Why Not Black Wednesday?

And Tuesday and Thursday, for that matter?

Now let's get one thing straight - I doubt any retailer really waits until Thanksgiving to finally get "in the black" for the year. I certainly wouldn't buy shares in any such company that bleeds red ink all year and has to rely on Furby sales to turn profitable.

Who ever wanted this devilbirdrat?

But if the quintessential Black Friday "doorbuster" is extended to get people into stores, where they will presumably buy enough regularly priced crap to offset the discounts because, hey, they're at the store, so why not - and that is a revenue-generating phenomenon, then why not have Black Friday every day?

I should be running a company so I can drive it into the ground with exciting ideas that I spent 13 minutes thinking through.

It is my destiny.

All Right, I'll Say It: Gran Turismo is Boring.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: I love cars. I love driving them and I love tinkering with them. Naturally, I've bought all the Gran Turismo games since #3, including GT5 today. But something's been bugging me for a while, and I just have to get it off my chest. I enjoy collecting the cars and tuning them, but let's face it - the actual racing in the series is incredibly dull. There isn't really a great sense of speed and the physics of your car sort of approximate a giant block of lead in a bowl of pudding. You can ram another car at full speed and you both sort of just stop. And the new "damage" modeling is a joke; you crash into the wall at 100 MPH and the seam between your hood and chassis sort of widens a little. Winning a race isn't so much about making aggressive moves as it is driving cautiously and avoiding mistakes. Realistic, yeah, but if I want to drive at 40 MPH and avoid the guardrails, I can do that in my own damn car.

I think part of the reason GT5 is so underwhelming is because Forza has gotten so good. It has fewer cars but seems to be a little more fun and less stodgy and rigid about what you can and can't do. There are many more cars in GT but 99% of them are 8,000 variations of the Subaru Impreza or Honda Civic.

So why did I buy GT5? Because I *thought* it would have my car in it. It does have my car model, but only the hatchback version and not the sedan, which I have, because I hate hatchbacks. They look like toy cars.

From the Mouths of TV Announcers

I don't know who was doing the TV play-by-play at the Houston-Jacksonville game (Gus Johnson, maybe?), but that thing was a treasure trove of material.

But first, that closing Hail Mary play by David Garrard was one of the craziest plays I've ever seen, but I'm glad it worked, because coaches are far too willing to piss away 30 or 40 seconds at the ends of regulation play. What do you have to lose by throwing the ball into the end zone? Defenses are taught to bat the ball down so it's not like someone's going to pick it off and run it back for a touchdown. I was also disappointed that Cleveland didn't go for two at the end of regulation against the Jets, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, without further ado, here's this week's gem, from Gus Johnson or his partner. The context here is that they're discussing an infographic with the top scorers in the 2nd half of games leaguewide, led by Arian Foster, and how great Arian Foster is:

"And let's face it, the second half is the most important half."

Granted, the NFL rules are constantly changing, but last time I checked, touchdowns are worth the same number of points in the first half as they are in the second half.

Is a computer that speaks English too much to ask for?

About once or twice a year my computer goes on a BSOD crashing spree where I can't keep the machine running for even a day without at least one crash. Past some rudimentary software/driver troubleshooting, I'm too lazy to find out what's causing the crash, so I've always taken that opportunity to simply replace the innards of my computer. Problem solved! But lately, I've been more conscious of saving money (haven't we all?) and so I've kept my system mostly unchanged for a while. But now my machine is acting up again and I'm pretty sure it's a hardware issue.

I prefer to replace only the component which is causing the problems, but unfortunately, when my computer crashes, it spits out incomprehensible shit like "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL," "The BIOS in this system is not ACPI compliant," or my favorite, "MEMORY_MANAGEMENT." You seriously might as well throw up an error that says "COMPUTER_WENT_DOWN_LIKE_$3_HOOKER," because that would be about equally helpful as what I normally get.

But seriously, what's so hard about making the messages more descriptive? Something like I WAS TRYING TO RETRIEVE SOMETHING FROM THE RAM MODULE AND IT SENT BACK A LOT OF FUCKED UP SHIT AND I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO SO I CRASHED MYSELF AND NEXT TIME SPEND MORE MONEY ON THAT PART YOU CHEAP FUCK

Now that's actionable!