Last week I was in a somewhat weird and tense mood. I just felt a bit off, and I didn't know why, which just made me even more off-kilter.
But then I went to the gym on Saturday and beat the shit out of myself for hours, and I felt a million times better.
So I realized that I hadn't been to the gym much for the past couple of weeks. I've been writing like a motherfucker, doing some major catch-up, and we also had some clients in town. For a while, I was getting to the gym almost daily. Suddenly, I was squeezing it in one or twice a week.
Then I hit the gym for another epic workout yesterday, and came out of that feeling like a million bucks. Which brought me to the conclusion that the gym was the x-factor... If I go, I feel good. If I don't go, I feel bad.
Shit.
I wanted to engage in a healthier life-style, and now I'm just a monkey punching a button. Which I guess means I'm doomed, but in a good way... There are worse things for me upon which I can depend for elevated brain chemistry, like booze or heroin or something.
But still...
In BURN AFTER READING, George Clooney's character starts losing his shit because he's been so busy he hasn't had a chance to get in a run. Now I understand why.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Prototype, and On Heroism in Video Games
I picked up PROTOTYPE the other day, and I love it. This game is pure joy. Your character - Alex J. Mercer - is so incredibly powerful, and the stakes of the story are so high, that you often find yourself in scenes of complete, unbridled, apocalyptic chaos. As Penny Arcade pointed out, it's a game in which your guy can jump up and kick helicopters out of the air... what more do you need?
But my appreciation for it goes beyond the destruction. The gameplay is phenomenal. This is primarily because it's an almost exact lift of one of my favorite PS2 games, SPIDER-MAN 2.
There are several games on the PS2 that I just ate alive: GUN, MERCENARIES, MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE... and SPIDEY-2. This isn't just because I love the movie; it's not like I've got video game adaptations of every movie I've ever liked sitting around the lair. In fact, most of them are known to suck. Go to GameSpot, and the bargain bin titles read like the summer release dates from two or three years ago. Nah, SPIDER-MAN 2 just rocked my house. I thought it was nothing but a very well-made, fun-as-hell game.
And here we have PROTOTYPE, which has taken every aspect of gameplay from SPIDER-MAN 2 and built from there. The comparisons are many... The game's a sandbox set on Manhattan. There's an A-story, but you can also unlock side missions that are either fighting or racing oriented. Anytime you want, you can drop down to street level and deal with the havok. (In SM2, it was stopping random crimes; here it's either general warfare or grabbing Web of Intrigue people). As you play, you collect points which you can spend to either unlock new fighting/movement moves, or improve core abilities. Your character has a method of "flight" which requires using the buildings around you... in SP2 it was Spidey's web-swinging, here it's Alex's gliding.
They're so similar, I was able to dust off my old SP2 skills and immediately get into PROTOTYPE, even on a micro level... getting around Central Park, dealing with overhangs, etc. PROTOTYPE improves a couple of things, too. For instance, Alex has parkour-like abilities, so he never gets hung up on anything while moving around. In SP2, running down the street was a hassle, because Spidey would get blocked by fences, cars and lamp posts unless you specifically dealt with them, i.e. jumping over them or whatever. Alex just automatically handles stuff like that. And Alex doesn't die when you fall. One of my favorite parts of SP2 was diving off really tall buildings, and web-swinging away at the last second before I hit the ground. It was always a pain when Spidey died from falling, and it felt incongruous to the character. Alex not only doesn't die, he lands with a massive BOOM which cracks the pavement and sends everything around him flying. Awesome.
Plus, PROTOTYPE has a disguise element. You can absorb a character, and change yourself to pose as them. It reminds me of DESTROY ALL HUMANS. It's funny; stealth-driven games kinda bore me, but I like games that use disguises. Go figure.
And of course the graphics are way beyond.
But the primary difference between the two games is in tone. SM2 the game is similar to SM2 the movie... It's high key, sunny heroism which is sometimes dark, but more often just fun and funny. PROTOTYPE, on the other hand, is edgy, dark anti-heroism. If it weren't for the presence of two female supporting protagonists whom you sometimes protect - his sister and ex-girlfriend - Alex would be exactly the monster the villains accuse him of being.
It's a game in which, to complete missions, you have to fight and kill New York police officers and U.S. Marines. In order to solve the mystery of Alex's identity, you have to "consume" NPCs and absorb their memories. This usually entails dropping onto a street and murdering them in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses, who scream in terror and run away. Alex can regenerate, but it's very slow... The best, fastest and frequently necessary way to heal yourself is to consume human beings. It doesn't matter who, just anybody who happens to be standing close by. When you drive a vehicle down the street and run people over, you score points. Shit, even MERCENARIES 2 and the GTAs penalize you for that kinda thing. (In M2 you lose cash, in GTA the cops come after you).
There are moments in this game that rub me the wrong way.
Now... I'm the last guy in the world to get on a pulpit and rant about how video games are ruining the youth, etc. PROTOTYPE is rated M, and is clearly meant for adults. And I'm definitely not squeamish about violence in games.
But I DO like playing a hero. I've played numerous games in which you are given the choice of taking the high or low road without penalty to your character:MASS EFFECT , FALLOUT 3 , OBLIVION IV, BALDUR'S GATE, NEVERWINTER NIGHTS, etc. If these games had come out when I was a teenager, I guarantee I would have played them as the scourge of the earth. These days, however, I consistently play a good guy.
The only other time I've felt the same way I've felt while playing PROTOTYPE was while playing MERCENARIES 2, another game I thoroughly love. In fact, in that game you're given a choice of three characters, and I always play the nihilistically destructive Matthias Nilsson (with excellent voice work by Peter Stormare). Again, M2 penalizes you for harming civilians... though you're free to steal their cars and blow up their houses, which never bothered me.
No - I'm talking about a section of the game in which you're asked to fight U.S. soldiers. It's spun very cynically, as the U.S. is only in the country to protect the oil, and they're allied with the Blackwater-style mercs who give you a hard time early in the game. And the big boss fight guys are evil CIA types. Plus, the overall tone of the game is dark comedy. It's not meant to be taken seriously.
All of that said, I still wasn't sure how I felt about that part of the game, and I had a hard time enjoying those missions.
In PROTOTYPE, there's no humor. It's a dark, serious game. Alex is an angst-ridden anti-hero, dealing with powers he didn't ask for, fighting an enemy who wants him dead for reasons he doesn't understand.
The villains make a point of calling him "it." As in: Alex is no longer a human being, he's a (sometimes) human-shaped vessel for a mutating biological warfare strain. The thing is, they're right, and Alex's actions reflect that.
One time, when I was a little kid, I was playing with some army guys, fighting out a war on my bedroom floor. My dad came home from work and, after watching me for a couple of minutes, said, "You know, those little guys are human beings." My response was something along the lines of nah, they're just pieces of plastic and this is just a game. But now I kinda see what he was talking about.
It's not like anyone who's ever played chess gets upset when they lose pieces. "My knight was a human being with a family!" And this is the same basic analogy, I suppose. Do my guts twist a little bit only because the "pieces" in video games actually look human (despite the uncanny valley) and represent specific people? (That is, they're not generic "pawns," they're members of the United States Marine Corps.) Probably.
PROTOTYPE takes pains to show the evilness of the masterminds behind the military response. They're a shadowy government bio-warfare group who, back in the '60s, killed an entire town of U.S. military personnel and their families in order to test an earlier version of the strain which now infects Alex. (Spoiler). When their strike teams appear, I take immense glee in fucking them up. The player is told it's okay to murder these people, and I'm personally fine with it as I play said game.
But it makes me think of propaganda. As a species, we're by-and-large fine with cruelty and violence so long as we feel it's justified. "They're different from us, they're evil, they must be killed, and in the worst way possible." I don't think this is even an indication of the inherent darkness in the soul of humanity or whatever... I believe it's an outgrowth of our survival instincts, the need to congregate and protect each other in a world where we're near the bottom of the food chain.
This is all well and good when I'm playing video games in which the enemies are non-human representations of evil like zombies, robots, aliens, demons, etc. This even applies to humans who are generally considered to be evil: criminals, Nazis, mercenaries, what have you. But twice now in games I've been asked to shift that "okay to kill" spotlight to fictitious representations of the U.S. military, and it's a little strange to me.
If there were a video game in which you were supposed to run around and kill, say, teachers or firefighters, everyone would lose their minds. But cops and soldiers are okay because... why? They have weapons and can presumably defend themselves from your super-powered character who can kick helicopters out of the sky?
I realize this is rambling and contradictory, and I'm not even quite sure what I'm saying, beyond the fact that I experienced something while playing a video game that was beyond the standard it's-fun-to-blow-stuff-up response.
But my appreciation for it goes beyond the destruction. The gameplay is phenomenal. This is primarily because it's an almost exact lift of one of my favorite PS2 games, SPIDER-MAN 2.
There are several games on the PS2 that I just ate alive: GUN, MERCENARIES, MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE... and SPIDEY-2. This isn't just because I love the movie; it's not like I've got video game adaptations of every movie I've ever liked sitting around the lair. In fact, most of them are known to suck. Go to GameSpot, and the bargain bin titles read like the summer release dates from two or three years ago. Nah, SPIDER-MAN 2 just rocked my house. I thought it was nothing but a very well-made, fun-as-hell game.
And here we have PROTOTYPE, which has taken every aspect of gameplay from SPIDER-MAN 2 and built from there. The comparisons are many... The game's a sandbox set on Manhattan. There's an A-story, but you can also unlock side missions that are either fighting or racing oriented. Anytime you want, you can drop down to street level and deal with the havok. (In SM2, it was stopping random crimes; here it's either general warfare or grabbing Web of Intrigue people). As you play, you collect points which you can spend to either unlock new fighting/movement moves, or improve core abilities. Your character has a method of "flight" which requires using the buildings around you... in SP2 it was Spidey's web-swinging, here it's Alex's gliding.
They're so similar, I was able to dust off my old SP2 skills and immediately get into PROTOTYPE, even on a micro level... getting around Central Park, dealing with overhangs, etc. PROTOTYPE improves a couple of things, too. For instance, Alex has parkour-like abilities, so he never gets hung up on anything while moving around. In SP2, running down the street was a hassle, because Spidey would get blocked by fences, cars and lamp posts unless you specifically dealt with them, i.e. jumping over them or whatever. Alex just automatically handles stuff like that. And Alex doesn't die when you fall. One of my favorite parts of SP2 was diving off really tall buildings, and web-swinging away at the last second before I hit the ground. It was always a pain when Spidey died from falling, and it felt incongruous to the character. Alex not only doesn't die, he lands with a massive BOOM which cracks the pavement and sends everything around him flying. Awesome.
Plus, PROTOTYPE has a disguise element. You can absorb a character, and change yourself to pose as them. It reminds me of DESTROY ALL HUMANS. It's funny; stealth-driven games kinda bore me, but I like games that use disguises. Go figure.
And of course the graphics are way beyond.
But the primary difference between the two games is in tone. SM2 the game is similar to SM2 the movie... It's high key, sunny heroism which is sometimes dark, but more often just fun and funny. PROTOTYPE, on the other hand, is edgy, dark anti-heroism. If it weren't for the presence of two female supporting protagonists whom you sometimes protect - his sister and ex-girlfriend - Alex would be exactly the monster the villains accuse him of being.
It's a game in which, to complete missions, you have to fight and kill New York police officers and U.S. Marines. In order to solve the mystery of Alex's identity, you have to "consume" NPCs and absorb their memories. This usually entails dropping onto a street and murdering them in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses, who scream in terror and run away. Alex can regenerate, but it's very slow... The best, fastest and frequently necessary way to heal yourself is to consume human beings. It doesn't matter who, just anybody who happens to be standing close by. When you drive a vehicle down the street and run people over, you score points. Shit, even MERCENARIES 2 and the GTAs penalize you for that kinda thing. (In M2 you lose cash, in GTA the cops come after you).
There are moments in this game that rub me the wrong way.
Now... I'm the last guy in the world to get on a pulpit and rant about how video games are ruining the youth, etc. PROTOTYPE is rated M, and is clearly meant for adults. And I'm definitely not squeamish about violence in games.
But I DO like playing a hero. I've played numerous games in which you are given the choice of taking the high or low road without penalty to your character:
The only other time I've felt the same way I've felt while playing PROTOTYPE was while playing MERCENARIES 2, another game I thoroughly love. In fact, in that game you're given a choice of three characters, and I always play the nihilistically destructive Matthias Nilsson (with excellent voice work by Peter Stormare). Again, M2 penalizes you for harming civilians... though you're free to steal their cars and blow up their houses, which never bothered me.
No - I'm talking about a section of the game in which you're asked to fight U.S. soldiers. It's spun very cynically, as the U.S. is only in the country to protect the oil, and they're allied with the Blackwater-style mercs who give you a hard time early in the game. And the big boss fight guys are evil CIA types. Plus, the overall tone of the game is dark comedy. It's not meant to be taken seriously.
All of that said, I still wasn't sure how I felt about that part of the game, and I had a hard time enjoying those missions.
In PROTOTYPE, there's no humor. It's a dark, serious game. Alex is an angst-ridden anti-hero, dealing with powers he didn't ask for, fighting an enemy who wants him dead for reasons he doesn't understand.
The villains make a point of calling him "it." As in: Alex is no longer a human being, he's a (sometimes) human-shaped vessel for a mutating biological warfare strain. The thing is, they're right, and Alex's actions reflect that.
One time, when I was a little kid, I was playing with some army guys, fighting out a war on my bedroom floor. My dad came home from work and, after watching me for a couple of minutes, said, "You know, those little guys are human beings." My response was something along the lines of nah, they're just pieces of plastic and this is just a game. But now I kinda see what he was talking about.
It's not like anyone who's ever played chess gets upset when they lose pieces. "My knight was a human being with a family!" And this is the same basic analogy, I suppose. Do my guts twist a little bit only because the "pieces" in video games actually look human (despite the uncanny valley) and represent specific people? (That is, they're not generic "pawns," they're members of the United States Marine Corps.) Probably.
PROTOTYPE takes pains to show the evilness of the masterminds behind the military response. They're a shadowy government bio-warfare group who, back in the '60s, killed an entire town of U.S. military personnel and their families in order to test an earlier version of the strain which now infects Alex. (Spoiler). When their strike teams appear, I take immense glee in fucking them up. The player is told it's okay to murder these people, and I'm personally fine with it as I play said game.
But it makes me think of propaganda. As a species, we're by-and-large fine with cruelty and violence so long as we feel it's justified. "They're different from us, they're evil, they must be killed, and in the worst way possible." I don't think this is even an indication of the inherent darkness in the soul of humanity or whatever... I believe it's an outgrowth of our survival instincts, the need to congregate and protect each other in a world where we're near the bottom of the food chain.
This is all well and good when I'm playing video games in which the enemies are non-human representations of evil like zombies, robots, aliens, demons, etc. This even applies to humans who are generally considered to be evil: criminals, Nazis, mercenaries, what have you. But twice now in games I've been asked to shift that "okay to kill" spotlight to fictitious representations of the U.S. military, and it's a little strange to me.
If there were a video game in which you were supposed to run around and kill, say, teachers or firefighters, everyone would lose their minds. But cops and soldiers are okay because... why? They have weapons and can presumably defend themselves from your super-powered character who can kick helicopters out of the sky?
I realize this is rambling and contradictory, and I'm not even quite sure what I'm saying, beyond the fact that I experienced something while playing a video game that was beyond the standard it's-fun-to-blow-stuff-up response.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Query of the Day
The last line is the kicker:
"A young woman in search for love and a serious relationship is devastated to see that when she finds love a Ghost appears and spoils the relationship for her claiming that she is married to the Ghost and she should not mess up with other men. The Ghost warns her.
Genre: True Life Story"
"A young woman in search for love and a serious relationship is devastated to see that when she finds love a Ghost appears and spoils the relationship for her claiming that she is married to the Ghost and she should not mess up with other men. The Ghost warns her.
Genre: True Life Story"
Thursday, July 9, 2009
"Yet Bpet" is Thai for "Fuck a Duck"
In the course of retooling RUN for Bangkok, I've run across a few instances in which the characters use harsh language with each other in an angry tone of voice. (I know, you're shocked). But some of these characters are now Thai, and it stands to reason they will drop into their native language when they're emotional, i.e. if they're screaming obscenities out of rage or fear.
Thus, I found myself in need of some Thai swears. Thanks to the magic of google technology, I was able to track down www.youswear.com. It gave me a lot of fun things for these characters to say, including:
Yet Bpet - Fuck a duck
I-ha - Bastard
Mae Meung Ttai - Your mom is dead
Shia! - Dammit!
And my personal favorite...
Ai na son teen - Your face looks like my feet
The last one is a little long and descriptive to easily fit in, but I'll try...
Thus, I found myself in need of some Thai swears. Thanks to the magic of google technology, I was able to track down www.youswear.com. It gave me a lot of fun things for these characters to say, including:
Yet Bpet - Fuck a duck
I-ha - Bastard
Mae Meung Ttai - Your mom is dead
Shia! - Dammit!
And my personal favorite...
Ai na son teen - Your face looks like my feet
The last one is a little long and descriptive to easily fit in, but I'll try...
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Zombie Dreams
One of the best things about going to the gym on the regular is I sleep more deeply, and do a better job of remembering my dreams.
Last night, I dreamed about zombies.
It was very long, almost a collection of inter-related dreams. They could have been eps in a series. And it was very, very bleak, more reminiscent of THE ROAD than say, the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake. They were slowish zombies, but not as slow as Romero's. And they were smart, like in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD... basically the zombified people were their normal selves, except they'd turned evil, and only wanted to eat human flesh. It was way creepier than normal dumb zombies - they were almost like body snatchers, in a sense.
Anyway, it started out at my grandmother's house. When I was growing up, she lived on the same block. The zombies got in, and a massacre ensued. I was upstairs for some reason, and I realized the zombies yet know didn't know I was there. As quietly as possible, I slipped out the window, dropped to the ground, and went to the house I grew up in.
The doors were unlocked. For a few super-tense minutes, I tried to barricade the house without letting anyone outside notice I was there. (It was a lot of quietly pushing furniture against doors, etc.) The whole time, there are sirens in the distance, cop cars screaming past, people getting pulled out of the houses by zombie mobs, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
I get a big shock when I find a boy hiding in a closet upstairs. He's maybe ten or eleven, and the source of the unlocked door. (How he had a key, I don't know - it's a dream). So now I've got to protect this kid while saving my own ass.
The zombies start poking around my house. The kid and I hold our breaths. The zombies try the the doors. Locked. They try to push open the doors. No dice... but the furniture in the way lets them know someone's inside (doh!), effectively causing my attempts to defend the place to backfire.
The zombies mount a full on assault on the back of the house. Luckily, they're of relatively normal intelligence, but death has blurred the edges for them. They've become very single-minded, so I'm able to smuggle me and the kid out through the front of the house while they're kicking in the back windows.
We have a long, scary chase of us running down the street, hoping the main mob will be distracted by searching my old house for me long enough for us to escape, all the while crossing our fingers that the zombies attacking the other houses don't notice us.
We get several blocks down before the zombies realize they were played. They come howling after us, alerting the other zombies, who join in.
We reach the first empty-looking house we can find. It's a big, rambling place that strongly resembles (but actually isn't) a house I had in Chicago right before I moved to LA. I forget how, but, in the dining room, we find a trap door under a Persian rug. It leads down to a cobwebbed basement. Fuck it - down we go. I pull the rug back, and hope the zombies don't trip over it (revealing the trap door).
In the basement, we find the owner of the house, a creepy dude who looked kinda like Eric Wareheim and acted like Tim Robbins in WAR OF THE WORLDS.
The zombies storm the house. They're calling my name, busting up the place looking for me. The weirdo keeps getting worried and about to make some noise and, like Tom Cruise in WAR, I'm wondering if I'm gonna have to kill this dude in order to save me and the kid from a zombie munch.
Then I woke up and went to the gym.
Last night, I dreamed about zombies.
It was very long, almost a collection of inter-related dreams. They could have been eps in a series. And it was very, very bleak, more reminiscent of THE ROAD than say, the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake. They were slowish zombies, but not as slow as Romero's. And they were smart, like in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD... basically the zombified people were their normal selves, except they'd turned evil, and only wanted to eat human flesh. It was way creepier than normal dumb zombies - they were almost like body snatchers, in a sense.
Anyway, it started out at my grandmother's house. When I was growing up, she lived on the same block. The zombies got in, and a massacre ensued. I was upstairs for some reason, and I realized the zombies yet know didn't know I was there. As quietly as possible, I slipped out the window, dropped to the ground, and went to the house I grew up in.
The doors were unlocked. For a few super-tense minutes, I tried to barricade the house without letting anyone outside notice I was there. (It was a lot of quietly pushing furniture against doors, etc.) The whole time, there are sirens in the distance, cop cars screaming past, people getting pulled out of the houses by zombie mobs, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
I get a big shock when I find a boy hiding in a closet upstairs. He's maybe ten or eleven, and the source of the unlocked door. (How he had a key, I don't know - it's a dream). So now I've got to protect this kid while saving my own ass.
The zombies start poking around my house. The kid and I hold our breaths. The zombies try the the doors. Locked. They try to push open the doors. No dice... but the furniture in the way lets them know someone's inside (doh!), effectively causing my attempts to defend the place to backfire.
The zombies mount a full on assault on the back of the house. Luckily, they're of relatively normal intelligence, but death has blurred the edges for them. They've become very single-minded, so I'm able to smuggle me and the kid out through the front of the house while they're kicking in the back windows.
We have a long, scary chase of us running down the street, hoping the main mob will be distracted by searching my old house for me long enough for us to escape, all the while crossing our fingers that the zombies attacking the other houses don't notice us.
We get several blocks down before the zombies realize they were played. They come howling after us, alerting the other zombies, who join in.
We reach the first empty-looking house we can find. It's a big, rambling place that strongly resembles (but actually isn't) a house I had in Chicago right before I moved to LA. I forget how, but, in the dining room, we find a trap door under a Persian rug. It leads down to a cobwebbed basement. Fuck it - down we go. I pull the rug back, and hope the zombies don't trip over it (revealing the trap door).
In the basement, we find the owner of the house, a creepy dude who looked kinda like Eric Wareheim and acted like Tim Robbins in WAR OF THE WORLDS.
The zombies storm the house. They're calling my name, busting up the place looking for me. The weirdo keeps getting worried and about to make some noise and, like Tom Cruise in WAR, I'm wondering if I'm gonna have to kill this dude in order to save me and the kid from a zombie munch.
Then I woke up and went to the gym.
Query of the Day
Huh?
"It is created adventure, comic genre writing (it is maybe subject for you). There are curious adventures of one man and several countries’ teenagers. As experts said, there is no analog. The theme is so big and maybe makes 3 or 4 films, as usual, telecast and animation.
If you are interesting about my theme I can send you the materials. Be sure that, this will be interesting for you which are around this theme; I will tell you this in the second letter."
"It is created adventure, comic genre writing (it is maybe subject for you). There are curious adventures of one man and several countries’ teenagers. As experts said, there is no analog. The theme is so big and maybe makes 3 or 4 films, as usual, telecast and animation.
If you are interesting about my theme I can send you the materials. Be sure that, this will be interesting for you which are around this theme; I will tell you this in the second letter."
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The Mouse, the Motorcycle, Moving & Me
All quiet on the mouse front. Enough time had passed that I stopped making sure the soap went in my bathroom sink when I went to work or bed.
Yesterday, I jumped in the shower, picked up the soap and noticed the tiniest of nibbles had been taken from one corner. So even when these mice are seemingly gone... they're not gone. Not ever. It's like a chronic disease.
I've decided it's time to move. My rent keeps going up, but the lair remains the same. Moving to a similar place with lower rent seems like the best way to make some extra money magically appear. I've been busy as fuck lately, trying to scrape up a war chest. Moving is expensive as hell -- I had to move four times the first year I was out here, and it beat the shit out of my bank account. I'm hoping to bounce within the next couple of months, getting out before the rent goes up yet-a-fucking-gain.
In the meanwhile, my lust for a bigger motorcycle grows with every passing day. I love the Rebel and it's a perfect learner bike. But I've been on it for six months now, and I'm itching to ride something stronger. I want a bike I can ride out to Arizona without getting blown all over the road. And on the Rebel, I have to shift up through all five gears before I get to 30 mph. It's fine, I'm used to it, but with city driving it's a shiftastic shift-a-thon. A lot of times, I don't even bother to lane split, only because it's kind of a pain in the ass to quickly pull ahead of traffic.
And I'm just getting curious about other rides. I'd been thinking of graduating up to a Honda Shadow, which is basically the bigger version of the Rebel. On the other hand, I'd like to see what the big fuckin' deal is about Harleys. I like cruisers.
Yesterday, I jumped in the shower, picked up the soap and noticed the tiniest of nibbles had been taken from one corner. So even when these mice are seemingly gone... they're not gone. Not ever. It's like a chronic disease.
I've decided it's time to move. My rent keeps going up, but the lair remains the same. Moving to a similar place with lower rent seems like the best way to make some extra money magically appear. I've been busy as fuck lately, trying to scrape up a war chest. Moving is expensive as hell -- I had to move four times the first year I was out here, and it beat the shit out of my bank account. I'm hoping to bounce within the next couple of months, getting out before the rent goes up yet-a-fucking-gain.
In the meanwhile, my lust for a bigger motorcycle grows with every passing day. I love the Rebel and it's a perfect learner bike. But I've been on it for six months now, and I'm itching to ride something stronger. I want a bike I can ride out to Arizona without getting blown all over the road. And on the Rebel, I have to shift up through all five gears before I get to 30 mph. It's fine, I'm used to it, but with city driving it's a shiftastic shift-a-thon. A lot of times, I don't even bother to lane split, only because it's kind of a pain in the ass to quickly pull ahead of traffic.
And I'm just getting curious about other rides. I'd been thinking of graduating up to a Honda Shadow, which is basically the bigger version of the Rebel. On the other hand, I'd like to see what the big fuckin' deal is about Harleys. I like cruisers.
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