[19:44] PxcTNK: I mean, so many people want Oblivion here, it actually overtook "porn" as the most searched item on our network for a while. And that's amazing.

A small sampling of work-related humor. I'd do the large sample, but I can't really figure out the proper way to describe Joel and Carlos yet. Suffice it to say that Joel has nicknamed me Snake, and delights in yelling it from time to time at me, alternating with maniacal laughter. This is much more amusing than it sounds, even.

As to work itself, well, that can be summed up by the fact that in two days we've had twenty-eight door rebuilds, mostly in-shop rejects caused by overwork by the understaffed assembly group, made worse by my being hauled off to sanding table for hours and days on end. This is, perhaps, worse than it sounds, and prompts a good Cole quote here: "Only at CC could moving up to short bus team be called moving up."

Anyway. So we're in line leaving today, and this exchange happens:

Pam: I sound like a squirrel on crack!
Dave: Hey now, you're giving squirrels a bad name.
Me: *can barely walk out the door from laughing so hard*

Keep in mind that Pam loses her voice a lot.

Somewhat earlier, but still near the end of the day, I'm all sitting there with a can of putty, which are about soup can sized, puttying my last door, when, thinking about switching to sanding, I grab the can and almost attempt a pass sanding with it before realizing what I had done and breaking down laughing.

Mary: Uh-oh. What's so funny?
Me: *tells story*
Sanding Table: *dies laughing*

Which then prompted me to tell another story from about a week ago, where I was gluing up a unit, and instead of grabbing the glue brush, grabbed the cap to the wood glue bottle, and tried to spread some glue with it before realizing the lack of good spreading qualities inherent in caps.

These things are not at all uncommon amongst our group. Not at all.

Back in those days of yore, say before 1995 or so, we used to get a lot of power outages, at least in proportion to these, well, enlightened days of today, in which we get maybe one a year if that. I in particular remember one outage on a hot evening in what was probably the late 80s, I was reading a book on all the presidents up to the first Bush when the power went out and stayed out. I read that book all evening until I ran out of light at dusk, then continued by candlelight. Pretty good book.

I was thinking of that episode last night when, yes, the power went out, disturbing my reading of Bill Clinton's book, which should explain why I thought of it. I used a flashlight this time, which conjures up other memories of my youth involving reading with flashlights after bedtime. Not a bad book, either. Well-written in any case, and he has yet to go anywhere I disagree with, so we'll see. I have a fair degree of pro-Clinton nostalgia, so I imagine it'll work out ok.

Too, it's worth it just for the pic of him in the 60s with a full facial beard and a huge mop of hair. Because wow does that look funny.

And as a final thought before work, I'm at the library yesterday, and I'm asked "So how was your week?" "I ignore the existance of weeks now," I say. "We skip over them to the weekends." Because weekends rule.

I'll know about SCSU inside of two weeks.

Wherein we, in that long tradition of game reviews, shall now turn our leporidic gaze upon that most anticipated of recent RPGs, Oblivion.

The short of it is that mostly it's like the coolest thing you've ever played, with a few things that work...not so well.

I feel the need here to note that Bethesda has inherited the mantle that Origin used to wear, and has done it quite well. Both companies went for large, freeform worlds, using engines that pushed the capabilities of computers of the day. This is, in fact, the second time I've upgraded my computer just to play a Bethesda game, the last time being when I got tired of 5 minute cell loads in Morrowind back in 2002.

That having been said, you'll immediately notice the graphics engine, which is great at worst, and ludicrously awesome with all the settings jacked up, like mine. It's a little hard to tell when you're cruising around in the dark (and I mean DARK) dungeons of the tutorial, but once you step outside and see daylight...wow. Vast forests, seas of grass, both of which do things like sway in the wind. We've had rain and snow for a while now, but they've never looked this good. Similarly, Morrowind's water looked pretty good, but now we've got ripples and sunsets reflecting off of it. You can, and I did, spend a fair deal of time just wandering around the world just gazing in awe at it.

Too, the graphics tie into character generation with a facegen utility with, oh, I dunno, 50 different options? More? You can do all sorts of things with faces, not to mention hair, eyes, whatever. I still can't quite get a Morrowind-style green Argonian, but oh well.

The whole Havok physics engine thing works out pretty good, too, especially in the environment. Trees sway in the wind, as do signs in big rainstorms and suchlike. You can pick up and move almost everything. Sit in chairs. Trip wires and get smashed by log traps. I can't really think of a game where I've been able to interact with the environment quite this much, ever.

The AI, too, is great. NPCs wander around, pick things up, have routines, and the like. They follow you through doors now. I've even had a case where I killed a guy, and an unarmed peasant came along, saw the murdered guy, picked up his weapon, and started beating on me with it while calling for the guards. Good times.

As to the actual gameplay, it's kind of more of the same, and kind of not. We're still doing the whole skill-based thing we all remember from Morrowind, except they dropped some skills, and changed things to have different mastery levels, with different moves with each level and each skill. This mostly works, though it's pretty hard for me to execute a good power attack, and the absence of old if perhaps underused weapons like spears and staves saddens me.

Quests are way, way better than any Elder Scrolls game ever, with even random side quests having a surprising amount of depth. The only drawback is that, while lengthy, it feels like there are less things to do in Oblivion's world, and the main game is far shorter. Ah well.

My dislikes are twofold, intertwined, and unfortunately fairly major. The first has to do with the melee combat system, which unless you play a lot of fighting games, is really hard to get used to. I still can't do the special moves well, whereas the enemies CAN, which means I spend a lot of time having axe-wielding dremora sending me flying over rock formations and balconies and suchlike, and not doing much of the same to them.

The second part has to do with the fact that the entire game is level scaled to roughly match you. Monsters, loot, stores, whatever. It makes the game harder than Morrowind was, to be sure, but it was done in a hackish enough way to feel VERY gamey, and still has serious balance issues, thusly:

For a time, until you can get your main combat skills to a sufficient level, say, the 60s, every single melee combat is a hardcore fight to the death. Mountain lions, dremora, whatever. You can't equip your way out of it, because equipment is level scaled, so you're stuck with fine iron longswords for a while, and leather armor versus the clannfear. Armor and weapon quality/damage scales with skill, which in no way improves this. So until you start hitting level 15 and glass/ebony, it's a hard, hard game for the melee character.

On the other hand, past level 20-25 or so, balance essentially breaks down as daedroths, dremoras, storm atronachs, and whatever become so much rabble to fall beneath your unstoppable skills. At the same time, there's a jump in loot quality from "reasonably sufficient" to "equipment not meant to be wielded by mortals." Case in point: My best ring went from +6/+6 in block/blades to +25 in blades and 33% reflect damage. Holy crap, guys.

This is, however, why there's a difficulty slider. Use it, and the issues more or less become ignorable, though the whole bandits cruising around in in enchanted glass cuirasses thing is a little...off. Once the mod community really gets it in gear, I expect my issues with that to go away.

Speaking of mods, one large black mark for me is the fact that Oblivion editing is actually a step back from what Morrowind had. On the one hand, the editor has more features. On the other hand, I had to find a third party tool to unpack the .bsa files so I could get to the .nif and .dds files to make custom objects. Too, the documentation for the editor is worthless, though the Wiki Beth started is a step in the right direction, but it relies on the fans to provide even such simple things as what the keys are, and how to make simple merchants and such. Very sad.

All in all, however, a worthy game. 8.5 of 10 aliens. We're not perfect yet, but we're rapidly approaching it.

Thanks for the title, Will.

Most of you have already heard one form or another of this rant, but I need something to talk about, so. I want to talk about Oblivion, but I'd like to finish it first, so. The good thing there is, at the rate I'm playing, that won't take long. I played, well, all weekend, really. Including about 10 hours after a full day of overtime, which brings us to...

...my boss is either retarded, or just flat out isn't thinking. This became aparent after Wednesday, when, despite not having the two people there who can run one of the most critical machines, we STILL got our two and a half units out the door, which is our normal pace. I also had to help my boss run said machine, which was fairly exciting, since while he's good, he also runs panels at intense speed, and blames me for the inevitable jams which cause panels to explode.

So the end result of that was, we all got to pull some 4:55am-2:40pm overtime on Friday, which I assure you sucks about as much as it sounds like it does, but is worth megabucks, so.

Too, we had a person on crutches Thursday, which meant that I, of all people, got pulled off of assembly, who need more people than me as it is just to stay afloat, and put on sanding table to do a job a chimpanzee could do, where I keep running out of work and going back to my old job simply because there's nothing for me to do, really. Because I'm only doing crossgraining, which is something I learned way back in week 1. As opposed to all of the other skills that I'm one of like 2 people who can do on a regular basis without destroying the entire production process. Rather unlike, say, all the machine operators doing my work now, which means they don't do their work, which means we all slow down.

And then, Friday, when we're trying to do a 4 person job with 3 people, he pulls one of our people off, meaning we don't even come close to finishing despite heroic effort. I dunno. It's almost like he WANTS us to fail. It makes no sense.

But on the plus side, I got into University of Rhode Island, so if I don't get into Southern CT, I'll probably be in school in June, and in any case I'm only there for like 3 months even so, so whatever.

In the meantime, Oblivion. Which is appropriate, if you think about it.

I got nothing to say...nothing but the one thing, as the song goes.

From the opening pages of Norman Cantor's The Civilization of the Middle Ages, I quote St. Bernard of Clairvaux:

"There are some who wish to learn for no other reason than that they may be looked upon as learned, which is a ridiculous vanity, ... Others desire to learn that they may morally instruct others; that is love. And lastly, there are some who wish to learn that they may be themselves edified; and that is prudence."

Those expecting a real entry, well, I'll probably talk about Oblivion or something in a time. That time is not now.