The Big Think

Jan lent me the PS2 game Valkyrie Profile 2 and, try as I might, I just couldn’t get into it. The main thing was the horrible battle system. Talk about half-baked! The difficulty is supposed to scale in these games to gradually teach you tactics. Unfortunately, the game throws a three minute battle system tutorial at the player and then immediately ramps the difficulty up. Sorry, Square-Enix, I don’t want to waste 40+ hours in frustration. I play to enjoy my games, not to be aggravated by dying every five minutes.

It feels like the developers had what they thought was a good battle system idea but then fell in love with it too early and let it out the door half-baked. I really wanted to like this game (V.P. 1 was apparently a knockout-great game). I’m always disappointed when a game fizzles for me. Ah well.

Maybe I’ll take a page from Katherine’s book and go play Civilization.

I’m sometimes ask people where they would go if they had a free ticket to anywhere in the world. Pick your destination and go, for a week, or a month, or a season. Where would it be? I get all kinds of answers- Europe, Russia, Hawaii. For me, the one place I would choose is Antarctica. Why? A couple reasons, really. It’s not on the way anywhere, so you’re never going to just stop off on a layover, there haven’t been that many people who have done it, but mainly because it’s just so different. Like a completely foreign planet. What must it feel like to be in a world that’s totally iced over year-round? Where a warm day is zero degrees? Where the windchill can get down to -100 fahrenheit? The alienness of that landscape fascinates me.

I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica at the library last week and just finished it tonight. Like his Mars trilogy, Robinson uses the dramatic backdrop to weave a very literate and moving story of technocratic utopianism. Along the way, he delves into the history and mythos of Antarctica as well as, through one of his characters, a very zen-like appreciation of the austere and sere landscape. One of his main character is a mountaineer guide and I was impressed with how accurate he got not only the technical details of guiding, but also the emotional aspects of taking people out into the wild. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it made me want to go there even more.

The Little Dog Robot.

(and I think only two of my readers will get that title).

Crash test your car at Consumer Reports here.

3D faces from 2D pictures. Cool.

Google Moon offers “street level” views of the lunar landing sites. Cool!

I don’t know what I like more, their incredible materials science or their inscrutable television shows. Why not put them together?