Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ The dawn's early light.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your pets break things more valuable than they are.

And yes, I always say I want to get to bed earlier.  And no, I never do.

I just hate to waste darkness with sleep.  I'm always more creative and full of energy and eager to work during the night than during the day, especially in the bright/hot/summer months.  But since in SF I'll have a woman stuff to do in the daytime, I need to be awake. Unless I can perhaps figure some way to keep Malaya up later than her usual sleep time.

Okay, that's about enough cheap remarks for now.

Weird case mods are becoming more and more popular. But this one is the best I've yet seen. Scroll down to see dozens of photos of the construction of "her".)

Neither does this picture I grabbed from the site that had the link, since it just looks like a female model.  Which it is, but she's got a metal skeleton like something off of Cockeyed.com, and it has the motherboard built into it, slots for hard drives, wires coming out of a removable door in her crotch, etc.  Tacky and sexist, but at least she's not naked or in a Playboy Bunny outfit, eh?  At least not for the LAN they photographed her at, anyway.

I had this whole rant planned about the outrageous prices at the LACC for any sort of edible of potable substance, and in fact I might have begun it yesterday, when I made some mention of Elly and Rush and Gaile being there.  Unless I mentioned it the day before. (No, I never remember what I talked about or when I talked about it.  It's all a blur 30 minutes after I write it.)

I've not had a chance to listen to Bill yet (and when I do I'll be writing it up to post on the D2 site, Sunday night hopefully) but I did get the photo of the prices.  And as you can see here... they're really not that expensive.  Bastards, they lowered them just to ruin my blog!

I don't know if the prices are much lower outside, or it's a building-wide reduction, but these are like a fraction of what they were last year and the three years before, when I was there and looking at costs.  Two or three years ago (not sure which) I was at the D2 booth all morning, and around lunch time two Bliz North guys I probably shouldn't name asked if I wanted to go walk around with them for a bit.  They'd both worked on D2 so we talked about that a bit, but mostly just looked at other games and demos.  One of them was a huge gaming fan, and was familiar with most other games we saw there, and eager to try them out, while I and the other guy were much more D2-only, and didn't really get into anything much.

The funny part was that like every 20 minutes some person would come up all excited thinking that the three of us worked for Blizzard (and being 2/3 right) since we were all wearing various D2 t-shirts.  And they'd always start asking how to get a job there, or want to show us their portfolio, or something.  One of the two guys was one of the lead artists on D2, so he was paging through photo albums full of various doodles and cartoons and trying to remain helpful and positive in his comments.

Anyway, we eventually went to the cafeteria and were looking for food.  The vegetarian options were pretty crappy, and prices were just outrageous.  A bottle of water and roast beef sandwich with a wilted dill pickle were like $13, and I considered getting a Pepsi and small garden salad, but that was going to run me like $11. I was hungry, but I just refused to overpay that badly.

So I ran out to my car and from the cooler in the trunk grabbed a tuna fish sandwich and blueberry muffin, and went back in and found the two guys on the floor around the side of the cafeteria.  Yes, adding to the fun of the economical prices was a total lack of available seating due to the huge crowds there.  At least the walkways are wide, so even with people lining every wall there is still plenty of room for foot traffic.

The other Bliz North guy was one of the main monster designers, and that made for an interesting lunch time chat, since it was off the record and away from PR, so we could just talk about anything.  They have weird influences.  The main design idea for Diablo in D2 was "Godzilla", according to the guy who designed him.  At the time I envisioned a big bulky slow thing, like the classic "man in suit" version of Godzilla, but clearly he meant the big budget 1998 US movie, which was dreadful, but had a iguana-Godzilla, which was thin and lean and very fast. I hadn't seen that at the time and didn't see it until long after D2 came out, so months later when I saw the D2 Diablo, I didn't find him very similar to the Godzilla image I had in mind.

And then a year or so later when I suffered through most of Godzilla on network TV, I at last understood.

ointless work stories.

One of the amusements of working at the stadium (or in pretty much any food service place) is that we have industrial stuff lying around.  Compressed air tanks, for one thing.  These things are used for powering all of the keg taps in the beer carts, as well as soda machines.  So there are always a bunch of air bottles sitting around. They are about hip high to a standing adult human, and are heavy and battered from years of use, and have a round grippy wheel handle on top, like something you'd have on a garden hose switch in your back yard.

When you turn the wheel you move the blocking nozzle, and out comes highly-compressed air with a very loud whistle.  This air is moving extremely rapidly, which is the whole point.  It can, of course, be misused, with a bit of ingenuity.

The latest activity, which I have never taken part in other than as a spectator, is to shoot stuff with the air.  You put a water bottle cap or something like that on it, lean the bottle back and bit, and with a quick twist of the wheel, blast the cap across the room.  You could, of course, just throw it, but what fun would that be?

That was fun for a while, but it got boring so now they have moved up to the actual bottles, soda or water.  They fit better over the air bottle nozzle, and with aim and a quick twist, you can shoot a bottle about 30 feet.  Plastic bottles are of course rather lacking in aerodynamics in flight, which makes them fun to try and catch, or better yet fun to hit with a makeshift bat.  Our bat is generally a long aluminum tube stolen from an outdoor umbrella pole, or else the broken handle from a mop. Broken in some other past destructive orgy.

So the sport is to get a pitcher at one end of the stand, and the batter by the front door with the desk pushed back, and shoot the bottle over while the batter tries to hit it.  Great exultation erupts when someone strikes out, or better yet makes solid contact and blasts the bottle across the stand, ideally knocking down something valuable and potentially fragile.

And it's not like this goes on all night; just at the start when there's nothing critically needing to be done yet.

Saturday night there were plans being made to create a more reliable launching system, like by cutting the base off of a bottle, getting a gasket snugly connect the neck of the bottle to the air tank, and getting a racquetball, or something like that to stuff into the bottom of the bottle and fire across the room towards the batter.

If you think about that, it's a rather ridiculous amount of effort to expend to shoot a ball that could just as easily be thrown, but working there on slow nights is a lot like high school study hall.  Everyone is so bored that they have to dream up stuff to keep themselves occupied, and doodling on scrap paper only takes you so far. And when there's all this equipment around that you don't have at home, the stand help can't help but play with it.  Especially when the manager is leading the games.

I had another story I was going to tell, but it involved someone getting fired just a couple of days ago, and it's a bit suspect, since I don't know the whole tale.

So for a replacement, I'll talk briefly about dry ice.

That stuff is fun, and most people have seen it boiling away in a tub of hot water, creating huge amounts of smoke and foam.  More fun that just water is to get a cup of soda, sprite works nicely, since it'll bubble up hugely, with the carbonation being activated by the dry ice.  Better yet is to put a bunch of soap into the cup; that blows big hovering soap bubbles full of the carbon dioxide smoke, which float up until they pop and release a puff of smoke, as well as making like a cup of rabies and drooling soap bubbles over the side pretty much forever.  Or until the remaining soap/water is all frozen into a sludge.

If you want to get really destructive, you can put chips of dry ice and some water into a plastic bottle, seal it tightly, throw it, and run.  It will explode in 30 seconds or so.  And I mean explode, we're talking grenade-like.  Do not put this anywhere a person might be near it when it goes off, it could easily put out an eye.

The fun at work is to chip up some dry ice, put it in a bottle, and throw that into the big walk in and slam the door. It rattles around in there by the kegs, and after a indeterminate wait, there comes a massive boom.  And I mean massive, it sounds like a small bomb or a very high caliber gun shot.  Generally we'll find tiny chips of bottle, or most of the neck, etc.  The rest is just obliterated.

How long the fuse runs for depends on how much water and how much ice, so there is some variability in the construction of such devices.  I've never made one, but I've seen/head a dozen or more over the years I've worked at the stadium.  It's not like it's hard to make, it's just that more water and more dry ice = faster explosion.  Filling the bottle too full could definitely result in an explosion in your hand, which would be bad, so err to the side of caution. Not that I'm recommending you engage in such activities.

Especially not at work.

<-- Yesterday  --  Tomorrow -->
Archives Page