Sunday, June 25 (posted later)
Must. Have. Sleep.

Oh well, maybe I can get this written before crashing. I did say I'd update yesterday. There was all sorts of stuff I was going to write about too, but most of it's sort of slipped away.

I went to Minneapolis Thursday afternoon with my dad (it's a 6 hour drive, and I didn't really have anything better to do than help drive it). Wandered around the Mall of America for an hour that night. (Build it the size of a small town, name the parking garages after states, put an amusement park in the middle of it, and you've got... A bigass mall. What the success of this thing says about American culture I prefer not to dwell on.) Came home Friday afternoon after sitting around an office reading a novel all morning while my dad was in a meeting.

Along with that novel (a copy of The Litany of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe), I got the latest issue of PC Gamer, which I haven't read in ages. I was pleasantly surprised. The ad count seems to have gone down to something tolerable, and it's still a decent mag. The really impressive thing, though, was the cover disc - they managed to get permission to distribute a dozen old but undeniably classic games. Stuff like the original X-COM, Wing Commander tweaked to run at normal speed and sound better, and Ultima Underworld.

I've been playing Ultima Underworld, one of those classics I missed the first time around. I'm impressed. This is a game that featured a 3D world with slopes, stairs, swimming, jumping, dynamic lighting, and a mouse based interface that actually doesn't suck, all of it integrated with the standard trappings of an RPG. In 1992.

There was a big (well, big is a relative term) celebration in Laurel over the weekend for the school's hundredth something or another (100th graduating class, I think, which would've been us - what I can't figure out is did they graduate a class the first year there was a school here? And does anyone actually care? Right, that's what I thought).

There were a bunch of alumni in town, the usual small town celebration kind of thing. Complete with a parade consisting of old cars and tractors, and all that crap. They dedicated the new football field / track, which I have to admit is pretty nice. There were fireworks afterwards, which were actually remarkably good, probably the best I've seen short of the time I was in Washington on the 4th. Then there was a dance, which was remarkably bad. The kind of thing where you have a mediocre band who're wasting what little talent they might have playing bad early 80's pop, and some distance away you have large clusters of people standing around with beer and talking about how much the dance sucks...

Which just about brings things up to the present.
(top)

Thursday, June 22, 11:13 CDT

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment. - Robert Benchley

Ok, real update tomorrow or Saturday. Meanwhile, have a big list of links culled from recent additions to my bookmarks:

Oh yeah, and Points of View is coming along nicely. Still some minor bugs to work out, but there's some actual content there now.

tags: fantasy, guy-gavriel-kay, reading

p1k3 / 2000 / 6 / 25