Randomalia

[davidklecha]

1. I’ve seen in myself the tendency to go through phases with things; not with the bright burning intensity of fannish devotion or anything, but with a sort of inertia that gets me moving in one direction or another for a while until something comes along to disrupt it. It’s one of the reasons I think I have a hard time getting into a serious fitness regimen. As soon as the inertia is broken, I can’t get much emphasis behind it, and I get distracted by something else. Also, the thing itself can break the inertia by getting burnt out on it.

In what is nothing resembling a coincidence, I fell off the NaNoWriMo wagon about ten days in.

2. What’s taken the place of writing for the last couple of weeks has been Lord of the Rings Online. Yes, that’s right, I’m so awesomely cool I’m into one of Turbine’s redheaded step-children of the MMO genre. Today they’re releasing their “Mines of Moria” expansion, allowing you to go on the original dungeon crawl, which is pretty cool. If it holds out, they’ll make playable the whole of Middle Earth in phases that follows the progress of the novels. It’s pretty interesting and, very attractively to me, it features no Player Killing. You think that’s a lot of fun, more power to you. Personally, I’d rather enjoy my leisure time rather than watching some hooting dickhole teabag my corpse. Rich Perna taught me a long time ago that there are several orders of magnitude in skill and determination between me and the best video game players out there, which means in head-to-head match-ups, I tend to find more humiliation than enjoyment. So, if I’m going to go larking about some huge sandbox world with a big social aspect and a regular expansion of the playable world, I’d rather do it in a place where the dude standing next to me won’t randomly chop off my head and shit down my neck just for the lulz.

And that goes double for Eve Online.

3. I told my mom today it was probably safe to read my blog and follow me on Facebook and whatnot. I hope she sticks to Facebook.

4. The Genius playlists in iTunes 8 are pretty darn close to Genius. There’s a certain element of just lumping together songs by genre and decade, but while there’s nothing I can point to definitively, it seems a little smarter than that. There are plenty of rock songs, for instance, listed as “Soundtrack” in my library that it nevertheless picked up and plopped in the middle of other, similar songs. Whether that’s just some huge database correlating choices Amazon-style, or some actual analysis of the song’s audio fingerprint, I couldn’t tell you. But it is pretty cool.

5. The office is almost done. Electrical gets finished Wednesday, and hopefully move-in to the new space and a general rearrangement of the house over the weekend. More pics and narrative this weekend, I hope.

6. Some dude named Matt has a nice post up about appropriate use of the word “hate.” I share his sentiments, though not about the schlub he refers to in the middle of the post. Disregard that stuff.

Crossposted with klech.net