caffeineslug.com

So much emptiness

The site has been blank for weeks now, great. Fortunately, I haven't done much:

- Went to New Jersey for vacation. Spent some time on the beach, ate unhealthy food, played enough miniature golf to get me through the year.

- Got my first-ever second place autox trophy. Thanks Clint! :-P

- Had probably my best ever Addams Family pinball game, at about 412 million points. The machine was almost fully-functional, which was pretty nice. I had at least a couple multiballs, getting the jackpot or double jackpot each time. Two or three extra balls helped out the score quite a bit as well. Towards the end I finally got the "Tour the Mansion" award, which is awarded after you've gone through all of the game modes. You get 50M points, in addition to a few other things. That was great.

- We have a cat now, and have had him for a couple weeks, but still no name. Current possibilities are Samba (after the monkey in Samba de Amigo, greatest Dreamcast game ever), Pi (after the greatest number ever), or Hobbes (after the tiger in the greatest comic strip ever).

- Had my first mountain bike crash just over a week ago, right over the handlebars. Knocked the wind out of me, scraped up my knee pretty good, and my right hand is still in pain. The urgent care doctor initially said it was broken, but I went to a hand doctor that said it wasn't, so that's good I suppose. Still, this isn't good for my golf game.

- 360voice.com lets your Xbox 360 tell everyone what you've been up to. Mine is like most others, in that it seems a lot like a dog - really happy when you play with it, sad and whiny when you ignore it. At least it posts every day, more than I can say about myself to be sure. It also seems to be good motivation to get some achievements, as I've increased my score a good amount lately.

Related to video games, I picked up Uno on Live Arcade last week, and it provided a level of fun commensurate with the price. Single player seems mostly worthless, but partner Uno can be pretty fun provided the other people in your game actually talk. You're paired up with the person sitting across from you, and if either of you goes out, you both get the win. Since Skip/Draw Two/Draw Four cards only punish the person next two you, you can get into good circles of making the other team constantly draw cards. If nothing else, having a teammate requires some amount of talking, and that prevents games where you just sit there with three other strangers and nobody talks (and if you're going to do that, you may as well just play against a non-human).

I also finished up the GRAW single player campaign at normal difficulty, that was pretty fun. After a few levels I realized I had to use the night vision goggles way too much, and that's when I discovered the brightness level in the game was set to zero. :-P Not so good on an LCD RPTV! Cranked that up to 5 out of 6 and I could finally see things. It was nice to get good use out of a $60 game. I might try to stretch it out a bit more and play some levels on hard for a few more achievements.

So speaking of $60 games, the 360 might be what gets me to try gamefly.com. More games are coming out that I want to try, but I don't feel like they're worth $60 to me yet, and prices haven't really come down at all in the eight months or so that the system has been out. Granted some have been less (PGR3, Table Tennis), but it's still feels like a big increase over the $40 and $50 games I was accustomed to with the PS2/Xbox. So for $15/month I could rent games as they become available, and not deal with Blockbuster (I'm doubting here that Blockbuster has changed at all in the last year or so since I dealt with them). That works out to 4 games a year - so what am I better off having? Four games that I can keep, or as many as I can go through in a year, but keeping none?

Honestly, I'd still have to buy some to keep. :-P Forza 2, Halo 3, maybe a couple others that I rent and really enjoy. But I'd really like to try stuff like MotoGP 06, the new LOTR game, Gears of War, etc. I think the stream of games due out is good enough to support using something like Gamefly, provided they have enough copies of the games to keep me playing something.

On to autocrossing, a proposal was made to move the 3-series BMWs and the IS300 out of DSP for 2007. As great as this initially looks to me on paper, it would be both a blessing and a curse. Obviously if this were to pass, I should have a car that's potentially a top competitor. Perhaps not the first year, but at least by 2008 the pax factor should be adjusted, so even if I didn't compete nationally I would still see a local benefit with no changes to the car. Still, if I have a car with potential to be competitive, I should really prep it a lot closer to the limit of the rules. And there's Part 1 of the curse. Just getting "closer" to the limit would mean an LSD, Hondata, exhaust, and dyno tuning. There's $2500 right off the bat if I want to use decent parts, and using cheap stuff doesn't save all that much. To go beyond that requires work that doesn't help the issue of street legality, like ITBs and a big header that eliminates the cat (figure $3k for the pair).

So I could have a car that's potentially competitive. I can take over $5k and get it a lot closer to fully prepared, or I can take that same $5k plus any money I'd get from selling the car, and buy something else. That's where Part 2 of the curse comes in - even for the $11k or so that we're talking about, I can't get a car that's as fast, as fun to drive, and as competitive in its class as my Integra. So I'm stuck with it (starting my 9th year with the car this month).

Of course, if the proposal gets turned down, my car remains uncompetitive, there's no reason to spend money on it, and getting a different car that's more competitive seems like a worthwhile venture. But whatever. I still think it should pass, I guess. :-P

Posted by Ben at July 10, 2006 12:58 PM