(I don’t expect anyone else to understand this or even care about it, but I’m posting it to make it both public and official. Which means that people can also nag me about it if I don’t go through with it. Anyway…)
As of August 31st, 2007, the Game and Anime Reclamation List Project is suspended indefinitely. No further reclamation of previously lost items will be permitted until the sooner of (a private goal is met) or January 1, 2008. This suspension may be extended at January 1 as well if circumstances require it.
A special moratorium on all new media purchases has been declared until the Reclamation List Project is resumed. No new purchases of anime, games, movies, or CDs (including iTunes purchases) may be made until the Game and Anime Reclamation List Project is resumed and advanced to a completion rate of no less than 40% (10 items reclaimed after resumption).
Gifts and awards are exempted from the restriction, but do not lessen the burden of reclamation (ie regardless of ‘accidental’ progress made on the Reclamation List during the suspension, I must still reclaim 10 items after the sanction is lifted in order to begin purchasing new items).
Today is a very good day; so far I’ve accomplished one or more of my major goals, so things are just peachy. I’m waiting to get the results of that, so it’s just going to be a little while longer before I can give the good news to everyone (though at least two of you already know what that news is, so no drinking for you, Pez). But soon.
I’m going into this weekend, then, feeling very charged. I have a huge amount of energy for no apparent reason, and I think I’m going to be able to get quite a bit done as time goes on. I really want to get back into writing Metal Rogue, but time’s coming up for me to start planning the ‘08 NaNo (you know, the one I actually intend to do this year).
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. I’m likely to actually waste the entire weekend playing through Luminous Arc, but meh, we all do what we can. Catch you folks tomorrow.
This is one of the things I’d said was coming up earlier this week; if you ever wondered just what it is I carry around with me all the time, LifeHacker posted my loadout. I don’t actually have a spiffy name for the whole deal; some folks go with “go bag”, others call it the “urban assault pack”. I just call it “my bag” and be done with it. (Confidentially, I’m surprised they posted mine– I would have thought for sure that my gear was completely uninteresting, though I bet the ’sewing stuff onto the bag’ aspect really sold it.) The ironic part about the “current reading material” is that I took the picture at 6:30p Friday, and I no longer needed the Pokedex with me as of 6a Monday (having completed LGrn). The real test of the bag’s portability, actually, is coming up in a few weeks… but I’ll wait to give you guys that news. Anyway.
I alluded there to the ‘game organization system condensed novel’… maybe one of these days I’ll actually get around to, y’know, writing that. The short short short version is: Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you playing Pez’s drinking game, you get two drinks today. That’s all.
Anyway, there are some things I can talk about. The first, and probably most geeky and consumer-whorish, is that I managed to reclaim a copy of Final Fantasy VII last night. I’d had to sacrifice the game back in late 2004 or early 2005, figuring I could easily get it back; it was, after all, all over the PS1 used shelves back then. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t. And then EB and GameStop stopped carrying PS1 titles, and the price shot up to the high $90 range after Dirge of Cerberus came out. Well, the prices have settled down– snagged a near-perfect, non-GH version for $35. I even played a little bit of it last night; just through the first mission and the dialogue establishing that Cloud’s an ass. I got a little nostalgic for the whole affair; ultimately, though, I’m probably not going to go through the game again until my current backlog clears out.
The biggest setback came with regards to Luminous Arc. Yeah, I’d said earlier that the game seemed easy; I was, well, dead wrong. Either I had forgotten a lot about tactical combat in the intervening ten days or the difficulty just jumped up to, like, thirty times the normal. Anyway, I have to admit that I still like the premise and the story (and the writing and line delivery… and I’m not just saying that because I’m biased, it really is good), but there will be grinding. Oh, yes, there will be grinding.
Finally, in a very strange bit of news that I’m sure most of you will likely not care about, I tried a new energy drink this morning: Full Throttle Bad Mother. Its green can and thorn-entwined logo imply a connection to nature; this indeed is true, as it tastes bad enough to make me commune it, and the rest of my stomach’s contents, with the soil almost immediately after drinking it. I did manage to choke it down, though, and thus it is merely vile instead of atrocious. Right, I know better now– don’t f%$# with Mother Nature.
….there just are no words for this one, folks. Incidentally, I learned an interesting lesson last night– don’t be lazy; laziness only leads to me being even more tired later on. I’d rather not explain that one…
Some folks may have noticed some oddness with the last post, and the front page in general. I’ve been doing some tinkering, but things should be stable now. I did add the neato little “reading” thingy up there, so… yeah.
I lied; I still haven’t had any time to get into Luminous Arc, and I likely won’t until tomorrow night, at which point I’ll be either ignoring it further or playing Wild ARMs 5. Yeah. Anyway, today’s another GTD spiel; this time about a software tool I re-discovered just recently.
I first got into the whole “Getting Things Done” and productivity kick after getting linked to ThinkingRock way back in March. At that point, the program had entered a bit of a stalled stretch as a new version was being prepared; of course, after I remembered why I quit using iGTD in the first place (crappy reports and very little capabilities beyond what was there– seriously, about the only thing iGTD has going for it is the Quicksilver bits) I decided to give the pseudo-beta version of TR 2.0 a shot. So far, I am quite impressed.
ThinkingRock is designed with the book-canon GTD workflow in mind; it has you collect your thoughts, then process them, and then you can see your next actions at a glance. The 2.0 version adds “criteria” onto the action descriptors such as “Time”, “Priority”, and “Energy”. (David Allen, author of GTD, uses that last one as a measure of the amount of effort needed to accomplish the action; I repurposed it into tasks which are “foreground”, meaning they require most of my attention, like writing a chapter, or “background”, which means they are mostly automated but still require an occasional check-in, like laundry.) I’d like the option to add more criteria, but for now it’s still good (with sufficient tweaking, which actually is what GTD is about).
While I didn’t ever use it previously, ThinkingRock also has a much nicer printing setup than iGTD. TR generates PDF report files which can then be viewed in Preview or printed. These reports look snazzier and even have support for the new-to-me-yet-extremely-nifty PocketMod page layout. It’s far and away an improvement over iGTD’s crude “print out a snapshot of the ‘actions’ pane without regard for page width or visibility”.
It was with some amount of satisfaction that I was able to get my massive mental to-do list trimmed down from “a lot” to, currently, eight items that are easily manageable. Two of those I can take care of tonight; beyond that, I have a plan. I can’t attribute this sudden burst of foresight to ThinkingRock or to iGTD, or even to GTD itself; it was simply a matter of taking what I already knew and just sitting down and doing it. I knew most of the GTD stuff, I knew that I needed to just sit back and prioritize; but I just let it pile up and pile up until I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. That, of course, changes now.
Anyway, like I said, tonight I’m kind of busy, so we’ll probably have Bailout tomorrow. If I’m smart, I’ll be able to clear the decks tomorrow night so I can sit down and enjoy Luminous Arc from the beginning (I was thinking of just continuing the game I started, what, two weeks ago?, but that would be a Bad Thing). Catch you folks later.
The Nyko Classic Controller Grip (street price $10) is a fairly simple concept; it is two pieces of plastic which allow a Wiimote to be connected in a fairly solid manner to the standard Nintendo Classic Controller, for use with, say, Virtual Console games. Whereas Nintendo’s (currently hypothetical) offering is likely just to be a straight-up connector, however, Nyko adds small DualShock-style “grips” to the controller. Having just put in twenty minutes with the device, I’m really kind of ambivalent. On the one hand, yes, it is a good concept and it serves its intended purpose without interfering too much with the standard Wiimote operation (the 1 and 2 buttons are inaccessible, and the Wiimote’s own -, +, and Home buttons are tricky to reach, but those last three are replicated on the Classic anyway). On the other hand, I’m starting to rethink the idea of the controller cradle; the Wiimote with batteries is somewhat heavier than one would expect while playing classic games. Put another way, the Classic Controller was just the right weight; adding the Wiimote weight onto that was probably not the best idea. The grips added don’t add to or detract from the controller, so I’ll just leave those be. What bugs me, though, is the relative difficulty of the connection process and winding the cord. I don’t really like winding the cord too tightly, but one practically has to in order to get it to wind properly without loosening to the point of distraction. Of the twenty minutes I spent, five were just putting the damn thing together. That was about three and a half minutes too long. To be fair, though, if you need to extricate the Wiimote (say, for Wii Sports), it’s a simple matter of unconnecting the cord and sliding the Wiimote out; the wrapping is attached to the controller cradle itself, so no re-winding is required. I would really only recommend this if you for some reason don’t like keeping the Wiimote in your lap or in a pocket while playing other games; beyond that, I’d stay away from this. I do sort of regret purchasing it, but it’s not a total loss.
Did some changes to my personal workflow this morning; nothing that would affect the site at all, not yet anyway, but just felt like getting my organization-geek on. Most of this entry is going to be about individual stuff, so if you’re expecting games and anime, this one might be worth skipping.
I freely admit that I often carry way too much stuff in my pockets; this has always been something of a concern for me, as I tend to like having all my stuff with me in the event of a random crisis that would somehow be alleviated by the use of my (devoid of credits) Splash Lagoon arcade card from Erie. In light of this, I found a slimmer wallet/money clip and have put that to use. I still have too much stuff in that, but fewer ‘just in case’ items. Actually, the biggest waster of space in the wallet now is the game and anime list, or rather it would have been if I had not just now decided to store that in the backpack. Now the only thing in my pockets at any given time are my mini-wallet and my voice recorder. I may go back to carrying a cheap pen once in a while, too, but for now that’s all I need at a moment’s notice. I’m kind of getting ahead of myself… I’ll detail the physical organizations soon enough. Maybe in a few days.
The biggest non-physical reorganization came through my Google Reader setup. I’ve been big on using RSS for a while now, and with GReader things just seem to click. The problem, then, becomes content; I tend to get way too upset by, well, most of the ‘front-page’ stories on Digg. I mentioned back in February that I was reading Digg and Slashdot through RSS only, and for a while that worked pretty well. I dumped Digg from my feed list during the whole HD-DVD key ‘revolt’, but put it back a few weeks after the crapflood had ended. Problem is, though, the front page stories are getting increasingly bad. Not because of the politics involved– I honestly could not give two craps about the election right now, nor do I particularly care about (insert conspiracy theory XYZ here, preferably blaming the current administration). I want tech news. So, I pulled the frontpage feed off and replaced it with the Apple and gaming feeds. Those seem to be quite adequate for my purposes.
I also added a few other prominent tech blogs to the feed conglomerate; specifically Engadget and Macworld. Moreover, though, I’ve decided to actually call attention to the stories that I read and find interesting. It’s not pretty right now, and it’s still in its infancy, but as I mark stories they’ll show up there. I’m tinkering with ways of embedding the feed here in the journal front page. (Also: forgive any weirdness with dating; GReader orders shared items in the sequence in which they were shared, not the order in which they were posted by their component blogs.)
I have most definitely fallen off the GTD wagon in the past few months. This disappoints me, as I had been so gung-ho about it when I first started out. However, that’s a situation I intend to rectify very soon. I need some time and resources to start the cleanup process, but I am going to go back to the basics, back to “desktop zero” and “inbox zero”. Moreover, that also means I need to break my bad habit of checking mail upon waking. It waited for eight hours, it can wait until I get into the office and have had sufficient caffeine to deal with whatever it is I need to deal with. GTD isn’t just about doing things, it’s about knowing when to do them and when not to do them. I really need to learn that lesson.
Finally, in order to save time when I get some of this stuff taken care of (specifically, the GTD stuff via software like iGTD, which now allows manual sorting finally), I’m thinking about getting a printer. I’d resisted getting one for quite some time because I didn’t want to have to deal with crap like paper and toner and all that, but having the printer at home means I can do all that wonderful GTD stuff in an automatic way without having to manually rewrite everything, and I won’t be dependent on an office printer or Kinko’s if I need to print something quickly.
Organization can be fun and easy if done right. And to be honest, I truly do enjoy getting my stuff in order. Anything that cuts down on distractions– like, say, the kind that meant I started this entry an hour and a half ago– is always good. In any event, I’ll catch you tomorrow– hopefully with some more in-depth impressions on Luminous Arc.
Not much going on right now, folks; the Pokemania is almost over (still can’t put it away away for four more days due to time concerns with transferring critters over to Diamond) and I’m mostly clearing my mental decks to go through Luminous Arc this coming week or so. I also double-checked the game release lists; I should be occupied pretty well for next spring’s drought, as there’s three big-name RPGs coming out in the next month plus my current backlog (at the moment, ten games, two of those started/’active’). I’m hoping that, with any luck, I should nail fifteen completed games this year; with twelve already under my belt, and SRT at about 66% complete, my goal really ought to be eighteen. I’ve received word that Luminous Arc is short– 24 main missions– so that one’s practically a given unless the difficulty ramps up big-time.
To stave off the feeling that I hadn’t accomplished anything useful all month, I managed to organize my backpack and my usual stash of gear on Friday. That’s really about it; unless something interesting happens (it might), I’ll give you guys the loadout on what I am usually lugging around with me.
Anime and movies, huh? Well, despite having the disc (and it is a very pretty disc– seriously, the disc art is quite impressive for an ADV release) I still have not watched too much of Air. Actually, scratch that, I have only watched that one episode I may have talked about here. The disc is on my shelf right now, waiting for me to turn it on; but I can’t quite get up the momentum to put it into the DVD player. Don’t know why, actually. Same thing for Pani Poni Dash… after the first episode, I kind of went “bleh” and need some time to get warmed up to the humor.
What I have been watching, of course, is Bab5. Saw the first episode of Season 5 this morning. I seem to recall saying, on my first impression of her, that “Ivanova needed to get, ahem, fulfilled.” I hereby retract that statement and apply it to Captain Lochley. Is it just a problem with JMS that all of his ‘independent’ female leads come off as having giant sticks up their behinds? Anyway, I can already see how this whole telepath thing is going to make for an interesting season crisis, so my fears over the last year being just a set of ‘epilogues’ to the series are allayed.
Holy crap, folks, it’s almost September. That means new CSI, Numbers, NCIS, House, etc. etc., New television! New, real TV! I almost feel like I don’t deserve it, but then again I really, REALLY want to see the cliffhangers of the past get resolved. Which, of course, is the whole point of a cliffhanger. Yeah. Anyway, it’s still a while off– I’m pretty sure the new season has gradually shifted over the past couple years from “September-ish” to “October-November-ish, depending on football”. I’m cool with that in the meantime.
