ck's weblog: the human experience, dressed like a sailor

Paul and Chelsea got married this past weekend at The City Museum in St. Louis. The couple invited guests to bring a change of clothes and explore the museum after the reception, so we did just that. It's an amazing place, and a great workout. Four days later, my upper body is still sore from all the climbing and my bruises are just beginning to fade:

Mel and I have been playing Bayonetta as of late. The titular character is the last in a race of ancient witches fighting against the forces of light for reasons that she's mostly forgotten. Her magical powers flow through her hair, which lashes out at her foes in the form of oversized fists or boots.

In the game's opening scene, a bunch of angels manage to slice off all of Bayonetta's clothing. She reacts by immediately creating new clothes for herself from that same magical hair. They look normal for the most part, but as she gets deeper into advanced combo moves, she needs more magic, and sensibly, turns her clothing back into hair.

There's a lot of ridiculous sexualization in the game, but for me, the first encounter with Joy takes the cake. Joy is a shapeshifter, impersonating Bayonetta to kidnap an annoying little girl. When Bayonetta catches up with them, she shoots Joy in the head, which naturally triggers a dance-off. After a brief Bayonetta vs. Fake Bayonetta fight, Joy takes a break to masturbate herself back into her true form:

Bayonetta shows a lot of parallels to Shoot 'Em Up, and I like it for many of the same reasons. It's all ridiculous fun, whether I'm strapping grenade launchers to every limb, tossing a baddie in a guillotine, or ice-skating through the holy hordes dishing out pain from my demon katana.

I'm not sure if we'll make it through the game at "hard" difficulty to qualify for the Penny Arcade Bayonetta contest, but we'll probably end up trying.

I took the first of my four mandatory furlough days earlier this week. Thanks to FLSA, I'm running into some scheduling issues. During the week in which a furlough day is scheduled, normally exempt employees are treated as hourly. That means that:

1. I may not do any work in the 24 hours that constitute my furlough day.
2. I may not work more than 8 hours in any day.
3. I may not work more than 40 hours total this week, including 8 hours for furlough.

If I were to break any of those rules, the University of Illinois would find itself in violation of federal law and would be quite cross with me. We've been warned that employees who violate the rules face suspensions and possible fines.

We are expected to work during business hours, so the new-to-us rules mean that during the week in which a furlough day is taken, an employee is effectively disallowed from working outside of business hours. That means that employee can not be on call during the entire week containing a furlough day.

It was announced yesterday that we can also just take a pay cut equivalent to the furlough plan while continuing to work. I haven't heard much enthusiasm for working without pay, though, so I expect I'll get to continue to juggle schedules for the next few months.

When it came time to put the living room back together post-remodeling, I decided it was time to change the way I was cabling things together for my home theatre. Since the last update, we've added a Siesta Sak to the room, which is easy to place within the range of a corded controller when needed. Because of that, I'm able to move my "classic" consoles out of the coffee table.

I also opted to simplify my configuration with a new receiver, Denon's AVR-790. It understands HDMI and can upscale analog inputs and route them over a single digital link to the TV. As you can see, that simplifies my configuration pretty nicely:

Or perhaps not. It turns out that it's tough to diagram a system where any of the digital inputs can be reassigned and all of the inputs have been renamed.

As an added bonus, I'm no longer using S-VIDEO for the PC's video connection. So instead of scaling 768p to 480i to 1080p and looking pretty shitty, I've now got a straight 720p connection from the video card to the TV. Mel noticed the difference right away, fulfilling one of my strongest metrics for whether a home theater upgrade was worthwhile.

Mel and I saw Penn & Teller's show last night and noted that one of our fellow audience members looked quite a bit like the NPH. As it turns out:

Just saw Penn & Teller at the Rio. Always have new material. Awesome. Pic of them giving me some magic pointers: http://yfrog.com/351bidj

--Neil Patrick Harris' tweet

I can confirm that he was suited up.