The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

The first segment of the winter gaming storm is going pretty decently.  I haven’t mustered the desire (or the disk space) to touch any part of Orange Box aside from Portal and Team Fortress 2.  I suppose that at some point I’ll crank up Half Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two, but who knows.  I spent a fair chunk of today grinding away at Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, trying to turn my party into a decent variety of something other than Squires and Chemists.  How did I ever play this game without massive grinding?  I managed somehow, years ago, but damned if I know how.  I’m getting Halo 3 tomorrow, so that Ryan, James and I can play the coop campaign over Live, and soon after that, I’ll be acquiring Guitar Hero 3 and Hellgate London, both of which will probably devastate my free time.  Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness is tempting me strongly, but hey… didn’t I just buy a SRPG for the PSP?  Damn.  I also have urges to pick up some slightly older games, like Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, and Odin Sphere.  And hey, didn’t another Phoenix Wright game just come out?

I went in for my first eye exam in five years or so, and ordered a shiny new pair of glasses.  I haven’t really been happy with the pair I’ve been using ever since I broke my primary pair in a fit of rage two Decembers ago… they’re too small in many ways, and I’ve long since destroyed the magnetic clip-on sunglasses that came with them.  One of the nosepads, which I didn’t even know could come off, vanished a couple of days ago, and though I’ve since discovered that I actually could replace them (I thought the glasses hadn’t been made for too long), I decided it was still high time to get a replacements.

Alice and I failed twice to go to the corn maze this weekend.  Sucktastic!  We’re going to try again on Thursday night, and hope that there are no crowds (and no inclement weather).

Luckily, it was a productive weekend in other aspects.  We got some errands done, I fixed the Camaro’s electrical problem (I think), and I got some paint thinner to try and fix the faucet in our backyard.  The faucet doesn’t seem to want to be fixed, but ah well.  It’s covered in paint from when the apartment complex got painted over with sprayers, so my shiny hose that I bought can’t thread tightly onto the faucet.  Sucktastic again!

It was a good weekend for video games, too.  I got a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics in, carved through Portal (I’m addicted to the ending credit song, by the way), and played some Team Fortress 2 with Ryan.  TF2 is good fun… anybody want to join us in playing online?  James?

We also watched Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, as well as last week’s Heroes episode, which catches us up.  This presents the problem, of course, that now we have to wait for a new episode to air every week  Sucktastic the third!  KHAAAAAAAAN!

I have corn muffins.  That will be all.

I finally got the goddamned PSP to update itself so that it would play Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions and sat down on the couch, ready to put in a nice, solid hour of badguy-whackin’ before bed.  Alas, it was not to be…

I got past the introductory battle by dicking around in the back and figuring out how Squeenix renamed all the skills, while Agrias and Gafgarion did all the work on the front line.  Some cutscenes rolled, and I was put down in the second battle of the game, the first real fight.  I dug through my meager troop selection, found out that I had a couple of female badasses (around 75 Brave and Faith each), plunked down a 75ish-Faith chemist and another random male squire, and then the familiar map faded in.  I remembered it giving me problems before in the original Final Fantasy Tactics, because of the enemy chemist who went around tossing potions to all his buddies whenever I damaged them.  So right at the opening of the fight, I sent Ramza and one of the supersoldiers after him, while the rest of the gang hung out with Delita to take out the enemy squires.

Ahh, Delita… you magnificent bastard, foil of my every plan.  The fight started out just fine, with Delita running around recklessly smacking enemies like a headless chicken, and my troops putting down the guys he lost interest in.  It was a slow process, but Ramza and his companion took out the chemist with no real problems.  Along the way, though, my other uber-chick fell in battle.  No biggie, I thought… just mop up the remnants in less than three turns, and she won’t disappear.  So I refocused my efforts on taking out the rest of the enemies as efficiently as I could.  Part of that plan, however, which ended up being the fatal flaw, centered around assuming that Delita would attack the nearest enemy, especially if that enemy was just about dead.

I ended up with two nearly-dead enemies about half the map apart, with two full rounds left on the death timer for my unconscious babe-sassin.  Delita was standing between the two enemies, but closer to the one that was on the edges of the fight.  So I merrily issued orders sending the others away from that guy, assuming Big D would take care of him for me… big mistake.  He jogged on over to the other enemy and hit him with a sword.

What’s wrong with that, you ask?  Delita took care of one of the remaining dudes, it shouldn’t be a big problem to take out the other and end the fight, right?  Wrong.  Near the last man alive was the corpse of one of his friends who had fallen early in the battle.  Right after Delita’s turn ended, said friend turned into a sparkly little rejuvenation crystal.  The Last Man Standing casually strolled on over and took it, regaining all his health.  Two of my troops were able to reach him, but weren’t able to remove his newly-refilled hit points before my precious sleeping femme fatale faded into crystal herself.

Alice and I went to the gym today.  I did:

• 3 x 12 x 35lbs dumbbell press
• 3 x 10 x 25lbs dumbbell curl
• (2 x 10) + (1 x 4) dumbbell lift (what are these actually called?)
• 1 x 10 x 40lbs shrugs
• 3 x 10 x 20lbs leg extensions
• 2 x 20 decline situps
• 1 x 10 x 25lbs weighted decline situps

and then I ran half a mile.  Not too bad, if I do say so myself.

Wyotech has continued its trend of being boring, but informative.  We’re currently learning about practical electrical testing and diagnosis with breadboards and DMMs and the like.  I’ve always been afraid of electricity, since I never really understood it, so this is really good for me.

Riding April around for the past couple of days has felt completely awesome.

I’m horny.

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!

Neither April nor Faye are fixed yet.  It’s been back to the boring classroom for the past couple of days at school.  And even with something like 2/3 of my day dedicated to “doing something”, I’m still restless for something real to do.  I itch.  I’m not exactly sure what it is I’m itching for.

On the upside, I’m on expensive meds at the moment that might cure two slight health problems I’ve had for about a year… I’m on proton pump inhibitor to reduce gastric acid production, which hopefully will stop my chronic heartburn and allow the flappy thing in my throat to heal, thus making it so that I don’t feel like something’s stuck in my throat for hours after every meal.  I’m also on some strong-as-hell anti-fungal foot lotion, to try and get rid of a mystery skin-peeling thing that’s afflicted only my left foot.  Also, Alice has garnered me some gym-buddies!  So between those two facts, perhaps my health can improve.  Not that it’s bad or anything.

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.

What do I want to do?  What are my goals?  What are my priorities?

Starting Monday, I’m going to be attending Auto Tech/High Performance Powertrains classes at Wyotech, so that’s 7AM-4:10PM M-F covered.  I want to turn that into some kind of career building badass cars, preferably for racing.  If I can get into racing myself, so much the better, although I don’t think I’m ever going to be super-awesome at it.  I’m definitely going for trackdays, though, as much as I can.  I’ve got such big plans for vehicles to acquire and mod and drive the shit out of… but first, I’m going to spend the next nine months eating and breathing cars.

I think I’ve mostly decided that cars/motorcycles and motorsports are what I want as my main priority.  There’s still a shit-ton of other things I want to pursue, but at least for now, this is the big one that I’m choosing to focus on.  It’s going to be a tough road, because I really don’t have all that much experience or knowledge to start from, but I’m going to work my ass off.  I kind of see this as my chance to redo school… I never really gave a shit about high school or college, and so I managed to pass, but didn’t honestly get much out of either one.  My English Literature B.A. is a testament to just how easy it is to get through liberal arts undergrad.  This time around, though, I’m going through a program about a subject I actually really, really love and am passionate about, and which will actually help me in terms of tons of practical knowledge.  Time to kick some ass.

Interestingly, though, I still also need more focus in my choices of hobbies.  There are just too many things I love and want to do, and I often can’t get myself to commit to any of them enough to actually DO anything.  Especially with so much less free time, I’m going to have to really push myself not to waste my time sitting around doing nothing anymore.

It’s insomnia again, for the second night in a row.  Alice starts her fall quarter classes tomorrow morning, so we turned in at a relatively sane hour of 1:45AM.  After only three episodes of Heroes, too… responsible adults!  We started watching the series Saturday night, after making up from an argument (hi Ryan).  We ended up burning through about 12 episodes Saturday and Sunday nights, staying up until around 5AM each time.  Not good for our sleeping habits!  I’m starting at Wyotech this coming Monday, so I’ve got to get back on the regular path myself.  I hope it’ll be worth it.

I neglect this blog mightily, and I think part of the reason is that I’ve forgotten that I’m supposed to just be keeping a personal journal–albeit a public one.  I make too much of my posts, try and insert some meaning into each one, whether it be some meaningful idea, a review of something, or just trying to keep a regular record of something I do.  I forget that I’m not a critic or reviewer, nor is this the Great American Novel, nor do I really, really need to keep track of every push up I do.  I have this problem all the time… everything I do has to be meaningful, has to be progressive… and in the process of overthinking the thing and planning out how significant it’s going to be, I forget to actually do it in the first place.  Old cliches are sometimes best… just do it!