blakerson.com

Here's a few shots from their Drag nights:



















(The Range Rovers are all from the security guys)

For the sake of perspective, I've been in these roadsters:

-Miata 2nd gen
-Miata 3rd gen (the new one)
-BMW M Coupe (Z3 + hardtop + 333hp engine)
-BMW Z4

I've driven all of those except the M Coupe.

My first convertible experience was behind the wheel of the 2nd gen Miata at the first Mazda Rev-it-Up two and a half years back. It was fantastic. It felt unlike anything else I had ever driven and it felt uniquely Miata-ish. Then I drove the Z4, of which I had high expectations for its better handling, faster engine, better interior refinement, and all the usual bells and whistles we've come to expect from BMW. Honestly, I was left without feeling the kind of magic that I got from the Miata. It drove not unlike my 3-series on the city roads, and while it certainly felt nice to open up, it still wasn't uniquely Roadster-ish to me. I didn't feel like I could stick my hand out and touch the road when I was stopped. I didn't feel like I'd lose control if I pushed the car too hard.

Purists tend to like the Z4 in comparison, because it "doesn't feel claustrophobic." And there's no doubt it's great on the track. But to me, it's too big. It's too loose. It's not even very easy to get in and out of, which reflects the actual size of the car, but it doesn't dart around on the road like a small car should. With that in mind, I was psyched to get behind the wheel of the new Miata...

...and was surprised to find the exact same thing as I did in the Z4. It feels big, roomy, and easy to drive. It's getting the same anti-claustrocity praise the Z4 did upon release, and it bugs me all the same. It's still easy to toss around (I actually ran a really good lap at the most recent Mazda event) but it doesn't feel as raw as the 2nd-gen. To me, these cars feel like a band's album that gets overproduced, or a cute girl who wears too much makeup.

When I learned to drive Roadsters, I learned to enjoy a car that was small and claustrophobic, a car that you had to make sacrifices to drive, but one that rewarded you if you could overlook its faults. Now, the general public has had its way with these cars, and in a word, they're heavy. Too much stuff got put on 'em. They all made space for GPS systems, extra-heavy frames, more spacious interiors, wider dashboards - all stuff that a purist's car doesn't need.

That's why when I come up with the money for a roadster of my own, I'll go get a Z3 of a 2nd-gen Miata. They're older, typically slower, smaller, and have lots fewer bells and whistles, but that's the sacrifice I have to make if my roadster is to make me happy. They might have drab interiors, sure, but between the curvy roads and the open sky, the interior is the last place I'll be looking.

I seriously haven't been doing much of it lately. My mom thinks I'm outgrowing the habit, which scares me because I can't think of what will fill the void in my time and the fun centers in my brain. But I have two big thoughts:

-Hardcore? I'm done with it. I spent a couple weekends lanning with my old clanmates and Q3 buddies, since there's been talk of re-organizing something now that Quake4's out. And while I think Q4 is a very cool and very well-designed game, and it'll be a competitive success, it's not for me. It's *very* demanding technologically, because the Doom3 engine just plain sucks for multiplayer, and at this juncture in my life I don't have the money to drop on a new system, I don't have the stamina in my wrists to endure 2 hours a day of gameplay, and my social life both here at UT and at home in A-town is far too good to put a dent in for the sake of the game.

I do admit that I miss my writing for the scene, and just last week I went onto Archive.org to look what of my old material I could recover. I managed to scrape up about the last 5 of my major articles, most of which were interviews. But even to get back into that would require a certain level of dedication which I just can't put out right now, not to mention regaining press access to the major events while I'm not living in Dallas full-time anymore. Maybe once I'm out of school, if I get real bored, it'll be something to pick back up, but by then I might have enough money to start throwing into cars on a more regular basis and I'll have a new hobby. =p

-Consoles: I miss being into 'em. I've had some of the most gaming fun in a long time being teamed up with my nearest friends, playing Halo together and whooping up on scrubs online. Mikey and I declared our retirement after some of the more recent playlist changes that made the Battle Rifle the starting weapon: they took everything that sucked about Halo 1 (spawning with the game's most powerful weapon) and put it straight back into Halo 2. It's way more fun to sit on the couch with your friends and go at it than it is to idle on IRC, waiting for games, waste time on the computer, etc. etc.

Since Perfect Dark Zero is launching with the Xbox360, my hopes are high, but according to the previews it's a large-team focused game, which is neato but not fun because you can't form a real close-knit team of 4 or 5 guys and there's no potential for individual players to be playmakers. If I turn out to be wrong, or there's a decent scene for 8-12 player games with teams, I'm *so* in, because Perfect Dark could have been one of the greatest games of all time. Oh, and PDZ looks purrrty.

I can't believe this, but I'm having *fun* in school. For the next month and a half I'll have my life consumed by 40 pages of research papers (half over the Japanese surrender in WWII and the other half over the Patriot Act), and I actually have something to look forward to out of that: the second research paper. I just spent an hour and a half doing some preliminary reading on electronic surveillance in the Patriot Act thanks to the EFF and the stuff is *damn* fascinating. If any 'serious' topic is going to lead me astray from my senior thesis on video games, this will likely be it. I wouldn't mind doing this kind of stuff for a day job. It lets me throw together my legal side, my writing side, my techie side and my advocate side all at once. And I'm gonna make a killer presentation on all this stuff; I can already feel it.

That said! The holiday season is coming up, which means several things:

-Parties! I'm contemplating throwing one in a couple weeks while all my roommates are out of town. Anyone feel like showing up? =p

-More Parties! But that's because it's my birthday. Mark December 10th on your calendars for a trip to Austin, because it'll be after classes are over and I'll be 21 and the times will be a-rockin'.

-Blowing holiday money! I got invited back to Spain. Only problem? It's in February. I'm starting to seriously consider going anyway and ditching school for a good solid week to spend roughly 10 days in Madrid, so I can see some of that city while staying with natives for free and catching up on my beautiful Spanish babies.

-Yet more travel! I've got a Plan2 friend named Taylor who's quite possibly the most outgoing dude I've ever met. After we bonded over I'm-not-quite-sure-what, he then approached me about his interest in games and we've thought about stuff like collaborating on theses and stuff. Just last week, though, he said he was going to volunteer for the GDC in April, because he's starting to take up a real interest in the development community. He invited me along for that too, and I'm finding it an invitation that's hard to turn down. A week in San Francisco in April amid some real developers and gamers, at a conference that'll be a really big deal since the next generation of consoles will have started [Xbox360 comes out this month, followed by Revolution next year and PS3 in 2007].

-Gaming? Mikey [my Halo-partner-in-crime roommate] and I officially retired from Halo 2 close to 2 months ago, and we've been frantically searching for a new addiction ever since. We've started picking up some single-player games from the last generation - he's playing Far Cry, and we're co-oping Doom3 slowly but surely. More on my gaming thoughts in a bit.

Who wants to talk about 2-seater convertibles? I do! I've been planning to do a car review on here for a while after I drove the new 3rd-gen Miata 4 weeks ago in Dallas, and the Z4 over the summer. But all of a sudden today, I checked TopGear.com, like I do, and this was on the front page:

The new M Roadster! The original M roadster, basically a Z3 with an M3 engine jammed in it, is still my dream car, because it was a damn-near-holy experience to ride in Mike Belske's back in high school. Now they're doing it with the Z4 (so far just the softtop but expect a hardtop one a couple years down the line), and the current M3 engine's being stuck in it for a ridiculous 333-hp Z4. They're giving it the usual 'M' color (it's a dark, bold red) and this makes me happy for two reasons:

-It's awesome.
-It'll drive down the value of Z3-based Roadsters, and they're already selling privately in the low 20's. Late-model ones even have the same 333hp engine, though they're a little bit rare.

If you haven't already clicked the link, go look at the car and be happy like me.