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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
greenexecutive's LiveJournal:
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| Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | | 11:07 pm |
It's like health care, but with smaller wheels
My old train set was packed in its original boxes, more or less. The ones that didn't come out of the original big-box set had price tags on them. The smallest coal tender I have was $1.50 at Target in 1981. In inflation-adjusted dollars, that's about $5.70, which is a little less than a 4x inflation. It's not an expensive piece---the parts are simple plastic, the paint job screen-printed, but it's perfectly fine to haul around. The cheapest equivalent I could find is $19.99 list, although you can get significant discounts online. Non-digital trains have increased at least twice as fast as inflation, possibly almost 4x as fast, and digital sets are sky-high. I suspect Lionel and Marklin have figured out that the profit on a few thousand obsessives is worth more than broad, cheap market penetration. Several classic hobbies have done this---baseball cards and comic books. Decade after decade chasing the collector and the specialist and ignoring the mass market, and then suddenly the market crashes. Lo and behold Marklin went bankrupt in March of this year. Whoops. OK, that's the last of the train posts for a while. I have to get back to my first love, collecting Beanie Babies. | | Friday, November 20th, 2009 | | 9:31 pm |
Train?
A trip to the train store in Redwood City did nothing to ease the train madness. We didn't get anything, but I left with my head spinning. Man, it's gotten so complicated. And expensive. | | Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 | | 11:12 pm |
The little train that almost didn't
It's train time.  (Yes, the engine is backwards.) "Your old stuff is cool," said Kate, playing with the little green car that, when wound, shot across the driveway. We were excavating the boxes my parents sent me, looking for the missing track to my electric train that dates back to 1980 or so. She had already cuddled Robert and Teddy, my ratty old stuffed animals, and wanted to take them to bed with her (no), and set my plastic day-of-the-week desk calendar to her birthday. I fished out my Irish 2nd grade math book too, to see if Kate could do some of the problems. We never found enough track to form a circle, but Kate loved pulling the train around on a short shoofly track and loading the car-carrier with big American cars. At lunch today, I hit the hobby store and picked up some new turns, railers, and a track with terminals to connect it to my transformer. After Kate went to bed (we played TransAmerica, of course), I replaced rusty track, oiled wheels, and rewired the terminals until my Burlington Northern engine was zooming around the dining room table. I have Burlington Northernn stock that my father bought be. They model the train that ran through Ames, and it was important to him that I had the "right" train. Dad has his own O-gauge trains from when he was a kid, all Santa Fe trains (including the famous yellow-and-red liveried engines). I'm sure setting up his trains and seeing my eyes light up was just like seeing Kate's. And so now the circle of train track continues. I don't know why trains are so satisfying. Is it because you are in control of something that's normally huge and unstoppable? Is it that trains and tracks are composable, so you can create something that feels like your own, unlike toy cars? Is it that, like robots and pets and children, something that moves by itself is immediately interesting? I love trains. Going full-on train guy is scary---you end up with a garage that looks like It's A Small World, or a basement that's lined floor to ceiling with miniature rolling stock. I've seen both, and it's...it's not good. It's not quite as bad as collecting Lladro figurines, but close. But, oh, it's fun. Maybe I need to hit the store again tomorrow and pick up some proper Union Pacific cars and a new engine. What do you guys think? More train? Or does that road lead to crazy? | | Sunday, November 15th, 2009 | | 5:54 am |
Brief note
Sara and I had been planning to make the smartphone move at some point; we'd hit enough moments where we were like, wow, I wish there were WiFi here that it seemed like it was time. I visited the Verizon store twice, once with Kate to scout out whether the Droid was awesome or not (she loved it), and once to purchase. The first time, on Veterans Day in a nearly-empty store, required a half-hour wait to see a salesperson. The second time, on a moderately-busy Saturday afternoon, had us with a 45 min wait until we gave up. We went down the street three blocks, walked into the Apple Store. We had an activated iPhone in less than ten minutes. On the way back from the store, I said, "Hey, Sara, is Adam's phone number in my old phone? I need to call him and see if he ever wrote me back... Oh, hell, I can just check my email, can't I?" | | Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | | 8:31 pm |
Postcards from Ferelden
I'm playing Dragon Age: Origins. It's so convenient that my birthday and a glut of video game releases hit next to each other. ( Read more... )My current problem is love, though. I have two people to workplace sexually-harass in my party. I have Morrigan, the cold-hearted witch from the Wilds, and...uh...sword guy, who I will call Marty. I actually like Marty better---if he were a babe, I'd totally be scamming on him. I'm playing as a dramatic red-haired warrior woman and if I could get over the GxB (as they say in the dating sim community) thing, I would be OK. Instead, though, I feel like I have to impress Morrigan. She and I share a disdain for organized religion, but aside from that I keep wanting to be nice and she's got teenager disdain for everyone. Morrigan gives me the "Morrigan Disapproves <3 -10" when I help out the poor and destitute. Just after lunch I helped a skeezy merchant overcharge refugees *just to impress her*. I'm...succumbing to RPG peer pressure. | | Saturday, November 7th, 2009 | | 12:34 am |
Bustin' makes me feel good
I just finished the Ghostbusters video game (2009 version, not the horrifying C64 or Atari 400/800 version). It gets the Wolff (bang) stamp of approval, with the caveat that you might try playing it on Casual to avoid getting hung up on anything hard. ( Read more... )Ah, nostalgia. Although, I didn't see this video much at all when the movie came out, now the collection of familiar faces (all so young) in the call-and-response is fun. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4uxIo4t7xMIt was just before I picked up this game that I finally realized that the official Ghostbuster uniform is simply the beige coverall of an exterminator with the poison tank strapped on the back. | | Friday, October 30th, 2009 | | 9:52 am |
Book-a-minute (spoilers?)
I picked up Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" at the library because, in part, the makers of Fallout 3 said they got a lot of inspiration from it. It's clear they did; I could see their graphics in my head as I slogged through it. For such a short book, it's kind of repetitive. I started skimming. To save you the trouble, let me give you the whole book in Rinkworks' Book a minute style: ( Read more... ) | | Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | | 10:43 pm |
Geese
I kept watching the trees, and they showed the wind high above the calm streets. Each hour, the wind grew stronger, and at 6 we couldn't wait longer and piled into the car, the sun already behind the mountains. ( Read more... ) | | Sunday, October 25th, 2009 | | 10:01 am |
Call of Nature (oh! I went there!)
Just finished Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It's excellent, but too many notes. Also, discussion of Scribblenauts. ( Read more... )I'm starting on the Ghostbusters game tonight. Based on ten minutes with the intro, it's nicely done---the voice acting is fantastic (Ramis, Ackroyd, and Murray still have chemistry after all these years), the proton pack sparks good, and you can't help but be excited when you see the 1958 hearse hit the road with sirens blaring. | | Sunday, October 18th, 2009 | | 8:02 pm |
Lagged
I was lying on the living room floor, eyes half-mast. I heard a splash, and then silence. "Katie!" I shouted. Nothing. "KATE!" I said again. Nothing. I got up to see what had happened, whether she was in the bath ignoring me or, you know, drowning. She was lying against the back of the bath with one arm draped over the side, legs sprawled, mouth agape, eyes closed. I shook her a few times and she started. "I think I was dreaming, there," she said. I got her towel and told her it's bed time. Kate normally senses the change in time like an arctic tern can sense magnetic fields, but not this time. We made it to Germany and mostly adjusted, but the return trip has left us getting up too early, getting impossibly sleepy at odd hours, and long, uncomfortable, gasping naps that strike like a malaria attack. Last night I was watching Battlestar Galactica to try to stay awake. I only had one eye open at a time, switching eyes now and then. I didn't make it through the episode. I'm trying to hold it together now, but I probably won't make it until 9:30pm. | | Friday, October 16th, 2009 | | 5:16 am |
Europe, with fewer broken arms
In Innsbruck, I sat down at the desk to check in to our fancy hotel. The bouncy guy who was checking me in in his natty suit started with "Grüß Gott", and the greeting made me remember my high school German teacher. I was marveling so much that he was just like Frau Furr said that I lost the thread of the conversation. His supervisor, a woman no older than he, switched efficiently to English as I ran aground. ( Read more... )We're home now. | | Monday, October 5th, 2009 | | 7:51 pm |
Safe
Kate and I were discussing safes and things you'd put in them. Money and passports, she suggested. I suggested gold. This led us to talk about why you'd need a safety deposit box. I told her about the only time I had one, when I was storing my great-grandmother's diamond I was going to use to propose to Sara. I didn't tell her that I kept a note in the box that read: "Dear Wolff: I love you, man. You're the cat's pyjamas. Dear Sara: I love you, sweetie! Dear Dave [my brother]: Hey, what are you doing in my safety deposit box? Dear Mom or Dad: Oh, dear. Something bad has happened. I hope I'm not dead." You have to cover all contingencies. Anyhoo, Kate then wanted to know when I gave Mommy the ring, so I told her how I proposed to Sara, and then Kate wondered who she would marry. She ran off singing "DYE-IT-SNAP-PULL" and I realized she was reading the label of my drink. I told her she was goofy, and then she serenaded me with a song composed entirely of words she read off of labels in the bathroom. | | Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 | | 1:42 am |
Heute Europa, Morgen Die Weld
Kate sat quietly as the characters fought with swords, and then kept watching as the plot churned away, characters talking. Just as we got to the airfield scene, Mommy walked in looking for help with dinner. We both got up. After dinner I asked Kate to sit on my lap and watch the next part, where Cliff Secord blasts across the sky. Zoom! Whoosh! A man flies through the air with fire on his back, spiraling through the clouds, saving a flyer in danger, saluting passengers in a passing plane, then crash-landing. We stopped as the gangsters arrived to try to steal the rocket pack. Man, there were too many characters in that movie. When we drive places, sometimes she tells me about how she wants to leap gracefully from car to car, swinging around traffic lights, a tiny red-haired Jackie Chan in her imagination. I know she wants to fly, too. "So," I said, "What do you think of the rocket pack?" Kate looked sideways at me. "Do we have any of those around?" she asked. "No," I said. "They're not real." "Then how did they do it?" she asked. "Just pretend. I'm sorry sweetie. Real rocket packs are huge and heavy because they need so much fuel to lift someone off the ground." Kate looked slightly unhappy, then asked about dessert. She brightened considerably when given mint chocolate chip ice cream.
One of my friends said that the difference after you have a kid is that when you see a man and a child together, you think "There goes a guy with his kid" not "There's a kid with his father." We watched "Mulan" tonight, too. It was better than I remembered now that it's out of the shadow of "Aladdin". It's also a whole new movie for me now that I have my own daughter. I found it was not about the Huns and their cardboard bad guy leader, but about Mulan and her father. And this is still a fantastic song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSS5dEeMX64 | | Saturday, September 19th, 2009 | | 12:07 pm |
Michael Bay and Orson Scott Card
I would argue that Shadow Complex and Michael Bay's The Rock are twins. ( Read more... )Somewhere after the second boss, the protagonist from Shadow Complex actually quotes John McClane (Bruce Willis) from Die Hard. I wonder if people 15 years younger than I playing this game have any idea that it's a Die Hard reference. | | Sunday, September 13th, 2009 | | 11:07 pm |
Quote of the Day
While playing Smallworld today: W, taking skeletons: "I never win with skeletons." R: "How many games of this have you played?" W: "One....and I took skeletons...and I won. But that's not the point." | | Friday, September 11th, 2009 | | 11:03 am |
Watching Watchmen
I finally saw Zach Snyder's "Watchmen". ( Read more... )I know why Alan Moore won't go see his own movies, but this was a solid imagining of one of his finest works. God help us if someone options some of his other self-indulgent twaddle like Promethea. | | Saturday, August 15th, 2009 | | 5:19 pm |
Applesauce = napalm
So, it's a hot afternoon and Kate and I have picked some of the endless harvest of Gravensteins. It's late in the season, and the apples are perfectly ripe. ( Read more... ) | | Sunday, August 9th, 2009 | | 1:44 am |
Coraline
Finally saw Coraline. With computer editing (and astounding amounts of money and skill), stop motion is incredibly expressive and almost flawless. The sewing in the first scene was a "Hey, by the way, we've completely mastered this craft, so don't you be nitpicking us" aside to the audience. ( Read more... ) | | Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 | | 11:08 am |
| | Friday, July 24th, 2009 | | 8:41 am |
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