blakerson.com

Psychologically, I think I'm ready to head back to Austin. I've started to miss hanging around them in the last week or so, and the food, and the complete freedom of schedule I have there, and my cozy little dorm room. I'm about as close as I'm going to get to caught up on sleep, and I've spent the last several days doing close to nothing - watching anime and playing guitar and Mario Kart. It's bringing me ever closer to that wonderful geek holy grail that most of the world calls carpal tunnel syndrome.

Oh, and praise be to whoever decided to make it not cold anymore. I'm headed to the West End tonight and I did not to be wandering around those streets in the sub-freezing cold. So instead, it's 75 outside. Thanks, weather gods, I appreciate. I could really stand to take a spin but I'm driving my car in a couple hours anyway and the BMW's unavailable since mommy's at work.

Eh, I'm bored enough, I'm going cruising anyway.

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owning a capo.

ca - po (n): Clamp that goes on guitar so as to transpose all six strings at once.

In the span of an hour I've already learned to play Not Myself and Howie Day's "Sorry So Sorry."

I am very happy.

So the tabloid the New York Post put up a giant rant on videogame violence and how the president of Take Two (a publishing empire - they own Rockstar, which published the Grand Theft Auto games among others) is such a shmuck. Then along comes a giant charity effort designed to bolster the image of gamers everywhere and no media coverage happens. Read the report from Penny Arcade.

After about three hours of painful labor, all the posts from my little self-run snagger.org have been moved over to Blogger, with their dates kept true to their original entries. Times were ignored [that'd be way too much work], but posts from the same day are still in chronological order. The new posts expand from 02/2002 to 12/2002, which covers the last half of my junior year in high school, the first half of my senior year, and the summer between. So, archive crawlers, enjoy that stuff, some of it's pretty interesting.

Oh, and since it's the new year, I'd like to take this opportunity to say:

Thanks!

to you, the wonderful reader. I know who most of you are, some of you are people I know and love and still read without my knowledge, but all of you (except the odd bored surfer) are near and dear to my heart. But it really does make me warm and fuzzy to hear occasional things brought up about what you kids see on this here place. Here's to two and a half more years on the blog.

It's the first post of 2004, and I'm twirling around this virtual noisemaker exactly once in celebration.

There, wasn't that fun? Oklahoma was a grand time. Got to see the brother and Karol (I'm starting to really love Karol's cooking), and eventually Kelly (the NY Times writer cousin) and her mom Karol (another one), and the old grandfather. While waiting on pizza, the three of us youngins snuck peeks through the family photo albums, which were a riot. After pizza and the Holiday Bowl travesty, Kris taught us to play poker so I can finally play a game sometime back in Austin.

Also got my first ticket on the way up. State troopers are Nazis between Decatur and Wichita Falls and they nabbed me for 10 over. Sigh. Bring on the defensive driving, yippee.

After a pleasant night at Kris's, I packed my stuff and headed home and prepared for the killer New Year's Eve party. Killer it was, and I spent the day following just kind of waiting for the chance to go to sleep. Over at Alex's, I stopped by and started the anime Spriggan with him and Aroon. The visuals and sound were nothing short of amazing, but the action was so friggin' cheesy I couldn't stay awake any longer and came home at 9:00. I went straight to bed and managed to get 13 hours of sleep before my allergies woke me up. And so I sit here, feeling great for the first time in a while.

It's a great day to feel good, too. It's just gorgeous outside. This is one of those days when I need to beg/borrow/steal the BMW and go for a drive and just relax. I could stand to do that, too. But for now, I'm busy amusing myself by reading my archives. At the very end of 2001 (that's two years ago), I had this girl named Abby stuck on my mind, as well as another girl who called herself Abby just for kicks. Right as the drama gets interesting, the whole thing gets cut off when the archives jump straight into February 2002, since I just never bothered to post what ended up happening (I still remember: the real Abby blew me off and the so-called Abby decided I was a jackass). Then the rest of 2002 gets cut off when I moved to my own system. That gives me a project for the day: move the posts from my database over to Blogger so I can have a complete website here.

I have a lot else to be happy about, too. Here's what I'm playing and spinning at the moment:

Music: I've rediscovered Hooverphonic, and their latest album Jackie Cane is a real work. It's got a different, more lively style, but their ability to take disparate ambient sounds and make good songs out of them is classic Hooverphonic. I'm on a Ben Folds kick lately; whenever a song comes up in random play I tend to really like it.
DVD: Michelle's totally my hero for getting me a copy of John Mayer's Any Given Tuesday. That, with Dress to Kill, has got me totally DVD-happy. Yay DVD.
Games: I'm strangely addicted to Need for Speed Underground. It's basically an arcade racer that would be a perfect videogame translation of The Fast and the Furious. The game's really fun for two reasons: the many many game modes and car customization. Pure racing also gets thrown in with drag and drift racing, both of which are crazy fun. Car customization is sweet because the mechanical, performance tweaks are greatly simplified (your car just levels up in categories like Intake/Exhaust, Turbo, ECU, etc.) and the exterior customization has tons of options. Almost all the customizations are insanely rice but it's still possible to make a nice-looking ricemobile that truly is fast. My ridiculously-fast Miata has a bunch of sweet Unique touches to it that make it look crazy cool.

OK, on to converting those old entries. I'll post when it's done.