The midwest is buried under 16 feet of snow, and the sun was out here today. Vindication.

I got a new driver’s license today. I tried to look as scary as possible for the photo, but it’s not great. I didn’t shave for a week, and wore a Cianide shirt. Unlike Indiana, they let me keep the old license (after they punched a hole in it.)

My friend Suzanne was here today. She’s been in Olympia since xmas, but her and her guy-friend Matt came up here tonight. We went to Denny’s, did a bunch of driving around, and stopped by my work for the tour. I’ve known Suzanne since 1994. She’s a manager at the Borders in Bloomington and I usually see her when I’m in town, and hassle her about stuff in the store or whatever. The first time I visited Bton after my departure, she went with me to White Castle. I went to the counter and told the girl “I came all the way from Seattle to eat here.” She said “I’m sorry.”

I wanted to write more, but I’m so tired. I read through all of Rumored to Exist tonight, and made some comments. I also read through all of my notes, and got all ready to start writing new stuff. But I’m not awake enough to do any work. (I am listening to the Dream Theater album entitled Awake, though.) My mom called me at 9:30 this morning, and I was dumb enough to pick up. And no naps, either. Maybe I will write more tomorrow.

Welcome to the new year. I need to write something here, and then go back and see if it breaks my indexing program. I’ll write more in a bit.

01/01/99 05:31

That took major brain surgery, but my war-torn indexing program now works for more than two years, and might even be a step closer to being Y2K compliant. I have no respect for people who meticulously hand-code pretty calenders for their journal pages. If you think you’re hot shit, try automating everything with a nice, messy C program. Machine-generated HTML is where it’s at, and I’m not talking FrontPage.

I wanted to write a bunch on Rumored tonight, but ended up playing the Star Wars game on the Nintendo. I found cheat codes that let you fly a TIE interceptor, or the Millenium Falcon. The TIE kicks ass - you can really weave around, and it’s great to be able to follow other TIE fighters through tight manuvers. There are many times in this one level where I am 3:1 against TIEs in an A-wing and during a quick approach, I’m lucky to randomly pick off one. In the TIE, I can stay on them like stink on shit and quickly destroy all three without thinking. The only bad thing is that the TIE has no shields, and no missiles. It’s a poor weapon for attack runs on ground equipment. The Falcon, on the other hand, kicks complete ass. It manuvers tight, turning on its side in corners. It has some heavy shields, and can take some serious fire. And, it’s weapons systems aren’t aimed with the craft - the guns swivel on turrets, and there are proton torpedos that home in automatically - you just get the target in your sights for a second, and a targeting circle will follow the ship while you move off in a different direction. I’ve been stuck on a level all week, and with the Falcon, I was able to completely pummel everything and finish. Unfortunately, you can’t use it on all of the levels - I’m now stuck on a level where you have to use the snowspeeder. The snowspeeder is really odd to fly - the weapons suck, and you can’t loop or dive too much, because it hovers. You can slam on either brake and turn on a dime, which is cool, but it usually runs me into a building. On this level, you are in these shitty little hovercraft, trying to down TIE bombers, which is like fighting an M1 abrams tank with a Schwinn bike and a ball-peen hammer. And at the end of the level, you have to do the little harpoon-cable-on-the-AT-AT’s-legs trick, which I’ve found impossible with the Nintendo controller. Oh well, maybe I’ll find another cheat.

So yeah, no writing. A little, but not much. I flipped through the channels a bit at 12, and luckily haven’t heard that fucking Prince song. Leno was pre-empted, which meant Conan was either late or gone, since Leno was in his spot.

Not much else. I should get back to work.

I’m really not awake today. I had to drop off Marie at the airport for a 7:20 flight, which involved waking up at 5:30, which is about 5 hours earlier than my typical schedule. She also had to deal with a bunch of shit from Continental, which has this problem with forgetting about e-ticket bookings. I just spent too much of my time writing them a pissy email, and now I need to stop thinking about it.

It was nice to have Marie here, although it wasn’t nearly enough time, and it was hellish here during her whole stay. Now she knows I’m not kidding about the permanently gray skies, pissing rain, and high winds that pummel the building. Seattle is a very beautiful city, for about 15 minutes a year. Anyway, we didn’t do much of interest or get out too much, based on the traffic and weather. I wanted to go to a movie, but there’s such a poor crop of films out there this holiday. If I had free passes to go to a movie, I don’t think I could pick one. We rented a few movies though, and I got to see Fear and Loathing again. I might watch it again - I have the tapes until Friday. It’s a great film, and usually gets me going about writing and living. In a world where all of the inspirational films are about sports and overcoming odds and whatever, it’s nice to see something new.

Now that the holidays are over, I need to get back to writing as much as possible. I’m still trying to figure out which book to work on, and I don’t think I’ll know, even when I’ve got pieces and chapters on the screen in front of me. I might end up going back and forth a bit. I think that the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron game for the Nintendo might slow down my writing output, at least until I finish all of the levels.

Lunch is over. More later.

I hope you survived this year’s day of Christian celebration without too much hair-pulling.

It wasn’t too bad of a day for me. I woke up “early” (8am) and drove to SeaTac airport to pick up Marie. The snow and ice turned into rain and fog by xmas morning, but the roads were completely empty, making it the easiest drive to the airport I’ve ever encountered, even easier than a 3am on Sunday night drive I had to do once. Parking was really bad, though, and I heard that a water main broke on the rental car level, creating a small lake down there. I got there an hour early, which turned into an hour and a half early because of delays. I forgot my gameboy, and didn’t have anything else to do, so I sat down in a crappy airport chair and fell asleep sitting up for almost an hour. I wish I could do that all the time.

So Marie got here, and it’s good to have her here again. We exchanged gifts and I got the Beat Generation CD set and the Burroughs set from Giorno poetry systems, and a ton of cool books. We spent the rest of the dark and rainy day around the house, playing with the new Nintendo and eventually getting to the IHOP for dinner.

We’re getting ready to leave and do some post-xmas shopping for Nintendo games, so I’ve got to find my teargas and rubber bullets for the uzi to make the trip to the mall a little more pleasant. Later.

Last night, I bought a Nintendo-64, a second controller, Diddy Kong Racing, and the South Park game. It’s a present for Marie, sort of like when Homer got Marge a bowling ball. No, really, she used to have one, and I thought it would be fun. I already told her about it, so I’m not outing myself by posting this. Of course, I set all of the stuff up last night, and stayed up way too late playing it.

First impressions: I’ve spent almost zero time with the Playstation or N64, so I was going into this as a complete novice. First, I like the way the console looks - it reminds me of a piece of Sun hardware, or maybe an SGI. It’s also very simple, with few switches, buttons, or jacks. I’m fortunate in that my video/audio setup at home is very generous in facilitating the video/audio setups. People with older TVs would probably have much more trouble dealing with the composite video out and stereo audio out. The controllers are a bit weird, and I still get screwed up on how to hold them and use the 90,000 assorted buttons. They are pretty comfortable after a while, though.

I first started with the South Park game. I expected more realism than other 8 and 16 bit games, but this totally blew me away. It has the whole introduction to the show, and the graphics look almost exactly like the TV show. Although you can tell the shapes are computer generated, it is not blocky or pixelated at all - it is very smooth and shadowed correctly, and looks truly amazing for something on a TV. The sound is even better - it’s stereo, and I ran it through my receiver, which added even more to the effect.

The South Park game is fun - you play one of the four kids, and then you meet up with the other 3 and do various things in the town, trying to finish each level. I haven’t played games that much, and I usually play very specific ones, so I was getting my ass kicked over and over. It is funny to hear Cartman die - all of the characters talk, and even swear (it is beeped out, mostly). But I wanted to see the whole game. So, I got on dejanews, did a search, and found a page of cheat codes. The codenames are funny, and let you enable different characters and other stuff. I think ASSMAN gives you invulterability. If you have the game and are trying to find the codes, email me and I will send them to you. I found a code that turned on everything, and started kicking ass. There’s one weapon which is a terrance and phillip doll, which is like a grenade of flatulence. You can throw a whole bunch of them and leave a path of deadly landmines which produce giant mushroom clouds of green gas. I also had a lot of fun with the cow launcher, and the chicken sniper weapon. At the start of each round, there is a little cartoon that tells you your mission, usually with Chef talking to the kids. It’s very cool - I need to get in there and start going through all of the levels.

I played Diddy Kong Racing a few times, although I spent so much time on South Park that I couldn’t do much more than run a few races. It’s very cool, the graphics look like a Disney cartoon and the sounds are very cute. If I had a kid, I would get them a N-64 just because so many of the games are like this. I couldn’t figure out the controls, but I will mess with it a bit more. Marie likes the game a lot, so we will play it more when she gets here.

Writing, of course, is at a dead stop. Maybe tonight I’ll get a few lines done, but now I need to clean the house and shop for Marie’s visit. I think my sleep schedule is about up to date now, so that’s cool. I also go to the dentist in a couple of hours, and find out how much heavy construction they’ll be doing over the next few months.

I found an odd page on the technology of Star Wars at http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~saxton/starwars/