I'm pretty tired tonight, as I couldn't get to sleep last night on account of a still-huge stack of comic books saved up over the last month while I was away. I just feel the need to update this blog before it gets to be a month between posts.

It's been strange being back this past week. I wasn't gone to Chicago for that long, not a semester, certainly, but I've had to readjust to life here. The bus comes twice an hour, not every eight minutes. With the exception of Thai Smile, the Asian food isn't as good. I'm not in constant line-of-sight range with a Borders, Barnes and Noble, or other bookstore. If I was at all employable I wouldn't still be in Muncie. I'm quite sure I could live in a big city now.

I watched On the Waterfront the other night. It's entertaining and intelligent, despite a heavy-handed tendency to beat the audience over the head with every possible symbolic reference the writer could think of. It works, though. I also devoted two nights to working through Gears of War with Scott on his Xbox. Despite the immaculate level of detail afforded by next-gen graphics processing, the game still operates under the same principles of the eight and sixteen bit games of the past two decades: run around, blow stuff up, wait for the talking heads to run through their script to give some semblance of plot, repeat. Beyond the graphics, there really isn't much to the game. Plot and narrative issues are hard for designers to work out, but they're also the cheapest problems to solve early in the production process. It's why the Halo series takes so long between games- the designers care deeply about creating a world for the player to work in. This is also why the first Halo was still on the best seller list when Halo 2 came out.