Blah

I’ve been feeling rather off lately and I’m not sure why. I guess it’s a combination of lonely, bored, and frustrated.

I want to work on cards, but given that no one is interested in playing or anything, I usually end up not finding the motivation. Student Wars v2 needs some rebalancing since the latest testing confirms that GPA is underpowered and RPG Get! needs card making… but meh.

My other computer is still borked and I don’t really feel like fixing it (especially since that would likely involve a reformat and such).

Haven’t been interested in food at all lately. I eat when I have to because eating is good, but it seems to be more out of necessity than actual desire. There’s some interesting places that will deliver pre-made awesome meals (such as this one) of food that I actually am interested in eating… except the cost is way too high. (Over $40/day for 3 meals? One dinner meal of fish with a side costs $20? No thanks.) There’s also random take-out places that I’ll sometimes be in the mood for, but eating out every day at $10/meal (even just once a day) is a bad plan.

Work is going well and is enjoyable, but I really should have a life other than work and PSO.

I want to shoot photos but there’s no one to shoot portraits of and shooting not-people is only fun with someone else.

Relationships are funny. I guess it feels so normal at this point that there’s part of me that is interested in being single again just for the hell of being single. It’s not that I’m at all unhappy or feeling trapped or anything… just that I feel like maybe such a huge change (in my mind) would at least be *something* happening in my routine of work, sleep, work, sleep, games, sleep, work, sleep. There’s also the fact that I often take words at more than face value. I don’t know.

I suppose life is good, and I’m not unhappy, persay. I’m just feeling off.

Games!

So despite most of today’s plans falling through (people coming up and/or heading down to San Mateo for fondue), it was still awesome and fun.

Matt came up from Sunnyvale and we soon collected a Dan, Gopi, Tao, and Raphael. Went to the mall and had tasty Chinese food and green tea smoothie, then watched Raphael play around with the projected stompy ad games, then went to the Metreon for some DDR and Beatmania.
Then we lost everyone but Dan but gained a Justin and played card games… Hecatomb (first time playing… seems like an awesome game), World of Warcraft TCG (which I think I like… but ugh, I really do not want to pick up a mainstream TCG), 3-player DBZ TCG (which gave off the impression that the game isn’t as well designed as it could be, possibly due to it not being built for multiplayer), and Race for the Galaxy (which is awesome and has elements in common with Puerto Rico/San Juan).

There should be people and games more often. Today was fun.

Also, Tim… again the issue with buying a new computer is with the amount. Over a period of a few months I undoubtedly spend the $700 or so it would cost to buy a new computer… but spending it all at once just makes it seem like a much bigger deal than it is. Also, the cards I just received were $117, but that cost is being spread out over 3 months so it’s not as bad.

HP laptop fail

Well, so my personal laptop appears to be fairly junked at this point. The battery now has 0% capacity (more likely something broke in the hardware such that the battery no longer supplies power, given that it still had plenty of battery power as recently as early July) so pulling the plug on it is a hard power off.
Besides that, it currently is unable to access the internet (through either a wired connection or the built-in wireless), is massively prone to overheating (and will hard power off when it does so) even when raised up on cups to let air circulate, and will often hard power off for no apparent reason (not due to overheating). Also, yes, the fan is working… it’s loud as hell and also comes on at random times when the computer isn’t doing anything.

All that and the laptop is only about 2 years old. Meh.

Don’t ever buy HP… they’re reasonably cheap and aesthetically pleasing, but they’re crap.

They also don’t come with install disks but instead a recovery partition… so you can either clean install from your own OS disk and lose all the applications (and have to manually find drivers online–the main reason I didn’t just install Ubuntu on it when I first got it) or use the partition to restore to factory specs (no other option). Also the preinstalled OS is horribly bloated with HP junk so restoring to factory specs isn’t going to give you the clean install you want.

I really should buy a desktop computer soon to replace this (the Inspiron 530 looks interesting) so I have something to use besides my work computer. I’m tempted to wipe it and install Ubuntu if/when I get it… and use VMWare or similar to run Windows XP in it for Photoshop and stuff (because wine seems like a huge pain to get working right). Someone who’s used VMWare before: How exactly does it work? Do I install it and then tell it to install XP from a disk I have or something?

But meh, I feel bad spending money on a new computer no matter how much I may need/want it. (Sticker shock, I suppose… not used to spending large amounts of money at once.) I feel like I get more stingy with each passing day.

Cards!


I has cards!
This isn’t all of them because the shipment was short 4 boxes of DBZ TCG base set (the boring brown boxes in the back). Have to contact them on Tuesday about those.

I’m trying to decide how to ration these out between 3 months so I have cards to open each month (good thing that September starts on Monday).
I’ve already opened 1 box of DBZ starters (not sure what to do with the other 4…) and the Hecatomb boosters. I’ll open maybe one more thing today (which will probably be the Inuyasha starters) and figure out what I want to open for September later.

Also, Hecatomb boosters have 13 cards (nice) distributed in a 9/3/1 common/uncommon/rare fashion (not so nice). I fully expect to have 14 copies of some of the commons by the time I’m through this box of 24 boosters… and I also expect to be missing cards from the 72 card set. Meh.

Also also, DBZ TCG looks like it’s a lot better than the old DBZ CCG… my only concern is that it seems each character needs their own physical attack lookup table now. Each of the 6 characters that have starter decks (Goku, Vegeta, Krillin, Piccolo, Raditz, Nappa) comes with a table, but what happens when I have other characters from boosters (Gohan, Trunks, Bulma)? Maybe they’re just not allowed to use attacks with AT damage values?

Also yay 3 day weekend!
Is anyone down in Mountain View planning something?

Edit: So both issues seem to have been accounted for. Hecatomb (at least my box) had one copy of each of the 24 rares in the 24 booster packs, so I got a complete set in one box. Also, all of the DBZ TCG physical attack lookup tables are the same (don’t know why I didn’t notice this before) so any physical attack table can be used for any character.

So yeah, I’m excited about some of these games. Someone should play with me at some point :D