neurological dryer lint

back from the constitution state. i said this last summer - i am never flying us airways or through philly ever again. all of our flights out of PHL were delayed by at least an hour and the airline was pretty weak in their handling of the situation.

the entire state looked like a golf course. we sadly missed an opportunity to have dinner in manhattan, as doing real work got in the way. go figure.

aside from my boss, i was accompanied by:

 blaqk audio - cexcells

very proud of ya and black sails in the sunset are two of the better punk albums i own... but sadly the last two AFI discs haven't quite thrilled, so it was encouraging to pop in an album by davey and jade that i really dug. one could disparage it, claiming most of the album sounds like AFI doing new order cover songs, but i found it refreshing - i love that genre, after all, and these guys do it well, with some solid beats, while avoiding the dreary repetition that plagues most other modern interpretations of the sound. plus davey's voice lately sounds much more appropriate over synth-rock than screamo-faux-punk.

(btw, i am tempted to play back through metroid prime 3 with this disc as the background music - it would fit perfectly, much the the fragile does over the first prime)

 burnout dominator

it'd been a really long time since i actually popped a game into my PSP - it's been relegated to video and podcast duty since mgs:portable ops. i'm considering selling it back - the ipod touch would fulfill most of its duties (the aforementioned video/podcasts as well as portable browsing) much more effectively.

that said, i grabbed dominator on the cheap because i enjoyed legends so much - the series works really well as a pick-up-and-play game, aside from the two or three minutes it takes to get to an actual race with load times and the cumbersome profile loading. once past that, you can play through a race or two in five to ten minutes.

this one doesn't do a lot more than legends did - there are a few new features like the "supercharged" mode, where you can extend your boost by driving more dangerously and using all your boost in one shot. it's still a lot of fun, though. mostly you get new cars, courses, and a new soundtrack - which has highs like would, it doesn't seem to matter and le disko, and lows like TWO DIFFERENT VERSIONS of avril's girlfriend, ugh.

 into the wild

i read krakauer's into thin air in high school and enjoyed it despite little enthusiasm for modern outdoorsy tales. writers trying to encapsulate that experience in words usually end up sounding melodramatic and don't ever accurately represent what it's like.

this is more a history of a guy, chris mccandless, who in his twenties, bailed on a comfortable American lifestyle and traveled the expanse of the western and northern US looking for meaning and fulfillment by living off of the land. the story is fascinating mostly because of the thorough account krakauer details - the family mccandless left, the folks he encounters (and enchants) along his journey, and the stranger-than-fiction tale of his eventual downfall. it's a riveting story about a real person that isn't too many left-turns away from any one of us.

i guess what hooked me was the jack-london-esque drive to throw off the shackles of the mediocre American consumer-driven existence - something i scoff at in practice but fascinates me in theory. i have mused about the dominance of technology and consumerism's stranglehold in my everyday existence and what a reduction in that would look like - the 'cottage in the montana plains' theory being the far end of that particular spectrum. but here's someone who took it full-scale, albeit in an arrogant, ill-prepared fashion - and illustrated how treacherous that life can really be. or maybe he illustrated how weak and comfortable we are?

by the way - the closest i have personally seen to a successful journey of this type is being conducted right now by brooke and andrea trisler, and as i read this book a part of me smiled, thinking of these two real human beings, following their passion and executing a much more sensible attempt at this kind of freedom. whenever they refer to their "burden" (the trailer full of their belongings they carried along during the drive), i glance around my apartment and nod.