“Any Messages for Me, Eva?”

A decade post-release, I finally own a computer that’s wily and robust enough to crunch all the polygons necessary to enjoy Grim Fandango without wishing that the lag would kill me outright so that I could experience being in the Land of the Dead firsthand. It’s been a challenging walkthrough so far, in much the same way that eating sushi for the first time challenges one’s preconceptions as to what should and shouldn’t go in your mouth. Hopefully, I’ll be able to put a decently concise review together sometime soon.

And hey, look at the barging synchronicity! Tim Shafer has made the original design doc for Grim Fandango available for public consumption, and in weighty PDF form, no less. This was obviously done in celebration of me finally getting to play this after all these years.

Aw, Tim. You shouldn’t have.

Wheel’s Yours, Captain

The only political scrip that I’m going to write for this election:

I’m pretty amazed, actually. To quote Richard the Knight, “You have chosen… wisely.”

What Richard – as well as Barack’s supporters – don’t seem to realize is that the onus of choosing the right path was never really on the voter in the first place. It was on Barack, who will probably grow quite a few gray hairs in the coming months contending with a country driven mad with fear and smoothing over a global reputation as a self-righteous bully.

Bush’s worst crimes weren’t misuse of public funds to wage a misguided war, nor were they back-patting greedy speculators and bank barons, oh, no. It was in driving such a sharp spike into the heart of a formerly (relatively) unified society; unified by our cultural headings and throughly capable of appreciating and contrasting opinions that differ from our own without the implicit need to announce our entitlement to such convictions, hard as that may be to believe right now. People that hung flags upside down were formerly regarded as extremists to be jeered at and people that threatened to move off the continent were, uh, Baldwins. Now, it’s a shameful norm.

Congrats, Barack. And now, onto the ship and into the storm. Just keep your priorities straight and get to work on that public trust. Make it a priority. With a staunchly allied crew at your back, things like a broken economy and tainted foreign relations will seem a bit more navigable.