Wednesday I saw a cat at the pet store that had only one good eye and it just about broke my heart. Would anyone pay for a pet so disfigured, one that looked like it might in need of veterinary treatment (or at least inspection) right away? Was the pet store giving it the care it needed? It seemed lonely and resigned and not interested in the attention I tried to give it. I even gave thought to the idea of bringing it home myself, except I think that even worse than leaving the cat in a cage like that is bringing a one-eyed cat into a home with a big bully cat like Fidget.

While in Wilmington, the wife and I brought a couple of our Blockbuster disks. The first was Lohan's I Know Who Killed Me. Ugh. All the ultra-short scenes were bad enough; when it started in on the graphic torture porn, we'd had enough. A brief scan of Wikipedia confirmed that my wife's early prediction of the killer's identity was in fact correct.

Second was The Heartbreak Kid. Now, I have a love/hate relationship with Ben Stiller. I loved Zoolander and Tropic Thunder, really liked Mystery Men and his work in Anchorman and Dodgeball. And then there's his romantic comedies. The ones where he so often plays the same wishy-washy douche who gets dumped upon again and again and can't bring himself to say anything -- until the end of the films when all the repressed rage causes him to explode. I hate that character. Hate hate hate. Ben Stiller in The Heartbreak Kid is not quite that same character, but pretty damn close. So while the movie has its share of laughs, it's yet another movie of various bad things happening to Ben Stiller's character.

Last weekend I was helping my wife at her vendor booth in Wilmington, at their Riverfest Celebration. It's a two day event on the downtown streets near the water. An event organized by dumbfucks.

A two day event typically has the vendors leaving their tents up on the event site while they pack up and take away their products for the night. Vendors at Riverfest were told sales would be between 10am and 6pm, so we all started boxing merchandise a little before 6. Of course, the organizers never gave a thought to how the vendors would actually get their stuff out. It's a street fair, so the roads were closed to traffic. A street fair that continued on well into the night as a street party. And none of the event staff knew anything about how vendors were supposed to load their merchandise into their cars for storage over night. It was never told to vendors or on any of the printed material. It's like they didn't even think it would be an issue. Leaving merchandise unattended over night in the middle of a street fair? Not an option.

Finally we got information from a police officer (not from event staff) that they'd let us drive into the parking lot behind our booth at 7pm. All the while, sitting around and not selling to people walking by who were wondering why all the vendors had packed up their stuff. We were so pissed by the total lack of organization that we simply packed up everything and left for home. We had no interest in going through that a second day.

While out of town, I used some spare time to play one of the few games I have installed on my work laptop: Master of Orion 2. This is a classic game. On the surface it hasn't aged too badly. Still, the more I play the more glaring its faults become.

The research system is horribly flawed; a non-creative race absolutely must tech trade or else has no access to necessary technologies. If there end up being no races to tech trade with -- either because the rest were eliminated or their tech level can't keep up or maybe even there exists a perpetual state of war -- the non-creative race ends up with maybe half of available techs. And in this game, tech is life.

In later stages, micromanagement becomes nearly unbearable. Without the ability to record a default build queue, you end up repeating the same steps over and over and over again. The build queue's limited size also adds to the tedium.

Only five ship design slots? There's six ship hull sizes alone! I usually end up sacrificing destroyers entirely not far into the game.

And then there's the AI. Don't get me wrong, I realize how hard it is to create a good AI (one that doesn't cheat, that is). But the AI players never refit their old ships with new tech. When you have limited command points and every ship matters, this is a big deal. The big scary alien fleets turn out to have quite the glass jaw when you realize most of those battleships have Class I shields that crumple like paper in the face of your death rays and particle beams.

It's a shame that Masters of Orion III was such a dismal flop. I'd really love a modern successor to the game that was so excellent for its time. While I've heard good things about Galactic Civilizations II, it lacks the tactical portion of the genre I love so much.