I have a quick question: What happens if, while playing poker, somebody dies at the table with an open hand? Does that count as a fold? Is the hand re-dealt? Does anyone get to see the dead man’s cards, or do they go back into the deck face down? What happens to the pot, and the dead man’s bets?
I’m sure Vegas has rules for such things, but I’ve never seem ‘em.
And, on a completely unrelated note, the brother-in-law hooked me up with a copy of Fallout 3 for Christmas, and I’ve been playing it nonstop ever since. Sure, it’s not quite as expansive as Oblivion (which I loved to death and played through twice), but it’s one of these games that seems to pull you right in and sucks the life from your very marrow. I find it difficult to put down. I swear, I’ve only managed eight hours of sleep these past two nights. I feel like a zombie but I’m dying for another fix of this accursed game.
It’s funny how these addictions seem to catch you when you’re most unprepared. Heh…
Forgive me if I cut this entry short. After twelve hours at work today I have naught the willpower nor the energy to focus on any one topic. It was, to put it mildly, “one of those days”. I blame the developers for this rotten day. Seems we have some new people who can’t QA their code worth a darn.
I think I’ll toss back a beer tonight and give a listen to Mewithoutyou‘s album It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright. If you dig The Decemberists, give Mewithoutyou a shot.
Having been flipped the bird in recent days, I’ve been thinking about the various ways in which the iconic “finger” is used. It occurs to me that there are two major styles to the “one finger salute” that everyone uses, and like it or not your hand unconsciously favors one over the other.
Finger #1: “The Traditional”: Favored by hard-drinking bikers, lumberjacks, and brutes of varying intelligence levels, this style is much like a closed fist with one angry digit doing its mightest to poke conformity in the eye. It’s used as a blunt tool in an equally blunt world. With no instruction or previous experience this universal symbol can easily be thrown in the heat of any argument.
Finger #2: “The Cosmopolitan”: This twist on “The Traditional” requires a bit more dexterity and forethought, and lends an air of hipster dissatisfaction with a prudish bent. Preferred by drunk sorority girls, supermarket cashiers, and published authors this finger tells the world to eff-off with a sophisticated flair missing from “The Traditional”.
Personally, I favor “The Traditional” over “The Cosmopolitan”. The Cosmo seems to send more of a pretentious message that tends to escalate tense situations quicker than the Traditional does. The Cosmopolitan conveys more of a flippant “screw you”, which makes one more of a target for a sucker punch. With the Traditional, words tend to get exchanged and combatants size each other up before the dancing commences.
Oh, BTW, the finger that was thrown to me a few days ago…Traditional!
…that I’ve been seriously slacking on the posting this week. My lack of ambition, motivation, and drive have been sucked dry by work. It’s strange how, after a long vacation, things tend to stack up when you’re not looking. I’m afraid my once shining example of what one man can do given a infinite amount of time and a grip-load of anonymity has spiraled out of control, reaching an ever-deepening, suffocating nadir.
But tremble and cower before my pitiful blog, for next week I bring some very interesting news from the family front. And no, it’s not about the bum fight I saw on the street corner yesterday (even though I did have $5 on the guy with the crazy beard), nor about the hitchhiker walking down the freeway at one in the morning sportin’ an impressive mohawk. Tune in on Monday for the nasty, dirty details.
And so, in honor of this wasted week, let me present you with 100 of the greatest hits of youtube. This sort video packs more entertainment in four minutes that I have all week long…
So, instead of doing some much needed housework, prepping the guest room to make way for baby, or doing any number of constructive tasks around the house this weekend, I shirked my responsibilities and opted to back up anew my music collection to five external hard drives. I’ve made so many changes to my master library as of late that simply copying over the changes to my various backup hard drives was not an option. Turns out that pushing 196+ GB over a USB 2.0 line takes six hours. Due to my lack of SATA / FireWire cables I couldn’t daisy chain the lot of them together and make just one big rapid push.
After a few failures, stops and starts, and a Blackberry falling from the heavens and hitting a unique series of keys that killed one backup job (Heh…I swear it wasn’t me!) I finally got all of my backups completed. In the end, I felt stretched and spent, just like Peter Griffin after he watched The Ring:
I’m now in the process of making duplicates of my MAME games for a co-worker. I’ve completed copying five of the 14 DVDs. It’s a hard core collection of games to be sure, and the duplications will continue throughout tomorrow.
Whilst in the midst of this Herculean, marathon backup undertaking, I’m reminded of what Tyler Durden once said. ”The things you own end up owning you.” I feel as if my data is pimping me out, slapping me across the face with the back of its hand while screaming, “Where’smymoney?!”
Ahh, but there I go again, anthropomorphizing my computer. Next thing you know I’ll be dressing up as a vintage Macintosh, attending furry conventions, and looking for the nearest yiff pile to dive into (God, why do I know such things?).
