Wasting Time Faster Than Ever Before

Oooohh, this is a nice machine...

Granted, I'm coming to the duo-core world off a Pentium III 800, but still... this is a nice machine. It boots in half the time (or less) as my old computer. It loads and runs like a dream. A good dream, I mean, not the bad kind... or even the surreal, nonlinear normal kind. It even looks cool - the case is black, with a flip-up panel on front for USB ports (I have 4 in the back, but it's nice to have 2 in the front for things I don't need plugged in all the time, like my camera) and little blue lights that flash when the hard drive's thinking. So far, I've been busily recluttering the empty hard drive with old vices and new ones. A few stand out in the crowd thus far, and I haven't finished loading junk yet...

First up, of course, is Bryce 5.5. I had hoped (rather naively, I know) for a relatively easy transition from Paint Shop Pro-type 2D graphics programs to the 3D world. I'd tinkered with the free program Terragen, a terrain rendering program capable of great things but which I usually just poked around at until I got something I thought looked cool (for me, that bar's rather low.) Lots of strange little panels that made no sense to me, but if I punched enough buttons and tweaked enough settings I could come up with something cool, if utterly random so far as I was concerned. As one might expect, real 3D isn't exactly that easy. Unfortunately, several online searches have turned up no supplemental documentation for Bryce 5.5, not even a stray tutorial page. The official site's moved on to Bryce 6, and most forums seem to linger on Bryce 5 (I read enough to know that there are apparently significant differences between 5 and 5.5, thanks to a post by one poor person who was told, most unhelpfully, that they should learn to use it on their own and write their own tutorials, ha ha)... on a level far above my newbie head. I found one Bryce 5 book on Amazon, but 9 out of 10 reviews were one star or less. I skimmed them hoping to find a better recommendation, but I found none. It seems that nobody wants to write about the program, even though I've heard about it before and was given to understand that Bryce was a relatively big player in the 3D graphics world. Fortunately, it came with a PDF manual. A big manual. A 500+-page manual where the table of contents alone spans 20 pages, outlining the contents of over 100 chapters. So, I've made it my personal mission to get through that thing and teach myself at least how to get by in Bryce 5.5, if only to hack off the kinds of people who post on 3D graphics message boards and berate newcomers with nonadvice and scorn. My goal is at least one chapter every two days, but that may slow down if/when I reach the point where I can actually start creating things on my own.

Another unexpected addiction came in the form of a cheap jewel-case game from the office store. Now, it's not entirely my fault. My sister and I found a jewel-case copy of a game my mother had once had and lost, and the display said that if we bought two other games we'd get the third three. Considering how Mom has a way of backhanding us (not literally) for attempts to do nice things (case in point: the reason she lost the game, she'll tell anyone who will listen, is that we evilly replaced her dying, crash-prone computer with my sister's older-but-still-newer-and-faster-and-far-more-reliable computer, which was built for gaming and runs beautifully but which she'll never forgive us for giving her), we didn't want to spend a dime more than we had to. So, you see, I had to buy a couple cheap games... One of them was Heroes of Might and Magic IV. I'd heard the name, and it looked fun in a timekilling sort of way. It turns out to be a remarkably complex and addictive game, a cross between the kingdom sim Majesty and RPG games. I suspect I'd be doing much better if I'd sit down and print out the whole manual (on PDF again - whatever happened to the days when the manual design and text was part of the setup for the game, when reading the manual at least once through was a time-honored ritual before one dared put the disk into the drive?), but my ink and paper supply are currently reserved for the Bryce manual.

Then, there's The Sims 2. Now, the first sims was addictive enough. Blame my sister for roping me into that one... and this one, too. I've watched her play enough to realize that this game is much, much, much more potentially addictive than the first one. See, you only need the latest expansion pack to actually play the game, so she's generously/evilly offered to let me use her old disks to "get started," and then I'll just buy my own Seasons expansion when I'm ready for that. (Little tip: each successive pack messed up the original "scenarios" described in the Prima manuals, so it's advisable to play through those parts before installing the latest expansion pack.) Now, when my sister gives me a game, it's never just the game. When I got roped into the original Sims, I was presented with several burned CDs of downloaded content, tweaks, and hacks, plus a full printout of where each file went and how/when/why to install them. She doesn't just download everything, either - she only downloads the stuff that works, the stuff that's made by people who know what they're doing, the stuff that won't overwrite vital game files or crash the system. Same thing with Zoo Tycoon. I've seen her typing up lists again... I wonder what she's burning off this time...

I'm still waiting to install a few other games, and I haven't finished reloading all the favorites from the past. Heck, I haven't even reintroduced my reloaded FrontPage 2000 to the websites it will be helping perpetuate, nor has the reloaded version of Word been properly acquainted with the stories it will someday bear partial blame for producing. I've been too busy wasting time at the speed of light, or at least the speed of a duo-core Pentium processor.