Last Saturday, as I was returning home from picking up some dry cleaning, a fire truck passed me on 5th Avenue. When I got to the corner of my block, I saw why -- there was a guy collapsed on the street right smack in front of Super Pollo Latino II. He was a well-dressed dude, with a dark shirt and a black sports jacket on. He was out cold. A small crowd had gathered around him, and the firemen were sort of prodding him. I'd been planning to go for a run, and it seemed like a poor omen for a guy to have what looked like an ataque de corazón a hundred feet from my front door, but I put on the old track pants, running shoes, knee braces, and boxer briefs (for my cojones, you know) anyway and headed out. When I got back to the corner five minutes later, the guy and the firemen and the gawking multitude were gone, as the thing had never happened. Across the street in Sunset Park, though, there was a small-scale festival going on -- a small cohort of Latin dancers wearing long, flowing skirts and these enormous, fluttering, disc-shaped hats made out bright feathers in a bunch of different colors were doing their thing on the promenade. They danced non-stop for four of my circuits around the park. Probably longer than that, too, but that was when my stomach started doing a thing and I had to go home and sweat and shiver on the toilet.
The folks at 680 Degraw St. threw, as planned, their final BBQ. I think the idea was for it to be a rager, a house party to end all house parties (and to at least spoil the property value a tad for the gimlet-eyed landlord), but it ended up being a rather sedate affair, just sitting around on what remained of the sod and schmoozing over Tedburgers. Maybe we're getting too old to rage? To his credit, Ted did put on his hat. I cooked a variation on Jurney's famous enchilada casserole -- a variation because I lost the original recipe and went with the one I found here. Despite my misgivings about the authenticity of "Mexican Tomato Sauce," it came out really tasty, although, as Eve pointed out, the blue corn tortillas I made it with turned a sort of icky gray color when I baked them. The one weird thing that happened was that a friend of a friend, so to speak, of one of the hosts showed up and got kind of... I don't know, crazy. This person, well, we couldn't tell if she'd simply had too much to drink (she wasn't really drunking it up) or if she was actually emotionally disturbed, but she was saying strange, aggressive things to people she'd barely met, and we didn't really know what to do with her. Eventually, she was escorted home by an acquaintance, but it sort of left an odd taste in everyone's mouth. It also reminded me this game that I and my freshman year floormates at Wesleyan used to play when we got high, in which the group would confront a single target and attempt to talk him down from a ledge he wasn't standing on: "Dude, are you okay? You are creeping everyone out. Look, just calm down, we'll get you to the Health Center." Great game.
On a whim at work I shelled the twenty bucks to download a copy of the Penny Arcade video game, On The Rain Slick Precipice Of Darkness. It's actually pretty good! It plays a lot like one of those old Tim Schafer / Ron Gilbert adventure games, except that there's a combat / role-playing component. The dialogue is funny, the art is swell, and there's this small-scale avatar customization system that kind of surprised me with how well it worked. The characters (and game) are a combination of 3-D and line art. You customize your character in 3-D at the beginning -- facial features, body shape, clothes, etc. -- and your choices are reflected in the line art cut scenes as well as the 3-D gameplay. It looks really sweet. That being said, there are a few frustrating, technical gameplay issues -- most of which I would probably be unaware of were I not in the middle of implementing this kind of thing right now -- such as not being sure where you're supposed to click to pathfind to a particular part of the screen and not always walking closer to an object before examining it. Overall, though, it's swell. I'm about three hours in and I've already collected like 14 pounds of hobo meat. That's a thing you do.
I spent hours today lazing around in Sunset Park, laptopping some Free Software documentation and enjoying the wonderful weather. Oh yeah, and this is after I woke up at two in the afternoon. It's been one of those days: Resty. Nina went to pick up some laundry after dark, though, and there was a guy passed out on the street -- possibly dead, she thinks -- people screaming and hooting outside La Campesina, a woman throwing up ("Like, a constant flow") between two parked cars. It gets wild out here.
Started reading, at Tom's behest, the first book in that George R. R. Martin series. I like it, but -- and maybe this is like the time I was disappointed that my archeology class wasn't going to cover dinosaurs -- I thought there'd be more elves and, you know, spells and shit. There is a dwarf, and, yeah, he's kind of the coolest character, but he's just a plain old little handicapped, no magic involved.
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