I bought an episode of Sam & Max. I hoped that there would be good jokes. I was nervous that it wouldn't run on my windows machine. It's a laptop, so I figured it doesn't have a 3D graphics card, but the game has 3D graphics. But when I tried it, the graphics worked fine. I should have worried about memory. The game juddered and shuddered, Windows threw up a dialog box saying that it was expanding my swap space. I searched YouTube for videos of other people playing the game--maybe I could still enjoy the jokes vicariously. I found some videos, and they were pretty funny. Frustratingly, those videos only showed about 2/3 of the game; I still don't know how it ends. Computer games promise fun but always lead to misery. Except for Paul du Bois' Emacs port of Bubblet, which I've happily played for years now, no problem, never runs out of memory.
Bah, stupid computer games.
If you visit jpod.info, the official site with information about the Douglas Coupland novel JPod, it says that this novel "updates Microserfs for the age of Google" but that is so misleading because the characters in in JPod obviously work for the computer game company Electronic Arts, not MicroSoft, not Google. Anyhow, this is yet another Coupland book in which characters who bespeak their era find out about the timeless value of friends and family.
I liked this book plenty, but I have a warning. Towards the second half, there's a lot of filler. Digits of pi, random digits, stuff like that. It's all very nice and it fits just fine with the artistic vision of the whatever and all that. But it might fool you into thinking "I just need to pack this one book in my backpack and I'm covered for my commute to work and back", and you'd be mostly right except you probably don't read many of the digits of pi and then bang you've finished the book and the bus is still in Burlingame, miles from home. Bring another book along, just in case.
Bah, stupid books.
Labels: book, personal organization, pi