Japanese food and karaoke

Yesterday was a very nice departure from the normal monotony.
There was awesome Japanese food at Kappou Gomi.



Then there was real karaoke at Do Re Mi (where we, of course, did “Don’t Stop Believin'”) followed by Karaoke Revolution at Sharon’s/Charles’ apartment.

More photos are here.
Many, many thanks to Sharon and Charles for organizing things.

I also made a few tasty things yesterday. I experimented with peanut butter and jelly brownies. They didn’t end up half bad, although the jelly kind of crystalized and got rather strange to eat. I also made mac and cheese with veggies… pretty basic and easy, but tasty. I also bought like a pound of deli turkey to snack on, and it’s already over half gone. Mmm meat.

Today will be awesome tasty Mexican food for lunch.

I’m feeling much better. :)

Photodump

I uploaded photos from Sharon’s/Charles’/Matt’s party thing to photos 2.

Anyway, after a long hiatus of photos, here’s a bunch of random photos from recent life:
Alice being Alice

Random board games


Indian food before the 162 R1 release



Jayesh

Ben giving a talk during the regular Friday meeting

Tasty Dim Sum

Signoff for the 162.7 patch release (poor Release Team… by Sunday, they will have done 9 straight days of releases)

I’ve been playing Baten Kaitos Origins lately (since it arrived before Baten Kaitos). I am a huge HUGE fan of the battle system… it’s partially real-time, but so much more strategic than most real-time systems. I now have three RPGs I’m in the process of playing (Baten Kaitos, Baten Kaitos Origins, and Evolution Worlds). I should probably not try to do all three concurrently…

Random thoughts

Random thoughts of the moment:

  • Relationships seem to last longer the older you are. In middle school, I remember people changing boyfriends/girlfriends every few weeks or months. Now it seems every other Facebook status update is, “Yay one year!” or similar.
  • Last night’s PSO game is what PSO should be. Despite being an open game, the 3 people I played with were awesome. They shared items openly, were good at their respective jobs, were extremely supportive (resta, anti, moons), and just generally fun to adventure with. None of this “Mage, buff me.” (just because it’s my job doesn’t mean you have to be rude about it) or rare hogging stuff.
  • Relatedly, my newm can survive Falz in ultimate now. Well, except for his rabarta wave of doom. Boo rabarta wave.
  • Facebook is getting creepier. There are now apps that aren’t served from the site itself but external locations (through Facebook Connect?). As such, they still have scary amounts of access to your private data, but there is no apparent way to block them (as you can only block Facebook apps, not external ones). Also, I found a bit of my private, visible to “No One” data in an ad this morning. WTF, Facebook.
  • Seafood is tasty. Last night’s dinner was really tasty. I want scallops.
  • I seem to have fallen out of touch with all of my friends from middle school (sometimes purposely, on their end… seriously, wtf is your problem?). This makes me sadder than it should, sometimes. This is primarily on my mind because I had a dream about this last night, and woke up rather upset.
  • My ribcage hurts. I think I’ve been sleeping on it wrong. Bleh.
  • If you send me a “kind of urgent, please respond ASAP so we can set this up” email and I respond, not responding back for days is kind of rude.

Poop.

Dreams

My dreams have been awesome lately, leading me through tons of different emotions every night. I find myself often waking up in a panic, or completely content, or really upset.
I keep intending to document some of these dreams.
Unfortunately, the instant I wake up, I forget almost all of the content. Sigh. So it goes.

Tried PSO’s challenge mode yesterday and ended up failing 1C1 twice (AKA the easiest challenge in the game). Fail.

My hard drive has less than 10 GB of free space. I need to buy a 1 TB drive soon, but I’m trying to delay until Thanksgiving sales.

My laptop is being even less cooperative, freezing when I try to launch windows explorer. I should perhaps do something about this, but meh.

Work is good.

Life goes.

More computer fail

The PC version of Grandia 2 I bought a couple weeks ago arrived. (It actually arrived last week, but the front desk didn’t send a package received notification like they usually do…)
Tried to install and play it and proceeded to get blue screens of death and/or various other crashes. From the internet, this seems like a very common issue with the game if you’re not running Windows 98 or ME (ewwww). Various fixes were suggested, but I don’t want to try them until I (somehow… probably when I get a new computer) have a VM up so I can mess with it all I want.

So yeah, the attempt at getting Grandia 2 screenshots for RPG Get! kind of failed. (At least I only paid $4 for the game.)
I think other game expansions will have to wait until I (somehow… when my parents next visit or when I go to visit them) get my Dreamcast and Gamecube here and have a usable video capture card again. Ugh. I guess it will be PSO TCG v3 for now. That’s not entirely bad, but kind of against the entire point of RPG Get! :P

I suppose, in general though, work on RPG Get! is going to slow down. I tried making more cards the other day and my computer was doing a weird thing where the desktop and taskbar (explorer.exe) seemed to crash, then the entire computer would reboot. I’m hoping it was some weird fluke, but I haven’t really had the desire to try it out again since them.

Computers are so frustrating. Why can’t they just work?
It seems like the more technology “improves”, the less reliable it is. I never used to have issues with programs not working and hardware misbehaving. Now it seems like everything I try to do just causes computer problems.
Just because I have the technical knowledge to work around or fix problems doesn’t mean I want to have to do so constantly. (And, as many people can attest to, having computer problems tends to cause me severe emotional issues… the last computer I had that completely died caused me to cry for something like an hour, and simple things like doing a clean OS install stress me out way too much.)
(I suppose this is part of the reason I find myself so reluctant to spend money on a new computer… I’m not convinced it will actually improve anything, and I’ll simply be out several hundred dollars.)

Also, annoyingly, it seems that LJ syndication is broken as it has not picked up yesterday’s entry yet.
Error Message: 500 Can’t locate object method “new” via package “HTML::HeadParser”
That makes no sense. Livejournal epic fail.

Also also, had a bit of an annoying experience on PSO today that basically made me stop playing for the rest of the evening. I was in a vhard game (level 65) playing with a level 85 Racast and we were doing fine. A high level Fonewearl (level 140) joins the game, complete with a Simple merge and Summit Moon (meaning she deals something like 1500 damage to enemies with her simple techniques) and proceeds to mow down entire rooms of enemies before the Racast or I can get a hit in (and therefore get experience from the kill).
As if that wasn’t bad enough, she gains a level and proceeds to quit a couple rooms before the boss fight (where her tech strengths would have actually been helpful) without so much as a “Thank you” for having her in our game.
Seriously, if you’re going to enter a game that you are overpowered for, you are there to *help* the players in that game, not steal all the experience for yourself. Whenever I join such a game, I limit myself to buff and debuff spells (that don’t deal damage), and only kill enemies when told it is okay to do so (and, even then, only after the other players have tagged them).
I should really stop playing in open games. Most gamers are just so rude.

As if that wasn’t enough to make me unhappy, the world just feels extremely wrong right now. Hopefully this will remedy itself on Monday when there is communication again, but for now I just feel like there’s a huge part of my life that’s missing. Blah.