Once on a donkey in Tunbridge Wells

Soooooo. I have been playing quite a lot of The Last Remnant - I'm currently just about to head into the Aqueducts in Nagapur and I've done all but two of the sidequests available. I'm saving those ones for grinding purposes (Cosmos Maiden and Wisdom's Echo). Both Rush and David have randomly learnt Blackout II, skipping Blackout, without me even quite knowing how that happened. Huh.

But. EMMA. Stupid bloody Squenix and their Aeris-style whallops. (Warning: major spoilers in the video.) I am also now deeply afraid of the Conqueror. Is it wrong that I want to see Conqueror/Emma now?

It says something about the way my mind works, though, that I'm not yet at the end of the first disk and I've already daydreamed up a dystopian AU where Rush is on the Conqueror's side.

However, stupid bloody Windows Vista keeps taking exception to TLR. Among other things, it has a) randomly sped up the battle speed in the middle of one battle and now I can't get it back to normal so Rush & Co look like the Energiser Bunny on speed, b) has bluescreened TWICE while I was playing the game, and c) keeps freezing the game in the middle of fights. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes not.

It says something that in the eight-odd years that I used Windows prior to getting the new laptop with Vista, I never once had a computer bluescreen on me. Since getting Vista? Three times in a year. Twice in the last fortnight.

...why is the Gae Bolg a giant penis?

What the fuck, Squenix. What. The. Fuck.

(The Last Remnant finally finished downloading, so I am currently sort-of levelling by cycling through the Gaslin Caves and the Ruins of Robellia Castle. Rule of thumb with any RPG: if you have an opportunity to do stupid amounts of levelling really early on, do so.)

Steam is going to drive me mad, I can tell.

I bought The Last Remnant PC version a couple of days ago and it arrived on Thursday. I thought installing it right there and then would be lethal considering that I have a job to apply for, work to go to, and still those areyougame fics to write that have been eluding me.

HOWEVER. Squeenix appear to have decided that they would put the game itself online, to be installed via Steam, and that the two DVD disks in the box were for something entirely different that I haven't quite worked out yet.

So now The Last Remnant is downloading to my computer at a rate of 235kB/s.

All. Twelve. Gigs. Of. It.

I'm really glad I have Dissidia to tide me over...

Still playing Dissidia, and spamming the quick battles. I've unlocked the initial 10 villains in the PP catalog, so I just played as Sephiroth for the first time. ( When he wins a battle, he giggles. )

I HAVE DISSIDIA.

Excuse me while I become a hermit for the next few weeks.

Edit: ...I knew it was a mistake to start with Cloud. Cannot beat Sephiroth because I am crap at defending. Argh. >.<

Son of Edit: Levelling in Dissidia is so much fun. I am spamming the quick battle option with Cloud - all the calendar bonuses are now unlocked so I level up pretty much once every three or four battles, and I just unlocked the Advent Children version of Omnislash. Mwahahahahaha.

dragovianknight linked to KnightFight today, and it looked like so much fun that I've signed up for an account. Lookie look, my first mission went well!

An evil duke is terrorising his people. You decide to set them free of his evil rule! Your mission was very successful. You received 108 gold as a reward from the liberated farmers and merchants!

You have been credited with 108 gold. On your mission you were also able to gain 2 experience points and your alignment has shifted 1 points towards the good side!

Not bad for ten minutes' work! Two more EXP points to the next level.

I may have done something incredibly cheesy/daft with my username, though. "Anria" was already taken, and somehow "almighty_frog" just didn't seem to cut it as the name of a Knight. On Friday I picked up a copy of Anna Karenina from Waterstones and I've been reading it ever since, so it was on my desk beside the computer when I registered. (Thus far it is bloody good, by the way.)

So can you guess what I named my Knight, then?

Yup, "Anria Karenina". :D

(Hey, for 7:15am, I think that was pretty imaginative! Or at least pretty punny, not sure which. Or which is better/worse.)

In other news: I am attempting to write my remaining two fics for areyougame, but I've had a few life crises and a return of the dreaded exhaustion (the doctor gave me pills for this! ::shakes fist::) so I've not really got much further than before. :/ I'm trying to force it through, but the tiredness makes it difficult to concentrate and my job is pretty demanding on the "needs attention" scale, so it drains me a lot.

In an attempt to keep to a semi-normal sleeping pattern, though, I've been replaying KH2. It's entertaining and doesn't require much brain power since all I have to do is button-mash. Ooh, look, a beneficial side effect of KH2's designers' laziness!

Edit to fix grammerz.

( Finally made it to the Dragovian Sanctuary... )

Edit: AHAHAHAHA I WAS RIGHT. Also, the Dragovian Lord was a ridiculously easy boss. WTF.

I have thumped straight into a wall insofar as my final two areyougame claims are concerned. I'm still trying to write them, just ... kinda failing.

However, I just finished DQ8! Wooh! Haven't done the Dragovian Trials yet, though - those are next up.

( What the hell does 'ragazzo' mean, anyway? )

-----

I figure I should actually try to get these eggs to hatch at some point.

Edit: the pics should work now. Curse you, Photobucket! *shakes fist*

So since TS3 pretty much enforces legacy-style playing on you, I decided hey! I may as well play a legacy family! TS3 is also addictive and therefore I have spent far too much time playing this family, which led to me making this post because if I don't I'll soon forget what the hell was going on at the time I took these screencaps.

Note: I didn't realise that my screencap programme was including the mouse in the pics, so there are several points where the mouse is clearly visible in the picture. Oops. Please ignore for now - I've changed the programme settings now so it shouldn't do that any more. :D

( Tsutsul Legacy Part One: Poverty and Gold Diggers )

At some point, I will stop playing with my DW layout. Promise.

Moving on:

( LIFE: I am an ill thing. )
( GAME: Disgaea )
( GAME: Sims 3 )

Just finished Persona 4. Awhrjsrjkghdjfkghjjgfawesome.

I just got to level 77 in Persona 3 FES, which meant that I could fuse Mara.

So off I went to the compendium to pull out the five different personae I would need to fuse the damn thing. I've got the Tower S.link maxed out, so I figured it would be money well spent.

So then. I went to fuse Mara. And.

What. The flying. Fuck.

Mara is a penis in a chariot. A penis in a chariot. Who thought that one up? Wait, more importantly, why did they think that up? What thought process leads you to put an enormous green penis in a chariot and then give it pierce skills?

...

Mara just got added to the list of "Why Atlus Is Fucking Awesome". XD

I had NO INTERNET between the 18th of Feb and the 24th of Feb. NO internet whatsoever. It was torture.

Anyway, that was not the point of this post: the point of this post was to say that I've changed my email address. If you want to email me in future, please use "anria [AT] solelyfictional [DOT] org", obviously amended so it actually makes sense as an email address. The old evilchibi yahoo uk address will still work, I just won't check it as often. It keeps kinda not receiving emails, or sending them to me several months late, and whatnot.

And now I play Persona 3 FES! I am determined to finish the whole thing (replay of The Journey and at least one play of The Answer) before Persona 4 comes out on 13 March. Wish me luck! ::salutes::

Just finished Crisis Core. ( Cut for spoilers. )

So in my last post I mentioned how I have a PSP now. It has been christened Albert, largely to stop my mother referring to it was "pusp". "Pusp" sounds like a skin disease, and is therefore not suitable for lovely, shiny Albert.

Anyway - I've been playing Crisis Core for a while now, and having great fun. I had a surreal moment when I first heard Zack speak, though, since I'd just been playing FFX-2 and immediately thought, "Why is Gippal in FF7?"

One thing I absolutely love about Crisis Core, though, is how they've included/updated music from the original FF7 and stuck it in wherever they can. It makes it so much more of a love song to the fans, while still being a good game with very good music for the newbies - it also gives things more of a haunting air, like how the background music in the Shinra building changes to the one from FF7 partway through the game, as if to say, "Here, this is what happened to make Shinra into the one you know from FF7 and not the happy-shiny-bouncy Zack kind." WAAAAH.

Plus nothing tops a half-naked Zack beating the crap out of things with a beach umbrella. Nothing.

(The end sequence to those missions, though, is really sad. It says a lot about Zack's character, only I'm not sure it's a good "lot".)

Off to play more... :D Also: HAPPY NEW YEAR! (And merry Christmas, too, since I forgot to add that previously.)

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! XD

Oh man, that made my day. Made. My. DAY.

Okay, so I've now got the hard drive from the previous laptop hooked up to this one as basically an external hard drive without the casing.

So I'm copying my files over (having wrestled with Vista for a while over their stupid "permissions" thing, even though it's scarily easy to override - hey, look, security flaws already!) and I suddenly realise something.

I don't have Microsoft Word installed.

So all those fic files that I was panicking over getting onto the new laptop so I could actually open them and keep writing ... are still inaccessible.

Eheh.

The laptop came with a disc with Microsoft Works on it, but I think I'll dig out the original Office discs instead so that I can have the full versions. They're still around here somewhere. I think.

On the plus side, I've been playing Neverwinter Nights 2, and holy crap, it works like a dream. The old laptop was lucky if it got more than one frame per second - this is seamless. And yes, I am going to keep geeking out about the new laptop for some time to come.

Okay, so when I said that next time I was getting a laptop it was going to be a Mac? I ... kinda got seduced by a certain Toshiba notebook and ended up getting a computer with Windows installed again. And not just Windows, but Windows Vista. Oh, how I have fallen.

On the plus side, the laptop is insanely powerful. It has the dual core Intel processors, and then on top of that it has two GeForce 8600M graphics cards, which mean when playing games its processing power is boosted to stupid levels. I installed Oblivion, set the graphics setting as high as they could go, and it didn't even blink. I realise I am an enormous dork, but I may in fact be in love.

The one real downside is ... Windows Vista. It's a pain in the neck, put bluntly. It's almost impossible to stop the programmes that are set up to run on startup from doing so without installing a programme like TuneUp Utilities that will give that capability. Add to that the fact that it's set up to whine at you every time you don't let it do whatever it wants with updating etc., and this may get very annoying very quickly.

Well, if all else fails, I still have the discs for XP! I'm pretty sure that someone will have got around most of the issues Windows Vista has with regards to user control, so I'll go hunting on the web at some point to see what I can find.

Anyway. Still no data recovery from the old laptop, though. That might take a while longer. In the meantime, I shall play Disgaea and enjoy the geeky power levelling.

(Also, look, new icon! It cracks me up. XD)

First of all, I have not been here for the last little while because my internet was a broken thing of broken. It was going slower than a 56kb modem, I tell you. I know this because on 56k, pages will actually finish loading.

Anyway.

Today, I have had a GOOD DAY.

First of all, I had an interview in the afternoon. While I have not yet heard about the job (duh, interview's only just finished), I did come out of the interview feeling like it had gone well and that I couldn't have done anything more to state my case. So, as job interviews go, that was pretty decent. Or at least not a catastrophic disaster.

And then. I came home.

And SMT: PERSONA 3 had arrived. A game which is half DATING SIM and half SUMMONING DEMONS by SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE HEAD.

There is also fusion. Mm, fusion.

This game. Arhjfggjf. My joy is a boundless ocean.

Aaaaaand I still haven't finished playing SMT: Nocturne. Hush.

I have also created a new layout for Pharmakon which I am actually happy with. This is deeply unusual. I have a feeling this satisfaction will last long enough for me to get the site up and running, and then vacate the premises for parts unknown.

I shall now depart to enjoy my good mood - and my GAME - while it lasts. XD

The KH2 Demyx battle in Hollow Bastion is the most annoying boss battle ever. I died four times before I said "fuck this" and went to go level up to, ooh, about ten levels higher than I had been. And I still nearly died.

(Well, no, I didn't nearly die - I kept nearly failing his stupid little "defeat X water forms in X seconds" annoyance and then nearly dying from those effing geysers.)

The whole irritation of the battle nearly distracted me from the hilarious woobie that is Demyx talking to himself and attempting to play nice with the Keyblade Master. And also made me think that the whole "Demyx is not a good fighter" thing in Jiminy's Journal is really undeserved. This is my second playthrough, and when I played through the first time Demyx was the only boss to ever give me trouble. (On the understanding that I didn't fight Sephiroth or the paradox cups. Plot boss battles, I mean.)

KH2 is also a leetle bit of a broken record in terms of how it deals with situations. Any time there's something plot-related that Sora needs to get through, what do they do? Start up a scripted battle. It's getting really monotonous. The Dave told me about this when he was playing it, but I thought he was exaggerating.

In more general life terms, I am once again working, and have been for the past two weeks. Yay monies! On a more hilarious note, one of my new work colleagues has a surname that - I kid you not - is "Moar". This is the same place that has a project which abbreviates to "PWP" - and not only that, it is frequently referred to as the "PWP project". Sometimes I have difficulty stopping myself from giggling at the inadvertently inappropriate subcultural references.

Since I've got a fairly long journey into work, I've been ploughing through the various academic books I kept wanting to read and never getting round to. I still have a reasonable list that I want to sell, though, so I might stick some details up here once I get it sorted out.