Comic Con starts today and goes all weekend, back in San Diego. Good buddy Travis is down there, taking in the sights.
I always mean to head down there to check out the Con (having free housing isn’t a bad carrot on a stick), but the travel doesn’t really appeal to me. On the other hand, I would get to visit the car again, and my brother has been doing some fantastic things to it.
Maybe next year.
I’m going to guess that this is how it broke down:
Rockstar originally had explicit sexual content in Grand Theft Auto.
Before it gets released, they decide to cut it. However, in the tradition of lazy programmers everywhere, they decided to perform the equivalent of “commenting” it out. They left the models and the situations in the game code, but the content wasn’t accessible in the game itself. The game was rated M, for Mature, meaning that (Thanks, mom and dad!) anyone under the age of 17 is not allowed to purchase it.
Along comes the PC version and quicker than my friends end up in the sky cage at Nexus, some enthusiasts “hack” the original game code and find the explicit content. Then they release a modification for the game that allows you to see and experience this explicit content, in game.
Now, why does this warrant a federal investigation? There are more important things to investigate, I’m sure. Come on New York, let Hillary know about what you want investigated instead of “smut in videogames.”
After some prodding from the RSS community, (thanks for the shove, Rick!) I’ve finally updated WordPress on the server so that the feeds work. It was working for some, and then not for others, but now that it’s updated hopefully it just works. That, and some vulnerabilities were patched up.
Either way, let me know. At least nothing on the surface appears to be broken.
But what lies beneath. . .
I got off the plane in New York, since Homer was going to drive me across the border. I’d been out of the country a couple of times, but that was the border town of Tijuana.
I didn’t really count those excursions. They didn’t even check my license on the way back.
Hell, in San Diego, some people do their groceries across the border.
That was years ago, and I was pretty sure that getting back into the States from Canada was going to take more than a polite recitation of my US address. I had my birth certificate with me, of course. I removed it from its plastic sleeve and handed it to the border guard with my DC Driver’s License.
It was a photocopy, and the guard asked me about it. I explained that it was the original despite being a photocopy, and that the seal was in the lower right corner, very faint.
He eventually handed it back to me after an interminable fifteen seconds.
Then the guard looked at Homer’s legitimate, United States passport for what seemed like five minutes, due to the ridiculously out of date photograph.
Eyeing the fragile xerox, I realized how tenuous my link to the United States seemed. If anything were to happen to a thirty year old sheet of paper, there’d be nothing to prove my citizenship. I replaced it in the sleeve and put it back in my bag.
Now, nearly a year later, in the depths of my illogical mind, I have worst case scenario daydreams of me attempting to prove my US citzenship. Ridiculous nightmares that include DHS officers asking me, “Papiere, bitte.”
So now, I’m filling out my passport forms and setting up an appointment to get the process started.