Sad to say, the Toyota is on its last legs. It’s been a good car, and it was my first ever car, but ten years and 115,000 miles have taken their toll on it. The other night I was driving around with David and it was shuddering and trying to stall and had no pickup. We felt we couldn’t really put any more money into it.

So we went out last night and, though we didn’t intend to buy anything at the time, ended up buying a 2001 Saturn L200. It’s a nice car - a lot nicer than what we had before, what with its functional engine, working heater, and gobs of extras (to us) - CD player, power locks, power windows, cruise control, rear-window defroster, airbags - these are things that weren’t in the Toyota. We even managed to reduce our down payment and get a lower monthly payment on it than we anticipated.

Here’s a photo of it:

I’m sorry to see the Toyota go - I’m one of those people that can feel bad for discarded or unwanted things. But it deserves a medal for all it’s done.

I discovered a pretty good new site about comic books, Comic Book Resources. They have an article there at the moment about comics and movies/TV. The good news is, the “Smallville”/”Birds of Prey” team is doing a TV show based on James Robinson’s “Starman”. Now, I admit that I don’t watch any of those shows and I know for a fact that Robinson is a lying dirtbag, but I’m still interested in checking this out, if it acually happens.

On the flip side, they’re also making a movie based on the DC comic, “John Constantine: Hellblazer” which I used to read before Garth Ennis got in there and left it a steaming wreck smelling of urine and Guinness. And apparently one of the guys in Hollywood who didn’t get to use the brain this week decided to cast Keanu Reeves as the mysterious title character.

Picture a venn diagram, the saying goes, only a stupid one. Constantine wears a trenchcoat, Keanu wears a trenchcoat, my god it’s like he was BORN FOR THE PART! Never mind that he shares no other qualities with the characters, we can always tidy that up in the script. Sure, he never surfed in the COMIC but it also never said he DIDN’T surf! (I’m the only person in the world sick of Spike on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” but James Marsters would make a pretty good Constantine, incase the guy WITH the brain is reading.)

This is why I rage against the trenchcoats, kids. They’re not unique, they’re interchangable.

Man, this entry was all over the frickin’ place, wasn’t it?

I never noticed this before, but now that I have, it’s gonna bug me. The coffee machine at work says, “Cafe Diem: Live for the coffee.” Obviously a play on ‘Carpe Diem’ - “Live for the day.” Fine, except that you replaced the “Live for the” part and kept the “Day” part. So your translation is actually “Coffee Day”.

Second, ‘Carpe Diem’ doesn’t mean “Live for the day”, it means “Seize the day.” So you’re doubly wrong.

When coffee starts lying to you, who can you trust?

Haven’t updated in a while, because not much has been going on, and there’s only so much disgust I can register towards the current political situation before I get tired of even listening to myself. However, I’ve been whiling away the hours playing the computer RPGs, Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale 2.

Neverwinter Nights was pretty cool. GRanted, its main game is mostly a vehicle to show off the capabilities of its create-your-own-RPG engine, and it was pretty impressive. Unfortunately the impressiveness of the game was a little diminished by the stupid, old-fashioned NPC handling. You can hire an NPC to help out, but you can’t outfit them, can’t choose how they develop, and have only minimal control over them. Lame. Still, the game is pretty fun, and I’m kind of interested in checking out the possibilities of the engine.

Icewind Dale 2 is the latest in the D&D games from Bioware. This has been a really nice series (Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate I and II, and Icewind Dale). The Icewind Dale entries tend to be more combat-heavy, making them into more straight-up dungeon-crawl games, which is fine with me, even though I’m not really all about the combat. The combat in this one is tough, but usually only because the way you make fighting trolls tougher is to add more trolls. However, one thing that’s becoming incredibly frustrating about the game is the awful path-finding algorithm. This is the bit of code that, when you tell your characters to go from point A to point B, finds a route there and moves them. This has been a little problematic in the past but never this awful. Getting the party through a door is nightmarish at times, because as soon as a character sees that his way is blocked (because someone’s in the doorway), he goes heading off in a completely wrong direction. I have no idea how it got this bad and I’m praying there’s a patch to this soon.

Both games use the third edition D&D rules and the implementations are about as good as one can hope for without making the games turn-based and on a grid (which, honestly, would be fine by me.)