The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

I’m sitting on the couch at Alice’s parents’ house, watching Lucy play Animal Crossing on her new Gamecube.  I have a headache and a phlegm-filled sore throat, and my feet are cold.  I think I’ve decidedly shifted over to being a summer person.  Or maybe just a not-winter person.  It’s too cold for convertible driving or comfortable riding, things and people are closed for the holidays, and everything is just gloomier.  I guess I can’t appreciate that as much anymore now that I personally am not quite so gloomy.

I got a pretty good haul for Christmas, though, so that was nice.  Alice and I splurged on each other, so she ended up getting me Blankets, The Name of the Rose, Casino Royale, and the first season of House.  The rest of her family got me a couple of Bill Bryson books, a radioactive reindeer (don’t ask), a giant stuffed penguin, and a 1:18 Peugeot 307 WRC model.  Woo!

We’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 around here.  Alice and I suddenly have become able to play GH3 on Hard, though we’re currently stuck on the tier of songs containing Queens of the Stone Age’s 3s and 7s and Muse’s Knights of Cydonia.  It’s still a pretty big improvement over the last time we touched the game.  Magical!  Rock Band is even better, though.  Ryan, Sean and I took out a 12-song set the other night, which left us feeling pretty awesome, but left my throat feeling a bit raw.  Then last night, Ryan, Alice and I beat the Hall of Fame set, effectively beating the game… although there is still the 58-song Endless Set to unlock and beat.  Jebus.

I crunch across the street
To that Maine man
Who sells us our tree every year
He asks how we’ve been
I just smile
And say “bag up that five-foot blue
Spruce, please…
Nice trees.”

The taxi ride home
I’m just fine
It’s just me and that tree and Abdul
He shows me the lights
Red or green doesn’t matter
Pedestrians scatter ‘neath

A snowflake of light suspended
High above Fifty-Seventh
We slide to my stoop, I track in
Put up that spruce, step back and see
How it’s gonna be

Christmas without you
It’s hitting home, I’m all alone
Christmas without you
So unfamiliar
Christmas without the love we shared
A little much to bear
This Christmas…

At least you left the lights
Okay, half
Probably the ones that blink
Where are you tonight?
Every day I’m a mess
Even Rudolph’s depressing

I hop on a train to Macy’s
Thinking I’ll just replace these
Memories we made together
But all the memory shelves are bare

Christmas without you
It’s hitting home, I’m all alone
Christmas without you
So unfamiliar
Christmas without the love we shared
It’s far too much to bear
Don’t think I’ll ever be the same
This Christmas without you

Lonely are the days…
Lonely are the nights without you….

Alice and I went down to San Jose this weekend, for dinner with my parents and other randomness.  She has to stay down there until tomorrow afternoon for a dentist appointment (sad Eug!), so we took two vehicles… I rode Rosette down, to give her a chance to stretch her legs.  She was a bit upset at me for not having spent any time with her in over a month, but once she settled down she was in fine shape.

Every ride I take, I learn a lot from.  Body position, foot placement, throttle control, handlebar control, lean angles, how much more the bike can do than I used to think… it’s a massive flood of information flowing into my brain with every mile I cover.  I should have done this a long time ago… by “this”, I mean ridden a shit-ton of miles at a regular commuter’s pace.  I realized at my second Thunderhill trackday that I’m really still just barely learning to ride a motorcycle at all, so it’s not surprising that I’m so timid and nervous on the track.  I need to be able to control a bike in normal conditions before I can expect to do so under extraordinary conditions.  That said, I can’t wait for the next trackday!

This damnable cough is never going to go away.  I’ve had this thing for damn near a month now.  Balls!  (That one was for you, Trish.  :D)

It’s vaguely fun to dig into the data files for Puzzle Quest and make a character that completely and utterly rapes the AI, in order to get revenge for my first time through the game.  It’s great when you come up against a boss that took you about twenty tries to beat legitimately, and then pull out your custom Uber Spell of Doom.  Take that, Dugog!

I feel bad about vehicle neglect.  I haven’t really taken the bikes out at all for weeks, except a very short blast on April to run an errand, and Faye hasn’t been used for anything but commuting for a long time.  I need to wash all three of them, too, except that I don’t really have a good place to do it in the apartment complex.  I think it’s just about time for a shotgun car-washing….

Alice and I had our 16th monthiversary this past week, and it was pretty glorious, though low-key.  I love you, babe!   I’m looking forward to our 600th monthiversary. 

What a bust of a day.  Alice and I spent an hour and a half or so early this evening just lying in bed and talking, which was totally awesome, and afterwards we had a cowboy dinner of rice, sausages and BBQ baked beans.  But after that, it was all laundry and sucking hardcore at Guitar Hero 3, which is ridiculously, stupidly hard.  That, on top of discovering that the Rock Band guitar won’t work with GH3… what are the dumbfucks at Neversoft thinking?  Rock Band just won the battle.  At least, it would be the default winner if it weren’t for having to calibrate the audio/video coordination, something I seem to be completely unable to do correctly.  Suck!  And now it’s already time for me to go to bed and get not enough sleep before getting up for another 9 hour day at school.  Balls!  You guys should give me awesomeness (of any kind) to make me feel better.  I’m counting on you!

That’s right, we’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band around here lately. Ryan was awesome enough to help us acquire a copy, with quite the substantial discount, and we’ve been rocking out quite heavily. We even had a Rock Band party the other night, where our rock band consisted of–count ‘em–thirteen people.

I still haven’t gotten around to finishing Heavenly Sword, although I’m right on the cusp. I can’t help feeling like maybe I just haven’t spent enough time with the game, and that if I put in more replays of various levels and put more effort into getting better at the combat system before I wrapped it up (I’m currently a Button Masher Supreme), I would come away with a more rewarding experience. I doubt I’ll actually get to doing it, though… too many other things to do. I got a new-to-me hard drive (thanks again to Ryan), so I have disk space again after a very long time. This means that I can get crackin’ on The Witcher, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, and others. This in addition to Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, and more and more. Argle. Give me more hours in a day!

I’m almost over my illness, I think… I’m still coughing fairly often, and I still wake up with a sore throat every day, but it goes away pretty quickly and just subsides into itchiness and the aforementioned coughing. Alice, however, seems to have just begun the cycle, having caught it on the tail end of my contagion. She spent the day with a very bad sore throat, as well as some nausea. Here’s hoping she doesn’t have it as bad as I did!

Heavenly Sword is, for the most part, fairly awesome. It’s really just me that sucks, as I tend to at action games. But sucking is frustrating! And frustration leads me to feel that the game is no fun, and therefore suck. I just spent a couple of hours carving through most of the latter half of the game. The fights against regular grunts are occasionally frustrating, when you’re ganged up on by a bunch of guys and it feels like there’s no chance to attack, but the main frustrations for me came during boss fights. These guys are fast, and it feels like you’re expected to just go through trial and error to figure out their attack patterns and what to do. I don’t like trial and error, especially when there’s a loading delay of a couple of minutes between each instance of trial and error. I’m currently stopped after a session of error against what I think is the last boss… or at least, one form of him. Bohaaaaaaaan!

I am very sick. 

Hi!  My name is Eugene.  I like to play Hellgate lots - in fact so much that I have delegated the updating of my Blog to underpaid people living in a 5th world country.  I also like to say things like “Does water put out fire?!?!??!!” and I ignore my friends’ desperate pleas to replace their blinker fluid, even though I am a mechanic and could do such things in a Planck second.

These past few days, I have been going to Wyotech religiously, and even got a “Perfect Attendance” pin for it!  It looks SOOO COOL.  I am going to wear it on my shirt EVERY  DAY for the REST OF MY LIFE.   Today I finished the final for Wyotech in 21 minutes, because let’s face it, I am frickin’ smart (probably smarter than all of you, except for my girlfriend Alice, because she is smarter than basically anything, including me) and the only reason I am the 4th highest grade in the class and not the first is because I want to try and give other people a chance at being as awesome as me.  Haha. Fat Chance.

Okay, I am going to stop updating now because Alice is SUPER HUNGRY and I am going to happily cook her any meal she wants.  Also because we have to go back to San Jose tonight, and eat some of Alice’s parents delicious food.  Nom nom nom.

I don’t know why I keep having these thoughts.  They’re completely unfounded, and all they do is depress me and think about worst-case scenarios all the time.  It’s really stupid.  I have absolutely no reason not to trust her… it’s just my mind screwing around with me.  It’s times like this that I wish I didn’t fall so easily… not having anything to do with her, but that way I wouldn’t have gotten involved with all those various girls who’ve hurt me so badly in the past, and maybe now I wouldn’t be so goddamned paranoid.

I was pretty overdue for an angsty post there, wasn’t I?