World Fantasy Awards were announced -- so nice to see Dora and Matt and Kelly and Gavin and Eileen and Polyphony 4 there! (I was in Polyphony 4, which I think makes this the closest I've come yet to being on the ballot myself, though, yeah, it's still a considerable distance...)

Last night, I got Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which I ordered a while ago. I'm in love. It has all the qualities I loved in Vice City, and much much more. The dialogue is awesome. There's a radio station in the cars that plays old Alice in Chains, STP, Guns 'n Roses... it's like I'm 16 again! I am, ahem, a judicious user of cheats -- that is, I tend to cheat enough to get past difficult bits if I stop having fun, but not enough to unlock all the secrets, because that robs the game of momentum -- but I did use the cheat that provides a jetpack so I could fly around a bit and check out the lay of the land from above. It's an impressively large game world, and that's just in the first of the cities (the L.A. analogue) -- the Las Vegas and San Francisco analogues have to be unlocked by plot events. I must say, so far at least, the game is good about building in a nice slow learning curve, and none of the missions I've done yet have been overly difficult. Sometimes they take a try or two as I figure out how much damage a car can take before exploding, find out the best route of escape, etc., but it's definitely a well-made, rich, and intense game. It makes Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory look like Pac Man.

Not sure what we're doing this weekend. Blessedly, we have no plans. Maybe a movie, maybe some basketball, maybe a trip to the farmer's market, definitely some writing, most certainly a lot of video games.