Did you think I was dead?

Hey, look at that. I *didn't* forget how to put up a post in my blog. It's been so long I figured I'd have lost the knowledge. I'm quite surprised myself that I would be on a 2 month hiatus from posting. I guess I don't really have much of an excuse, either, though most of my November was spent on schoolwork. Most of my December has been spent on sloth. Ever since I handed in my takehome exam for algebra, I've just been doing as little as possible.

Hm, now which events from the last two months should I discuss? I went on my trip to Waterloo a few weeks ago, and that was fun. I stayed with Andrew the first few days, and Hugh for the last leg of the trip. We had a four hour game of Cities and Knights of Catan that was rife with inaccurate rules since Andrew had never read the rules in any great detail.

I had that party that I mentioned in the last post, and it went off without a hitch. Lots of people showed up, everyone had a great time, and it didn't take much effort to clean up the next day. I'll be sure to do it again sometime next term.

Hey, here's some big news: I've started drinking! Not as a hobby, or anything, but I don't refuse to drink anymore. I realized a while ago that I didn't really have a good reason to *not* drink, but I felt like I needed an occasion to start. I didn't want my first drink to be anticlimactic. I decided that Phil being in town was a good enough reason to celebrate. Since then, though, I've decided I don't really like the taste of alcohol, and the last few times I've had drinks it's made me pretty queasy, so at least now I have an excuse if someone offers me a libation. Plus on top of that, I'm still a cheapskate, so I'm not willing to buy my own booze often. At the moment, Adam keeps making new and disgusting drinks with what I have sitting in my bar. The only thing that I've enjoyed so far is the Amaretto Sour.

Phil is back in town again (yes, he's visited *twice* since the last time I made a post), and he and Adam are more or less living out of my house. We've been playing lots of Power Grid and Nexus Ops, some Guitar Hero, and we started playing X-Men Legends (very fun multiplayer game). I've been staying up til 5 or 6 the last few nights; I haven't seen much sunlight lately. At least I'll be well seasoned for New Year's Eve.

I didn't get anything extremely noteworthy for Christmas besides a Bohnanza expansion (from Sheena and Dan), and Super Paper Mario and Metroid Prime 3 for Wii. I was sort of hoping to get Super Mario Galaxy, but it'll still be waiting for me once I play the two games I got.

I attended a games afternoon the other day at the game store with Doug, a guy I met via BGG. I invited all of my friends to come, but none came. I'm willing to bet that Sheena and Dan would have, if they were in town. Regardless, I had fun. We played Incan Gold, Citadels, Bang (twice), and Munchkin. I'm not really a huge fan of any of those games, but I wasn't about to bitch and whine about it since it wasn't really my event. I sent an email inviting all of them to come to my games nights. I'm anticipating a pretty nice turnout to my games nights, but of course I've said that in the past only to have the usual 5 or 6 show up. If all goes well, Doug and his friends will come, and up to 6 people from my classes will start coming out as well. Hopefully Dan's two brothers will start coming as well. If I could get enough for two tables on a regular basis, that would probably be ideal.

Well, that's as much as I'm willing to write about at the moment, so I'll end it around here. I make no promises about when another post will show up, but hopefully I can get back into the habit of making a public journal of events in my life that next to no one cares about.

Listening to... Foo Fighters - Come Back
Link of the moment... Please do yourself a favour and watch all of these game reviews. HILARIOUS!

"Boom shaka laka!"

First, I'm going to list as many commentator quotes from NBA Jam that I can remember off the top of my head:

Boom shaka laka!
The nail in the coffin!
Is it the shoes?
From downtown!
Can't buy a bucket!

If you can remember any yourself, please remind me of the wonderful literary artistry from that game.

Well, I'm sorry to say, but I gave up on Super Mario Sunshine. I got to a point where there were three or four levels that were just TOO frustrating to complete. Yeah, that's right, I gave up on a kiddie game. Hugh, if you're reading this then I know that you're the most disappointed in me, but that's just the way it is.

I started up Tales of Symphonia for GC, and I've put some serious time into it already. It's a pretty good game and not too difficult, though some of the bosses can hand my ass to me in a flash. It's supposedly a 50+ hour game, so it's gonna be a long journey.

I've spent quite a bit of money on eBay lately. I got a MIDI to USB converter for my mom's new Mac to replace the old sound-card dependent one. I won Wind Waker for $18, a DVD boxset of Mission Hill for $30 (I was reminded of it when looking at the Filmography of the voice actor for the main character in ToS who also is the voice of Kevin French in Mission Hill (and Robin in Teen Titans)), and a 36-booster box of Harry Potter CCG cards for $20 (the best deal I could find).

In an effort to clean up the crawl space/storage room, my dad bought 6 heavy-duty shelves. Of course, I wound up assembling them, but I guess I have to earn my keep somehow. At least now I can feel like I did *something* productive this summer. They were a bitch to assemble, but they certainly will help in organizing all of our shit. Once we get rid of our old entertainment center (my brother is going to take it) and our old couches, there will be a lot of free room. I think I'll move my gaming tables in there to be set up permanently.

I realized that since we got the HDTV, I hadn't yet tried setting up a computer to the PC input. I have an old 900MHz Compaq running XP that doesn't really do anything besides get played on by Adam (who now has a job and doesn't come over as often as he used to), so I set it up to the TV. I haven't really done much with it yet, but I've fiddled around with all my emulators and set them up to the right resolution. Along with my PS2 to USB dongle (hehe, dongle), it's a nice little gaming machine now. Unfortunately, it's not powerful enough to run Project64 without slowdown, but everything 16 bit and lower runs fine. I haven't yet checked ePSXe, but I have a modded PS2 so emulating PS games is not a high priority.

Well I guess there's only a month left of summer. I suppose that soon I'll have to get together with my academic advisor to figure out what courses I'll need to take. Fun. Last night I was thinking about how I don't really like dealing with Fibonacci numbers. Maybe if I'm bored I'll try to figure out if there are infinitely many Fibonacci numbers that are prime, or infinitely many Fibonacci numbers that are square. Or maybe I'll play video games. I'm not sure.

Listening to... No Use For A Name - Fields of Agony
Link of the moment... Does this blog have the Buddha nature, Master?

Let's see a BIG turnout next Thursday!

Games night has been rescheduled from Tuesday nights to Thursday nights starting next week (due to Tuesday being cheap night at the local movie theater). Last Tuesday wasn't much of a games night anyways. Chris brought Mario Party 8 as he had just rented it, so a four player game of MP8 ensued (unfortunately leaving multiple people to sit and watch, something I hate doing). After that was over, Dan broke out Singstar for PS2, much to Grant's zeal. The rest of the night was nothing but loud karaoke in my basement (though I did manage to fit in a game of Hive with Adam (I finally won!) and an unfinished game of Balderdash that was quite hard to converse over).

This was quite a shame, since I really had a hankering to play Vegas Showdown which I picked up (along with Nexus Ops) at the border earlier that day. I tried to get a game tonight with the neighbours, but once again my plans fell through as they had unexpected visitors. I swear, I shouldn't even attempt to plan anything anymore, since the universe likes to spite my plans.

My mom's Mac came in the other day (did I mention she got a Mac? Cause she did). I'm in the process of migrating her files to it and organizing them in some fashion (14GB to sort through!). I already threw boot camp on it and installed XP on a partition (for all those files that I unfortunately cannot transfer over to a comparable Mac program). It's really not fun to try to sort through other peoples' messes, so I might just tell my mom to sort it out on her own time.

Super Mario Sunshine is shit. I don't like it, but dammit I'm going to beat it. I have a bad habit of being unable to control Mario while jumping, which leads to MANY frustrating attempts at the same parts of levels. Sometimes he'll want to do a wall jump when I don't want him to, or he won't when I do. Sometimes if I want to turn around and do a small hop, he'll do a crazy backflip into the endless abyss. I've never wanted to bring pain upon Mario as much as I do now.

Well, Traveler is over. Only 8 episodes long. It's a pretty good show, and it's a shame that it's not going to be renewed for a second season (especially since there are DOZENS of loose ends that I won't get to see resolved now). Chanel and I have decided that we're going to start watching Prison Break season 1 (my mom has the boxset) on Wednesday nights since Traveler is over.

Listening to... Opeth - Deliverance
Link of the moment... Quite humourous. Watch it.

SMS or SM64? OoT or WW?

If you'll take note of the sidebar, you'll see that I have completed Suikoden 3 (and it only took 57 hours!). Often, when I finish a game, I already have another one in mind to play, but unfortunately no such game has piqued my interest so far. I've been spending a bit of time on Guitar Hero 2, trying to unlock some stuff. I'm currently trying to five star all the songs no medium (which is pretty easy but time consuming).

I bought a second Wavebird the other day. I couldn't find them at a slew of store, but I eventually picked one up at Superstore for $40. The next day, I was browsing the used games at Rogers Video, and noticed that they (most assuredly mistakenly) had priced the Wavebirds at $25 ($5 cheaper than they were selling the wired controllers!). Unfortunately, I had opened the packaging on the first one, and I didn't really feel like laying down $25 for a third one.

I think in the future I'll play a Mario game and a Zelda game, but I'm not sure which of each: either Super Mario Sunshine or Super Mario 64, and either Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker. Considering I still don't have my Wii online, and since Grant has WW that I can probably borrow, I'll probably choose SMS and WW, though in the future I might have time for the other two. I was telling my friend Gennie the other day how I try to stay at least 2 years behind the times WRT video games. You'll save a lot of money that way. I didn't buy my Wii because I wanted a Wii, I bought it because I wanted a Gamecube and figured that two years from now I'd want a Wii. It's genious, I tells ya.

I ordered Nexus Ops and Vegas Showdown from Amazon.com the other day. The two games are regularly $40, but they were on for $11 each (plus $4 shipping in the US). For that price, I figured it was worth the effort to get them shipped to Grand Portage and pick them up. I had planned on picking up Nexus Ops at some point, and Vegas Showdown has got some positive feedback on BGG. They made it to Minnesota on Friday, so they should be ready to get picked up sometime tomorrow. Maybe I'll try going Tuesday morning so I can break them out at the games night.

I'd like to turn as much of my media digital as I can, in an effort to clear up some space. I have a bunch of CD cases and DVD cases that are doing nothing but sitting there on the shelf. What I'd like is to get a 500GB drive, put everything I have on it, and then sell off my DVDs (undoubtedly illegal, so don't tell anyone). Of course, if I buy a 500GB drive, it'll be SATA. To use SATA, I'll need a new motherboard. For the new motherboard, I'll need a new processor, etc. I suppose I could get an external drive or a drive enclosure, but I think my system has issues with USB 2.0 (vs. 1.1), so maybe not. Well, it's not too urgent anyways.

I played softball last weekend with Sheena, Dan, and a bunch of Dan's friends. It was quite fun. I even got a double when I was up at bat! I was sore for a few days afterwards, but I'm looking forward to the next game (Dan wants to play sports more regularly, but we'll see if anyone actually has the motivation to organize it).

Listening to... THe Dillinger Escape Plan - 43% Burnt
Link of the moment... I'm starting to track game sessions to see how often games hit the table. Geeky, eh?