i must be crazy.

third year in a row. and hey, it's finished this time. i actually finished a story o.O

happy thanksgiving.

more colonial-centric blogging.

it is cold and wet and grey here. bleah. but tomorrow's supposed to be nice! and i think the pumpkin ice cream is a success.

15,000 words to go in the nano. will i finish?

further impressions.

so now i've had a bit more of a chance to play wii games besides just losing tennis. wii golf is actually pretty cool (by which i mean i'm better at it than i am at wii tennis :) and it also adequately demonstrates the ability to play the wii like a toolbox.

he's really enjoying excite truck, except for the music. it apparently restricts him to a half hour of playing.

we also did manage to get it online, updated, and also redeemed 500 wii points to buy the original legend of zelda. apparently, we actually ended up lucky in this, because some people are reporting problems with nintendo's online service. i'm wondering if we didn't have any problems because we didn't get around to actually getting the thing online until later in the evening. we have 1500 points left waiting for further purchases, because currently, there aren't any other virtual console games we're interested in. there were reportedly supposed to be 30 titles at launch, but we did not see that many last night. i am also engaging in baseless speculation by pondering the idea that nintendo had to scale back their offerings a little because of network problems.

zelda is...pretty cool. frustrating at times: there are a lot of things to remember...like, if you're holding your lantern, you can still swing the sword just by waving the wiimote. for some reason, the sword isn't accessed by the B-trigger like other items. but then, i'm not much of a console gamer either. the much vaunted fishing takes forever, but i'm actually doing better at the puzzle solving in twilight princess than i was in wind waker. graphically, it's not the most impressive, but no launch title for any console is going to fully be able to take advantage of it, and twilight princess was always intended to be a gamecube game.

oh. he just downloaded a whole lot of music onto an SD card and is now playing excite truck to that.

anyway. for some reason, everyone was sold out of their nunchaku (and this time we're not alone). and i mean everyone: toys'r'us, gamestop, target, and circuit city. we didn't get a chance to check out best buy or the gamestop and eb games in the mall. maybe wal*mart would have nunchaku. except i'm boycotting wal*mart, in a passive-aggressive way. really though, the lack of a second nunchuck isn't in any way a disaster. i'm not interested in wii boxing, and zelda is the only other game we have that uses the nunchuck and that's sincle-player only.

the sensor bar, btw, is tiny. it's way smaller than it looks in the pictures. also, i believe only employees of nintendo call the main controller the "wii remote." i would like to know why they made the two buttons on the wiimote "1" and "2" instead of "X" and "Y" like they are on the gamecube controller and on the DS. it seems silly, since they kept "A", "B", "C", and "Z".

getting the wii itself was shockingly simple. we woke up at 10am, which was when toys'r'us was opening. we had coffee, read the newspaper, took showers, and then drove down (maybe if we'd managed to get there on time, we could have gotten the extra nunchuck, but i don't know how they would have handled line priority between campers and those who had secured pre-orders). got to toys'r'us, walked up to the videogames desk and proffered our pre-order tickets for the console and zelda. grabbed an extra wiimote off the racks. walked out.

whee! or wii! as you prefer.

wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

in the end, the crazystupidness paid off, and we have acquired our wii. and an extra wiimote, excite truck, and, of course zelda.

i have already had my ass kicked at tennis.

it's actually remarkably easy to use, and i can join the ranks of people who have reported that the wiimotes work like a dream. no lag, very exact. pretty much identical to using my wireless mouse here. also, the sensor bar is remarkably tiny. and it has sticky feet to keep it from falling off your tv.

we didn't get a chance to set up the second wireless router before we got home, so i can say nothing about retro gaming yet, but we did buy 2000 wii points waiting in readiness for downloadable gaming.

now i am 4000 words behind in my nano, so i am giving up next-gen gaming for the moment, in order to try and scrape this thing into a semblance of readability. since i hate it so much and think it's dumb and uninteresting, it will probably turn out to be my best shot for being published of three so far ;) wish me luck.

democracy in action.

so, tuesday was election day. did you all vote? i hope you did.

i had my first experience with an electronic voting machine, because bucks county hadn't gotten them for the primary last spring. i'm not sure if it was thanks to some protesters or not, but bucks county did not have the fabled diebold machines. we had some other kind that i've never heard of, but were kind of weird. it wasn't a touch screen; it looked more like a touch-sensitive screen that had a big piece of paper on top with the candidates' names and offices. there were red LEDs under the paper, and you had to push a little square to, i assume, complete the circuit and make the red LED light up next to the candidate or ballot issue you voted for. it was interesting.

the other interesting thing i noticed is that while nationally, the area seemed to vote democrat, locally, people voted republican. where rendell and casey took bucks county 60/40 against their republican opponents, the republican state senators and representatives won by about the same margin. and the federal representative was running 50/50 with his democratic challenger until he conceded a loss by about 1000 votes and gave bucks its democrat representative in washington. with all the speculation about what appears to be a wide-open race for the whole country in 2008, it might be worth examining national verses state elections and see where people voted. there were reports that republicans were hitting the local issues hard, so it may be that there's this disconnect in people's minds, and they somehow see the state parties as separated ideologically and politically from the parties at the national level. on the other hand, pennsylvania has always been a staunchly purple state.

and again.

apparently, i haven't learned anything because i am attempting NaNoWriMo for the third year in a row. i'm not feeling terribly confident about this year either, but i still think it's worth trying. everyone has to have a year when they fail, right? ;) or not. hat trick, anyone? :)