Dead Computer

The fan on my laptop stopped working, so the engine wouldn't even turn over.  Sorry, Target card, I missed that payment.  I couldn't get to my login information in time.  It would be no problem at all to move all of my settings to Tyson's computer with the miracle of Transfer Wizard or whatever Vista calls it, but my hard drive has been turned into a slave drive and I can't install the program.  And I didn't export my bookmarks before my computer died, so I'm having to find them again manually.

Ugh.  I think I'm done for a while today.

I am a dork.

Those of you who know me only by reputation (or from my blog) may see me as this hipster cool twentysomething living it up in Sin City, bypassing the mile-long lines at the ultralounges, calling in sick so I can go to Ditch Friday at the pool at the Hard Rock and chat it up with celebrities, but really, that's just the image I try to cultivate.

Because my secret identity as a sappy D&D dork must be protected at all costs.

Thanks to my friend-in-law, Kurt, I have been playing Neverwinter Nights for about five years now.  (I have a very long attention span for games I like a lot and tend to play them over and over again.  I'd like to say I take an analytical approach, playing them differently each time to get the most out of the game, but I don't.)  This is easily the best D&D RPG game ever, although it's also the only one I've played (not counting a half-hour of WoW, in which I only barely mastered the controls).  I've beaten it a bunch of times, created dozens of different characters, and probably spent more hours of my life devoted to hacking up bad guys than I would care to admit.  When I first started playing, I had to make myself a schedule where I was limited to skipping only one class a week so I would not have to explain to the advisors in the education department why, exactly, I failed my freshman-level composition class.

Anyway, in this one expansion pack, one of the optional members of your party you can add is this fighter/weapon master tiefling, Valen, and if you are a female character and not a complete twat, he eventually harbors a massive hard-on for you. 

I am not kidding.

This is a picture of Valen about to confess his passionate and undying love for me.  We just got duped by a powerful demon and sent to Cania, one of the Seven Hells (the frozen one, I guess).  Now we are on a quest to discover this demon's True Name so we can get out of here and go get all hitched or whatever.  (He does not normally glow green, I am just holding the mouse over him.  By far the best feature of the game is that, essentially, all you have to do to beat bad guys is click on them, and the badassery of your character does the rest.  My Whirlwind Attack can take down four drow warriors at a time with just one click of the mouse--way easier than enrolling at that Kung Fu studio was going to be.)  

The grown-up part of me understands that this is all just a video game, that neither Valen nor my patently made-up character who wields two +7 katanas with energy-draining, electrical-zapping powers and can run around all day with 533 pounds of stuff (thanks to my +24 strength!) and beat up all kinds of undead dragons and such are not actually real people, but I have to say I was looking forward to this chapter of the game since I started playing it again.  Something about making a broody, angsty, ass-kicking boy go all weak-kneed and sappy is just so yummy.

And I think it's not quite as pathetic as reading romance novels?

Update: Hooray for the Internet

Marmots: They're sort of both.  Males are territorial and have harems of multiple females and offspring, usually creating a family unit of less than 20 animals.  We can split the 10 points.

Planets: Here are descriptions of where the planets are chillin' at over the course of this year.  They are not always visible, but it was probably either Jupiter, which is at opposition right now (essentially we're seeing a "full Jupiter") or Saturn that we looked at with binoculars.  One million points for me for general astronomical correctness; ten for Tyson for correctly differentiating between a star and a planet.

A Dirty Sanchez is either funny or gross, depending on the degree of seriousness with which it's suggested.

Brian Jones founded the Rolling Stones and is now dead.  I still don't know how or why John Darnielle thinks he'd be like Brian Wilson. Maybe sort of old and sad, and trying to capitalize on their past success?

Dinu Lipatti was a Romanian pianist.  I don't know why someone would need his bones.

Gas in Baker is an even $5.

Sand accumulates not because of static cling or anything like that, but primarily because of a process called saltation.

The lake that covered a big chunk of the intermountain west was Lake Lahontan.  A summary of Nevada's brief history as a seafloor is here.

As for Mercury, that's going to take some digging, and I haven't downloaded Google Earth on this computer yet.  If anything interesting turns up, I'll post it.

New laptop woohoo!

I was minding my own business in the kitchen yesterday, making linguine with clam sauce and hot fudge pudding cake, when Tyson comes in with a NEW LAPTOP for me!

Okay, it's an old IBM ThinkPad his school was tired of using as a doorstop, but it has a working OS (would that be an operating operating system?) and a SOUND CARD, which I have not had in several years now.  It also has some fancy-schmancy docking station so I can pile a whole bunch of peripherals on my desk and not have to mess with reconnecting them when I want to puck up my computer and take it with me.  Finally, despite being a year or so older than my Dell, it is about 3/4 the weight and has a little smaller profile (it still won't fit in a manilla envelope like the MacBook Air, but whatever), so I can actually use it as a mobile computing device rather than just sitting it on my desk and only taking it somewhere when it's really worth it to lug 10 pounds of computer around.

Suffice to say, I am extremely excited about this.  Now I just have to put all my old junk--Quicken files, a bunch of folders of old school things I'm not ready to sort through and delete, my photo albums, etc, back on this system (everything's spread between 2 flash drives, Tyson's desktop, and the laptop in the living room).

Oh, and did I mention I can listen to things now because the sound card isn't melted into slag?  Yaay!