blakerson.com

I've officially been home a week, and my, my, look what I'm up to:

Online at 4:30am, after a night-long bender with SSB with the boys. This little tradition started the summer before senior year - of high school. This means I've played SSB, and consistently come back, for four years. That's more time than I've put into Quake or CounterStrike. Yet, after these four years, tonight was the first night I have managed to play away an entire night, playing past the point of tiredness, and playing almost until reality starts to lose focus. I haven't done that since I played Goldeneye back in junior high.

Man, this summer is going to rule.

But for the first time, it wouldn't have been over something I lost: a friend, a love, a family member. I guess if I had to connect the reason why back to myself, it would be something I never had in the first place.

I went grocery shopping today. And this Tom Thumb down the street, like many grocery stores, does a good thing and hires some of society's truly most unfortunate people - sufferers of birth defects. The kind that result in physical deformities and incomplete mental development. You know the kind. You've most likely been in such a store before.

But this store has a twist. It just got remodeled - the building and its employees. They all got retrained to be extra polite. Butchers ask you how you're doing; same story with random employees restocking the shelves. Imagine Van Wilder walking into a Hollywood grocery store and you'd get a surprisingly good image of what it was like. Not surprisingly, it's the same story with the cashier and the bagger, a Miss Kim Y. according to her nametag. What looked like a pair of children's sunglasses failed to hide Kim's receded, crossed eyes which I avoided like most people do.

That didn't last. As I took my shopping cart back to take off, Kim said, in a stereotypically impeded voice, "What was your name again?"

And in my stereotypical blakerson(TM) accent (read: unwittingly Texan), I said, "I'm Blake."

"Umblake?" Quickly realizing that with my lazy speech I have no right to describe anyone as "impeded," I nodded and gave her credit for effort. "Have a very nice day," she managed to squeak out.

Enthusiastically, I answered, "Thank you! You too!" just because I'm generally nice to people at stores. After that encounter, I took my cart and rolled out. But by the time I got to the car, it hit me: she got retrained too. Considering how hard it is for most sufferers of stunted cognitive growth to learn anything once, much less twice, I hoped she didn't go through the anti-fairy-tale image that went through my head of a heartless manager of an Arlington grocery store, yelling at her until she said the line and said it right.

It hit me that I had been rushing through that store to make sure the organic crap I bought from Whole Foods didn't get too hot sitting in the back of my BMW. God, it makes me sick just to write that sentence. It hit me, like a sucker punch straight out of Fight Club, that this was not a legitimate concern. It hit me that it's a wonderful, good civilization that can at least give a real life to someone born with such unfortunate circumstances. It nearly drove me to tears that I couldn't do anything to be a stroke of good luck for this young woman.

If I had the kind of money that my friends and family expect me to make 10 years from now, I would have stopped in my tracks and said, "Today's your lucky day," and cut a check for as much as I could stand to give to someone to make their year. $5,000. $10,000. $50,000. And the usual advice that accompanies such ridiculous charity - "Spend this wisely" - could go without being said just once. $50,000 in the right hands can solve a lot of problems. In the wrong hands, it creates many more. But this poor young woman has paid her dues to an extent that none of my known readers ever likely will. But someone in that condition (mind you, one that never goes away) who probably survived multiple years in a Texas public school and still shows up to work every day is not liable to take a cash handout and go throw a $50k crack party. This woman has paid her dues, and she deserves to have some of her problems taken away. For what it's worth, a manager that would hire her probably isn't going to be the nightmare manager I thought of earlier.

Nevertheless, Kim Y. deserves to have something truly good happen for her. And until that very-distant day arrives where I'm pulling down real cash, I'm open to suggestions.

-3 weeks left until LSAT. My brain is on the verge of meltdown, and my score will either be amazing or horrible. Hopefully the assistance of caffeine (which I don't have now) will help me a lot. Studying mucho from here on out.
-Being sleepy. I spent another week in Austin after a short trip home in order to say some goodbye's and help out at Plan 2's graduation. After coming home again it's home-from-school syndrome all over again, which means for the next several days I'm sleeping 10 hour nights and being generally groggy.
-I'm counting the days until I can get my DS Lite. Seriously. It comes out the day before the LSAT, so I'll be making my purchase while I'm still on the way home from the exam in Dallas.
-Driving. I'm planning to hit the track this summer, so give me a ring if you're going autocrossing.
-Being happy that Facebook finally implemented decent mobile support, so now I don't have to check 15 times a day to see if I got messaged/poked/invited to something. Thank goodness.

I'm contemplating selling off all my technological possessions. Computer, laptop, LCD, cell phone, iPod, the works.

Now don't let that scare you, it's so I can buy new ones.

The difference, this time around, would be how they're structured for use. In marketing speak, a "lifestyle" shift. There's good reason for this: All the stuff I have now was bought basically in the mindset I had in high school. Back then, nothing was as important as the game, so I had a high-power, portable desktop that was great for LANs every weekend. I virtually never play PC games anymore, so I need a desktop that's ergonomically friendly and speedy enough to get the job done, burn the occasional DVD, etc. In the next year, I only see myself playing Sin Episodes and Oblivion on the PC, and both of those run on what I've got now. After that, I'm out of the country anyway.

But I digress. Most of the devices I got years ago will still do the things I want to do. It's just that I want to spend less time being connected and have that aspect of my life become more automatic. Back in high school, my way of being social was to hang out on IRC and IM and talk to my friends who were very far away. Nowadays, I don't have the time or the strength of wrists to face my computer for several hours a day, but I still don't want to lose touch with all the friends I keep in touch with electronically.

As an example of how I'm trying to change things, I built the media center computer last year to serve as a TiVo and all-around media player for everyone in my apartment. It's allowed me to do things like watch downloaded stuff in the living room, all the while adding stuff I never had before like PVR functions. It's worked out well, and I'm going to keep using it when I live on my own.

To keep this from getting stupidly long, here's what I want to do and not do:

Do: stay in touch with friends all over the world - email, IM, blogging, reading the news, etc.
Not: spend hours and hours in front of the computer in attempting to do so

So I come to you, amigos, for advice. What's a boy to do? Here are the ideas I have so far:
-Sell off both my Shuttles and build one new one out of quiet parts, while keeping my video card and TV tuner, to place in the living room. Buy a wireless/Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo for couch surfing. If I had the cash, I'd buy a Shuttle M1000 - a quiet, shelf-mounted, fully-functional PC you can use from the couch.
-Get some crazy new smartphone so I can use IM and email from anywhere. New phones like these are the ones I have in mind. Hell, I could even plug it into my car's aux-in port to have in-car phone connectivity or Shoutcast music. It's really nuts what these things can do.

Alternative title: "Blake gets really, really jaded with gaming"

Looking at my E3 post from last year, I was wrong about a lot of things. Gears of War didn't launch with the 360, Call of Duty 2 sucked, and Nintendo hasn't completely lost the plot.

Then again, I was right about a lot of things. 360 has been weak, Sony is a lying bunch of douchebags, and the PC really is in decline. Every couple of years there's an E3 where everyone says "PC gaming is back!" and this year wasn't one of them. Windows Vista stands to ruin computer gaming, hardware is about to hit a dead-end, and there's a serious lack of triple-A titles on the horizon, with the exception for spiritual successors for Diablo and System Shock. Here's my rundown for this year:

Sony: Screw Sony. Seriously. Never before has a pre-show conference actually pissed people off, yet I find myself seething just thinking about the nonsense that was their conference. They showed ****no**** games of substance, every PS3 trailer was again composed of entirely CGI renders (except Eight Days, a possibly-good-looking game that mixed gameplay with CGI, maybe). And even with that, there were no promising titles there. PSP looks like it's going to continue its downhill trajectory. I love the system, I really do, but there's just not a huge wealth of games that do amazing things with the hardware, unless it's the only console you own.

Oh, and pricing the PS3 at 500/600 and having Ken Kutaragi call that "too cheap?" A perfect example of how full of themselves Sony has become. At that price point, all the uneducated yokels who already have PS3s on preorder at Gamestop without having seen actual running games can't *afford* their systems. What's worse, Microsoft has already proven that a two-tier price structure is a bad, bad idea. Every system that retailed for 500 or even 400 in the 1990s (what's up, NeoGeo/Jaguar/3DO) bombed horribly and now Sony's going to bite the bullet unless Final Fantasy 7 gets remade.

Sony might, *might* have one saving grace: Metal Gear Solid 4. The only trailer to show actual in-game graphics, and a game that promises to finish the MGS saga and do so with a game that won't be easy to swallow. After the 15-minute trailer, I'm convinced that Kojima might save the series and create the best game ever made in so doing. All I'm saying is the potential's there, because 2 and 3 sure as hell showed that Kojima can easily fall off his rocker.

Microsoft: *cue sound of crickets chirping* Seriously, when you lead off your conference with Gears of War, a delayed game that's showing itself to be repetitive, it's all downhill from there. MS spent the show trumping the "Live Anywhere" program which will link together your Xbox gamer profile across your 360, your PC (if you're dumb enough to buy Vista) and your cell phone. WTF is this nonsense? I can see MS's vision for a unified gaming structure across all systems. And it's even a half-decent idea, lord knows I wish my cell phone interacted with one of my IM programs or email clients in a two-way fashion. But I have ZERO FUCKING INTEREST in letting all of my friends check my best Bejeweled score from the platform of their choice. Let me say this again: LIVE ANYWHERE WILL BE FUCKING USELESS AND SO WILL WINDOWS VISTA. There, that feels better.

Nintendo: Nintendo, in Halo terms, killed everyone and brought back the flag. Holy hell. Nintendo hasn't had such a good showing since the Nintendo 64 premiere 10 years ago. The Wii and the DS are both positioned to make an absolute killing with their hardware, both have outstanding lineups for the winter and spring, and they're both half the price of their nearest competitors. Need I say more?

OK, I guess so. Wii is showing itself to be living up to the hype. This funky new alternate controller thing opens up a lot of possibilities, but everyone's all psyched about SSB Brawl anyway. I'm personally psyched for the fact that at launch there will be a true new Zelda game, a true new Mario game, and a couple of decent games that demo what the controller can do (I don't care if Red Steel sucks, any game that lets me control guns and swords with the Wii controller has my money.) Oh, and if the tech demos for games like Tennis and orchestra conducting actually make release, they'll have a really curious mass-appeal game on their hands. Hell, my mom will play the orchestra game if it gets released. My *mom*. A 55-year-old executive. Between glasses of white wine and organic dinner, she will conduct the Wii Philharmonic.

But amazingly, this toy which won E3 by itself had a follow-up that was worthy of any E3 winner: the DS. OK, so it's been out for 18 months, but the DS Lite version will finally have enough appeal for someone like me to buy it - not because of the iPod-ish looks but because of the smaller form factor, better ergonomics and much better screens. And when I do pick one up the day after launch, immediately after I finish the LSAT, there will be a huge bunch of innovative, fun games already available, from Kirby to New Super Mario Bros. to WarioWare.

Thanks to Nintendo's E3 run this year, I feel almost as excited as I did 10 years ago when the N64 hype was at the point of meltdown and I made my silly little AOL screenname with exactly that hype in mind. Back then, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning in the middle of May. Now, I was saved from being a jaded, disenchanted soon-to-be former gamer. Well done, Nintendo.