Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
At 9:16a, I completed Stage 5 of Space Invaders Extreme on the Nintendo DS. This is the twenty-eighth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii), followed by Mega Man 9 (Wii) and Bionic Commando: ReArmed (360). Game cleared over 16 days.
I really wanted an excuse to call attention to this, though given the massive rant I’m about to unleash, I wish it were under better circumstances (even though it is still somewhat appropriate).
So. We Cheer. You should know a couple of things about my attitude towards this game. The first is that when it was first announced, my reaction was somewhere between nonexistent to active apathy. A cheerleader game? Honestly, why? The more I thought about it, though, ( the more sense it made… » )
So, I guess this means I’m getting back into doing regular (kinda) blog posts. I missed being able to launch into these long discussions with you folks. I’m probably going to drop the whole LJ side as well, and just maintain that as a meme repository or some other thing. We shall see. Let’s shoot for the next post to be Thursday or Friday. After that, we’ll see where we go with this.
This week has been more than a little hectic. I’ve just now got the chance to sit down for a short amount of time, and here I am, with too many things I could do that I have no idea what I will do. Of course, by typing this, I’ve effectively solved that problem, if only until I finish this post. ( There’s more here… » )
For the time being, folks, I think I know what I’m going to do: finish my laundry and then go get dinner. Maybe today I don’t need to be ‘productive’ to feel like the day was worth something.
At 5:51p, I completed one full loop on a single credit in Gradius (within the Gradius Collection disc) on the PSP. This is the twenty-seventh game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Bionic Commando ReArmed (360), followed by Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP) and Rock Band 2 (unlock all) (360).
At 7:38p, I defeated Neukhia, the final boss of Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on the Nintendo DS. This is the twenty-sixth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Bionic Commando ReArmed (360), followed by Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP) and Rock Band 2 (unlock all) (360). Final clear time was 57:24 over 69 days.
Tuesday saw the Apple event, and with it came the news of iTunes 8 and a few other little bits. Before I go into this, I should probably say that I didn’t have any trouble with my iPhone backups before installing iTunes 8, and now they sort of stall or at the very least run intolerably slowly compared to before. That’s probably an artifact of the 2.0.2 firmware, though, so unless it persists after Friday (when 2.1 hits) I’m willing to let it slide and just not sync tomorrow.
What is interesting to note is that the biggest complaint I had with iTunes itself– the sometimes ten-second-long visits of the Beachball of Damnation– are now, largely, things of the past. Granted, my library is not terribly big compared to some folks’ stashes– I’m really only using about 82 GB (just under 20K files, and I did buy a 300 GB drive last year to ensure I didn’t run out of space), according to iTunes– but it was still a genuine pain in the ass to sync up, and I dreaded adding new material simply because it would be such a tremendous sink of time. Those days, thankfully, are gone, and I again have a reason to advocate the use of iTunes, as it’s back to what made it attractive for me in the first place: for the day-to-day stuff, it doesn’t get in the way. Smart Playlists are zippier, the Spotlight-search runs ludicrously fast again, and background tasks are now truly background, as opposed to “I’ll say it’s background, but good f$%#ing luck trying to do anything in the meantime”. I have some complaints about how some preferences were obscured (the genre panel option in particular; I don’t use it and I don’t want to waste time with it), but overall this is the kind of update that makes me really happy as an iTunes user.
Now, iTunes is grinding through my library to find out what songs I like through the Genius feature, which I am only using to see how it can reconcile my loves of both Maximum the Hormone and Debbie Gibson. My collection is the ruiner of AIs.
Probably we’ll talk more about this on Saturdayish.
For lack of a better title, I’ll just use the song stuck in my head right now.
Anyway, as you might have expected, things are relatively quiet here. I’m (slowly) continuing my grind through FFTA2 (I have roughly 10 story missions left to go), and similarly slowly making my way through the hiragana practice. What has been keeping me from all of these has been the wonderfully addictive Space Invaders Extreme, which wound up being far too much fun for its low price tag. Granted, it’s hard enough to keep me engaged, so it’s not like I’ve paid for a cash-in on a game that’s older than I am. Think about how Pac-Man Championship Edition was updated compared to its original, or Galaga Legions (that one is actually a far more apt comparison) and you’ve got an idea of how SIE works, silly usage of “Extreme” notwithstanding. (Like I’m really one to talk there.) I’m also liking Castle Crashers, but that’s not getting as much time due to wanting to get through A2.
In terms of anime, I’ve been catching bits of Cromartie High School and Moon Phase, trying to see which one will grab my full attention first; I think it’s Cromartie, just by virtue of being sillier and shorter. After that, I’ll probably take a re-watch of something I haven’t seen in a while; maybe Kino’s Journey, but more likely it could be Risky Safety or Kare Kano. I’m honestly not sure.
And as for the writing that I supposedly do? Well, I do have a rough outline for the ‘08 NaNo, but given that even-numbered years tend to be bad for noveling, I might not wind up writing it this year. I’ve been distracted by too many things and I’ve been getting this urge to work on an XNA game of all things, so I might spend November doing that instead– but at least I’ll have this outline ready for when I do start writing again. Incidentally, the outline is the backstory or prequel to last year’s NaNo, which might wind up taking its title. How to refer to the “second” book, then, is going to get interesting.
I’m kinda hungry, so I’m going to get breakfast. Catch you all later.
