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Hello, My Name Is Brian And I Am A Civ Addict

2 comments By Brian Filed in Life, Links, Misc Tagged with , , March 9th, 2010 @ 12:12 pm

Yes, for the next 6-8 months you are going to have to deal with me periodically going all fanboi and frothing at the mouth about the upcoming release of Civilization V. Once it does hit the shelves, you will then have to deal with me complaining about all the bugs and poor gameplay issues until the first few patches and mods finally shape it into something playable, whereupon you will hear next to nothing from me while I spend countless hours playing One More Turn.

Here is the first of what will undoubtedly be many previews of the game as the developers start feeding the gaming websites with sneak peeks and propaganda designed to whet the appetites of the fanbase. While some of the changes in the game that are discussed in the article sound fascinating, I am a little concerned that the focus seems to be pushing the game further and further along the path of being a war simulation game and less into the multi-faceted “many ways to win” model that Civ IV pursued. But it’s clear from the article that the developers are still addressing gameplay issues and aren’t committed to the final form of the game yet.

True personal story: I began playing Civilization in 1996, when the Mac version of Civ II first hit the market. The day I brought the game home was also the very first full day we had Maynard, when he was a tinky-winky li’l kitten only a few weeks old. He was so little that we had to feed him kitten formula from a dropper, and I wasn’t entirely sure that he would survive, but he turned out to be a very tenacious little kitten. The first weekend I had the game, I stayed up all night playing it on my Mac Performa, checking in on the kitten, who needed to be fed every four hours. Mister Maynard is now a senior citizen kitteh of almost 14 years of age, and I am not sure that he will be with us by the time Civ V hits the shelf, but I was wrong about his chances as a baby, so maybe I’m being too pessimistic again now.

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Invasion Of The Burger Snatchers

0 comments By Brian Filed in Food, Life, Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , March 4th, 2010 @ 1:06 pm

They’re building a Sonic Drive-In on Main Street in my town. It’s just the latest in a number of retail constructions on the main drag in the past couple of years; you’d have no idea the entire economy was in the crapper by the number of construction sites. Sadly for the property developers, though, once they get the sites built, they don’t always have tenants ready to move in, and so there’s a lot of brand-new-but-half-empty retail space waiting for the time way, waaay off in the future, when somebody might want to move in. But I digress a little…

The Sonic is being built right next door to the McDonald’s, which cannot have the McDonald’s franchisee too happy. Previously, the space housed a car dealer. When the car showroom building was torn down a couple of weeks ago, everybody was abuzz wondering what would take the space, but now that the frame of the building is up, so is the large banner on the front of the site. No doubt the cognoscenti of our little suburb knew exactly what was going on well in advance, but for us hoi polloi it came down to a six-foot strip of vinyl tied to a temporary fence to bring the news.

It’s kind of a big deal, not just because our town lags behind all of its neighbors in sheer density of fast food chains that aren’t Dunkin’ Donuts, but because it’s only the second Sonic location in the entire state of Massachusetts. Indeed, it is only the second Sonic in ALL SIX New England states. The first Sonic opened last summer to much attention from cherry-limeade-starved souls, who were willing to endure two-hour lines, valet parking, and unholy traffic congestion on a major thruway (the infamous Route One strip). Needless to say, there is much tut-tutting and clucking by the villagers, who are worried that the already-busy section of Main Street will turn into a parking lot from all the looky-loos who will descend on us like a plague of french-fry-devouring locusts.

Having grown up in Maine in the 1970s, I have been down this road before. When we first moved to Lewiston-Auburn in the summer of 1971, there was only one McDonald’s for a “metro” area of about 70,000, and it was way on the outskirts of Lewiston, close to the Maine Turnpike exit. It was a huge deal when, several years later, a second McDonald’s was built on the Auburn side of the river, and then equally big deals ensued when Burger King arrived a few years after that, and finally, when I was in high school, Wendy’s. Maine, however, is always late to the party for the expansion of national retail chains; there are still only a small handful of Starbucks in the whole state (our town in Massachusetts got its Starbucks two years ago, but they are numerous in the Boston area).

In a bit of serendipity, this infographic is making the rounds online. It shows the distribution of the major fast-food burger chains in the United States. Here’s the Fast Company article that brought the map to the attention of the Internet, and here’s the original blog post from a site called WeatherSealed.com. The Fast Company version changed the background color to make the McDonald’s locations (which were plotted in black against a black background in the original) stand out better. It’s interesting to see that McDonald’s base is so tightly concentrated in the Northeast, but even more interesting to see the predominance of other chains in other regions: Dairy Queen, which is a rarity here in the Northeast and operates almost exclusively in its form as an ice cream stand, OWNS the South Central region in a way that McDonald’s can only dream of.

For the sake of the franchisee, I hope the arrival of Sonic goes better than the arrival of Krispy Kreme donuts a few years ago. The anticipation behind the opening of the Krispy Kreme in Medford was nothing short of insane, and the initial customer response was enormous, but after about a year the whole thing died right off and the Kripsy Kreme chain itself went into bankruptcy. The retail location sat empty for a long time before finally being picked up by the beloved local chain of roast beef sandwich shops, Kelly’s. Meanwhile, the Ghost Town Plaza across the street sure could use half a dozen tenants.

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Hey You Kids, Get Offa My Virtual Lawn!

1 comment By Brian Filed in Life, Links, Media, Misc Tagged with , , , , March 1st, 2010 @ 12:00 pm

The Pew Research Center is conducting a survey to determine the prevalence of behaviors that typify the “Millennial Generation” (people born after 1981) among all the age delineations in the U.S. You can take the survey here, and after you complete the quiz it will tell you how you compare. The questions focus on things like whether you get your news online vs. traditional media, whether you’ve given up having a landline telephone, and stuff like that, as well as a few things like whether or not you have a tattoo or body piercing and whether your parents were married when you were growing up.

I think of myself as being fairly “connected” with technology and modern media consumption, but as you can just about make out from that shrunken-down version of my score, I placed pretty much exactly with my “generation” (having been born in 1963, I am right on the cusp between Boomers and GenXers). My media habits are more like millennials, but my other social norms are decidedly rooted in the pre-Information Age. I have often been struck by just how “old fashioned” so many of my peers are, but now I think that just speaks to the transitional nature of being born at the dividing line between generations.

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Truth Or Dare

By Brian Filed in Life Tagged with , , January 29th, 2010 @ 12:45 pm

Here’s my guilty confession of the day: I’ve never read “Catcher In The Rye”. My high school’s American literature syllabus was strictly 19th century except for “The Great Gatsby” (not even a little Hemingway!), and my personal reading inclinations as a teenager were more towards genre fiction than literary fiction. Plus, I wasn’t the rebellious, angsty, struggling teenage type, so I wouldn’t have been drawn to that sort of book organically. As I headed off to college, my reading shifted to non-fiction, where it has remained ever since, with only the occasional dip into reading a popular novel here and there, but never any genuine attempt to make up for my lack of literary depth. At middle-age, I occasionally have a pang of intellectual remorse for not being better read in literature, but it doesn’t ring very deeply. No one could ever accuse me of not being a reader, I was just never set on fire by made-up stories, no matter how gorgeous the writing.

Sorry, J.D.

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When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Lemonade

By Brian Filed in Life Tagged with , , , January 20th, 2010 @ 1:51 pm

Rush Limbaugh notwithstanding, it seems like everybody has been motivated to do something to try to help the people of Haiti. Early last week, Charlotte’s teacher sent an e-mail to all of the parents of her class to let us know that they would be running a lemonade stand to solicit donations for Haitian relief efforts from their classmates; parents were asked to contribute items they would need, such as cups, juicers and a huge amount of fresh lemons, and, if possible, to sign up to help out on the day of the event. We signed up to provide the cups, and I volunteered to go in and help out.

Charlotte’s school is grades one through three, with a total of somewhere around 350 kids, so the actual amount of funds to be raised from this would only be modest, but the entire school district had done a separate fundraiser which collected a couple thousand dollars on top of this event’s proceeds. It speaks well of a town that is mostly white, lower-middle class and prime Scott Brown country that the schools felt that they could ask for and receive the kind of support they’ve gotten.

Today was the big day, and I arrived at the school just as Charlotte’s class were being led through the hall (quietly and single-file, of course) to gather up the several hundred lemons, gallon jugs of water, five-pound bags of sugar, and whatever else needed to be taken to the cafeteria. I and another dad, along with the teacher’s husband (who, not coincidentally, is Haitian) got the tables in place and plugged in the half-dozen or so electric juicers. I passed out lemons to the kids and showed them how to roll them to make them easier to juice. The moms on hand helped with slicing lemons and supervising the kids on the juicers. Every kid got at least a brief turn doing each part of the process, except for the two boys who declared themselves the “Ice Patrol” and took it upon themselves to make sure every container of lemonade was adequately supplied with ice cubes. Though Charlotte wanted my direct attention a few times, for the most part she stuck to her assigned jobs and interacted with her classmates. It was fun to watch her be one of the kids rather than be part of a performance or other staged event where she gets to be the deliberate center of attention.

I think the actual task was a little bit bigger than the teacher had imagined when she came up with the idea, but the kids were exceedingly well-behaved and did whatever was asked of them. As the momentum of things shifted from one task to another, I tried to run interference and do whatever seemed to need to be done: showing the kids how to stir the bottoms of the containers to dissolve all the sugar, ferrying completed containers to the “Ice Patrol” to keep them working steadily, clearing away the emptied water jugs, and so on. Our hour and a half sped by, and the kids were rewarded with a cup of their lemonade; as you can imagine, some batches were unbearably sweet, others impossibly tart, some just watery. The kids mostly drank their cups, though some only took a sip or two. The kids were then seated for an early lunch so they could spend their regular lunch period selling the lemonade, and the adults handled cleanup and pre-pouring the lemonade for service. A second shift of parents had volunteered for the lunch hour selling, and they began to drift in just as we finished and the rest of the school kids were starting to line up for the caf.

I’m pleased and proud of Charlotte and her classmates for their willingness to make a real contribution to helping people who have suffered an unimaginable tragedy. Sunday evening we watched the “60 Minutes” segment about Haiti, and Charlotte got to see the footage of the piles of dead bodies being loaded with a back-hoe into a dump truck for mass burial, and I think it took her aback a little bit. I hope this taught her that being willing to offer even a little help can be worthwhile.

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Happy Apocalypse, Dear Charlotte

By Brian Filed in Life, Links Tagged with , , , , , January 4th, 2010 @ 11:17 am

I think by now we’ve all had about enough of the “End Of The World”. That “2012″ movie that came out in November has only grossed about $163 million domestically against an estimated production budget of $200 million (although the overseas receipts have more than made up the difference). Astronomy blogger Phil Plait has been telling us for two years that the whole thing about the Mayan Calendar is just a load of hooey. Even the SNL spoof of the 2012 trailer which ties the end of the world to the election of the Palin/Beck “Dream Ticket” has managed to evaporate from most corners of the web (pulled from YouTube, not available on Hulu, etc.).

And do you know why??? It’s because the REAL “End Of The World” is coming MUCH SOONER! In fact, the Last Day is now firmly set for May 21, 2011. And who has given us this knowledge of the Day Of Reckoning? Why THIS GUY, that’s who! And he should know, because he’s the same guy who correctly predicted the End of Days back in 1994! He’s even got it right on the front page of his website, so it MUST BE TRUE! Camping says its all based on a complex mathematical formula explained thusly in the SFGate article:

The number 5, Camping concluded, equals “atonement.” Ten is “completeness.” Seventeen means “heaven.” Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011.

“Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.,” he began. “Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that’s 1,978 years.”

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days – the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

“Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story,” Camping said. “It’s the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you’re completely saved.

Well, how could you refute such ironclad logic and big numbers and stuff? Any fool can see that the number 722,500 spells The Rapture! And that whole 1994 fiasco? Just some bad math. This time for sure.

May 21, 2011 also happens to be my daughter Charlotte’s tenth birthday, so I guess I won’t have to send out invitations to all those True Believers who are going to be Raptured up to Jesus that day. That’ll save a lot of money on birthday cake and goodie bags to be sure. Any possible metaphorical connection between my daughter turning 10 and the Apocalypse is completely coincidental.

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First Flies, Now Moths

By Brian Filed in Life, Links Tagged with , , December 4th, 2009 @ 10:41 am

mothra

For the last couple of weeks, our back door has been blanketed by dozens upon dozens of little brown moths. I usually leave the light on out back for the cats, since they like to spend their evenings al fresco, and when I open the door to call them to come in for bedtime, there are swarms of the moths, all doing their dance of death with the naked lightbulb. Charlotte, who has such a phobia about flying insects that she has an actual clinical diagnosis for it, is completely freaked out every time she has to go in or out of the house in the dark. Bridget tried to get rid of them by using the electric fly swatter we bought back during the Invasion of the Flies, but for every one she killed, there were five to replace it.

Now, the Boston Globe tells me that we are not the only ones inundated with moths. The mild weather we’ve been having around here has proved to be ideal for the Winter Moth population, which one entomologist in the Globe story says could be as high as ONE TRILLION MOTHS in Massachusetts alone. Only the males mature into flying insects, which means my yard is teeming with legless female winter moth worms waiting to breed. Eeeeeew.

Well, okay, accident of nature and all that, but if it starts raining toads around here, I’m moving.

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