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Dyin' ain't much of a living, boy

I was coming out of a bank today, when I noticed somebody hanging around my bike. They walked away as I was coming out, so I inspected my bike to see if anything was missing and it seemed fine, so I assumed it was just somebody curious about my funky disc brakes. Later, I noticed marks on my cable lock where somebody had used cable or bolt cutters to try and cut it off! Fuck, was I pissed off! I raced back down to the mall to see if I could find the motherfucker, but he was nowhere to be found. Argh, that put me in a foul mood for the rest of the day, but I guess it could have been worse, he could have been successful and I would be bikeless.

Dungeon Siege II

Played some DSII today. Yawn. Not a terribly exciting game, too easy. You can't choose your dificulty level either, they make you play on "easy" before you can unlock the veteran mode. Most of the time you don't feel threatened at all, your life gauge barely moves from the max. You get tons of "loot", but 99.9% of it is worthless, so you waste a lot of time examining crap to see if it's worth keeping. Pretty tedious after awhile. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through already so I'll probably follow through and finish it. Not recommended.

Portable Gaming '05

I finished Final Fantasy I & II on my GBA-SP awhile back. Then Soul of Rebirth, which was more of a little add-on than a full fledged game. Cool games, I liked how they updated the graphics and ported it to the GBA, well done.

I then tried to pick up where I left off with Golden Sun: The Lost Age, but it was impossible to get back onto the storyline. After I got the boat, I travelled all over the world checking things out, but now I'm lost. It's a very good game, kinda like FF but with added puzzles to figure out so it's not just levelling up all the time, you need to think about what you're doing.

Frustrated with GS, I saw a bunch of GBA Zelda games on sale at Amazon, so I picked up the original Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventures of Link [both of which I finished way back in the NES days], Zelda: A Link to the Past and The Minnish Cap [never played these two]. Started playing the first Zelda and I hope to continue through the whole series. Damn, this first game starts off hard, you don't have much life! I'm up to 5 hearts now so it's getting easier. I also have two Tri-force shards and the blue ring and the bow. I might play this through at the same time from my Zelda collection on the Gamecube. The GBA edition seems like a straight port, no improved graphics or extras, maybe that's why it was so cheap.

Perdido Street Station

I'm about 2/3 of the way through "Perdido Street Station" and I'm liking it pretty much now. Unlike my first impression, which was rather negative because of all the obscure language he was using. It becomes much more intelligible after the first couple chapters. I'm still not crazy about the main characters and his penchant for describing things in such detail when it isn't really necessary. Anyway, it is a good book overall and hopefully I can finish it this weekend. Oh, and the slake-moths are very cool.

A Box of Books

My book order from Amazon came in today, here's what I got:

• Ubik by Philip K. Dick - I haven't read much PKD, bit I loved "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" so this should be good. I was trying to get "The Man in the High Castle" but they said delivery would take a few weeks, so I just ordered books that would be shipped in a reasonable amount of time.
• The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham - read "The Chrysalids", "The Midwich Cuckoos" and "Trouble with Lichen" so this was a no-brainer. I love how he writes so simply, yet his stories are very imaginative, original and entertaining. A lot of writers could learn from his style, or lack of it.
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin - never read anything by this author but the story sounds fascinating.
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler - I've read "Wild Seed" and absolutely loved it, one of the most twisted, entertaining stories I've ever read, so if this one's even remotely as good I'll be happy.
• Doomsday Book by Connie Willis - another author I've never read before but it won some awards. And the last book I read that was named after a book was pretty damn good. [Cryptonomicon]
• The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers - another novelist that I'm not familiar with but this book is also well regarded.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke - the biggest novel of the bunch, hope it's good. Her first novel, rave reviews, yadda yadda.
• Perdido Street Station by China Mièville - never read any of his stuff but this novel got a lot of hype. So I decided to start reading this one first tonight. After a couple chapters I'm very underwhelmed. He uses a lot of words that I'm unfamiliar with so I broke out the dictionary and found that hardly any of them are even listed! He's either using very obscure words that can only be found in the big 3,000 page university dictionaries, or he's just using strange spellings [like chymical rather than chemical] or he's just making words up. So I gave up on the dictionary and am trying to decipher his prose via context. I can't say I've ever run into this problem before, at least not this severely. And I hope he stops going on and on about how bleak this city is, I get it already, get on with the fucking story already! Anyway, despite my bitching, it's still early and this could turn out to be a good novel once I get into it.

So that's it, I'm set for novel reading goodness for like ever now. ;)

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