Haha, this was awesome. I sent out the big call to go to Penasquitos East, weather permitting. Well, it's been raining a fair bit lately, and it turns out when we got there that Penasquitos was closed and way too muddy. So, I suggested Marian Bear and we met up at the parking lot by Regents Road and 52.



I figured Marian Bear wasn't too muddy, and it wasn't, but I didn't really figure on the creek being swollen. We'd hardly started when we had to cross a makeshift bridge which didn't quite go all the way, so we kind of had to jump the last few feet, and I pushed over a larger rock to help a bit. That wasn't too bad, and we hiked on for maybe a quarter mile, but the next "crossing" had no such convenience and we had to turn back.



We went back, crossed over the bridge, and tried the other, smaller trail on the other side. That went just a few feet before ending at the water again, the creek was so overflowing. Undaunted, we climbed up the embankment and trudged through a bush to get back on the trail on the other side. John slipped here and almost ended up in the water. I grabbed him, but he still got kind of muddy.



We continued boldly on. This section of the park is really nice; overgrown and pretty. We hadn't been out for very long and I wanted to keep going, so we pressed on into the scrub beneath the 5/52 interchange, and looked for a way to turn north to get to Rose canyon. The problem was, this meant crossing the creek again... We searched around and then finally spotted a large, fallen tree which could potentially be crossed. After climbing through some bushes, we reached the stump. It was kind of high; the top of the log was maybe ten feet above the water. I was a bit nervous starting out, and even though the bark was rough I crawled out onto it. There was some dried brush on part of the log, and when I pushed it off the back underneath was wet and slick. So, we had to jump down from there, maybe 4'-5' up. It occurred to me after landing that there was now no going back...



But the trail went on, and so did we. There's a bike path alongside I5 here which leads up to the Gilman offramp. From there, we entered Rose canyon near the train tracks. The trains made Lisa kind of nervous, although we never got near them, we just had to cross the tracks several times. The dirt road/trail I normally take through Rose canyon was horribly muddy, so we trudged whereever we could. We found some old bleached jawbones here which were pretty cool; I'm not sure what species they were from.



Eventually we reached the trail back to Regents Road. I scouted ahead to see if this creek was fordable; it was, kind of, although the main trail was pretty much obliterated. Crossing involved jumping down a ~4' embankment, slogging through some deceptively deep mud, then jumping across the water (which wasn't nearly as wide as the other creek we'd had to cross) and finally clambering up the other embankment and trudging through some bushes.



The final climb up to Regents is a relatively new trail, complete with nice little wooden bridges over tiny little dribbles of water. That felt ironic; why are there only bridges where we don't need them? We followed Regents back down to the Marian Bear parking lot. All told, we hiked almost three hours! Luckily everyone had a sense of adventure or we'd've probably had to turn back at the first embankment.

Hooray for this download rate. It's like typing, only much slower. It should be done around the time the sun turns into a red giant and snuffs all life from the Earth.







That's right... "1 bytes/s". Why is that even a possibility?

Mostly fun, generally interesting, occasionally frustrating, occasionally boring.



Continuing the tradition, Episode 2 does a lot to vary the gameplay of the basic FPS formula. Aside from that, there's also a surprising amount of relatively coherent (for Half-Life) story in this one. Sadly, to make that happen, there's quite a few of what I would call "de facto cut scenes". Half-Life tries very hard to keep you in your character, so they never do standard cut scenes, but in this one I think it got quite forced. They're constantly finding excuses to take away your control of the situation or even, in several cases, yourself. It's not entirely new (this did this a couple times in Half-Life 2, and frankly less believably - "why yes I will voluntarily climb into this prison module rendering myself captive and helpless"), but it's wearing pretty thin for me.



What's also wearing kind of thin is Gordon's complete inability to engage in social activity. That wasn't a big deal in Half-Life where there is very, very little social activity to engage in, but again, in this episode there's a lot that could be done but can't be done, if you know what I mean. As just a tiny example, when I finally won the last battle of the episode, one of the rebels holds up his hand to give me a high-five, and I can't do a damn thing about it. I totally felt like I snubbed that poor guy.



Highlights: Running things over (never gets old), vortigaunt covering fire, sprinting by the ant-lion guardian, killing Hunters with their own fletchettes, having Alex provide covering sniper fire, throwing bombs back at the helicopter that dropped them, crawling through trenches to attack a fortified position, the lead-up to the final battle.



Lowlights: Hauling a stupid garden gnome 9/10ths of the way to its destination only to find it impossible to keep it in the car in the final drive while under chopper fire. Endless ant-lion caves (might've been more tolerable minus the garden gnome and my attempt to squish all the grubs - stupid achievements). The obnoxious final battle.



Seriously, what was up with making the final battle several times harder than the rest of the game? It was kind of cool in a crazy way - a real battle, lots of resources, lots of enemies. But ultimately I found I could only beat it by majorly abusing the quicksave feature: drive up at full speed quicksaving as I go, hop out, run around back taking cover, grab the sticky-bomb, and heave it out, hoping against long odds to (A) hit the strider and (B) not have it get hit by the hunters and (C) not have the strider turn around. If any of A, B, or C, reload and try again. Quicksave. Run back for another load, deal with any hunters that followed. Quicksave. Drive at full speed, quicksaving, towards the next strider...



I really don't like to play that way, but if I had to kill all the hunters, miss with the bomb, go back for another bomb, kill some more hunters, then finally hit only to have the Strider turn around so I couldn't set the bomb off, then hide until the strider moved on and I could kill it, then miss again... Well, that wasn't working, to put it mildly. And I've read that they actually toned that battle down after playtesting. Sheesh.



The only thing that made it bearable was the way the rebels cheer when you blow one up.

Well, I'm bored but don't want to go outside (yay air purifier), so I'm basically glued to the computer.



Portal... If you don't know, it's a short, episode-length game that comes with Valve's Orange Box. It's a first-person perspective game using the Source engine, apparently set somewhere/sometime in the Half-Life multi-verse. Unlike Half-Life, it's not really a shooter at all, per se, but more of a puzzle game.



The basic hook is that you get a portal-creating device. You "fire" once at a flat wall, and it creates a blue oval. You fire with the other mouse button and it creates an orange oval. Once there are both ovals, they form a single portal - you (or anything else) can see and pass through it freely either way. You can fire as much as you like, but there's only ever one portal, so if there's already a portal and you make a new blue oval, the last blue oval disappears and the new one connects to the orange oval - which in turn remains in place until you create a new orange oval.



Oh, and you're mysteriously immune to falling damage. Which, as it happens, is a really good thing, since you can create portals in walls and ceilings, and some of the puzzles involve moving at remarkably high velocities...



With that fairly simple premise, they create a wide variety of environmental challenges, each more interesting than the last, and combine them slowly and steadily over the game. The whole game is in some sense its own training; it's really kind of neat how they slowly introduce game mechanics, show you how they work, make you use them a couple times, and then throw in twists and combinations. I never got completely stuck, but a few spots took a fair bit of thinking to figure out.



The story, what little there is of it, is also quite interesting. It's definitely in the Half-Life 2 minimalist storytelling style, where you can just barely sort of piece things together by the very end. Much of it is cutely disturbing, or disturbingly cute, or something like that. I'd say more but I really don't want to spoil it.



Anyway, I highly recommend it.

First there were landslides, now fires, I'm pretty much expecting frogs falling from the sky sometime in November.



Hot, dry air with winds blowing almost 70 mph from the desert makes for ideal fire conditions. I seem to be sitting pretty except for the smoke and ash; my place is actually pretty nice, if hot, with the doors and windows all closed and my air purifier working overtime. I went in to work today for a bit, swapping backup tapes and doing some troubleshooting, but I went home because the air quality in our building was bad and deteriorating. I might take my air purifier with me to work tomorrow; then I'll have both air conditioning and clean air!