July 10, 2010

Team Fortress 2

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On nights like this, I won­der how I’m going to kill the time before it’s late enough to fall asleep, wor­ried that I’ll be bored on a Friday and con­se­quently faced with the fact that I’m so very alone. I was crav­ing some kind of human con­tact tonight, but spend­ing time with peo­ple takes too much energy nowa­days so I decided, instead, to play Team Fortress 2.

I pur­chased it on an impulse, but this was still three years after TF2 first came out. There’s a very good rea­son I avoided buy­ing it for so long: it’s the sequel to Team Fortress Classic, one of the games I was most addicted to in my life, and a huge time sink1. An entire day could go by with­out real­iz­ing it when I was play­ing TFC, and I pur­posely didn’t buy TF2 when Aaron was get­ting into it too; I knew I wouldn’t stop if I had friends encour­ag­ing the habit.

TF2

 

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  1. Also the same rea­son I haven’t tried World of Warcraft. [↑]
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August 21, 2008

Four Day Vacation

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I’m in Toronto right now, at John’s house. He has the cot­tage for his birth­day week­end, so I took two extra days off work to see him. It’s kind of strange how much I’ve been see­ing him lately. In the past, we’d go over a year with­out see­ing each other because he was in Windsor for law school and I was in Ottawa with­out a car. But now that he’s been called to the bar and I’ve obtained the Civic, things have worked out.

We plan on going to the Ontario Science Centre today — some­thing I’ve wanted to do for a while1 — then dri­ving up to the cot­tage tonight. We’ll spend two days at the cot­tage2, maybe take a day trip to another town, and drive back on Sunday. Aaron also called me yes­ter­day about his co-ed baby shower on Sunday, which i’m not sure if I’ll be attend­ing yet, since I’ll have dri­ven eight hours that day.

Sunsets and Audiobooks

The drive was absolutely amaz­ing. The weather was per­fectly cool, and the sun took its glo­ri­ous time set­ting over a few hours. I think the most sat­is­fy­ing part is get­ting to the sec­tion of high­way where the 417 splits to the 416, and one can stay in the left lane and accel­er­ate through the turn, leav­ing all the traf­fic behind.

I lis­tened to some audio CDs of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking on the way over. The con­cept is that our first reac­tions (made within a few sec­onds) are often intu­itively cor­rect, and that even after think­ing about some­thing for a long time, we end up going with our gut feel­ings any­way. We’re made to believe that the more impor­tant some­thing is, the longer we should take to make a deci­sion. I’m espe­cially guilty of this3. Wally lent them to me in an effort to help me act faster so I don’t miss any oppor­tu­ni­ties. Not sure if they’ll help me, but the way it delves into processes of the human psy­che is a very inter­est­ing lis­ten nonetheless.

Feeding Butterball

Left Dolly lots of food, and I’m hop­ing she doesn’t eat it all. The rea­son why I feed her by hand is because she doesn’t have any sense of how much to eat, and bal­loons up if not con­trolled. In either case, I expect a lot of poo in the lit­ter­box when I get back.

New Game

I bought John a copy of Assassin’s Creed for his birth­day, which thank­fully was on his list of games for which to watch. It was devel­oped by Ubisoft Montreal, the same stu­dio who made Prince of Persia, and plays very much the same way. An open-world con­cept with lots of stealth ele­ments. Certainly a game I could get into. We take turns play­ing, and it’s made me real­ize that I haven’t been play­ing much myself in the last few months.

A Sense of Overstimulation

Life has been some­what over­stim­u­lat­ing lately, and I can’t blame any­one but myself. After spend­ing a day shop­ping for house­wares with Julie last week­end, the house is a big mess, with things scat­tered over the coun­ters and floors. I haven’t even had a chance to write about the last time I came to Toronto. It seems like life is going faster than I can keep up. I’m just try­ing to enjoy it, espe­cially when the weather is this beautiful.

After all, life is for the liv­ing. This won’t last for­ever. I get to look for­ward to some time alone when every­thing is settled.

  1. I don’t think I’ve been since grade 4, so over 18 years ago. [↑]
  2. Last time I was there was two years ago [↑]
  3. John says that I tend to over ana­lyze things to the point of paral­y­sis. [↑]
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December 16, 2007

Christmas Wish-List ’07

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A look into my cur­rent tastes, updated for 2007. This list is some­what shorter than last years because the ones I haven’t checked off still apply, and I’ve been guilty of some spend­ing this month; The first two sea­sons of Robson Arms on DVD (which I des­per­ately waited two years for), sea­son six of Trailer Park Boys, my mit­tens, a RAZR 2 (the cell phone I’ve had for five years died), an elec­tric tooth­brush, and var­i­ous gifts.

Photography

  • Bogen / Manfrotto Background Support System 314 ($280) — To quickly set up dif­fer­ent coloured back­grounds in my pho­tog­ra­phy room.

    Bought it on sale, which was still $260.

  • Arca-Swiss Monoball Z1 Ballhead ($475) — My cur­rent tri­pod isn’t strong enough to hold most of my lenses in place, and the lock­ing mech­a­nism is extremely chintzy. Very frus­trat­ing when work­ing with dark shots. A ball­head would give me tremen­dous flexibility.
  • Gitzo GT3530LSV Mountaineer 6x Carbon Fiber Tripod Legs ($625) — Carbon fiber tub­ing makes for an extremely light and portable set of tri­pod legs. Packed with all the impor­tant lit­tle fea­tures like an anti-leg rota­tion sys­tem, the Gitzo leg lock­ing sys­tem, and remov­able rub­ber feet.

Furniture

  • Rubix Cube Ottoman ($129) — A black, two-toned square ottoman to go with my leather couch.

Housewares

  • Bodum Assam 2-Cup Tea Press ($25) — I have one of these at home, but it would be great to have one at work too, so I can make more than one cup of tea at a time.

    Julie bought me a Stokes gourmet Formosa tea infuser for Christmas 2008. A lit­tle cham­ber for loose leaves dan­gles from the top, as opposed to a press, which can cre­ate bit­ter­ness in tea.

  • Braun Impression WK 600 Kettle ($90) — A large ket­tle for my tea. Right now, I have to boil water in two cup inter­vals, which takes a while when guests are over.

    Andrew and Alex bought me a sim­i­lar model for my birth­day, and it’s SWEET.

  • Tingler Head Massager ($15) — On Jason’s rec­om­men­da­tion on my recent post about man­ual stim­u­la­tion. The reviews say that it helps put you to sleep, and that can never be a bad thing.

    Found a cheep one at Zone for five dol­lars! Doesn’t vibrate or any­thing but still pretty good. Next is find­ing some­one to use it on me.

Games

  • Orange Box ($50) — A nos­tal­gic trip back to the days of my favourite game ever: Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life. I hear the game­play has changed a lot, but I don’t care. We’ll prob­a­bly be play­ing this at the next LAN.
  • Odin Sphere ($40) — A side-scrolling fan­tasy RPG for the PS2 that I don’t want to miss.

Movies/Shows

  • JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure OVA ($52) — My favourite anime of all time: a com­bi­na­tion of fas­ci­nat­ing uni­verse, and very intel­li­gent action. I cur­rently have a copy in Japanese with French sub­ti­tles. While this helps me learn more French, I also don’t under­stand much the phrases.

    Found a copy of this for download.

  • Reno 911 sea­sons 2–5 ($90) — An hilar­i­ous, orig­i­nal look at law enforce­ment. Trailer Park Boys from the other side of the law. I have the first sea­son (thank you Music World for going out of busi­ness and giv­ing me 20% off), but I’d love to get the rest, along with the movie.

    Bought all of these on a lark. Did not regret the decision.

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December 1, 2006

Christmas Wish List ’06

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Thumbnail: Christmas cupcakes

You know it’s get­ting close to the hol­i­days when the fresh cup­cakes at the local bak­ery start hav­ing Christmas tree sprin­kles, so I thought I’d make a Christmas wish-list. Usually I have no prob­lem spend­ing money when I want some­thing, but I’ve been sav­ing my money as a goal lately. I’ve been good too, only spend­ing $120 on myself in November (two movies, a toque, and win­ter shoe spikes) as opposed to the $500+ I nor­mally do.

This isn’t a fan­tasy list by any means; these are prac­ti­cal things I even­tu­ally plan on buy­ing. I just can’t jus­tify get­ting them at this moment. Of course, I don’t actu­ally expect any of these things to show up under a tree on the 25th, since I don’t cel­e­brate Christmas, although this isn’t by choice.

Photography

  • Canon EOS 5D cam­era body ($3800) — The 5D sup­ports a very nice 12.8 megapix­els, but most impor­tantly, it has a full-frame sen­sor that would let me take full advan­tage of my wide-angle lenses.
  • Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens ($950) — For those extra-wide group shots, and styl­ish fish­eye distortion.

    Bought a used ver­sion of this great lens for roughly half the MSRP in early 2007.

  • Speedlite 580EX flash ($600) — I cur­rently have the Speedlite 420EX, which can used as an off-camera slave to be set off remotely. It takes a flash like the 580EX to act as a wire­less master.

    Bought this flash with an umbrella and light stand in the sum­mer of 2007. Extremely happy with the off-camera results.

  • Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX ($750) — Macro pho­tos have been espe­cially dif­fi­cult because of the exag­ger­ated cam­era shake with a 100mm lens. A nice macro flash would allow me to increase shut­ter speed, and get evenly lit shots.
  • Wacom Intuos 6x11” tablet ($450) — For edit­ing my pho­tos in Photoshop. I have one of these at work, and I can’t get over how much bet­ter a tablet is over a mouse.

    I was start­ing to get shoot­ing pains in my wrist and fore­arm, so I bought this tablet in early 2007 to ease the strain of mouse pos­ture. It has greatly helped, and on top of that, work­ing with brushes in Photoshop is a delight.

Games

  • Playstation 3 ($650) — I’m cur­rently wait­ing on this one, since none of the launch titles inter­est me, but it’s my next-generation con­sole of choice. I wanted the Wii for the longest time (back when it was code­named Revolution), but the lack of HD sup­port and dated hard­ware quickly turned me.
  • Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess ($60) — I can’t pass up the leg­endary last game in the Zelda series. It’s com­ing out in 12 days for the Gamecube, although I may see if I can bor­row Pat’s/Aaron’s/Trolley’s Wii to play it with the Remote and Nunchuk instead.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 ($60) — I’ve been wait­ing for this game ever since I fin­ished the orig­i­nal Neverwinter Nights over two years ago. My next pur­chase was either this or Company of Heroes, but John bought me the lat­ter for my birth­day and so we could play online together. It was as much of a gift for himself.

Furniture

  • Saga sofa ($1400) — Getting this in a nice dark-brown leather is one of the options with which I’d like to replace my old Ikea couch. I wasn’t par­tial to leather until I saw the unit in the store, but it boosts the price closer to $1500.

    Bought a Scotch couch in October 2007 from EQ3 in a black leather instead. Sold my old Ikea couch to help pay for this.

  • 2MORROW side table ($150) — To go with the sofa.

    Bought a frosted glass sidetable from the same series as my cof­fee table from Zone in late 2007 instead.

  • B2C 36″ stor­age ($550) — A place where I can store my books.
  • CONICK pen­dant light ($120) — I’d like to have this above my din­ing table. The light fix­ture I have now is a lit­tle dated.

    I bought a rail light fix­ture from Ikea instead. It’s bet­ter for direc­tional light, and much cheaper.

Appliances

  • Grind & Brew Thermal Automatic cof­feemaker ($150) — This baby grinds, brews, and can be set on an auto­matic timer to do both right before you wake up. Unfortunately, it’d be all decaf for me.
  • Ultra Power Series stand blender ($180) — For smooth­ies. Because lunch sand­whiches get bor­ing quickly.

    Got myself a nice Hamilton Beach Eclectrics Blender at the begin­ning of the year. Been mak­ing smooth­ies almost daily ever since.

TV Shows

  • Six Feet Under ($230 for the com­plete series) — I’ve been want­ing to watch these with Bronwen for a while now. I only got to the mid­dle of the sec­ond sea­son, but it really put the hook in me.
  • Trailer Park Boys ($150 for sea­sons 1–5) — I’ve seen up to sea­son 3, and every year, the Trailer Park Boys keep me guess­ing about how much mad­der things will be in Sunnyvale Trailer Park.

    Bought these up to the sixth sea­son in early 2007 to watch with Bronwen. She loved them. Still look­ing for the Christmas special.

  • Battlestar Galactica ($100 for sea­sons 1 & 2) — I only got as far as the first sea­son, and this is one of those shows that you can’t watch out of order because you’d be com­pletely lost.

Movies

  • Best In Show ($20) — This movie charmed me the first time I saw it. One of those movies you can watch at almost any time. Christopher Guest at his best.
  • Punch Drunk Love ($16) — P.T. Anderson’s sim­ple, beau­ti­ful love story.
  • Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle ($15) — Because every­thing about this movie reminds me of sum­mers with John.
  • Contact ($16) — The begin­ning of my fas­ci­na­tion with astron­omy. And Jodie Foster.

    Louise bought me this for Christmas 2006.

  • Boys n the Hood ($16) — A movie that touches me, even though it’s set in a world com­pletely removed from my own.
  • Waking Life ($10) — I wish I could explain what it is about this movie that draws me in so much. Maybe it’s the fact that every time I watch it, I under­stand some­thing new. Also the first movie I ever saw high. Triptastic.
  • The Breakfast Club ($18) — The ulti­mate teen angst movie. Also cur­rently the only movie to use the term “Neo-Maxi Zoom Dweebie”.
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October 1, 2005

Pita And Friend

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After the last house­warm­ing party, Pita stayed the night, hav­ing come all the way from Montreal, not want­ing to drive back after a few hours of drink­ing. I asked him to stay on Sunday, and we ended up play­ing all the old Gamecube games that we used to play and mas­ter, back when we lived together. We never had the chance to do this since he moved to Taiwan and back to Canada over two years ago, so it was quite a rem­i­nis­cent experience.

Discovering I had a free week­end, I invited him over a lit­tle while ago for two days of pure gam­ing. The invi­ta­tion was extended to his room­mate, after Pita said that I should meet her, being a hard­core gam­ing chick who appar­ently can kick his ass in Soul Calibur 2. I have yet to observe this ass-kicking chick phe­nom­e­non for myself, and unfor­tu­nately, I haven’t had any time to prac­tice with Kilik or Raphael, so I’m pre­pared to get my ass handed to me. I’m hop­ing to make it up in Super Smash Brothers Melee.

This is the last week­end of fun before I start to get seri­ous about work (aside from a LAN party I have planned for the first week of November). I decided not to take the job at the book­store, and put my full focus on a web solu­tions busi­ness that I reg­is­tered this week.

They should be here any minute.

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March 12, 2005

Books, Games, TV, Movies

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I haven’t been able to get into any­thing in the last lit­tle while. Keeping myself occu­pied has been dif­fi­cult. There are dis­trac­tions every­where, and I don’t think this will end until I move.

I’d really like to get into a book, but I’m never in the mood for what I have avail­able. I’ve decided to take a break from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is why the Zarathustra ses­sions are on hold. I zeal­ously read it when I was search­ing for a greater mean­ing to the prob­lems I was going through at the time, but now I’d pre­fer to read some­thing that’s eas­ier to get through. I still have my copy of Doctor Zhivago that Christie gave me, but I would need to be in a cer­tain cul­tural mood (i.e. Russian) to enjoy it, and I’ve read enough Russian lit­er­a­ture in the last five years to keep me sat­is­fied for the next lit­tle while. I’d like to start Moby Dick again (and pos­si­bly even fin­ish it this time), but I want to be a lit­tle more set­tled in my life before I try read­ing such an epic again. I’d try to fin­ish the Story Of O, but I gen­er­ally try to stay away from hard­core erotic lit­er­a­ture when I’m on the bus or before I go to sleep. I’m not in the mood for sci-fi right now, which is too bad, because John got me a copy of The Butlerian Jihad a few years ago at Christmas, one of the only thought­ful gifts I’ve ever recieved from him. After read­ing Tigana I can’t get into any other fan­tasy books, because they all seem shal­low and cheesy in com­par­i­son. I’m in the mood for some­thing mod­ern, so maybe I’ll go to Chapters and pick up a copy of The Stone Diaries.

There aren’t any decent games to get into at the moment. I don’t com­pletely agree with the new match­mak­ing poli­cies intro­duced in the 1.17 patch of Frozen Throne, so I don’t play on battle.net any­more. Usually it’ll be a tower map against John, or a big free-for-all with Trolley and Aaron, but noth­ing com­pared to how addicted I was to Starcraft or TFC. I also know bet­ter than to get into some­thing like World Of Warcraft if I want to retain any sem­blance of an actual life. It’s tragic to not be able to play what could eas­ily be one of the most sig­nif­i­cant games of the next decade, but I’m not will­ing to take that risk.

There isn’t any TV I can get into lately either. I’m wait­ing for the fourth sea­son of Trailer Park Boys to come out on DVD. I’ve watched the first sea­sons of Arrested Development and Clone High over and over again. I’m wait­ing for Trolley to recieve the first three sea­sons of Six Feet Under to come in through Zip.ca before watch­ing it. I got half-way through the sec­ond sea­son with Louise, but it started to get point­lessly depress­ing. Maybe this is just in con­trast with shows like Trailer Park Boys and Arrested Development, where peo­ple who are placed in the worst sit­u­a­tions still man­age to keep their chins up and their hopes high.

The only thing that has been able to keep me occu­pied is music, which has been com­ing in at a reg­u­lar pace. After hear­ing Cochise by Audioslave, I wasn’t too impressed with what has become the after­math of both Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine breakups. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I’ve always been on the Nirvana side of the Cobain vs. Cornell debate. Some may think that grunge died with the dis­so­lu­tion of Soundgarden, but Nirvana fuck­ing started it all, mock Pixies band or not. In any case, my first impres­sion of Audioslave’s sound was that it was flat and repet­i­tive. What else can be expected from a bassist known for mim­ic­k­ing the main gui­tar riff in flag­ship songs like Bulls On Parade and People Of The Sun? I had been lis­ten­ing to Audioslave’s Shadow Of The Sun from the Collateral sound­track for two weeks now, but it was only two days ago that it really hit me. And yet I’ve been going through so much music lately, that the song becomes as sig­nif­i­cant as any another I’ve decided to keep.

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November 21, 2004

Assorted Daily Life

2

So yeah.

Got my hair bleached blonde. I’ve always wanted very pale blonde hair, but mid­tone is about as far as it goes.

Trolley, Aaron, and wheaties got me Half-Life 2 for my birth­day. I didn’t have a chance to really play it until this week­end, but I decided to play through Half-Life: Source first, because it was four years five years since I last fin­ished it, and going through the game again would help me appre­ci­ate all the lit­tle details being put into the sequel. The odd thing is that I remem­ber tak­ing weeks to play it through, whereas I started play­ing HL:S Friday, played a bit last night, and am almost done now. It’s nice to be able to sit and play through a game, tak­ing my time, not hav­ing to worry about classes, or assign­ments, or tests, etc. This makes me real­ize that I haven’t really got­ten into a game like this since I fin­ished university.

Finally get to go for some pho with Loo today. We haven’t been almost two weeks.

Aaron bought me a quadruple/quadruple from Timmies yes­ter­day, and it was good. I’ve been try­ing to cut down on sugar and creme for years now, so four of each being so sati­at­ing (almost candy-like) is very scary.

I took my first puff from a cig­a­rette yes­ter­day. It was a Matinee Extra Mild, and it wasn’t pleas­ant. I was stoned, and the weed tasted way better.

The Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex tracks that Number18 sent me are amaz­ing. She rules.

Been busy as fuck.

That’s all. I’m going back to sleep.

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November 15, 2004

The Half-Life 2 Hype

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I won­der if any­one under­stands how much the release of HL 2 means to me. I won­der if any­one can under­stand how emo­tional I get just see­ing the con­cept art. The first Half-Life defined more than a year of my life, the way decades have defined phases for pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. Half-Life was my favourite game of all time, not even sec­ond to Chrono Trigger. It was an expe­ri­ence, a jour­ney, not just a game, and the sequel is being released tomorrow.

I for­mat­ted my machine yes­ter­day (some­thing I haven’t done in over a year, even though I used to every quar­ter before the release of XP), to clean up my sys­tem in prepa­ra­tion. I’m hop­ing I’ll be able to run it on a decent graph­ics set­ting; my video card is a lit­tle dated now, but it’s still a DirectX 9 gen­er­a­tion ATI Radeon.

I can’t wait. The entire idea that some­thing I’ve been wait­ing more than four years for will be released tomor­row hasn’t quite set in my head yet.

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July 17, 2004

Soul Calibur 2

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I was on gam­ing hia­tus for a few months (my longest yet), but now I’m back into the old swing of things with Soul Calibur 2. I didn’t play much of it before because I didn’t know any­one else who played it, but Aaron and Jessie have been addicted since the begin­ning of the month. Now I actu­ally feel like I can invest some time into train­ing a char­ac­ter and learn­ing their fight­ing dynam­ics. The game is so deep and involved that I can prac­tice for weeks and weeks and still be con­sid­ered a begin­ner. I mean, Virtual Fighter 4 had a pretty involved sys­tem, but SC2 extends past the “basic” guard>attack>throw>guard with added sidestep>vertical attack>horizontal attack>sidestep, and mid-guard>high/mid attack and low-guard>low/high attack, not to men­tion the options that open up with soul charg­ing and unblockables.

The prob­lem is that SC2 has so many cool char­ac­ters that I want to use. There’s some­thing about using a char­ac­ter that matches the per­son­al­ity. It’s like a pro­jec­tion of the self in a fan­tasy world. Whenever I do RPGs, I usu­ally cre­ate a char­ac­ter that’s like me (although with height mod­i­fier +6 when the option is there). That’s why I never use the “evil” char­ac­ters in fight­ing games.

I started SC2 with Kilik since he had the most rec­og­niz­able tra­di­tional Shaolin fight­ing style (my favourite), although Xianghua’s and Yunsung’s moves have fairly obvi­ous Chinese roots as well. Kilik ended up being too bor­ing for me (no per­son­al­ity, pre­dictable moves), so I switched to Yoshimitsu, cause he’s really cool and sneaky, but his moves ended up being too awk­ward. I real­ize that this is how Yoshimitsu is sup­posed to be played (with off-timing bal­ance), but the char­ac­ter didn’t click for me.

Right now I’m using Raphael, who hap­pens to be the most inter­est­ing char­ac­ter move-wise, but also the biggest pansy out of all of them. He can go in and out of stances eas­ily, with sev­eral attack­ing options in each stance, mak­ing him an offen­sive, but difficult-to-master, char­ac­ter. He has amaz­ingly vari­able com­bos, and in between hits, his foil guard-impacts, just like a fencer. He’s unlike any other char­ac­ter in the game, and I have to applaud Namco for com­ing up with the idea and mak­ing him so realistic.

My ner­dy­ness is com­ing back. The same ner­dy­ness that used to say, “Why make out with you when I could be play­ing a game?”.

On a side note, I’m also back into big break­fasts with bacon, sausages, and milk tea on the week­ends. My arter­ies hate them, but I for­give them and love them all the same.

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June 11, 2004

Dinner With Sonas

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I had the chance to hang out with Sonas on Wednesday night. He brought over some wine and cig­ars just as a chance to relax. He grad­u­ated last month and is look­ing for a job before he looks for a law school. The thing is, he’s not tied down by any­thing at all. His girl­friend is in Seattle, fin­ished her stud­ies and work­ing as a phar­ma­cist, but he has no plans on mov­ing there. He’s per­fectly fine with mov­ing back home, out west, or even over­seas to find a job. I have to admire that kind of free­dom, espe­cially since he’s in a rela­tion­ship. There’s a trust there that really goes beyond most of the other rela­tion­ships that I know. We ended up order­ing in and hang­ing out on the bal­cony. I can’t relate to him very well because I don’t know much about him, but I can def­i­nitely say that he’s an easy per­son for me to talk to, which is a rar­ity in itself.

Yesterday I had the chance to hang out with Pat, and just kick back with some Soul Calibur II. We were pretty evenly matched, although I had the upper hand because I actu­ally own the game and have a steady char­ac­ter. We’d really learn each oth­ers moves, so it ended up being a game of reflexes and feints, instead of but­ton mash­ing like it is against most peo­ple. He’s the only per­son I know who used to be a hard­core gamer the way I used to be, so it was great to be able to talk about fighter styles and relate on that level.

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March 16, 2004

The Only Rabbits Foot

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I’m gen­er­ally not a super­sti­tious per­son but I have this one super­sti­tion when I’m lis­ten­ing to my iPod. I always have my songs on ran­dom, and if two songs ever play in a row that were meant to be played in a row (i.e. in order on an album or if the sec­ond song devel­ops the motifs from the first) then I think I’ll have a good day.

I think it started when I used to play lad­der matches in WC3 with Jacky. She always lis­tened to music when she was play­ing, so she had her 8000 songs queued up. If Sigur Rós ever came up, she would know that we’d win. I don’t think she was ever wrong.

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February 27, 2004

As Long As I Pass

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I can’t study with­out rewards. This may pos­si­bly be the fault of my par­ents, telling me from an early age that I’d earn some­thing for every spelling test I got per­fect. I told some of my class­mates at the time, who would earn noth­ing but the pal­try praise of their par­ents, and they rather pre­co­ciously told me that such a sys­tem was unhealthy. Of course, I was too young to under­stand such things at the time, and now I find myself unable to be moti­vated to study with­out think­ing that I’ll get to do some­thing fun as a break.

I’ve been try­ing to study for my account­ing mid-term all week, and couldn’t actu­ally get started until I knew that there was some­thing enter­tain­ing I could do. At first it was play­ing Chrono Cross, but my emu­la­tor was just too buggy. Then it was try­ing to make a new back­ground, but it ended up being too much think­ing for a break. I moved onto Uru, and I’ve been play­ing it ever since. I have to admit that there are worlds that com­pletely take my breath away. It’s one of the few games that really make me appre­ci­ate a high-end GPU. I wish I could be play­ing with Trolley, but I rather like being able to solve the puz­zles by myself. I’m always, always, ALWAYS the slow­est one in fig­ur­ing things out, and never the one who gets the answer if I’m play­ing in a group.

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January 13, 2004

Holidays Season Games

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One of the “prob­lems” around the hol­i­days sea­son is the flood of qual­ity games that come out. Publishers are always vying for that Christmas mar­ket, and set release dates so that peo­ple have ample time to wrap up a game and put it under the tree. I’m cur­rently addicted to Tony Hawk Underground for the GBA. I’ve been play­ing some Prince of Persia, although with­out a con­troller it’s very frus­trat­ing. I can com­pletely under­stand why so many peo­ple have such good things to say about it, but I’m think­ing that it’s only playable as a con­sole game. There’s also Uru, which I still have to play and fin­ish with Trolley. Then there’s Double Dash for the GC I haven’t tried yet, and Wind Waker I haven’t fin­ished yet.

Good thing I already fin­ished Call of Duty before Christmas, and the Thief III and Half-Life 2 release dates have been pushed back or there would be no way I’d be moti­vated enough for class.

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January 11, 2004

A Few Moments Of Insomnia

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It’s seven in the morn­ing, and the sun still hasn’t come out yet. I’m com­pletely exhausted. I’m going to try to take a six hour nap, and then stay awake until night to put my sys­tem back on track. Nick says he’s going to go to sleep now and wake up at noon. I say, “Hahahhhahah good luck buddy”. I’m too tired to go to prac­tice (I’d be scared of falling asleep on the bus ride there), so I’m just going to spend the day fight­ing sleep. Maybe I’ll watch Midway, Ghandi, or Seven Samurai to keep me busy. Maybe I’ll install Sands of Time so I can stay awake. Gaming is the only thing that I can do with­out falling asleep. After all, I’m still awake at this hour.

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November 19, 2003

A Birthday Present

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Dina bought me a plat­inum GBA SP! I can’t believe it; I actu­ally gasped when I fig­ured out what it was. It’s been a pretty rough day, so this was a really nice sur­prise. I can bring it with me on my trip to Hong Kong so I can play on the plane. Now I want to buy so many games, like the sequel to Paper Mario on N64, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Fire Emblem, Tony Hawk’s Underground, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. There are actu­ally more I would buy if I won the lot­tery, but for now, I can down­load a few and upload them to my flash car­tridge with the linker.

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