tekHedd – the blog

I’m in a music store. I ask if there are any good sample CDs. I’m thinking it might be nice to have some new loops and samples. And the salesman immediately whips a CD off of a stack and says “these are great, here let me play some of them for you.” Sweet, I get to hear it before I buy! And then he turns around with a case full of flash memory cards and little USB devices and says “here we just have to get a retinal scan.”

Oh of course, we just have to have a retinal scan and, yes, a tissue sample before you can use the samples, just to be sure you’re not stealing them. So, now the guy has a strange metal device that scans your eye while simultaneously scraping flesh from the inside of your cheek. My tissue sample is rejected because I had a cold recently and apparently some viruses are still in there.

At this point, of course, I wake up. Darn, I really wanted to hear those samples!

In this dream DRM system, I can’t even listen to a demo of the samples on the store’s system without a DNA sample. And in the dream, I’m thinking that if that’s what it takes to get some good content, I guess that’s what it takes. The big labels have us whipped good.

I just got the Amazon notification that my copy of DNF has shipped. I’m excited, and of course scared. Reviewers don’t like him, but of course he wouldn’t care about that. He’s stuck in the 80s, which is bad and good.

Bad, because it means no cover-based shooting, no “realistic” gore, minimalistic puzzles with switches to push… now that I start talking about it I don’t really care too much about the bad part. Is he puerile? Does he kick ass and sometimes remember to take names? Hmm, so I guess that’s OK.

And it’s good, because it means no cover-based shooting, no realistic gore… but it also means he won’t try to be “cinematic,” a word I have learned to hate. I can only hope this also means he will avoid other things I have learned to hate like “press X to not die,” cheesy moralism, fake good/bad moral choices with no real consequences… I figure it’s too much to hope that there will be no turret defense sequences of any kind, but maybe we’ll be lucky there too.

All in all, it could be worse. Let’s hope it isn’t.

It’s hot and I clearly have a low grade fever from this head cold. It’s hot enough that I’m sweating, but this is more than just heat. And I just brewed a pot of decaf, which I am going to drink hot. Yes, it’s not even caffeinated–I don’t do that any more. So I know I’m not drinking it for effect.

Man I love coffee.