Ethereality News & Weblog

NEWS:
ImagineFX magazine’s posted on their website the interview they did with me, originally printed in the first issue of the magazine. For those of you that missed it when it was in circulation, you can now read it here

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Spectrum 13 has shipped, and one of my paintings was accepted this year. (For those of you that don’t know, Spectrum is the most prestigious annual publication in the field of sci-fi/fantasy art.) You can find out more from these links:

About Spectrum, the annual sci-fi/fantasy art publication

About Spectrum 13, the latest in the series

You can purchase the book by clicking on the image:

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I’m still in the Bay Area at the moment. I have no idea when the studio wants me to move down to Burbank, and I’ll remain busy freelancing for them in the foreseeable future–until I get snatched up by another studio, that is. If that were to happen it would be too bad, because I like the guys there and my tour of the studio gave me a good impression of the place.

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Been a long time since I updated Kitty Cat Diary. Not that I stopped shooting, just that I’ve been too busy to prepare the images for the web. I took a couple of days off this weekend and got caught up though. You can see the latest entries here:

WEBLOG:
I used to pull all-nighters a lot when I was in the comic book industry, writing and illustrating comics for a living (if you can call the laughable money I made “a living”). When I defected to video games, I’ve only had to do an all-nighter once in three years and five shipped games (the all-nighter was for a Playstation game called “Pastrana VS. McGrath Freestyle Motorcross,” and I actually got to design the level as well as texture it–it’s the level with cherry blossoms, taiko drums, shrines, and lots of snow). In CG animation, I never had to pull an all-nighter–maybe really late nights, but never seeing the sun come up. In the last week, I had to pull three all-nighters straight on Spiderman 3 and Surf’s Up, with roughly two to three hours of sleep between each day. I took a caffein pill on the first day, and Elena boiled up a pot of jinseng–they helped to keep me awake and alert. The second and third day I did without any caffein pills and just drank the jinseng. I didn’t really feel any difference, so I’ll do without the caffein pills the next time I pull an all-nighter.

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One thing I don’t like about using WordPress for blogging is that although I have full control over everything (CSS coding), can host it myself, add plugins for more features, and make my own backups, I don’t have all the nifty features of communities like Livejournal and MySpace (they’re the ones that most of my friends use). So I figured out a way to implement it–a simple link to my own Livejournal/MySpace pages, which will then be linked to all of my friends, and also linked back to my site. Those links are now implemented into the menu on the left.

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Here are some quickie movie reivews of the stuff I’ve watched lately:

Brick - I was excited to watch this, as the guys at Filmspotting (one of the best film review podcasts on the internet) raved about it, but the film didn’t live up to expectations. I understand what the director tried to do–bending the noir genre by setting it in a high school with teenagers, but the whole thing felt more like an exercise in style than something that’s truly heartfelt. I can’t help but think if the film had been shot in a more realisitc manner with natural dialogues, instead of the hardcore noir dialogues and David Lynch-esque scene setups, it would’ve resonated more emotionally. There’s something inherently fake about teenagers playing grownups–something that writers do occassionally, but rarely do it well enough to be forgiven. Teenagers without any trace of what makes that age group unique, are not teenagers anymore, and I think that’s essentially what’s wrong with writers trying to push inexistent maturity upon characters that just aren’t ready for it yet.

Spanglish - I was afraid it would be one of those mindless and patronizing romantic comedies that plagues mainstream Hollywood, but Elena and I ended up really enjoying the film. The dialogues were unpredictable, and although it was light on serious social commentary (which isn’t the point of the film at all) about racial or cultural issues, it packed enough great moments to hold our interest–it even got some big laughs out of us.

And oh yeah, Paz Vega is quite something in that movie. There’s a scene of Adam Sandler yelling at her to get out of the wind because he was being distracted by the view of her being back-lit by the moonlight, with her dress clinging to her, revealing all kinds of curves. It was quite a vision. There’s a Chinese phrase the describes curaceous women as “Protudes in the front, sticks up in the back.” Quite fitting in this case. Strangely enough, I’ve also seen her in Sex and Lucia (from the director of Lovers of the Arctic Circle), and in the nude she isn’t that curvaceous at all. It just goes to show you how much clothes can shape a woman’s figure.

Battle Star Galactica Season 3 - Still one of the best shows on TV (although I don’t really have time to watch TV at all, so I’m not exactly up to date on other shows out there besides Lost). I’m so happy to see Sharon reinstated as an officer, although I found it hard to swallow that Adama would be that careless. I mean, everyone still remember that Cylons can be mind-controlled to do things, right? What’s to stop Sharon from another murderous episode, or worse, an evil betrayal? I’ve only watched up to Exodus part 1, and I hear part 2 was a mind-blower. Can’t wait to see it.

Poseidon - I can’t believe this is from the same director of Das Boot. It’s probably the most typical mainstream action/thriller film I’ve seen in a long time–totally predictable, by the numbers, and without any trace of creative passion from the people behind the lens.

Eight Below - As much as I love dogs and as cute as the ones in the movie were, I kept thinking the dogs were way too human-like in the movie–then I remembered it’s supposed to be a Disney film.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - A pretty good chick flick for teenage girls. I would watch anything Alexis Bledel is in, because she’s such a rare mix of angelic grace, shyness, and natural beauty.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand - It’s no Brian Singer, but it wasn’t a disaster either. On the other hand, it would’ve taken a really terrible director to wreck the standard set by the previous two films. Even a hack director can simply ape the vibe of the previous two films and end up with a half-way decent sequel.

It’s interesting to see the previous generation of cute teenage actresses getting older and losing some of their fresh-faced appeal. I used to think Anna Paquin’s a total cutie, now she’s starting to look a little strange to me. But Kitty Pryde–meeeeow!

News:
I’ve just returned from CGOverdrive 2006 in Singapore, and it was a blast! Although the jetlag and the south east Asian weather took its toll on my body, I managed to survive the whole affair with only a sore throat and recurring dizzy spells (no idea what that’s all about).

The conference itself was a huge success–I think it surprised all of us. Not that we expected it to suck, just that the vibe of the whole thing was so wonderful–all the attendees were very enthusiastic, and all the speakers (well, almost all) rocked the audience during their workshops. The kind folks behind the whole thing were very generous and professional, and have a genuine love for everything related to CG. The real shocker for me was the fact I got mobbed for autographs and photos everywhere I went for all three days of the conference. I had no idea people actually knew who I was, or even cared, but apparently despite the national diversity of the attendees (Philippines, India, Thailand, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, UK, Sweden, USA..etc), they know about me from online CG forums and websites. If any of you are reading this–hi! it was very nice to meet you all!

No trip is complete without photos, right? That’s why I took plenty–complete with commentary! Read up on my little trip to Singapore and look at the boring photos. I put all the photos and commentary on a seperate page because I don’t want to kill all the 56k modem guys who read the blog but aren’t interested in the CGOverdrive 2006 conference.

News:
Kitty Cat Diary Updated:

Weblog:
If you’re a fan of Joss Whedon’s Firefly, you must sign up for this:

I’m a huge fan of Firefly, and a fan of Joss Whedon in general. He could get a bit campy at times, but when he flexes his muscles for dramatic storytelling and character relationships, he is every bit the portrait of a talented genius. I personally feel that the Firefly TV series is his strongest work to date–surpassing Buffy, Angel, his feature film screenplays..etc. The Serenity movie didn’t quite capture the magic of the TV series though, which was a slight disappointment. Although I did like the movie, the execution felt a bit contrived–missing the casual smoothness of the TV series.

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Our shipment arrived recently–it left Fuzhou, China, arrived in Los Angeles, then made its final stop in Oakland. To our dismay, two items were stolen, and two more were initial missing, but turned up later damaged. My Xbox and Takamine EAN-10C Electric/Acoustic guitar were stolen out of their protective packaging:

The two missing furnitures that turned up later were both severely damaged (legs broken off, dents and scratches..etc). We’re fairly sure the theft must’ve happened in China, as American shipping companies all have lots of security cameras covering their entire warehouse operations, and also because the moving companies in China are famous for stealing. We’ll probably never recover the Xbox and the guitar, but the damaged furnitures might be salvageable if we do a bit of repair work on them.

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The heat has gotten unbearable here in the Bay Area in the last couple of days. It’s been a hundred plus degrees during the day, but once the sun starts to set, the temperature cools down significantly. At least it’s not humid in California, or else we’d be even more miserable. Since Northern Cal doesn’t really get that hot usually, just about all the homes don’t have air conditioning–only heaters for the winter. We were so tempted to go out and stay in a shopping mall all day and wait for the sun to set, but just the idea of leaving the house admidst the killer heat and getting into that oven-baked car. . .. My solution was to drench my t-shirt in cold water and let the evoporating moisture cool me off (I got tired of splashing water on my face/neck/arms because they dried off too quickly in the heat). Maybe it’s not healthy to do that–I’m sure someone somewhere will point out the dangers of cooling off that way, but at least it got me through the day.

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A few nights ago while dinning at a nice Thai restaurant (Thai Pepper on De Anza in Sunnyvale), the front bumper of my Acura Legend got ripped out completely (it got caught on that raised concrete strip at the end of parking spaces). I’m certain its original owner must’ve damaged it prior, because a bumper shouldn’t come off that easily. We managed to kick it back into place and hoped it wouldn’t fall off on the way home. Next day, we gave our best shot to fix it ourselves, because we’re budget conscious at the moment (until I find a new job). All the places where it was secured to the car’s frame was ripped apart, so our solution was to drill new holes in the bumper and then use thick aluminum wires to tie it to the frame:

Here’s the handy Kitty Cat trying to tie the front license plate back onto the car with wires:

So far it looks like it's working. The experience was more eventful than I'd have wanted though--the car hood came down on my left hand (the hydraulic rods that hold it in place is broken--we found out the hard way), and left a nasty bruise. Thank God it plunked down on my head first and then my hand, or else my hand would be in a cast right now and I'd have to type with one hand--which would cramp my style severely, as I've been told I type freakishly fast for someone who's not a courtroom transcriber.

Here’s how it looks mounted to the front windshield (I’ll probably need to buy an adhesive disc so I don’t get a ticket for mounting it to the window):

The photo was taken while we were driving through Hillsborough. I wanted to show Elena the city of Burlingame, with all those beautiful giant trees lining the streets, and of course, we just had to drive through Hillsborough in that area to look at the beautiful houses we could never afford. Whenever we drive through rich neighborhoods, I always joke and say “Poor folks coming through! Hide your dogs and your kids! Lock your doors and windows!”

Wouldn’t it be funny if one day we end up owning one of those multi-million dollar homes ourselves? Never say never, right?

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When one of your favorite musical artists does a cover version of another favorite musical artist’s song–that’s like life’s precious little gifts that puts a huge grin on your face. It just happened for me the other day–discovering that my favorite Korean singer, Lee Soo Young, did a cover version of one of Tamaki Koji’s (leader of Anzen Chitai) song. You can listen to it here (it’s also a photo slide show of a recent photoshoot she did).

Lee Soo Young is my favorite Korean singer because she’s an awesome vocalist, is very down to earth, funny as hell (she’s got a goofy sense of humor and is not afraid to act dorky or appear on comedy shows), and never bothered to glam up for the cameras. She’s certainly not bad looking by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s always avoided getting dolled up for her photoshoots or music videos–in fact, she’s not even in most of her music videos–they’re usually short films acted out by other actors, telling heartbreaking stories. In the recent years, she’s been paying more attention to how she looks though–I guess when you get that popular, the record company will put pressure on you to do that. I’m not complaining though, as she looks quite delicious dolled up:

Tamaki Koji is my favorite Japanese male singer/songwriter because he’s got an awesome range of expressive styles–ranging from heartbreaking ballads to rough and gruff rocking out growling screams. His songs are often covered by the Chinese singers, but this is the first time I’ve heard a Korean artist covering one of his songs–and what’s refreshing is that it was covered by a female singer.

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I’ve always been interested in action figures, garage kits, and fashion dolls, but having collected them for a while, I decided they just take up too much room and cost too much money. I ended up selling most of my collection (although I still have a couple grand’s worth of them left in storage, but I plan to sell them all off eventually). My buddy, Em, deals in Obitsu dolls, and he’s always wanted me to try my hand at painting custom action figures and dolls. I did one repaint for him about six years ago, and started doing another one recently, but I guess my interest in the whole painstaking craft just isn’t there anymore, so I ended up not finishing it. Here’s how far I got on the Obitsu head before I lost interest and patience:

Unfotunately, she’ll have to join a pirate ship and wear an eyepatch from now on, because the chance of me finishing her face is very slim.

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Elena’s driving lessons are going slowly, because like I mentioned before, she’s a total klutz with very slow reflexes, due to being too sheltered as a child and lack of interest in physical activities as an adult (and she doesn’t play video games). Just asking her to put the car in reverse puts her into a state of panic. I have no idea how she’s going to survive on the road down the line.

Here’s the kind of torture I put her through during her driving lessons:

We always do her driving lessons around supper time, because she hates getting baked under the hot sun, and as all photographers know, sunrise and sunset are two of the best times during a day to take photos. Here are a couple I took during her lesson breaks:

While practicing yesterday, an Indian couple apparently had the same idea to practice driving in that huge empty Macy’s parking lot. It was also a husband teaching his wife, and needless to say, the two learning drivers made each other a lot more nervous.

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I sometimes have problem sleeping, so instead of spending hours tossing and turning, I prefer to just get up and go about my business. The other day, I woke up just when the sun peered its face from behind the horizon line. I grabbed my camera and went out for a little walk. Here’s a photo I took during the walk:

Elena loves going for a walk after dinner, as long as the weather doesn’t suck, and she always drag me alone with her. I oblige because 1) I need the exercise 2) She’s giddy like a school girl whenever we go for a walk, and I like seeing her happy. I sometimes bring a camera along, depending on the lighting condition. Here are a few taken with the Fuji F10:

We’re planning on selling the Fuji F10 because the F30 has been released and is supposed to have the features we felt were missing with the F10. The new intelligent flash linking with the ISO setting is the main reason for the upgrade, as we hate washed out flash photography, and there’s no way to set the flash exposure compensation in the F10. The F30 at least will vary flash output depending on your ISO setting–it should make a big difference in how natural flash photography turns out. I’m still disappointed in the dynamic range of most point & shoot compacts, since it’s inevitable to get completely blown skies, skin highlights, or total loss of shadow detail, but we really do need to have at least one point & shoot camera between the two of us for occassions where a humongous professional camera is overkill or inconvenient. I’ll also be selling off the Olympus C3030Z as well, along with all the accesories I’ve gotten for it.

News:
Kitty Cat Diary updated:

I also added some stray entries in the 2004 and 2005 archives.

Weblog:
While searching for a good office chair so I can sit on my ass comfortably for 14+ hours in front of the computer when I need to (of course, I try to get up once an hour and stretch), I came across this funny little diatribe against the famous Aeron chairs. Watch the demo video clips, and if you have people in your office that use Aeron chairs, make sure you get them to watch the videos with you. There’s some cussing in good fun, but if your office culture sucks, then you might want to just watch them when you get home.

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As you can tell from the latest Kitty Cat Diary entries, I’ve been teaching Elena how to drive. I may suck at a lot of things, but teaching isn’t one of them. Teaching seems to come naturally to me–I somehow just instinctively know how to impart information in such a way that’s easy to understand even for total beginners. The upcoming workshop for CGOverdrive 2006 will be my first time teaching to a crowd of 1,500+ students–it should be a lot of fun.

There’s a huge parking lot in front of a Macy’s where we live, and it’s about 90% empty all of the time because of nearby renovation of another building. I would put shopping carts in some of the parking spaces and then have Elena practice parking. She’s particularly slow at eye-hand coordination feats, as she grew up very sheltered–no playing physical games with other kids, no sports, no dancing, and not even video games. Without those experiences in her early years, she is drastically slower in reflex and physically uncoordinated (this woman trips even when the ground is perfectly flat, wearing flat-heeled shoes). When I taught her how to jump rope, she twisted her ankle. When I taught her how to play badminton, she cracked her foot. I was relieved that when I taught her how to swim, nothing bad happened.

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I finally got my paws on Dreamfall. However, about ten minutes into playing it, I just had to stop–my GeForce FX5200 video card just couldn’t cut it anymore, and this is the kind of game I really want to play on the highest setting possible for full immersion. So, off to shopping for a new video card I went. Unfortunately, my motherboard is still an AGP one, so my choices were severely limited by the current PCI Express trend. I decided to spend no more than $200 (I ended up ordering a Diamond Viper X1600 Pro from newegg.com), as I only want a card that will tie me over until my next full upgrade to a PCI Express motherboard (probably in a couple of years). I just want to be able to play current-gen games on reasonable settings instead of watching what’s essentially a damn slide show like I was with the FX5200. The next upgrade will be the big one–probably a full-blown mega-highend DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), while my current machines will take on extra processing and sample hosting duties. My current main workstation isn’t all that shabby though–it’s a P4 2.8, 2 GB RAM, and almost a terabyte of internal and external hard drives.

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Recently while writing a custom module for Neverwinter Nights, I realized that although I love writing and being a storyteller, I really don’t enjoy writing for RPG’s. The amount of multi-dialogue path management one needs to do is just torturous. The more freedom you give the player, the less fun you have as a writer, because you are limited to providing a fulfilling experience for the player no matter what gender, race, class, alignment..etc the player chooses. When the main character can’t be locked down like that, writing becomes more of a chore than enjoyment. I would much prefer to write for adventure games, where the choices provided for the player are less limiting for the writer.

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Inspiration #2:
Love and Rockets (the underground comic book, not the band, which took its name from the comic book) - I discovered the Hernadez Brothers’ Love and Rockets from reading an interview in the early 90’s with Adam Hughes, a famous comic book artist. He cited Jaime Hernandez as an influence because Jaime is excellent at drawing natural looking figures, and is a master of spotting black (using lots of flat black shapes instead of lots of unnecessary detail). I gave Love and Rockets a shot because I thought Jaime’s artwork was great, but in the end, I got hooked because of the excellent writing (What’s not to love about mexican lebsian punk rockers?). I prefer Jaime’s writing more, because it’s not as dark and hopeless as Gibert’s writing, while still containing a lot of drama in that “slice of life” style (Gilbert’s art is also hard to look at for me–it’s very raw and to be honest, quite unattractive). The visual style of Jaime’s work definitely became a main influence in my own comic book work–anyone who’s seen my Enchanted series knows that. Of course there are other influences, but I’ll talk about them another time.

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Our little quest for the perfect automobile GPS has lead to a disappointing conclusion–none of the current models on the market fit all of our requirements. I returned that Magellan Roadmate 800 after owning it for two days, and I’ve been looking for another AIO (All-In-On) unit, but after much research and trying out the units at a few retail stores, I realized I might have to either wait for promising upcoming models to be released, or compromise and settle for something less than what we really want.

The current models that are strong contenders are the TomTom Go 910, and the Magellan Roadmate 860T (an updated version of the 800 we owned). The Garmin Nuvi 350 gets a lot of favorable reviews, but it falls flat on its face when it comes to sound quality.

The TomTom 910’s map doesn’t show all the names of streets around you, which is important to me because it gives me a good idea of my surroundings. I also wish it wasn’t so deep with the protruding back end (never thought I’d ever say that. Oh wait, we’re not talking about chicks. . ..)–you can’t put it in your pocket. Otherwise, I think its UI (User Interface), features, audio speakers, voices for text-to-speech, number of different voices..etc are all far superior to the Nuvi 350.

The Nuvi’s the most portable one without becoming too small to feel limiting, but I really didn’t like its UI, the way you input information, and the text-to-speech is just horrible–everytime it spoke, I felt like I was listening to Charlie Brown’s teacher. The audio speaker is just as bad–distortion at high volume and bad sound quality. I’ve heard cellphone speakers that sounded much better. The travel companion stuff is great, but I really have no need for it–at least not now.

The Roadmate 800 for the most part was quite nice–I almost didn’t want to return it. Although it’s bigger than the other two, it’s actually easier to slip into your coat pocket because it’s flatter than the TomTom 910. I think the features are great and has the best UI of the three, with nifty implementations of little things like smart spelling input, which makes it much faster to input information. The map also displays all the surrounding street names–great for those days when you just want to roam around. I liked it enough to almost want to just go ahead and get the 860T for the text-to-speech, but the two things holding me back are 1) I wish the battery could last longer (it only runs for roughly two hours), and 2) I wish the unit’s a bit smaller so it can go into a shirt pocket instead of a coat pocket. I also have no idea how the text-to-speech sounds on the Roadmates, since all the stores I went to didn’t have a single working model on display.

So at the moment we still haven’t found a perfect unit yet. I’m thinking maybe we should wait for the Magellan Roadmate 6000T to be released–but I have no idea if it’ll come with it’s own set of shortcomings.

Anyway, our current list of requirements to meet are:

01) Natural sounding Text-to-Speech that’s intelligible
02) Quality audio speaker(s) that won’t distort at high volume
03) Fast auto-rerouting if we take a wrong turn
04) Smart Detour with alternate routes to choose from (ideally more than one)
05) Easy to search POI (Points of Interest) that’s fairly updated and informative.
06) Portable size (fits in shirt pocket)
07) Long batter life
08) Detailed maps that show surrounding street names
09) Powerful receiver, or with option for external receiver on roof
10) Easy to read screen in all conditions

News:
I’ve been getting emails for years about my Melancholic Princess painting. Apparently, some person bored out of his mind decided to make up a urban legend around my painting and started passing it around. I’m pretty sure it started in China, as the earliest email I got about the urban legend was from China a few years ago. Recently, I’ve been getting emails from English-speaking people about it, which means this whole idiotic ordeal has reached the western hemisphere. This is an example of one of the links people are passing around in forums.

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Kitty Cat Diary updated:

After we settled down, I promise I’ll start shooting more “serious photography,” instead of keep on posting my casual “bad photography.”

Weblog:
This teenager in India has been emailing me nonstop everyday with tons of very basic questions about 2D and 3D, and I tried to help him with the time that I have. When I finally had to tell him that I’m too busy to cater to his every whim and wish, and pointed him to cgtalk.com for his future questions, he decided to call me names. It boggles my mind how ungrateful, rude, and selfish some people can be. When I was growing up, there was nothing like the internet available, but everyone learned anyway, because we were passionate, hardworking, and resourceful. Now, with this amazing learning tool called the internet, the overall IQ and motivation of young people seems to actually drop to alarming levels. Maybe back then the unmotivated and dim-witted ones just never had any chance, so no one noticed them anyway. Now they can jump online to annoy and terrorize others with their presence.

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Elena and I have been contemplating the idea of putting a GPS navigation system in our car. We have terrible sense of direction and get lost all the time, so a GPS system would save us a lot of wasted fuel from wandering around. Some models are really fancy, doing crazy things like language translation and millions of point of interest for visiting Europe. We just want a simple voice guided system with auto updated correction if we veer off the planned route, but it appears that’s only available in the higher end models–which always includes a lot of stuff we don’t need but will pay for anyway. Of course we could just go on relying on mapquest.com and printed maps, but dealing with them while driving is just such a pain, and often you have no place to pull over for a long stretch.