Twistin' the Night Away

I'm on a Sam Cooke kick tonight, probably because tomorrow night is karaoke night, though I'm fairly certain there isn't any Sam Cooke to be had in the Saturday Night Music Club catalog. However, tomorrow night at the bowling alley, I will be singing my usual Eric Cartman version of "Come Sail Away," though I'm fairly certain that I'm going to preface this with "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch," as well as a couple of other songs I generally wouldn't sing (read: 1960's soul music).

I'm pissed off, because I put a quarter-inch ding in my laptop screen, which I'm going to see forever. It's like a focal point once you know it's there. I can't help it, but my eyes are just drawn to it, like a reminder of how I managed to fuck up my screen. Oh, sure, I could fix it, but it's not worth the $300 to completely replace the screen. It pisses me off, but I have my limits.

The World Cup is on this week, and ... yeah, I really don't give a shit. Yes, I am American, which means my love affair with soccer (note: not football, futbol, or any other spelling of such) ended when I was about ten years old, at which point videogames effectively took over my life. That America is now officially out of the World Cup tournament isn't much of a shock, nor am I terribly disappointed, given that Brandi Chastain isn't on the team. Yes, my happiest memories of soccer involve the U.S. Women's World Cup team, particularly the part where Brandi Chastain whipped her shirt off (stupid sports bra).

I'm about halfway through season five of X-Files, and it's all part of my plan to watch all of the episodes (nine seasons' worth, plus the movie) and determine precisely where it was that the show jumped the shark, if at all. Now, since I'm not one of those people who gets particularly attached to stars of a show, I think that I could probably evaluate it strictly from a writing and production standpoint, and might possibly come to the conclusion that the show was still good at the end, when David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were no longer on the show. For the time being, though, I'm really quite happy with the series, as I'm about a dozen episodes from watching the movie, which takes place between seasons five and six.

I've spent about the last week being sick. I'm getting better, but for a couple of days, I seriously thought I had mesothelioma or black lung or something along those lines. I've gone from having stuffy sinuses and a dry cough to a wet cough with dry sinuses, and I'm trying to figure out which one is worse. At this point, I'm still not fully convinced that I don't have tuberculosis (or, as I prefer to call it, consumption).

I've been playing Galactic Civilizations II for the last couple of days on my PC, and it's eating my life. It's a very nice game, but I'm not all that happy with the tech-tree, which is more like tech-lines, since there are never multiple requirements for advancing a piece of scientific knowledge. This was one of the things that Civilization 4 got absolutely right (along with most everything else). I mean, I can't really say it's a bad tech system, since everything makes sense, but I find that I haven't been getting into knock-down drag-out brawls with my opponents. I've just been winning the game too quickly, and that's not satisfying. That I've been working my way up from the lowest difficulty setting is probably a good part of this, as I understand the opponents' AI gets to be a real bitch around the Tough difficulty level.

Anyway, it's late, so I'm going to get some sleep and go do karaoke in about eighteen or so hours.


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