well, life seems to have settled down in into it’s post-vacation routine again. I go to work. I come home, sleep. And so forth.

Nothing really notable has been going on. I’ve been playing a lot more of Metroid Prime. It took me a while to get into, but it proved very rewarding once I did. Once I finish I’ll probably post my impressions of the game overall.

Also, after three months of self-imposed abstention, I bought a toy. It’s a PVR (personal video recorder). The idea is that, while I really don’t watch that much television, the stuff I do like (mostly on comedy central) is only once or twice a week, and I don’t care enough to change what i’m doing so i can sit in front of a TV. Also, I’ve gotten to the point where even one commercial is enough to make me recoil from the TV room in horror. So we got this ReplayTV thing that is supposed to automatically figure out when all your favorite shows are on and record them for you, and when you play them back it automagically skips all the commercials. All this for $120. Sign me up.

Finally, I should mention the freakish weather of the last couple of days. It’s been in the EIGHTIES AND NINETIES. I know. It’s amazing. How quickly I forget my roots.

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Comments

cameron — 2004-04-26 14:33:46

Metroid Prime = WHOOP! I’m excited about all the info we’ll get about Metroid Prime 2 (Echoes?) after E3.

Let me know how the whole PVR thing works out. Ever since I learned of TiVo, it seemed like something I would use and enjoy.

bryan — 2004-04-29 09:39:31

So far the PVR has kicked ass. We’ve gotten to watch the Daily show, which we almost always miss because we go to be to early, and I found late night showings of the Family Guy and Kids in the Hall. I didn’t even know the shows were still on the air anywhere, and now I can watch them whenever I want!

I just finished Metroid (took me about 5 attempts on the last boss), the same day I read about MP 2. So now I’ve played Zelda:WW, Mario Sunshine, and Metroid. What are other must-plays for GCN?

Cameron — 2004-04-29 16:15:57

Did you ever get your Zelda Collectors Edition? You should definitely take Ocarina and Majoras Mask for a spin. Other than that, the o­nly other games I’ve played significantly are Mario Kart Double Dash and F-Zero GX. I rented Soul Calibur II and enjoyed it as a rental. And I have Prince of Persia, which I know you’ve played o­n PS2. But other than that, I don’t have much. I’m looking forward to hearing more about Tales of Symphonia and the Lord of the Rings RPG.

bryan — 2004-04-29 20:06:24

Yes, I did finally get it. I got two, actually, because after they sent me my replacement my apartment complex told me they had been sitting on the other one for about a month. I guess it’s time to give Ocarina another shot :)

em — 2004-05-01 11:18:57

Did you intentionally embed two other “pvr” instances in your email?

post-vacation routine
proved very rewarding

bryan — 2004-05-06 16:16:34

no… how eery.

So, it’s that time again for all our favorite websites to do silly things for April 1st. Slashdot let me down this year, but there were two excellent showings from homestarrunner and maddox. Better hurry; I suspect everything will have returned to normal by tomorrow.

The entirety of last weekend was absorbed in scuba training with Leslie. I was actually certified back when I was sixteen for a trip my family took to Cozumel, and I did a bit of diving in Costa Rica in ‘98, and then another trip to Cozumel in (I think) 1999. The upshot is that it’s probably been five years since I’ve been underwater, and so I figured my skills could use a bit of polishing. And, of course, Leslie needed to get the training under her belt, too.

The dive shop where we were trained is called “Diver Dan’s Wet Pleasure.” No, really. It’s very near our apartment, and the staff there really seem to have their shit together. We happened to be trained by some high PADI mucky-muck, so there were a bunch of aspiring instructors there to help. Actually, there were about 10 instructors and only 8 students, so the ratio worked out pretty well. We took the “accelerated course,” which means 3 hours on Friday, 9 on Sat/Sun, and four dives next weekend in Monterrey Bay. In honesty, if you read the book outside of class, the time spent in the pool is really the only time not wasted. I’d suspect Leslie would have been fine just coming in, taking the final exam in about 30 mins, and spending 4 hours or so in the pool.

Let me tell you a story about water temperatures. You might think that 70 degrees is a pleasant temperature to go swimming in. Well, it’s not. It’s really frickin cold. Even 80 can get cold after a while. Why? Because your body is 98.6, and even dropping that a few degrees can cause uncontrollable shivering and hypothermia. And water can wick heat away from your body like no one’s business. Any way, when I first got certified in Austin, we went diving in Lake Travis (Windy Point, to be exact). The water was in the low 70s, and it was pretty damned cold. We’re going for ocean dives in the Pacific, which makes Lake Travis in winter look like a hot tub. The current water temperature in Monterey is 54 degrees. I’m shaking just thinking about it.

We’re supposed to be in Monterey (about an hour and a half from where we live) at 7:30 next Saturday morning. Lemons to lemonade, we’ve decided to make a little weekend trip out of it. We’ll probably head out Friday afternoon, shack up at the Travelodge and take it easy. Maybe on Saturday afternoon when Leslie is recovering/grading papers, I can sneak off and visit Laguna Seca. Hmm…

I went back and forth between loving and hating this article about five times in the course of reading it. Maybe he makes some good points, maybe he just goes in one big, self-indulgent circle.

Instead of worrying about the RIAA sending you a lawsuit, why not pay for privacy? In the end, though, maybe we can legitimize P2P. I don’t know. I always think it’s kind of funny when people try to quash file-sharing on the internet in one way or another, technically or legislatively. It’s funny because what they fundamentally want to prevent people from doing is sending bits to one another, and that’s all the internet does anyway. They want to turn the internet into television, pushing out all the products to you that you should buy. They hate the fact that the quivering masses out there have the ability to push stuff out to, and they especially hate it when they payed for the creation of that stuff. It’s understandable. They just want to make money like any reasonable corporation.

I’m not worried, really. It may be true that corporations are better at purchasing legislation than the American people, but in the end not even as corrupt a government as we have will turn their constituents into criminals. As more and more people realize that for essentially zero marginal cost they can make a copy of their CD, their DVD, their video game, you can bet your DMCA they’re going to do it, regardless of the law. It’s so easy. It doesn’t *feel* illegal. And even when they think of whom they’re screwing, they don’t Imagine it’s Peter Jackson or Eminem. They think of Sony Entertainment and BMG, and who gives a fuck about them, anyway? People just want to listen to music. If it were easier to pay for it, people would. People are lazy.

But it’s too hard to pay for it. Even though, to copy a DVD, I have to rip it, decrypt it, and remove region encoding (30 mins), then I have to trasncode it to fit on a DVD-R (1 hr), then I have to burn the finished product back to a DVD-R (20 mins), which costs me $1 in materials and quite a bit of time, it’s still more compelling than going to the store to spend over $20 for something which will entertain you for at best 6-7 hours for the duration of your ownership.

One of two things is going to happen:
(a) nothing. people will continue to be treated as criminals by media companies with no concern for customer satisfaction beyond the profit motive. Piracy will get easier and easier on old technology (CDs, DVDs, TV) and new technology will get more and more restrictive. It will be a constant arms race between pirates and content producers, and everyone will lose.
(b) someone will figure out how to make money by selling something worth buying. If I could buy a DVD movie for $7, I would do it in a second. I *know* they could make money on it. If I could by a CD for $7, I’d do it in a second. It’d be even easier to make money on that. CDs and DVDs cost pennies to manufacture. Cut prices drastically, and recover production costs in staggering volume.

I don’t have a lot of hope for b. But who knows? Enough ranting, I need to swap my next Netflix disc in to my Mac for ripping…