neurological dryer lint

well they FINALLY fixed our oven. after two months. now instead of having two settings - off and charcoal - it works as normal.

this weekend is ridiculous. tonight is haloween over at tony/steve/chip/dethloff/miller/brad's place, and ben and i are going for a while, and then i'm leaving to go see renee. tomorrow night there are two halloween parties... sunday i was supposed to go out to a concert at CCM for my arts class but it turns out it doesn't count for class requirements. which is good - because the pay phone in milford that gets ILB calls has EIGHT (count em) scheduled for sunday, from 3:55pm to 5:05pm. me and kirsten, the only other person in the tristate who actually is a geek enough to show up at this phone (and she lives five minutes from it), have our work cut out for us. i also have a personal call at 2:15pm. so that should be fun.

i'm part sad and part relieved that ILB is ending sunday. we have no idea what the final stuff is going to be like - but today was a milestone in-game, the AI that has been at the center of the whole game (and her counterpart/adversary that helped us from time to time) turned out to be two pieces of the same personality. some guys sent a bunch of code via email to a third character, a piece of software that was working as a third-party to the two, that 'reunited' them. so now that the main puzzles have been solved - we're wondering what the end will look like, if the AI leaves and goes back to the future (heh); if the website goes back to normal; if we get to meet dana, melissa, jersey, kamal, the sleeping princess, or any of the other characters we've followed...

these ARG's are great and entertaining and cool community-builders, but sap way too much of my free time for my own comfort, i've decided. :) although marketing campaigns like this seriously work - in fact they're probably the only form of advertising that can break through our generation's numbness to traditional forms (tv, print, popups, etc). not that halo2 needed any more marketing - but it was worthy of a game like this.

i'm sure in a few weeks someone will have compiled a site / FAQ summarizing the whole game. i'm proud to have had a small part in it. there's two more starting up soon, apparently. unfiction.com has a lot of details on past and future ARG's.