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Chugging away…chug, chug, chug. I go through periods where absolutely nothing exciting is going on. I have no creative energy, and there’s nothing external going on with other people and what not.

Then, all of a sudden, lots of stuff happens over a 2-3 day period. I guess the goal is to shorten the downtime.

Man, I am so out of it today. I ended up getting up at noon, screwing around for a few hours, eating lunch, then going to sleep at 6. Now I’m awake and I think I’ll be up all night. Ouch.

I turned notifications on this blog. You can put your email address in the form element to the right and it’ll email you whenever I update this thing. Yay.

One of the things I did today was finish the CSI video game. It was really fun, but really short and easy. There was a bug in it where the background images for the game kept screwing up. I hate buggy software - UbiSoft sucks for releasing it that way. Software is NOT meant to be released early, and then patched - see the video game console industry for details.

Wow, reality is starting to hit hard. I have a fuckload of work to do between now and May 1. All of it has to be at least pretty good, but all I feel like doing is going back to Vegas.

I have to go move my car. Parked in a red zone because I couldn’t find a spot earlier. Generally OK there until tomorrow morning, but I don’t feel like waking up at 4am just to move my car. I wish this neighborhood were less trendy - there’d be more parking.

Oh yeah - I forgot - on Sunday I went to go see the Notwist and I Am Spoonbender at the Knitting Factory.

Knitting Factory’s cleaned up their sound in the main room quite a bit. Saw about five bands there over the past two years, and it used to be muddy.

The Notwist is a better band live than on their latest album, which I thought was a little too sequencer-heavy. Even though the sequenced stuff was still there in the performance (reworked in some places), they just rocked harder live. The lead guy from the Notwist kept saying, “Zank you for coming. Deez was die Notwist.” I’ve been mimicking him all week.

Back from Vegas…tired but it was a super fun trip. I definitely needed to get out of town, not see the same surroundings that I see from my daily computer-at-home, computer-at-work, apartment, and office building routine.

Highlights (and lowlights):

• When I went to pick up my friend, I stopped at a Wherehouse, which was going out of business. All CDs were 75% off. Although there wasn’t much left, I managed to snag 10 albums in the category of “albums I’d wanted to check out, but didn’t really want to pay $15 each for,” including a couple of Built to Spill albums, Paul Westerberg, Boards of Canada, Tanya Donnelly’s solo album, the last Trail of Dead album, and others. $45 for all 10 albums.
• I learned how fools pick music for movies - somebody basically burns like 5-10 CDs of songs. My friend ended up with these CD-Rs for a big giant movie, and we were listening to them on the way there. Kinda cool to learn how that works.
• The Palms is definitely my new favorite joint to stay at in Vegas. It’s off the Strip, but I’ve been to Vegas enough to know that pretty much after your first hour there, you just end up taking taxis everywhere because, umm, you don’t feel like driving or walking. I scored another $5 limited edition CSI chip there - this one I’m going to send to my parents, who like the show too. I ran across two $25 CSI chips while I was playing blackjack, but ended up cashing them in.
• Speaking of blackjack, I spent most of my time playing Super Fun Single Deck Blackjack, which is basically just blackjack with a few variations, like being able to double or surrender at any time. I probably should have checked out the house advantage before I left, but I wasn’t too cool with the standard games I was seeing. Also, my play isn’t perfect enough to justify deciding against a game because it might have a half a percentage point difference in favor of the house. But true to its name, it was super fun - better than getting stuck in a bad shuffle and getting worked throughout an entire six-deck shoe.
• I’m getting better at playing blackjack - learning to pick good games, better money and time management, and setting up stop/loss scenarios. Yay.
• Despite talk of a weakened economy, it looked like Vegas was in full swing on the Strip and Downtown - more like a weekend than a weekday. My friend had never been downtown before, so we quickly checked out all of the casinos. We only gambled at two. It was actually hard for me and my friend to get a table, except the Golden Gate, which was kinda dirty and full of fools like whom I’ll probably end up when I’m 40, and the Plaza, where we had to sit through newbie dealers who fumbled the cards. We only played there for about an hour, then went back to the Palms.
• Red Bull/vodka and Corona brew both glow green under ultraviolet lights (or whatever those lights are called). Also, never wear dark clothes in clubs that have this lighting - all of the dust and stuff that you can’t see in the daytime shows up under the special lights, and you look like you have Xtreme Dandruff that got all over your shirt and pants. Embarrassing.
• The Bellagio buffet still rocks, and I think it’s priced lower than the last time I was there - it was $15 for lunch and it looked like $25 for dinner. But I don’t think I can eat any kind of red meat from Vegas hotels anymore. There’s something about it - prime rib from buffets, steaks from hotel coffee shops - that just makes me feel sick and jammed up these last 2-3 trips.
• The Bellagio again - the casino’s overuse of dark browns in garish patterns for both the carpet and the awnings makes it hard for me to see clearly in that place. Yuck.
• Tried to catch the Stern broadcast at the Hard Rock, but the line was ridiculous. Oh well…maybe some time in the future.
• It only took us 3.5 hours to get to Vegas due to the new 210 freeway extension that goes all the way to I-15, but it took us SIX hours to get home. Keep in mind that this is a Thursday afternoon on a non-holiday week - it’s not like we caught the Sunday rush of fools returning home to Southern California. Traffic stopped 45 minutes out of Vegas on the I-15 to merge into one lane due to construction (took us 2 hours to get from Vegas to Baker). It also stopped again outside of Barstow, for the same reason. Meanwhile, there are miles of blocked-off lanes where absolutely no construction work is happening, and where there are construction people, there are five guys standing around, watching 1 guy work on some asphalt or something.

  I’m not driving to Vegas until they’re done. It’d be well worth it to pay $60-$100 for a flight and not have to deal with inching forwards for two hours on the interstate when you were heavily drinking the day before and only got five hours of sleep.

That’s about it. Back to the real world tomorrow - but the real world is getting more exciting and fun, so this trip was a nice diversion and not a total denial-of-reality escape.

I went to see Zwan tonight at the Wiltern. I haven’t been to a show that size in AGES. Those guys rocked the house - the sound was a little muddy but they had great energy and were super tight. I had no idea Billy Corgan could shred like a metal guitarist. My friend had lent me the Zwan album last week, and I’d been listening every day. They didn’t play “El Sol,” but busted out my other favorites - “Lyric” and “Settle Down.”

Work continues. I haven’t had time to bust SOCOM at all, but that’s OK I guess. I think I have something pretty major coming up that I’m super excited about. We will see.

Oh - the reason that I need downtime from video screens is that when I spend too much time glued in front of a screen, my eye starts drifting and then it looks like I’m not looking at people. I hate that, especially when people say, “Sorry dude, it didn’t look like like you were looking at me.” You want to push my buttons, that’s what you do.

I can get it fixed, but I’m a little skeptical about cosmetic surgery. If God wanted to fuck up my eyes, so be it, I guess.

Bleah.

Getting better at SOCOM - jumped another 9,000 spots to 91,935. Meanwhile, what am I supposed to be doing? Sorry Matt - I’ll work on your jams tomorrow.

Also, the Vegas trip is ON! I can’t wait - I need some downtime away from video screens. I should be working on the basic strategy table too, otherwise I might as well just show up to the casino and hand the nearest dealer my bankroll. The last two trips I took (x-mas and January), I got worked in every single way possible. Nie wieder.

Heard on the radio this morning that Stern is broadcasting from 4-8 those days from the Hard Rock, so we’re gonna go check it out. Yes, readers (all 3 of you), I am a Howard Stern fan. Started listening when I first moved to L.A. - those first few months when I didn’t have a job, car, ‘net access, and everything else, except for a clock radio that I bought from a garage sale, and that was my entertainment.

Work’s going fairly well right now, which I’m surprised with. Of course when there’s good shit happening, I don’t write about it. Nice work!

Hey, if you live in L.A. in the Los Feliz area - we ordered from Vito’s Pizza today, which is near LACC. I swear it’s the best pizza I’ve ever had out here. F the calculated attempts of California Pizza Kitchen to turn pizza into some sort of safe, upscale dining experience. I just ordered Pizza Hut before, but after today I’m switching. Vito’s is the real deal - just a straight greasy and tasty NY-style jam. Ranks up there with Powelton Pizza in Philly, or Oasis in Portland.

Okay…bedtime. I have a checklist of things I need to do tomorrow.

ahhhh F, I forgot to call my friend tonight like I said I would. I started playing SOCOM and totally lost track of time. Now it’s 1 a.m. Sorry dude. This entry is for you.

I jumped 11,400 spots in the rankings today, from about 111,450 to about 100,050. I still suck.