Currents of Time

Hello! I have a PS3! AND SO I AM USING IT. I went out and bought the first two Uncharted games because a couple people recommended them to me and because buying them together new cost less than if I'd bought the first one used, liked it, and gone back to buy the second one (also used). (... It wasn't much of a difference, but, hey. Whatever.) And also because they are made by Naughty Dog, and I know they've made some other stuff I've liked in the past, sooo. Good place to start, I suppose. (So basically that day was, AND THEN ND ATE MY WALLET, since I also preordered the Jak and Daxter Collection.)

( I won't just hang around, like you'll show me where to go~ )

So, yeah. I'm going to go have Ecco-related nightmares now.

mmm, sleep.

I spent forty minutes around 5 o'clock this morning (well, Tuesday morning) in bed weeping in pain and unable to even think from the agony, while I waited for the painkillers to kick in. BUT THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH MY ANKLE, OH, NO, I GUESS THIS IS TOTALLY NORMAL. (It's still not sprained, either! YES, THANK YOU, MEDICAL WORLD, I'D NEVER HAVE FIGURED THAT ONE OUT ON MY OWN.)

Anyway, it's been a couple days, and I'm just brain-dumping a little more about 358/2 Days. (Because I am kind of embarrassed by the NOTHING that goes on in the ramble, I guess? Or something.)

( Cut for spoilers! )

Now for some slightly less depressing stuff? I GOT MY GLACEON! Yay, Ayarei! And my Leafeon(s! The female is Rana, the male was named Kodama at my brother's suggestion). I also finally managed to track down a Scyther. I've been stalking that damn bug-catching contest for like a week now, and never finding one, and eventually getting sick of restarting and just settling with a Pinsir or whatever. BUT NO MORE! Yaaaay. ALSO I've taken my Pokéwalker with me to work enough now that even when it has nothing in it, I still grab it. Except! Apparently if there's no Pokémon in it, one will join you?! I DID NOT KNOW THAT but there's a Furret in there now and there wasn't earlier, and, awwww ♥ it totally made my day yesterday. Which, uh, was kind of weird! I did not expect to be so touched by that, but I kept finding myself being all happy about it. So, um, whatever?

AND. THE BEST THING EVER! I FINALLY BEAT MAAT. AAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA THAT ONLY TOOK FOR EVER.

… @_@;


Now for some videos that made me laugh but which probably none of you will understand. The Greatest Boss in Gaming History! Not shown: the hundreds of times it kills you by pinning you against the wall. (PING PING PING PING PING PING PING PINGPINGPINGPINGPING) (And, for a strange twist, I actually appreciate most of the comments on these videos. XD) And the hardest video game jump ever. Thankfully not included: the godawful TINK sound that comes from striking into a wall. OH GOD THAT SOUND. And also I don't quite know what he means about the last three being easier / on a keyboard? Speed is not the biggest problem, the biggest problem is getting exactly the right angles at exactly the right time. By the way, you play that level twice. (The worst part of the jumping one is that I dicovered years later that there is a fucking shortcut? That I was just never able to find? Oh, god, did I scream when I found out about it. Actually, I'm not sure I'm over it yet.) (The first one is funnier. The second one is still a little too AAAAUGH for me.) (DO THOSE VIDEOS EXPLAIN A LOT ABOUT ME, especially re: my THING with dolphins? THEY SHOULD.)

Maybe I just don't get the point, but April Fool's Day always seems kind of ... dumb to me. (On the other hand, I'm one of those people who can keep track of the date. ... If not necessarily the day of the week, as evidenced by my thinking Tuesday was Wednesday and Wednesday was Saturday.) I am always surprised when people get all up and freaked out about news announcements and stuff on this date because, uh. Hello? It's April 1. Most of it is just obnoxious.

But I think what The Allspark has done to their layout is amazing (it was the entire site for a while, but now it's just the main page and the Transformers discussion forum, where there are a bunch of time travel threads (we're back in 1985!), which amuse me greatly.

Who's Unicron?, A Transformers convention would be SO COOL, We're getting more episodes!, and discussion of information from SECRET INSIDE SOURCES are ... well, most of them, really. But I think they're funny. (Also, there's an an entirely new [fake] subforum.)


Anyway, as often as fanficrants makes me run screaming (when I can be bothered to check it...), this entry is actually pretty awesome.


I went out walking and, as you do, ended up in a GameStop. They're having some big... sale thing. But I didn't want any of the new games they had for cheap and, anyway, trying to not spend money! Buuut they had Ōkami (I still need to finish that game, arg) for the Wii! Which I've been trying to sell my mother on for, uh ... since whenever she bought the Wii. Coming up on a year, now, if we aren't there already. And I finally succeeded! So I picked it up for her. And then they were giving out promocodes for this free, browser-based online RPG, so I checked that out. Kinda fun! I made it to level 4, but now I am out of Action Points until tomorrow, which is pretty lame.


THERE ARE TRILOBITES IN FFXI AND MY BROTHER KEEPS TRYING TO GIVE ME ONE. asvdghn.ln So far I've escaped the horror because my inventory's been full. At least my keyboard-mashing and wails of despair are still amusing to / a source of amusement for others?


Oh, man, spring is coming. Allergiiiiessss, whyyyyyyy. MAYBE LAST YEAR WAS A FLUKE AND THEY WON'T COME BACK?


Edit:
Oh, right. April. I didn't sign up, but for my own future reference, the current word count (untouched today thus far) in the "official" word doc is 5,381. I don't know how much of that's actually writing and how much is just me blathering about plot details in allcaps and shorthand, but that's the number I'm going with.

Also, YouTube's got some funky stuff going on in select videos (for today, anyway). It's kinda neat. Worth a look, anyway.

H -- For some reason, that lone letter was saved as a draft. No wonder I had no idea what would be restored when I clicked 'okay'...

I hope everyone had a nice day, regardless of whether you celebrate Christmas or not!

I appear to have survived the day without any horrible or violent incidents. Largely because my brother and mother have been running interference, but also apparently because the man has finally begun to understand that, yes, actually, some of this (possibly even most of) situation is his fault. Sure, I have to make it to almost 10 tomorrow morning, but most of the following hours will see one or both of us asleep, anyway. So I'm counting it as a success. (Five minutes into the future, the house explodes and takes half the planet with it.)

I'm pretending my mother was amused when I gave her Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. I don't think she'll play it (they haven't had the Wii on it, um. Months, anyway.) She did seem to actually like the rest of the stuff my brother and I came up with. (We didn't really get my father anything. He didn't want anything, in our defense. My brother's situation was fairly similar, so I think mom and dad are planning on just giving him some money to help pay for his new computer. Which is amazing, by the way. Everything looks incredible.)

I finally have my own Sega Dreamcast! ...sooo, now I can play the original Ecco: Defender of the Future again (YOU KNOW WHAT when they ported it, they changed basically nothing except the location of ONE vitalit and I drowned like a million times trying to find the stupid thing before giving up and progressing wit the level AND THEN THERE IT WAS NEAR THE END and I threw Ecco into the wall a few times because there's sometimes something cathartic about the sound of his nose colliding with the stone walls? Sometimes the noise just makes it worse, though. It depends on why you are hearing it...)? And Sonic Adventure, whoo! And... something called Illbleed, because my brother thought since I play Silent Hill that I might like it, or something.

Mom also bought both of us (er, my brother and I) phones. Still not proper phones, really - his actually does have a contract, and mine is another "pay as you go" because I never use mine... but apparently now I can call internationally for pretty much no extra charge, which is pretty cool, I guess. Because... I call international numbers... ever. But now we have to figure out how to transfer my number to the new phone (because I like my number. It's easy to remember).

... and wool socks. Lovely, lovely, warm wool socks. AND A SPIFFING HAT. And an Optimus Prime ornament with candy inside it, which amuses me, and I'm not entirely sure why.


I love that the hotel block sold out by almost 200% in under 24 hours. (My mother making a reservation is probably the best present I got, haha. Hopefully it holds...)

On ...Tuesday? I was poking around with my PSP edition of the Sega Genesis Collection, and instead of pressing Triangle or whatever it is to read the "museum" blurb about the game, I accidentally pressed the confirm button, instead. And then, because I am an idiot, I decided to not just restart, but kept going, and somehow found myself starting to play through Ecco: The Tides of Time. Oops. Vacation put a bit of a delay in it, but then I came back and had to finish. I will share with you.

MY LIFE AS ECCO
( Tides of Time edition. )

On the positive side, I now no longer desire to play Defender of the Future.

HERE IS THE LAST OF IT.

( Shadow of the Colossus PART 4 YAY )

And my very, very short list of deaths. Not very exciting.

( Death! )

So that is over and posted now.

HEY. Shadow of the Colossus is freakishly pretty and also just a good game in general, so I RECOMMEND IT. Just, you know. To conclude things.

(Nnnnot that anyone ever listens to my recommendations, because I suck at pimping things. But most of the time I recommend something, someone else comes along and recommends it and then people listen to them? SO PERHAPS I AM TRYING TO CONVINCE SOMEONE ELSE TO REC IT TO ALL OF YOU.)


UNLESS YOU'VE ALL PLAYED IT ALREADY IN WHICH CASE NEVER MIND I AM JUST BEING SLOW TO THE BANDWAGON AGAIN~

Picking up right where we left off last time.

( Shadow of the Colossus PART 2 YAY )

TO BE CONTINUED AGAIN TOMORROW.

Have I mentioned it? Did you know there was a time you could type "Valkurm" into Google and in the search results, it'd pop up, "Did you mean "HELL"?" Wish I'd saved a screenshot so badly.

Supernatural's 'Houses of the Holy' versus Jecca's memories of Doctor Who's 'Blink' .... FIGHT! I don't care that none of them were weeping. I'm just glad that whole scene in the room with the statues wasn't too long.

Also, I've discovered, entirely by accident, that I am able to take screencaps! Bwaha! I thought FRAPS only snapped from FFXI, but I opened my screenshots folder to sort them to my external hard drive and there were, somehow, Supernatural images in with them. How confusing! I'd seen FRAPS take shots from WinAMP, but that had only happened while I was playing, and I assumed it was because I have WinAMP set to always be on top. I have not been playing FFXI and watching Supernatural at the same time (man, that'd be hard), but I have been talking over IM, and I have, on occasion, used the \ key, which is set to save an image.

(A bit relatedly, and amusingly, my mother made extreme woe-faces at me this evening when I informed her I had decided to stop waiting for her to have time. I assured her I'd be willing to watch it with her, anyway.)


Unrelated, that Ecco is featured on TV Tropes under the video game section of Nightmare Fuel (search the page for Ecco, as it's quite a ways down) amuses me so much. Also is a bit of a relief, because IT'S ALL SO TRUUUEE. I swear I wasn't the one to add it. (Oh, it actually has its own page, too! Cool.)

That Silent Hill isn't really listed on that page also amuses me, though obviously for very different reasons.


Edit:
Re: 'Born Under a Bad Sign' at about the halfway point: Saaaaaam. *weeeeeeeep* Clearly it must not be what they're trying to make us think it is, but I WEEEEEEEEP.

(I mean, I am despairing for both of them, but considering the potential/problem here...)

With dolphins in my brain, it is hard to think, so I finally broke down and brought my PS2 back into my room and hooked it up, popped in Ecco: DoF and... almost went.

Then I remembered, you know, I bought a microphone a while back and my computer has recording software. And everyone comments on my habit of talking to video games, especially Ecco. So I took a minute to set everything up and then went.


I was very quiet up until the five minute mark, then made a couple comments... and then around the 8-9 minute mark, acknowledged to myself that the microphone was making me self-conscious.

Then not long after that, I reached the second pool and, okay, yeah, I, uh. Talk to myself and the game a lot. Though I don't make dolphin-esque noises as much as I'd been led to believe. (I do make a fair amount of just random noises, though.) This is kind of entertaining and kind of frightening, because I really have no recollection of saying most of this. (I remember all my comments to the dog, and I remember telling the Death Glyph that resurrects you to shut up a few times, but most of the rest of it? All new.)

Also, I hum/make noises along with the soundtrack a lot.

Jecca, driving to work. It's a beautiful day and there's not a cloud in the solid blue sky. The sun is somewhere overhead, completely out of her field of vision.


She thinks, genuinely confused: But I turned weather effects back on last night.



Then she nearly crashed the car in horror.




In FFXI, when you disable weather, you not only turn off actual weather - rain and snow and wind and the like - you turn off sky effects. No clouds, no stars at night. There's still a sun and a moon, but the sun's often directly overhead and not in your field of vision. I play with weather effects off most of the time, because some effects, especially dust storms, make my computer lag up. Lagging is not something I can afford, as timing is very important to a thief. I turn them on for short periods of time when I know I won't be in places with EXTREME WEATHER or if I'm not planning on partying. Reference shots of sky, 11 am (game time): weather on, weather off.

I cannot believe I actually thought that. I just... I've never done anything like that before, completely misplacing reality in such a manner. I am both mortified and appalled.