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Post from Phone (this may not work)

The Lovely Jenny is on vacation all week, so I've been on my own here. Some quick thoughts:

Pro: I can stretch out in the middle of the bed!
Con: I'm the only one in it.

Pro: I can leave my stuff lying around upstairs without worrying about it being moved ('cleaned up').
Con: I have to clean it all up.

Pro: All the string cheese is mine!
Con: I'm almost out of string cheese.

Pro: I know how to take care of the fish now.
Con: I don't think they like me. They don't say much, but I can tell...

Con: I didn't get to sit on the beach with her, watching the ocean all day.
Pro: I visited my grandma on her 90th birthday after work, and she was surprisingly lucid and upbeat.

I won that last one.

*Edited in-browser next day, because I can't leave well enough alone.

Gaming.

So my newly upgraded PC has led me astray from LotRO and into other games that I didn't think I'd realistically be able to run... in my lifetime. My PC budget is basically $zero, so I was lucky to pick up our friend Haley's old PC for $150, which is more than $zero, but still a good buy. This PC killed not one, not two, but three hard drives, so I'm expecting a crash at any time, but I can live with that.

I actually gutted that computer, along with my old one and the lovely Jenny's, and used all the bits to cobble together two new computers. I'm now running an Intel Quad-core at 2.5GHz with, somehow, 3.25GB RAM and my ATI HD 4870. Jenny is now running, in a different case, basically what was my old rig. An AMD 4000+ with a Gig of RAM and the NVIDIA whatever-it-was video card from Haley's comp. I'm no good with NVIDIA. Dunno what it was, but it was a massive step up from the ATI 1350 she had before, as is the RAM and CPU.

So now I can finally run games like Assassin's Creed II and GTA IV, and she can finally play games like Spore and The Sims 3, and can max out LotRO. And let me tell you: Assassin's Creed II alone was worth the upgrade. Seriously, that game is fucking amazing. I'm pretty much done with it now, in that all that's left to 100% completion is finishing all the annoying races, and I'm thinking about starting a new game to play it all over again. I've been playing GTA IV at the same time, but fuck that game. So far, it's not as fun as GTA San Andreas. Massive disappointment. I mean, it's good, but nowhere near as good as I expected. Instead of diving into it after finishing AC2 before returning to LotRO, I'm probably going to go back to LotRO and keep playing GTA on the side. I miss my Champion...

Never pay full price.

Steam is in the midst of a summer sale, and this is what I wait for. I can't remember ever paying full price for a PC game, except for the occasional retail bargain, like a boxed Painkiller trilogy or Half-Life 1 compilation. This week I nabbed the Grand Theft Auto IV complete pack for ten bucks, Assassin's Creed II for less than seven, and Bully for three and change. That's three full AAA games plus two expansions for the price of four Arby's value meals. I win.

I've got something like sixty games on Steam now, all but a handful purchased while on sale for a deep discount. Risen, a game I really, really want, is on sale today at 66% off. That still puts it at a little over ten dollars, so I passed. Discipline is the name of the game with Steam.

In other news, the lovely Jenny got a job with my company today, and she starts tomorrow. This is awesome. We'll be on the same sleep schedule now, and can carpool, saving tons of money on gas I won't spend on my 19-year old Explorer, since we'll take her Accord. And we can eat lunch together every day (double bonus points). Well, every day that I'm not out of town or on a PM, which is most days (minus 50% on double point bonus). Still, it will up our combined income hugely (financial stress level minus 60%). And I won't have to sweat in the heat all day and then drive home in a truck without air conditioning that's been sitting in the sun all day long (endurance level increased 50%).

On the downside, it's critical that we get her Accord serviced ASAP for all the warning lights that have been coming on lately, and I have no idea what repairs they might require. But that should be an affordable expense once she gets settled. Probably.

New mouse. This is big news.

About a month ago my mouse died. I loved that mouse. I even blogged about it. I bought it on my birthday, three years ago. Since its untimely death I've been using this cast-off, HP-branded piece of shit I dug out of a bin full of old computer cables. I hate it. I mean, it works, but its DPI is incredibly low, it's uncomfortable, it's ugly, and its cable is too short. Well, today is a new day.

I bought this thing tonight at Kmart. At $20, it's clearly the cheapest laser mouse you can possibly buy at retail. But it was there, so I bought it. And it ain't half bad. I mean, it's slightly too small for my hand, and somehow the DPI toggle button below the wheel keeps getting hit even when I don't actually click it, but I've had far worse mice. It's relatively comfortable, looks sharp, and the nicely clicky scroll-wheel glows red all the time. They had a purple one, but I went with red, because that's how I roll, motherfuckers.

You see, this is what Twitter has done to my blog. I'm on Twitter constantly now, so there's not much left to blog about. Twitter.com/Maladhros, for the record.