The official Batman Begins trailer.

Despite getting to my “daily reads” more or less daily, there hasn’t been a lot to post about recently. However, the Brothers in Arms demo should be worth a peek for those of you who don’t have the full version.

Between the unseasonably pleasant weather here in the Chicago suburbs (70-ish° F) and, of course, World of Warcraft, my desire to try out new games is at a pretty low point. However, I’ll provide links to a couple of demos which popped up while we were gone in case you all might enjoy them… and hey, I suppose I might change my mind at some point.

• Empire Earth 2 single/multiplayer demo for RTS fans
• Dungeon Lords single/multiplayer demo for multiplayer RPG fun from the creator of the Wizardry series

Well, Desiree and I are back from a well-deserved break… our first “real” vacation since our honeymoon. Almost all of our travel between then and our recent trip has been either for work or to visit relatives. As much as we love our families, travelling to see them is not really the same as leaving the country to go to tropical destinations. For the same reasons that ColdForged mentions, we weren’t inclined to announce our trip ahead of time, so I offer my apologies to our (semi-)regular readers.

Our vacation was a cruise, just like our honeymoon. I don’t think we’ll be doing it again. Don’t get me wrong - Desiree and I had a really great time and it was fairly relaxing. The time in the sun, the ocean, the pools, the hot tubs - all great stuff. But when it comes right down to it, Desiree and I have a very similar attitude toward people; let’s call it “hopeful misanthropy”. What I mean by this is that we strongly dislike other people in general, but we’ll give individual people the benefit of the doubt until they give us a reason to hate them, too.

Being in a confined space with so many passengers who were behaving so badly - both to the crew and each other - did not do a lot to enhance our dim view of humanity. The good times (which were thankfully the rule, not the exception) were punctuated by all sorts of infuriating behavior from people. We were on a European cruise line for which English is not the primary language and the dining and service customs are distinctly continental, so many of these cringe-worthy moments came from fellow Americans (the vast majority of the passengers). Our countrymen acted with such ignorance and were posessed with such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that Desiree and I exchanged the phrase “…and that is why the rest of the world thinks we’re obnoxious” several times a day. Add to that the sheer irritation of lines, crowds, and herd mentality in general, and pretty soon you’ve got Sartre’s “No Exit” on a boat. Don’t even get me started on the perplexingly high proportion of adult males hitting on girls that are clearly of middle-to-high school age; it’s creepy enough all by itself, but when it causes your SCUBA dive master to leave uncertified divers in the ocean - and by divers, I of course mean me - because they’re too busy trying to hook up with sixteen-year-olds, then it’s even more thoroughly unacceptable. Well, it could have been worse - there was a diver in our group who, due to lack of supervision and no fault of his own, drifted into the boating lane and nearly got his head taken off… just a few minutes before he ran out of air due to a leak in his gear. (He made it back ok, no thanks to the dive masters.)

So, in a nutshell - overall vacation: very good, close proximity to vast numbers of stupid people: very bad. I think next time we’ll go for the sun and surf minus the people… maybe rent a big beach house somewhere with some friends.