RedBeard’s Curious Life

So I just blew a few hundred bucks on clothes, and another hundred on a gameboy advance with some games. And I’m planning to spend more!

I did the Black Friday thing and waited for half an hour outside Circuit City at 5 am to get the gameboy, then headed to the mall where I snagged a number of tops for about $150, with a free hat & scarf thrown into the mix. Then I went back and spent another $90 on some jeans and a sweater and got another free hat & scarf, but they didn’t have any more of the color I actually wanted. In retrospect, I could have saved an extra $40 or so if I’d sprung for their store credit card, but the store is closed now and I’ve already paid for the stuff with a different card.

I’m about to order some more shirts and pants online, and perhaps some music CDs and gameboy games too. I looked for GBA games in retail outlets but couldn’t find any worth buying. The best I saw were a couple of used carts in gamestop, but since they have a “buy 2 get 1 free” and I couldn’t find a 3rd worth having, I passed on them.

Call me a consumer whore, but all this isn’t more than half of a paycheck and will last me well into next year.

I seem to have a predilection towards purchasing inexpensive games. Over the last year, I’ve bought a number of them for prices around $5 to $20, and have yet to actually install or play most of them. I still buy brand-new games when they appeal to me, but the cheap games seem to offer far better value. I have been known to buy these games and instantly place them on a shelf, or perhaps allow a friend to borrow them while I personally do not partake of their entertainment goodness. I’m fairly selective, yet still have a rather large collection of ill-attended titles.

I do want to play them, but I do not possess a time machine, and will have to carefully pick to which games I devote my spare hours and minutes. I am open to suggestions, and will thus list my current collection of mainly-unplayed games, in no particular order:

• Doom 3
• Silent Storm
• UT2K3 & 2K4
• Commandos 2
• Thief 2
• Homeworld
• Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire
• Splinter Cell
• Quake 2
• Master of Orion 2
• MDK, MDK 2
• Descent Freespace + Expansion
• Fallout 2
• Dungeon Siege
• Z: Steel Soldiers
• Mafia
• Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
• Massive Assault
• Perimeter
• American McGee’s Alice
• Rise of Nations Gold
• Max Payne 2
• Vampire Bloodlines
• American McGee’s Scrapland
• Tron 2.0
• Operation Flashpoint GOTY

Also, I’ve recently ordered Call of Duty 2, and have yet to play Civ4 to a completely satisfactory degree. In other news, I recently beat FEAR and can only say “WTF?” to the plot/ending.

I was told by someone that I got too into the details on my last post. This one would turn out rather long if I got into the details, so here’s a publishing of the notes that I usually transform into a more grammatically-cohesive structure. Let me know what you think. If people bitch, I might dress it up with pretty things like transitions and support.

*Life is a constant struggle against entropy
*Entropy still present in all life, with random mutation of genes introducing new genetic codings
*Darwin’s theory is that the “fittest” mutations survive
*Fitness mainly a function of ability to reproduce – survival, impregnation, protection
*Instinctual behaviors coded as part of the surviving genetic “firmware” encourage reproduction
*Humans seek happiness, thinking it’s an emotion not felt by “lower” animals
*Happiness still hinges on instinctual influence, with attraction and copulation filling in a key aspect that perpetuates the “lower” fitness level
*No matter how much we analyze and understand beauty, it’s unavoidable to feel attraction to beautiful/suggestive images or sensations
*Fashion seems to act mainly to accentuate or create the impression of positive physical attributes
*My excuse for having virtually no fashion sense is that I don’t find men attractive, and thus have no in-built mechanism to identify what would make me look attractive. I mainly just buy whatever’s cheap and somewhat popular.
*Life is basically about sex, but there are many other activities that invoke the pleasure centers of the brain. Sex is just the best one.

Addendum: Intelligent Design is unverifiable, and also not mutually exclusive with evolution.
Evolution is a valid theory (as it has not been disproved), ID is a hunch.

F.E.A.R.
So I pre-ordered the “director’s edition” since it was going for the same price as the regular one and came on DVD, thus avoiding issues with disc-swapping and such. I’m not sure why all games don’t come on DVD by default, are there honestly any computers that can play these new games and that don’t have a DVD drive? I just bought a brand new DVD burner for $40, that’s less than the cost of the game itself… Anyway, the game arrived in its box, but when I removed it from the packaging I discovered that it was virtually naked to the elements, with merely a thin paper shroud to cover it! That’s right, no jewel case despite the singular quantity of discs enclosed – apparently the cost of producing a single DVD disc is comparable to producing the 5 discs included in the CD version, to the point that the expense of a jewel case would be considered extravagant. I hear also that certain individuals had difficulties with the copy protection of the DVD edition.

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