Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Nerd TV

Nerds do seem to be becoming more and more mainstream. I'll just assume that my Carleton's Biggest Nerd win was the herald of a bright and new era of widespread nerdlery and move on.

Watched the first episode of the new Heroes season, and before that I was pleasantly surprised by Chuck, which is conveniently aired right before it. The premise is nothing super-original, but the execution of the nerd-becomes-pivotal-government-operative plot is actually pretty darn good. The supporting cast is also quite funny, and, more importantly, has Adam Baldwin. That's right. The main character is a nerd with a spy sort-of-girlfriend played by a Russian supermodel, and gets into a car chase with Jayne from Firefly. What more could you ask for?

The Heroes season opener was good - not terrifically exciting, but good and definitely a solid setup to some new stuff. Aside from some obvious Nissan product placement, I'm definitely looking forward to more superpowered actions. There are at least two new characters, Mexican it would seem. I have my theories about them, but I'll keep those to myself until everyone's seen it.

The space game I mentioned before progresses; I think the different cultures/empires and ships are the next step.

Apparently both Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillion are in Halo 3? Wackiness. Still, nothing trumps Command and Conquer 3's cast.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Work, pirate raid, and a few projects

Greetings from the library, where I sit at my desk and manage my multitude of matriculated minions. Actually there are only two of them, but at least I have minions. Being an Evening Supervisor is pretty relaxed, which is good; the only downside is that three times a night I have to go around the entire building and count the number of people, divvied up by various areas. It's for "usage statistics" or something frivolous and corporate like that. My theory is it's to keep me from doing nothing but sit at my desk and surf the intarwebs for six straight hours, so it might actually do me a favor. It's a decent amount of walking.

The search for a second job is still a big fat zilcho, though as usual I still have a few leads left to explore. I am taking it at a kind of leisurely pace, because let's face it - getting rejected 8+ times in a week would be kind of bad for the ego, even if it's just because most places don't seem to be hiring at the moment. I blame the economy, or something.

More shenanigans have been borne of WoW: one of our buddies was quitting for Tabula Rasa (which looks more interesting than it has any right to, from an I-can't-afford-it standpoint), so we gave him a farewell Pirate Raid. I think my writeup came out pretty well. There are even Pokémon jokes at the end, and overall it's at least marginally accessible to people who don't fritter their time away online excessively. It actually made one of my guildmates ask if I did this kind of a thing for a living. Nerd commentary? Please, be a real profession someday. Soon.

Another guildmate and I are in the early stages of designing a browser-based space strategy game. Think the Fleet Game, only with less nobody-wants-to-play-it-itude. And computer-based, like it would have needed to be. We're looking at a pretty standard planetary expansion model, with technology and ships and whatnot - nothing revolutionary, but a chance to take our own stab at the genre and for him to learn a new programming language (Ruby Rails, I think? Maybe just Ruby). I'm not going near that end of things. We're in the early design stages, but I'm pretty excited, so perhaps expect more about it in the future!

No beer reviews because my booklet from the event is at home. Maybe that'll be impetus to post again before another three weeks go by.