Currents of Time

Today is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry's and I have had delicious ice cream for free! (The only thing better than delicious ice cream is free delicious ice cream. This is a proven fact.)

I also walked over to where my mom works because the river there is running super fast and high (neither of us have ever seen it like that) and she wanted me to take pictures of it. (I teased her about that, since every year she says she wants to take her camera and, every day she works, take a picture of the river to track its changes over the course of the season, and every year, no matter how many times I remind her, she never actually does it.)


30 Days of Video Games

( Day 03 - A game that is underrated )

NOW TO THE STORE TO BUY GROCERIES SO I CAN MAKE REAL FOOD FOR DINNER.


EDIT:
HEY TRANSFORMERS TOY-PEOPLE you probably already know, but maybe not! A bunch of the Reveal the Shield and Generations figures are back in stock on Hasbro's site and have been that way for a few hours now! If you need Wheeljack, Scourge, Kup, or, uh... others (but not Windcharger, sadly ... well, now you all know which four I've been after I'd pick up Thundercracker, too, if I had the money...) and have been stressing over how hard it is to find these guys, go check it out! (Though note that the estimated shipping date is a ways off.)

This hasn't better be a joke, or I will scream in rage. (It was posted, what, yesterday? And I doubt SE would like their representative posting a joke like that on their official forum. BUT PARANOIA.)

FFXIV is getting auto-attack omg yesssssssss NO MORE 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 4 1 1 1 (WHY IS IT STILL ALIVE??) 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 'You cannot attack a KO'd target' (oops). I mean, I kinda like their set-up now (it does have some good ideas), but god, I really hate having to click EVERY TIME I want Rana to even just swing her sword.


So, yeah! I give XIV (and SE) a hard time 'cause, look, that was an embarrassingly bad launch, and it only got funnier and more embarrassing as the months went by. But they are doing a really good job of working to turn it around. I am so proud of you, SE. (For example: some of - I don't even know what the hell all the problems were - whatever they changed has allowed the game to run significantly better on my computer. I mean, no, this isn't a hardcore gaming machine, but wtf, it shouldn't have run as poorly as it did. People with hardcore gaming machines had troubles running it.) (They've been running surveys asking the player base what they want to see and in what order, and then they listen, which you'd think would be obviously, but this is SE we're talking about, man, they know what's best so stuff it.) (You can even navigate the menus now! Yay! ... yes, really. The menus were horrible on launch, almost unusable for some.) (Also, the love they've given XI since XIV flopped helped, too.) (... that said, if they suddenly announced they were going to start billing, I'd probably cancel my account, because it's still not good enough for me to pay them to play it.)


I'm almost done packing (should be working on the straggling bits, but, well... I'm tired of it), woohoo. But, 'cause I'm an idiot, earlier today I went to the game store (...I went to pick up the key, then I went to the bank, and then I got lost on the way back and magically found myself at GameStop) and bought more things to pack. Genius me r. (Someone else's post recently reminded me that I need to pay attention to DS game launches now, and then I wanted to go check it out, even though I'd already looked up the price online. And then, hey! They had a used copy of Birth By Sleep that included the cover art and booklet - and the product registration code, which was a surprise - and I've never even seen a used one, never even mind one with all its parts, since for some reason everyone else throws out everything but the game when they buy things for the PSP. I will probably never see another one! So I had to buy it. And then immediately pack it, since it's not like I can get to my PSP right now, anyway! Since it's packed, too.)

And while I was there waiting in line, two things! One, apparently there's another Silent Hill title (STARRING A PRISONER, whee, I'd say more but this is getting too long and it would mostly be WTF, whining, and fan-bitching, anyway) coming out at some point. The girl in front of me was reading the Upcoming Games! list and was like, what, another one? So then we whined a little about how the more recent ones haven't been any good. And then I found out the guy working there had also played FFXI and wanted to play FFXIV (and to get back to XI, but POL kept crashing when he tried to update, so I gave him some hints on how to get around it and a bit of a summary of both their current states). Kinda cool! Never met another SE MMO player (or, rather, met someone who played either and not because I'd talked them into it). (No, really, all the people I know who play/ed it are people I knew before it launched or people I met in-game. And I've only tripped - ie, met in a place that wasn't a FFXI/V-based community/forum - over one person online who played XI. I WAS EXCITED OKAY? ._.;)

AND WE ALL KNOW WHAT FEBRUARY MEANS! FUCK. MY. ANKLE. OMG, do you really have to start up the first of the month? It's earlier every year and adshfkjlg it HURTS and why can't anyone ever figure out why. I'll probably end up at the doctor's again by the end of the month, despite all past experiences proving it to be a waste of time and energy. WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH YOU, ANKLE AND FEBRUARY I WANT TO BE ABLE TO WALK AGAIN :(


Top Gear! I think we all saw this coming. I'm only surprised it took so long to turn up.


...MY ROOMMATE (who proclaims every year her hatred of cake mixes) IS EYING MY CUPCAKES (made from cake mix). Fortunately she did not ask for one. So I do not have to share. I am a greedy cupcake hoarder! CURSEEEESSSSSSS


Anyway, this is my life now:

( Helping brother with homework. )

My DS arrived today, buuuut since it was Mom who placed the order (I have no PayPal account), she had it sent to the house. Where I am not. And that Snowstorm of Doom is rolling through tonight and tomorrow (heh, every school district save one has already decided to call off tomorrow. Too bad they can't cancel my work, I don't wanna go out into what we're supposed to get), so it is unlikely she will be able to bring it by. But the game I ordered also arrived, and I had that sent directly to meeee. So, uh. That's something, at least!


Anyway, Final Fantasy VII has completely consumed my brain (the takeover was inevitable, I've been trying to avoid it since beating XIII, but even then it felt like a losing battle), and I am thinking the best way to solve it is to just replay the game already and possibly blather endlessly about it as I go.

Anyone wanna play along with me so we can blather about it together? :D? (We could arrange a time line of sorts, or something!)

Moving on.

HOURS OF ENTERTAINMENT

Using my real name that people call me (as opposed to my real full name which no one uses), I am #610, a Flying/Dark Cat-type. Height 12′10″, Weight 391.8 lbs. "It eats 6 kilograms of trash a day. It howls elegantly and is said to represent the lake."

(Answers change depending on whether or not you use capitalization, but you always get the same answer for the same name.)


Since we're on the subject, anyway, have a video. I cannot believe the time and effort it must have taken to re-skin all these creatures (all the summons and no small amount of monsters), oh, my gosh. They had serious dedication to this. XD


And speaking of Final Fantasy MMOs, Squeenix used the wrong "right" on their Rite of Passage certificate and I laugh at them. (Well, it's more like I snort in amusement, but same difference.)



And in entirely unrelated news, my mother finally made it home from California (she's been stuck out there due to Weather delaying flights and then my grandmother being stuck in the hospital, but that's a looong story, and it's probably not that interesting.)

Fun complaint from the FFXI playerbase that was going around for a while (maybe it still happens, but I don't see any of it, anymore) was that SquareEnix had mucked things up somehow and you were double-billed for your account. What a pain! So you call them to get it corrected and they refund the charges and next month rolls around and suddenly you find yourself banned for trying to skip payment. So you have to call SquareEnix again. That second part doesn't always happen, but it did seem to a few times. Hasn't happened to me (yet?).

Saw a thread yesterday, "You thought FFXI's double bills were bad?" and I was intrigued! So I clicked. It was another link! Apparently Warhammer Online had some kind of epic glitch and billed massive amounts of its players - regardless of whether or not they were due for billing - tens of times. People were charged in the thousands. And then hit with overdraft fees!

That is terrifying. I mean, yeah, of course you want to have more than the absolute minimum needed in your bank account if possible - even I always have enough to pay my bills and for any extra stuff that comes up. Food, or whatever. And I always make sure I have cash. And I have a credit card for emergencies. But I do not have thousands in my bank account! (People paying with credit cards got off a bit better since, of course, you do not pay that immediately and all.)

Players are being told to contact their banks to get it reversed (which, hey, whatever. You need to own your own mistakes, though, guys), banks aren't all wanting to remove the overdraft fee...

Obviously they're working to fix this, but wow. If something like that ever happened to me, that'd be it. I would be done. Account'd be canceled immediately. (Though, uh, apparently some people were billed despite having terminated their account months earlier.)

Additionally, this apparently isn't the first time this has happened! Though it's on a much larger scale this time. Geez...


Jumping to Transformers, this thread (CAN DEVVY EAT IT?!) entertains me more than it has any reasonable right to.

I never remembered to mention this, which is a shame, because it is funny. To me. I can't find it online so if anyone's interested, I'll try to take pictures of my copy later. ANYWAY. Last month's issue (wait, it says March on the back. What?) of GameInformer contained a flowchart that helped you determine whether or not you would die in a zombie apocalypse. IT IS THE BEST THING EVER and I think I am going to end up pulling the pages out and taping them together on the wall or something. I don't care about Duke Nukem, so not a big deal if I remove half of that article, and "Top 10 FPS Multiplayer Maps" isn't really anything I'll be bothered about missing, either. Hmm....

BUT YEAH. ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE FLOWCHART. AWESOME.

(I was reminded of this when, uh, April's issue arrived the other day. It contains a long article on Portal 2 that I didn't really read much of because, you know, spoilers. Apparently they've tweaked the ending of the original now. Not by much, though.)


Apparently there's a scifibigbang. (This is probably common knowledge but I wasn't aware, okay? I only ever see people talking about other Big Bang things) The stupid part of me is considering, if not signing up (NEVAH SIGNING UP! FOR ANYTHING run away! And also because then I'd have to post it. And then people might, you know, read it. And ... other scary things, besides), at least setting the dates in my head and trying to use that as a goal for Aniko's fic. Because, self. Wouldn't it be nice to make actual progress and finish the thing? SERIOUSLY, YOU STARTED PLOTTING FOR IT BACK IN MAY OF 2008 and have almost nothing to show for it (aside from three concepts in the scrap heap and ten million scenes you decided you didn't like and had to rewrite. And -10k sanity points, possibly). This is getting embarrassing.



THIS PARAGRAPH MOVED FROM A NOW-LOCKED ENTRY since it had nothing to do with why the entry was locked: Completely unrelated thing that amuses me: people naming their original characters the same thing as a well-known character! I mean, Transformers has, what, a million different characters? And some of them are pretty obscure (even if a search through the wiki will bring them up)! But one of the slightly more mainstream characters? That just amuses me. (In their defense, his [relatively] recent new name doesn't appear in the character menu because we all just use his original name. Still. It makes me giggle. XD)



...IN OTHER NEWS I STARTED WRITING ANOTHER OKAME-VERSE STORY hahahahargtrhnlgghkmfr

Perhaps the next one won't be.

Wheeljack was on this week’s Top Gear! Excellent. … Oh, come on, a red and green Lancia Stratos that isn’t really a Lancia Stratos? And then things go wrong (well, okay, that’s just the Top Gear norm)! Sure, it wasn’t a perfect match, but you thought it, too.

Did I miss anything while I was in exile? I am lazy and don’t feel like going back through a week-and-then-some’s entries right now.

Blahblahblah to follow.

( BLAHBLAHBLAH )

No one has replied here, and it makes me sad. Please let me know if you want a card or a gift or anything, because I am running out of time to find/make/send things!

Aniko beat Silent Hill last night! ... Well. Sort of. Technically I beat the final boss. Harder than it should have been. Think I mentioned before that she kept getting trounced by the monsters and so was healing a lot (when she wasn't dying. Haha, oh, Harry). If not, now you know. I forbid her from healing once we entered the last "area" of the game and told her to kill herself when she accidentally used the ampoule at one point. And she had to switch to a melee weapon again for a while when she ran out of handgun bullets again. Haha, it was kind of a mess, in a hilarious sort of way. HARRY HAS AN EMERGENCY HAMMER AND HE IS COMING FOR YOU. HAVE YOU SEEN A LITTLE GIRL AROUND HERE? It is in your better interest to answer.

Anyway, forcing a cessation of item usage didn't do much good because I started too late. Our state, going into the battle: one health drink, one first aid kit, one ampoule, and 50% health.

And the thing can practically kill you in one hit. It went awesomely. As I am sure you can imagine. She died a bunch of times before I offered to take a shot (...har har, pun not intended) at it. I got kind of lucky and took it out on my first attempt, and then, yay! No more Silent Hill! We got the Good+ ending because I made her do the Kaufmann sidequest and gave her the means with which to save Cybil (though was called a bitch for not telling her how to save Cybil, and actually that was how the ampoule got used the time I told her to die for it).


Next game will be Final Fantasy VIII, since she's only played VII. I have already assured her I will not make her play the scary RPG. My plan of attack is to go through the game until the end of the third disc and then swap to a file where I have all the extra GF, lots of nice spells, and am higher level than, what, 43 or something. Fun to play and all, but I can't imagine she'd greatly enjoy watching me grind everyone up and up and up and get all the weapon upgrades and die to Ultima half a million times (never even mind the task of getting down there in the first place) and fight a tonberry or twenty, et cetera. No idea when we'll be starting that, and then not sure what we'll do. I do have to replay Final Fantasy IX at some point, but who knows when we'll beat VIII. Silent Hill's a fairly short game, and that still took something like a month.


Am ridiculously tired. Blaming it on the fact that there's been snow, even though that's, you know, unrelated. Augh, not even halfway through October. We barely had summer! I'm not ready for it to be winter again.

With the rate at which I'm being reabsorbed by video gaming, this should be less surprising than it is, but turns out Crisis Core hit me a little harder than I thought (Dissidia is not helping), and I am having an impossible time resisting the urge to start a replay of Final Fantasy VII.

This becomes perhaps a bit more impressive if you know that - I shouldn't admit this, because it makes my near-memorization of the entire game that much more ridiculous - I gave up on my second play-through attempt after Mideel, when a power fluctuation caused the system to reset and I didn't have the willpower to get through the scenes again right after, and eventually just never got around to it. It's turned into some massive complex now where I feel guilty if I start the game at any other save point, so I haven't played FFVII at all in over... five, six years? But it's like an itch right now, and I think I could pick up from there or start completely fresh (or do both) if I wanted to.

My list of stuff that I haven't finished is already long, though, so, hoping to get around starting yet another game, I watched Advent Children. It seems to have worked for now.

I had a much longer entry here about the movie and why I love it and why I think it works, but I remembered right before hitting post that I am one of maybe three people who, along with having played the game, (1) has seen the movie and (2) actually likes it. (That is only as far as I can tell. Perhaps lots of people like it, but are all as afraid of the hatred that got flung around about it as I am.) So I thought better of it.

That was quite the wind-up for what eventually came down to nothing, wasn't it?

... It is too bad the fandom became so terrible.



In unrelated news, Supernatural starts up again tonight. Whoo. This is supposed to be the last season, isn't it? Not that I hate it and want it to end (I do watch it and all), but I hope they stick with their plan, instead of forcing it on to fade out in a slow, painful, downward spiral to oblivion via cancellation.

Highly enjoyable, though, so it doesn't matter. Sometimes it is nice to play a shorter game, anyway.


And now an announcement. Or two.

Video games: STOP MAKING ME CRY

Self: STOP PLAYING GAMES YOU KNOW - or at least suspect - FULL WELL WILL REDUCE YOU TO WEEPING WHAT IS, TO BE PERFECTLY HONEST, AN EMBARRASSING AMOUNT.


I AM ONLY JOKING OF COURSE PLEASE DO NOT STOP though actually if you could stop beating them right after you've cleaned your glasses, that'd be great. Tear-splatter is a bit annoying.


(Final Fantasy X and Shadow of the Colossus are still worse.)



My brother told me I should tackle Crisis Core next, but I am afraid that ending might OKAY WILL hurt, too. Even if I have known what it will be for, er. Years. Whenever I first played FFVII, anyway. So I am thinking perhaps not. Hello something happy, or at least moderately less sob-inducing.