a week of curb stomps...

Gah! It's been non-stop Gears of War for over a week now, and I'm still not sick of it. Tons of multiplayer and all three difficulty levels in the campaign (still need more to get the final Dom achievement). Forced myself to take a break from MP until I completed Insane, and almost wept with joy when I finally took down General RAAM all by my lonesome. Hopefully I'll get some MP time in during the next couple of days, since I've really missed the experience of playing with everyone here. Plus, I've felt bad about turning down so many game invites...

Looks like I'll be forced to take a longer break soon, though. My girlfriend wants to leave for St. Louis on Tuesday morning, which means I won't get any game time in until we get back to Chicago on Sunday... All is not lost, though: last year we had Thanksgiving dinner at her uncle's house, and he's a really great guy, a complete geek and an amateur inventor. After the meal, the whole family proceeded to drink a lot of wine and watch a James Bond marathon on cable. He and I got around to talking about what a great game GoldenEye was, and he mentioned he still had a N64 and a copy of the game (I was shocked since he's almost 50). We were too far gone at that point to dig it out and hook it up, but I made him promise that he'd have it ready next time.

Unfortunately, leaving Tuesday morning also means I might miss a call about a job that a friend is trying to help me land. It's at a REALLY big corporation, and I know those places can be slow in responding, but I'd really hate to jeopardize anything -- the job pays far too well to risk it. My resume is already in the pipeline, so now I just hope I can pass along my cell phone number to my contact (which she in turn would pass along to her boss) in case they need to contact me. And I REALLY hope they need to contact me.

So yeah, besides the potential GoldenEye, I'm not really looking forward to the trip. At least I have all of my This American Life podcasts for the car ride. I actually met Ira Glass at a friend's party last summer. Very nice guy, but I was quite drunk by the time I was introduced to him. Nothing more pathetic than a skinny, awkward, and inebriated NPR fanboy. Turns out I'm on a "friend of a friend" basis with a few obscure geek celebrities, but considering I usually drink heavily to mask my social anxiety, nothing will ever come of it. I have, though, decided to learn how to play poker, since a friend plays every week with Steve Albini. I realize that there's a good chance I'll just get really drunk and start gushing to him about how amazing Big Black was, and demand stories about when he produced In Utero (I've already heard that Kurt Cobain was a complete fuckwad the whole time)...