The videogame geeks were out in force yesterday, perhaps because Xbox Live was down for updates. Temporarily and intermittently: Matt and I played several hours of Halo 3.

(I did a web search to find out more, and the forum posts on this subject were ridiculous: on one side you had teenagers demanding a year of free service because they had to wait an extra day to play Call of Duty 4 online, and on the other you had obvious Microsoft shills praising the company for its wisdom and farsightedness. Give me IGN's "Three Red Lights" podcast any day.)

Thwarted on Monday, I went to another K-Mart in the hopes of picking up an early copy of Mass Effect. I was excited to see that they had several copies right next to the register. Unfortunately, they were in a box labeled "Street Date November 20th DO NOT SELL." Scene:

Our Bold Hero: "So they have it... but they won't sell it."
Random Geek: "I know, they're taunting us."

I don't really see why K-mart is even bothering, when their willingness to sell the game early has been widely reported. If I were them that box would have said "Cash transactions only."

As usual, on my way home my iPod radio tuner was repeatedly overpowered by the iPod radio tuners in other cars; there are only so many good radio dead zones to use, after all. It's not all bad: I find it somewhat diverting to guess which car is listening to what I'm hearing.

So I heard the usual snippets of terrible music, but for most of the ride home, one of the cars behind me broadcast over the videogame podcast I was listening to with a different videogame podcast. It was pretty surreal.