The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

From and for ferahgo… so the directed questions are about her!

1) Are you currently in a serious relationship?
A. Yes!

2) What was your dream growing up?
A. You know, I don’t really know. Mostly I just played video games and didn’t think much. After about age 14 it was to be a singer.

3) What talent do you wish you had?
A. Enough patience to be able to practice things. XD I have a lot of talents that I’m pretty okay at, but I can’t make myself practice any one of them enough to actually be GOOD.

4) If I bought you a drink what would it be?
A. Some kind of nice beer… and I mean REAL beer, like Guinness or Newcastle or Tetley’s… or Caffrey’s, but then we’d be in Ireland.

5) Favorite vegetable?
A. Pee-tainting aspara-guys!

6) What was the last book you read?
A. The last book I finished was First Among Sequels.

7) What the most embarrassing thing you’re willing to admit?
A. What is this “embarrassing” you speak of? Seriously, I don’t get embarrassed by much.

Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Explain where.
A. None. I have a massive master plan for a full-back series of tattoos, tucked away for the next time I get my heart broken… but it looks like that isn’t going to happen.

9) Worst Habit?
A. Probably procrastination. And leaving my hand on the shifter. Poor synchros….

10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride?
A. Probably! Although come to think of it, I don’t think I know what you look like.

11) What is your favorite sport?
A. Road racing.

12) Do you have a Negative or Optimistic attitude?
A. I mostly express pessimism, but I usually harbor a secret belief that everything’s just going to kind of work out nicely.

13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
A. …try to get out? Why, what would you do? o_O

14) Worst thing to ever happen to you?
A. Heh… There’re quite a few candidates for this position… but everything that’s happened in my life has made me the person I am now, so whatever. Let’s just say the prime candidate involves the death of a loved one wrecking my life for ten years, shall we?

15) Tell me one weird fact about you.
A. I’m extremely uncomfortable pooping unless I’m completely and totally naked.

16) Do you have any pets?
A. Yep! Two cats, a plethora of little freshwater fish… hopefully in a year there’ll be a puppy and a third cat.

17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?
A. I’d probably ask you what was going on… and then we’d play video games.

18) What was your first impression of me? (hmmm…careful!)
A. “Oh hey, a person Alice met on LiveJournal who shares a lot of her interests.” …since, y’know, that’s what she told me about you.

19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
A. Neither?

20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
A. Un-ugly! Just kidding. Probably I’d make my face less round… I don’t like perpetually looking like I’m 15. Height might be nice too, but maybe it wouldn’t be.

21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
A. I’d probably be your conscientious crime partner, though leaning more towards the conscience.

22) What color eyes do you have?
A. Dark brown… when I was a kid I was convinced they were black.

23) Ever been arrested?
A. Twice, both times voluntary surrender, meaning I went down to the station on my own time to be printed, paid bail, and went home.

24) Bottle or can soda?
A. Don’t really care.

25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it?
A. Probably toss it in my savings account. $10k isn’t enough to really do anything amazing with.

27) What’s your favorite place to hang at?
A. Home? I’m a big homebody. I also like racetracks.

28) Do you believe in ghosts?
A. Yes, although apparently this belief doesn’t fit with most of the rest of my personality.

29) Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
A. Too many! Play video games, drive, ride, sing, watch movies or TV shows on DVD, read, hug Alice.

30) Do you swear a lot?
A. Depends on the company… but usually yes.

31) Biggest pet peeve?
A. Quite a few! Misused apostrophes and turn signals are among the top.

32) In one word, how would you describe yourself?
A. Verbose.

33) Do you believe/appreciate romance?
A. Yes!

35) Do you believe in God?
A. No, but I’m open to the idea of a higher power.

36) Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?
A. Does this count?

For Alice:

Ten things that recently made me happy, in no particular order:

1. Odin Sphere, Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition, Disgaea PSP, and House: Season 2 showing up in the mail today
2. Top Gear, Bike, and Classic Motorsports being bought at Borders on Saturday
3. Good games of Forza 2 and Team Fortress 2 with Ryan and James on Sunday
4. The awesome beef stew Alice and I made yesterday in our slow cooker
5. Two dumbasses getting kicked out of my school for doing something monumentally stupid
6. Kissing sleepy Alice goodbye this morning
7. Seeing Alice when she came home this afternoon
8. Aston Martin Vantage RS concept!
9. Sasha Grey
10. Alice’s mouth

So I’ve discovered in the past year or so that what I really, really want in life is simply to be entertained, fulfilled, and having fun on a daily basis.  Not to say that I don’t still have lofty goals… that falls under the “fulfilled” section, I believe.  But really, what I most need to do to improve my life is to simply do what makes me happy.  Whether that’s buying useless things, “wasting” some time doing some random activity just because I feel like it, or whatever else… within reason, of course.  I’m not going to go out and blow all my money on an Aston Martin right now, for example.  But I spend a great deal of time agonizing over the most meaningful way to spend my time, when really, I should just be spending it doing something I like, and not worrying so much about the results or the tradeoffs.

Nicoise salad is an ongoing WTF of tasty, yet bewildering surprises.  Lettuce, green beans, boiled potato, tomatoes, hard-boiled egg, tuna… the presentation, such as it is (scatter each ingredient in a random layer as you finish preparing it), doesn’t help anything make more sense.  On the other hand, it sure is yummy, especially with red wine vinaigrette.  Nom!

Also, this post’s title would have been even better if I was talking to my niece.

Ryan and I have moved on to Normal AI in Supreme Commander.  I’ve improved my production to the point where I can keep up with him now, but I still tech up too slowly, and there’s still a bit of stagnation at certain points.  We were still able to win fairly handily, thanks to Ryan’s early and constant harassment of the enemy.  He kept them busy while I teched up and made an engineering-corps assault on the center of the map.  That center island was a good staging ground for tech 2 artillery and Ryan’s fleet of naval gunships, which penned the AI in until my WTF Bomber and Ryan’s attack fleet could get in there to finish the job.

I messed around a bit with Trackmania United… it’s just as fun as the previous games, especially in platform mode, although it’s still frustrating at times.  I’m also not sure I like the new, shiny graphical design… I liked it better when it was a little more cartoony, and when it was a vaguely top-down view, like old arcade racing games.  Ah well… it still feels like it’ll be a nice time-killer.

Alice and I had stuffed pork chops from Nugget tonight, accompanied by a cheddar zucchini stir-fry that we found in a recipe magazine.  It was delicious.  I am extremely full.

I had no time to really do anything today, aside from Alice, but we did plan out about a week’s worth of meals and go grocery shopping.  I’m trying to get us into the habit of planning ahead on food, and doing the whole week’s worth of food shopping in one go, instead of spread out over five or so trips in the course of the week.  Must save time, so that I can spend it playing video games!  Or something.

Next I have to start going to the gym again regularly… which I say every few months or so.  Let’s see if I can get myself to actually do it this time.

Ryan and I just finished our first full game of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, and it was pretty epic.  After our ignominious defeat the other night against three AI of varying difficulties on Seton’s Clutch, this time we went up against two Easy AI to give ourselves a chance to re-acclimate to the game.  I played as the Seraphim, and worked primarily on not getting stuck in expansion brainlock… meaning I pushed myself to keep building and expanding at all times, and never sit back and just watch what was going on.  I think I succeeded, for the most part, at least in building sheer numbers of buildings and units, but my teching up was pretty slow, so I can’t really say I was instrumental in our victory.  Ryan did most of the work of keeping the enemy hordes at bay while we built up our production capabilities, though I can say that my T2 fighter-bombers did a fine job of removing enemy ships that were bombarding our firebases from out of range.  My forces also sealed the deal, when I threw 150 or so T2 land units and around 100 fighter-bombers in behind a T4 Experimental Bomber (otherwise known as the WTF Bomber), supported by four battleships for coastal bombardment.  While I followed that with two more Experimental Bombers to clean up, we had time to mess around and build and play with some of the new experimentals in the expansion pack.  The game was finally ended, appropriately, with a shot from the Experimental Strategic Missile Launcher, a super-nuke, right on the bow of a submerged nuclear submarine that had been taking potshots at our shields for the last half of the game.  Woo!