Wow. TDS is really branching out by sending their people around the world. Wonder what country they'll hit next...

(In case the link above doesn't work:  http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080806/nyw108.html?.v=101 )

Comments for Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Guest: Se. Chuck Schumer

You may or may not remember my last Dwarf Fortress post about Komanreg, my favorite fortress. It's late into the summer of 1054 now, and we'd had four goblin attacks without any injuries; our two finest and bravest warriors, the Hammerlord (or rather, hammerlady) Doren Rigothenshal Ednadadrilolon Nomes* and the Axelord Shem Kilrudmuzish Isteriklist Zat*, with the assistance of six other dwarven soldiers, had always successfully protected their fellows from the vicious savagery of marauding goblins.
*Dwarven warriors earn additional names for particularly dramatic acts of prowess. It's a gesture of respect.

Alas, the first sign of their latest strike, a particularly dishonorable sneak attack, was the death of one siege mechanic, setting up traps against their villainy. It was my fault that he was so far, too far, from the shelter of the fortress walls. And sadder yet, it was not even one of my new junior mechanics, freshly arrived from the distant dwarfhomes and too recent a pair of immigrants to have made any friends or endeared itself to me. Instead, it was one of my founding members, one of my two favorites, the friendly, easy-going, creative, altruistic, siege-engine-loving Tosid Lalturrigoth. ;_;

R.I.P., Tosid. *hand over heart* We of Komanreg will never forget you, or your loyal service to the wellfare of this great fortress. A new ballista will be erected in your memory, and when we use your masterwork mechanism we will do so with grateful pride.

Comments for Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Guest: Seth Rogen

Ganked from inactivism:

Name a series and I'll tell you the character(s) I would:
1. Bake cupcakes for:
2. Trust with the keys to my car:
3. Put thumbtacks on the chair thereof:
4. Have a crush on:
5. Pack up and leave if they moved next door:
6. Vote for President:
7. Pick as my partner in a buddy movie:
8. Pair up:
9. Vote off the island and into the volcano:
10. Wheedle into fixing my MP3 player:

Getting up on time despite staying up late only works when I set my alarm before I go to sleep. -_- Of course I didn't wake up until noon.

Comments for Monday, August 4, 2008
Guest: Dennis Hopper

My twenty-year-old cousin came around our place a week ago. He's very kind but extremely conservative, which made for some interesting discussions...

ME: I wanna get my cartilage pierced and dye my hair with streaks of blue and get a tattoo when I turn eighteen and learn how to ride a motorcycle! Oh, and I have a really filthy mouth.

COUSIN: Gee, [Nimoru], don't you want to be a bit more, you know, feminine?

ME: ...NO?

I'm really different from pretty much all the rest of my family. Everyone else is extremely conservative and frankly rather dull although pretty nice, while I...am on Livejournal at ten at night talking to people who love to kill fictional characters. Yeah.

Friend came back from her summer-long upstate vacation today, yay! Except only for a day. And I won't get to see her for another month. AND she has my only copy of Good Omens. ;_; I can't wait for summer to be over so I can freak out my classmates even more. xD

Saw Hellboy the first a few days ago and Glod it's really weird. I'd like to see the second one, though.

Have realized I'm getting taller and not as horrifically runty. Which kinda sucks because, well, I like being runty. xD I think kickboxing three times a week sorta helps, too...

I saw a dead thing two days ago. It was very dead. I think it was a woodchuck, actually. Or maybe some other Large Furry Creature.

I'm feeling unusually moody recently and now have the urge to kick something.

And, um, yeah. Totally pointless post is pointless.

So in between this afternoon's stretches of servitude vile (Mom has this weird thing about keeping the house clean), I spent some time writing up quick character-information blurbs on all the journals from my headspace. Except for Wizard, because he already has that Bio Of TL;DR. The important parts are the (kind of) detailed physical descriptions and the "in play" stuff, which is basically "feel free to hurt him :D" or "please do not maim" or "warning: godmodes" or variations on the above.

Astrolabe was particularly fun to describe for some reason. :D I love my giant robot dragon airship.

EDNA IS BACK. BACK AND FIXED.

Her memory's a little borked, but who cares?

EDNA IS FIXED. \o/ ALL HAIL MY DAD, RESTORER OF COMPUTERS.

Off to play Civilization now~!

Life update! I suppose I should do this once in a while.

Um.

I'm over that damned cold! (Obviously, or I could not have given platelets.) However, the combination of giving platelets two days after I got over a two-week cold made my body have a critical crash, and I've been sleeping 8-14 hours a night. Of the "I go to bed at midnight, and wake up anywhere from ten to noon" variety. Not the sort where I stay up all night and sleep all day, even! I need to stop it, and intend to do some kind of forced reset tonight, because it means I'm riding in the evenings, which is less than ideal for several reasons. No one else is usually out there, plus it's been storming a bit in the evenings, and that hasn't scuttled a ride yet but easily could soon. So, back to getting up in the morning for me!

I want Edna back. >: Dad hasn't even started on the fixes yet, so it's probably going to run over into this week; again, I won't be on much until she's fixed, and almost definitely not on messengers. (Jodie uses that browser-based thing, and I used it once, but I hated it and won't be using it again unless I really need to.) Actually, it's not my Internet addiction that's killing me half as much as this burning urge to play a strategy game. There are distressingly few strategy games for consoles. :/ I mean Civilization-style strategy, not Fire Emblem--sometimes you just want to win the game by becoming so culturally dominant that all their cities voluntarily switch sides, y'know? It's a good feeling.

Right now, I am kind of tearing through Mom's book collection. Sooner or later I need to pick up some Milton, in obedience to Dr. Bradshaw's orders, but I was hoping I could do that online, so I'm still holding out for Edna on that one.

So I was on Gamefaqs yesterday, because that jungle on Avnuenue is nearly impossible to navigate, holy crap. And while I was there, I figured I'd navigate on over to the Reviews section and see what kind of reviews it got. Maybe the reason I can't seem to find anyone else who's played Baten Kaitos, besides Thea, who got me into it, is that it wasn't well-reviewed anywhere!

...Incidentally, I was wrong. There were only two reviews lower than 7/10, and a lot of 9/10 and 10/10 reviews. Maybe it was just marketed really, really poorly? But that's not the point of this entry.

One of the reviews I read commented that Namco was making Baten Kaitos at the same time they were making Tales of Symphonia, and it really showed in the soundtrack. I hadn't really noticed the game's music before, besides feeling that the soundtrack seemed a little generic to me, but when I went back to playing I payed more attention and wow, the reviewer was right. :O There are a lot of similarities; when I gave a close listen I could tell it wasn't generic, like I'd thought, it was just really similar to a particular game I'd played before! In particular, I'd swear that the "Rest your wings" music in BK and the inn/sleeping music in ToS are the same song, but there are a lot of other parallels as well.

Also, guys? Savyna is smokin' hot.

Apologies to all on Flist who are being swamped by PPC Stuff because of me.

Okay, Savyna's pretty awesome. :3 It's like each new character you meet goes up in awesomeness, more or less. First Xelha, who is at least pretty, then Gibari, who is really cool, then Lyude, who fights with musical instruments, then Savyna, who is really badass.

...It's just too bad for him that poor Kalas is your starting character, I suppose. :/ Why did I pick this asshole as worthy of my Spirit Guardianship, again? He's improving a little, but not that fast!

Oh, Baten Kaitos, how I love your card-based battles. ♥ I just--I don't think I've ever run across another battle system that I've loved quite as much. Honest.

I still maintain that King Ladekahn looks like he came straight out of a 1990's shoujo manga. Not that he's much worse than all the others. I mean, it does grow on you (and Gibari is the kind of old-guy hot that I like in a lot of live-action actors but I feel is rarely reproduced properly in animation, Western or Japanese, so that is definitely a plus), but seriously, sometimes I pause just to wonder how much they paid the artist that did those headshots for when the characters speak. IT CLEARLY WAS NOT VERY MUCH. Except for Gibari's headshot.

...I need a Gibari icon. And, somehow, somewhere, an icon of Lyude fighting with musical instruments. I beat the latest boss with that "Concierto" combo card. My new favorite way to win boss fights, y/y?


[edit]Dear Gamefaqs: Why is your starred walkthrough the one where the writer seems to have no concept of how to reorganize character's decks? It's full of comments like this one: "Gibari is a big no-no for this fight, considering how he has a bunch of Wind Magnus." The answer to that is simple--reload his deck with Time Magnus! *headdesk* Okay, I actually reloaded his with healing Magnus and reloaded Xelha's with Time Magnus (and Lyude got to keep his Darkness-heavy deck because for some reason Time Magnus do, admittedly, seem to be the hardest to get my hands on), but the principle is the same.[/edit]


[edit2]Okay, Queen Coriella was quite pretty, and Emperor Whathisface was nicely creepy and well-drawn. That brings us up to three well-done speech portraits.

...This is not a good record, folks.[/edit2]

Comments for Thursday, July 31, 2008
Guest: Brian Williams(!!!!!) :D

So I gave platelets again today. And they tried to put my blood back into my right hand (they were having trouble finding the one at the elbow) and blew the vein. So now my right hand is all swollen and purplish-blue and cool-looking. :D

I'm typing one-handed. And for once glad for the touchpad, I can use it with either hand. Haven't hunted-and-pecked this much since the keyboarding class in high school. My arm is already tired. Huh.

But I only really need one hand to play Dwarf Fortress! \o/ I love my dwarvsies.

Comments for Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Guest: Ben Wattenberg