That's no moon...

...it's PAX East, and it's a space station. This is a big event for yours truly. Even though I am pretty dorky and have been since the beginning essentially, I have *never* been to any sort of big dork event, like a Star Trek convention or a Star Wars convention or a computer game convention or anything. I think it has been because they have always been far away. I am a card carrying nerd. But am I enough of a nerd to buy plane tickets to and a hotel room in Indiannapolis, probably by myself, to go to Star Wars Celebration? No. But then PAX East came. It came right to my backyard in downtown Boston. So I'll be there bright and early Friday morning, with my computer no less, to see what the nerd herd really looks like.

I actually have mixed feelings about this thing. I'm excited for sure and very much looking forward to it. But I'm also somewhat apprehensive. What if these nerds are all, more or less, *real* nerds. As in nerds that like nerd things that I haven't even heard of, yet they all know about it and I am so dumb for not knowing. I kind of felt that way, just a little bit, at a few pre-PAX get togethers for Boston area people who are going. I guess what I'm saying is, what if I can't relate to them? That may be rough. I am a nerding nerd, big time. But at the same time, I like doing mainstream things too, like filling out my NCAA brackets and playing golf and, you know, guy stuff like that. Will there be guys like that at PAX? I'm afraid that there won't be...but we'll see.

Gonna wrap this up as Carolyn just got home and I'm hungry and kinda not really being in the writing zone tonight and all that stuff. Some quick things.

Superbad Update (Superbad is my PC)

hl2.exe Appcrash error is fixed. For some reason, just on Portal, the Valve logo screen (the bald guy with the valve in his head) causes a crash in Windows 7. But the same logo shows and is fine when you play Team Fortress 2 or Counterstrike. In any event, adding a "-novid" parameter to the Portal properties in Steam fixes it. That's usually how PC issues go. If something happens *every* time you do it, there's usually a very small dumb tweak you can make that makes it go away. That's why I love reading the endless posts of "Did you reinstall the game? Did you reinstall Windows? Did you (and this is always my favorite) run a virus scan?" People are just so stupid and I am so awesome.

What I've been playing

Just Bad Company 2 really. It's okay. My gripe with it is that, so far, there are numerous situations where I am thinking "what the heck am I supposed to do?", and then I'm dead. The game just leaves you hanging like that some of the time. And so you have to take the trial and error approach. I hate that. It completely takes you out of the game. But the graphics and sound are awesome (even though, and this just may be my headphones, the pronounced reverb on the sound effects are noticeably out of place in outdoor environments), and the real heart of the game is multiplayer, which I haven't gotten to yet. I'm in the "play the campaign so I know how to play online" stage. The rest of the time I've just been installing games in preparation for PAX.

Okay, I'm out. See you nerds later.

-BG