Weekend

[prog]

Had a great weekend. Saturday classicaljunkie and I drove to the south shore to meet my mom for her birthday. We drove around the area together and looked at the houses I grew up in, which still look quite the same, though Cliff Top is smaller than I remember! It still has a nice "Cliff Top" sign; I'm glad that its name has survived whatever sequence of owners it's had over the last two decades.

We walked around Nantasket Beach a little. It looks a lot different without that roller coaster, man. The two arcades I so fondly remember both still seem to be there, though. I want to return soon, after the summer season starts, to see what they're like now. Honestly, I'm surprised that the Penny Arcade is still there; in the 1980s that's where you'd find all the low-rent arcade games, while the nicer and newer stuff was in Dream Machine. I'm assuming they're not actually boarded-up vacant properties with the signs still on!

We saw "The Illusionist" on DVD, and I didn't like it very much. We watched the finale of Survivor Fiji, which made me subtly upset, becuase (a) the wrong guy won because a third contestant played kingmaker for irrationally selfish reasons (though at least the winner was one of the "good guys"), (b) half the people in the final jury acted like total assholes, and (c) I still don't have a million dollars and here this other guy does now. Though I bet he doesn't actually, coz of how these things work, but still.

Everyone played too much Puzzle Quest. Blaaargh. It is a really good game.

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Starting this week, I'm rolling out out a new way to parcel my time. I had been vaguely holding onto a model from when I started at ITA, but that's been outmoded for months and it's high time I tried something that reflects my current actual lifestyle. Here's what I'm trying instead:

Mon, Tue, Wed: Make money. For now, that means contract programming work, and activities that support same.
Thu, Fri: Volity furtherance, of any kind. Can be coding, or project management, or just reading a relevant book.
Sat: Free day. Wheeee.
Sun: Video projects. Edit, write, or plan. Whatever needs doing next.

I can be social and whatever on any day; this schedule just defines where my default stance lay on any given day of the week. It also gives me some soothing mental sorting: if I'm fretting because I have three fairly heavy things to accomplish, lo! here is an arbitrary but good-as-any order to accomplish them in, based on where we happen to be in the calendar.

Comments

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

what didn't you like about the illusionist?

i was really disappointed in the adaptation. neil burger and i got something different out of the story, that's for sure. it was disappointing to see this story that reads like a victorian horror on the page turned into the usual suspects with magic tricks for the screen.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

We were discussing this on Friday: isn't Hull/Nantasket really considered "the cape" rather than "south shore"? Or does "south shore" really mean "everything between the Charles and Rhode Island"?

I still don't know what to make of Dreamz. He claims he never really intended to keep his promise, but he sure seemed to agonize over the decision to break it. Was that all an act? He doesn't seem to be that good an actor. I am totally for the it's-just-a-game ultra-deceptive style of playing Survivor/Big Brother (a la Richard Hatch or Johnny Fairplay), but something about his betrayals seemed too... clumsy to be rewarded, even if it did get him to the final three. (And how was anyone surprised that it would be a final three instead of final two? Did nobody watch the previous season? Was it not a huge hint that Rocky made it onto the jury?) And how could Dreamz have ever believed he could win against Earl in the final vote? I guess that was groupthink—everyone was talking about "sympathy votes", which has never happened in Survivor as far as I can remember—or else he really somehow convinced himself that Alex, Edgardo, and Mookie would still think of him as being on their team.

I have a feeling that some players now intentionally try to be as dickish as possible in the final jury interview just because they're following Sue Hawk's precedent in season 1. But it's not funny anymore.