Rage and technology

This is an exercise in taking two different concepts and bringing them into togetherness and love. Please keep your divs inside the allotted browser window. No malformed code allowed, not even in the comment box. Today’s post is brought to you by the letters “ooooooooh” and the word “lovely”. Lets now commence with the sense making.

Rage

For the past few weeks I’ve been watching my good buddy (you know the one with too much spare time) whenever he can pull himself away from the PSP as he manuevers the incredibly hot (and viscious) Kratos on his quest to kill Ares the God of War . What a sentence.

Now some of you might be thinking things like “that’s got to be boring” or “normal people would prefer to play the game themselves”. Not at all. This game is awesome and has only been made more awesome by the fact that I don’t have to worry about being eaten by Cerebus puppies and can pay attention to things like the lovely tilework and the fact that in a certain room you get three warnings before the floor opens up and you fall to your death.

Also it can rest heavily on someone elses concious that we missed the sex minigame or that to progress past a certain point requires “the ultimate sacrifice”. I rather enjoy the decapitations and breaking of necks and the ripping off (and out) of vital body parts. I even think it’s humorous that Kratos can kill the innocent run-around-in-the-middle-of-the-fight-with-my-hands-over-my-head bystanders for some more rage. but the sacrifice thing would have probably taken me a couple hours to figure out and sort of threw me off. The really odd and addictive part is that we’ve got to be almost to the middle of the game and and I’ve learned more about the story from the splash page on the game site than from the 8 or so hours of (watched) gameplay.

It does cause a tiny bit of anxiety that Jordan’s method of gaming is to go immediately to the most obvious next step (say killing all 600 medusas) and never look back whereas I tend to explore every accessible unit of space before weighing my options (ooohh you mean I can get past them without actually killing them all?) and moving on. Jordan has been very good about sensing my anxiety when it reaches critical points and going back to explore. Over all it’s a pretty synergetic mix of running commentary, sarcastic interjection and proper appreciation that reminds me of the good old days of web dev.

The Technology

In other news.. I have joined the masses of people in Tallahassee (and around the world) that own a cell phone. I’m rather happy about it even though it wasn’t my idea and left up to me would have probably never happened. But it wasn’t left up to me and I picked it up at Greyhound package express almost a week ago. I almost have my number memorized.

It’s a lovely little flip phone with no camera, no keyboard, no intergalatic remote control… it’s just a phone. And I love it that way. It does have the capability for instant messaging and web browsing but I’m not impressed. I’m currently doing both of those things quite well on a 19 inch flat panel monitor with a nice full sized keyboard and wireless mouse. The thought of switching to an almost-two-inch cell phone display with a number pad is not appealing.

We’re using T-mobile and my phone is Samsung and between the two they have the worst user manual and written documentation ever. Ok it’s not the worst ever but kinda bad isn’t as dramatic. Basically I’ve been trying to figure out how I need to enter numbers into the phonebook so that they work when I try to call them. Seems like it should be a pretty basic need but I appear to be wrong since no help exists on the site or in the rather thick (and mostly useles) user manual for the phone. Such is life.

In conclusion…

So thats the news from Lake Sparkalyn. Where all the women are geeks, all the men are obsessive and all the cell phone manuals are a waste of time. Images taken from ign.com and samsung.com respectively.