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May 22, 2008
Shooting Threes Like the Ray Allen of Old
Remember me? I'm that guy who writes here occasionally. Like Staind said, "it's been awhile." They had a hit song roughly around the time of my last entry, it feels like.
John Lennon once said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making plans." But he lived before the age of blogs, since he undoubtedly would have said something along the lines of, "Life is what happens to you in between blog entries," were he around in this day and age. (He also would have personally killed Simon Cowell after Season 1 of "American Idol," but that's another story altogether.)
So here's what's been happening since last I wrote...
I've played "Grand Theft Auto IV." Not finished it, but played it. About 15 hours in to the game, and while I wasn't a fan of previous installments, I'm a fan of this one. I especially like how you have to maintain friendships in the game in order to more successfully complete missions. To wit, I learned a valuable life lesson a few nights ago. I learned that if you take out a girl, and you take her to a bar, and you try to drive her home while drunk, and you happen to start off shooting your Uzi halfway to her place, yea, she totally doesn't like that. Took me ten tries to get her to return my calls. But then, I'd wiped out half of the Albanians in LIberty City, but I wasn't the same man I was before she stopped sending me straight to voicemail.
I've listened to Bill Simmons' excellent podcast with Chuck Klosterman. Talk about two heavy hitters going at it, and two of my favorite writers. I must confess that the podcast did not live up to expectations until the end, where Chuck turns the tables, starts asking Bill questions, and completely confounds Simmons in the process. As if listening to that wasn't great enough, the majority of what followed was an analysis of the writing process itself, a topic I found fascinating. At one point, Klosterman makes the astute observation that what a writers finds compelling about his/her process is far different from what a reader finds compelling. I thought that was both an obvious and yet brilliant observation. Listen here if you're intrigued.
I've almost got divorced thanks to "Final Fantasy X." Yesterday, I was under the weather, didn't feel like playing GTA, but wanted a few hours of gaming under my belt lest I have to watch Oprah or something. So I popped in FFX, which I hadn't played in a few weeks, and I sporadically played for the rest of the night, usually when the wife was doing something else. At one point, though, I started what turned out to be an insane slog from one checkpoint to another, during which Mrs. Me went from "casually annoyed" to "I'm looking up numbers for lawyers" in about 30 minutes. If you don't know the game, it's a turn-based role-playing game that involves lots and lots of random battles. It got to the point where Mrs. Me would count the number of seconds down until the screen "crashed," signalling battle mode, and then hurling swears at me, the game, and the universe as a whole. It's enough pressure battling flying fire demons without fear that your significant other is in the other room packing her life's possessions.
So, like, what have YOU been up to lately?
Posted by Ryan McGee at May 22, 2008 10:18 PM