The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

April, at least, has come back to me in good shape.  Well, relatively good shape.  Her clutch is grabbing really high, although maybe I’m just forgetting what it’s supposed to feel like.  And she still likes to float RPMs and such every so often.  It’s not nearly as bad as before, though, and she’s completely rideable.  I want to go ride some more right now, but it’s wet and cold and getting dark.  Sigh!

I’ve got Orange Box and Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions coming in the mail, along with a pair of cheap Mechanix gloves… woo!

This sucks… there are a bunch of games out now (Orange Box, Crysis, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, World in Conflict, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lion, Odin Sphere (though that one’s not that recent), etc.) or that are coming out in the near future (Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, Hellgate: London, the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion, Guitar Hero 3, Rock Band, etc.) that I really want to play.  This is, of course, in addition to unfinished games I already have, and older games I want to acquire and play.  But even if I could afford all of these, I really shouldn’t… and even if I did, I don’t really have time to play them much.  I’m already sleepy as hell from stretching myself too thin every day.  5-6 hours of sleep isn’t catastrophically low, but it leaves me lethargic for the entire day, pretty much every day.  But if I sleep more, then I wouldn’t have time after Wyotech to cook, clean, hang out with Alice (sexually), watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and Heroes, play a bit of video games, and generally have a life.

Speaking of Wyotech, though, our second day of shop time today went pretty nicely.  I added a GM 5.7L V8 (not an LS1… LT1?  My partners thought it came out of a truck) and a 13B rotary to the list of engines I’ve cracked open and reassembled, although the 13B struggled mightily against the “reassembled” half of that process.  I thought those things were supposed to be simple!

The status of my own vehicles, of course, continues to fluctuate.  Faye has been having issues… a fluctuating idle that I thought was intake-related.  This morning, however, she completely died upon attempted startup, with all lights and gauges vanishing into the darkness.  She started up after a couple more tries, again with the wobbly idle, so now I think it’s a loose electrical connection somewhere.  Because THAT won’t be hard to track down.  In good news, however, Mister Awesome Man Dirty Dan has apparently successfully fixed April… if this is truly the case, then I can start riding the shit out of her all over the place.  Yay!

Wyotech is pretty fun, I suppose.  We just got into the shop today after a week of boring-as-hell classroom time, in which I have to put up with about 40 trouble-making numbskulls and about 10 decent people… such is the demographic of my classmates.  It’s okay, though… I get to hear fun stories from the instructors about various experiences they’ve had working on cars, and today I got to rip apart and reassemble a 4G64.

Heavenly Sword is fairly fun, and really pretty (even if Alice can’t tell the difference between God of War II on an SDTV and Heavenly Sword in 720p on a 42″ plasma).  It’s frustrating at times, though, but that’s mostly just my general frustration with action games in general.  They aren’t very intuitive to me, and I get frustrated at things that I don’t pick up very easily right away.  The other part of my frustration with it is the shooting segments, where you shoot things from a first-person view, and then “aftertouch” them to their targets.  That frustration went away, though, as soon as I switched off the motion sensor control of aftertouch.  Good job, Sony, your little gimmick is more annoying than it is fun. 

I feel the urge for RPGs of any sort.  I hear Neverwinter Nights 2’s expansion is coming out relatively soon, and fixes a lot of the UI issues that made me stop playing the original game about half an hour in.  I’ll probably give that a shot….  Also, Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP is out.  I loved the original game, and this remake supposedly has lots of added bits that make it even better.  Who doesn’t love SRPGs?  Not me.

Pageant week is over, and life can go back to something resembling normal again.  If all goes well, I’ll be spending the upcoming time working on my vehicles, and possibly earning some money on the side.  October will mark the start of my time at Wyotech, eating and breathing cars.  Should be fun times!

Alice and I attended the wedding of an old family friend of mine last night.  It was interesting to see various people after 3-10 years (depending on the individual).  I think a lot of people didn’t know what to make of the fact that I want to build race cars for a living… hah!  Take that, Chinese engineering students!

Before pageant week began, I was playing a lot of God of War II and Super Paper Mario… hopefully I can get back to doing that now too.

I’m sad that the only comments I get are spam. 

Mrrr.  My sleeping has been really messed up for the past half-week or so, so I’ve been constantly tired… more so than usual.  I hope I get relatively rested before the trackday on Friday.

Trackday on Friday!  Thunderhill with Rosette… I hope she doesn’t throw me. 

I’ve been playing Disgaea 2 again (because I don’t have enough things taking up my time), and it is fun, as usual.  It’s pretty brain-melting for me, though… the more open-ended a game is with player choices, the more paralyzed I get playing it.

France in a week and a half… wow.  This is going to be the longest I’ve ever been away from home.  I hope the cats are okay with the friends we’re going to leave them with. 

Almost through with the stack of car/motorcycle magazines.  I also started reading the last Alvin Maker book, The Crystal City.  It feels like I missed a book, although the title list claims I haven’t.

Today I got Forza 2, and have been playing it for most of the day.  That is all.

Oh, except for this Tower Defense-style game that Ryan linked me to.

I can’t seem to concentrate on anything today… not Puzzle Quest, not reading….  My brain might have melted.  There was a slight lack of sleep last night… maybe that has something to do with it.

Pyrrhic (my desktop) is occupied with starting the task of backing up the hundreds of gigabytes of crap I have stored on his hard drives.  This is the first time I’ve ever burned a DVD, and I gotta say… good god, it’s slow.  An hour to burn a 4GB DVD at 18x?  Daaaamn.  Ah well, it has to be done.  I have about 600GB over four aging drives, and I’ve been too negligent for too long in my backups.  Of course, if one of them was to fail, with my luck, it would do so right now.  You can’t see it, but I am now knocking furiously on wood.

I marathoned the rest of Nanoha last night, while Alice was working on her paper.  In the end, it’s a fun series that uses its cheesy emotional string-pulling and cuteness to make you care about the characters, but also throws in some pretty okay action (relatively speaking).  I liked it.  Nanoha A’s and StrikerS are probably in my future, but not as priorities.

Puzzle Quest is pissing me off.  The AI cheats like crazy… it definitely cheats in at least one way: it makes moves that it knows will give it certain benefits (i.e. extra turns), even when the benefits are supposed to be determined by chance.  For example, if it has two identical matches it can make, but it knows the RNG will give it an extra turn for one and not for the other, guess which one it will take?  Whereas the player, of course, has no way to know….  I’m also fairly certain the game tailors gem drops for the AI to increase its combos… maybe to artificially increase the difficulty or something.  Bah!  I’ve had a string of 5 crushing defeats.  We’re talking about matches in which the AI is routinely taking 5 or 6 turns for every one of mine, and I die when my opponent still has 2/3 health remaining.  Of course, for all my whining, we all know I’m going to keep playing the damned thing….

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 just had a pretty decent game of Supreme Commander with Ryan… us against two Supreme AI.  We got creamed in short order the first time, but got our revenge the second time, with the assistance of T1 bomber-rushing on one of the two AI to take him out of the running early.  The rest of the game amounted to us stalling the other AI with suicidal base attacks while teching up, taking his infrastructure apart with T3 artillery, and striking targets of opportunity with T3 strategic bombers and T3 gunships.  We may suck (especially me) compared to serious SupCom players, but it’s fun for us!  I managed not to let my base stagnate this time around… usually I start forgetting to build upon reaching T3… I’ll set a bunch of things with long build times going, and then I’ll forget all about my base and run around like a maniac with a small group of units, get them killed, get my base attacked, and sit back until I die or Ryan saves me.

The Transformers trailer… wow.  It looks like it’ll be a fun action movie (as expected of Michael Bay), with no substance whatsoever.  And forget about adhering to the source material… Megatron isn’t a gun, and you can’t even tell what any of them are supposed to be when they’re in humanoid form.  Half the fun of the old Transformers was that you had a robot with distinctly recognizable car (or whatever) parts as arms and legs.   Bumblebee as a new Camaro, though, I can live with that.  And Megan Fox… I’d like to have a relationship all over her face.

The Alvin Maker books (Orson Scott Card) are pretty good, as expected of Card.  I’m going into the fifth book (Heartfire) soon.  My favorite character so far has been the judge who presided over Alvin’s trial… pity he didn’t get a bigger part.  Judicial pwnage ftw!

It looks like we’re not having that comment contest, since nobody seems interested.

Oh, and I’m now officially enrolled at Wyotech, in their chassis and powertrain program.  I start in October.  Nine months of eating and breathing cars, and doing terrible things to make them go faster.  You can bet Faye won’t come out of it stock.

Started a solo Titan Quest character tonight… warfare/defense.  I got him up to level 10 and at Megara.  Whackwhackwhack!