I bought my sister's housemate's old Cinema Display, so my New Year's resolution is—wait for it—1920x1200!

Ba-dum-bum-CRASH

We're back now from a week in Austin, visiting friends and relatives, eating too much, sleeping too little, and having a very good time. Every time I go back to Austin I play the "what if I'd stayed here" game; I love my life here in Portland, but I do miss the Texas weather, and I'd like to be closer to family.

Anyway, the house was still standing when we arrived (always a concern), the cats didn't seem to notice we'd left, and the antique folding camera I bought on eBay showed up while we were gone. It appears to be a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515 circa 1937, in quite good shape, and 4.5x6 instead of 6x6 format: 4 more exposures per roll! It's a nice change going back to a rectangular format, having a choice between landscape and portrait. Easier to find frames, too.

Lastly, and not related, I read about half of the new Best Science Writing collection on the plane today, and it reminded me that I need to put together the essay on determinism that I've been throwing around in my head for the last year or two. It's not quite original, but I haven't seen anything yet that addresses this head-on. Here's the general outline: First, assume the universe is entirely deterministic. (If not, then we're stuck in an overly-metaphysical realm with icky things like free will and "magical" consciousness.) Then, either the world we see here is the only way things could happen, that somehow the Theory of Everything implies, specifically, me sitting here writing this after coming home from eating a dozen hot wings and sharing a pitcher of IPA with my wife after flying home from holidays in Austin, along with the American Revolution and the Roman Empire and Homo Erectus and Dinosaurs and Primordial Earth and everything else that's happened until now; or, every possible (or maybe just reasonable) outcome exists in as "real" a fashion as the here-and-now.

Neither of those is particularly compelling. But it gives us an excuse to talk about exponential growth and counting arguments.

Yeah, I've caught the Sudoku bug. I ran across the simple yet perfect Sudoku Companion on accident the other day and gave the game another try. The first time I saw Sudoku in a newspaper, I filled out the obvious numbers and assumed the rest was an exercise in simple logic, that everything would just fall into place once you filled in enough squares--say, a third of the board. That, or it would be trial and error all the way down, like those super irritating "magic squares" we used to do. Unfortunately, it's not that simple, there's plenty of interesting higher-level thought involved, and now I'm hooked. I went from doing the medium difficulty puzzles to "fiendish" over the weekend and can do the daily puzzle in around 20 minutes now.

Thing is, though, I can't tell if I'm actually having fun or not. It's not FUN! fun, but it's something to do, and my brain gets some kind of primitive behavior-reinforcing reward when I complete a puzzle. I don't have to think about what I want to do for another half hour. But then what? Start a new one? This is starting to replace Google News or pinging the AP feeds on Salon as my compulsive time waster. I think I need to set some limits.

After a nearly a year of design deliberations, our fabulous Katamari Damacy T-shirts have finally shipped! I stayed around Friday night and helped stuff some three hundred envelopes with shirts. We've sold most of what we had printed, and have around 400 orders sitting waiting for the next run.

I've been doing the bugfix mambo, and we should have Unison 1.7.2 out tomorrow or the next day. Releases take a little longer now that we have to translate everything to Japanese every time. I'm crossing my fingers that we can sit on this release for a long time while I work on something new.

I'll be crewing on the Lady Washington from May 14th to 28th!

We're headed to Austin for Christmas, and will be back by new year's for our second annual New Year's Day Brunch.

Since I mentioned Animal Crossing DS, my friend code is 2019-2414-5779; I'm Dave in Erewhon. If you add me (uh, all you people reading this..), email me your friend code. I often leave my gates open during the day. Of course, by the time this is Google-indexed and someone finds this, I'll have long since given up on the game..

The second game I was really looking forward to (excuse me, "to which I was looking forward") shipped this week, Animal Crossing: Wild World. I didn't actually play it much at E3 or read much about it, but I loved the original GameCube game, loved it right to death. I assumed that the DS version would expand on it in lots of fun ways, like bigger towns and more things to do, as well as being able to play the game with friends. So far it's a bit of a disappointment: looks like it's pretty much the same game with the online play patched in. It such a weird mix of insanely cool technology and base tedium it makes me dizzy. Just now I connected to a guy's DS in Australia, on the other side of the world—and there was nothing to do but say hi, walk around, then leave. There's almost nothing you can do to make your town different from everyone else's, to make it a place people might want to visit. I'm still having fun doing all the same things I already did in the GameCube game, but it seems like there was a huge opportunity missed here. On the other hand, it does show that we can look forward to some really, really amazing online DS games.

Of the two games I saw at E3 that I was really looking forward to, the first, Lost in Blue, turned out to be a total bust. Interesting in that, yes, surviving after being shipwrecked on a remote island does require a strict focus on immediate needs, boring or repetitive as they may be. (Read Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls for more on that.) Even when I realized that most of the game play would be fishing and gathering firewood over and over again and taking care of a girl who's so stupid she'll starve to death with a pantry full of coconuts, and that I wouldn't even get to milk the goat (not a euphemism there) until I'd played all the way through once, I still trudged through because I know that once you've given up you're good as dead—may as well fast forward a dozen years to the discovery of your remains and the forensic analysis of whatever dumb way you did yourself in. When the game turned into a weird kind of action platformer a la Metal Gear, I called it quits. Little Timmy and his idiot girlfriend are dead now, and I just don't care.