I have nothing profound to say today.<\/p>\n
I feel as though I’ve been on a roll the past few days. I wrote a letter to my sixteen year-old self<\/a> (and it’s longer than any short story I wrote in 2009). I waxed philosophic about Robert Downey, Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes<\/i> movie<\/a>. And I watched Doctor Who<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n Compared to those, today I feel like I’ve been mean to my mental hamster, making him run really fast on the wheel that makes my brain cells go.<\/p>\n Not every day is quality, sadly.<\/p>\n I began a short story on the train home. The first page is deadly serious, but it’s about to change. It’s not the greatest idea in the world, just something random and silly with a lot of profanity.<\/p>\n I put a video game in the Xbox last night, one I’d bought five years ago and never finished. (Yes, I’m talking the original<\/i> Xbox. I have the green Halo<\/i> system. I have no intention of parting with it.) The Bard’s Tale<\/i>. I remember when the game came out. I was so<\/i> looking forward to it. I played it, and I played it, and I enjoyed it, and I played it some more, and then Lord of the Rings: The Third Age<\/i> came out and I put The Bard’s Tale<\/i> aside so I could go adventuring in Middle-Earth. Only, I never got back to The Bard’s Tale<\/i>. I picked up from my old save file and had no idea where I was or what I should do. So I started a new game.<\/p>\n It was a pretty clever game, as it satirized the whole RPG genre. The Bard (voiced by Cary Elwes) was snarky, and he had a snarky narrator (voiced by Tony Jay), and the Bard wasn’t out for heroic quests. He just wanted coin and cleavage, not necessarily in that order, and preferably together. The play style was basic hack-and-slash; it used the Baldur’s Gate<\/i> Snowblind engine.<\/p>\n To be honest, I got a mite bored with it last night.<\/p>\n I love the soundtrack to the game, though.<\/p>\n I spent part of the day at work listening to a concert bootleg of Elbow and the Halle Orchestra from July. I’ve had the mp3s since August, but this was the first time I’d really sat down to listen to them. Sadly, I couldn’t muster much attention for the concert, and I’ll come back to it.<\/p>\n Finally, I had Scotland on the mind today as I put up a new 2010 calendar at the office.<\/p>\n My 2009 calendar was the George R.R. Martin A Song of Ice and Fire<\/i> calendar. For 2010, I went with something a little more real, a calendar of Scottish scenery I picked up at the calendar stand at the mall on Friday for half price. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n January’s picture is of a group of stone houses in the Outer Hebrides<\/a>. <\/p>\n I’ve never been to Scotland, though I would someday like to go.<\/p>\n