Last Cool URL

The last few years, I’ve really gotten into sports. I suspect this is partly because of aging, but it’s also because of my line of work, especially my old job. I mean, when you work with people that can only talk about their WoW character and raiding for eight hours a day every day, it’s a breath of fresh air to talk to the normies, even if it’s about the Yankees and how much you hate them. My love of sports further expanded the night an associate of mine had a party.

We went about our usual pre-party regimen that night, meaning we played some basketball and had a few beers watching a baseball game and shouting at the TV. We turned up to the party and immediately sank into the usual sports talk, bullshitting about the game we’d seen, the way the season was going, the usual sort of thing sports guys talk about.

Unbeknown to us, my associate had also invited a gaggle of anime nerds to the party, hoping to mix two nerd cliques in the interest of better socializing for everyone. We, of course, inadvertently contributed to ruining that, by the simple act of standing around and talking about sports. I’m told at some point during the night, one of the anime nerds actually said, “She didn’t have to invite those jocks.” Simply by sprawling out in front of the TV on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I’d become The Other. A monster. A Jock.

I’m closer to 30 than I am to high school and the last time I heard the term “jock” fired in anger outside of a teen movie was, literally, decades ago. It was hilarious enough that I promptly resolved to watch more sports. And beat up more nerds.

Naturally, moving overseas put a crimp on my sportswatching ways for a while, so in the process of getting the cable turned on, I had my eye on some of their sports packages, especially with The Big TV meaning I could watch soccer without squinting. I expected a robust lineup, and found it, but I also found the North American Sports Network, a dirt-cheap ESPN network intended to broadcast football, baseball, college football, and hockey, to an audience of about 10. I promptly said “Give me all of it!” and got all the sports channels my network offered, including the NASN.

Which brings me to today, when it is Sunday and I am watching football. Giants-Patriots. In Europe. Now, I already know who won, but that’s not the point.

My sports day today includes:

Chelsea-Newcastle (A heartbreaker of a game decided by an uncalled offside penalty that caused me acute physical pain).
Giants-Patriots
Montreal-New York Rangers (Live!)
Rugby of some kind

Now, watching a game on tape delay has its advantages. Such as no commercials. I’m watching Giants-Patriots with only a handful of commercial breaks, like a soccer game more than an American football game. How much would you pay for THAT?

Well, I’m paying less than I was for cable in the US. How crazy is that?

More, the NASN lineup for the next few days is, basically, Bowl game-NHL game-Bowl game-Bowl game-NHL game-recap show-bowl game-bowl game-bowl game. I’ve got an overseas ESPN that’s better than the US ESPN. How crazy is that?

I may never come back at this rate. I also can’t wait until baseball season.

Watching Everton-Arsenal live in HD. This is fantastic.

I am learning a Zen-like approach to dealing with European electronic devices.

For example, I ordered a PVR from our cable company some weeks ago. It arrived in good time (one thing I’ll say about the Posten is shit gets here quick) and I set everything up per the instructions (or per the pictures, since I don’t speak Norwegian). It promptly didn’t work. It continued not working for several days. My time here has taught me, though, that if I ignore them long enough, things will spontaneously start working.

For example, this PVR didn’t work with our old TV for several days, suddenly started working the day we bought the new TV, then didn’t work once we disconnected it and connected it to the new TV. I left it alone, firing it up every couple of days to see if it had decided to work yet and, lo and behold, a few days ago, it decided to work. Keep in mind, we didn’t do anything to it in the interim, so it wasn’t changing the wiring or anything that suddenly made it work. Nothing was “fixed”.

Now, the PVR was coming on and I could peruse the menus and everything, stumbling as best I could in my ghetto Norwegian, but none of the channels I’d paid for were coming in. In fact, no channels were coming in save BBC World and the Adult channel (God bless you, Europe). I thought back to my previous experience and promptly turned it off again, then would turn it on every few days to see if things had started working yet and, when they hadn’t, I’d turn it back off and flip back over to the boring old basic cable we’ve been using since I arrived. Norwegian law allows you to return pretty much anything in 14 days, but that was well past, and I had faith. It was functioning fine (like, no weird noises or anything) and set up correctly. It just needed to decide to work.

Tonight, we resumed the PVR project. I puttered around in the setup menus and found that I could switch the menu over to English–funnily enough, this wasn’t offered during the automated Easy Setup, it was buried 5 menus deep in an obscure submenu–which made things considerably easier. From there, I messed with a few things, but nothing at all got it working. So I was sitting in front of the TV–which was a black screen with NO SIGNAL FOUND on it– staring at the remote, looking for interesting buttons to press, when I was blasted back by a wave of sound talking about panzers. Ah, yes, The History Channel.

We’re not entirely sure how it started working, or why, but we’re quietly grateful. It gives me a new understanding of old timey religion since, hell, last time we sacrificed to Zeus, we had a bumper crop. May as well do it again, just in case.

I figured out how to progress through that one mission in Company of Heroes. It’s by working around the problem. See, I thought the trucks you have to escort were just timed to show up, but they’re not. I had an absolutely brutal–but totally satisfying–battle with the Wehrmacht, carving out enough resource points to defend my base, and finally putting together the heavily armed fighting force needed to destroy their army and insure the safety of the trucks. I’d figured out that capturing two of the strategic points triggered the event…but nothing else did. So I went ahead and killed just about everything, parked a huge combat task force at the far end of the road, with recon vehicles stationed at strategic points, captured every OTHER point but the two that triggered the event, and made sure everything was repaired for the occasional spawning wave of Germans, and only then did I trigger the trucks, and everything went swimmingly. It feels a bit too “gamey” at that point, like a workaround more than a genuine combat scenario, but eh. I liked it well enough to keep playing (and will play the 2 expansion campaigns, I’m already drooling over the Brits and Panzer Elite) and purchase the Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War platinum pack due to the goddamned Steam Christmas Sale. Like I needed more of an excuse to spend money.

So, I am affilicted with the longest stretch of vacation I’ve had since I dropped out of college. Over 10 days, plus a short week when I get back, then a weekend, then a business trip down to Zurich, then another weekend. I’m seriously unsure of what to do. I have close to two weeks free of any obligation.

Of course, since I’m a nerd, I immediately bought games.

I bought Company of Heroes, even though I quit because it annoyed me, because it was cheap on Steam.

I bought the Company of Heroes expansion, even though I know I’ll quit because it annoyed me, because I was on Steam and I figured why the fuck not?

I bought Bioshock, because having played the demo, it’s clearly my kind of game, even if my laptop proves unable to run it once shit gets real. Not sure on that, it struggled some during the demo, but I didn’t care because I was zapping creatures, flailing around with a wrench, and screaming like a girl even then. I mean, I need to reward those kinds of games, even if I can only finish them later.

But what’s great about Steam is I can. I can finally treat games like Pokemon, already an impulse of mine, where I can acquire them and maybe use them one day. Or not. I really wish I could convert my boring box games to Steam to clear out even more space.

Though this is largely because I gave up on Bloodlines. I’m at some mission where a mansion is on fire and the other vampires are on fire and I die like instantly and who cares I want to kill Germans.

I was going to buy The Witcher, but it doesn’t seem to be up on Steam, so fuck it.