Pointing out that, once upon a time, I made fun of Steve Henson for posting a list of contracts so bad that they couldn’t possibly be traded. By "once upon a time," I really mean "last season." And how did Steve-o do? Well, of the eleven players he named as completely untradeable albatrosses, two of them (Carl Crawford and #1 pick Vernon Wells) were successfully traded, one (Alfonso Soriano) would have been except that he invoked his no-trade clause to block it, and one of them (Jason Bay) was released and then picked up off of waivers. So good job identifying players who couldn’t possibly be moved, Steve!
April 3rd, 2013
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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When I was new to the workforce lo these many years since, I was given to significant reliability problems. By which I mean I used to call out of work a lot. Pretty much whenever I didn’t feel like going to work, in fact. Which was all the damn time. I never bothered making convincing excuses, either; I’d do that bit we all learned from Ferris Bueller where you make your voice all feeble and shaky, and I’d tell my boss I have a dire case of Monkey Pox and I’m far too sick to fold boxes on the assembly line, but I’m sure it’ll be better tomorrow so don’t bother finding coverage. Then I’d go back to playing Dragon Warrior 7 like I’d been doing all day.
This changed for two reasons. Reason one is that I finally learned that work is not school. See, I got a job right out of college, and I’d never had a job before except bullshit campus jobs where I worked like three hours a week and nobody cared what I did. So I was thinking of this whole "work" thing like it was the New Game+ mode of school. I never went to school if I had a pressing appointment with the Nintendo, so why go to work? It was a few years before I finally got to grips with the fact that, although skipping school is 100% upside, skipping work carries the nontrivial disadvantage of they don’t pay you. And if they don’t pay you, not only can you not buy any new video games, but you cannot in fact even pay the rent. And if you don’t pay the rent, you’ll quickly find yourself devoid of any place to plug the N64 in. So eventually I realised that, while I could spend more time playing Mischief Makers today, eventually I’d find myself on the street selling pencils out of a cup to raise money for my Game Boy battery fund. The other reason is because I finished Dragon Warrior 7 and sometimes I can’t tell if anything worth playing has come out since then.
By which I mean Bioshock Infinite’s out. You played that? I haven’t. The original Bioshock was way too infinite for me as it was. The world’s most rudimentary shooter mechanics stretched around a completely meatwitted plot. Also there is Pipe Dream. But don’t worry: I hear Bioshock Infinite is about racism! I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with a theoretical reality in which that ends well. As for me, hey, if I wanted to play an utterly derivative, repetitive game with a cutesy visual style while simultaneously being lectured about what out-of-touch game developers consider deep social issues, I still have a copy of Braid.
Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is out too. It might be fun. I don’t really know, though; I played about ten minutes of it, after which my wife seized the 3DS and ran off with it. As I write this, she’s huddled up in the corner chanting about it in weird languages. So either she likes it or else the preorder bonus was an actual real ghost. I’ll update this post either way when I figure out this encounter’s gimmick.
April 3rd, 2013
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
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