I’m entering my third week on the road. You can always tell when I’m out traveling because updates are few and far between during those weeks. It isn’t so much that I don’t want to post, but that I have very little time to do so, and the time I do have I typically spend trying to relax a little. My job is a lot of fun, but it’s also physically and mentally draining.

Normally, I spend these small convalescent periods between dates staring at the ceiling or cleaning between my toes with the complimentary apricot scrub provided by the hotel. Unfortunately, I recently learned that you can only exfoliate your little toesy-woesies so many times before you hit bone, so that avenue of pleasure has been temporarily closed to me, at least until I grow some skin back on my feet.

Until that day comes, I’ve taken to entertaining myself with Half-Life 2.

In case you’ve been living under a rock under a boulder at the bottom of an underground river in remotest Tajikistan, Half-Life 2 is one of the most efficient time wasters ever produced by mankind – even beating out such contenders as crack cocaine, pornography, and Seattle rush hour traffic.

I avoided buying it for a long time because I:

1) Figured it wouldn’t really be “all that”

2) Figured that, if it was “all that,” it would rule my life

I was wrong about #1.

I really can’t believe this game. From the graphics to the size of the world, it’s unbelievable.

In playing it, I’m not left with the impression that it’s the “next step” in the progression first person shooters have taken since Wolfenstein 3D, but that it’s actually leapfrogged right over whatever the next FPS should have been.

I’m not going to write a full review because I feel that whatever I say would be woefully inadequate. I just can’t believe it.

As a coder, I can’t believe the complexity of the world - the physics, the interactivity, and so on. As someone whose “artistic” abilities are limited to whatever it might take to draw stick figures, I can’t believe the detail of the models. As someone who’s worked with others toward common goals, I can’t believe that someone managed to take all these different creative streams and tie them together into one successful product.

I cannot, cannot, cannot believe it.

Although the game’s content sometimes leaves me feeling queasy, the game itself strikes me as being a work of collaborative genius, and I don’t feel that I’m exaggerating.

If the same amount of effort were put into medicine, we’d all be immortal with enormous private-parts and never-ending stamina.

Which, now that I think about it, would be another fabulous way to waste time…