I'll have things to say about class, but I'll say them after class. For now, I have 15 minutes to kill, so here's an ICQ I got from Marechal:

So I am reading in this economics textbook, Marius ... and everything I am reading says regulation is bad. They've got graphs and charts and stuff proving it. So then I'm like ... "Well, duh." Call me a Republican, a capitalist, and a patriot, but yeah .. ... so I don't understand how you can be so pro-regulatory with minimum wage laws and lots of taxes and rent controls and welfare. It's bad economics. What am I missing???

What's missing is, essentially, two things. First is the lessons of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which in short form tell us that unrestrained capitalism is enormously detrimental to people and society; combined with the second, which is 250-300 years of political philosophy that tells us, essentially, that the duty of government is to provide the best possible deal to as many of the people it governs as possible.

We'll deal with the second concept first. It is essentially the ideal that the United States was founded on. Life, liberty, the persuit of happiness, no taxation without representation, etc, etc. Extrapolate this to the French Revolution and others throughout the world. Along with that goes a lot of earlier Enlightenment thinking, the English parliamentary movement, and a couple of others that escape me. The point is that modern government is built on the idea that it exists to serve the people.

Back to the first concept. The lesson that can be picked up from the Industrial Revolution is that business cannot be trusted to look out for the well-being of it's workers. Whether government actually looks out for the well-being of the governed is debatable, but we KNOW that business can't be trusted. That's as true of the 1870s as it is today - contrast the robber barons with Enron, frex. But we have minimum wage laws to provide a living wage to workers, because business, left on it's own, will not provide this - note the 19th century's company store syndrome for one, child labor records, and unsafe/unhealthy working conditions.

And it's classtime. More later.

Hurt like hell. Read on.

So I just got back from my first class.

"But Erik, it's 10pm!"

Yes, it is. I went to class at 7. Yeah.

Good stuff, though. History of 20th century science. It's something I know comparatively little about, so it should be fairly interesting. We can but hope.

But the bulb in the projector, see, wasn't doing so hot. And it's one of those newfangled computer ones, see, that project straight off your computer. Good times. Except when they start going out, and the screen turns red, then goes all RGB pixelated and crap. For three hours, in bad lighting. Ow. Ow ow ow.

And tomorrow, we get to wake up at 8:30, go to class at 9:30 for an hour and a half, get an hour and a half off, go back at 12:30 for 3 and a half more hours, get an hour off, and then go back until 6:30.

Do we love life yet? Oh yeah we do.

I would like to note that there is, in fact, a Hell, and in Hell there is a special place reserved for the people responsible for allowing the student parking lots here to be used as visitor parking during the football games, which means I am currently parked in the middle of nowhere.

There is also a special place reserved for those people who brilliantly decided that we don't need more parking, when in fact this is not the case.

There is also a very extra special place reserved for whoever it was that last year decided that the student lots were SO special, we had to move our cars during games, or they'd get towed. Yay for that particular thing lasting all of one game.

There is also a special place reserved for OSU Parking Services (services? They give me services?) for charging me $120 for a parking permit.

Fuckers.

Speaking of burnination, this was way too much fun.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/trogdor.html

Quoth Cole, in reference to Terminator 2:

"And Trogdor laid firey burnination upon the playground."

Which of course makes more sense if you read Strongbad. And watch T2, but we've all seen T2, here, right? Right?

You, in the back there. I saw that. You're in trouble. We're coming for you.

Also, the Battletech section over there on the right has actual content now. 'coupla mechs, 'coupla aerospace fighters, and my very own Snow Raven unit, complete with a good amount of fluff. 'bout time it made it up.

Listening to A Perfect Circle's Thirteenth Step right now. I'm ambivilant about the album as a whole, but that's because I'm used to Mer de Noms and it's not, and because I'm addicted to the third track.

"With your halo slipping down..."

(our, uh, floor theme is "At the Beach" this year, if you were wondering. *shrug*)

Not much happening, really. Met a few people, went to MW:DA where I got my head handed to me twice, then proceeded to do major league stompage in a game that involved:

The Bannson's Legionnaire charging Malisa Nova Cat and missing the 10-to-hit charge.
Malisa Nova Cat retaliating with a full alpha strike.
A Bannson's peasant company pulling off a 17-to-hit capture on my Scorchers.
A Bannson's peasant company needing a 17 to capture my Po tank in hindering, and missing by 1.

Me getting my first full sweep in a long, long time. Good fun.

Back here in the real world, the main event is...monster cookies are back! After five years, they're back! Soft cookie goodness, for only 99 cents! Happy! Happy!

Well, here we are. Back in Corvallis. Back at OSU. Back at Callahan. Back in 322. The fifth year for the most of it, the third year for the room.

Movein was decidedly non-suckful. We all knew what to do, knew where it all went, and it was all accomplished inside of an hour. The RAs are mostly either the old crop, or people I knew before, so about every five minutes it was like "ERIK! YOU'RE BACK! GREAT!"

It's good to be loved. ;)

Of course, last night I got really tired at midnight after the packing fun, and decided to go to bed...

Life utters the words 'refresh'

You feel suddenly awake!

Doh.

So I was up until 3:30am, got up at 7:30am, and was really freaking tired all day until I got that nap in. This is good.

And apparently the freshmen have begun their social networks without my interference, such that nobody has stopped to say hi yet. That's new and different.

For those of you who remember the little review of a book called 1632 a bit back...

Picked up 1633 yesterday. Read it pretty much in a day and a half. It's bigger than the first book. This is good, in ways. The world is much more fleshed out, now, along the lines of Island in the Sea of Time. And there are plans for an obscene number of new books. This can be nothing but good. OTOH, the story sort of dragged. I suspect it's a setup book for 1634, but...

Oh well. Good times.

Also, before the Blakist whacking rituals, we saw Terminator 3. This was good. T3 is good times. But not as good times as T2 was. T2 is...damn. Quite a movie. Whereas both T1 and T3 were sort of...good. But not great. The T-X sucked, IMHO. Hot, of course, but the T-1000 was far more badass. John Conner going somewhat around the bend was kind of neat, though. And it amazes me that they found three actors who look very similar to each other, for each incarnation of John, plus dad.

And I go back to school on Tuesday. This is...good, I think.

So we played the second session of our MW3 game tonight. Wherein after being massively dropped on by Blakists, and all nearby settlements blown up with nuclear weapons, Our Heroes run to the hills, where they recruit a few conscripts for La Resistance: The back hills hick with half a machine shop, the random investment banker, the random doctor, and the random hillbillies with 4 kids, one of whom is their only ICE engine repairman.

So while half the PCs stay back to guard the fort and build stuff, the other two take off in the investment banker's Lamborghini aircar to scout out the main town in the area. As it turns out, they're spotted by Blakist air patrols, and a squad gets sent out to arrest them. Well, the one of them pretty much pulls a Terminator (we just saw T3 today, btw. It owns), whips out his mech-class multibarrel 50 cal MG and takes down most of the squad in a hail of bullets, while the other guy runs over another Blakist with the aircar (who lives, amazingly, and even fights for a round), then crashes it into a jeep and gets knocked out. And the other guy takes down the rest of the squad, takes a prisoner, and that's that. And I'm being like "Damn, that was good moving there."

Except they got greedy. Had their prisoner call in a Blakist medivac chopper to take it over, then called their own base to get their own chopper in to strip it. Well, the Wobbies intercepted the latter transmission. Sent another squad in a gunship. Squad lands, gets owned in a firefight with the party, then the choppers open up, killing half the party. Right as the PC chopper arrives, takes down one chopper, but gets shot down by the other. They try to shoot down the other one, but it kills them. End of session, end of characters.

So we'll see what they come up with. All I know is, no matter what, this shit is fun.

Well Toast, this one's for you. I was going to reply in the comments, but it sort of outgrew that, so:

yeah, I sorta remember us talking about Iraq quite a bit... interesting how you already back then never used al qaeda as an argument, while the entire press was basically screaming about it constantly. Good thing :)

And does anyone but me see the irony in vetoing that resolution? France, Germany and Russia?!?!? Bah I say, bah!

The Iraq debate was an interesting one. Knowing what I know now, I'm not sure I'd have said all of what I remember saying, but.

I never used AQ in my arguments because it was abundantly clear to me even then that no matter what the administration was saying, the links between the two were weak at best, and frankly we had a lot better reasons to be doing the thing. Like WMDs. And me, I still believe that Saddam WAS trying to work on the things, trying to hide...something. He clearly had no intention of complying with the UN. It worries me that we haven't found much, but it was a good reason.

There are also the reasons of Saddam just being a really bad guy in general, our continuing low-grade war there, and a particular need of ours to have a state in the Middle East that will showcase democracy in the region and give us some sort of friend there besides Israel, who isn't exactly the one we want to be showcasing, and the Saudis, who, well, aren't. Much less assorted other undemocratic bunches. And I guess when it comes right down to it, I viewed, and view all of those reasons as being good ones. All of this spewing about "pre-emptive war" is, I think, a disguise. Nations will do what they want in the end, anyway.

And of those, long-term, the democracy one is going to be big. Because I think this is it. This is the West (including Europe, here) versus extremist Islam in Cold War II, which is likely to be more of a hot war than the last one. And we're going to be here for probably much of our lifetimes.

Which isn't to disguise the fact that the Bush administration has done a horrible job of going about diplomacy. I had always sort of thought that vaguely, but poking around Wes Clark's website and thinking a bit on the 90s, it occured to me that Clinton would have found a way to get Europe on board and doing more or less what he wanted anyway. Bush made a little stab at it, but not really. And that's a bad, bad thing. And even Bush is starting to realize that. He'll be lucky if he gets anything. Were I the UN, Europe in general, I'd probably tell him to fuck off just out of spite, which may well be what they're doing. I don't like it, but can't really blame them.

The problem, of course, is that in the coming election, we've got a foreign policy choice ranging from Bush on the one hand to a whole range of Democrats on the other, ranging from pure isolationism (yeah, that'll work...) to the pretty good ideas of Edwards and Dean, to Clark, who's got about the only worthwhile game in town that I can tell. OTOH, we know Bush's domestic record (hurty), Edwards and Dean who have pretty good ideas, and Clark, who so far as I can tell hasn't got one yet.

We shall see.

This is a particularly sad bit of news. Firstly, I'm all for democracy, but I live in the same country as any number of very stupid people, and this saddens me. Secondly, just a TAD late there, eh Mr. President? Because it would of course be horrible of you to make the statement back when it mattered, like, oh, before the war, when everyone was chanting "Let's go bomb Iraq because they helped with 9/11" and you were saying shit about how Al Queda and Saddam were working hand in hand, now wouldn't it? Because that wasn't a fucking stupid claim to base a war on or anything.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I see shit like this, I grow exceedingly tired of Bush and his lying, his incompetence in running a peace let alone anything else, and let's ignore for the moment that I never did like his politics.

And then there's Ashcroft, but let's not go there.

And things like This make me wonder why everyone in my country wonders why nobody likes us.

Speaking of religious fanatics in government, I think This is hilarious. Mostly because they'll never accept. The monument itself is...not good.

Much to say, and it's all me and roleplaying games. So those of you what don't play em, sorry. But just for Whir, I played MW3, and you didn't, so nyah.

So this last Sunday I got invited to play in the D&D campaign that Rema (who runs the MW:DA games I'm in) runs, and Griselda (of RBCiv fame, and who I think has been lurking here without saying hi... ;)) plays in, along with a couple of the other MW:DA folks and another guy I didn't really know. Needless to say, I accepted. Please, don't twist my arm too hard... ;)

The character I come up with is a diplomat/spy type rogue, grew up in the streets but is now a merchant, and REALLY hates racists, of whom there are a lot in the town he grew up in. ("Think of Auchester as kind of like Salem, where all the Aryan meth-heads live, and Reme as like Eugene, all pot-smoking artists and stuff") So I'm in Reme, fleeing like mad from Auchester. Didn't actually play much, which was ok, because I was new, and I had had like 4 hours of sleep and was pretty out of it. So I watched. Holy shit are these people a riot. Couldn't. Stop. Laughing. Finally I do get in with the party, we do a bit of in town stuff, go shopping and the like. All of a sudden, I get shot in the neck with an arrow of elf-slaying (I'm a half-elf, here, folks), drop to 5 hp, and am knocked out and bleeding. Fuuuuuuuuuuck. So the rest of the party is chasing this assassin guy, whereupon Gris' cleric heals me and I'm up and chasing him too. Through alleys and such. When we last left off, I was leaping down a manhole, all alone, to beat this guy down single-handedly. Remember that he's much higher level than I am, and packs uberarrows. But my Wisdom score isn't exactly rock-solid, here.

Good times. Can't wait until next time.

So today Cole, Jason, and I played some Mechwarrior 3rd Edition. For those of you hopelessly confused with the difference between that and MW:DA, MW3 is a roleplaying game, MW:DA is a tabletop miniatures wargame. No, that didn't help at all, did it? But don't worry. I'm a professional.

So the premise is Our Heroes are Capellan soldiers out to turn a backwater militia planet into a full-scale regimental base. In late 3067.

Our cast:

Cole: Infantryman/Tank driver/technician officer. Nominal group leader.
Cole: VTOL pilot/doctor.
Jason: Death Commando that can do ANYTHING. Pilot mechs, battle armor, aerospace fighters, you name it. Currently in a suit of IS standard BA. Only problem? He's amnesiac and doesn't remember half his skills.
Jason: Fat Bob the computer tech. Drives a Raven 4L of all things, which is an electronic marvel with stealth armor, and is a bit...perverted.

Now, for those of you not in on the storyline, late 3067 is when the Word of Blake Jihad hits. Now, these people worship toasters, but they've got nice tech. And they're fanatics, but they're smart fanatics. So they hang out for a time, watch the base, and...move in in the middle of the night.

Now, Our Heroes were kinda smart. Fat Bob parks his Raven right outside the HQ, and there's some decent security measures set up. Most of which fail because the Wobbies were watching, but it was a try. So the Wobbies come in in Tornado PA(L)s and Purifiers (stealth suits, in other words, armored ones, bad news), and start blowing up barracks full of guys. Only the Death Commando and the officer wake up, see a couple of these guys, and it all sort of furballs from there. The DC goes and gets on his BA suit and proceeds to kick ass, while the doc and the tech are gunning/grenading down Wobbies from the building. Fat Bob manages to get out to his Raven and get it started up. About 6 infantrymen make it out of a firefight with another 4-pack of Tornados.

The doc gets grenade fragments in the head and drops, whereupon the tech hauls him up and leaps out the window, then heads around back. Meanwhile, the Raven is gunning down PA(L)s and Purifiers left and right because no matter how cool you are a battlemech-class laser HURTS, and getting kicked...ow. Meanwhile there's a showdown between a Tornado with a laser rifle, and the Death Commando. Poor Mr. Tornado can't get through the battle armor with his laser rifle, whereupon the DC shoots him down with his machine gun and uses his corpse as a club to beat down a couple other guys.

About this time Fat Bob checks his sensors and realizes there's an Overlord dropship coming up the way with 6 aerospace fighters in support, and there's also 4 more Purifiers coming down the way, unhurt. So Our Heroes, carting the wounded doc, along with six infantrymen and three mechwarriors who happened to be in the building but mechless because the WoB commandos blew them sky-high, run over to the thus-far unhurt helipad, wheel out the doc's specialized MASH chopper, and try to make their escape...

"Anybody know how to fly this thing? No? Crap."

So they slap a Stimpatch on the doc, wake him up, and get him to fly the VTOL while they patch him up with his own gear. And as they're getting the hell out of Dodge, wondering where a good spot to go would be, they notice huge flashes of light and mushroom clouds rising over the two nearest cities.

Final Bodycount:

Our Heroes: 4 dead Purifiers, 15 dead PA(L) suits of 8 and 16 going in
Evil Dudes: 1 mechwarrior, 12 assorted tank crews, 4 VTOL crews, 6 aerospace pilots, 78 assorted infantrymen, unknown but very large number of civilians.

In the 31st century, life is cheap. Battlemechs are expensive.

("Crap! The SRM-carriers haven't got very many reloads on them!")

(with the corollary "Hey, how many clips have you got for that rifle?")

Hello, and welcome to the Jihad. Enjoy your stay. Nobody else will be.

This isn't the actual update I promised, but I was pondering the want to put this up somewhere, and here's good. So this a post I made over on the Classic Battletech boards. Whir will be amused, even if nobody else is.

Back before we understood the fire rules, we had a fire spread over an entire map. Something like two lances of light and medium jumpers are leaping all over the place in fire and smoke, lining up rear shots at point blank range. Had this big chain of mechs winding all over the board.

Playing on Large Mountain/Heavy Woods. Mechs on both sides I think were Pack Hunter clones or the like. He's in the woods, jumps a lot, figuring I can't hit because I jumped to the top of the hill. I need 12s with a Clan ER PPC. Roll to hit...12. Roll for location...12. One very thrilled me. I lost the game, but nobody remembers anything but that shot. :)

We play a lot of random mech, random map, random drop location. Three of us playing 1v1v1. A more or less unhurt Sirocco, a, uh, something, and me, who just died. Grab the next mech in the stack...and it's a Thor! With a UAC 20! I fiendishly laugh, roll for location... right in the middle of the action! Win init. I'm laughing fiendishly as I line up on the random mech for a double shot with the UAC...and roll snake eyes. I'm left with 2, count them 2, ER MLs. Not that it matters, because on his turn I go down to a snake eyes double gyro crit. Bah.

So I draw again and get...the 3025 Enforcer. Oh dear. And I start...right next to the Sirocco. Oh dear. And I immediately blow the head off it with the AC 10. Go figure.

In a campaign we were playing once, there was a lance of mercs, custom low-end 3050 lights, against a couple lances of Scorpions. The day is not going well for Our Heroes. The dual-LL Panther can't hit a thing. The Flea goes down almost immediately. The other PC mech isn't doing so hot. And here's this Javalin, missing both arms, armor all ripped up, a bunch of internal damage, but with decent legs. Rampant DFA action ensues, taking down 3 or 4 Scorpions, single-handedly. The legend of Trooper Boy lived on thereafter.

Another random drop game. I've got a totally unhurt Penetrator versus a Hunchback with an LL. And I'm long-range dueling with the HBK...and losing. Two ER LLs versus an LL, and I'm losing. Get head hit, things just aren't going well. So I close to close range, figuring my pulses can take him out. So he shoots me to death with medium lasers as I miss a lot. Gah.

Unhurt Flashman goes toe to toe in the city with a Clan MunchkinMech, fairly hurt, but with a Gauss and a UAC 20. I alpha strike...and miss with almost everything. HE alpha strikes...and cores my CT with everything. Ow.

My group has...player quirks, I guess. Frex, the one guy loves to play quads, and loves to play MASCed quads. And he ALWAYS fails the MASC roll in some highly inconvenient spot. And their always just plain old MASC rolls, no multiple rounds, nothing. Like the time he had a MASC quad running away from the other two of us, he runs behind the hill...and the MASC cuts out. So we left him there.

Or me. I can't make piloting rolls to save my life. "Oh, I need a 4, you say? No problem..." 2. "Well, that sucked. Now I can get up..." 3. OTOH, I ALWAYS make the impossible shots. That 12 head hit isn't an isolated event, around here. And I ALWAYS, ALWAYS win init. And then I go on to lose a lot, somehow. Go figure.

The other guy has a strange one. He gets an ENORMOUS amount of snake eye double gyro shots/snake eye triple engine hits. I've had maybe 2 or three of each. He can go two or three of these per game, some days. It's unreal. But it only works against ME. Aeeyah.

This is likewise hilarious in its own special way, though if you're easily offended by the idea of suburban Japanese families trying to act like they're down in the 'hood, complete with the requisite language, this maybe isn't your thing.

Or just don't let Mom catch you watching it. :P

This is the best thing I've seen in weeks. Really.

So, we're sitting here, Clyos and I, and it's like "Well, what do we do?" "Dunno. Let's play some multiplayer MC2." "Don't we need another computer for it?" "Well, yes." "Where do we get one, then?" "How about all those spare parts you have?" "Well, we can try."

So we do.

We end up using the corpse of my old Pentium 500 for it. P500, 128 MB of RAM, my old 16 meg vid card, and we hope onboard sound of some sort. And then we rip parts out of the old P233 - the old trayless 24x CD-ROM, the old 64 MB of RAM, the floppy. And we wrestle with old battleship steel cases a lot. This is ghetto computing at it's finest, here.

So then we try for Win XP.

Can't run it from DOS. CD isn't bootable. We try copying setup files, we try LAN booting it... nuh-uh.

"Well, maybe we need an XP boot disk."

*grabs floppy*

*pops open CD-ROM drive*

"Uh..."

After we get done laughing, we start formatting disks. 6 of them later, or rather I should say 6 that work (many other floppies flop their last here), including a 1992 Lotus Organizer disk, an AOL disk, and a 1993 MS Mouse driver disk, we toss in the XP boot disk, and it...installs. This is good.

Meanwhile, Cole's over here slicing up the faceplate for the CD-ROM in an effort to make it work. Fun with Xacto knives. And the mini saw. And the Dremel. After we recharge the Dremel, that is.

And eventually we have installed it all.

But no sound. So we go digging in the ancient manual for my Micron (this is why we keep old manuals), and find out that I have an Intel SE440BX. Ok. Google tells us that there are drivers. So we download them. And they are installed. Or...not. So a sound card is in the works.

But games can be installed anyway. This is good.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geometry, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
---John Adams

Well, I finished David McCullough's biography of John Adams last night. Call it 3am. Good times. It won a Pulitzer, and for good reason - it's a very informative book, while being a good read in the bargain. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, and came out more knowledgable for it. Can't say better, I think. Go forth, acquire it, if you've got any interest in the subject at all.

So, Adams lived in some very interesting times, in the Chinese sense of the term. '76, the Revolution, the diplomatic troubles of a new nation, serving in the almost useless VP spot, and finally as President in his own right, and then doing the whole Cincinatus thing. Quite a life. Quite a life.

Me, well, I get interesting times in another way. As of 7:55 AM, I've been up, listening to guys replace our roof. This 50 year composite stuff had better be worth my sleep deprivation. John Adams? Worth it. Watching T1/T2 back to back? Worth it. A new roof? Maybe. I'm so going to want a nap.

So, back to Adams. Yknow, all during the 90s they used to throw a lot of shit around about how my generation is sort of...disconnected. Those of you what've seen Fight Club know the drill. To quote Tyler Durden: "We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual one. Our great depression is our lives." Yeah, that about sums up the 90s. And I always used to sort of regret that, in a way, how the 90s were always going to be sort of like "The Roaring Twenties, Episode II" and all. Our great-grandparents had the First World War. Our grandparents pulled the Second. Our parents had Vietnam and the Sixties. The great movings of history. And us? We got the decade of decadence. And history major me kinda regrets that.

But, yknow, listening to the President last night, and reading about Adams, I was thinking. That's over. It's not a profound realization, such as it is, but we've got our own interesting times. We've sort of noticed that since 9/11, though it's been true even in the fairly boring 90s. Our generation, I think, will come to be defined by Iraq, by the War on Terror. In a good way or a bad way, I haven't a clue. But we've found our war, and probably found enough war to last us the rest of the decade and beyond. Because the way I see it, this war is going to be a long war. I see us being forced to confront Islamic terrorism for a very long time, and if we run away from that they'll blow us kicking and screaming right back into that fight. People talk about when we're going to pull out of Iraq? We're stuck there, kids. It's my thinking that we've found the next Cold War, the new Vietnam, at least in duration. I dunno what it means, exactly, but I know this much: we look at a guy like John Adams, and we say "Wow. This guy lived through a lot. He lived through 1776 and the American Revolution. He was there for the birth of a nation. He lived to be Vice President and then President, and he was instrumental in setting up the nation. He saw the Louisiana Purchase, he saw the War of 1812. He lived through quite a lot." Whatever else they say of us in that regard, they will say that we lived through the fall of Communism (even if some of us were a tad young for it), they will say that we came of age during yet another of the great ideological conflicts of the last century and a half.

Interesting times, indeed.

And because I happen to like this quote from the book, I'll, well, quote it:

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geometry, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

---John Adams

So it's freaking hot, it's 3:30am, and I've been reading far too long. So there shall be musings.

Sort of looking forward to school starting again. I will, no matter what, not be bored, I think. More than that, I've got something to prove. 16 credits is going to be the most I've taken since that fateful winter term freshman year where I took 18, and the resulting beatdown pretty well shell-shocked me. I haven't been pulling the best of grades the last few years, and I want to get over that. I've fucked up pretty hard, in fact. I want that to be over. Been saying a lot of shit lately to folks like Marechal about how you hafta stand up and take charge, and I've been thinking about how I've always prided myself in that while I might be a slacker, when the time comes to get the job done, I can stand up and do it. Well, here we are. Senior year. I have 16 credits 2 terms out of 3, and my 12 credit term promises to be almost as hard. The time has come to get the job done, and I hope to hell I can stand up and do it.

And then there's the inevitable spectre of jobs and real life. I've been avoiding that pretty good for quite a few years, too. Need to stand up and do that, too.

Yes Whir, I do update every so often.

So we, and by we I mean me, Cole/Clyos, and his brother, went up to Corvallis yesterday. Checked out the apartment their going to be getting. Funny place. I can't quite stand on my toes and touch the ceiling with my head, but it's close. Plus every room has a distinctly different style - shingle walls, fake brick, wood panels... very amusing. Gas stove from like the 40s. But cheap. And large. Can't ask for much more. And it's just them. I predict hanging out over there a bunch.

Went to the bookstore, too, which made my wallet $274 lighter after I got my books for school. I am going to be way, WAY into reading this year. Boldly going where no reading has gone before, and the like. Exploring the vast new frontiers of reading. One small book for author, one giant reading list for studentkind, sort of a thing. Aeeyah. Corvallis, we have a problem.

I got amazed looks from the cashier and the cute girl at the counter, however, which makes it all worthwhile in the end, I suppose. Maybe.

So then we came back, and on the way back, this bee somehow got into the car, into the back seat, behind the seat and down my back, where it kindly stung me. That was interesting. I haven't actually been stung in about 10 years. Doesn't hurt nearly as bad as I remembered, actually. But I now have this nice red lump on my back. Whee.

But then we played a lot of Battletech. Giant Robot Games, the Revenge. We played, I think, for something like 12 hours. 1v1v1 random draw, random placement. Lots of good moments, including the massive amounts of head shots, charging like fiends, Mecha Inferno on the vast forests, the DFA that knocked a mech off of a level 4 hill much to the hurt of the mech that was on said hill, and RACzilla, the Awesome with 3 RAC 5s and a sword.

"RACzilla opens up on you, and hits with 1...2...3 full auto RACs! For...3...4...5...12 shots! You take A Lot Of Damage!"

"Ow."

Good times. Good times.

Going for the flashback a bit now...

Watched Apollo 13 the other day for something to do. Good movie. First time I had seen it since it came out on video the first time, so it was a rewatch, but an old one. Very good movie, but not one you can really watch more than once every few years.

Acquired and played Mechcommander 2 the last couple of days, too. Very fun, as is the wont of the MC series, though I'm slightly amused at how they feel the need to throw Clantech into Inner Sphere games all the time. This. Mechwarrior 4. Ah well. They're fun, so what the hell.

Played some more Ultima 7, too. Fear me, for I am the scourge of random bandit camps in the woods where they hide the magic breastplate. Raaarg.

One of these days I'm going to finish my HRE writeup, too.