More information pending.

Should be in by mid-October.

Need furniture.

And there it is. After all this time waiting. It's black, very expensive, and all of it paid for by my employer without touching my regularly scheduled paycheck. Yippee! And it doesn't really show well, but the entire back half of that case is open and it's at least two feet to the wall back there. I'm taking no chances with enclosed areas. If that guitar hero box would stop falling over there'd be nothing back there but a bajillion cords.

If you look closely at this particular image you'll be able to see all five of my regularly used consoles.... SNES, 64, Wii, PS2 and 360 (my Cube lives in a box now. Poor Cube.) That thingummy near the Wii is a system switcher doohickey, and of particular interest to Shen, that underneath the Indiana licence plate is a poster from the HP7 launch party I went to. Boy it took me a long time to get a picture of that. :roll:

I cleaned my room, just for this picture. Aren't you proud of me?

[Edit: Question Answering]

I got the Elite. *points at picture* Why? Because it's Halo 3 launch week and everything else was sold out. Honestly, I think I got one of the last consoles left in the state. By the next morning's local news half the retailers were sold out completely and Walmart was anticipating having up to a month before they could restock!

For other games, laugh if you wanna, but the first thing I ran out and bought was KOTOR I & II. I never had an XBOX, so I've been beyond itching to play those for years and I'll be damned if I was gonna wait any longer. Pretty much all my other purchases are still in the planning stage. ;) SKATE, Overlord, and Viva Pinata are tentatively planned, along with a bunch of things coming out this fall.

Going online... Probably. At least I hope so. My wireless network is about the worst I know of, and I have no possible way to connect via ethernet, so I'm gonna pick up the adapter and see how it goes. Chances are it'll be mighty laggy and I'll be mighty sad. But then again, my Wii connects alright and is pretty stable, so who knows. Gamertag's SophinaK, although I've yet to upgrade it to Gold, so don't go adding me till I know it'll work.

Shen: we will play something together when I figure out that thar network. For sure.

Zaps: I will dutifully report for my thwomping when GHIII comes out. ;)

Ko: I did forgo Halo 3.

Finally.

It is 360 week. I haven't got the console yet, I'm still waiting one one last gift card to come through so I can say I got my 360 for free. But, I should have that last piece in hand on Monday, and I'll have the console ASAP when that happens...

In preparation, or celebration, or what have you, I went out and picked up some games for the console I don't have yet. Eternal Sonata here I come. *rubs hands together*

:D

Remember that job I applied for a while back? The one in a local college's admissions office? I just got a letter back from them stating that they're done accepting applications and they're going to be starting the interview process soon. It's time to keep my fingers crossed and wait by the phone.

I think Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair/Canticle is one of the prettiest songs I know. It's so pretty as to be nearly painful. Teeth-grindingly pretty even.

The weather this summer has been so capricious. It's dry and humid intermittently. Torrential rain bursts without warning out of sunny afternoons. Today was one of those days. This afternoon was beautifully clear, breezy and bright. I drove to work and just about burned up in my non-airconditioned car. I left the windows down an inch or so, because when I came back out for lunch I didn't want to burn myself on the steering wheel like I do half the time when it's hot like that. A little after four the sky went a funny color. Like the clouds were more vivid than real life, and all colored in weird shades of purple and green. It honestly looked like some kind of special effect from a high budget movie. I started to worry about my car windows. At about four fifteen the sky turned grey and it started to pour. Fortunately, I had my break right then, and I rushed out to shut the car windows, getting completely soaked in the process. I mean, I could not have been wetter had I dived into a lake fully clothed. I only went fifty feet or so from the building to my car and back, and I was drenched.

It was a very bad idea. Next time I will let my car float away before I get that wet with six hours left in my shift. It was one of the coldest wettest experiences of my life answering phone calls in a completely soaking wet state in a building that's kept so cool I sometimes need a sweater even when dry. Will not do that again.

In hopefully nonboring news, I have been spending time with the VC lately. Got ActRaiser and SimCity this weekend, and I've put a couple of hours into each of them. Both good quality purchases. I've spent more time with each of them than I would in a theater if I went to a movie, and the prices are about equivalent, so I consider it money well spent. Especially since I can go back to them anytime I want. And I don't really enjoy movies that much anyway. *ducks inevitable hail of stones* Sim City in particular is a really good game, even after this long. I used to spend countless hours trying to get the coveted megalopolis, and I'm no closer to it this time than I ever was then. Hopefully no monsters will come to smash my nuclear power plants and casinos and amusement parks. It certainly would be bad for my approval rating.

They're tearing up the road I use to drive to work on. Yesterday when I got to the bottom of my million mile driveway there was a flagger standing there not letting me out. This is very unusual for Maine. I live on a tiny small road, so for a flagger to even be around was pretty intense. Then I drove along the small tiny road which was plastered along both sides with giant signs which declared "Multiple Lane Closures! Next 9.67 Miles!" How they can close multiple lanes of a two lane road I do not know. Like seriously. Two lanes. One westbound, one eastbound. How can you close mutliple lanes without shutting the whole road? I dunno. This bodes ill for my commute.

Seems like, with only a few exceptions, it's impossible to have a good argument lately. Whenever a discussion gets to the point of really becoming interesting, suddenly people start to appear with messages like "why do you really care about this, it's clear you're not going to agree..." or "is this really worth fighting about?"

That's not the point. An argument, a constructive discussion, isn't about making the other person agree (although th always sweet when it happens), and it isn't about causing a fight. It's about trying to further your own understanding of a subject through dialectic.

Dialectic (n.) "the art or practice of logical discussion as employed in investigating the truth of a theory or opinion." (dictionary.com)

Dialectic sharpens your mind. What it does is pit your idea, as finely honed as you can make it on your own, agains the ideas of someone else, who's also made them as strong as possible. Like fencing, the idea is to get holes poked in your theory so that you can retreat, learn how to better guard them, and advance again. Argumentation isn't about hostility or even about winning. It's about learning. Other people think differently than you do. No matter how brilliant you are (or think you are) it's a good likelihood that your reasoning on any given subject is flawed if approached from the right angle. How are you to know which angle that is, unless you lay out your ideas for someone else to try on for size? It's hard to criticise yourself because you lack objectivity. Other people provide that vital sounding board, so you can see when you're being misled, or pompous, or just plain silly.

It doesn't matter that nobody's right or wrong. Having a concrete answer isn't everything. That's not the point of a good argument. Let's just see what you think, and you can see what I think, and together maybe we can learn from each other.

...down at my folded hands, and realized they're two distinct colors.

One of my arms is tanned very dark from hanging out the window of my nonairconditioned car every day for the past two weeks. It's been over ninety every day lately, and that's very unusual for Maine, and very uncomfortable when you're driving long distances to work during the hottest part of the day. The other arm is not pasty-pale, by any stretch, but it's a good bit lighter than my left arm. I'm gonna start having to sleep outside in the morning to even myself out.

That said, I made a good start at it today. Spent the whole day outside in the blistering heat (hopefully the blisters are figurative), at a work picnic/barbeque thing. It was over a hundred degrees today, and completely inhumane weather for eating hot grilled foods, but that's the day it was, so that's what we got. Was there to suck up, but didn't get a whole lot of kowtowing in, due to the fact that I just don't like the people I work with very much.

I'm ready for a new job. Still no calls from the applications I did last week. Will be calling back soon to check in. Meant to do it today, but I was stuck at that darn barbeque till too late.

The other night I was driving home from work and there were some deer in the road. Well the first deer kindly got out of my way, and I continued with only a bit of brake-slamming and mild cursing. The second deer leapt out in front of me and then just stood there, like... well, like a deer in the headlights. That particular deer caused me a lot of swerving, tire squealing, and a bit of going off the road into a ditch. The ditch in question was fortunately a very friendly ditch. Nearly flat, grassy, and leading gently into a field. It was an easy ditch to get into, sit for a bit breathing heavily, and then get right back out of and continue. When there were no deer left, of course.

That was scary for sure, but what I saw today made me realize how much scarier it could have been. We've been having a weird summer 'round here. Very hot and dry compared to our usual weather, with just enough heavy torrential rain to cause a lot of road wash outs. As a result there's been more than the usual amount of routine road maintenance going on. Thought nothing of it.

Today I drove past the spot where the deer chased me into the very friendly ditch. That ditch is no longer friendly. It's been dug out to keep the rainwater from washing out the road, and where less than a week ago there was a nice smooth grassy slope, now there is an abrupt four foot drop with a bunch of large sharp spiky rocks at the bottom. And a bulldozer. Scary! How lucky am I that I drove into that ditch last week and not this week? And how scared am I that the deer might come back and I'll wind up at the bottom of that spiky rocky pit next week? *shiver* I feel lucky all over.

In unscary news, T-Mobile continues to impress with their bathroom humor. Gone are the Calvin and Hobbes mocktastic posters. In their place a new poster, intended to celebrate the latest in a string of JD Power awards for customer service... this one reads "We're on a Roll!" And it's plastered, you got it, on the toilet paper dispensers. On a roll, eh? Get it? Get it?!

Lately, I've been wondering about the way my "virtual" life overlaps with my "real" life. These thoughts were inspired, in part, but not entirely by some interesting blogging I've been reading: this from Terranova, a blog that looks at the academic side of online culture, and this from our very own Draqq_Zyxorian. It gets me wondering about why I read what I read, why I go where I go, and why I avoid the things I do.

I've always been a blogger, always been a fan of keeping a portion of my soul bared somewhere on the web. I started off at blogspot, where there was never anyone to read my ramblings, so I moved to xanga, where a bunch of my online buddies congregated while not discussing Tolkien rabidly on the forums I was then frequenting. The killing blow for Xanga came when I realized I was too connected. First my college friends turned up, and while there was a certain cameraderie to that, I also had to discontinue using my blog as a venting point for what was happening in my real life. Then people from my hometown started to appear, and horror of horrors, my employer made an appearance.

I became paranoid and carefully protected every entry, allowing only ten of my trusted friends to have access. More and more of my entries were made private, just in case I wanted to discuss anything even one of my very trusted friends wouldn't approve of. Very soon, I might as well have been keeping a written journal. The very allure of blogging was how shockingly exhibitionist it felt, but nobody wants to be an exhibitionist with their grandma in the room-- that sort of display is for strangers. So I very carefully made a new xanga, with a new screen name I'd never used before, with no reference at all to my old site or my real self. I moved my journal over to it and discreetly invited a few of my old friends from the forum to read my new-improved site. I maintained my old xanga with just a shadow of its former entries to keep up the illusion that I was still writing there. All was well.

And then I received a disciplinary action at work. At the time I was working (just over the summer) at a church-based summer camp as a lifeguard and part-time counselor. It was a job I really enjoyed for the contact with the kids, and just the break in regular life. It was like a working vacation. But when I got called into the camp office to discuss my use of inappropriate language on the internet, it was anything but a good dream. The decision had been reached, they told me, not to fire me; but they did want to make clear that this sort of language was unacceptable for one of their staff, in or out of work. My reputation was damaged and I was going to be closely monitored during the remainder of the summer to ensure I wasn't a bad influence on the kids. The entry they referenced was from my new, secret xanga.

I didn't blog much for more than a year. Kept up appearances on my original xanga, and killed the secret site. Then I found GameSpot, a site so niche nobody from my real life will find me here, and so family friendly that I'm not even tempted to get into anything that needs protecting here. This is the perfect fit, challenging my more academic writing and allowing me to build some friendships without feeling that need for overemotional ramblings that pervade networking sites like myspace.com and Facebook.

The point of this longwinded story, of course, is the complete shattering of the illusion that what I do online doesn't matter. There's a common perception that the realm of online is free from interference from the real world, protected somehow. It's Draqq's magic circle working in reverse. We are protected from the inappropriate content of certain games by the closed off and mutually understood nature of play, but where is the return protection my actions in a closed sphere have from my everyday life? Isn't that the way the barrier works? Puppies don't act aggressive with their superiors when they're not playing, but as a logical consequence, they're not disciplined for the agression they've shown in play. Maybe in previous years, before internet access was something everybody's grandma had, this would have been true. Maybe back in the days where IRC and ICQ were the ways you connected, and xanga, myspace, and Facebook had yet to be dreamed up, before MMOs made "out of character" the standard, it would have been possible to have your life online only intrude on reality when you chose for it to do so.

The only spheres where the separation is complete are those where you're all alone. You can't have outside intrusions interfere with your enjoyment of Final Fantasy X--there's no other player there to spill secrets, refuse to cooperate, or report you to your boss. But even in the range of the completely isolated you can't be guaranteed not to have any outside intrusions. Otherwise why did I have to limit myself to my own blog and the blogs of a trusted few friend during the days leading up to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' release? Like most everyone who wanted to experience the book firsthand, I had to seriously limit my online activities to avoid the everpresent spoiler. Even email wasn't safe, and I know Korubi had the ending of the Half-Blood Prince spoiled on the main page of GameSpot's forums. I strenuously avoided all mention of the book on my own blog to avoid drawing stray comments, and limited myself strictly to the sites of those friends I knew were doing the same.

There's no circle that allows me to disconnect from my real life by going online, and no way left to keep my online self protected from encroachment by my real life connections. So how connected is too connected, and what's become of a private space where you can share a bit with friends and know it will end there? And what's to become of these separate circles--or is the line completely blurred?