psionic stress radiation

Shucks. My DVD player froze and died yesterday.
I was feeling needy and bruised and I thought an episode or two of Buffy would slay some of my personal demons.

Alas, no. My dour mood actually slew my disk player.
That happens a lot.

When I'm in a crap mood, my car, my appliances, my computer, and my t.v. (and accessories) all respond sympathetically.

When I was in my early twenties, and constantly, profoundly depressed, I would drive home late at night after work, and streetlights would never fail to respond to my discontent by winking out as I passed beneath.

One by one.

Some well-read acquaintance once told me that this was called the "Thor's Hammer effect". Ultimately, he proved to be joking, and I guess he wondered if I wasn't giving too much ground to my obvious persecution anxiety. He offered an instance where he had been left in the dark under the same circumstance.

I countered this with rehearsals of all my recent experiences. By the time I had related the story of the River Road Blackout (ten streetlamps summarily auto-extinguished as I passed beneath each of them in turn) he was speechless -- and to my mind, somewhat affrighted.

I like complicated machinery.
I am a fan of and respectful towards complicated machinery.

So why shouldn't it behave in kind? If it is intelligent enough to know what I'm feeling, then surely it can deduce that its continuing functionality is better served by making me happy, as opposed to breaking the fuck down...

Disgust, horror...and whew!

I contracted the About:Blank Adware virus/trojan two days ago.

Nasty, stubborn piece of work.
It replaced my homepage and added five minutes to my boot time.
The internet became a prickly hedgemaze of redirects and pop-ups.

If that's not bad enough, somehow this bastard hijacked my last two blog entries and inserted commercially targeted hyperlinks around a random selection of ordinary words in the post.

It took most of yesterday to get my removal skills up to speed.
Twelve hours and a dozen gray hairs later, I was able to clean it out.

In the process, I had corrupted Norton, (add the half hour I spent looking under my bed for the disk in order to effect a reinstall), and somehow Internet Explorer got deleted.

I am now firewalled to the hilt. Any of you bitches want to play now?

Actually, disregard that cocky challenge.

Just leave me alone.

aarrggghhh

Bugger.

Bugger

Just hours after getting my newly repaired monitor home from the service department, I got hit with a couple of adware infections.
Bad ones.
The list of things I have to do (and learn) if I'm gonna have a prayer at successful infection removal is staggering.

I'm leaning towards reinstalling my OS. Hey, at least I've got backups...

File 'O Crap

I had the patience to nearly finish Resident Evil Outbreak , but the fucking sequel has managed to embarrass and belittle its heritage at its own expense, as well as the player's.

Were they under the impression that the original Capcom game was entertaining on a purely adrenal level?
Because a lot of us enjoyed the quiet times we spent inspecting levels cleared of threat. The intricate decor alone was a substantive replay feature. But this last title is nothing but a (very) loosely strung together quintet of practice missions. There can be no casual examination of clues once the immediate threats are eliminated, because every minute or so is interrupted by an automatically generated zombie breaking down the door of a room or corridor that you proudly swept clean a moment ago...

That kind of constant pressure might be fine for a military cadet learning combat simulation, but for a gamer who appreciates the effort and talent of the background rendering staff, the incidental musicians, and the puzzle-crafters, frenzied pacing is a cheap substitute for a haunting, replayable atmosphere.

I've only finished the first three missions, so my judgment might sound premature, but... I've read the reviews. They are uniformly middling.

The recent RE4, for the X-Box, in contrast, is getting stellar reviews.

Are we Sony owners just suckers, or what?