Category: Gaming

Charlie Gets in Touch With His Inner Geek

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Click for full size


Not as bad as I feared.


With the cube, he has a little James Bond thing going on

Saturday evening, we picked up Charlie’s Bar Mitzvah suit after some tailoring.

Well, Charlie really hated the idea of wearing a tie, but he has to wear one, so we got him a normal tie when we bought the suit a week ago.

On Saturday, he said that he wanted to wear a bow-tie.

I told him that I did not know how to tie a bow-tie, and that I had already paid for a tie.

He agreed to pay for the tie out of his own money, and said that he’d learn to tie a bow tie from Youtube.

Sunday morning, we fired up the laptop, and he stood in front of the mirror, and practiced, but he didn’t get it right.

Well, we had a wedding to go to, a three hour trip to Lakewood, NJ, and he practiced, and he taught himself how to wear a bow tie on the way. (We brought the regular tie as a backup)

So, he’s spouts obscure scientific erudition, he does Rubik’s Cube type puzzles, and now he’s wearing a bow tie.

As you can see, I got some action pix (my phone has a rapid fire shooting option) of him doing a one-handed solve.

Gawd.

There is no hope for him.

Dungeons and Draghi*

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Someone has finally set up the Greek/Euro financial crisis as a choose your own adventure game:

Reading the media and blogs, it seems to me that left and right are united in the view that the Greek default is being handled appallingly, that the current attempts at a solution are childishly obviously wrong and that everything is the fault of someone, probably the Germans. My own view – that it is not at all clear what the direction of policy is, and that although I don’t agree with the troika plan, it’s recognizable as a good-faith plan made by conscientious international civil servants working under unimaginably difficult political constraints in an economic context that was irreparably broken before they got there – is, as always, unpopular.

I don’t have a solution myself – the more I end up discussing this with people, the more I am reminded of the London Business School proverb taught on some of the gnarlier case studies, which is “Not All Business Problems Have Solutions”. So, CT hivemind, what do you think the best outcome is? Below the fold, I note some talking points, aimed at preventing our commentariat from falling into some of the pitfalls and mistakes which appear to be dominating debate at present. Because the whole issue is a twisty turny maze which at times seems to consist of nothing but false moves, I am presenting it in the form of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. I would note at this stage that I could probably have presented it in a funky HTML way rather than making you scroll up and down, but I have convinced myself that this is a feature rather than a bug – the medium matches the message here, because international debt negotiations are cumbersome, inconvenient and irritating too. Also, it is probably easier than it needs to be for readers to end up at the wrong paragraph and get a confusing jumbled narrative which bears little resemblance to the decisions they thought they’d made. Again, this is a crucial part of giving you the authentic international financial diplomacy experience.

…………

It’s an inspired idea.

*Not my bon mot. One of the commenters on  the above post came up with it.

OMFG!!!!! Epic Fail!!!!

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Fighting the Kha’ak, who lack staying power

You know, it’s not, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” but in naming the alien race in X3: Reunion the Kha’ak, pronounced “kawk”, it appears that someone has seriously jumped the shark.

The developers are German, and the dialogue, which explains why they don’t understand when a native English speaker might find it amusing when a character in the game says that, “The Kha’ak are not interested in dialogue,” though it does ring true.

I’m sure that this mirrors my wife’s, as well as my XGF’s experience.