GRABBINGSAND

“You’re lit from within… You got fires banked down in you- hearthfires and holocausts.”

- Mike Connor (Jimmy Stewart) to Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn), The Philadelphia Story

amen, jim. amen.

does liberty have a price? if you had to shell out actual cash for the things you did, would you do them? while you ponder that thought, scan this list of fees:

- Dancing ($35)
- Gambling ($35)
- Watching an “R”-rated Film ($70)
- Cursing ($70)
- Being present where Alcohol is Consumed ($100)
- Actually Consuming Said Alcohol ($150)
- General Immorality ($150)

think your wallet wouldn’t be able to handle the strain? well, it is a good thing you’re not a student at jerry falwell’s liberty university…

it was back in college. i was living in dana 104. my first semester at berry. i guess my roommate was the one paying for it, but we had cable. he was a jerk, a racist floridian named tracy who left after that semester, so i was happy to get at least some entertainment value out of the deal. regardless, i was watching television one night, staying up late and avoiding studying. this commercial comes on. it’s a volkswagon commercial. the passat? maybe the jetta. either one, the car didn’t impress me nearly as much as the music that accompanied it. it just stuck into my head and i really liked it. at the end of the ad was an 800 number to locate a vw dealer.

i didn’t need a vw, but that song was going to drive me nuts. so i called from the hall phone and waited for the next available operator. finally, a tired young man answers and asks if i want to hear all about the new line of volkswagons. no, i say, i don’t need a new volkswagon, but i would really like to know who does that song on your ad.

silence. long sigh. “the song is called ‘harry’s game’ … it’s by the group clannad … you’re like the 20th person today that’s asked.”

if only i would’ve had adtunes. adtunes is a fantastic pop culture reference tool, even though it has only just begun to serve the needs of the commercially entertained. basically, if you’ve heard it on a movie trailer or in a commercial or anywhere else, adtunes is probably tracking it down.

it’s over… the beta, that is. as of midnight or so, “ahazi” - the server containing my primary beta character - was turned off in preparation for tomorrow’s launch. there are probably players still running about on “bria” - the original beta server - but they are scheduled for shutdown in about half an hour. the servers will then be wiped clean and revamped with the release build of star wars galaxies. then on thursday morning, the hard-working devs will give the go ahead to launch at least 10 servers nationwide. if everything works, these will be up and ready to receive the estimated 70,000 users that will purchase their own copy of the game.

i spent my last night of beta running around with a mon calamari named cootar (AKA gray), the highlights of which i have posted here for your amusement. one of the other beta testers took a more retro approach to his screenshots. and if you want to see it in action, check out the fan-made birth of an era video.

i promised a more detailed review didn’t i… let’s just say that it is still to come. the bottom line is: it is a gorgeous game, it plays well, the freedom of development is better than any other of its type and it has more potential than almost anything else on the market.

and it is star wars. i mean, come on…

i never wanted to be the tow-headed one. yeah, he got the saber and he was the chosen one. sure, he’s the one that blew up the first death star and pulled an errol flynn to save princess leia. but for my money, it is all about solo. solo was in it for the money, or so he thought. he didn’t have the hand of destiny on his shoulder, just the lure of enough cash to remove the price from his head. in a galactic civil war, he’d remained neutral. he didn’t become a rebel because he was born to save us all. he became a rebel through his own observations of an encircling evil that threatened a people for which he initially had no use, but was for which he was finding himself more and more concerned. solo was surprised by his own true nature. the ultimate pirate with a heart of gold encased in carbonite.

han. luke. leia. chewbacca. ben. yoda. these were welcome heroes to a kid in the early 80s. i had so many action figures and made my mother send of proofs of purchase to get even more. (that was the only way to get boba fett, after all.) and something from those good times of play still remains today. i am not alone.

in two days, you will have the option to not only watch star wars… but to virtually live star wars. sony online entertainment, makers of everquest, have finally completed three years of work on star wars galaxies. and this is unlike anything you’ve seen before. even usa today considers it worthy of coverage.

have i seen it? yep. i’ve been testing it for the past three weeks. take a look. a more concise review will come tomorrow.

i’ve already written about lake winnie, but it deserves a second look. about half of the rides were operated by kids from my high school, all of them serving summer time in the employ of the park. lake winnepasaukah. home of the matterhorn. a spinning mini-coaster on a spoke system, taking a series of dips and hills over and over again. at the controls was a wanna-be d.j. with a meanstreak and a tape-deck. the trick was to sit in the matterhorn car on the outside of the circle, leaving the inside for your mid-teen date. or perhaps just the girl who you had optimistically decided to follow around the park. no matter, because you were counting on that evil ride operator to choose an opportune moment to shift the ride into overdrive. this was your first lesson in centrifugal force, but you didn’t realize it. the faster the ride would go, the closer your “date” would gravitate to you and you had only pure physics to thank for this phenomena. so it wasn’t that romantic, and yes, you had to accept an incredible amount of dizziness in exchange for this extreme high-velocity closeness, but it works well enough for junior high. it seemed worth it to risk motion sickness in exchange for just a little bit of closeness, spinning at 13 revolutions-per-minute to “jungle love” by morris day & the time.

Oh-wee-oh-wee-oh!

and now you can relive this in your own backyard…. assuming you have a rather sizable backyard and enough extra electricity and insurance to cover it. ital international sells used musik rides. you can have a 70s era himalaya for a reduced cost of $120k. maybe you’d like the flying bobs model for a mere $50k? and don’t think that these are just remnants of a bygone era, because they are still being made here in the southeast at bertazzon’s of brentwood, tennessee.

of course, you’d have to hire your own brace-faced teenager to man the controls…

hulk mad! hulk angry! hulk smash! hulk use green skintone to market tint-associated products to masses! would you like to buy some palmolive from green hulk? palmolive get grease off of hulk’s dishes! keep hulk’s hands smooth and supple! after dishes, hulk need fresh breath! hulk wants you to buy scope! not sissy blue scope! green scope! gargle! gargle with hulk!

or at least, that’s the way i would market the hulk. color association. because i know i saw signs for the big green guy in the grocery store this weekend, but for the life of me i cannot remember what products were promoted. and isn’t that the point? i did bit of googling and came up with this contest with hershey’s. the bulked-up hulked-up sweepstakes. and then there are others, like banquet tv dinners and slim jims, but i really think they are missing out on some opportunities here. so many green items could use a bit of hulk-ification.

hulk stinky! hulk bathe! hulk use irish spring! smell hulk now! hulk too angry to whistle, but hulk thinks you get point anyway!

if you want to get all hulked up in preparation for this weekend’s movie opening, take a look at leader’s lair. whoever this guy is, he must have plenty of free time and an incredible admiration for the green fellow in the purple pants.

“Knoram is home to more than fifty thousand characters, representing more than one million levels gained. Thats a lot of dead wildlife.”

Are you tired of those other massively-multiplayer-online-role-playing games? You know, the ones where you have to actually choose a direction and click on a target and occasionally type. How annoying! Tired of complex keyboard commands? This one only has one: ALT-F4 to Quit. Wouldn’t it be better if you could just sit there and just watch the experience and character development roll right in? Well, consider yourself power-levelled, my little friends, because ProgressQuest is about to become your newest addiction.

Or maybe not. Actually, it is a brilliant instance of shareware-as-satire. And to prove that practically anything can have a following, it has its own collective of player-run guilds, as well as some remarkably embellished stories of in-game experience. Take the tale of this questing Panda Man…

“Now Im thinking hooking up with a succubus should be cake with my new pants, but everytime I try to talk to one of em, some loser tries to cut in on my action and I have to brain em with my +7 Steely Vicious Poleax. While all of the quartz giant crystals and yeti furs are good for my bank account, its not getting me any closer to getting laid or finishing my quest.”

Priceless.

they’re baaaaack. sort of. okay, so they’re in development. and there are no signs that we’ll be seeing the return of marc singer (yeah, the beastmaster) and robert englund (yeah, the guy that played freddy). but when all of the networks seem bound and determined to give me nothing but new reality shows and reproductions of CSI, i have to admire this attempt to revitalize one of the best television series of the mid-80s.

still haven’t figured it out? v, the then-amazing alien-invasion mini-series is doing a come-back in the form of a new three-hour movie. if you saw it back in the day, you remember it fondly and remember how freakin’ cool it was and how it jived perfectly with the pre-1984 jitters in the air. you remember how the aliens hid behind big aviator sunglasses and you couldn’t tell what was more frightening: the fact that their human skin would peel away to show the scaly alien beneath… or how the iconography and militarism was incredibly creepy in that just-like-nazi-germany kind of way.

but do yourself a favor. don’t seek it out on video and avoid the reruns. this is another of those childhood memories that we would be better to leave intact, coloured by imagination and faded by time. the effects really weren’t that good, the makeup was rather low-end… and really… you don’t want to see marc singer trying to emote again, do you?

the morning commute. the evening commute. the morning commute. the evening commute. you develop a pattern. drive to work. you start to recognize patterns. drive back home. you know just when to leave the apartment to get to work on time. heading south. you know just when you want to leave work to beat the homebound rush. heading north. 7:26am. the morning x or morning edition or a random cd. 4:51pm. all things considered or 640am or a random cd. and you do it everyday.

and sometimes you are rewarded for your routine. the other morning, probably thursday, and i am driving south on ga 400. i had an early start, so the road was clearer than usual, with more spaces between the cars and the allowance of a decent clip. in my rear-view mirror, i spot him. it looks like an eighties era nissan. the boxy kind, built like a volvo but somehow lacking any and all prestige. and what i notice is the way it’s rolling. the rear end of the car is almost scraping the asphalt, just a good pothole away from sending sparks after the cars behind. what the heck is he hauling, i wonder? cigarette smoke is billowing from his driver-side window as he creeps up alongside me. plastic bags. white. filling the car from stem to stern, leaving only enough room for the driver and completely blocking his rear window. is it trash? or… maybe he’s moving. perhaps he has been kicked out of the house, everything he owns in glad kitchen bags, his mad as hell wife standing and steaming in the doorway with their two kids and one on the way. could it be a life’s collection of aluminum cans? no. wrong on all counts…

phone books. he’s that guy. the unseen fellow that drops off your new sack-of-yellow-pages. few people notice him, but i have. and let me tell you, he is risking his neck and the necks of everyone around him, just to deliver five pounds of bound listings to your home and mine.

… and to bring a welcome change into my routine.