The Dude Has Got No Mercy

Speaking as someone who lives about a quarter of a mile from a Subway sandwich shop (or is it shoppe?), let me say that I admire them for taking the initiative to launch their $5 sub promotion. I know it’s only temporary, but hey, if it saves me a couple of bucks on sandwiches for a little while, then I’m happy to have it around. One of the benefits of their little deal is that the rest of the sandwich manufacturers (Quiznos, etc.) have also matched the five dollar promotion. Previously a footlong turkey sub would cost something like seven dollars, and since I buy a sub basically every day now, the savings are substantial.

Needless to say, the fact that I’m actually making a post about this should tell you how bored I am at the moment. Oh well, back to my gin gimlet. Gin makes a man mean!

So some of you probably saw over on my GameSpot blog that I’ve left San Francisco for the warm, sunny climate of Orange County and a job at Obsidian Entertainment. That’s obviously great, I’m pretty happy. It’s an interesting environment down here, though. I’m currently carless, which was fine in San Francisco, but here in Orange County it’s not exactly something that’s doable. I’m currently busing to work, which takes around an hour each way, with a half-hour bus ride and half an hour of waiting for the bus or walking to work from the bus stop. The drive should take 15 minutes or so, so obviously I’m cutting myself short by not owning a car, but in the meantime I get to read on the bus a bit and get a little exercise on the walk from the bus stop to the office.

I’ve got another 12 days or so before I get my first paycheck, which I kind of need to get before I can budget out car payments and how much I want to pay for a permanent apartment (currently renting, month-to-month, a furnished room with a TV and bed and private bathroom on the bus route for 800 a month, which will be fine until I manage to find someplace permanent). In the meantime, I’m learning just how awkward it actually is to buy a car. I’m pretty bad at navigating choices when it comes to large purchases, and I’m likewise pretty bad at haggling/etc, so I’m pretty worried about biting the bullet and buying a car, especially when it comes down to making a choice between new and used. I figure it’s my first car, so I’ll probably get in a wreck at some point, so I might as well get something used, but you never know what you’re going to get there. I need something with good mileage, so I’m also thinking of just getting a new Corolla or something similar with good depreciation value. (The downside of looking at cars with good depreciation is that recent used cars cost almost as much as new ones, which is the case with the Corolla.)

At any rate, I’m looking forward to that first paycheck. Since I’m going month to month for the first few months, I’ll be able to save money on the rent, but man, the rent in Orange County is as bad if not worse than it was in San Francisco. Luckily, with a car, you can live a bit further out and not worry as much about catching public transportation. It’ll take a little time to get used to that, I guess.

In the meantime, life is pretty damn boring, as evinced by my writing a blog on a Saturday night. That’s good, though; I spent a lot of money on beer and the like up in SF, so that’s one more area where I’ll be saving money in the meantime. I couldn’t move with much, so I just brought down a new laptop and some magazines. I need to get on ordering some books, I guess, as I really don’t have much to do at the moment.

So I took my driving test today and passed with flying colors - 98%, with points off for a spot of rough braking. I feel pretty good about driving now, which is interesting considering that I just started learning a couple of weeks ago. I went from learning how to turn the car on in the first lesson (at which point I had never been behind the wheel of a car) to almost acing my test after about 14 hours of classes. My instructor said that people normally take much longer to get prepared for a test, so that’s good, at least. Unfortunately all I got was a flimsy provisional license; they have to mail you the actual card, but I’m not going to be at my current location for much longer, so hopefully the USPS forwards it along promptly. Then I just have to worry about insurance and finding a car that I want to drive. I’m thinking a Corolla or something sensible like that.

At any rate, I’m glad it’s out of the way. Now I just have to deal with moving to Orange County on Sunday. I’m flying down, so I can’t bring too much down with me. I need to get a laptop to deal with net stuff, I guess. I’ll try to buy one tomorrow. I’m putting basically my entire apartment into storage on Saturday, not withstanding the furniture, most of which I’ve sold.

If I don’t update my blog here for a while, it’s probably because I can’t remember the URL to log in to it. Heh.

There is indeed some Big News for the mattro that will hopefully find its way to my GameSpot blog later this week. Since I can’t talk about it much now, though…

I saw Cinema Paradiso at a friend’s place the other day. Unbelievably maudlin with a score that grated on me like nothing else that I can remember. I’ve been meaning to watch it for a while, but now I kind of wish I could get that 2.5 hours of my life back. I don’t know if I necessarilly jibe with the Italian sense of the world. I think French movies are much more believable in emotional terms, for whatever reason.

I’ve been going through driving classes lately. Believe it or not, but at 28 I had never driven before a week ago. It’s been pretty easy so far, and I should be prepared to take my test in a week and a half or so. The weird thing has been my hyperawareness behind the wheel; it’s been odd trying to adjust to a situation where you need to have a 180-degree field of vision at all times. If nothing else, driving in San Francisco should prepare me for driving almost anywhere else. Which, you know, may come in handy sooner rather than later…

If you ever get a chance, it’s easy to kill an hour or two by browsing the Medal of Honor website. Not the game; the site dedicated to the actual award. Here’s one of my favorites:

TOMINAC, JOHN.

Rank and organization: First Lieutenant, U.S. Army,

Place and date: Saulx de Vesoul, France, 12 September 1944.

Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty on 12 September 1944, in an attack on Saulx de Vesoul, France 1st Lt. Tominac charged alone over 50 yards of exposed terrain onto an enemy roadblock to dispatch a 3-man crew of German machine gunners with a single burst from his Thompson machinegun after smashing the enemy outpost, he led 1 of his squads in the annihilation of a second hostile group defended by mortar, machinegun automatic pistol, rifle and grenade fire, killing about 30 of the enemy. Reaching the suburbs of the town, he advanced 50 yards ahead of his men to reconnoiter a third enemy position which commanded the road with a 77-mm. SP gun supported by infantry elements. The SP gun opened fire on his supporting tank, setting it afire with a direct hit. A fragment from the same shell painfully wounded 1st Lt. Tominac in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. As the crew abandoned the M-4 tank, which was rolling down hill toward the enemy, 1st Lt. Tominac picked himself up and jumped onto the hull of the burning vehicle. Despite withering enemy machinegun, mortar, pistol, and sniper fire, which was ricocheting off the hull and turret of the M-4, 1st Lt. Tominac climbed to the turret and gripped the 50-caliber antiaircraft machinegun. Plainly silhouetted against the sky, painfully wounded, and with the tank burning beneath his feet, he directed bursts of machinegun fire on the roadblock, the SP gun, and the supporting German infantrymen, and forced the enemy to withdraw from his prepared position. Jumping off the tank before it exploded, 1st Lt. Tominac refused evacuation despite his painful wound. Calling upon a sergeant to extract the shell fragments from his shoulder with a pocketknife, he continued to direct the assault, led his squad in a hand grenade attack against a fortified position occupied by 32 of the enemy armed with machineguns, machine pistols, and rifles, and compelled them to surrender. His outstanding heroism and exemplary leadership resulted in the destruction of 4 successive enemy defensive positions, surrender of a vital sector of the city Saulx de Vesoul, and the death or capture of at least 60 of the enemy.

I realize this is quickly becoming an image and video blog, but hey, I don’t always have a lot to write about.

Unbelievable.

(Haven’t been posting much lately, for reasons that I will hopefully be able to reveal soon. I’ve had this draft kicking for a while, so I figured I’d go ahead and throw it up.)

I was bored recently, so I decided to watch the entire first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Surprise: it’s not very good. It’s not very bad, either. It’s aggressively middletastic, if I had to pick a word to describe it.

I don’t know much about the development of the show, but I don’t envy the job of the creators in taking such a well-loved (by some) franchise and adapting it to television, which obviously would require a lot of down-scaling from the massive budgets of the movies. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t really care much about the Terminator series. Terminator 3 was probably my favorite of the movies, if only because it didn’t have the weight of James Cameron’s pretensions saddling it. The man can direct an action sequence, obviously, but man, you’d have a hard time making exposition sequences more plodding and grim than those in Terminator 2. Linda Hamilton was a relentless downer, and Edward Furlong has never really been capable of acting. Arnold was decent enough, and Joe Morton gave a nice performance, but outside of the shit-blowing-up scenes I find that movie fairly difficult to watch.

As far as Terminator 3 went, it might sound sacriligious, but I enjoyed it quite a bit more than T2. Nick Stahl was pretty affable as John Connor, he had pretty good chemistry with Claire Danes, and the script was a lot more humorous than T2. It also gets bonus points for completely reversing James Cameron’s ethos of “the future is what we make it” and instead making it “the future is set and unchangeable”, which I’m sure pissed him off to no end.

Hah, and now I have no time to talk about the actual TV show. Suffice to say that it’s something of a guilty pleasure for me. It’s not very good, to be sure, but it’s not good in an interesting way. I’ll try to follow up at some point.

Aka the Greatest Thing Ever Made.