only that, but whenever you’d ask the teacher for help with a problem, she’d always go make you do the problem on the board, on your own, before explaining word one to you. Which meant that anytime you asked for help, you’d automatically get to be made a fool of before any teaching would begin. It’s little wonder that few students rushed into that opportunity.

So by now there was a handful of students up at the head of the class with problems on the board that they didn’t know how to solve. One of them, a girl named Alicia, is trying to muddle through hers after everyone else has either finished or given up and gone back to their seat. After a few moments of puzzling over it, she concludes that she still doesn’t know where to begin, and begins to return to her desk without having completed the problem. The teacher barks at her, “What, did you not do this or something?” Freaking out, and desperately seeking an act that will avoid landing her in the firepits of hell, Alicia scrambles to find a friend who has managed to get further with the problem than she has. The teacher wants the problem done, so Alicia’s friend lets her borrow her paper so Alicia can complete the problem on the board.

Again, the teacher flies in to a rage. “Oh, so now you’re gonna copy it!” she blares. Confounded by this continued beratement, Alicia attempts to defend herself, the way a cornered puppy would after you’ve given it a treat and then beaten it for having the gall to eat it. Likewise, the teacher continues bitching at her, all while standing right next to my desk. By this point I was so fed up that after the instructor’s latest gripe, I muttered under my breath — but deliberately audibly — “Man, one more remark like that and I just wouldn’t do it at all!” Perhaps luckily for me (especially because I hadn’t figured out half of the problems either), my remark was either unheard or ignored. I just cannot conceive of a situation where this method of “teaching” is recognized by anyone as acceptable, let alone effective. It’s no wonder I did so horribly in math during high school, despite consistently performing at least to a competent if not spectacular level in the years prior.

The rest of that day’s review of our previous trig assignment continued in a similarly stress-inducing fashion. The real kicker came at the end of the class, when the teacher informed us that not only were we going to have a test on this stuff the very next day, but the final exam in the following week would include problems covered by the next section of our books, which we weren’t going to have time to cover in class! “You guys will have to figure it out for yourselves, because it is on the final,” she said dismissively, as if it wasn’t her problem. A pretty amusing and hopelessly idealistic thought, given how much it had just been demonstrated that many of us were struggling with the material we already had. What a talentless hack.

I can think of numerous other teachers I had in high school who were similarly disorganized, similarly disinterested in doing their job and similarly eager to treat us all with the same level of contempt that you’d reserve for something you just scraped off your shoe. Most of them were from the math department, though there were examples nearly everywhere, including the religious studies department (it was a Catholic school) and the English department. On the flipside, I also had some teachers who were so on-the-mark with everything, that by the final week of class we had not only completed the lesson plan, but also were handed back all of our old tests to review and ask questions of and even had a couple of light activities on the final day before exams. Ironically, some of these exceptional teachers were also the most strict in their expectations, but managed to elicit the best responses from us — not because we feared retribution otherwise (though there was that!) but because we respected them and felt we owed it to them to do our best. Those were the classes in which I got the highest of my grades.

After this past week’s worth of excavating archaeological finds from the ’90s, I’ve concluded that not only was there indeed a whole lot wrong with the high school I attended, there was also a whole lot wrong with my response to it. It was a shitty time and a shitty place, and even the rose-colored lenses of history can’t eradicate that fact, but I wish I’d had the wisdom to approach the most dismal of its people and situations with a different frame of mind. Taken a few more chances here, a few less there, and most importantly, just let the little stuff go. But I suppose that’s easy to say when you’re an adult who no longer has to worry about people trying to sabotage you because of what you look like, what you wear, or what you say.

All I know is, I’m happy to have a family, a job that I enjoy doing, and a place of my own to call home. I wouldn’t trade a single minute of it for another second in high school, but at least now I can look back on those years with a sort of detached bemusement, rather than the smoldering contempt I once felt. And if nothing else, I hope those experiences will make me a wiser font of advice when my son eventually gets to high school himself. If he’s lucky, he won’t need to draw on them — but if he does, I hope I can steer him down a clearer path than the one I charted for myself.

I hit the reset button and tried it again two or three more times, in case it was a fluke. Still couldn’t logon. I even used System Restore to go back to the previous restore point, which was yesterday evening, when I knew the machine was running normally. Nope…still couldn’t logon.

Naturally, I’d arranged to work from home tomorrow, and now it was looking like I wasn’t going to have a PC to actually work on. So I did what any reasonable man would do in the year 2012: I got on my smartphone and started looking for clues. While that was underway, I tried booting to Windows 7′s Safe Mode. Interestingly, that worked. From there, I checked the System event log and found a whole lot of messages about services timing out or not starting in a timely fashion, like this:

A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Print Spooler service to connect.

This was really just symptomatic of the problem, not indicative of its cause.

Fortunately, after relatively little searching, I found Microsoft Knowledge Base article 2578159. It describes a hotfix meant to resolve issues with the logon process, in which a “race condition” between the Windows Event Log service and the Event Tracing for Windows functions causes a deadlock situation. Now, quite honestly I have no idea what that means or why it would suddenly decide to happen after a year of trouble-free OS operation. But it sure described my problem to a T, so I decided to give it a try.

Here’s where the sheer number of hoops that I needed to jump through just to install a hotfix became comical. First off, Microsoft wouldn’t let me just download the hotfix. They made me give them my email address so they could email me a link to it. OK, fine. So after I’d downloaded the hotfix (still running in Safe Mode, remember) I tried to install it, but the installer service reported that I could not do so from Safe Mode. Great, so how am I supposed to install it if I can’t login normally?

Further searching of the web revealed that I could use msconfig.exe to selectively disable all non-Microsoft startup items, which would allow me to login normally (read: not in Safe Mode). After firing up msconfig, at first I tried to be greedy and just choose the “Diagnostic startup” option. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, because that prevents the Windows Installer service from loading, thus the hotfix still could not be installed. Grudgingly, I went back to msconfig, picked “Selective startup”, and then literally unchecked all of the Services and Startup items that did not say “Microsoft Corp.” listed as their manufacturer. Finally, after doing that and rebooting, I was able to not only logon normally, but also install hotfix 2578159.

Since installing the hotfix, I have had no further issues with logging on. It does indeed seem to have solved my problem.

Just thought I would put that out there, with an added smattering of real-world experience, in case anyone else runs into this.

Today I’d like to announce the launch of Singuloddity, a new companion to the Oddball Update that I’m referring to as a “microlog”. It’s a place for me to post spur-of-the-moment topics based on things that are happening right now. Whether that’s a tidbit of news I just ran across, a photo I just took, an interesting place or situation that I find myself in.

Given Oddball Update’s recently reinvented image as “Your Place For Reviews!” and the fact that Twitter is just far too textually limiting for my usual brand of blather, this seemed like a move worth making.

I plan to cross-post links to new articles here on Oddball Prime over at Singuloddity, and my Twitter feed is on there as well, so you could theoretically follow only Singuloddity to keep tabs on everything I’m spouting off about.

I freely admit: it’s an experiment. One that may end ceremoniously in a matter of weeks or days. And oh yes, there’s precedent. But in case it does work out and Singuloddity sticks around for the long term, feel free to subscribe to the feed and see how long you can take it.

My opinions are all subjective, of course. That’s why I said “my history books”. I’m a sucker for sci-fi. For stories that tease us with the origins of the cosmos, have us unravel a mystery of such enormous age and scale as to be nearly inconceivable. Mass Effect did all that, right up until the very end. And then it…ended. I’m still trying to decide how I feel about that ending. That’s why I’m writing this, because maybe I’ll figure it out by the time I’m finished.

In case you hadn’t heard, the Internet went absolutely apeshit over Mass Effect 3′s ending. I believe that it contributed almost single-handedly to the fact that Electronic Arts was chosen as the Consumerist’s Worst Company in America for 2012, which is nigh unbelievable and certainly ridiculous in the grand scheme (I mean, worse than both Bank of America and Walmart? Really?). When the gamer rage over the ME3 ending broke out, I largely refused to wade into that shitstorm. Mostly because nothing good ever comes of such an act, but also because I hadn’t yet finished the game myself and didn’t want to comment on something about which I had no experience.

Well, now I have experience. And I will say this, if BioWare wanted us to really feel something about the way the story ended and take it very personally, they succeeded at least where this author is concerned.

Following are some serious spoilers, so take appropriate action.

First, a mini-review of Mass Effect 3 itself — the 36 hours that I played leading up to the final battle. There’s no need for me to go into much detail here; the game was simply a masterwork. Although the main plot was perhaps less compelling (due to its more straightforward nature) than that of Mass Effect 2, the game was played out in such an epic scale that I felt like I was living through the most wonderful, engaging and emotionally rewarding sci-fi film of all time. All of those choices I’d made since the very beginning in 2007, all of those characters I’d met…they were all touched on in some way, affecting my missions and relationships, my successes and failures. People I’d saved years ago showed up to take a heroic stand when it counted. Groundwork I’d laid in prior installments reached a payoff as I brokered peace between the quarians and geth, who had been at war for centuries. Pride rose within me as I saved Wrex and his entire race from death by curing the genophage, losing a former teammate and friend during a bittersweet moment along the way. It was all so incredibly grand, and I’m sure I’ll never forget the experiences I’ve had during this game.

The mechanics of the game itself — the gunplay, the cover-based shooting, the environments and the missions — were all, again, top-notch. Seeing (and hearing) so much of the once-enigmatic Admiral Hackett, voiced by my personal favorite Lance “Bishop” Henriksen, was great fun. Scouring every system in the galaxy, finding all those war assets and racking up all those points put me on the edge of my seat as I watched the numbers pour in, realizing that we actually had a shot at beating the death-bringing reapers once and for all. The only question was how it would play out. I enjoyed every last second of the road I traveled on the way to finding out.

And then I found out.

It all came to a head on Earth, during the final battle as my squad and I made a desperate run for the conduit that would take us to the Citadel. Before we could reach the conduit, Harbinger’s lethal beam struck. My screen turned white, and I thought I was dead. Did I not react fast enough? Did I fail to dodge out of the way? As it turns out, this outcome was intentional and inevitable.

I then watched in horror as the Commander Shepard I’d created from scratch arose weakly from the ashes, alive but only just, his armor slagged, unpowered and half-melted to his battered body, realizing that his days as a combat vehicle were finished. But I still had to get to the Citadel, had to activate the Crucible and destroy the damnable reapers. How was I going to do it like this? And where were Liara and my good friend Garrus? I had hand-picked them for this mission to fight alongside me, representative of two of the galaxy’s other prominent races, in this melting-pot of sacrifice and resistance that hoped desperately to save each other’s burning worlds. Were they…dead?

Shepard staggered toward the conduit, armed only with a pistol. Nearby was an Alliance soldier, wounded but conscious; I made my way toward him, time dilating around me as I shuffled with agonizing slowness. Some cannibals attempted to rush me; with a wavering arm I put two bullets in each of them and watched them fall. By the time I returned my gaze to that Alliance soldier, he was dead. I soldiered on.

I made it to the conduit, which rushed me like a miniature mass relay to the Citadel orbiting overhead. My jaw fell open and probably didn’t close for another five minutes as I found myself in a dimly-lit, choking corridor filled with half-slagged human bodies, bodies piled everywhere like a landfill of corpses. Admiral Anderson was talking to me on my headset, apparently having made it to the conduit just before I did. Through the horrible and macabre corridors I stalked, losing blood and barely keeping conscious until I found the control room. And Anderson. And the Illusive Man.

The Illusive Man was, by now, half-reaper. Indoctrinated by that evil force, just as I had long suspected, he used his newfound powers to force Anderson away from the console that would have activated and fired the Crucible. In the tense conversation that followed, I used all of my reputation points to try and talk the Illusive Man down. He shot Anderson in the gut, but failed to deal the killing blow, thanks to my own power of verbal persuasion. In the end, as my words bestowed enough clarity of thought upon the Illusive Man for him to realize he was being controlled by the reapers, he found it in himself to put the next bullet through his own head. The avatar of Cerberus was dead at last.

I engaged the Crucible’s firing mechanism and slumped down on the floor next to Anderson, watching the destruction unfold around us as the reapers fought the galaxy’s combined fleet in orbit around the burning Earth. Anderson confessed that he was proud of me, then died quietly of his wounds. I thought that this might truly be it, that I was going to die up here with him after pushing the final button that granted the galaxy its salvation.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. The Crucible wasn’t firing. Hackett was screaming at me on the comm to do something. I tried to make it to the control panel but passed out. And then…

…I woke up in a new location at the top of the Citadel tower, and there before me was what I can only refer to as the star-child. A highly-evolved being of light which took the form of a young boy, he explained to me that the reapers were his own creation some hundreds of thousands of years ago, a creation meant to prevent galactic chaos. His assertion was that synthetic life — artificial intelligence, androids, creations like the geth — would always and inevitably rebel against and destroy the organics who created them. In order to prevent all organic life in the galaxy from being permanently extinguished, he created the reapers — themselves synthetic life forms — to wipe the galaxy clean of advanced civilizations once every 50,000 years, while leaving intact those lesser races that had not yet evolved. The lesser races would, over the next several millennia, take the place of those advanced races that had been exterminated. They would invariably create synthetic life of greater and greater complexity, until the cycle of cleansing would repeat all over again. The reapers’ sole purpose seemed to be as a controller and manager of entropy.

But this solution would no longer work, the star-child reasoned, for I had finally found my way to his secret lair, proving that the organics had gotten hip to his little scheme and would find a way to pass that knowledge on to the cycles to come. He placed in my hands the ability to choose a new solution, a new way to prevent the inevitable extinction of all organic life at the hands of the synthetics that we would create. There were three options:

• Destroy the reapers as I had planned to do from the beginning. This would destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy, even the geth (who had recently begun to work together with their creators, the quarians) and EDI, the self-aware AI from my ship who had become quite attached to its human pilot. Organic life would be allowed to live on, but the star-child assured me that without the reapers to cull the flock every 50,000 years, we would eventually all be destroyed at the hands of our own synthetic creations.
• Control the reapers, as the Illusive Man had wanted to do. This choice would place me, Commander Shepard, in the role currently held by the star-child. The reapers would obey my commands. I could simply tell them to get the hell out of our galaxy. But control of such vast and powerful beings is a tenuous thing, and I saw how lust for it had corrupted the Illusive Man. Was it too dangerous a path to take?
• Synthesize a new form of life by irrevocably combining all organics and synthetics. Humans, turians, asari, quarians, salarians…we would become part synthetic, and synthetics like the geth would become part biological. We would have free will. The cycle of destruction would end, for it would no longer be necessary. Organic and synthetic beings would all become one and the same.

I agonized over the choice. The game’s climactic music thudded in my ears, Shepard’s lifeblood leaked slowly onto the Citadel’s cold metal decking and I racked my brain trying to decide which solution to choose. It all came down to this. The entire galaxy would be upended by whatever I decided to do next.

Glowering at the TV screen, I felt like the Synthesis ending was being dangled over my head like a carrot. Presented as a kind of “best of both worlds” choice. A choice in which everything would change, in which all life would become homogenized and inextricably blended. And it all stemmed from the star-child’s premise that organic and synthetic life could not possibly coexist. The latter would eventually destroy the former.

This seriously rubbed me the wrong way. Had I not just proven that this premise was flawed? I had convinced the quarians and the geth to end their centuries-old war and work together. Hell, the geth were helping the quarians rebuild their homeworld. Furthermore, my ship’s AI, EDI, had “evolved” into a self-actualized synthetic life form with free will — she was even pursuing a romantic relationship with the ship’s freaking pilot! How did this prove that organics were doomed to extinction at the hands of synthetic life?

On the flipside, I had to consider that these two examples — EDI and the geth — were only coexisting with their creators because of the influence of reaper technology, a technology that is at its core a combination of organic and synthetic life. Both EDI and the geth became self-actualized only when reaper technology was allowed to either infiltrate or gain control of their higher processes. Did this mean that they were now representative of the new form of life that would be created if I chose the “Synthesis” option? It seemed as though this was the diplomatic solution, the perfect compromise, the choice that would have made a man like Jean-Luc Picard proud. The choice where nothing will ever be the same, but where everybody apparently wins.

Unfortunately for the reapers, I have always been more of a James T. Kirk.

My Shepard is a soldier, both by description and by class. He’s a master-at-arms. He has access to four different ammo powers. For God’s sake, he took his gunnery chief and fellow Spectre to bed. This is not a man who compromises with the opposition. He’s a man who destroys it.

I used my last bit of strength to charge at the Crucible’s power conduits and fill them with mass-accelerated lead until the enormous super-weapon fired a burst of pure, concentrated annihilation. I had spent the last five years and three games fighting. Fighting this enemy, staving off what everyone had told me was the inevitable. Watching as the reapers torched my world and the worlds of my friends, burned and slagged and melted and assimilated millions upon millions of innocent lives. I wasn’t going to reason with this shit. I wasn’t going to mind-meld with it. And I damn sure wasn’t going to merge with it. I was going to fucking kill it.

The reaper capital ships all vanished in a flash when the Crucible unloaded, falling to ruin all across the galaxy as the fiery red shock wave spread everywhere. The star-child, too, vaporized in the ensuing destruction. Earth itself was completely unharmed by the blast, the Alliance soldiers on the ground raising their assault rifles in shouts of victory as the reaper destroyers fell lifelessly to its surface. The mass relays that connected every corner of the galaxy self-destructed, sealing away each star system in its own isolated pocket of the universe once more — and stranding the entire combined fleet of the galaxy’s surviving races in orbit around Earth! Holy shit, what?

And now here’s my ship, the Normandy, in slipspace…trying to outrun the shock wave from an exploding mass relay? Huh? Where is my ship going and why is its crew running away? Aren’t they going to try to save me from the self-destructing Citadel? Aren’t Garrus and I going to have that drink on the beach and make a killing off the royalties from the vids? The shock wave catches up with the ship, and…

We see the Normandy’s crash site on a deserted garden planet, one very much like Earth some hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The hatch opens, and out steps Joker, shielding his eyes from the sun…he’s followed by Ashley, my fricking girlfriend, who I guess left me to burn back there in Earth orbit? How fucking kind! And she’s followed by Javik, the prothean who’s the star of the From Ashes DLC mission that I found so compelling. It’s appropriate, somehow, the lone survivor of the previous reaper cycle some 50,000 years ago, ending up as one of the lone survivors of the next.

There’s a slow pan across the wreckage of the Citadel to the body of who we are to assume is the fallen Commander Shepard. A close-up on his slagged armor and N7 dog tags. It looks as though he’s dead. The unkillable Commander Shepard, KIA at last.

And then he inhales sharply, suddenly.

Credits.

Okay, I need a moment here.

Actually, let me take an additional moment and tell you how much I love the end credits music. It’s by the Canadian electronic rock band Faunts, who also wrote the incredibly awesome end credits theme from the first Mass Effect (which was titled “M4 Part 2″). Whatever you thought of the game’s ending, the music that played over the credits makes it all worth it in my estimation.

And then the game followed it up with the character creation music, which is my other favorite track in Mass Effect 3. Brilliant.

There is an after-credits scene that needs to be mentioned. In it, a beautiful snowy landscape of some decidedly non-Earth planet is shown. In the distance two silhouetted figures walk through an ice-covered field, one of them an old man, the other a young boy (judging by their voices). “Did that all really happen?” the boy asks. “Yes, but some of the details have been lost in time,” says the old man. “It all happened so very long ago.”

“Tell me another story about the Shepard,” the boy requests.

The game ends.

Well.

Some have postulated that the ending scene is actually an elderly Commander Shepard telling stories to his grandson. I don’t buy it. Everything about the way it’s written suggests that it truly does take place a very long time after the events of the Mass Effect series proper. Whatever race and culture the old man and the boy belong to, they have romanticized the legend of Commander Shepard to the degree where they now refer to him as the Shepard. It’s kind of awe-inspiring, at least to me. The events of the games themselves take place so far in this fictional future, and now suddenly this scene catapults us far, far further than even that — making the game’s future a distant past in the blink of an eye. It’s like narrative vertigo. But I like it, honestly.

In the end, there are some things I wish I knew more about. What happened to the fleet after they were stranded in the Sol system? (And how did the quarians and turians survive, since all human food is toxic to their metabolisms?) What happened to Garrus and Liara, my trusted squadmates? What happened to the crew of the Normandy, and why the hell were they headed out-system when the mass relays self-destructed? What happened to Commander Shepard? Why was there that teaser scene at the end where he takes a breath, proving that he survived, and why was that scene so important that it is only shown if you complete the game with over 5000 points in war assets?

Apparently BioWare is gearing up to provide some answers, potentially to some of those questions, with the new “Extended Cut” DLC that they’ll be releasing for free this summer. They’re producing this in response to the huge Internet shitstorm that I mentioned at the beginning of this article, because apparently a lot of people are very, very pissed about the ending. They complain that all the choices they made while playing all three Mass Effect games basically had no effect on the ending beside the color of the explosions, who stepped out of the crashed Normandy, and a few other minor details. And there was almost no explanation for many of the points I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

While I would like some additional closure and am interested to see what the “Extended Cut” DLC adds in that regard, I have to admit that I was profoundly affected by the ending as it exists because my mind filled in the blanks. Or at least, it immediately ran wild filling in every possible blank that it could get its hand on, extrapolating the aftermath of Commander Shepard’s story down so many paths that it was like I was writing a whole new follow-up trilogy in my mind’s eye. It’s staggering, all the potential ramifications of the choice I made. The fact that BioWare didn’t show us a single damn one of them doesn’t mean I don’t have the capacity to imagine what they could be. Perhaps that was their intention? We may never know.

I’m perhaps more disturbed by the rumblings I’ve heard, which claim the original writer of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 did not intend for this kind of ending and had in fact planted seeds in the first two games that were supposed to lead to an ending that involved dark matter and the decay of the galaxy. Here’s where I start to get a little skeeved, because now I feel like the author’s original intent for the story may have been ignored or outright tossed. Because there was potentially a much deeper and engaging ending in the works — or at least in the writer’s mind — at some point, makes me disappointed that we may be missing out on what could have been.

However, the ending as it stands does nothing to detract from the incredible experience that the Mass Effect trilogy has been. I’ve enjoyed it so much, I fear that it’s going to be one of those trilogies that I have trouble playing more than once, only because I’ll remember how it ended and I don’t want it to end again. It’s like how I don’t enjoy watching the final episode of my favorite TV shows, knowing that this was the end and there was never any more to the story afterwards. Mass Effect has been an absolute masterpiece, and I’m sad to see the legendary Commander Shepard’s story come to an end. Especially because he was my Shepard, with an appearance and backstory of my own design, who made choices based on what I would have chosen for myself.

For now, I’m going to put the game away and revisit it this summer when the “Extended Cut” DLC arrives. Until then, I’ll continue to churn over that ending in my mind, wondering if I made the right choice, wondering how it all worked out for the survivors, wondering what became of my friends and comrades.

And I’ll continue to be in awe of just how damn terrific Mass Effect has been.

Just this morning I was doing some serious nostalgic stargazing back at the ’90s. Understand, when I actually was in the ’90s, I never thought I would do this. I can’t think of any time in my life, before or since, when I have been so angry at life, felt so marginalized by society, and was generally disgusted with everything around me save a small subset of people and things. But the ’90s were also when I started to keep records — journals, audio recordings, actual creative things that I had produced — and when I look (or listen) back at those things now, the rose-colored glasses go into full effect and I wonder if it was really all so bad after all.

It was, of course. At least, to my teenage self’s mind, there was absolutely no greater hell on Earth than high school. Of the admittedly cushy life I’ve led, my high school years remain my least favorite. And yet incongruously, those years were also when I met some of my best friends, played some of the most memorable video games and explored my most diverse spectrum of hobbies. I dove into game programming and level design, I got heavily into anime (went to conventions and everything!), met people in chat rooms, engaged in video game tournaments and wrote stories like they were going out of style. With the exception of writing — and even that has been scaled back greatly — I don’t do any of those things anymore.

Granted, I’ve got new things to focus on now. The obligations of life that naturally come with adulthood — work, paying the bills, keeping up the homestead, fixing the car, that sort of stuff — naturally represent a significant portion of my time. With a newborn son at home, there’s also a whole new universe of shared hobbies and experiences that I’m eagerly awaiting the chance to introduce to him. Beyond that, I’m mostly too engaged in playing today’s incredibly huge selection of video games to worry about modifying them. And since I turned to console gaming a few years back, modifying today’s games is mostly impossible anyhow.

But it’s fun to look back at what I was doing in the ’90s, both as a source of amusement and a motivator for myself today. I was into so many things back then, what would be the harm in rediscovering some of that old hallowed ground now? Or even exploring new territory altogether? Even as recently as 2004, creating levels for the 1992 PC game Wolfenstein 3-D was as much therapeutic as it was anything else. It might be fun to get back to that from time to time. Or do some more serious story writing. Or blogging; at least then I’d be writing something. I’ve also recently toyed with the idea of going back to Tumblr and trying to find some sustainable use for it, because I still crave the concept of a microblogging platform with a complexity somewhere between Twitter and Oddball Update.

This morning I was listening to some audio recordings I made exactly 17 years ago, during this week of April in 1995. It was one of those heady times from my high school years when I had a week off for Easter, my parents had gone on vacation out of state, and I was spending nights at my grandmother’s house and days at home alone, whooping it up with computer games and Star Trek marathons and whatever the hell else. My parents’ acquaintances were always shocked to learn that they would frequently go off on trips and leave me at home by myself for hours, even days at a time. “Isn’t he going to tear up the house? Wreck the car? Do something illegal?” they all asked. In truth, about the most trouble I’d get into when I had the homestead to myself was eating too many Awrey’s cake doughnuts. I was too busy with my 486 DX2/66 to get into mischief of the traditional teenage variety.

I sound like an total dork on those recordings from 1995, a kid who thought he was way cooler than he actually was. But there’s an unchecked enthusiasm there that’s so genuine, unmarred by the outward reservation I usually apply toward anything I enjoy today, lest someone think me foolish. In retrospect, I envy it. And I think Steve Jobs was right when he encouraged those Stanford graduates to “stay hungry, stay foolish.” If you don’t, you risk tamping yourself down so far that you can no longer recognize a great idea — and you certainly can’t create greatness if you’re afraid to admit what you think it is.

So maybe it isn’t a bad thing to look back at the past for ideas about how to enrich life in the present. Perhaps a good start would be to rediscover some of the creative pursuits I used to undertake more often in those days. Game design? Creative writing? Journaling? Whatever; it’s got to be more fulfilling than sitting around consuming the fruits of someone else’s labor.

Just let me get through Mass Effect 3 first.

And as for that Twitter trending topic? Here are some actual #thingsisaidinthe90s:

• I really need a modem with a 16550 UART.
• Why won’t the Wolfenstein 3-D source code compile? Friggin’ Turbo C isn’t cutting it!
• This $15 I’ve got left in my wallet should be just enough to fill my car up with gas. I’ll get some after school on my way to pick up lunch at Bullet Bell. 12:50 schedule days rock!
• Rise of the Triad shareware is 5 MEGS? I’d better start downloading it this morning before I go to school if I have any hope of playing it tonight!
• I’m on the Internet, fragsters! Email me at blaze at oeonline com! (I thought that eventually people would stop pronouncing the “dot” in “.com” when giving out their email addresses and URLs, as if it would be assumed. It was a stupid thought.)
• Have you played Doom yet? I’ll bring it in on a floppy disk if you want to try it.
• Hmm, I’d like to play The Legacy tonight. Better find that boot disk so I can free up 628K conventional.
• Hey Damon, what’s up. Is my Trans Am in yet?
• I’d like to go on the Internet now, but I can’t because Mom’s on the phone…
• There’s no way I’ll ever fill up this 1 GB hard drive!
• Is The Next Generation a rerun this week?
• I will move heaven and earth to be with this girl I just met. She says she’s from Thailand…

I recently added a second Xbox 360 to my home console array, marking the first time that I’ve had two Xboxes up and running simultaneously. I was really interested in getting one of the new slim-style Xboxes, and rather than trade in my old “fat” console, I decided to move it downstairs to the living room. Now I have the ability to play both in the game room upstairs, where I can get a real cinematic experience (but am fairly isolated from everybody and everything), or downstairs in the living room where I am more accessible. Since I also added a second set of wireless headphones, I can play in silence in either place, which is useful when the baby is sleeping.

Using the same Xbox account (or “gamertag”) with multiple consoles used to be a serious mess. Formerly, the best way to maximize convienence was to move your gamer profile to a USB thumb drive or Xbox memory unit. And if you wanted to play the same games on multiple consoles, picking up where you left off each time, you needed to keep your savegames on that thumb drive too. This was made somewhat easier when Microsoft allowed us to use basically any 16 GB or smaller USB stick as a memory unit a couple years back, instead of only their proprietary memory units which topped out at 1 GB.

However, this method was not without its inconveniences. You still had to remember to carry your USB stick with you, or be forced to go retrieve it from one Xbox when you wanted to play on the other. You also (if you’re paranoid like me) had to worry about breaking, losing or otherwise encountering corruption with your USB stick, which could cause you to lose your profile — and worse, all of your savegames. In reality, an Xbox hard drive is probably just as likely to fail (if not more so, given its moving parts), but something about a small USB stick that could fall out of your pocket or get stepped on made the prospect of keeping your game data on it seem more dangerous.

You had one option other if you didn’t want to keep your gamer profile on a USB stick. You could store it on your “main” Xbox’s hard drive as usual, and then on any other console you’d use the “Recover Gamertag” option to pull down your profile from Xbox Live. The problem was that this took forever and a day to accomplish, sometimes didn’t work correctly, and at the end of the day, you’d still be without your savegames on the second console. Add in the “rights management” issues that you often encountered, and you’d quickly see that this wasn’t much of an alternative.

With the latest Xbox dashboard update, however, Microsoft has made this process much, much easier.

Now, the “Recover Gamertag” option has been replaced with a new process called “Download Profile” which downloads your entire gamer profile from the cloud in just moments, and stores a local copy of it on the console. When I set up my new Xbox, I used the newly-revised Hard Disk Transfer Cable to move everything from my old unit’s 250GB hard drive to the new one’s 320GB hard drive. Then, after moving the old console downstairs, I used the new Profile Download feature to pull down my gamer profile from the cloud. In seconds, I could sign in to Xbox Live on my old console again without ever messing with a USB stick. And as long as I stayed signed in, I had access to all the protected and purchased content that’s associated with my account. (For security, you will need to enter the password associated with your gamertag’s Microsoft Passport account when you sign in. You can optionally choose to have the console remember it so you don’t have to enter it again.)

Add to this the “Cloud Saves” feature that Microsoft also just introduced, and which is currently exclusive to Xbox Live Gold subscribers. Essentially, this is a 512 MB “memory unit in the cloud” that the Xbox sees as just another storage device. When you start up a game and it asks you for a storage device, just pick “Cloud Saves” and you’re done. You can also copy and/or move your existing savegames to the Cloud Saves area just like you would a USB stick. Then, from any other Xbox console, as long as you’re signed into Xbox Live with the same gamertag, you can access the Cloud Saves “drive” and pick up any game where you left off. This means that I can continue playing a game from the same point seamlessly on either the upstairs or downstairs console without ever having to remember to keep a USB stick handy.

As a result of all this, gaming on multiple Xboxes is just about perfect now. But one remaining weak leak in this whole process is the need to have a retail game disc in the DVD drive in order to play it. Obviously, there is no such limitation for downloadable arcade games like Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light or Alan Wake’s American Nightmare — just sit down at any Xbox, on a whim, and pick up where you left off. But if you were playing a disc-based game like Binary Domain on one console, then later find yourself at another console wanting to play it some more, you have to go get the physical DVD and put it in the drive — even if you have installed the game to both hard disks. This is merely a copy protection holdover from the PC days that I wish was no longer necessary, but what can you do. (Well, that question does have an answer, but it’s not an officially sanctioned one, so I won’t go there.)

There is also one other problem with Cloud Saves. Certain paranoid games, the Mass Effect and Forza Motorsport series among them, don’t let you copy your savegames to the Cloud Saves area (or to anywhere else). They only let you move them there. Although this does not seem to be a problem at first — you can move your games to the cloud, but the Xbox seems to keep a locally synced copy anyway — this may come back to bite you in the ass later in strange and devious ways that are hard to predict.

For example, if you moved your Mass Effect 2 savegames to the cloud, and then tried to import them into Mass Effect 3 to continue the story, the game would not allow the import to succeed. You’d have to move the saves back to the storage device that they originated from in order to do a successful import. In effect, the apparently unreliable combination of Mass Effect and cloud saving has conspired to make me leave my Mass Effect 3 saves on my upstairs console and only play the game up there. There’s really no reason for this that I can see, and it’s aggravating, but fortunately most games seem not to suffer from this.

Other than those minor issues, I’ve been greatly enjoying the new functionality that Microsoft has implemented to make multi-Xbox gaming easier and more seamless than before. It really was the perfect time to pick up a second console — not just because of the revised hardware, but the revised operating system too.

Speaking of that second console, a word about the Gears of War 3 Limited Edition Xbox 360 S that I bought in February: it’s easily the best Xbox that I’ve owned yet. Even though it took some dealing with Microsoft’s warranty department to reach this conclusion (more on that later), I wound up being perfectly satisfied with the purchase. The console itself is a deep blood red (not a fire engine red like some of the product photos would have you believe) with a glossy finish, featuring the instantly-recognizable Crimson Omen logo of the Gears of War series. It features a pair of matching controllers, each with their own “satin-gloss” finish, and a 320GB internal hard drive, currently the largest offered on an Xbox.

Compared to my old Final Fantasy XIII Limited Edition Xbox, which was of the classic white design, the Gears of War Xbox is instantly recognizable for its design (whereas the FFXIII console needed a faceplate to even set itself apart from a run-of-the-mill Xbox). On top of that, the new slim design is definitely a step forward in aesthetics, size, cooling, and ambient noise. Rather than a pair of small cooling fans, the new Xbox 360 S features a single large fan that exhausts heat out the top (or the side, if you’ve chosen to stand the console up on its end). Since everyone knows that larger fans can move more air with a lower frequency of noise, the result is a nearly dead-silent console.

The DVD drive in the new Slim (I think it’s made by Lite-On) is a lot quieter than the old ones, too, even the evolved drives that made it into the last of the “fat” Xboxes. I still install everything to the HDD to keep the optical drive from spinning at all — why not, with 320GB at my disposal? — but there is definitely an improvement there.

The one area where the new design of the Xbox 360 S does not stack up to the original is in, of all things, the power supply — otherwise known as the “power brick” that sits midway between the electrical outlet and the Xbox itself. Earlier this month I briefly outlined the debacle that I went through with this thing. Believe it or not, although Microsoft has quieted down the new Xbox to levels approaching silence, it’s the power supply that now makes noise. Where I never heard a peep from any of the original power bricks attached to my old Xboxes, the newly-redesigned power supply for the Xbox 360 S has an audible internal fan to keep it cool.

This is and of itself is a step backwards, in my opinion, and I would have rather kept the comically large power supply design of the old Xbox if it would have meant a larger, quieter fan (or no need for a fan at all). Not only did my new Xbox come with one of these audible power bricks, mine was also defective: its fan resonated with a kind of aggravating hum that reflected off the wall of my game room and bounced right back to my ears. Worse, the fan ramped up to full-speed within moments of turning the Xbox on, even if it just sat at the dashboard. This too seemed to be against its normal operating parameters, which were to have the fan run at low RPMs until you start a game and begin drawing more power (thus generating more heat).

I won’t recap the entire warranty return process that I went through (see my earlier post if that interests you). Although it was a pain in the ass to have to do this on a brand new console, I wound up pleased with Microsoft’s warranty department in the end. They sent me a replacement power supply that’s completely inaudible, at least from where I’m sitting. Now the new Xbox truly is “whisper quiet”, to match Microsoft’s advertising. It’s about time.

Secretly, though, even if Microsoft had sent me back another bogus loud power brick, I probably wouldn’t have noticed — thanks to the other new toy that I’m about to describe.

Cone of Silence: The Logitech F540 Wireless Gaming Headphones

When I moved my old Xbox downstairs, I moved my old Sennheiser 900 MHz wireless headphones down with it. I love these things. My wife gave them to me for Christmas many years ago, and they’ve been a crucial part of my gaming sessions ever since. Whether I want to avoid annoying her with an evening of raucous gunfire, or whether I’m playing games late at night, these headphones have been a godsend. Not only that, but I can hear sound effects and understand game dialog so much easier with these things on my head, to say nothing of the amplified immersion factor. It’s the only way to game, in my opinion.

With the arrival of a second Xbox, I realized that I’d want a second pair of wireless headphones. Sennheiser still makes the ones I currently own, although they are of course an evolved version. But not only were they fairly expensive, I wanted something a little more attuned to gaming. Something with an integrated boom mike that I could use for in-game chat in multiplayer sessions, for example. With my Sennheisers, playing multiplayer games was impossible if you wanted to chat — because I couldn’t wear both the Sennheisers and a chat headset at the same time. (Believe me, I tried.)

I have also been experiencing a lot of interference on my analog Sennheisers since we moved to Texas. Unlike Florida Fogeyville, where technology is so far beyond most people as to be indistinguishable from magic, there was nothing to interfere with my wireless signals for miles around. Here, everybody’s got wireless everything; even our home security system communicates wirelessly. The result is a pretty crowded spectrum. I decided that I wanted a headset that operated on the 5 GHz frequency range, just to stay out of the morass down there between 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz.

After very nearly pulling the trigger on the Turtle Beach Ear Force X32s, I decided instead to get the Logitech F540 wireless gaming headphones. In short, I’m glad I did. They satisfy all of my requirements: integrated chat with independent volume control, 5 GHz operating frequency, internal rechargable battery that charges directly from the base station. Plus, these headphones are of a circumaural (around-the-ear) design, which is more comfortable than my on-the-ear Sennheisers.

Not only are they more comfortable, they do an admirable job of blocking out external sounds. Combined with the excellent stereo imaging of the Logitech F540s, the audio immersion factor is way beyond anything the Sennheisers could match. Granted, the F540s aren’t “surround headphones”, but it’s hard to imagine markedly improving upon the incredibly good stereo separation and crystal-clear sound that they crank out. And now I can barely even hear the turbine-blast of the air conditioner when it comes on upstairs — double bonus.

The headphones come with an integrated boom mike that lets you chat with your friends while playing online games. Although I don’t have the time (or predictability of schedule) for that very much anymore, I can see how convenient this would be. To make it work, you do need to connect the headphones to your Xbox controller via a small cable. After that, simply lower the boom mike to enable chatting. The microphone automatically mutes itself anytime you stow it, and there’s also a mute button on the left ear cup. A corresponding red LED at the tip of the microphone lights up to give you a visual indicator that it’s muted, which is convenient because you can see it in your peripheral vision without having to take your eyes off the action.

I do have a couple of minor complaints. The F540s have a very slight noise floor in the form of a hiss that is barely perceptible, but definitely present. It’s quiet enough, however, that you no longer hear it once any measurable audio is being emitted by the speakers. And while the headphones swivel and pivot at various points to make them easy to wear and place on a tabletop for charging, this lends to a somewhat flimsy feel — they also creak ominously when you adjust them.

My biggest gripe is the standard USB to micro-USB cable that’s used for recharging the headphones. Let me tell you, the micro-USB end is a serious bitch to plug into the bottom of the left ear cup — it never wants to fit right, it’s too precise a connector to fumble around with in a darkened room, and half the time it feels like I’m going to break the headphones just by plugging them in. In contrast, Sennheiser’s “charging cradle” that you simply hang the headphones on to recharge them is unsurpassed in convenience, and I do miss it when it comes time to plug in the Logitechs after a gaming session.

World Enough and Time: The Epic Game Backlog

So now that I have what is (in my opinion) the perfect gaming setup and a nice new set of headphones to better enjoy it with, I have to acknowledge that I’ve got a serious video game overload going on here. It’s become a common problem of the modern gamer, one that is both a blessing and a curse: The Backlog. Given the sheer number of quality games that are produced and published these days (many, like Mass Effect, with excellent replayability) and our increasingly busy lives, it’s difficult to play all the games that we’d like to experience; there just isn’t enough time. So what inevitably happens is we form a backlog of games that we’ve started — or maybe even just purchased — but haven’t completed.

I’ve always had a tough time finishing games, even before our new baby arrived. Now that he’s starting to learn to sleep better at night, I’m picking up an extra hour or two of gameplay most evenings, but I’ve still got a lot of games to get through. Here’s some of what’s sitting in my backlog stack right now:

• Mass Effect 3. The juggernaut, and the game I’m currently playing. I suspect I won’t divert from its path until I reach the ending; it’s completely sucked me in. I’m doing every damn last side mission and go-fetch quest there is, as well as continually running new missions in the Datapad iPhone app so that I can get my Galactic Readiness score up to maximum. My war readiness indicator bar has already maxed out and I’m just a few hundred EMS points away from the coveted 5,000, but I’ve still got loads more missions to do. And dammit, I’m still trying to get Lt. Cmdr. Ashley Williams to ask my Commander Shepard to take her on a date. What is that woman waiting for? Armageddon? (Too late.)
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I adore this game, but was distracted by the release of Forza Motorsport 4 (and later, Mass Effect 3) after getting about three-fifths of the way through it. If nothing else, I absolutely must get back to this one — especially because I bought the add-on mission “The Missing Link” and have yet to experience it as well. (It takes place during the middle of the main storyline, I’m told, rather than as a follow-up adventure.)
• Forza Motorsport 4. Speaking of Forza, I got only a fairly short ways into the latest game in the franchise before my son was born. What I saw along the way was breathtaking, gorgeous and incredibly fun. As a Forza season pass holder, I’m also missing out on car packs that I’m entitled to, and I hear there’s a big update coming which adds Porsches to the game for the first time (apparently there were some licensing issues until now).
• The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Just prior to Mass Effect 3‘s release, this is the game that I couldn’t put down. Its vast, sweeping RPG world teeming with sidequests and adventures aplenty could keep a person busy for weeks (and already has, in my case). I fully intend to return to this one as well, which is a first for me when it comes to Elder Scrolls games — or, in fact, any game of a fantasy setting.
• Gears of War 3. This came with my new Xbox console, naturally, given that it was a GoW3 limited edition and all. I haven’t even taken the game itself out of the shrink wrap yet. Just too many other titles in play. I did, however, rewatch the major cutscenes from GoW2 on YouTube to refresh my memory of what happened, since it’s been such a long time. Definitely will be fun to get to this at some point, but…when, is the question!
• Binary Domain. I just picked this one up after playing the free demo and finding it surprisingly fun. It’s a Western-style third-person shooter similar to Gears of War, but was developed by a Japanese studio, giving it an interesting and unique flair. It also has an innovative voice recognition system which interprets things you say into your headset; your computer-controlled teammates will actually react to your cursing them out or congratulating them after a mission, among other things. Mostly, though, I just enjoyed the robot-smashing combat. Overall the game is like a big American action film with Japanese quirkiness, and I’m looking forward to returning to this unique experience.
• Driver: San Francisco. GameFly recently had a sale on used games, and I scored this one for 12 dollars. Considering it’s been on my wish list since before Christmas, I was pleased to finally be able to pick it up. The Driver series has always been, essentially, a video game celebration of car chase films. This latest entry apparently includes drivable set pieces based on some of those films, including the 1974 original “Gone in 60 Seconds”, “Smokey and the Bandit”, “Vanishing Point” and others. Most importantly, it features the return of the elder games’ Film Director mode, where you can actually shoot and edit your own car chase sequence. I haven’t even had the time to play this one yet, but it’s on the top of the pile at the moment.
• Saint’s Row 1-3. Yeah, that’s three games. I scored all three recently for very little money thanks to a gift card and a variety of coupons and credits. Sorta like Grand Theft Auto, but less serious and more egregious in terms of the crap you get to pull off. I was recently listening to an old recording I made while playing the original Saint’s Row demo in 2006 and was inspired to pick these up, having never owned any of them.
• Even more games. Oh yeah. There’s more. Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, as well as both of the expansion episodes for the original Alan Wake. L.A. Noire (never finished it). Portal 2 (got close, but never finished it). F.E.A.R. 3 (never finished it — are you noticing a trend yet?). And on and on — expansions for games as old as F.E.A.R. 2 and Fallout 3 still remain unplayed! By this point, any games that I’ve still got in my collection are either keepsakes that I’ll never get rid of, unfinished games that I intend (perhaps in vain) to get back to, or are so old that they’re worth nothing on a trade-in and thus aren’t going anywhere anyway.

I’m sure I’ll get around to all of that stuff eventually, although the next generation of consoles will probaby get here first. Then all bets are off!

Everybody’s got a hobby, and it’s pretty clear what my favorite one is right now. I watch next to zero television simply because I’d rather be part of an interactive experience like a video game than just sitting passively watching a screen. My boss, on the other hand, has eschewed practically all video games in favor of tabletop games (board games, card games, etc.), and I have to admit, I’ve been having a lot of fun joining him and our friends and coworkers in some of these.

With games like Pandemic, Elder Sign, Saboteur, For Sale, Small World, Carcassonne and countless others, it’s pretty easy to have a good time playing games even without a controller in your hand. I may get into more of this myself — and I’m excited for my son to get old enough to where we can play tabletop games together. Somehow, there’s something much more meaningful and intimate about that than sitting around playing video games with each other!

This probably should have been three separate posts, especially given the lackluster rate at which I’m posting things, but that’s not how things work here at Oddball Headquarters — at least not today.

Gotta get back to the game. I mean, work. Sorry.

I’ve got over a year’s worth of logfiles to peruse, so let’s get to it, shall we?

Since the last time I did this, certain corners of my blog have gotten a lot more popular. For instance, there’s a particular post about fixing slow WebDAV performance that draws a ton of visitors each month and has been linked to around the Internet, including in documentation and software wikis, even though I was merely reprinting a solution that I’d found elsewhere. (Guess I better make sure I never delete it or change its permalink.) As a result, my search logs are stuffed with dozens or even hundreds of these types of queries each and every month.

I’ve mostly discarded those keyphrases for the purposes of this post, but there’s still plenty of zany fodder in the search logs beneath all of that unfunny relevance. Whether it’s a particularly amusing query for an otherwise sensible topic, or a search that is apropos of God only knows what, I’ve collected what I hope will be an entertaining selection below.

• apple slice soda
• faygo honeydew mist
• recipe for bill knapps chicken fricassee
• keebler classic collection chocolate fudge sandwich cookies
• keebler french vanilla creme cookies
• discontinued keebler fudge cookies

Yes, people are still searching for these antique and long-unobtainable foodstuffs, despite the fact that I first (and last) wrote about the subject back in 2006. One guy even knows that his fabled cookies are discontinued! My search logs are filled with these kinds of queries every month. Excepting the seekers of Bill Knapp’s top-secret recipes, I’m not sure what people are expecting to find — someone with a thirty-year-old stockpile of Apple Slice and Keebler chocolate fudge cookies in his Soviet-era bomb shelter? Good luck. But as long as we’re waxing nostalgic on the subject of cookies, anybody remember Keebler’s other stroke of cookie genius from the ’80s? They were called Magic Middles, and they were delightful.

Moving on…

• oddball automotive new mexico

I’m not sure whether this is a mechanic’s shop, a car dealer, or what. I’ve run a search for this query and turned up nothing conclusive. Nothing except my own site, that is.

• do i need a tivo sunscription if i have comcast?

Maybe it’d help if I knew what the hell a “sunscription” was. Beyond that, how does paying Comcast for cable in any way obviate your need to pay TiVo for their guide data? You gotta pay both, so far as I am aware.

• tenchu z hairstyles

This showed up because of a review my friend (and ocassional Oddball contributor) wrote of this game in 2007. But why hairstyles? What the crap? I realize that your character’s aesthetic attributes, including hairstyle, were customizable, but is the hairstyle choice a hallmark feature of this game or what?

• vegas style games xbox

Hee. It’s a legit query, though not really for this site. What’s funny is, I bet I know why this came up.

• star trek online how to take a seat

Seriously. You need to ask how to sit down? In truth, the ability to “take a seat” — or perform numerous other actions, such as the fabled Picard Facepalm Maneuver — are fairly hidden away in Star Trek Online. What’s amusing to me is that it was so important for somebody to know how to sit down that they searched for it. And trust me, it wasn’t just one person, either.

• apple we’ll be back soon font

I think it’s called “Marker Felt.”

• mrs oddball

Hey! Leave my wife outta this!

• star trek online i bought the bundle but it still costs money?

For some reason, I saw this query as being almost lyrical. Kinda like Jerry Reed’s song: “She got the goldmine and I got the shaft!” But I’m not surprised to see this query; I had nothing but problems the one and only time I attempted to buy something from the Star Trek Online store, to the point where I eventually gave up empty-handed.

• oddballs nurse porno

A Google logic failure illustrated. This is a lurid combination of my blog name, the title of the review I wrote of the Thai horror film Sick Nurses, and…porn, which…this site doesn’t feature. Seriously, what the fuck.

• how to listen my radio i install in my gto

This had me rolling, and not just because of the incompetent grasp of the English language. How can you possibly operate a motor vehicle, let alone install a car stereo yourself, and not know how to turn the radio on? Surely that means the windshield wipers and high beams are also well beyond your understanding. This query is scarier than Sick Nurses.

• excellent affinity for destruction intact shepard

Haha, nice. It didn’t take long for this to make it into my search logs from this month, proving that someone else enjoyed Mordin Solus’ quip from the Mass Effect 3 demo as much as I did. (Incidentally, speaking of Mordin, did you know that he has a different voice actor in the latest game? I couldn’t tell, judging only by the limited lines he had in the demo.)

• skip blitzball games

I sympathize, truly I do. But you can’t.

• blitzball simulator

Conversely, here’s a brave soul who enjoys Blitzball so much, he wants a simulation of it. Like a team management game for Blitzball or something. (Maybe he should play Final Fantasy X-2, since I understand that’s more what Blitzball is like in that game.)

• mass effect questions annoying

Renegade Shepard: “I am sick of this reporter’s annoying questions! Garrus, grab a gat and shut her ass up!” Apparently, judging by the number of times some variant of this query appeared in my logs, numerous people find Mass Effect’s conversations really annoying. I guess that’s why the latest installment has the new “Action” experience mode that turns the interactive convos into cutscenes.

• what accent is the man from cradle of life

I think it’s a dialect of Incomprehensible, commonly spoken by natives of Mumbleyville. Seriously, if you mean Gerard Butler, it’s Scottish. And I couldn’t understand him either, if that’s what you were getting at, though given the movie in question, I don’t think we’re missing anything.

• on being an oddball

I mean, I guess I would know, right?

• webdav fucking slow

Out of all the hundreds of queries I get each month for WebDAV issues, using every combination of terms imaginable to describe the problem, I like this one the best. The guy really boils it down.

• why does the display button on my jvc head unit work

If I understood you correctly, you’re asking why the display button…is working properly? Who asks questions like this? “Holy shit, why does everything work RIGHT? This stuff is doing what it’s supposed to and I can’t TAKE IT!”

• skyrim too few voice actors

Jesus, yes. JESUS, YES.

• how can i get an illegal cable card for my tivo

Oh, that’s very good. This is like that one I had a few years ago where some guy was Googling for the best place to buy illegal drugs. You might as well just search for “where can I steal a TiVo from” while you’re at it.

• tahmoh penikett kotor

It looks as though somebody else made the same connection that I did. (I admit that this is an assumption, but I cannot imagine why else they would have searched for this.)

• horror movie nurse with a trunk 70s

A horror movie about a nurse…with a trunk? From the ’70s? Huh? I have no earthly idea what this query is on about, but I’m envisioning an old slasher shot on Betamovie featuring a tarted-up evil nurse who lugs around a huge trunk and…I dunno, beats people with it while funky guitar licks play. My imagination is odd. (Annnnnnd that’s why this site is named what it is…)

• odd ball the game

Oddball: The Game. That’s awesome. If it actually existed, I imagine it would be an awesome adventure about my incredibly pedestrian life. Sadly, it does not exist, so I have no clue what this idiot was looking for.

Oh…wait. It does exist. And it looks like it sucks, too. Oh well. Probably because it’s not an awesome adventure about my incredibly pedestrian life. If it were, it would have sucked much, much harder.

• i am playing a year and a nice christmas

This sounds like something that a state hospital inmate might run up and say excitedly to you if you accidentally went down the wrong hallway.

• oddball truck driving jobs

Because it’s not hard enough being a truck driver, you want the oddball truck driving jobs. What would those be, anyhow — transporting alien corpses from New Mexico to Mulder’s office or something?

• i knew it would work

I’m so glad to hear that. Why you searched for this phrase, however, continues to elude me.

• i might busy from weekend until next week

*pulls hair* Seriously, what is with people who search for these conversational non-sequiturs? WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO FIND? Are they song lyrics? Movie lines?

• always bet on duke broussard

While I know that “always bet on Duke” is a famous quote from Duke Nukem creator George Broussard, the way this query was structured makes me envision a character named “Duke Broussard”: a big, ponytailed programming guy with a mega-arsenal who kicks ass by coding and snarking aliens to death.

• tomb raider underworld coastal thailand boobs

It seemed like a perfectly legitimate query, until suddenly there was “boobs”. I guess boobs from coastal Thailand are what the searcher would really like to see. As opposed to, say, Valhalla boobs or Arctic Sea boobs. (All of these are locations from the game, and I guess you could technically say that there are boobs at all of them, since Lara Croft travels there. Ba-doom-boom.)

• commander-in-chief bugged out on everyone

Which commander-in-chief is this? What is this in reference to? I may be the Chief Oddball, but I’m not bugging out on anybody, let me assure you.

• roxio burn crap

Another amusing search for what I guess is a crappy product, wherein the searcher doesn’t really want answers, they just want validation that Roxio burns crap. Sounds like a pretty cool slogan, actually. “Roxio: We Burn Crap.” That can’t smell too good, incidentally.

• freedom force boring

Somebody apparently agreed with Pooch’s ye olde review of this game, written back in B.C.E. 950. (I mean, 2004.) He thought the game was so boring, the word even makes its way into the title of the post.

• darfh

Hey Pooch, I think Scott may be looking for his old PS2 memory unit.

• knight rider it’s a bomb code red

This is awesome. Somebody else must think this scene is iconic enough to search for, because there it is — the famous airport security guard’s line from season four’s “Sky Knight.” The guy sees a bomb trundling through the baggage X-ray, exclaims to himself, “It’s a bomb!” and then leans into a microphone and drones generically, “Code red.” Wow! I’m sure that’s proper FAA/TSA procedure for reporting the presence of explosives!

• apple slice soda fermententation

Ignoring the fact that the guy G.W. Bush’ed the query with one too many syllables (“fermen-ten-tation”?), I can only imagine someone would search for this if they had (or were looking to buy) a case of classic Apple Slice left over from the 1980s and were worried about how the stuff might taste after all this time. Maybe it’s the person I alluded to above, who’s got a line on a source of this discontinued food stuffed in somebody’s Soviet-era bomb shelter. Hey, look at it this way: if the Slice actually is fermented — which I doubt, because there is likely no trace of actual apples in that stuff’s apple flavoring — it might be a good way to get drunk.

• thank god i’m not in high school anymore.

You and me both. I don’t know why you searched for this, but I raise my glass (of fermented Apple Slice) to you.

• ted spindler jewish

Ted Spindler may be many things, including the man who spilled instant Quaker oatmeal on the Ventana Nuclear Power Plant’s control console in some crazy fiction of my own invention, but as far as I know he’s not Jewish. …Oh. You mean some other Ted Spindler.

• young nurses are dunking in hospital with doctor

Another one of those bizarre queries that sets my imagination afire with mind’s-eye visuals of a doctor and group of nurses merrily dunking their heads in a pan of water in the basement of some hospital somewhere. Seriously, I’d love to know what this person is really looking for with this.

• chevrolet watchamazon

Is that the name of a new model they’re going to release next year? The “Watchamazon”? Perhaps they can sell it alongside the GMC Sumpinorudder and the Buick Thigamajigiba.

• aztek pontiac raider tomb

I think whoever searched for this is dyslexic. If you read the query backwards it almost makes a bizarre kind of sense. Except it doesn’t, because to my knowledge there was never a “Tomb Raider” special edition of the Pontiac Aztek (although if there was, given the time that vehicle was in production, its pointy nose would have borne a striking resemblance to the pixelated visage of ancient low-poly Lara Croft).

• phony 1080i transmission by some satelitte networks look like poop

Hee hee. He’s absolutely right, but I just love the fact that he searched for this. This. Not a question (“Does it look like poop?”), not a solution (“How do I make this look less poop-like?”), but a statement of fact. More Internet validation-seekers, it appears.

• highly compressed vampire game

So are you looking for a game about vampires that has been compressed (i.e., with 7-Zip or RAR) with maximum possible efficiency? Or is this a game about highly compressed vampire midgets who just crawled out of a trash compactor?

• pictures on the internet i dont want

If you don’t want them, why on earth are you searching for them? Or are you looking for pictures from that “Do Not Want” meme? Because if so, you’re doing it wrong. (Oooh. Meme-mixing.)

• is it wrong to ask someone to do as they are told

Not if you’re their superior officer or paying them to do a job.

• jack dunworth haunted

“The Jack Dunworth M…” …is haunted. I guess.

• pastor john c mills

This is the guy who recorded a whole litany of those Faith Bible Hour “tape cassettes” that my late grandfather left me. I have no idea where Mr. Mills is now.

• i am 51 and dont want to use the internet

Yet, here you are. Using it.

• is jin from fear dead or not

I see somebody else is confused about the F.E.A.R. canon contradictions where Jin Sun-Kwon dies cheesily in the Extraction Point expansion pack and then shows up in F.E.A.R. 3 alive and (mostly) well. Answer: Extraction Point is not canon and should be disregarded (even though it is a higher-quality F.E.A.R. experience than F.E.A.R. 3…).

• i feared that i would run into a last night.

Well, I fear that I will one day have to engage somebody with your mental capacity in conversation.

• i signed a contract with nozzel nolan do i have to honor it?

Isn’t that the definition of signing a contract? But really, what I’m here to snark about with this search log entry is the unmitigated hilarity (and unfortunateness) of a company name like “Nozzel Nolan”. I looked them up and they seem to be a pest control company. Yet all I can think of when I hear that name is “the nozzle” gag from The Venture Bros. “Please do not be alarmed. We are about to engage…the nozzle.”

• toyota commercial oh yea this is serious stuff

“Oh, yeah! Toyota…that’s serious!” Seriously boring. (I assume this was a tagline from a commercial of theirs or something.)

• hello i want a big mac mcdlt quarter pounder

Bahahahaha! I assume this is a reference to the old McDonald’s Menu Song from the ’80s, but what really gets me laughing is the errant “hello”, which was not part of the song. It makes the query read like somebody just walked up to you, said “Hello!” and then started reciting the McDonald’s Menu Song. (I guess we’re back in the wrong hallway of that state hospital again…)

• my mom havebeen loving

Wait…what? All this makes me think of is that guy from Shawshank: “I had your momma! She wasn’t that good!”

• wolfenstein 3d project totengraeber xbox download

As the creator of Project Totengraeber, I think it’s cute that somebody hopes it’s been ported to the Xbox…somehow. (How would I do that, exactly?)

• cablecard fuckery

Ha! Another one that really sums it up. Dealing with CableCARDs is probably one of the worst experiences you can have with a cable company, and given that they’re, y’know, a cable company, that’s really saying something. “Fuckery” indeed.

• thaigirls inn koh samuie

Only one word of that query escaped being misspelled, sadly enough. Since Koh Samui is in Thailand, I’d say it stands to reason that there would be Thai girls there. But if we look closer, it seems that perhaps the searcher is looking for the “Thaigirls Inn”, which I can only assume is a brothel. Either way, have fun getting around with such poor communications skills.

• acura all ugly

At this rate, that might as well be the name of Acura’s next model. The “All Ugly”. Because undoubtedly it will be. (Seriously, though, I should give these guys some credit. They’ve been trying to fix their rampant uglification lately.)

And finally, here’s the last query, which I can only assume was spurred on by my multi-week (sometimes multi-month) absences from posting on this site:

• what happened to the oddball guy

At this moment? I’m right here. But in case I should disappear again, I’d like to present you with a revolving assortment of excuses for it, which you can choose from at random:

• Preoccupied with the baby
• Got sucked into a sidework project that has brought the level of cursing at Oddball Headquarters to new heights
• Too busy bitchslapping Reapers/monsters/Belltower agents in Mass Effect 3/Silent Hill/Deus Ex
• Went to Zimbabwe for fun and profit
• Fell off the back of a truck
• Invented an automatic necktie straightener and quit my job due to sudden financial windfall
• Fell asleep at keyboard

Till next time.