On Being A Giant Robot

For most of college, I was pretty sure as soon as I popped out and put on my graduation cap and drove off into the sunset, I would immediately start working at a video game design studio. It's what I wanted to do since before high school, it's what I took all my electives in and spent a lot of my free time on (that which was not spent on track meets or music). It didn't really turn out that way - the game industry is notoriously competitive to get into, and the economy was not exactly at its best when I started shoving job applications out the door. (I do admit I started a bit late - my senior year was a little chaotic)

Still, I really love the damn things. One of my favorites of all time - Mechwarrior 2 - involves you stomping around on various planets piloting a giant robot warrior, as part of some space-faring feudal caste society that led an exodus from Earth when space travel was first becoming commonplace. Sadly, it's a videogame made in the mid 90's, and the successive sequels to the franchise have just gone downhill. Some bunch of yayhoos, however, undertook the rather massive task of creating an entire new Mechwarrior (as a modification of an existing game engine) and releasing it for free, and hot buttered lugnuts, it is exactly what I have wanted for quite some time.

Sadly, the website is actually overloaded (they exceeded their bandwidth! how about that for a success story) but I shall link to it all the same: http://www.mechlivinglegends.net. The game runs as a full modification for Crysis, so if you don't have it, it's probably worth buying for this alone.

I also recently blew through a new book that had the first pages featured on the NYTimes about a week ago - its release sadly coinciding with one of the deaths of the men it followed. The book, "Last Train From Hiroshima," covers the events that dogged 9 particular men and women who were present at both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (and survived them). The man who recently passed away was Tsutomi Yamaguchi: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07yamaguchi.html.

James Cameron also has evidently optioned the movie rights to it - I am not sure how that would work, considering a great deal of the book is grisly, physics-centric descriptions of how easily nuclear weapons snuff out human life. Here's the news release concerning the movie and the preview of the book that inspired me to buy it.

I've also been doing a little bit of that "running" thing - had a kind-of-not-the-best-last-week last week, with what I will fancifully call "faux-bronchitis" dogging me at every step, and a mile race that was the slowest I've run in 3 and a half years. Ew. Mostly I think that was a case of just mentally not being in it - which, for me, is not such a big obstacle to overcome as not-being-in-shape. The Terrier Invite is this weekend and I'm in the 800 - hoping to see a PR. I'm not positive about that but I think I'm in the right kind of shape. This week has also gone significantly better in terms of running - the cough has basically cleared up and I am not constantly popping pills to stave off muscle aches / slight fever. I would like to take whoever gifted me with this drastically inferior immune system and put them to the question.

Tonight was especially entertaining for running - sometime between when I returned home from work and when I left to run (about a 20 minute span!) two inches of snow just dropped like a lead weight from the sky. I did my usual thing around the Cleveland Res and was greeted by comically intense wind blasts on the eastern side of it. With the full moon, though, it makes a pretty stunning visual - especially combined with the orange light from the street lights and the snow whirling in bizarre eddies from the wind whipping behind you.

I think that's all the verbage I have in me tonight.