And You Will Know Me By the Flash of My Teeth
Next month I’ll be visiting Washington DC with my mother for the first time. She’s been more than once and has wanted to take me since I was a teen. We were both hoping to wave at Madame President while there, but that didn’t work out quite like we’d hoped. I’ve been preparing for the trip in a few ways:
– Going through the visitor’s guide and highlighting things I’d like to see and do.
– Buying a new camera to take vacation pics.
– Replaying Fallout 3.
From what I’m told by friends who’ve played FO3 and visited the capital, the in-game map is actually pretty faithful to real life. So much so that they got anxious waiting to be attacked by radioactive ghouls when taking the underground DC metro trains. I can’t wait. Fallout 3’s gameplay and graphics are both fairly dated, so I decided to install some mods to spice things up a bit. It’s had the effect of making things prettier but also a lot more unstable, probably due to my lack of experience modding games. This is honestly probably for the best; I’ve got better things to do with my time and having the game crash randomly discourages me from playing it as much. It’s a feature, not a bug.
The Sunday before last was Super Bowl (Superb Owl, Sub-par Bowl). My wife and I took part in our favorite ritual; dressing up as superheroes and going bowling. We’ve never been sports fans, and I can’t imagine going to some party and wolfing nachos while watching some dudes slam into each other on TV could possibly be more fun.
Super-bowling wasn’t our idea, much as I’d like to claim it. I’m honestly not sure who came up with it, but a bunch of our friends decided that it would be funny to go bowling in super-drag as an alternative to the Big Game for us weirdos. We’ve gone for the last four years or so. The bowling alley seems to like us quite a bit: we generate business on a normally slow day and I’m sure we’re fun to watch. Our secret identities have stayed the same, although my wife’s gone through at least one costume change. You gotta shake things up every couple years to give sales a boost. Professor Violence, PhD (my hero persona) has no powers- he’s a disgruntled JPL physicist. A super-science hero, somewhere between Batman and the Punisher. Every year I get an idea for a new superhero and think about doing a different costume, but get lazy and go as the Professor again. OK, that’s not totally true; last year I actually went dressed as a good friend of mine who also attends Super-Bowling and has a very distinctive fashion sense. I told him that he was my hero. He thought it was hilarious.
Next week I get my third gold crown installed. Take care of your teeth, kids. I was at a friend’s house eating chips a couple weeks ago when I realized that most of my molar was gone. Seems the filling in that tooth had just given up the ghost and I’d swallowed it. This apparently happens more often than you’d think- at least, according to my dentist. Right now I’ve got a plastic temporary crown. It feels kind of rough. I think they made it in a 3D printer, which is kind of cool and futuristic. The real thing will be cast by hand out of gold, like a fucking caveman or something. I could’ve had it made from titanium, which sounds awesome and would make me feel like a cyborg, but I’ve already got the other two and I’d rather have them all match. Maybe I’ll have them all taken out and redone in titanium when I get rich and bored.
Automated Lagomorph 