*chuck*

I've got enough Leaf and Moon stones to start a bloody army, but they refuse to cough up a single Water stone. Pleh.

I've been playing alot of Pokemon recently since I don't have any of my console games available yet. Still working pretty good at my pace, 227 pokemon caught and 10 badges earned. I'll destroy the last 6 gyms soon probably, after I finish getting evolution stones and swarm pokemon. Gonna have to start trading soon to get more stuff though, would be easier if the 3DS would just be out already. =P Black and White versions are coming out next weekend! 156 new pokemon too, that's the biggest increase ever, at 5 more than the original lineup. Let's hope for moar Eevees. >:3

Also next weekend is Reitaisai SP! I'm not really sure if it's going to be noteworthy, as ZUN's already put out Double Spoiler and Great Fairy Wars this year. I feel like there should be a reason to the second Reitaisai this year, but it'll probably just be a bunch of average doujin stuff.

Been trying to find other stuff to do to pass the time too, since grinding the Bug catching contest was boring after the second attempt. Downloaded and tried Mabinogi and Lord of the Rings Online at various points. Mabinogi was cute, but meh, so I only played a few days. LORTO I started up yesterday, and while it's better than the average Free MMO, it hasn't really made me feel like I want to keep playing it much longer. Maybe when I get to Bree things'll seem more interesting.

Finally put in my preorder for the FFXIV Special Edition. Been holding off all this time mostly to make sure my finances for the semester were in order first. I've read some things about the game, but I'm not getting in to too much and I'm staying out of the Beta, so when late-Sept, early-Oct comes around I can get a fresh, new world to play around in. Of course, I very much hope it's good, because if I end up stopping my subscription for any reason, I'll probably find myself back in Vana'diel faster than a pos-h4xing THF Fleeing off Thousandfall Ridge.

Speaking of Final Fantasy, a new Dissidia game has been announced, Final Fantasy Dissidia Duodecim. So far there's not really much information on it yet, however Kain from FFIV and Lightning from FFXIII are confirmed as playable. Here's to hoping Prishe makes it in this time. >:3

Nothing special about school yet. Though we didn't have Japanese class all week. Apparently our professor is ill and had to go to the hospital (nonemergency I think) I'm still keeping up with the lessons we missed, although I doubt she'll completely skip them, so I'll just end up ahead for a class or three if we start up again this week.

Gonna start doing weekly photo assignments again. I'll bother Adrienne later this week to see if she wants to again, unless someone else wants to think up topics for me to try to photograph this year.

PASTA *poink*

I can make pasta! And curry! I CAN MAKE PASTA CURRY!!

Pokemon is being annoying. Unlike pretty much *any* other gen, there's literally no good way to get evolution stones in Soul Silver, and the only ways that do work don't open up until I get off my arse and beat the Elite 4. Hopefully the Bug catching contest won't suck too much, because the Pokeathelon does. On a good note, I managed to catch both Raikou and Entei today, so that's 2/3 roamers. I think I'll just chuck my Master Ball at Latios when he shows up and save myself the headache.

School's off to a good start more or less. Jon showed up, though he's not around much. As for classes, Geo I'm not sure about, since we've only had a very brief lecture so far. The first lab's this Friday, so we'll see if I get what's going to happen yet. Stat is easy peasy lemon squeezy glancing over the first few chapters, but maybe by November the math will be more difficult than the vocabulary? Haha. IS310 is kinda boring, and it's the only one I'm confirmed to write papers for this semester, so yeah. The teacher seems decent at least, so maybe the class won't suck too much. Management gives me severe deja vu vibes from Microecon over the summer, so I'll expect to pass with a 98% in this as well, hahaha. Maybe not, since there's no math, but it doesn't seem like a hard class. Japanese is the same as I remember it from 2004 when I took this teacher this first time. A new section of the class was added though, where we meet for an hour once a week and no English is permitted. I like it, but there are more than a couple people struggling with basic pronunciation. It might've helped more if we were using the Hepburn system, but c'est la vie.

Nothing else really this week. I did go get the car, so I can do stuff outside school now! I'll probably just play video games all day though. Or I would, but my living expense check still isn't here, so I have to wait to buy my TV and bring all my crap up here. ;x

Broken Comics

Just in case you were looking at older entries before now, there were a surprising number of comics that were no longer functioning. I moved to a different host for all my Flash files, and they *seem* to have more than enough bandwidth for me, unless people actually start liking my comic for some unfathomable reason. Even then, I can probably just do a fake-out and create more accounts with them. Lemme know if anyone sees more broken comics though.

*guitar solo*

What is...OH GOD IT'S A CAR GET IN THE LION!

Comic right? Holy carp! It's like a mountain of needles in your face! Don't worry, my friend I have just the remedy. UPDATES EVERY SUNDAY! Or Monday. Usually. Unless I forget. Or get bored. Or asfljanfLSANVKAJGNAWKLJVBAKLJmkjnsldkgnaejrn. But expect it!

Why did this happen? Because I made monies, and bought this:

It's a tablet! So I updated! Like I said I might! Aren't I thoughtful?

Out of nowhere except right here! It's a HeroQuest update! Because I actually got off my arse at the end of summer and finished painting the couple dozen or so I still had sitting around. Here's the 5 metal girl figures I ordered back in winter:

Overall there's close to 150 figures I think. I didn't count. I have even more, but they're not really needed right away. With the set I have now, there's no problem playing through the main Heroquest game, and the Kellar's Keep and Return of the Witch Lord expansions. I'll need to buy and paint more if I surprisingly actually ever find a group to play with and even more surprisingly they last through that far to get to said quests. But for now the game's finished, aside from minor things like a method of transport for the minis, or a DM screen, or something.

I ended up going to Otakon anyway in Kogasa mode (BEROBEROBA~!), even though I was only able to attend for two days. I still had quite a lot of fun, and spent far too much in the Dealer's Room, as opposed to my usual nothing. I bought a Marisa Nendoroid plushie to sate my Touhou needs, and a slew of Higurashi figurines. Adrienne was also awesome and got me a Rena plushie, so now Rena and Marisa can enact plushie warfare throughout my room while I'm in college. Saw a few things like Axis Powers Hetalia (a bit confusing, but better than I expected) and Welcome to the Space Show (Not quite Ghibli quality, but a very fun movie).



Comiket 78 has come and gone, leaving us with many, many goodies. Umineko Episode 7 is out, which is good as the Episode 6 translation patch was just finished recently as well. It's predicted Episode 8 will come out this winter and wrap up the series. In a related Tangent, mangagamer.com has now released the entirety of the Higurashi series, Episodes 1-8~!

For Touhou, there's been a slew of new games. Officially, ZUN released 12.8, Great Fairy Wars. It plays like a standard Touhou shooter, but you can now freeze most bullets in ice, as you play Cirno. You face off with the 3 fairies Sunny Milk, Luna Child, and Star Sapphire in the order of your choice in a 3 stage run (as opposed to 6) Daiyousei, Lily White & Black (Official now! =D) and Marisa also make appearances.

Next up is the New Super Marisa Land. It's a Mario fangame that's *very* well done, even if a bit short. Enemies and powerups are similar to many things done in Mario games, but with plenty of unique stuff too. But you don't care about all that. You just want the Bunnycopter. Fine, have the damned Bunnycopter.


Touhou Pocket Wars EVO+ came out, but I tried EVO and...I dunno. It's good, but there's just not that much to do. Maybe I'll check it out when it gets translated. There was also an RPG named the Genius of Sappheiros that looks really good, but there's no point in playing it if I can't understand the damn story. =P

Lastly, Touhoumon v1.8 came out. Also, Drakuaza's Insane version too. Honestly, I haven't really bothered with either, as most Touhoumon games are just kinda blah. And Kanto's freaking boring, do something new gaiz.

Onto other stuff, I bought a PS3 and a good camera as well this summer, and hope to be buying an HDTV soon, so I can see FFXIII in the pretties. Already beat Flower and Soul Calibur IV. I really wanna start FFXIII, but it all depends on when that living expense check comes in.

Speaking of which, I'm back at UMBC now. Living in the apartments this year, and things are already looking alot better. First off, both of my roomies I've met are gamers to some extent, and I've enjoyed hanging out with both so far. There's supposed to be a fourth person with us, but as of yet, he's MIA. So maybe only three people? At the very least, that'll cut down on bathroom smell, hahaha.
Here's my awesomely tiny room:


Doesn't bother me since it's ALL MINE >:3 Still working out a few kinks with making my laptop more mobile around the room though. Bought a TON of kitchen stuff. We're actually mostly set now, and it wasn't as much a money sink as I thought it'd be. I paid for most of the non-food items too, so I can keep them and reuse them for future stuff. I fel iz gro'd up nao yish?

Got a major role in another of Erik's films! In what? You'll have to wait and see! I'm going to kill you with anticipation that you won't feel because you'll have already forgotten what I just said by the time you make it to the end of this very long run-on sentence.

Phantasy Star Portable 2 demo came out. It uses the PSU system again, but they're very much improving it. Of course, they also just announced Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity in Japan, so I might instead wait for that and just mess around in PS Zero more, heh.

FFXIV in 3 weeks! FFXIV Open Beta in 2 days! ARE YOU RAWRDY!?

My Dream Diary's seemed to started to work really good. I've had detailed remembrances (mostly) 5 times in the past week, which blows away the spotty stuff here and there throughout the summer. Hopefully my dream memory will continue to improve all the way to lucidity! >:3

And, I'll finish up with a song. Because you're not the boss of me.

School's out

Or just about. I still have my weekend adventure class, but I hardly think that counts as school, haha.

Finished the summer session pretty easily. Billiards was an obvious Pass, I'm not actually sure how to fail that course. I haven't gotten my grade for Microecon back yet, but assuming I didn't totally bomb the final, I should easily have an A. Infosys I *did* get my grade back, and it's not really that surprising I got an A, haha. My lowest assignment grade in the class was an 88, and the next lowest was a 97.5. =D My Hiking class is this weekend, so I'll be out in West Virginia for about 2 days. Sounds fun.

Finished FFIV: TAY a while ago, it certainly had a rather interesting ending to everything. Unfortunately, they opted for one of those final bosses that look like a mass of...stuff. I totally had no idea what I was supposed to be fighting the entire time aside from what the name told me it was, haha. Overall, I'd rate the game as a 6.5/10, like I gave FFIII, haha. I *do* recommend that anyone who wants to play FFIV also play TAY shortly thereafter, because TAY is notably better and develops the characters alot more than they bother to in the original game, especially Kain.

Currently playing Pokemon Soul Silver now, although at sort of a lax pace. Pokedex is @ 60-some odd, with 3 badges. Once I get past the Lake of Rage event, I'll probably spend most of my time filling out my pokedex for a while, so I'll probably start playing another game around then to break up the tedium. Not sure which one yet though.

FFXIV has entered actual beta-testing finally! Of course, I don't really follow it that closely, haha. I'll get it when I get it. I'll probably preorder the collector's edition in a few weeks after I figure out how much money I need to spend on a new camera.

Oh yeah, I guess I never said which laptop I ended up getting. It's this one. The cheapest of the G73s sure, but I don't really need any of the stuff that makes the others cost more. And it can still kick arse. Almost hit 4000 on the FFXIV benchmark, which is absolutely amazing for a laptop right now, especially for this price. Hoping this will take care of my gaming needs for 3-4 years, until I finish college and all that jazz and it's practical to actually build a proper desktop, with modifications. ;D

Looks like K-ON! S2 isn't finished after all! I was expecting another half-season, but they've started a new intro, so it'll be a full-length season it seems. That's good, as KyoAni isn't trolling everyone like they did with Haruhi S2. Looking around at the other summer anime seeing if anything's worth watching, but I haven't seen anything yet.

Me and Erik hit up the PF Chang's in Annapolis to see how their cuisine held up. It was certainly quite good, and the servers were surprisingly professional, but the food just didn't match up to the local stuff from Hunan L'Rose. And it cost more. So Hunan L'Rose has been added to our list of places we like to eat often (incl. Matsu Sushi, Potato Valley, Famous Dave's, etc.) Probably gonna move away from Asian cuisine now and look at other stuff, and I'd also like to try out a few new curries before the end of the summer. Hopefully I won't "discover" Death Curry Mk. II, haha.

2 classes remain

And then I'm finished with most of Summer stuff. Still holding out with high As in Microecon and Infosys, and I managed to score second place in the Table Tennis tournament. (The guy who beat me had a crazy flat shot, haha. Still managed to get the score 4-2 though) Also, more word on my Hiking class finally, there's an info meeting a week from Monday, so I'll finally be able to learn something about what's happening. Hopefully there'll be finalized dates so I can let people at work know when I need off.

Changed one of my classes for the Fall this week. Instead of doing my SciLab credit with Water: An Interdisciplinary Study, I changed over to Exploring the Environment: A Geo-spacial perspective. So instead of running around outside looking at mud, I get to run around outside with a GPS. Sounds neat!

FFIV:TAY is actually shaping up better than it seemed at first. The first story segment with Ceodore is really the most painful crappy part of the whole game so far. Rydia's tale was a complete 180, and very enjoyable to go through. Obviously the single-character tales aren't that long though, but there are challenge dungeons you can grind for special gear and whatnot. I don't care enough to do that. Overall, the only ones that weren't that good were Edward's and Edge's, for somewhat obvious reasons. Palom's was surprisingly one of the better tales, and Yang's, while enjoyable, had one of the dumbest plot devices in history. Okay, so they're on a boat. A boat with sails. They're crusing to Baron, and suddenly run out of fuel. So, with no fuel, they turn around and stop at an island. To look for coconuts. So they can run the ship on coconut oil. Riiiight. Only one side-tale left, that being the Lunarian's Tale. Then onto the latter half of the main game, hopefully with as little forced Ceodore as possible.

Summer!

SUCKS! =D You know it's true. God damn giant fireball thing.

Anyway, today's a recap post since I've been too busy/lazy to post for two months.

Spring Semester I more or less dominated. A's in Calculus II, Chemistry I, and Scenography (Theatre Shop). B's in CompSci II and Discrete Math(Logic & Proofs). No idea how I pulled the A in Calc, other than being awesome. GPA for semester was 3.6, overall rose to 3.5.

Started Summer classes (half over already, lol). Microecon is easy and I currently have a 98%. Management InfoSys is also easy, but more annoying, so I *only* have a 97%. lol. I actually went out of my way to write up all the assignments for InfoSys early, so now I don't have any outside homework assignments except reading. Billiards/Ping Pong is a Pass/Fail class probably, and I don't see how I could possibly fail, haha. My Trail Hiking course sent me a notice a few weeks ago, but I still don't have dates on that. I guess it's early though, but it should be confirmed in the next two weeks.

GAMES. I CAN PLAY VIDEO GAMES AGAIN! =D Haven't done too many, trying to work down my queue (But it's only getting bigger? haha) Played through Fallout 3 and all the add-on scenarios. Honestly, while it was a good start, the game just flat-out isn't as good as Oblivion. Combat in particular, but there's also significantly less story to explore and the fan-content isn't quite as good either. The Add-ons mostly sucked though. Mothership Zeta and maybe Broken Steel were passable. Was on a post-apoc kick, but the fuel died out pretty soon after exploring Megaton. Maybe there's something else out there to satisfy me...

Also played through Pokemon Colosseum's Story Mode, since I sort of had skipped that before and gone straight to XD: Gale of Darkness. Was somewhat interesting, though XD was longer and better, even if the main characters in Colosseum are significantly cooler, haha. I picked up Pokemon Soul Silver the other day, though I'm trying to save it just a little bit more. I played enough to start messing around with the PokeWalker though, so I've been carrying that around now. =D

Current game is FFIV: The After Years. Honestly...it's kinda painful. I've cleared the first scenario, but this has potential to be the worst FF game I've played. As a small bit of respite, Kain isn't a one-dimensional failure of a character like he was in FFIV, now he's two-dimensional just like everyone else. =D No complex plot here yet though, but maybe I'll like it more after all these side stories. Of course, maybe it'll all be tedium. Let's find out! (Thank god Rydia's story is next.)

Oh yeah, I started working! Yeah... It's not too bad though, even if it is dreadfully boring. Better than most jobs I've worked. Working 3 nights a week atm, might bump it up after classes are over. Hope to buy at least a new laptop and a PS3 along with some games by the end of the summer. Not finalized on which PC yet, though I've got it narrowed down to a handful, and I may very well buy it next weekend or the following. If I have enough funds, I'm also thinking of getting a new digital camera and a tablet. We'll see how long they keep me around, haha.

No additional progress on the HeroQuest minis. I know, it's been sitting there since Spring Break. >_>; I'm actually hoping to start that up soon in-between bouts of being ruthlessly frustrated at FFIV:TAY.

Nothing much new on the anime front. I ended up watching Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou through to the end. It wasn't terribad, but after about 3 episodes it seemed like they just said "Screw it!" and threw the plot into hyperdrive. Amusing at least, though I'd only give it a 6/10. K-ON! S2 should also be ending this week, and has been significantly more irrelevant than the first season.

I managed to get my hands on the Higurashi translated game! So far I only have the first four chapters, but I can't wait to actually sit down and realize all the loads of stuff they had to cut from the animoo. Hoping to get Ch5 and 6 soon too, since Tsumihoroboshi-hen is easily my favorite of the series. I probably won't get to read any of these until August though, haha.

Discovery! Hunan L'Rose in Odenton is absolutely fantastic for Chinese cuisine. Myself and Erik went there for a curry lunch a few weeks ago, and got almost more delicious food than we could eat for dirt cheap. I didn't see any steam buns though. =(