Sargonas.com

Yes, the weekend was indeed insane. Between friday morning and sunday late afternoon there was a fluctuating number of roughly 25-30 people in my house at any given point.

Stale had several other friends on the Penny Arcade forums who had birthdays, so they came to town as well, plus a large contingency of their little social circle from all over the us (plus a poor guy from Ireland who suffered an 8 hour flight and jet lag just to join in!) The house was a nonstop party and it was fun as hell. Well into 2 thousand dollars in alchohol was consumed, enough food to feed a small nation was cooked in cycles regularly and destroyed in minutes each time. (Chris makes a glorious cheesecake that I would happily move to Seattle to be able to have all the damn time!)

Fortunately there were no casualties of war this time, like last, where one of Dan’s couches was utterly destroyed by the projectile contents of an over intoxicated stomach, however I found out after the fact Kovak did have a little mishap all over the wood floor of my downstairs office, but it was quickly cleaned up (although the carpet outside the door of the room, at the base of the stairs does indeed bear some battle scars, come to think of it.)

Good times were had by all, there was more rockband going on that I think Harmonix ever envisioned, tons of Smash brothers and Mario Kart on the Wii up in the game room, plenty of pool (and weird schenanigans ON the pool table), tons of drinking games (the concept of Zoom still makes my head hurt) and I also learned when trying to find peace and quiet at 6am when everyone else is up still yelling, sleeping in the back seat of a Honda Accord coupe is NOT a good solution.

Then there was my actual birthday on monday… good lord. I must say, I was not looking forward to my birthday this year. It is the first time in 7 years (since the beginning really) that my birthday did not fall right on MML week, so I was not going to be home in Louisville with a few HUNDRED friends around, plus another 1,500 more gamers as well for several days. It was just me, and work, and Dan and Summer around and that was it, I have to admit i was really not planning to enjoy my birthday. However, Dan surprised me with the most insanely awesome present ever that morning at work, two front row seats to see Eddie Izzard live tonight! There is someone very special I would like to take more than anyone else in the world, but sadly she is not available.. but its ok, a great time shall still be had. Also, my facebook profile is setup to text me when someone writes on my wall, I left this on because at MOST I get 2-3 wall posts a week, if Im lucky. I had to turn the damn feature OFF yesterday. I’ve never felt so appreciated by so many people, my wall was literally destroyed with an untold number of posts, as was my myspce profile (by mostly the same people, LOL!) It certainly cheered me up a ton. Thanks to EVERYONE who left me a message on Aim, Myspace, Facebook, voicemail, email, and everything else. I love being reminded how many friends I have scattered all over the country, and the world, thanks to my love of gaming and all my traveling related to it. Its kind of cool to know I could be stranded just about anywhere in the US and know I have great friends not far away in some odd direction

Wohoo! I have overhauled my site as you can tell, if you check it regularly. An entirely new Theme for starters, which was hard for me. I LOVE my old web 2.0 looking, rounded cornered aero stylish black with green and gray. After all, green and black are my favorite colors. However I decided to go with a widget capable theme so that all that nav bar stuff on the right no longer had to be hand coded by me whenever I wanted to add a feature.

This theme, obivously, is. It was hard convincing myself to get away from the green and black, but its really growing on me more and more, and the response from my friends who have been following my site has been universally positive as well.

Also I added a new module that will show a random pic from my picasa gallery, as well as my current twitter feed. Along with that, when I make a new post from now on, an entry will be generate for me to twitter, which by default, will also go into my facbook now! LOL Then it will of course show up here on the site, come to think of it, in the twitter box.

Good lord, I just might cause the internet to fold in upon itself and implode, I should maybe rethink this plan…

One of my favorite sites to check in on daily is Garfield Minus Garfield. They simply take a Garfield strip that includes just Jon and Garfield, rip out any images of Garfield, and you are left with the crazy ramblings of a lonely depraved man..

www.garfieldminusgarfield.net

Today’s I especially like… kinda feels like me today

Yeah so two days ago I got pulled over on GA 400 by an Alpharetta cop on a motorcycle, for doing 70 in a 65 zone.. what the hell? Its GA 400.. if your doing under 80 your lucky to not get plowed down by someone in the right lane doing 90… and here I get zinged for doing 70.. and being passed by 20 cars in the 3 lanes left of me!

So he pulls me over, walks up to the passenger side of my car, and with out wasting time hands his Laser gun though my passenger window and says to me “I clocked you doing 70mph.. if you look the left number on this readout is your speed, the right is the distance from you to me.” And I have just enough time to read its 70 alright, and before I can even react he pulls it out the window and says “I’ll be citing you for 5mph over the limit sir, one moment please” and walks back to his bike and fills out the form. Watching him in the mirror I can see he going rather quick about it, as he aparently has most of the form pre-filled out, and just had to add in the info related to me. He walks back up, asks me to sign the notice of reciept, and hands me my copy, says good day and walks off. Whole thing lasted a ridiculous 7 minutes… dont know what the hell the story was here with the drive though pull over but whatever…

So my birthday is in a week and two days, if anyone cares. Dan is having a ton of people into town because between the 21st and the 24th he has 4 friends with birthdays, including me.. should be good times, assuming anyone here remembers I have one too, heh. Aside from that though I expect to spend my actual birthday alone.. I had really big plans this year too.. I was gona take “her” to vegas for a 4 day weekend…

So the subject of my previous post and I had dinner the night I wrote that. We had a really good talk. In short my main theory was right, the sudden actual commitment scared her shortly after realizing it had happened, and she got scared. I cant fault her for that, it happens. At least she was wonderful enough to sit down with me and have a great conversation over it, I walked away from it feeling very good about things, at least, I felt up beat and not destroyed, heh.

Really I was doing quite well, untill the car trip home. 6 hours alone in the car with my thoughts was rough, the first few hours went pretty well actually, untill XM-47 decided, for the first time in my own knowledge, to play some Placebo… her favorite, and that… sucked..

Up in louisville has been hell…. the majority of what I had planned to fill the three days around the time of my sisters party was meant to show her around and have fun, naturaly all of that is no more, so I’m bored out of my mind and lonely, because I intentionally didnt tell anyone I was coming home, so they wouldnt want to hang out with me and divide up too much of my time. Now of course everyone is busy on the holiday weekend and has no time for me. The few things I do go out and do, all I can do the entire fucking time is think about if she was along, what it would be like, where we would go, what I would show her next about my hometown, etc. I spent an hour going though 12 boxes in the garage, trying to condense down all this crap I have accumulated since high school and left home, stuff from living here, in my first apt, Chicago, etc. Going though a lot of old things made me reminisce, and then wish she was around so I could show her all the fun little odds and ends of my childhood.

And now I have a new problem these last two nights I have never had to deal with before, and I dont even know how. She has managed to somehow invade the privacy of my dreams. What is weird is that in them its not some self created lie where we are all happy and things are how they were and i wake up sad, but instead, things are as they are now, but worse.. they are vague to remember, but I think the general gist of each one is shes around, things seem like they are turning for the good, and then suddenly she will knock me down a few pegs and I wake up feeling like shit, and unable to fall back to sleep for a half hour or so. This has never happened before and thrown me for a bit of a loop…  I can honestly say its taken me to the point I am afraid to sleep anymore.. these are not thoughts I want to have. Mostly because she herself would never do these kinds of things to me.. so why the hell am I thinking them..

I’m going to skip the boring and trite “omg its been forever since ive posted.. blah blah blah” shit and get to what i need to vent in the open..

 I’ve spent several months involved with someone. The exact context is debatable. are we dating.. are we not, to what extent. We never really discussed and let it sit as a moot point, we were happy with what we had, what else mattered? Then about a week and a half ago she informs me at dinner, that she is indeed now my girlfriend. What happened in her mind to make this change I do not know, but it was a monumental one for us and something important. She was very clear on the statement of this, actualy having made it while i was on the phone with my father, who overheard it and had a chuckle over it. The rest of the day was quite pleasant, and late that night she makes another monumental leap, informing me that she does indeed love me. For the next several days things between the two of us had a much different context, there was obviously more in depeth, heartfelt emotion than before.

Now I am familiar with the concept of such a huge leap as this, after so long of the prior, making someone uneasy one morning, and this is ok with me, if thats all that happened, I could understand this, and work with it. This girl in question, sits me down for a conversation two days ago, and asks to back out of a long planned weekend trip she was taking with me to my hometown this weekend… and tells me that she needs some time to think, she isnt happy with how her life is going right now, too much chaos, too much confusion, and that “we” only complicated things. She needs to sit down and look at what her future holds, and that really, shes not sure there is room for an “us” in ir. I understand this concept, on its own. But how can someone then continue on to act like “that conversation” the sunday prior never happened. And when I ask about it, she tells me i was mistaken… I must have taken some off handed comment and twisted it in my head into hearing what I wanted to hear. She swears she never would have said that, I am clearly mistaken.

This is hurtfully insulting. I can understand her kinda having a quasai panic attack. The “oh shit” moment where that casual relationship that had no expectations became a commited, locked in deal. I understand this, I have BEEN THERE. But to tell me that, I know DAMN well she remembers this conversation, there is no question in my mind about it. Its insulting, hurtfull. I can accept if she doesnt feelt hat way anymore, I can accept if she has a change of heart. But to pretend it never happened, and to tell me to my face I am imagining it… is just… insulting.

 To make things better, today she chats with me about a few things, and then proceedes, out of the blue, to inform me “I’ve changed my mind.. I will come along this weekend”. This is something my brain is totaly unprepared for.. so i hesitate for a second, and simply tell her “ok I am now confused” which is responded with “i’m so mean… im just kidding!”

My only conclusion is that she somehow, feels the need to drive a wedge between us, because we had such an easy, understanding seperation between our two highly intertwined lives, that she feels she must completely make me want to alienate her in order to put her mind at ease… thats all I can assume.

So on black friday I decided to go with my dad and look at cars. When I come home next month I was planning to buy one, since my eclipse most assuredly needs to be retired, horrendously so. I was looking at a 350z (pricey end of my range) or a jeep sahara unlimited ( the decked out 4 door wranglers) and wanted to look at some numbers and get some ideas based on lease rates and trade in value on my eclipse. Instead, I ended up with this….

  Now then, can you actually believe this is a Honda? yeah.. that was my reaction. This is the new (as in, been on the road for about a month) 2008 Accord V6 Coupe. I have always liked Hondas for their reliability, but they are not the “me” kind of sporty little car. This however, changes that. It just plain looks awesome and has every single feature that they make as an option on the accord coupe,  and has 268hp, which, believe it or not, far out classes the old v6 in my ’00 eclipse GT by about 75hp. (not that I’m all that hung up on engine power, but by god you can feel it in this thing.) It also has a lot of nifty features, like their VCS system that manages the number of cylinders being used in the engine to conserve fuel economy. (ie. if your running on a constant speed on the express way, it shuts down the rear bank so you are only using the front 3, and when coasting to a stop or doing low powerd lane changes or merging, it adjusts to 4, etc) Some of the other nice things is that I finally have XM built into my car, no more using that damn tape adapter for that cheap ass roady I have in my eclipse, heh. I’m happy. Its not at all what I expected to end up with in the least, but I dont regret it one bit at all. its an awesome car, I ended up saving myself some serious chunk of money in comparison to what I was looking at as well, even though I don’t at all feel like I gave up on anything. Along with that, this model, the EX-L V6 when fully loaded out comes in around 32,000 give or take… before you factor in my trade in value on the eclipse… mine was 26,500 or so. It’s good to have my dad’s connections

Oh yeah, here is a stock photo of the interior of mine for those who care.

Only major difference being mine is an automatic, not a stick, aside from that  it’s the same. One thing I love about the interrior of honda’s is that they use a much softer, nicer leather than that viny-like crap that was in my eclipse, meh. Also there is a lot more of that brushed silver metallic trim than it looks like in the pic, which accents the black nicely, you just kind of loose that effect in the glare of the pic. Oh yeah, and it has an aux port for my iphone or any other mp3 player…  thats hot right there Been wanting something like that for a good while now!

So guitar Hero3 came out yesterday. It is great, indeed it is glorious.

From the very beginning it is clear that Harmonix is not involved in the game, and this is in both good, and not so good, ways. Harmonix is an awesome group, and while they were partners with RedOctane in the Guitar hero I and II endeavors, and RedOctane owned most of the rights to most things,  I will forever think of the Guitar Hero series as a Harmonix game. The changes are subtle but there, most are for the good, but there are a few things that annoy me. For starters, the entire game has a, well, Tony Hawk feel about it. No surprise there, it WAS made by Neversoft after all. My biggest gripe, and its purely cosmetic and just a personal thing, is the bastardization of Judy Nails. She was the character I always used, because in games I and II she could have been a digital clone of Ariel. It’s not that I have some sick twisted facination with my best friend (well ok maybe a little, but its purely sexual attraction, nothing weird) but simply if I am going to stare at the same person rocking around on stage for hours on end, I want it to be someone who’s easy on the eyes.

However in 3, when Neversoft got their grimy little skate board axle greased fingers on Judy, they seemed to have, well I dont know. Its like the squarshed her down a few inches and plumped her out oddly. Her chest is now 2 sizes two big for her body, shes a few inches shorter than before, and now oddly out of proportion because of it, her face seems far too chubby for the rest of her body because of this, and they beefed up her arms and legs to look rather creepy. All in all looking at her in the selection menu made me go running to the next character option, which was Lars Umlaut, and as we all know hes none to easy on the eyes either, but it was an optical reprieve for me none the less.

Aside from that I am so far happy with the game, the song selection so far is kick ass, and when I was unlocking extra tracks I found Kaiser Chiefs “Ruby” which just about made my day. I was disapointed to see there is no Freezepop songs for the first time, but this is none to surprising because they are personal friends of the Harmonix crew, and likely kept their loyalties to them and Rock Band. The song selection so far is great though, but I wont bore with details on that since its highly documented elsewhere.

Thew new multiplayer battle mode is nice with the twist of having “attacks” to use, instead of star power. Their concept of using this mode against 3 “bosses” made of famous musicians is also a nice change for the campaign mode. It eases a new player into the concept for online play, as well as breaks up the monotany of “beat this song… now this one.. ok good now this one” which is otherwise the only aspect of the campaign mode. One other nice addition is that the cut scenes between venue upgrades got a small but awesome tweak. Gone is the simple graphic of a map with your tour bus driving from point A to point B. In its place is a full cut scene, with a nice artistic twist of no vocal audio. It shows things for example, of after the back yard gig, a guy walks up, shows a business card, throws a ad for a battle of the bands competition in you face, flashes some money and smiles. In other words, you just got a manager and your first gig. The animation style is on par with the guitar hero look and feel, and the lack of spoken dialog is actualy nice, plus there is some good visual comedy in each one, and they are each 10-15 seconds at most to keep it short and simple. Again, this was a good twist that broke up the same ole same ole of the past games, without really changing anything.

All in all I give guitar Hero 4 out of 5 stars, now if you will excuse me… I need to go beat Slash into the ground so I can jack his avatar and rock that pimp ass hat he wears myself.