Even though I have an old tiny CRT TV and not some fancy HDTV, I've found only marginal difficulty reading dialogue text in what is otherwise the most addictive game I've played since Katamari Damacy: Fallout 3. Maybe it's the bleak grey-brown alterna-future, the 1950's art design, the payoff for exploration... I have a very hard time putting down the controller at 2:00 a.m. and coming to bed.

It is very much like WoW in it's constant-quest-giving nature. There's always just one more thing to do before you take a break. Unlike WoW, the quests feel substantiative. Although I know I'm wasting my life, I don't feel like it so much. Perhaps it's the lack of online play, though, that makes it better. It's post apocalyptic; You don't expect to see a ton of other people out trolling the wastelands. Well, maybe one or two, but that's what makes them fun to run into... There's only the one.

The one thing I am certain of, Fallout rewards exploration with oodles of eye candy. There is huge incentive to straying from the path you were on to check out that neat, oddly solid looking building beside that pile of nondescript rubble. You may be rewarded with creepy tunnels filled with glowing purple soda and giant crab monsters that don't really care if you shoot at them... it just pisses them off. Quick, go get the missile launcher! Dark Cloud 2 I liked a lot for many of the same reasons that I like this game. However, we can thank developers new propensity for catering to "hard-core gamers" (i.e., adults) for delivering a game which is worlds more mature.

Fallout 3 wins in it's character flexibility. It's a true role-playing game. It gives you tools and flexibility to play as any disturbed, unbalanced personality you can come up with. So you want to play an alcoholic pacifist? Great! Go for it! It's in there.

Bethesda has made a fantastic game, in a setting I actually want to play in, with characters I like, and enough content to screw with your head for months. Don't tell my girlfriend. She thinks she's getting me back eventually.

As I touched down in Reno, my head welled with congealed mucous. As soon as those doors opened, I knew I wasn't going to last even the last half-day at work. I stuck it out for two hours, but couldn't hang all the way to 5:00.
So, today I stayed home. Three weekend illnesses in as many weeks does little for my faith in my immune system, which to this point I believed to be very good.
Perhaps it is my diet or my lack of exercise (which is bad again since it's cold as shit in Reno again, and I refuse to buy a gym membership. Either way, It certainly can't be good for me that I've reentered the "sloth months."

The dualities in my life are multiplying. This post is the first to be listed both as my LJ account as well as at unventure. My social group is split between Seattle and LA (745 miles north, and 510 miles south), but things are going well with all of it. Seattle was great, as always; I love the Halloween party at the compound. This year we even had the press crash the party... Having LMK there was really good for my psyche. I've been wanting to bridge those worlds for a while, and even though we didn't have a lot of time of relaxation opportunity, I think the goals were accomplished. My "family" has had a chance to get to know her, and she got comfortable with some of them. I think next time we visit it'll go even better.

My site has it's first members (yay!) and I still have a ton of content and tweakery to add/do to it. I've been looking at drupal sites by others and realizing there's a lot more flexibility to the node system than meets the eye. I can definitely make my site easier to navigate... it'll just take some time. I'd live to spend a week in the office just working on making my site smooth.
Until then though, I'll be stuck in this slow process of tinkering between service calls.

By the way, if you're reading this on LJ, go look at unventure.com.