Hot day at work today, not as bad as yesterday and the day before though, which were in the high nineties. still hot and humid, made worse by that power washer being used in tight spaces. with all the dust and grime out here, it's a smelly sauna.

I'm sweating bullets out here on the fairgrounds, in the shade, sweeping water out of here with a squigee. but it actually feels good to sweat, to be moving around, even though I think little of the work of cleaning up a restaruant that's out of action for ten months every year. I'm now active for much of the week, and it's a nice change after those two sedentary school semesters. there was that soreness that I remember that comes with activity after so much inactivity. now that has passed, and I'm into work and effort again. I feel like I could keep going. if I try, I might be able to kick this fat of mine for good.

I doubt this work is good on Rodney, my co-worker, however. He's fifty six years old, but I would have guessed at least 66, from his several prominantly missing teeth and extremely weathered features. a vietnam veteran, he's definetly not against using the "G" word when referring to people of asian descent. I definetly don't feel like there's much to chat about between us during the shift.

2 o'clock, time to go to the dentist for that appointment. ditch the grease stained clothes, take a shower, replace them with clean stuff, then head out across town to the davidson family dentistry. the girl at the counter greets me by name, though I don't remember hers after six months.

sit in the chair, bite down on the x-ray tabs, get hit with elementry particles that bombard my teeth in less time it takes for me to comprehend, and I get the good news, no problems. then comes the metal probe that shows my flabby wimp gums have not been buffed up with properly scheduled flossing. I don't know why i stopped doing it so regularly over the winter. maybe this time I'll keep it up until the next appointment, maybe.

4 o'clock on my way out with sore gums and polished teeth. I've got time to stop at the mall. I arrive at the mall with no car accidents thankfully, despite my distraction at trying to spot that baugel restaruant on my way down the street. go to gamestop, look at the 360 isle like a slow person, not seeing what I want. they do have a used Lost Odyssey (finally spelled it right) for 27. but i really want to play Red faction. I don't want to spend 90 today. pick up a quesadilla on the way out with the game, get home, sit down, pop in the game, blow up a few things in the time I have.

5:30, time to head out to grandma's house for dinner. just me alone visiting her after a few weeks. the meal is salmon patties and fried potatoes. the patties are dry. i don't mention it, but I do take some mayo out as a substitute for tarter sauce. I hope that doesn't insult her cooking.

why does grandma have to have the TV up so loud at the table? typical I suppose for people over 80 I think. then after watching the feature on that woman who performed chemotherapy on herself in antartica who finally died of her cancer, grandma brings up how her mother died of breast cancer. this is new, i think to myself, while I respectfully stay silent. she tells me it gets her upset to talk about it, and she goes on, and she does get upset. to see her tear up makes me want to say something but i had absolutely nothing to say. her mother had to go to the hospital and get diagnosed which was the first time she had been in a hospital in 40 years. she had to have her breasts removed one at a time over two days, which i can imagine was the most unpleastent thing imaginable. then she tells me how her father died while she was there in the hospital, under a transparant oxygen tent for his lung cancer. he went into a seizure right there when she saw him, and he died before she could call her sisters to come over.

I wonder why she has told me this all at once. then on the news, still with the volume up loud, there is a story, about a man who lost his fiance-to-be to some freak wave or shore current that I've never heard before. they're walking on the sand, water to their knees, he turns to propose to her, and she's gone, swept away as the water suddenly turns 180 degrees toward the open ocean.

how perfect. another subject to apply my questions of fairness in life. it boggles my mind however. it almost sounds like something you would make up.

but i also want to ask, "did that actually happen?". it's like this subject is so terrible to think about that it brings up some idea of solipsism about life and death in my mind. can self-aware individuals really come to such an end? one is going along as normal, and then everything is turned upside down then there is just nothing? if perception remains in some afterlife, do they care?

there's a lot more I wanted to write, some more details I feel compelled to write down. but right now I'm going to play some red faction.

the countdown to the countdown to the arrival of the retrospective begins in:

250 hours

It's too bad that the second half of the game felt like work to me. There are a lot of things in the game that I'd like to refer to with the offensive "R" word pertaining to mental deficiency. As a stealth game, it fails. I'm thinking that the scale of the game probably should have been pulled back so they could focus on the AI and mission variety. I could have gone without the Kingdom hub world completely, as stealth was pointless when you could only be inconspicuous if you were walking as slow as possible in front of the guards that were positioned ever 20 meters in open terrain.

The last third of the game was when the story became truly interesting, suggesting ancient treasures with magical properties which suddenly revealed itself to be something entirely secular instead. The story had become dissapointly boring with the pondering way the details were handed out to you, namely from the assassination targets.

That is another thing, the assassination structure, even after the beurau-investigations-beurau-again part, didn't allow for much freedom or creativity. You watch an unskippable cutscene, you kill the target(usually while spotted), then you watch another very ham-handed exchange between you and him. The writing just beats you over the head with its messages about ambiguity and how "oh I'm not bad, this is for the greater good, blah blah". I guess I'm just outside of that demographic that doesn't have time for subtlety.

The ending reached its climax of intrigue while hitting the low of gameplay. Yahtzee said the amount of enemies thrown at you made Space Invaders look conservative, and he was not joking in the slightest. There were so many shoulder-to-shoulder foes surrouding me, that at one point, I couldn't even see individual attacks coming at me, because of all the torsos and arms blocking the view. Then I had to run, then I had to fight some more, then I had to run a bit, then fight in some repetitive instant-death fight sequence involving some unwelcome trial and error. Then I got the ending cutscene, which of course, decided not just to suggest a continuation, but to demand one.

Is it really ever necessary to stamp onto the end of the disc "THERE HAS TO BE A SEQUEL" with a billboard-sized branding iron? I killed 9 nine guys who all repeated basically the same message, only to have something new be implied at the end and that's when the gameplay ends?

And while this game was far from great, only hitting "good" because of the thrilling free-running aspects, I'm pretty interested in the sequel. Maybe its because it's so reasonable to assume Ubisoft can make a big improvement over something that so much room for improvement.