So lately I've been eating things.

Lunch friday at that Indian cafe dealie in Inman Square. I cannot remember the name [It's Punjabi Dhaba - thanks pheromone] but if I recall correctly they have a really colorful woo-woo-we're-hip sign out front. But the inside is all business, of the sort I most commonly associate with hole-in-the-wall Chinese or Italian joints. It's really cheap and good. The aloo mater I ordered for around $6 came in a large metal TV Dinner-style tray, which actually made for easy together-slopping of the rice and various fixins. I enjoyed it a great deal. I want to go back and get the same thing but have em throw in some garlic naan. Mm.

Later, breakfast at Supreme Kitchen, halfway up Highland Ave. Oddly I have never been there before. More oddly, it was not Soundbites-jammed on a Sunday late morning, though it was certainly turning some brisk business. I guess the nameless neighborhood around Somerville Hospital just doesn't have the visibility of Ball Square. Anyway, I had eggs n pancakes n snausage and it was all very good. I shall return.

Finally classicaljunkie made a tremendous amount of chili yesterday and gave me a lot in a Pyrex container, which I have so far dropped only once. I am still eating it and will be for another day or two. It's great.

What else is new

Of the four pillars, I've been paying the least attention to Volity. I've been quite aware of this, and last night was reminded of it further by a visit from those creatures of my mind I call the boogeymen, the imps who crouch on my shoulder when I'm having trouble sleeping and chuckle into my ear about how I'm heading into failure, about what a fool I've been, reciting a catalog of my missteps. All I can do is twitch and moan feebly. It's awful.

The thing is, though, they're totally on my side. It's bitter medicine, but when it mixes with the morning sunlight, it turns into a fuel of tremendous potency. There's little that motivates me more than proving naysayers wrong about my own work, even if they're imaginary projections of my semi-conscious anxieties. And I have to think they know exactly what they're doing.

So last night the boogeymen were cooing about all the wasted effort of last year, and all the threads that have been blowing in the wind for months. So today (after a lovely breakfast and etc.) I kicked ass across three Volity-related fronts. I finished redoing some libraries that were causing deep-set bugs from poor design decisions I made last year; I merged contributor code into the Subversion trunk, updated the change log, and chatted with said contributor; I closed a bunch of old tickets on RT and solved some new tickets that happened to come in during all this.

Much remains on the backlog but that was a fine day's (at least) work. And here it is only Monday. Very good. It is not wise to rely on frustrated sprinting as a primary work pattern, but once in a while it can do a lot to make one feel more able.

---

I am completely unprepared for the 'thon. Oh, I'm going, all right, and it's going to choo-choo-train me right into the ground. Why don't they look. I'll come out the other end a drained and broken man, I just know it. At least it's in the Somerville Theater this year, making for an easy hobble home. And my supporting entourage this year is gonna be great, too, so yay.

This year's logo (spotted via derspatchel because I am not keeping up on the message board for some reason) is brilliant.

---

I am trying to get five stars in every song at the medium difficulty level in Guitar Hero 2, so I can unlock a stupid bonus guitar (which does nothing for you gameplay-wise, just gives you something to brag about). It's hard but quite addicting, just like Amplitude was a few year ago. All day I kept wandering over to the TV to throw on the silly little toy Gibson and try another couple of songs, which takes only 10 minutes, and then I felt done and went back to my desk for a while. Safer than Angband any day.

The difficulty ramp-up between Medium and Hard is pretty intense. I can't get through even a single song at that level.

Also that Pie place closed.

I shouted at my TV last night because one of aspartaimee's userpics, the source of which I'd never had cause to investigate, suddenly and distinctly flashed by while I was watching one of the Arrested Developments that I torrented last December.

That's hilarious. I always love it when that happens.

The show is good too. Watching it marathon-style is a little tiring because all the episodes more or less kick off in the same way: Michael confronts his mother or siblings about their spending money foolishly, or his dad in prison tells him about yet another chunk of the family's secret fortunes stashed away in some ludicrous fashion. But they then each spin off and then re-collide in wonderful ways, and the characters are great. It's the most fun I've had watching a comedy TV show since I was into Seinfeld.

Oh: I forgot about The Tick, the live-action one. But that didn't feel like a TV show since I saw them all over the space of two evenings at jhango's house with friends. Hella fun, though.

Volity LJ feeds

I just created volity_forums, which carries all new posts to the volity.net Web forums.

And it looks like someone else already created volity_schedule, which updates every time someone tacks a new item onto the volity.net game scheduler. (Or maybe I created it last fall and forgot.)

Gameshelf Season 2 promo

The camera-cleaning stuff finally arrived today, and it seemed to be just what I needed. I ripped the rest of the studio footage (some of it months old now) and threw together a promo for the episode I'm gonna finish this month. Why is the aspect ratio off? Dammit. I have to run. I'll fix it later.

The music is part of our new theme song, and was composed just for The Gameshelf by taskboy3000. Cool, eh?

Should I put promos like this on Google Video / YouTube? It seems "wasteful" somehow, I dunno.