WHAT?!?!

I need to regularly maintain my geek cred. This month that took the form of attending a concert by The Advantage, a rock band that covers old Nintendo tunes.

The concert was held in Nickel City, a brilliant move on their part. Nickel City is the best arcade I've ever been to, with a huge range of games from classic Centipede up through Time Crisis 3, all set to accept nickels. (Pac Man is free, X-Men is a nickel, Tekken Tag is three nickels, Dance Dance Revolution is ten nickels [still half the cost of DDR anywhere else]). It was the perfect place to celebrate video game culture.

And really, isn't that something? It blows my mind that there really is a video game culture. But there absolutely is, coming from the shared set of experiences we have, touchstones of reference in the same way other communities have Super Bowl III or Watergate. It's so exciting to see this art form coalescing and becoming self-aware, with second-generation game designers coming into their own and criticism beginning to evolve from shilling to true analysis. I'm glad to be living in a time when not only can games like "ICO" and "Shadow of the Colossus" get made, but also be appreciated and at least mildly successful. People are now interested in the art of gaming and the ways our society is reflected in the games we make.

In a way, this concert was about the move in the other direction, taking something created in a game and giving it back into society. These very talented men from Sacramento weren't doing note-for-note transcriptions; what they would do is take a song, have one guitar play the melody, and the rest of the band (guitar, bass, drums) elaborate on that melody. It was a pretty amazing experience, and I imagine pretty fulfilling for them as well. Much like Mozart would take an existing tune and make it his own, The Advantage created something wholly original while still wholly recognizable.

There were two opening bands. The first, "FACO," was a pleasant looking kid who strummed an acoustic guitar while screaming rap lyrics into the mike. He got lots of pity applause, and mercifully had a short set. The second was an incredibly high-energy rock/metal band with a surprisingly charismatic lead singer. In between the sets people would stream back over to the arcade and get in a few rounds of whatever they wanted.

I got back to the room a few minutes before The Advantage took the stage, though I didn't realize that at first. Having never seen them before, I idly thought that the long-haired guy who was setting up equipment must be a roadie. Soon he sat down at the drums and began experimentally whacking them. One by one the others casually made their way through the crowd and started tuning their instruments; all this time the house music was still playing loudly. They gradually segued from tuning to playing, in a loud rush of pure noise with lots of plucking that, yes, sounded a bit like bleeps and boops. The sound grew overwhelming, and as they crescendoed they transitioned to the theme from Super Mario III.

I enjoyed the show immensely, but it also drove home just how tenuous a connection I have with this generation of console entertainment. I recognized about two thirds of the songs, but could only identify the corresponding game for about a quarter of them. This makes perfect sense, of course, as I think we only had about five games during the time we had a Nintendo (SMB1, Dragon Warrior 1, Spiritual Warfare, Legend of Zelda, probably one or two more I don't recall), but most of my friends had Nintendos with larger libraries and I would frequently persuade them to play while I watched. Regardless, even when I didn't recognize the source material, the quality of the playing was absolutely enjoyable on its own.

The audience really got into it, and regularly shouted out all sorts of suggestions. The very first one was "DUCK HUNT!", and over a dozen titles were loudly suggested over the hour-long set. The Advantage stayed quiet and stuck to their set list; some did eventually get played, but it didn't seem that they acknowledged the requests any more than a touring rock band would respond to "FREE-BIRD!"

Their set winded down much as it started, with the organized sound of the theme to Contra giving way to dischordant tones, clicks and clacks, as their sounds grew apart and fuzzed. Then, without warning, they launched into the powerful opener of "Smells like Teen Spirit." The audience was appreciative yet wary. When they got to the part where Cobain's guitar reaches for darkly twinkling stars, though, their guitars led the way into the Legend of Zelda music. The crowd went wild. It shouldn't have worked, but absolutely did.

The Advantage seemed very nice, polite, quiet, and talented. Here's the sum total of their stage chatter, spread out among the band mates over the duration of the concert:

• Thanks for coming. We're The Advantage, from Sacramento.
• We would like to thank the opening bands for providing us with alternative rock.
• That was the song from Batman, Level One.
• We have a new album out, which goes on sale in stores on the 22nd, but we have it here for sale tonight.
• Thank you all for coming.

So, that was that. Good concert, and I now have another thing to lord over my geek friends. Let's see them try to out-nerd me now!

Can this one count as, like, five posts?

Things that I could turn into long posts but won't.

I've started to (very, very, very, very) casually think about making a trip to Japan sometime next year. While looking for tourism information, I ran across an excellent official FAQ, including this gem of a question. Yes, that's the result of the American educational system, folks. I especially like the helpful map that the Japanese have hopefully included, believing in vain that it will explain the situation to people asking this question.

As threatened, I bought that nice hard drive from Tiger Direct on Sunday. I've since learned that not all online retailers are equal. I've heard plenty of good things about Tiger Direct and will certainly consider doing business with them in the future, but this experience has made me realize how spoiled I am by Newegg. The drive didn't even ship until last night, more than 4 days after I ordered it, whereas with Newegg I probably would have received it yesterday. Since this isn't a crucial component I'm not upset or anything, just thought I'd share my experience.

I picked up all sorts of goodies while home for the holidays, but one of the most immediately wonderful was a collection of short stories by George Saunders. They're really excellent. I first encountered him in a gripping New Yorker short story that I started reading casually, realized about 2/3 of the way in that (a) I was reading something wonderful and (b) I had no idea what was going on, and ended up poring over multiple times. These collections ("CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Pastoralia") are really similar; some of them directly touch on the same sorts of themes as that first story (loneliness, bureaucracy, ghosts, violence), but they all share an incredibly sharp wit, an engagement with America that is simultaneously affectionate and despairing, and a brilliant thread of absurdism. It is this last part that most attracts me to Saunders. It is just so rare to get an American author who can treat important themes with surrealism and phantasmagoria; it feels like the use of these wonderful tools has been all but abandoned to genre writers. After finishing these, I'm elevating Saunders to the same class as Vonnegut and Pynchon in my hierarchy.

On a related note, I think I want to start blogging about books more. Not necessarily reviewing or anything, just doing that sort of living record stuff. I spend nearly as much time reading (including the New Yorker and online sources) as playing games, but... I guess I haven't been writing about books largely because I'm less confident in my analysis (despite my degree in English Lit, or perhaps because of it). When it comes to games, I feel like my analysis is as valid as anyone else's, something I'm less secure in for literature. Except when I'm really passionate about it, like Saunders. But in either case, I should at least be able to occasionally write "I just finished XXX, and I really (dis)liked it."

Continuing in the literary vein, I'm finally starting to read "His Dark Materials." This trilogy has been on my radar for about four years now, ever since I read on Slashdot that it was being considered for a movie adaptation by Terry Gilliam. (For reference, the only other adaptations discussed on Slashdot are "Lord of the Rings," "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and "Ender's Game".) Gilliam is probably my favorite director, so that piqued my interest, though I didn't know much about the series. Later I learned that they were "Children's books," but well-regarded in literary circles. I just finished an interesting profile of Philip Pullman in, yes, the New Yorker, where I learned more about the series and finally decided to try it. I started the first book, "The Golden Compass", and am growing enthralled. The obvious comparison is with "Harry Potter" or "The Chronicles of Narnia", but so far I'm drawing a stronger connection to the "The Dark is Rising" series that I loved so much growing up. However, even though HDM is technically not set in this universe, I feel like it is less escapist than TDIR, and what I've read so far combined with the teasers in the New Yorker article gives me very high hopes for this. I'll try to remember to check back in once I'm done with the trilogy.

And what's up with children's literature, anyways? How come some of it is so awesome? There are some books and authors I read twenty years ago that gave me images which still resonate with me. For whatever reason, though, I don't revisit them now, and apart from HDM I haven't ventured into the Young Adult stacks for many years. It bothers me, and I'm not sure whether this is reflecting some sense of elitism I have or what. Somewhere along the line I bought into the fallacy that more difficult books are better, and make myself feel guilty when I read something simple. I hope I can unlearn that prejudice, because if HDM is any indication, I'm missing out on a lot.

Not to mention that I'll be able to read all three books in less time than it took me to read "Circe" in Ulysses.

I love my New Yorker subscription. It was a very thoughtful gift from my parents two years ago and each issue is something I treasure. I love its cultural coverage, its political insight, even the often-snarky "Talk of the Town." The one part I often have trouble with is its fiction. I don't know just what to make of it... you have stuff like George Saunders, which was so good that it would make up for 40 mediocre stories. That's hardly the only good story I've read, but so many were forgettable, and more than half the time I don't even manage to finish the story, which for me is an atrocious record. (Remember, I'm the one who has only two books that I didn't finish over my entire educational career.) I don't know if there's exactly such a thing as a "typical" New Yorker story, but if there is, it's a first-person introspective character study, which can be a fine display of the author's chops but which I personally find interminable. Of course, there's only so much one can do with a limited number of pages, but... I don't know. I just want the stories to be better more often.

I've already chronicled my history with Apple. After last week's announcement I went through a typical period where I thought, "Huh, that looks really pretty. Maybe I'll buy one. Wow, that's really expensive. And none of my games will run on it. Oh, well." Of course, one of the most exciting things about Apple moving to Intel chips is the increased probability of third-party emulators appearing that will run such applications. If a robust emulation/porting community emerges, I'll give serious thought to taking the leap and grabbing one of those sweet Powerbooks.

You know how you have that list of tasks to do? And you keep on adding stuff and taking things off, so the size remains roughly constant, but there's a few things on there which never get done, and you get tired whenever you think about it? Well, for me, that task is going through my blog and linkifying my posts. In particular I want to cross-reference posts that refer to one another so that, for example, one could click in the paragraph above and go to the post about Apple. Of course, I usually don't have many links at all in my posts, unless they're specifically about other web pages. In one way this is good, because it means that in the future I won't need to go through and clean up dead links when pages inevitably move or disappear. However, links within Blogger should be pretty constant. The big issue here is just my method of composition. 90% of the time I write my posts in Notepad or GVim instead of in Blogger. I like this because it allows me to spread the composition over multiple sessions; the longer posts generally take more than a day to finish. Of course, Blogger supports a Drafts option for posts, but it's simpler for me to just edit a plain text file, and besides this protects me against the dreaded "Close the wrong browser window and lose 30 minutes of work" curse. So it's great, but the downside is that it isn't easy for me to look up posts while editing the post. When a post is done I'll open up Blogger and copy-paste the post in. By then I'm usually impatient to just get the darn thing up and will say "Well, I'll look up the URLs later." Of course, I almost never do, and the result is the solipsistic blog on your monitor now.

Returning to an earlier offhand comment: I feel weird whenever I write something like "I went home for Christmas." Everyone here who has ever gone to college has felt the same sort of weirdness: is "home" where your family is, or is it where you live most of the year? If you asked me straight up, "Is your home here or in Winfield?" I wouldn't hesitate before saying it's here in San Jose. And yet, I regularly find myself referring to our house in Winfield as home. What I'm wondering is, when do people stop referring to their parents' place as home? I get the feeling that if I ever got married and started having kids, "home" would become "Grandma and Grandpa's". Who knows, though. I guess that, though I've always thought of "home" as a single defining location, maybe it's possible (especially in today's extraordinarily mobile world) to have multiple places that one thinks of as home. I know I feel just as comfortable in my parents' house as I do here, so maybe that's what the word means.

Desert Peace

Since I hate giving a beginning without an ending, I thought I'd recount how the WWII scenario ended up.

I think I wrote the first post around the time I took Algiers. By this point the Italians had been removed from Africa and Vichy France was in decline. My task became both more complex and easier. Harder, because I needed to figure out how to ferry my ground troops over the sea to strike at my next objectives. Easier, because my allies couldn't follow me there. I finished taking the north coast and then began shifting my forces, leaving the inland cities to the growing Free French and Allied forces who instantly set about their top-priority mission: ensuring that no roadways would ever again exist in Northern Africa.

Oh, quick note. There's a Word document that ships with the scenario that gives a little more background. Here I learned that, despite Eisenhower being their leader, the Allied faction early in the game actually represents ANZAC (the Australian and New Zealand forces). These were indeed focused around Cairo, which is why the faction starts with that city. After Pearl Harbor, the Americans are presumed to join this faction; this is represented by them getting some free units and gaining the ability to build naval and air units.

Back to the game. The obvious next target was Messina, on the eastern edge of Sicily. I'd prepared a transport for the occasion and was building several more. By this time I also had a nice little air fleet of about 8-10 bombers and several fighters. (I think the bombers are Vickers Wellington). Messina was within operational range of my island city, so the bombing commenced while I loaded up my transport and positioned my naval forced. By now I had managed to restore my navy to its prior strength, and operating from the island base I succeeded in sinking or badly damaging the nearby Italian ships.

Unlike Civ 1 or 2 (but like Civ 3), air power can weaken units dramatically but not destroy them outright. By the time I landed my tanks and machine guns on the hilly slopes of northeast Sicily, the defending machine guns were down to about 25% strength (4 or 5 of 18). In just two turns they took the city.

Now, there was also a city in western Sicily, not an objective but one that I couldn't allow to survive as a launching point for counter-offensives. But I was eager to press on to Athens, the final objective city, so rather than bring additional troops to the island I consolidated my present troops in Messina and started bringing the rest of my forces to the eastern Mediterranean. If I'd known what the next dozen turns would bring, I probably would have taken the extra time and tried to take the whole island right away. What happened was the Italian air force (I know! Who believed it existed?) took up position near Messina and gave me the same merciless pounding I had delivered. As a result none of my units, offensive or defensive, ever returned to full health. I ended up relocating my air force again to Messina and spending time pounding back down the interlopers, finally sending in several half-health tanks (and losing a few) to defeat the quarter-strength machine guns. Not a lot of fun, I hate casualties, but the island was finally secure.

I attempted to do the same with Athens. However, no existing city of mine was close enough for my bombers, and I only had one carrier (each carrier can hold 3 planes). So I would either need to take another city or build many more carriers. By now my bombing fleet had climbed to over a dozen, and it just seemed more practical to leverage them than to produce large numbers of suiciding ground units. I initially thought I'd be forced to use carriers, then I realized that I had a base on Cyprus within bombing distance of Crete, which in turn would give me the range needed to strike at Athens.

I wasn't the first to come up with the idea; Free France had landed a few units on Crete. Three, way too few to take a city, but every bit helped. I relocated my bombers and had them help Free France keep the city soft while I brought around an invasion force.

Now, this was my first time directly confronting Germany. We'd had two limited engagements before. Rommell landed in North Africa early with the Afrikorps. These units were way stronger than the Italian ones I'd been pushing back, but he didn't have sufficient numbers to pose a large threat. Later, while the bulk of my army was focused on Algiers and Messina, he landed a transport with a parcel of Panzers near Libya. They wreaked havoc for several weeks, tearing up my roads and making it impossible to quickly move units to the front. I eventually took them out but it was an aggravating process, and in the future I always held a few Crusader tanks back in my homeland to protect against future incursions.

Anyways, this was my first time taking a German city, and it proved a far different experience than assaulting Italy or Vichy France. Part of this is probably the result of Germany remaining untouched by me for so long while I pounded on their allies, but they clearly had taken care of their defenses. Crete was well defended by intercepting fighters, who kept many of my bombers from completing their runs. Even when they did get through, I wondered why they caused so little damage, usually just around 5% instead of 20%. I realized that Germany had actually taken the time to build Bunkers, something I had never bothered with since I wasn't expecting a serious invasion, but which was proving invaluable to them. As a result of these two factors, even with my vast force I had to bomb for about a month before I felt comfortable landing my troops, as opposed to the week or two I had expected.

Even here, things were dicey for a while. Germany knew where the action was and had pulled up their bombers close; the very turn they landed, before attacking, all my tanks were down to 50% or lower. The odds didn't look great, and if even one of my units went down I wouldn't be able to take the city, and they'd be down again to 25% the next turn. So I had them dig in while I loaded up some units I'd planned on saving for Athens.

Using twelve units proved much better than four; the machine guns took the brunt of the bombs, and the surviving tanks were healthy enough to defeat the also-battered defenders. Crete was mine, and soon became the most populated base in the Mediterranean, holding something like 20 aircraft, a dozen ships, and two dozen ground troops.

Even with Crete gone, Germany remained a fierce opponent. Their navy, which I had barely seen before, was present and deadly in the Aegean and nearby. I couldn't go anywhere without large convoys. They had foolishly allowed many fighters to be destroyed in Crete, but it proved only a fraction of their air force. For the first time in the game I started to actually set fighters to interception, trying to give my units some reprieve from the falling death.

Athens was a tough battle. I scouted out the position first with my navy and started coastal bombardment with my battleships. However, I had to keep swapping ships with Crete, because Germany sent well-orchestrated counteroffenses against me. The bombers did the best they could with the city, but once again it was a slow process. Finally I sent out four transports loaded up with artillery, machine guns, and supremely veteran (Level 5 by now) tanks. They landed on the hilly, forested land west of Athens and took the city in one turn, albeit with staggering losses.

From this point, it was time to play the waiting game. My team now controlled all six objective cities, and just needed to hold them for ten turns. Still, if any cities were retaken, the process would start over. I decided that just dumping machine guns in Athens wasn't necessarily the best strategy; I had to gain some lebensraum to buffer myself.

Something very cool happened: the Allies managed to take another Grecian city on their own, with just some helping airpower from Britain. My southern flank was now secure, and I struck north into the Greek mainland. My units wouldn't count in my score (I think) and wouldn't be of any use to me anyways in a few turns, so I freely expended much of my artillery when taking cities. After I had a freed the land around Athens, I decided I was in good shape and bored of moving units, so I fortified everyone and waited.

The timer ticked down as the Germans and Italians threw themselves against me, the Allies and Free French having finally seized the last Vichy city. Five, four, three, two... game over!

Shortly before the timer actually reached 0, I got a popup with a title like "Africa freed". It said something on the order of, now that Africa is fully within Allied control, the Axis powers have lost any chance at accessing the oil resources they need from the Middle East. Their war machine will be defeated, good work!

Now, I'm not exactly sure whether this was supposed to happen or not. It might have just been that the counter displayed on the screen was off by one and I did get the real "You Win!" message. However, I was credited with a Score Victory, when I was expecting something like an Objective Victory. And the wording puzzled me, since it only talked about Africa, even though only two of the objective cities (Algiers and Suez) are in Africa proper, the rest being further north. So I wondered if I had just reached the timed end of the scenario and was seeing the message because my team had won enough territory to get the leading score. That seems weird, though, since this happened in mid-1942, and I'd expect the scenario to run until 1944.

What really torques me off, though, is the fact that it was a Score Victory with no bonus, and as a result I got pegged for the first time ever (well, in Civ IV at least) as Dan Quayle. Granted, I was playing on Warlord instead of my customary Noble, but still... I'd like to think that taking all the objectives in less than three years should get me something higher than that.

On the whole, the scenario is very fun to play but has a very frustrating lack of polish. In addition to other things I've complained about in these two posts, the units are extremely well illustrated, but the leaderheads are awful. Franco's, in particular, has a totally wrong background, which is glaringly obvious and would take all of two seconds to fix.

As far as other lessons I've learned, I think that if I play this scenario again I'll make much more use of artillery, especially in taking cities. I never did much with them in this game until the very end, since bombers and battleships could bombard the cities and tanks had great attacking power. However, tanks also have severe combat penalties when attacking cities. I was able to get my tanks up to City Raider III mainly by using them against weakling Italians for easy victories, and so by the end of the game my tanks were even or had a net bonus when taking cities. Still, this is inefficient; artillery also can take City Raider, and it makes more sense to build the cheap Artillery for this task and give the Tanks promotions related to their core missions of scouting territory and defeating enemies in the field.

Another thing I'll do is give some units marine promotions. As the debacle on Crete showed, it can be disastrous to have a stacked invasion force near a large supply of enemy bombers. Once you've softened up the defenders, healthy Infantry with Marine promotions should be able to take out the defenders with ease from the sea, and then you can take the city before the bombers get a chance to harm you.

Again, on the whole this was a very enjoyable scenario to play, a little slow towards the end but not at all bad. I learned a ton about tactics and strategy, some of it particular to this scenario but much of it applicable to my main Civ IV game.

I haven't played any more Civ since I beat this scenario last week; I hate to say it, but after over two months of nonstop playing, I needed a break. I'm revisiting ICO now and hope to pick up either Shadow of the Colossus or The Warriors the next time one of them goes on sale. I will be returning to Civ, though... I haven't even tried the game on Prince yet and want to start experimenting with those higher difficulties.

I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.

This weekend wasn't all pain and disappointment. Once again, I had one of my best hikes ever.

I feel like I'm being patronizing even bringing this up, but I want to say it anyways. Anyone who may be reading this blog to get a better idea of who Christopher Charles Horatio Xavier King III, esq. is, unfortunately is getting a very skewed view. I'm writing everything in my spare time on topics that come easily to me and that I really feel like discussing and/or know will be of interest to some readers. That tends to mean a fair amount of stuff on San Jose and video games, much less on other things. My job may be the single most important thing in my life right now, it's where I spend 45-50 hours every week and derive the greatest satisfaction, but I barely ever write about it, both for legal reasons and because I know it will be of little interest to anyone but myself. (I realize that this flies in the face of earlier assertions I've made that the blog is first and foremost a personal journal, but in all honesty, the fact that it is public does at least somewhat guide my decisions in what to post.)

Besides work, another key example is hiking. I've gone every weekend that I've been in town, except I think for one week (too much rain), and often ends up being one of the high points of my week. Yet, I don't write about it, partly because I think it would be excruciatingly boring (I know how little fun it can be to watch someone else's nature slides; hearing them talk about it would be worse; reading them write about it worse yet), and partly because my expository powers are woefully inadequate to describe the beauty of the California wilderness.

This weekend I'll make an exception, though, just because of one particular event that was SO cool: I went into a cloud! The hike was the trail to Monument Peak in Edward Levin Park. It's called Monument Peak because it's covered with radio antennae and broadcast towers. It was up about 2100' from my starting point and 2.5 hours past the trailhead; I had just started to descent along the Ridge Trail when I looked over the valley and saw this HUGE mass of cloud steadily rolling towards me. It was like something out of a horror movie, coming so gradually yet inexorably, with plenty of time for me to think "Oh wow, there's no way I'm getting away from this thing" before it enveloped me.

I wasn't scared, of course, just really excited (and pleased that it didn't look like a raincloud). It covered me, and then I was Inside. It was a surreal, almost religious experience. My visibility was cut down to about 10 feet, so I could navigate the immediate trail just fine, but lost any perspective of where I was in relation to the peak. As I climbed down large landmarks, trees and boulders, would suddenly loom forward from nowhere. While I didn't feel any droplets of rain, I received plenty of moisture during my stay.

Eventually, I hiked down below the cloudline and continued my descent. Again, the experience was rather surreal, and I'm not doing a good job of explaining the mixture of exhilaration and awe I felt. But it was really fun. Yet another thing that makes me feel so glad to be living here now.

People cry, people moan. Looking for a dry place to call their home.

Ladies, there is nothing in this post that concerns you, and a great deal that will disgust you. Please skip to either the previous or following post, depending on your standard browsing style.

Gentlemen, I have a boon to ask of you: any time you use a toilet in a public restroom, please leave the seat up before you exit.

Why, you ask? Because such seats are often filthy. The root cause of the problem is individuals with an overconfident estimation of their aiming ability. Rather than simply wait to use a urinal, they will barge into a stall, do their thing in 3 seconds, and then rush back out. If considerate they will stop to flush, but this does nothing to alleviate the surface mess they have left behind.

I don't want to go into too many details, but you've all seen this before and know what a pain it is. If you have some more serious business with the toilet, you have a handful of options, none of them particularly promising. In my recent month of flying all over the country and spending hours in airports, I had one too many experiences of playing janitor, and then hoping against hope that the flimsy seat of tissue I had sandwiched would provide protection against any germs that remained.

The best solution would be for people to (a) stop doing this, or (b) at least clean up their own mess. But I get the feeling I'm preaching to the choir, and those individuals who are at fault here are not likely to change their ways. So I hope that my proposal will limit the damage they do. If the seat is already up, anyone who is in a hurry will be happy to go for the larger target. Who knows, the extra space may even allow them to get it all in the bowl. Even if it doesn't, though, the mistakes are going on a surface that nobody will ever sit on. The only time the seat is lowered is when someone is ready for a more long-term relationship with the toilet, which virtually never results in an exterior mess, and as long as they raise the seat after they flush, the next visitor will face the same tableau they did.

I fear that decades of nagging regarding the proper position of toilet seats has blinded us to the folly of current bathroom practices. Yes, when you are sharing a house with a family member or spouse who happens to be female, by all means, lower the seat and keep them from falling in. But we're all men in the men's room, and no man in the history of the universe has neglected to check the seat before sitting down. There's no downside to leaving it up, and we'll be saving our arses.