I strongly doubt I can keep my sanity with that blasted touchpad mouse, however. It registers when I pick my finger up, and if I pick it up and put it back down too quickly, the computer equates it with a click. I'm also a left-hander who’s trained himself over the years to wield the mouse adequately with my right hand. The touchpad makes it all moot, as my right-hand's useless with it. This is perhaps what spurred the apprehension. It's damn awkward having to steer the pointer with the hand you've trained to type. It means I have to pick up my hand to switch over to the keyboard, and if it I switch back too quickly it registers it as a click. Yup, I'm definitely investing in a USB regular style mouse. I can put up with the touchpad on the run, but when I'm at my desk, I'm gonna need the real deal.

It fascinates me that after feeding her and letting her in and out all night for the summer, the cat (aka Dad's cat) has been re-programmed to whine at me for everything but one thing once the lights go out. For whatever reason, after she's fed and done with her inside wandering, she still scratches at my father's bedroom door to go out. It's interesting that their long-term mutual affection extends beyond current self-interest. If Pavlov was right about behavioral conditioning, clearly there's a deeper, more powerful force at work as well.

I miss the glory days of Myst. When Riven came out things looked to be bigger and brighter and better and on and on. There has yet to be a game that matches Riven's photorealism with enchanting and enthralling interactive storytelling. The vast majority of PC games are movie and sports tie-ins, Cyan's daring and possibly revolutionary Myst update "Uru" underperformed and it's most promising feature - the online experience - was subsequently axed. Now comes "Myst IV: Revelation" which looks spot on, ventures into exactly the area of story I've always wanted expanded upon - that of Yeesha's childhood - and the demo is discouraging. Now visually it's not all it could have been or probably will be. But that's more than forgivable. No, the problem I had is much deeper; the developers don't seem to be comfortable with English. What glimpses we get of Catherine reduce her from the sexy, competent, intelligent Rebel leader of Riven to little more than damsel in distress. And Atrus, whose writings were always so fluent and articulate, his writings in the demo read as though written by someone with a sound sense of grammar and an expansive enough vocabulary whom never the less lacks Atrus's understanding of sentence and paragraph flow. Everything I read seemed to be trying hard to be articulate but each sentence was a clunker. The insight the journal revealed wasn't multi-faceted or subtle. Exposition without anything to dull its stiffness. A further insult to the player's intelligence, an amulet you find gives players the ability to force Atrus to read them allowed. Rand Miller, who has always played Atrus wistful and wise and open, can only plow ahead. He tries adding emphasis wherever the dialog gives him the opportunity, but the whole effect makes the writing seem even more hollow. It's bad when even the character's creator sounds like he rather be somewhere else. That said, the trailer was awesome and the visuals and decent if over-compressed. Hopefully I just got a bad read from the little I was able to play. And hopefully if the reviews are good I'll have a chance to play it through. Nite.