10/26/00
PlayStationing; making the world a Terribly Happy place...
So here I thought putting together an online journal and site would be easy. I thought, "Sure, I’ll just throw some pages together, a page of links, a couple of quick graphics, and I’ll be up in a week. Register the domain, la-dee-da, I’m up and running. Get on diarist.net, tell the folks at damnhellasskings and soon I will be the toast of the Internet!"
Never mind that my interior monologue seems to have delusions of grandeur. This Web shit is hard! I’ve done Web sites before (www.senorsex.com, www.lcp.org), and they’ve always taken me a long time to do, but I always had people helping or some raw information that I was trying to present. In other words, all these sites had a point to them. And in this case, with terribly happy, the point is me and I’m not quite sure how to go about putting myself out there. Do I talk about my love life? (Not sure.) Can I talk about work (probably not.) Does anyone even care what I’m writing about, and if so, how will I know without putting up mondo forums for people to talk about it? And how vain would that be of me? I’m not Pamie. I’m not Tomato Nation. I don’t have hundreds or thousands of people hanging on my every word.
Okay, it’s only the second update, maybe I should calm down. But you know, one of my pet peeves is these little vanity sites that are just useless. They just take up space and say nothing. I didn’t want that to be what this site was like. At the very least, it should be mildly amusing. In that spirit, here’s a little joke:
There were these two peanuts walking down the street. And one was a salted. Then the other was a roasted.
Ha ha! Hee hee! Ho ho! (Oh man… I’m in big trouble.)
It’s a lot of work, though. If you’re not Mr. HTML Wizard (it went over my head right about the time tables and frames started getting popular) you need a good HTML editor. And they can get expensive. I downloaded Fireworks and Dreamweaver, and they’re great, but you’ve got to spend some hard-ass time learning them to get any good results that don’t look like you’re making a site for your fishing club circa 1996. Then you have to make sure the ISP knows to set up your e-mail right and register the domain correctly and link it to the right place and set up your account for CGI (which they’ll forget to do) and type in the right password for you (which they will mis-transcribe even after you e-mail them six times) and eventually, after they get tired of you calling every day for two weeks, they will do what you ask instead of continuing to forget about it. But it takes persistence.
Now I’ve got all this Web space, and no clear idea of what it is I should say. Don’t worry, it’ll come to me…
I wrote a story about the PlayStation2 that ran on the front page today and people are freaking out. I got two calls at work today, one from a lady who was very angry at Sony for suggesting that retailers were to blame for the console shortages. She said she talked to a man from their customer help line and he said that people like Wal-Mart just didn’t order enough systems. Which, if you’ve read anything on the subject, you know is bullshit. Sony has said, very publicly, that they dropped the ball on production and weren’t able to ship out enough systems to meet all the pre-orders out there. But obviously, this person was trying to pass the blame. Tsk tsk tsk…
Another guy called me today and asked if I knew where in Austin to find a PS2. I told him I didn’t know, but that he could try e-bay. He asked how I got my hands on one.
"Well, Sony sent it to me."
"Do you want to sell it?"
"No, not really."
"Aw, c’mon, man. I got plenty of green."
"It’s not really mine," I said, starting to feel a little uncomfortable. "It belongs to Sony. They just sent it so I could review games on it. They could ask for it back anytime."
"Well…" he said, clearly desperate, clearly letting his gaming Jones get the best of him. "You really ought to sell it."
One woman e-mailed and said that Radio Shack doesn’t have PlayStation2s, but they’ll guarantee to ship you one if you pay $499. The system costs $299, folks. Radio Shack is turning into the Extortion Shack.
So is it worth all the hype? I want to say it isn’t. I want to say you should just buy a Sega Dreamcast, which has so many great games like Chu Chu Rocket, Soul Calibur, NFL2K1 and Seaman. It’s cheaper, too, by about half.
But there’s just something so cool about having a system that plays DVDs on it, as well as new games and older PlayStation games. I ripped the DVD player out of my living room and stuck the PS2 there, and unless the zombies come to try to kill me and steal my goodies, that’s where it’s staying. The games themselves aren’t that impressive. That was the same impression I got when I played some of them at the E3 expo in May. They just weren’t as impressive or fun and original as Sega’s lineup. Unreal Tournament is limp without online play. X-Squad is boring. And Orphen is just goofy as shit. (Why did they send me all the sucky titles?)
But they’ll get better. This is first-generation, after all.
Another guy called today. He liked the story and wanted to know where he could get a system. "I’ve got $600. That’s as high as I’m willing to go."
Insane. I’m one of those people that likes to buy CDs of my favorite bands the day they come out and see movies opening weekend, but I’m not willing to pay double for the privilege. That’s just wrong. Sony, you have officially turned this into the Cabbage Patch Console.
I suffer from Squishy addiction, but I never feel too bad about it when a classic entry comes along like Pamie’s elaboration on a very nasty, very gross debate going on among friends. Seriously, you don’t want to read this unless you have a high tolerance for graphic sexual nasty talk. But it’s soooo funny.
My new Third Watch recap (titled "Jimmy's Mountain)" should be up today. They’re taking longer and longer to write. I should have invited Johnnie Cochran to visit like I did last week.
Remind me to talk about the cult of celebrity next time. There’s getting to be a ton of them in Austin, and then one of them turns out to be someone you know and they’re talking on the radio, and… it’s just strange.
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Clip
Art Corner
"This is your sperm count. Would you mind sitting
a bit further away?
