Cyrus

Since buying a new video card, I have been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2*. I've spend most of my time as an engineer, followed by the pyro. The reason is that I like to switch classes a long during a game to help the team, but I only switch out of engineer when all of my stuff has been destroyed. As a result, I am frequently alone and bored to tears as an engineer, but feel that it is my duty to keep my turrets active just in case.

Today, I was accused of using an aimbot. Though slightly offended, I find that it is probably one of the best compliments I have ever gotten in a multiplayer game. I learned early on that defensive pyros, my favorite way to play, never run out of ammo, so I can light up entire rooms at a whim and then retreat to a cabinet. We were playing Capture the Flag on 2Fort; my accuser was playing a spy and I noticed that he had been using the Dead Ringer constantly. This device lets you feign your death and turn you invisible as your opponents see a corpse fall down. However, I learned to keep firing my flamethrower on the chance that the spy I killed was using it, so I managed to get him several times and he started accusing me. My first response was to point out that I knew he was using the Dead Ringer.

But then in a bizarre coincidence. I found and ignited him again as I was randomly blasting a room. I don't think I'd believe me either if I was him; it was just too suspicious.

My next defense was fairly dumb. "Pyros don't need an aimbot," I weakly retorted in chat and stayed silent. He may no further mention of it, instead complaining that there were too many pyros**. At one point at the end of the match I think he was balanced onto my team.

As I was not in fact using an aimbot, I shall take the accusation as a sign of my skill when accuracy and twitch-playing aren't an issue. My worst classes are demoman followed by sniper.

* Portal and TF2 apparently share a lot of common files. When I decided to reinstall it, the game started a 68% complete.

** I agree with him on this one. We had four pyros and maybe six other people in total. We never got the enemy's intelligence even once.

Radeon 9200 -> Radeon HD 4670
Yes, this was mostly for Team Fortress 2, but now I can play Portal, Fallout 3, and a bunch of other games I've been interested in without the dread "OS page memory low" error.

Headphones
Not technically an upgrade, but the old ones died. My headphones seem to have a high turnover rate of six months to a year. Though the new pair only cost $8, it does not completely cover my ear.

Because I forgot to post this here:

Verbal 610, Quantitative 800, Analytical Writing 5.0.

On Friday, my dad and I watched the new Star Trek movie in Imax at Palisades Mall. I went to the Kinokuniya bookstore and bought a Oh My Goddess artbook; I tried to speak only in Japanese, but when the employee mentioned a discount program I was in over my head and sadly continued in English. Is a person supposed to say "どう致しまして" at the end of a purchase?

The movie itself was okay; the characters were all spot on in terms of both behavior and development, everyone had a chance to shine at one point or another and the ship interiors looked nice (my dad complains how Star Trek: Enterprise and this movie look more high-tech than the Original Series, but frankly I prefer this to looking at tons of silly buttons and blinky lights). The action was fast paced, the red shirt met the expected result, and I enjoyed the lesser confrontation of Warp Drive vs. Black Hole, no matter how improbable it was.

Though I could almost understand why they made the Enterprise look different (apparently most of the Federation's major starship designers were on the USS Kelvin), I thought both ships looked rather ugly. The visual style was annoying, with the blurring sweeps and the stupid white saturation whenever the camera looked at a light serving no purpose other than to force people to blink. And the twin coincidences of Delta Vega should have been avoided.

My major issue is exactly what Stephen Notley pointed out: Now we are stuck in a new timeline with only the Enterprise series. And what about the Temporal Fleet? Did they think the events shown might be worth correcting? I agree that the new cast is great and should be given a chance to shine, but at the same time certain changes were made that served no purpose (such as Vulcan) other than to show the bad guy was far more evil than his rather-uninteresting acting led us to believe. The new movie had no subtitle but I could easily come up with one. Star Trek: Screw Spock Over.

My favorite series in order are Deep Space 9, the Original Series, the Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise. Following this movie, all but the worse one are now completely impossible. If I was in charge of the Star Trek license, I would have the very last movie I made with these characters reset the original timeline. They could undo the event that created this, but I'd be quite happy to allow them to pull a Froborr's Squid.

Froborr's Squid is a paradox that occurs when a character is created in a timeline which eventually ceases to be, but the character continues to exist as if this hs never happened. I'll try to find popular examples later. It's named after a RPG session in which Froborr received a pet squid which he kept in his hat. The DM at the time (we alternated every session) couldn't come up with a plausible ending and the entire session was declared to never have happened. The next session, it was revealed that the squid was still living in his hat even though the events that originated him had been undone.

Plus, I just love the name Froborr's Squid as a name to describe a certain type of paradox.

Song: The New Tetris - Egypt
Association: Finding a Parking Spot at GMU at 9 in the Morning.
Whenever I hear this song, I am reminded of driving around the student parking lots in an attempt to find a spot in the closest parking to the dorms I was living in that semester. I had spent the night somewhere else and was trying to make it back in time for an early morning class when this song starts playing from the CD I had burned for the car, and I decide to set it on loop until I am no longer in my vehicle. I began to associate parts of the song with common events that took place - driving around a corner, following a pedestrian in the hopes that they were going to a car and leaving, and pulling a U-turn when another car entered the lot (following another car would mean they got first pick). I recall doing this for Lot A when I needed to go straight to class, Lots E and F (which have since been closed to be replaced with parking decks) when I was living in the Commons, and Lot I when I was in the student apartments near the end of my undergraduate career. Parking usually took ten minutes from entering the lot to stopping the engine.

Compared to Magic Knight Rayearth, You're Under Arrest is a much better anime series. While watching MKR, it became a chore to watch an entire episode in one sitting and I would frequently pause to find something else to do besides watching that cliché-fest. While currently watching YUA, I want to stay up far later that I should to continue one episode after another.

And good gravy does Kousuke Fujishima have an unhealthy fixation on automobiles. Why doesn't he just make a series where the main female protagonist is a robot and get it over with?

She will still probably end up either riding or turning into a motorcycle.

Or both.

As I continue my quest to watch old anime, I have seen good shows and bad shows.

Magic Knight Rayearth* is a Bad Show.

Aside from my usual aversion to graphic and superfluous blood (which all three of the main characters possess), there are a multitude of other problems with this series. First, the episodes are all quite formulaic. Princess Emeraulde shows up at least once every two episodes to either say "Magic Knights, please save Cephiro" or "Zagato, please stop." The "Meet a Rune-God" episodes always follow the exact same formula.

Step 1: 1 Magic Knight Leaves Party
Step 2: Rune-God demands to see Strength of Heart, Magic Knight doesn't understand
Step 3: Villain shows up, beats up other 2 Magic Knights
Step 4: Last Magic Knight returns, stands between Villain and defeated Friends
Step 5: Rune-God uses Step 4 as a sign and saves Magic Knight, then defeats Villain
Step 6: Rune-God joins Magic Knights, evolves their armor, then says "You're not ready yet." **

Half of the heroines' dialog is spent just repeating what other characters just said ("It's a magic barrier!" "A magic barrier?"), the other half is spent repeating what they said in an earlier episode (1st Episode: "I promise we'll save Cephiro and go back to Tokyo together!" Next Episode: "I promise the same thing, still!" Next Episode: "Yup, still promisin'!").***

Though the armor and swords evolve as the series progresses, the heroines continue to be cut and injured on their unguarded arms and face. It'd've been far better if Clef just summoned some plate mail at the get-go, instead of his ridiculous magically-growing Ceramic Dermal Parasite.

There are plenty of opportunities to explore the consequences of a world where wishes can come true, but the plot has been stripped down to a minimalist rush to the next location. Fight enemy -> gain powerup -> repeat. This series was quite obviously a parody of the RPG genre, whether this was intentional or not.

To top it off, this anime follows the most egregious example of people talking past each other I've seen in a long time. It's fundamentally an idiot plot: The villains don't tell the heroes that one critical piece of information that would change everything. The twist at the end is minor and frankly inconsequential. There are times when I want to shout at characters for being dumb, like how Ascot complains about the Magic Knights kills his friends but never stops to think about how he's trying to kill the Magic Knights.

Frankly, there's only one reason to even consider watching this: Mokona, voiced by Shiratori Yuri (白鳥由里). I was quite surprised at the range of emotions she could dexterously display simply by modulating the tone of the word "Puu!" Clearly, her excellent performance was the precursor to the entire Pokémon series. I don't know what a voice actor feels when they're forced to say only one word over and over again, but it must be a harrowing experience. She would make an excellent Pokémon.****

* I have only seen the first twenty episodes. I don't think I want to watch anymore, but I will anyway. Completionist!

** You know what the next two steps are, of course.

*** Way too many punctuation marks!!1!

**** Would a voice actor cringe or be pleased by such a complement? I wonder.

Why is that every time a program receives a major upgrade, it gets even worse?

In a fit of insanity, I foolishly disregarded my own advice and upgraded to IE8. What a mistake that was! Internet Explorer 8 was the worst web browser I have every had the misfortune of attempting to operate. Its problems could be divided into two exclusive sets: Cosmetic and CATASTROPHIC.

The cosmetic problems were all that: Small issues in the user interface which I could probably have gotten used to if I wanted to change my life to conform to a web browser and not the other way around.I like the relative positions of the bars from IE6, and attempting to relocate them involved editing the registry. On top of that, doing so apparently removes the "backwards compatibility button" from the address bar. I was unable to find out how to remove the separate search bar (in other browsers, it can simply be dragged off). Finally, IE8 decided to use a thicker font which I found, like everything Microsoft does lately, superfluous and impossible to correct.

Calling the other problems catastrophic is of course, a bit of a misnomer. They were not truly calamities, just incredibly stupid examples of why I no longer trust Microsoft or its programmers. IE8, despite (or more likely, because of) being the latest release, was the buggiest and worst of any IE. Frequently, just visiting regular sites (like Google) would cause the the system to lag, and once Task Manager indicated that the unresponsive IE8 was using using 1.2 gigs of RAM. Isn't there some way to program an OS such that if a program like, I dunno, Internet Explorer 8 is using up more RAM than the operating system itself, that the OS should consider shooting it down?

In addition, every visit to Hotmail caused MSN Messanger to attempt to reinstall itself. Every bloody time.

The final proof of incompetence comes from uninstalling IE8. For no adequately explained reason, I had to uninstall Service Pack 3 first. Yes, I dragged my feet on downloading SP3 and got it after IE8. But what in the world do they have to do with each other? How does that make any sense? If I need to sign a NDA to understand the answer to this question, then they're doing something wrong. Once again, I am SP3-free. And I haven't noticed a single problem with XP.

So that's it. I'm done trying. For the third time in twice as many months I've returned to IE6. I prefer it to Foxfire, Opera, IE7 and IE8. Firefox had some issue the first time I DLed it, but whatever it was seems to be fixed. And Opera is strange.

And the minute Microsoft stops supporting IE6? I switch to Firefox. It's already on my hard drive, tweaked to nigh-perfection.

EDIT 1 (4/28/09): I just forgot about IE6's recent problem. Occasionally, it will just keep opening one window after another without end until I shoot it from Task Manager.

Firefox is now my primary web browser.

EDIT 2 (4/28/09): Another catastrophic problem I found with IE8 was that, most of the time I tried it, pressing the 'stop' button didn't actually stop anything. Good to know that I can't actually stop a page from downloading potentially dangerous content, because I'm sure the program is quite capable of never being subverted. Once again I feel that users are losing their ability to control programs with every increase of the version number.

GRE Complete. Next anime: Magic Knight Rayearth.

At this writing, I have been awake for twenty hours attempting to fix a sleep schedule that rapdily fell apart since my return to New Jersey, while simultaneously reading over multiple vocabulary lists and aiming to take at least four more practice exams this week before the GREs. I have entered that wondrous stage of sleep deprivation where I feel detached from my body and am only externally witnessing phenomena. Interestingly, the words I am having the easiest time remembering are all related to frequency of speaking: Laconic, garrulous, loquacious, et cetera.

Have also watched the anime series Moldiver (new total of 168 anime movies and series). I was rather distressed by the sudden graphic depictions of violence in the last two episodes. Would not recommend it. Further explanation will need to wait until a hypothetical future in which I own a website and post anime reviews; otherwise my brain is to busy attempting to convey the perception of forced insomnia through a dissident Wernicke's area to produce a worthwhile review filled with banter and all that other stuff you external stimuli are so interested in reading.

Now signed up for the GRE General Exam.

Get Smart: Season 1
Last week, I purchased the first season of Get Smart, a spy comedy series starring Don Adams, Barbara Feldon and Edward Platt (sadly, I discovered a box set of all five seasons which I shall now begin saving up for somehow). It was THE defining show of my youth, even surpassing Star Trek, and cemented within me a fondness for spies and humor that persists even to this day. It happily survived through my transition to an adult, unlike other shows I used to watch as a kid. I was one of those kids that never wanted to be a superhero, just a secret agent.

Raymond Scott - Powerhouse
There are two things worse than having a song stuck in your head. The first is having a nonexistent song stuck in your head; in my case, this a strange combination of "Brass de Chocobo" from Final Fantasy X and "Funny Pun" from the anime Yakitate Japan. The second is having a song stuck in your head without knowing its name. Today, I discovered that 'assembly line' theme from cartoons was the middle third of a song called "Powerhouse" and originally composed by Raymond Scott in 1937. All this time, I thought it was a heavy/industrial remix of "The Cat in the Hat" (which you must acquiesce sounds identical to it) and would desperately search Google whenever it became embedded in my internal media player. Thanks to the TV Tropes web site, I discovered its true appellation and rapidly downloaded several versions onto my hard drive where I shall no doubt listen to them regularly for the forseeable future (about one week).

1. New hard drive acquired. Computer up to 900 gig. Holy crap.

2. Bought FFIV DS. So far, more of the same. Would have been 10% better if they used the old SNES sprites for the map on the bottom screen.

3. Seeing this single sentence updates makes me think I should be on Twitter.

4. Rewatched El Hazard. Reminded that Jinnai is the only instance where an English voice actor is better than the Japanese one.

5. Bought new PS2 controller. Old one had sticking buttons and low responsiveness. PS3 controllers cost twice as much, and look almost exactly the same.

6. Lugged huge TV to bedroom. When combined with no. 5, can now attempt Ar Tonelico 2 again.

7. Am now on Skype.

Finally saw all of the TV series of Urusei Yatsura, all 196 episodes.

New Stats
Total Anime Series and Movies Seen: 151

Take that, productivity!

Extreme Optimism: Prevalent in IMs when one person (namely, me) continually forgets to add "not" and other negative modifiers to his sentences.

Encephalysis: When a person's head melts, such as when a historical figure is presented technology from the future, such as a Walkman. pristis has noted "something about the epistemological bankruptcy of the universe and the stark impossibility of knowledge as revealed by the existence of portable cassette players."

Pulmotussis: Coughing so hard you lungs fall out. Happens to a lot of people I know.

Random Consonant Displacement: Prevalent in IMs when one person is attempting to comment before the other has a chance to say something else.

Sudden Onset Antidermilation: When your skin falls off. According to rules set down by the FDA, this cannot be considered a side-effect, it is an EFFECT!

While I was down in DC, staying with froborr, dejapes and starlightv and getting my car "repaired" and registered, I was introduced to the Fallout series. dejapes had Fallout 3 on his computer, and I selfishly hoarded playing it for hours at a time, afraid that I wouldn't be able to beat it before I had to return to Jersey. Not only was my computer's video card wasn't one of the recommended ones, but even the CD autoplay generated an error I'd never seen before. Despite my transgressions, dejapes's savior-faire never waivered and I was able to get through the entire game.

I had never played any of the other Fallouts before 3. I was under the impression that they were ultraviolent and full of inappropriate innuendo, and never really checked for myself. While playing 3, I was able to get used to the ultraviolence and discovered that the, shall we say, "intersexual interactions" were entirely optional. I loved the game, and was sad that I was unable to even visit every place on the map, let alone complete all of the optional quests.

When I returned to Jersey, I found copies of Fallout and Fallout 2 and proceeded to play them. They haven't aged very well, and I only played through both of them to satisfy my completionistic tendencies. The first two Fallouts don't feel like a post-apocalyptic world. Instead, they're just kind of empty. The area on the west coast were they took place was devoid of a central government or working infrastructure, but it felt more like everyone just moved away, rather than was destroyed in nuclear rainfall.

And while I was on the topic of isometric RPGs I'd never played before because I thought they would have too much violence to be enjoyable (a surprisingly large category), I decided to give Diablo 1 a try.

Diablo 1 was better than the first two Fallouts, but even in Diablo I got stuck because a group of enemies on the last floor could kill me before I could even get to them. They moved as fast as I could and had projectiles that were even faster. The Result: I would walk toward one of them, while the others would all scatter and kill me. I finally hit about the unbelievably painful tactic of luring them one at a time and chasing them around the dungeon floor.

Compared to those ranged fighters two floors above him, Diablo was a pansy, easily beaten by walking upon and hitting him with my Axe of Damage +115% until he stopped being evil.

I was thinking about looking for Diablo 2, but then my preordered copy of Ar Tonelico 2 arrived.

Ar Tonelico is, by far, the best isometric RPG I've ever played.
It might also be the best PS2 game I've ever played. It definitely has the best music of any game I've played, as the five music CDs I purchased can attest to. Ar Tonelico 2 (when preordered) came with two CDs, but I'll probably get more of them later. I bought the artbook months before it came out, but deliberately avoided looking at it so I would not be tempted into reading it and getting spoilers.

Sadly, based on my hour of gameplay, the two potential romantic interests aren't all that interesting. In AT1, it was a choice between the shy one and the genki one (or the third character, who escapes a simple one-word description, other than "BUNNIES!"); in AT2, it appears to be a choice between the haughty one and the easily-embarrassed / overly-apologetic one.

There's probably a Japanese word for that type of character. Oh, wait, I already know it. It's called being Japanese.

Battle Athletes: Two thousand years into the future, people are still bad at math.

I discovered a program called LackeyCCG which allows one to play CCGs over the internet. It's still a beta, which means no rules enforcement and no AIs (probably not ever). dejapes once worked on an online card game, and mentioned having to input the rules of every single card; this leads me to suspect that any potential AI would be mediocre at best, unless a group of bored programmers and game theorists got together.

I'm only really interested in three CCGs. Star Trek and Star Wars, which have been already been made for this program, and Ani-Mayhem, which I've been working on the plugin myself.

More to the point, I can now seriously consider making a CCG of my own now that Lackey presents a method of playtesting with actual people. I always wanted to make a multiversal objective-driven CCG, free from the constraints of attempting to secure licenses or turn a profit.

This unnamed CCG is now at a higher priority than Plot Twist, the card game, which can only really be worked on when two or more people are present, and has been on relative hiatus for over one year.

Car finally repaired, planning next trip to VA for emissions test in progress.

My computer has been upgraded, a combination of new and old parts. The best part was a sale at Micro Center: 1gb of RAM for $9 (after a mail-in rebate).

New Specs:
· 2.93 GHz Processor (Secondhand)
· 2.00 Gb RAM (New)
· 500 Gb SATA Hard Drive (New)
· DVD Burner (Secondhand, IDE)

There are several problems with the system however:
· My Radeon 9200 card could not be installed. I'm running off the Intel chip on the motherboard. Game over, man, game over! Saw an okay video card for $35 but didn't get it. Saw an awesome video card for $60 but it required more amperage on the 12V than the new 500W power supply could provide. Edit: Radeon 9200 reinstalled, works fine.
· Windows XP (and Office) had to be re-initialized over the phone (not as bad as I thought) before we could install software on the hard drive to recognize the motherboard's built-in Ethernet, video card and sound card.
· Left and right sound on the front is reversed, sound overall is too quiet (I can barely hear anybody on my DS9 season 7 DVDs). We appear to be missing a wire which is considered outdated (IDE DVD drives are a thing of the past).

A new video card can wait until I find a game that needs it. I'd rather not buy a new DVD player, but may have to if we can't find the DVD audio wire anywhere.

Historical data indicates my friends will all get better computers than me in about one month, so I must use this narrow window to rub it in at every possible moment. Tentative plans include taking out an ad everyday in local periodicals, calling them at 4 am... and of course, Marching Band Sundays.