Aside from the Gunpowder Treason and Plot, there were other reasons why this weekend was memorable. Last week was heavy, what with two different major writing projects being turned in, and next week is erratic, what with two of my regular classes not meeting and last week's two writing projects almost certainly requiring some rewrites. Therefore, I took this weekend for some much-needed downtime. A good chunk of it was spent finally playing Final Fantasy XII, which has to be one of my favorites in the series to date. It's a near-perfect combination of breathtakingly beautiful visuals, sweet music and a completely compelling story. Anyone who ever asks "Are games art?" needs to play FFXII.

The rest of it was spent hanging out with my girlfriend Laura, which was well overdue. On Saturday we went out to find her a pair of boots and came back with all kinds of stuff, not just her boots but also some clothes, some candles, and, for my own personal hardware collection, an ElGato Hybrid TV tuner for my G5 and a terabyte.

There's one of those sentences I never thought I'd write. I popped down to the mall this weekend and picked up a terabyte. Yet there it is – I'd spent a bunch of precious time a week or two ago cleaning space off my G5 and still needing a bunch more, so I was going to pick up another external drive, but when I got there I ran the numbers and discovered that for the money, pound per pound, the LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB was a pretty good deal. It was still pricey, but all things considered it's still jaw-dropping to see storage space go from about $20 for a Zip disk to about fifty cents a gigabyte. So now I have plenty of room to record video interviews for my thesis. Excellent.

So, yes – all in all a great weekend, and badly needed. The new week looms large on the horizon.