I hadn't expected just how busy we'd be in LA. Pretty much every moment not spent sleeping was either doing something or driving to go do something. A lot of that something was eating, which we did to excess; another big part of that was E3, which, like all trade shows, was a lot of noise for not much interesting content. The Wii was certainly the highlight of the show, and showed a lot of potential even if most of that potential wasn't realized in the games and demos we saw there—it didn't seem like the controller adds much in the new Mario game, but they've got plenty of time to work on that. The closest I saw to what will hopefully be the proper Wii Experience was a Wario Ware demo where you hold the magic wand on your hip and mime hula, hold it like a steering wheel to drive a car, hold it on your head ("The Mohawk") and do squats, and so on. In this ideal, the controller is no longer an abstract interface, using buttons to represent actions, but a tool that lets you express the action itself. There will be advantages and disadvantages to removing this layer of abstraction, and I'm sure we'll see some really clumsy implementations, but I'm sure we'll get a lot of new experiences that weren't possible before. In other words, I'm excited.

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I'm off for another two weeks now, with another 30 rolls of film. I've got the whole summer to catch up on photos and journaling, so I don't feel too bad about all this Doing instead of Writing about Doing.

(I know, I know, I used the dreaded B-word.. But only to make a bigger, even cheesier word, so I say it's okay. Also, Photoshop just crashed with twenty minutes of unsaved scans in its belly. Let that be a reminder to you to save early, save often, and don't trust no sucker application with your data. I'm sending the crash report to Apple out of spite.)

Most people go on vacation to spend time away from the computer, but I'm looking forward to a week of avoiding work and catching up on my China reportage. (My posts now seem to be either promises for upcoming posts or apologies for not posting what I promised, so consider this one all of the above.) I'm headed down to LA tomorrow along with Cabel and Mike and either Josh or John, can't remember (so we'll just call him Jo??, pronounced /jaw-unnh?/) to hit E3 and see friends, and also to remind myself again why I live in Portland and not Southern California. And to deliver unto Molly's brother and his girlfriend splendid Gifts from the Orient. And in the interstices I plan to push the keys on this keyboard in the right order to convey something interesting about our trip to China. (Photoshop just crashed again, so I won't be working on any new scans.) But really I'll be thinking about the sailing trip and wondering what it'll be like three weeks from now when I'm back home and don't have any big trips coming up.

(ALSO! I have to post this from LA because Blogger has been crap lately. Yes! We're in LA now! Uh.. Woooo!)

I've been so busy pushing photos through the pipeline that I haven't had time to write about the trip. And I only have a week before we head to E3, and after that only one day before I head off for my two-week boat trip. I scoffed when I read that they suggest bringing a laptop on board, but now I'm seriously considering it. Computers love the fresh salt air, sure! Anyway, 31 rolls of film are developed, and 31 contact sheets are scanned. I've scanned full-res picks from the first six rolls, and have around 15 images to show for it. I'm slowly feeding them into Flickr as they come out. These aren't thrilling, but there's some really nice ones coming up..