The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

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!

This weekend was supposed to be pretty full of things, and well, I guess it was.  Alice and I went with friends to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End on Friday night.  For me, the movie was full of face-palm moments, cheap laughs, and predictable melodrama, but it was still damned entertaining, all in all.  Stupid movies can still be tremendous amounts of fun (as I predict the Michael Bay Transformers will be).  And it’s always nice to watch a movie with my wife in a starring role.  Good job, Keira honey!  Best of all, though, was the trailer for Live Free or Die Hard that played before the movie.  Yippee-kay-yay, motherfucker!

Saturday, we drove down to San Jose for the MAAP escort training at Andy’s place.  Good eats, good meeting, and good hanging out with my closest friends, who I miss terribly.  A load of laundry later, this theme was continued up at Mikey’s place in San Francisco.  I really missed the guys, and spending the day with them was great… especially hanging around towards the end of the night and just talking shit, like we used to do.

Of course, Alice and I didn’t get back home to Davis and get into bed until BFT in the morning, so it’s thrown our sleeping off up to and including today.  We didn’t get out of bed yesterday until mid-afternoon (which meant I missed going to watch AFM races at Infineon with the 530 crew), so we just decided to waste the rest of the day as well.  Star Trek: TNG episodes were watched, pancakes were made and devoured, books were read, and video games were played.  We then proceeded to stay up until about 3AM, which meant the sleeping-schedule-fuckup rolled over to today as well.

Today’s activities so far have been paper-writing for Alice and an advance segment of Game Night for me, with Ryan and Andy.  Titan Quest was played.  We’re now level 47, and we just got past Epic Egypt into Babylon.  My character, She-Legolas, acquired a new-hotness bow and a new helm with big stat boosts, but is now sorely lacking in movement speed compared to her companions, Dillios and Leonidas.  It is sad.

I really wish I could sleep less… sleeping is so wonderful, but I really don’t like missing the whole morning part of the day.  Sleepiness aside, I really love early morning, when everything is dim and cool and the world isn’t so crowded.  Early morning rides, drives, biking trips and runs/walks are always so great.  As well, I don’t like losing so much time that I could be putting into all my time-consuming hobbies.  I’ve got tons of games to play, movies, TV shows and anime series to watch, books to read… I’ve still got that massive backlog of car and motorcycle magazines, too.  And in three weeks, it’s off to France for a month… I’ve got to hurry up and pack my iPod full of tunes.

I’ve been reading more of the Alvin Maker series… Alice and I are both done through Heartfire, and I just ordered The Crystal City off of Amazon.  What I most admire about Orson Scott Card and his writing is his ability to create multi-dimensional characters.  There are very few flat characters in his stories, and he does his best to give everyone a fully fleshed-out personality and history, and one that makes sense, to boot.

Under the Tuscan Sun, on the other hand, doesn’t seem like it really has much of a story so far, but then, I’m not very far into it.  Despite the lack of plot development, it’s really putting its hooks into me.  It’s the kind of “classic literature” style that I really love, in which every sentence is a piece of poetry, regardless of whether or not they fit together into some epic tragedy or whatever type of story you want.  I think this is a style that’s becoming lost on people in general, since now all the popular materials depend on Something Happening every few seconds.  Plot development is king now, and I think we’re sacrificing something important for it.

I spent most of yesterday playing Puzzle Quest, and it is awesome.  It’s like Bookworm Adventures, but without the words… I could play this game forever.  Even if I do spend most of it cursing at the AI and its uncanny ability to CHEAT.  Oh well, it doesn’t break the game (and I’m not sure it’s really cheating at all, just analyzing situations really bloody fast, as computers tend to be able to).  I also gave Moto GP a try (finally, I own a PSP game!), and it’s pretty good too.  Hard to control, with the PSP’s stupid “analog disc” thing, so it’ll never really be a good racing sim, in my opinion, but it’s fun.  I gave up on being good and technical with it, turned on all the assists in the game (brake assist, AT, sim mode off) and just had fun with it.

On the anime front, Nanoha is turning out kind of fun… the last couple of episodes I’ve watched have changed the tone around from lighthearted and cutesy to moody and portentious, and I’m liking it.  Lucky Star is also doing me pretty well, despite what seems to be a massive backlash against it in the fan community.  I don’t get it, because the show is funny and cute.  Oh well, we all know I’ve never really been a great meter of public opinion.

I’m slowly getting started on putting up a bunch of old (but not that old) pictures I have sitting around on my hard drive. First up is this small batch of photos from Sergeant Fong’s birthday celebration, back in the middle of February, at TGI Friday’s in San Francisco. Enjoy!

Ryan, Andy and I stepped once again into the world of Titan Quest, this time with a concerted assault upon Act II, otherwise known as Egypt.  With the Artifact of OMG safely in the hands of Andy’s Leonidas, we followed his warwinding blades across the sands of the desert, leaving birds and beetles flying in our wake.  Shortly, what did we discover but the means to create a second Artifact of OMG!  We did so, and I used it to energize the arrows of my avatar, She-Legolas.  A new bow, fitted with Artemis’s Bowstring, made me even more deadly, and lo did we three carve a path right to the lair of the second Telkine, with Ryan’s Dillios keeping us all in good health.  The Telkine and its foul corrupted spawn fell before us, and we emerged in Babylon, inexplicably called the Orient.  All in the space of a single night’s session!  Interweb failures notwithstanding, I declare the night to have been a success.

So I went on a group ride with the crew from 530riders.com on Saturday. It was a fun ride, lasting about 4 hours with a few rest stops… but unfortunately, the end of the ride saw me lowsiding the Ninja on Russell, coming back in to Davis. I followed the person in front of me too closely and didn’t notice them reduce speed drastically in the first part of a 40mph sweeping left turn. I hit the brakes to avoid tagging his back tire, went off the pavement, and lost traction. The bike slid out from under me, and we both skidded about 30 feet on grass and dirt to end up in a ditch.

Damage to me: one bruised elbow.

Damage to gear: armor is a bit green, burrs everywhere, helmet is iffy and being replaced.

Damage to Ninja: right handlebar insert snapped, right footpeg/rearset snapped, right front turn signal popped off, left front turn signal housing/lens broken, sidestand bent, and the all-important Vacaville Motorsports license plate frame snapped. Light scratches to the plastics.

Lesson: DON’T TAILGATE! Also, for in-turn panic braking, straighten out, brake hard, resume turn - don’t try to brake and turn simultaneously.

Here’s a link to the group ride thread… the last three pages or so have commentary on the ride, as well as pictures. Here’s a link to my Flickr photoset of pictures I took on the ride… nothing too exciting there, though.