Blessed by the Potato

Penny Arcade drew attention to the fighting words of one game developer, who will explicitly not support used games from joining in multiplayer mode.

Controversy ensues.

Myself, I’m more than a little torn on the issue. On the one hand, I naturally rebel against a company trying to lock down content that I’m going to pay for (not that that’s a concern with this specific case of a wrestling game). Being able to own something and resell it has been a long-standing property right, whether it’s a car, air conditioner*, book, or video game. Who is this greedy corporation to arbitrarily decide to degrade the product/service you paid for, just because you sold it on to someone else? Indeed, if it wasn’t for Blizzard making StarCraft2 impossible to transfer to a new account, my SC2 woes would have been solved in a trivial way. Heck, even if you twist it so that instead of “buying” a game, you “license” or “lease” one, in the real world even licensees and leasees can often assign or sublet.

On the other hand, I do want to support the ability of people to come together to trade money for stuff in ways that work for them. And digital delivery is going to may require a different playbook than we’re familiar with from physical media.

Where I get caught up though, is when companies try to charge the same for less. If I can ordinarily share my games with friends when I’m done with them, or sell them used for $10, then this crippled version of the game should cost less up front because it is in fact an inferior product. Likewise with ebooks: there’s no reason in my mind for them to cost nearly as much as a paperback, and that’s from my point of view of receiving value, not even taking into account their lowered distribution/publishing costs side of things. So when these companies say that they don’t care about used buyers because they don’t (directly) see any of the money from the used transaction, I have to step up and say that they did get money from the used buyer, and they got it up front: the first buyer paid $50 for their own use of the game, and another $10 that they hope to get from the used buyer down the road.

* – incidentally, I’m still trying to sell my wall/slot air conditioner. If you’re London and want a used air conditioner for a wall slot (typically found in highrise apartments) send me an email!

For some reason people around the office started talking about drafting their bucket lists (I hope someone’s not seriously ill and I just don’t know about it). Some of the entries were hilarious, in particular one person’s desire to get a pet pig named Bacon.

It made me realize that I want to get a dog and name it Indiana.

…

Beyond that, there’s not much I can think of that I really would put on such a list. I’m not a big travel person, or a list person for that matter. Write a novel maybe? (A good novel). I don’t know, I guess I just don’t like the idea of setting my life up like a checklist (especially since I have set up the milestones for my thesis completion that way, and failed miserably!). I just live each day as it comes.

Plus if it was set up as a series of checkpoints and goals, I’d probably be very disappointed in how things turned out (e.g., I’m 30 years old and still in school!). Yet I don’t think I’m disappointed in my life.

Am I? Should I be?

I have just invented a new concoction which I don’t think will catch on with anyone else in the world, but I thought I’d share anyway.

The background is that I am, like many, trying to eat healthier. So, I went to the grocery store and picked up a pack of roasted yellow chickpeas and a pack of roasted salted soybeans. They’re both good sources of protein for a vegetarian: the chickpeas aren’t exactly jam-packed with protein, but they’re high in fibre and low in fat; the soybeans have a ton of protein, but it comes with a lot of fat as well. Both are full of lysiney goodness.

I’ve been getting loose soybeans like this for a little while now, and know that I can just pop a few handfuls at a time and eat them straight like that. I tried doing that with the chickpeas, and my reaction was “well, I guess if the zombies come, this’ll keep us alive.” They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t particularly good, either. They just had no flavour of their own. However, they did have a decent enough crunch. Realizing both could use a bit of flavour, I came up with this mixture:

2 tbsp nutella
1/2 c roasted yellow chick peas
1/4 c roasted salted soybeans

Just mix to evenly coat everything.

In total, the concoction has 440 calories, 17 g of protein, 21 g of fat (5 g of it saturated), plus 10 g of fibre. Though it’s not very big in the bowl, it’s pretty calorie-dense, I find it’s a good breakfast-sized portion (but keep in mind I’ve only had it twice now).

So there’s obviously way too much fat in this concoction to be really healthy, but it’s just so hard some days getting vegetarian protein. Most of that fat comes from the nutella, so I’ll see if I can tweak the recipe to find another way to bind everything together and give it some modicum of flavour.

It’s September. I don’t know how this happened. I had so much to finish before the end of August. In fact, according to my timeline, I had to finish pretty much everything by the end of August:

Yet here we are, in September, and I’m stuck somewhere back in May according to my timetable and the progress I’ve made so far.

Urk.

It is also the Season of Spiders. They’re ridiculous this year, especially around the hospital. Some of the biggest spiders I’d ever seen outside the zoo or a horror movie. Yesterday a coworker killed one so big that I felt like I should have earned experience points just for being in the party during the kill; I was a little surprised we didn’t check its corpse for copper pieces or armour upgrades. Today another spider camped out on the wall across from the office, and I killed it with panache (via roundhouse kick to the face, BTW). Then I was there late, on my own. The sun was down, and when I opened the door to the office for a washroom break, I found four spiders lurking there, waiting to ambush me as I came out. And I’m not exaggerating the ambush thing due to the terror they induce: one of them was hanging down in mid-air, right in front of the door, just waiting for me to walk into it so it could paralyse me with its evil spider venom and suck my delicious juices.

I slammed the door and decided I didn’t need to pee just that badly yet.

I came up with a heroic plan: I would call the fire department, who have axes and protective clothing and stuff, and they would come to free me from the spider’s trap. Then I realized that I did, in fact, need to pee rather more urgently than waiting for the fire department would allow, plus I began to think of how that could go badly against me if the firefighters didn’t take the threat seriously, and the spiders caught them and laid eggs inside them, and then I’d face an army of spiders instead of just four (although that is still 3 to 4 more than any man should have to face alone). So, my new plan of attack was to use a piece of paper to smoosh the one hanging by the web in mid-air in front of me, as it presented the greatest danger: while a spider can jump off a wall or the ceiling, they are much harder to see and track in free space, especially with our ridiculous spider-hiding carpet (would a matte white flooring option be so difficult/boring/hard to clean?). Then, get the two on the wall, and run wailing and crying from the one on the ceiling. My only defense against it was speed and blind hope that I’d make it to the safety of the washroom before it could drop on my head.

As it turned out, the one on the ceiling caught a ladybug in its web: the ladybug was thrashing and flailing in the web, which served as an effective distraction, as I’m sure you have all figured out due to the fact that I’m still alive to report these horrific events to you, but also a terrifying warning: “this could be you, delicious human.”

The geeky hilarity starts right with the Universal logo scroll, re-rendered in faux 8-bit style, complete with midi synth music.

It’s sweet, funny, entertaining, witty, makes plenty of gamer references, and of course, is full of fighting. To steal the best part of someone else’s review: You know how in musicals, people will just break out into song for no reason at all, just because it’s a musical and that’s what you do? This movie is like that, but with cartoon fights.

What’s not to love? Stop reading this and go see it already.

Rating: Awesome.
Favourite line: Jetpacks.
Fun fact: the coins are indeed Canadian coins.
Lesson learned: geeks do consider themselves in an exclusive relationship even when they’re not allowed out after dark and have only held hands. This was news to some of the “cool kids” who saw it.