New DS games

I don't actually have any money from ITA yet, but I have been passing in invoices, and therefore have money futures. So I bought a couple of new DS games.

Point Blank DS: Impulse buy. Port of a gun game I fondly recall from a Waterville arcade. The single-player mode is kind of boring and runs out of stuff to do pretty quickly; a "brain massage" mode that is a transparent attempt to ride the coattails of Brain Age / Big Brain Academy doesn't help much.

I was hoping that two-player mode would be better, but they totally screwed it up with abysmal load times, which were each as long as the actual minigames that they preceded. It managed to kill the fun entirely.

Clubhouse Games: A whole bunch of public-domain board and card games, and a handful of dexterity games, with Internet play. You know I had to get this one. I've only played it a little but it seems like a winner so far. I've tried it with a local friend and was happy to see that, as with Tetris DS, it has a fully-functional Download Play mode, instead of letting you play only a subset of the games or otherwise limiting things. Cool.

Recent news events have risen my baseline anger level to the point where I can't play any of the dexterity games, like an otherwise fun bowling sim, against a computer opponent. I probably wouldn't do well with them in Internet play, either.

Flying Kimchi Monster

Went to hear Richard Dawkins read from his new book The God Delusion at the, uh, church that Church Street (I assume) is named after at Harvard Square. With dougo and the dictator555.

Ha ha ha... I just now discovered that the introduction that the introducey person introduced him with was taken word-for-word from his Wikipedia page.

Anyway, it was OK. The first half was fiddle-dee-dee about what a total bastard the pre-Christian biblical God is, and I do declare I've heard that all before, and so have you. He gets marks for not trotting out everyone's favorite story of God summoning bears to eat naughty children, but that's the vein he was in.

There were some nice bon mots in there but for the most I rolled my eyes at everyone else's laughter and applause at his Old Testament exposé. Haven't any of you ever read a weblog ever? And some of it, frankly, was like a lame comedy routine, at one point basically going So this Trinity thing, is that three gods or one? Make up your minds! [LAUGHTER] Blat.

Then, uh... I dunno. It didn't really leave much of an impression on me. I might end up reading the book anyway for guilty-pleasure reasons, and/or the hope that it surely must contain some new insights I haven't already been exposed to.

tahnan will be disappointed to know that he again invoked the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

A guy during the Q&A session asked if he could give him a hug, but the introducey lady wouldn't let him.

Then we ate Bibim Bap at Seoul Food on Mass Ave and the nice lady said WHY AREN'T YOU EATING IT RIGHT and picked up my spoon and mixed up my bibim bap for me because I hadn't bothered. I told her it was because I was lazy. When I finished eating it she said GOOD JOB!