entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

After about 48 hours of Civ4, i'll have to catch up to see what i've been missing.  I will say this: the so-called "minimum" and "recommended" system requirements, as far as RAM goes, are a joke.  The game sucks up 410 MB of RAM, and i saw it hogging over 700 MB of virtual memory after i exited the game.  When your stripped-down Win2K installation uses 180 MB of memory just sitting there, it's inescapable that you need a minimum of 640 MB, and you should really get a gigabyte in there to be comfy.

My copy of Civilization IV Special Edition arrived today.  This should keep me busy during the time where i would normally be working...

On July 16, the first two innings of the [Northern League's Kansas City] T-Bones [and Schaumburg] Flyers game will be played [on an] Xbox [using] EA Sports' MVP Baseball 2005.  And the first two innings will count toward the outcome of the game.

The world-famous dpk (of Usenet's alt.fan.dpk) writes in dpk_wp some of his thoughts on MMORPG grouping and soloing and experience rewards thereof.  I don't morepig, but i know some of you do, so see if you have any comments for him.

Gridlock.  40 levels.  Thanks to broken_gizmo.

My DVD drive just broke (the tray slides freely, and it won't read the disc even if it's closed all the way), so now i can't play Pirates!, although its charm is already waning.  The game gets repetitive after a while, and playing at Swashbuckler level is insanely hard (your opponents in duels are lightning fast and your crew gets disgruntled pretty much as soon as you leave port).  As far as gameplay failures go:

• When you split the plunder and spend nearly a year on land, nothing changes outside; if there was a villain on his way to a port, he remains on his way.
• Criminals will patiently stay in hiding wherever they were first reported no matter how long it takes you to get there.
• Sailing can be tedious; instead of making your ship sail slowly or quickly, depending on whether you're sailing against or with the wind, it should have your ship travel at a quick, constant pace and have the time pass more quickly or slowly (the wind almost always blows from the East, which can be a problem, but that might merely be a matter of realism, and i can accept that if it is).
• You can't buy a better ship.  The only way to change your vessel is via piracy.  While, yes, the game's name is Pirates!, it also offers the chance to play the game as a good boy.  And if you can sell vessels, why can't you buy them? Cannons are also almost never found for sale.
• More persistence problems: if a city gets a new governor, there should be a new governor's daughter, too.  This doesn't happen.
• Would it have killed them to have more facial models?  The same faces get old real fast.  Some configuration of your own pirate would've been nice, too (and, hey, there's a tale of women pirates in the manual, so why isn't that an option?  maybe romance the captain of the guard in each town instead of the governor's daughter, to keep it all nice and historically-accurately hetero).
• There are two cities that are not ports of the Caribbean; as a result, the only way to get there is getting out of the ship and walking there.  This is a monumentally tedious thing, as walking is about as slow as sailing against the wind (Panama isn't too far from the other coast, but Gran Granada is quite a walk).  While they probably put them in for historical accuracy, they needed to find a way to shortcut the traveling, maybe by setting waypoints on a map.
• You can take credit for events that the computer initiates, such as delivering immigrants, a governor, or a peace treaty, just for being there, even if you weren't assigned those particular tasks.  Conversely, if you are assigned a task and it fails, you aren't punished.

Also, i have a cold.  Bah.

Last Monday, i went to the Solaris 10 launch with my ex-partner in crime Tchie at the Tech Museum of Innovation.  Solaris 10 looks really good, especially compared to its predecessors; Sun claims you'll see a 20% increase in performance just by upgrading from 8 to 10.  Scott McNealy has really aged in the last few years; he looked a little hunched, even.

I've spent the last few days on jury duty call (found out this morning i was off scot free for a year, yay), so i threw my energy into cleaning the house and office, as well as tackling the huge amount of unfolded laundry in our room.  As a result of that, i called for the Great T-Shirt Cull of `04; verdict: one and a half grocery bags of T-shirts were consigned to oblivion (including my totally rad netrek shirt *sniff*).  It's not so bad; i just had to make space for new T-shirts (like mjg59's excellent "ESR STOLE MY CULTURAL HERITAGE").

Also, thanks to solipsistnation's alert, i picked up my copy of the Limited Edition of Sid Meier's Pirates!.  So i might be busy this long weekend when i'm not eating.

pobig was sucked into the NET vortex.  Now you can, too!  I cleared out the Normal levels and now i'm up to 11x7 Wrapping.

Some of you might have noticed the recent dearth of my entries.  My free time has been sucked up by KOTOR.  Just so's you know.

ENGAGE YOUR LIZARD BRAIN AND DESTROY TELETUBBIES. THAT IS ALL.