Monthly Archives: December 2002

First let me tell you that I was never a big fan of New Year’s eve. Basically, I think it is just everyone getting excited over absolutely nothing. It is just one more day- the day after yesterday and the day before tomorrow. New Year’s parties are generally forgettable at best and mind-numbingly boring at worst. Of course, I never was one for parties, ESPECIALLY when I only know a few of the people there. I tend to be a bit misanthropic, and would much rather hang out by myself or with a few close friends than with people I hardly know (if at all) in a situation where they are all drunk to the point of vomiting and with music blaring loud enough to wake the dead. Anyway, this year (for the first time since highschool) I am hopefully having none of that. I am either going to go to a friend’s house to hang out or I will go to the 7-11 with Bobby. I am curious as to whether the 7-11 salesperson acknowledges the passing of the New Year or not, and Bobby agrees with me that 7-11 will likely be more memorable than the majority of New Year’s parties. I am lucky to have friends as odd as I am! Of course, if both of those options fall through, I will simply stay home and play video games. Which is PERFECTLY fine with me ^_^

Speaking of video games, Metroid Prime ROCKS. The music is mostly newer versions of songs from the older Metroid games, my favorite so far being the Magmoor Caverns theme which is an updated version of the Norfair theme from Super Metroid. At the very beginning of the game when they played the opening music from the original Metroid the nostalgia was thick enough to cut with a knife. I got the original Metroid for Christmas when I was 7, this was like reliving my childhood all over again- it gave me butterflies! The graphics in this game are simply amazing, and I couldn’t think of anything that could be done to improve them. The attention to detail is great, for instance when you are in a dark area with the combat visor and a bright flash occurs near you, you can see the relection of Samus’s face on the inside of the visor. Steam, rain, and electical feilds also have a visible impact on your view, and when you leave a body of water you can actually SEE the water streaming away from your visor. The “FPSish” style of gameplay takes some getting used to, and adds quite a bit of challenge to the game, but in the end it is still Metroid (and therefore good).

Super Mario Sunshine is JUST like Super Mario 64, only more adventure-like (There is more to the plot than “Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle”) and with awesome graphics. Either it is significantly harder than Mario 64 or I have become significantly worse at action type games. I haven’t played this in a few days as I have been concentrating my gaming efforts on Metroid, but It is quite enjoyable. I will play it some more when I feel like getting my ass handed to me again ^_^ Those old-skool platformy boards are challenging as all get out!

And if I wasn’t spending so much time playing GameCube, I would play DDR more. But at the moment I crave storyline, no matter how shallow!

Yeah, I’ve been up for way too long. And I’ve only spent a little of that time playing Metroid Prime today, surprisingly. Most of the rest of the time involved me working on my computer (no, not that work, though I do have some to do, and I DID finally get paid).

Chris made me a cool blinkenlights apparatus with wood paneling on the front (I’m not even joking) using a BASIC stamp and a glue gun ^_^ I spent most of my time tonight hacking the XMMS Blink-O-Tron plugin to work with my serial device as opposed to the parallel device it was designed for. It was actually pretty easy, despite my seemingly abysmal C knowledge. The timing still seems to be off a bit, and the LCD screen doesn’t seem to do much of anything, but hey- BLINKENLIGHTS! Oh, and of course I already broke Chris’s glue gun craftmanship while removing a wire after I programmed some BASIC on the actual stamp. -.-;;

In addtion to that, Chris also got me a binary pillow (someone actually paid attention!) and my (VERY) belated birthday present- DDR with a floor pad. I am completely horrible at DDR, but now I can at least have fun at it without making a fool of myself in public. Oh, and keeping up with the nice trend of breaking Chris’s very nice presents, I already lost one of the feet on the DDR pad. Pha.

In unrelated news, either my Compact Flash reader has died entirely, or my computer is sadistic and likes to toy with me. (I know THAT can’t be true, I treat it better than I do most of my living friends). For the past few weeks the reader would intermittently decide to stop working and would cause the mount process to become zombified. The only way to fix it would be by rebooting and crossing my fingers. At first, I blamed the RAM. But now I have new RAM, so I don’t think that was the cause. It’s not my setup because I didn’t change anything and it WAS working fine previously (and this isn’t Windows so stuff doesn’t just ‘stop working for no reason’). Anyway, I tried to mount the flash drive today and it is even worse than before- “mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device.” Logs tell me that the USB bus is detecting a device there, but that it can’t determine what it is. USB Mass Storage never even loads, so the verbose debugging that offers is no help either. I verified my kernel setup again, it is exactly the same as it was a few weeks back when I could occasionally access the reader. Oh well. I guess I’ll try it on the Windows machine later just to verify that the reader really is the problem.

But right now I should go to bed so I can wake up in a few hours to accompany Bobby on hs Christmas spending adventure.

Oh, and I went to see LOTR again with Chris and Bobby earlier tonight (last night to the rest of you). The best line in that move: “I want my elf!” Weeee!!!!

Well, I finally went to sleep around 9, after finishing wrapping gifts and eating dinner. And then I promptly woke up at 2:30 -.-;

In an effort to make myself tired enough to actually SLEEP again (I was PLENTY tired before, geez) I decided to play on the Internet. I took a silly quiz that means nothing! Yay! ^_^

Where Did Your Soul Originate?
brought to you by Quizilla

Now I am again finally getting tiredish (it’s a good thing because absolutely no one else is online ~_^ ) I’ll go back to sleep and wake up in a few hours and get my GAMECUBE!!!! And my new cellphone, games, clothes, etc.

People seem to like this picture I modified (Way back in April during a heat wave, actually) Yay! It’s finally the right time to display it! I send this message out to kids from 000001 to 1011100:

Happy Christmas Everyone!

So I was supposed to go see the Two Towers today, but my nocturnal habits prevented that, heh. My dad woke me up at half past noon (I had gone to sleep at about 7:30 AM) and said we would either leave in a half hour or go tomorrow. Well, no way in hell was I getting up at just that moment, so now we are going tomorrow ^_^ If I don’t go to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight than I will have troubles then, too. I wonder how many times I will see this movie total? I know Chris is coming back on the 23rd from Ithaca and wants to see it.

Anyway, before I got a chance to go to sleep again, my boss called. He wants to give me my check, and has more work for me to do. Because I already have plans to see LOTR tomorrow, and driving down Rt. 4 on December 23rd is not high on my “Fun Things” list, I am going in on the 27th. That gives me 36 hours to play video games, by my calculations.

I still need to do Xmas shopping for two people, and I have absolutely no idea what to get them. FUN. And I have to pick up two more things for myself, too. Not to mention an as-of-yet undetermined number of cards for people. :/ Guess I should try to get most of this done tomorrow, since I already have an excuse to get up before nighttime, and I can’t buy Bobby’s present on Saturday with him… um…. present. :)

Well, in happy-fun Katsucon news, Night may be taking a flight to Newark, in which case I will pick him up and drive to Virginia. Bobby said he will definitely go, I just need to find out what is up with Chris so I can determine housing accommodations as quickly as possible and possibly make hotel reservations.

As of today, I am one of the top-talkers in #ffaf. I feel so… blabby.

And this is getting really old. I think I will stop posting it now ;)

Music: Squaredance