I'm hanging out in downtown Portland today, at the wonderful little Coffee Crutch, just up Yamhill from Pioneer Square. Its just a dollar for a cup of coffee, and you can refill it for free. I imagine some of their business model revolves around one feeling guilty about such a deal and making up for it by purchasing a pack of Tic-Tacs or a muffin, which they leave conveniently on display. Tempting me.
In addition to the usual Systepic stuff, I am revisiting my work on Project Theta. It is interesting uncovering work one has done before; I rediscovered a bunch of OneNote entries I wrote almost a year ago, many of which I'd forgotten existed. I think I'm going to pick up where I left off, which means I'll have to hunt down my copy of Dante's Inferno again. Judging from my notes, I was somewhere in the middle of the 9th circle...
On the gaming side, I recently picked up Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for my DS, and am having an absolute blast with it. I was initially a bit worried when I read the game would work entirely off of the touchscreen, but as usual Nintendo quietly backhanded my doubts away within minutes of my first gesture. All in all, the game feels like a lighter, more to the point version of Wind Waker; the same look and feel, less text. The world appears smaller, though I've only uncovered half of the sea charts, and explored less than half of one of them. Unlike Wind Waker, which split the world into dozens of small postage stamp charts, the entire map is split into just four large ones. These are all just initial impressions, so take anything about the game's size with a good slab of salt.
