TechgnosisWeb Prime

Whew… So I haven’t met a single one of my Massively Multiplayer commitments this week. Am I flaking out completely, as I always do?

Maybe…

Still, I have an excuse: this week was my birthday (on Wednesday, actually), and I just haven’t felt like being useful to society in any real way. It’s one of those things where I keep thinking I should be writing, I should be blogging, I should be doing something useful, and instead I just think ‘But it’s my birthday!’ and blow it off. Things should be more stable next week, I hope.

So, many of you are wondering if I managed to raise the funds to buy myself the Abacus PDA watch I was lusting after. Well, the short answer is: Yes. The long answer is: Yes, but I’m not buying it.

You see, when you live with a woman, certain things change. One of the things that changes is that you no longer get to decide what to spend your birthday money on by yourself. Instead, your girlfriend makes her opinion on what you wanted to buy known. And she does so rather forcefully. Now, in her defense, her arguments against the PDA watch were based on Common Sense: I already have a very good PDA that does everything this watch could do, and better, with a color screen, folding keyboard, Bluetooth, SD and CF card slots, etc. And this is all true. I tried to defend my side of the argument: ‘But… It doesn’t fit on my wrist!’, I cried, but, alas, not even this rock-solid logic-bomb of an argument would dissuade her. Alas, it was the doghouse for me if I bought that watch.

Now, mind you, I didn’t back off completely. Her suggestion that I should, instead, spend my birthday money on clothes was met with a disdainful sneer and a snort on my part. This is birthday money, after all! It should be for something fun, not something practical! Seeing that I would not budge on this point, we instead worked out a compromise: something fun, but that would not be basically duplicating something I already own. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the thing I’m going to buy myself for my birthday with the money I got.

This, my friends, is a GBA Flash Cartridge. 256, 512, or even 1GBit of storage space, battery power, internal clock, and ROM management software, ready to plug into my trusty and pimped-out little GBA SP. It allows me to carry 8, 16, or more entire game ROMs in one single cartridge, thus being able to have my entire Gameboy Advance game collection with me without carrying a dozen extra game cartridges around. It also allows you to download ROMs for games you don’t own and play them on your GBA, but you shouldn’t do that, because it’s illegal, and wrong. And if you find a place with lots of these illegal ROMs, you should tell me the address, so I know to avoid it. Bad, bad people.