A Snag in the Addiction

Last night I ran into a snag in the addiction front. Despite the claims that The Longest Journey is one of those games you can never die or get stuck in, I managed to get stuck. To make a throughly incomprehensible story even more so, I managed to get out of the police station in chapter 3 without grabbing the can of soda. And THEN...then I wasn't able to get back in. Pisser. I'm sure you're bummed too.

No worries. I had to revert to a previously saved game, which isn't so bad save for the fact I hadn't been saving at any regular interval. In fact, I was only saving 1 game, overwriting the previous save each time I played. The only reason I had any history is because the game had trouble overwriting that particular save. Thankfully, I will only have to go and replay 5 or more scenes, as opposed to the whole game, something I'm not thrilled with the prospect of. In all, it will server as a lesson learned, telling me I should have a few states saved for just this eventuality. Hey, it happens.

So I replayed a few scenes and then said fuck it and went and had a few beers. I started off with an Anchor Christmas Ale, which was ok but really not all that special, despite the name of "Our Special Ale." My second beer was a Three Floyds Alpha King Pale Ale. This was a great beer, instantly making it into my Keeper list. I even wrote my first Beer Advocate review when I was done. I currently have 4 beers on my Keeper list, this beer and 3 from Dogfish Head (Indian Brown, 90 Minute IPA, and Raison). This list can only grow right now.

The Rules of Commuting

There are certain rules that the commuter is supposed to adhere to. When I say "supposed to" I mean by definition of me. I make the rules. Anyone who rides on a train, bus, or subway will agree with my rules. They are few and very simple:

1. Shut the fuck up.
2. Walk in a straight line.

That's it. The 2 obvious violations of these rules are when people talk, and walk sideways. The talking one is obvious. When a train full of people is trudging towards the city (I would love to use the word "rocketing" here but the train almost never operates in such a manner), and the vast majority is either reading or sleeping, it should be pretty obvious to most people that common courtesy would dictate you shut your big fucking pie hole.

And for the most part this happens. But when you get a car full of 100 or more people, all it takes is one moron to ruin it for everyone. You might think that it takes 2 to tango, but it is certainly possible to talk on a train without disturbing everyone in a 30 foot radius. That's why you often seem to hear people talking to themselves on a train. The conversation partner has a freaking clue how to verbally communicate without letting the whole goddamn car know what you ate for dinner last night. Here's a clue: we don't care.

There are exceptions. The holidays, with the endless streams of kids, will be impossible to get around. How can you tell a kid to sit and stay quiet for an hour? You can't, so you either deal with it or wear headphones. If you want to read, chances are you're going to need a lot of concentration to get past the din of post-holiday-show children as you go home. Holiday children never take the 6:55 into the city. So only going home is a problem.

The other issue is walking, and this is why native New Yorkers hate everyone else. I'm not a native New Yorker, but I understand how to walk. All it takes is a week to see that you should walk the way you're facing, and look before you walk. The holiday season is the worst for this, especially at Penn Station when the vast majority of people seem to think that the way to walk is to look left, then blindly walk right. You may think I'm making this up. But spend 10 minutes in Penn Station near the holidays and you'll soon see what I mean.

But this is something that happens all the time in the subways - you just see it more in the holiday season. People will walk on the platform, then stop, blindly ignoring the fact that any number of people were following them. Here's a newsflash: The world doesn't revolve around you, asshole.

That's the core issue here, which is the same core issue of so many of the problems in society. While I could give 2 shits for the most part, these are 2 things that irk me on a nearly daily basis. Today, 2 women who ride the train every day sat near me and blathered away for most of the ride. Luckily, the book I was reading (Rabbit, Run) was engrossing enough to keep their incessant noise at bay. But that's not always the case.

Anyway, if you commute, and you read this, and you don't know rules of commuting, you should learn them. Now.

New Year's Resolutions

I don't make New Year's Resolutions. But then again, everyone does. Anyone who isn't trying to constantly better themselves in some way is brain dead. The rest is a matter of semantics. Maybe you wake your fat ass up every January 1st and declare that your jeans must fit better. Why bother, since this is the same resolution you made last year? Maybe you should try something else, like juggling. At least next year you can have a new New Year's Resolution.

So what the new year brings is usually a honing of your resolutions. Or rather, a snapshot of what you want to do right now, this immediate moment. To that end, I'm going to list my New Year's Resolutions as they come to me right now, at this instant. For the year 2006, I resolve to...

1. Get a cup of tea.
2. Eat an orange in a few minutes.
3. Go take a look at the only cute girl on the floor when I go get a cup of tea.
4. Get myself home safely so I can resume an addiction I blame my wife for, the playing of the game The Longest Journey (wiki). She got me the game for Christmas.
   
5. Complete some menial task to convince myself I'm not totally wasting the day surfing.

I guess that's about it. Sure, I could say something trite like "lose weight" or "learn how to free Tibetans with a can opener," but frankly, I'm never going to be a GQ model and I don't much care to waste a perfectly good can opener on wide-eyed experiments. If you made me come up with a list of things that I'd like to accomplish this year, it would be something like 2000 miles on the road bike, 40 mountain bike rides, learning some more useful programming skills (default career enhancement requirement), to drink better beer (not terribly hard), to write a little more consistently, to do 50 pushups at once, mount a pair of C-cup breasts on my bedroom wall, and so on. A responsible human being would also resolve to have a happy and healthy baby this spring but that's a hope, not a resolution. It's not like I can alter that future.

So the biking and beer drinking added with the current addiction and a baby on the way will probably equate to a year of beer drinking and video game playing, with less sleep than I want. That's ok. If the games are as good as TLJ and the beer is as good as the Indian Brown Ale I had last night, I'm going to be a happy (and possibly fat but BFD) camper in 2006. Here's hoping that your goals for 2006 might be as easily attainable as mine appear to be.