Soft Rock!

Not so hard as before.

I always giggle every time I walk past the Hard Rock Cafe's new location in downtown Seattle. This is its second home; it's first used to be closer to the financial district, but far from the tourist zone. From the new locale the iconic Pike Place Market sign can be seen, and it's right between two major tourist destinations.

That said, I giggle because it now occupies what was, for all of the 90s and much of the 00s, the most downtrodden pawn shop in the city, above which was unquestionably Seattle's sleaziest adult magazine, toy and video store. From the big open pit design which allowed the proprietor to watch every browser who might want to lift a copy of Aunt Peg's Photoshoot or a Doc Johnson Butt Plug, to the scary back booths with loose latches where, if you listened, you could hear men willfully violating the "one occupant per booth" rule as a video played to them on a cheap looping analog player.

Compared to that, the Hard Rock Cafe is pretty limp.

That said, at night, walking past, the broad alleyway separating the Cafe from the Starbucks next to it still reeks of overcooked hot dogs, steam, and stale urine.

That's Seattle for ya.

Щоб з'їсти своїх дітей є варварським актом

The Ukrainian in the subject translates to "To eat your own children is an act of barbarism." This phrase was printed on leaflets and posters throughout the Ukraine in the 1933, when the Soviet Union, whether through accident or design, so thoroughly destroyed Ukrainian agriculture that an estimated 4 million people died.

(This is why hammer-and-sickle hipster t-shirts annoy the hell out of me; everyone remembers the Shoah, and well they should; but nobody cares to remember the Holodomor, or any of the other atrocities perpetrated.)

And while Republicans whine and bitch and moan about how the deficit and the debt will destroy our children's future. Their solution? Instead of destroying our future, why not consume it all now? That's exactly what the $60 billion in cuts proposed by John Boehner's House Congressional Republicans have proposed. As Brad Delong writes:

WIC is nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children; let's cut that, because the damage to the nation from malnourishment is a problem for future politicians. NOAA is weather and climate - hey, what we don't know can't hurt us. Nuclear nonproliferation - well, we probably won't feel the pain of a terrorist nuke assembled from old Soviet fissile material for a couple of years. FEMA - well, how often do hurricanes hit New Orleans? CDC - with luck, by the time plague hits someone else can be blamed. Don't start thinking about tomorrow.

After ten years of thoroughly wrecking the American economy-- take out the illusory financial sector, and the US economy created almost no new jobs in the years between 2000 and 2010-- and with a current president utterly uninterested in fixing the problem, the solution, it seems, is to cave.

It is striking to me that nobody will tell the basic truth: we have the deficits we do now because the Obama administration actually put our two wars on the books, rather than what the Bush administration did, which was hide them in a separate set of books entitled "emergency" accounting.

I think the President ought to say, "Okay, I take the Republicans at their word. Our unemployment problem is structural: the people out of work now are those who can't find any because they don't have the skills. And the Republicans want to reduce the size of government. Therefore, I am cutting the Pentagon's budget in half, closing two-thirds of our military bases overseas, and eliminating most new weapons programs. This will eliminate tens of thousands of government-sponsored jobs and shrink the size of government substantially. Yes, it will put many people out of work, but those people clearly have desirable skills, and if the Republicans are right they'll be able to find new work in short order."

I'd forgotten what was so annoying about DOOM: Resurrection of Evil

Now that I have a video card that can play the thing at full speed and bored over lunch, I sat down briefly to play DOOM: Resurrection of Evil, the last official module for Doom 3 to come out of Id. It wasn't done by the Id guys, but was instead rushed into production after the success of Doom 3.

I got to once section that reminded me why this game was so less pleasurable than the original. At one point, having gone outside to retreive the plot token, you enter the Mars base where the mad scientist is holed up through the garage and walk back through the station. Along the way, you pass the Armory. You meet the Mad, endure a poorly scripted cut scene, and the Mad says, "Here's the key to the armory. You might find some things in there useful!"

The door back the way you came is, for no explicable reason, now locked. Instead, you have to go out another door, circle around the inside of the base to get to the armory. At one point, you cross a catwalk over the garage. The game rules say you can't hop a three-foot barrier and jump down onto the boxes stacked under the catwalk, no, you must cross the catwalk and take the stairs down, where more encounters lay.

It's this railing that annoys me so much. Doom 3 had some sidepaths, exploration and freedom. More even than Half Life 2, which used a lot of locked doors to make you go toward the end of the plot.