Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "hella"
¤ Usage: "Hella m'ungry, Punchin!"
¤ Origin: Old Valley-Girl speak, or something like that. It was big in the 80s, vanished, and has been reborn largely thanks to Cartman.
¤ Etymology: It's short for "hell of" I suppose, even though no one has ever used that two-word phrase for the purpose that "hella" exists. It's basically a synonym for "very" or "extremely" and is best used to great excess, or for intentionally-annoying sarcastic effect, in much the same way adults can effectively use L33t sP34k.
¤ Notes: An annoying and stupid word, but one you'll soon find yourself almost powerless to cease overusing, if you dare take a verbal step down that mixed metaphor of a road.  Cartman says "hella" about twenty times in an old episode of South Park, driving everyone else crazy, and while it's amazingly annoying to hear him say it... neither Malaya or I can keep from throwing it into conversation when we get a chance.  Mostly to each other, as a sort of "that sounds so stupid it's funny" joke, but we slip up and use it when talking to other people from time to time as well. Much to their horror, I'm sure. -- May 3, 2004

keep saying I've got good reader mail to get to, I keep getting good reader mail, but I keep not getting to it, since I keep writing other things, and I keep trying to spend most of my writing time on fiction.

Speaking of fiction, I was a good boy on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, writing non-stop from about 1am until 8am. I began to fade around dawn, and was distracted once Malaya got up and started getting ready for work at 7am, but I typed while she was in the shower, and after she was out the door at 7:30 and I did another 20 minutes of decent work, before my mind shut down on me.  So far Thursday morning isn't going as well, since I just got an hour or so right around midnight, and then wasted an hour playing Warcraft 2 and surfing, before doing another half hour, and then turning to the blog.

The sad part is that when I manage to live up to my expectations, and spend 4 or 5 or 6 hours a day writing, I'm not happy with that since I should have done more. Even if I do as much as I had time to do that day, and it was good, I always find myself thinking about how I didn't get shit done the day before, or the day before that.

Never being satisfied with the amount of work I finish is a good way to stay motivated. Either that or burn out entirely and go get a job pouring cement.

¤ I've added another fresh My First Time entry today, from another actual first time viewer/mailer. Check it out.

¤ No news today. Well, almost none.

I read the news every day, but some days I want to talk about it, and other days I don't. I've been meaning to comment on the ongoing story of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. It's not new news, not since there have been major reports about it since at least January of this year, but it never really took off in the press until the photos started to leak out, and that apparently only happened since troops there were disgusted by it and mailed photos home, since the chain of command in Iraq was preventing any news of it from getting out.

My main reaction so far has been bemusement at all of the people who seem to actually be shocked by the fact that US troops (or the US-hired mercs doing the dirty prison work for 10x the pay the grunts get) following orders as they tortured prisoners. I suspect these Pollyannas are the same people who were simply shocked by the Rodney King tape, and had never imagined that decent white police officers would actually use their tasers and batons to nearly beat a man to death, and then lie and try to cover it up afterwards.

Wake up, kids. People in positions of authority have always, and will always abuse their power, especially in physical ways. Even if they're god-fearing Americans. Especially when the US Secretary of Defense is signing orders to tell them to do it. It's clearly been worth violating the Geneva convention and ruining America's already soiled reputation world wide, though, to obtain such intelligence triumphs in Iraq. I mean they must be getting great info with the torture, given the tremendous success the Iraqi occupation has been. Right?

And yes, alleged-Al Quida guys cut off some dude's head. It's barbaric, and it sucks for him and his family, but... there have been dozens and dozens of deaths in the US military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, where even the military admits that at least 50% of the detainees are innocent of any real wrongdoing.  It's just that the US troops aren't stupid enough to film their actions.

Oh wait...

¤ Does anyone really value or appreciate perfunctory apologies and thanks? I guess it's better to have some cashier idly say, "thank you" when you complete a transaction; even though you know they could care less one way or the other, it does bring a sort of closure to the events.  But do you really want a chatty waitress, or a salesman trying to strike up a conversation about your family, or some old dude standing near the entrance of a store and bellowing out a "Welcome to hell!" to every person who enters?  I suppose someone must, since more and more stores keep adopting that harassment style of customer service. But that someone is not me.

I don't want to talk to you. If I want help I'll ask. If not, keep your distance, and keep quiet. Going to Bed Bath and Beyond (AKA BBB or B3) has become much less pleasant of late, since every time we go there now the salespeople are giving us shout outs, or "Hi there's!" or other forms of verbal pestering.  It's disconcerting as you're browsing a store when every other step brings a "Hi!" from one side or the other. Especially in BBB, where they always seem to have about 6 more employees walking around than they need to have walking around.

Malaya hates it when salespeople talk to her, and she'll often not buy something, or not ask about something she might want to buy, just because a salesperson is chatty, or just looks chatty. She drives me crazy sometimes, since she'll wander a store for 15 minutes trying to find something that we could find in 30 seconds if we asked for directions. But at the same time, I can see her point since some salespeople don't tell you where it is. They start talking to you, and eventually impart the information you want, but they take too long to do it, or they walk with you and linger when you obviously don't need anything else from them.

The new wrinkle on this "if we talk a lot people will think they're getting better service" are the people, phone service types usually, who say "thank you" and "your business is important to us" and other such bullshit with every sentence. I've been on the phone with Comcast tech support half a dozen times in the last two weeks, related to the cable modem being screwed up (on their end) and they do that perpetually, to the point of distraction. As soon as you finally get to talk to a real person, they launch into their scripted opening remarks. "Thank you for taking the time to call Comcast and we apologize for any delays. My name is ______, how can I help you today?"

My thought is always, "If you didn't have to waste 30 seconds introducing yourself and apologizing for the wait to every person who called, there'd probably be a lot less waiting to apologize for."

Comcast isn't as bad as some of the others; the last time I called my credit card company there was half a minute of, "Thank you for choosing our service." and "How may we offer you exceptional customer service this afternoon?" type bullshit. I expect that crap from a recorded voice when I'm on hold, but why have a real person spout that crap when I just want to get to business and get the hell off the phone?

I assume someone in management came up with the bright idea and is just sure it's a great service, since management can never get enough ass-kissing. And as I said earlier, I guess someone out there must enjoy it, but that someone sure isn't me.  Every time some salesperson or cashier feels the need to make conversation, Malaya and/or I take the brunt of it, responding with grunts or quizzical looks, and then when we survive the verbal assault and escape, we always wait until we're outside before trading a long look and breaking into laughter at the absurdity of it all.

The funny thing is that I was one of those people who talked more than the customer required back when I worked at the stadium in San Diego. Except that I was doing it for my own amusement/sanity-preservation, and any enjoyment the customer got out of it was entirely incidental. Oh, I was making jokes that quite a few people found funny, and I did them quickly enough to not delay the overall sales process, but I doubt too many people expected it in advance. It was also something that was entirely perpetuated by me, since we had no training in customer conversation, and there were no requirements that we engage in it.  We really should have had some training, now that I think about it, since quite often I'd see other employees selling things without telling the customer what their options were, while being rude, while being unclear, while not telling them the price, etc. You'd like to think that sort of stuff is common sense for anyone with any intelligence and a desire to sell stuff, and since we were paid on commission, we had an obvious desire to sell stuff.

At least that's what you'd think if you've never worked in retail, or been around the type of people who do. There is no common sense there. Trust me on that one.

As for my non-common sensical comments, they varied for the occasion, but I had a dozen or so standard remarks.

• When I had only one option to purchase, especially if it was obvious that I only had one, such as when I'd started off with blue and pink cotton candy, and had sold all of the pink already:
  • Which color would you like?
  • Pink, pink, pink or pink?
    • Little kids would often puzzle over this for ten seconds, trying to determine which was which, which was better, and which was bigger. The first and truest childish emotion? Greed.
    • They'd also often reply, "Pink pink!" having missed one of my verbal commas.
  • Would you like light pink, dark pink, or double pink?
• To a guy who had just bought a cotton candy for his kids/wife:
  • "What, none for you sir?"
    • Men never buy cotton candy for themselves, and this provoked a laughing, "Oh no, none for me!" reply 95% of the time.
• To a person when I'd just dropped or spilled something on them/their seat:
  • "No extra charge, sir."
    • This one was used judiciously, and only to someone who was laughing and clearly had a sense of humor, or who was an asshole who deserved to be fucked with, a bit, but didn't look like such an asshole that they would get me in trouble.
• When asked who to pass something towards:
  • "Towards the money."
  • "I don't care, just as long as you pass the money towards me."
  • "To the guy in the white Padres hat."
    • Only used on giveaway nights, when virtually everyone had the same color hat, or t-shirt, or beach towel, or whatever on/in their possession.

There were lots of others, but I can't give all of my secrets away at once, can I?  Either that or I've forgotten them, now that I'm not on the spot and aren't bored doing an intellectually-vacant job where I need to think up things to amuse myself.  And it wasn't saying them that amused me, it was gauging the reactions of people. Since I was saying the same things dozens of times a game 70 or 80 or 100 games a year, for over a decade, I got to try them on a wide variety of people. My inner sociologist enjoyed tracking the responses, and comparing the actual replies to what I figured they would say before I spoke to them. Even though I usually forgot what each person said 30 seconds after they said it, it gave me something to do then, and a way to pass the time. Which is, I suspect, what most of the brighter waitresses, cashiers, etc are doing when they chatter some with every other person who comes along.

he following was written last Sunday night. It's followed by a short update that was written two minutes ago, and can be seen below the dotted line.

I've been happily playing the occasional game of DroD for the last week and a half, and enjoying it. Not enough to play it for hours and hours, but then again I haven't felt like I could afford the time to play anything for hours and hours in many, many months. Drod is an old game, basically a strategy dungeon crawl type thing, and it's got graphics from the 80s. Entirely 2D, monsters created from a couple of dozen sprites, etc. But in puzzle games it's the gameplay that matters, as long as the graphics aren't so actively awful that you simply can't tolerate them. Right?

Drod was providing me with adequate gameplay, for a while at least. I mostly enjoyed the first 7 levels (each level has a couple of dozen individual rooms), finding the puzzles pretty good; challenging without being tedious. However I loved level 8, where I first encountered the evil tar monsters. What was fun about them was that strategy was required, but the tar continually grew and grew, so I had to battle constantly, make every move count, and figure new strategy on the fly.

And then I beat level 8, after hours of enjoyment and thousands of deaths (I never said it was an easy level), and reached level 9. Which I will never, ever complete. It's a different style of play on level 9, one that both frustrates and annoys me. It's not exactly hard, it's just tedious and stupid and pointless. Every room in the level has a few enemies, and you must kill all of the enemies to get credit for clearing the room. The problem is that the enemies, giant roaches in this case, are all locked away behind magical walls. Walls that open when you hit various golden gonging sensors with your sword. The problem is that there are generally a dozen or more sensors per level, each of which opens, closes, or toggles up to four different walls. There's no logic or rhyme or reason to which sensors open which walls, and there's no real danger of dying. It's just endless experimentation with the sensors; endless time trying to figure out which opens what, and in which order you must hit them in, and where you must lure the roaches to advance so the sensors will set them free so you can kill them.

For example. Each of the yellow dots on the right and left effect multiple doors (the yellow squares) and you have to hit them repeatedly, in all sorts of different orders, to open up the doors and lure the roaches out.

The problem with this is that it's not an action game, and not a strategy game at this point. It's become an endless trial and error fiddle-fest, as you try to reverse engineer the room to figure out what totally arbitrary way the level designer created it in.  There's no real skill to this level; it's just endless experimentation. It's not even logic, it's just tedious and boring, since any logical approach to clearing this level would require writing down what every orb does, listing the 50ish doors, and trying to plot out an order to hit the orbs in that would open every door.

When I first saw this room, I just laughed and exited the game. I don't have so much time to game with that I can afford to waste it on something that's no fun.

Some of the levels on 9 aren't so bad, and you can use logic and skill to figure them out without endless experimentation. But way too many of them are just time consuming try and try again memory tests, and they make me unhappy.

I had a couple of levels on 8 that I didn't think I could do, but once I figured how to deal with the tar it was just a matter of proper technique. And I enjoyed them. These on 9 are just frustrating, since I'm not interested in playing a game that requires me to write down long, complicated logic puzzle type "hit sensor 1 and 3 but not 2 or 5, then 4, etc..." sequences. Admittedly, some people are, and I see about 1/50th as many "help me with room X on level 8" threads on the Drod Forums than "help me with room X on level 9" threads. I only needed help on one room in level 8, and it was a typical, "Why the hell didn't I think of that?" sort of thing, once I saw a tip on how to pass it.

Those type of frustrations are fine, since it's something you could figure out on your own, if you just thought about it from the right perspective. It's not like you had to try 50 different ways to clear it, until you found one that worked at random. Which is the case with these "dozens of sensors and doors" rooms.

Ironically, since I wrote the first part of this update I've passed all of level 9, including the shitty room seen above.  What's ironic about it is that all of the rooms on level 9 that looked impossible, such as the one above, were bullshit. They were made to look impossibly-tedious, but were actually pretty easy, if you knew the trick of them. The one pictured above was ridiculously easy, once I found a google-archived forum thread about it. I just had to hit every sensor on the right, and then keep going up and down the ones on the left until every door opened up.

That doesn't make me feel any better about things, though. Why make a level that looks impossible, and should be, given the way it's designed, and then make it ridiculously forgiving and simplistic? It's like having a room filled with spikes on the walls, so many spikes that it would be impossible to pass it, and then letting the player discover that 90% of the spikes are rubber, and that once they memorize which are actually dangerous, they can easily pass the room.

I don't see "relieved that it's just a stupid joke of bad design, rather than actually impossible" as a real good reaction to passing a challenge in a video game.

For a time last week, I was so annoyed by the awful room design on level 9 of Drod that I cast futilely about, trying to find some other game to play. I don't want to spend the time or energy on something entirely new, especially not something complicated that would possibly become addictive. Not while I'm writing several hours a day, and trying to move it up to half a dozen hours a day. So no Warcraft III, even though Malaya bought the War3 Battlechest some weeks ago, but has yet to do more than read some of the manual. She's busier than me with her writing projects. I don't have a working 3D card in my machine anyway.

I haven't paid any attention to any new games in years; I know I'm not going to play them, so why bother? I don't want to buy any games anyway; Diablo II took enough years off of my life. I'm not about to pay $40 for the privilege of not working on things I desperately need to work on ever again. At least not unless/until I finish some big writing project and feel okay about taking a week or three off and having some nonproductive fun. And that's not going to be happening any time soon.

For some reason, my bored "I want to game some but not with anything that'll be that involving." mind fixed upon Warcraft 2 as a likely object. It's sort of a strategic, tactical, puzzle-type game, something like Drod, which I seemed to be in the mood for. Plus I've played it before, and I enjoy it. Tragically, my copy of the game is in storage with most of my other old games, CDs, DVDs, tapes, etc, in Malaya's parents' basement. Malaya has a copy of Warcraft 2 as well... in the same place as mine. The penalty of living in a one bedroom apartment with insufficient closet space rears its ugly head!

Still, since I didn't want to play that much Warcraft 2, I figured the demo would give me a couple of hours worth of fix, and let me get back to more important things. Like blogging about the experience!  Of course the Blizzard.com site didn't have any links to the demo, and neither Malaya's or my copy of Diablo is over here. (I think there was a War2 demo on it, though I wouldn't swear to it.) Her parents' basement claims another dream. Fortunately, I realized that there's this Internet thing, and with the aid of google it didn't take me more than 30 seconds to locate a downloadable copy of the Warcraft 2 demo, even though the game is about 10 years old and copies of the full game can be purchased for about $5.99 at this point.

And you know what? After spending an hour and a half slowly overkilling the few scattered orcs on the three human missions, and having a big platter of nachos supreme for dinner, I felt a lot better. Just as well no copy of War2 was over here, since I'd have just gotten involved in it, and would have spent hours and hours on the later missions, with the slow, precise, tech tree-climbing mage/deathknight-based attack style I enjoy playing.

-------

Since I wrote the above, I was over at Malaya's house on Sunday, and we dug around in the basement and found a bunch more old CDs we wanted to rip to our computers for mp3 fun, and also retrieved our old copies of Warcraft 2. She even got her Starcraft Battle Chest, for good measure.

Fortunately, though I was tempted, I'm really in the mood for writing now, largely motivated by a total lack of finances, and I didn't even install War2 until Thursday night. And then I only played the first three human missions, enjoying the ease of killing on them, and quit there, since while mission 4 isn't especially difficult, it does take quite a while to complete. And that's time I'd rather spend on writing. Or petting Jinxie, for that matter.

I am curious about Malaya's Starcraft and Broodwar games though. I never played SC, other than the demo (which didn't come out for months after the retail game, and wasn't any good either) but everyone says it's like the best RTS game ever.  I like RTS games, in theory, but I can't see putting in the time to play it and learn it.  Perhaps the SP campaigns will be so well designed that I'll ease into the game and be hooked before I know it.  We've also got Warcraft 3 sitting here in the battlechest, and neither of us have played it. I played the beta, some, but didn't enjoy it enough to keep at it. The colors were pretty, but the gameplay didn't feel very intuitive, and it was too tedious with all the micromanagement required.  In fact, most games feel like that to me now.

I've gotten so lazy about gaming; I used to look at a new game with a ton of options and skills and characters and get excited. So much to learn and experiment with! So much variety! Now I see articles about WoW and its half dozen classes and the hundreds of skills and spells and crafts in it, and I think, "Man that sounds like a lot of trouble."

Is this what getting old is like?

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