I need a place to vent

Since the people this rant talks about might read my main blog, I'm posting this here.  I'm changing all the names around, but to any one of them it'll probably still be obvious when I'm talking about them.  This is more than just my pent-up frustration, this reflects the frustrations of a good portion of our group.  My opinions also are not necessarily the same as those of the rest of the group.

So, first off.  We watch anime every week.  A specific person, whom I'll call Aaron (yes, I'm starting with A and working up through the alphabet), is the one who provides the computer, gets the episodes, etc.  His position is an elected one.  Yet, our group has had very little to no say in what we watch.  I'm only mildly annoyed at this, as he hasn't really shown anything that I object to, but others in the group have a stronger dislike of it.  However, we all agree that a person in an elected position should listen to and consider the opinions of the rest of the group.  My opinion of what we've been watching lately also differs a fair amount from the rest of the group.  I enjoyed watching two of the series and was curious enough about the third that I didn't mind seeing it.  Others felt like "what's the point of coming to showings when we're not watching anything I can enjoy and/or haven't seen before?"

Aaron basically has a general belief that if you don't come to showings, your opinion matters less.  However, there is a huge flaw in that thought.  Mainly, people who would come to showings if there was a reason for them to do so.  The easiest way to make it so they can show up and enjoy themselves is to involve them in the decision-making process and value their opinions.

Outside of his elected position, Aaron is a nice person.  I get along with him fairly well.  Others take issue with him and some of his interests and actions, but that's normal.  The thing that I think makes me different from the rest is that I try to value what I like in a person and overlook any bad points as much as I can until something happens that just can't be overlooked.  It seems like a good portion of the group sees the bad points and refuses to see the good until the bad is remedied.

Which brings me to the second person, whom I'll call Bob.  Bob has always been a difficult person to get along with.  Most of the time it's fine, and he does have a sense of humor that it's possible to trigger reliably, but on occasion and seemingly randomly he'll either go into extreme defensive mode or just be a total jackass.  This was highlighted recently.  A portion of our group rents a house.  One person signed the lease, the rest sublet.  Well, the person who signed the lease moved out recently.  So, things had to be shuffled around and now it's Bob's name on the lease.  Things changed about the house (at least towards those of us who don't live there) quickly.  Up until the lease change, the house had been a periodic hangout spot after a showing or meeting.  Now, not so much.  If he doesn't know why you're there, or doesn't agree with it, you get told to get out.  This actually erupted into forum drama in not one but two threads that had to be locked, and he ended up apologizing, but not without a lot of effort on everyone else's parts.

One issue is that Aaron and Bob hang out and get along with each other pretty well (they share a number of interests).  I don't agree with the rest of the group, but they really just want Aaron to graduate and move away so that hopefully Bob will go away as well.  So, in other words, losing a perfectly good member of the group to get rid of the less desirable member that he's friends with.

Another thing that annoys me, and seemingly only me, is that the rest of the group sees no foul in talking about anyone behind their backs.  They're generally faulting people for things they might not have a lot of control over regarding their character.  Who knows what gets said about me when I'm not around, and I do know there are subsets of the group that do things that I'm mysteriously not invited to.  I'm not asking to be invited to everything anyone in our group does, but when stuff like this happens while I'm there, I can't rule out the possibility of it happening when I'm not there.

I had at one point considered moving into the house I mentioned previously.  Now, I don't really want to.

Also, the showing tonight is a movie I know nothing about and a movie that's largely out of context from a bigger series that I have no interest in.  Surprise, the rest of the group had zero involvement in choosing these movies.  I don't think I'll be going to the showing tonight.  I would have much preferred another theme night where people bring in an episode that fits a specific pre-announced theme.  Those are always fun.

Now, Charlie, whom I get along with pretty well, is considering running for the position of "director" and managing the showings, since Aaron wants to concentrate on his 4th year classes, which is reasonable.  Charlie told me his plan and I like it a lot better than what we currently have.  Our showings have three slots, which generally we watch three or four episodes of each series per showing, so that it works out to about 4 hours.  He's sticking with the three slots (we tried four a while back, it died horribly, and two is too few, three just seems to work perfectly), but, if I remember correctly, dividing it up as such: The first slot will be a 26 episode series that will go on the entire semester.  The second slot will be two 12 or 13 episode series, when we finish the first, we'll start the second.  The third is essentially a variety slot.  Basically, in this slot, we'll show random episodes.  If a bunch of people have been talking about a specific series around the rest of the group and enough people are intrigued, we'll slap an episode of it in so they can see what exactly is being discussed.  There's also those series that just wouldn't go over well being shown for an entire semester (or even half of one), but would be perfect for a single night.  Other times, the variety slot would be a rotation of short OAVs and movies.  It seems like a pretty good idea.  Also, we'd still have a couple theme showing nights per semester, which gives the group at large even more opportunity to choose what gets shown.

Now all we have to do is get people to stop (verb: combine the meanings of discredit, insult, and discriminate)ing against other people's tastes and saying they need to stop feeling a certain way or liking whatever they happen to like.  Our group has been trying to maintain a "whatever you like, you're welcome here and free to talk about it" mentality, but with random bigots thrown in it gets difficult to maintain that.  Also, we kind of have a double standard because we openly don't like furries, but then again nobody likes furries.

Also, regarding showings, the group has been trying to reacquaint itself with its western side for a while.  We've technically always been a general comics and animation group, but the core content of the meetings and showings for quite a while has been purely manga and anime.  A fair amount of the group for whatever reason (or lack thereof) doesn't like anything western.  I'm personally open to the western stuff, but since I haven't ever been the biggest fan of it, I don't know what's out there outside of the mainstream.  Bringing showings back into the context, one of the series we watched was a western series, but so many people didn't like even the simple idea of seeing something animated that had English audio that I'm pretty sure that we don't have a western slot for next semester.

This brings in Aaron's belief that if you don't come to showings your opinion doesn't matter.  Also, there is indeed someone who came to showings just for the western series, and left after it ended.  We really can't say we're trying to bring the western side back into the club if we don't even try.  Zero (well, one) of our meetings so far have had anything regarding western series as the topic.  That one meeting was early on in the semester and since then we haven't even touched western stuff as a topic.  The one person who was exclusively into the western stuff resumed not coming to meetings.  Either we need to be a 50/50 group, or we need to be all Eastern stuff and advertise ourselves as such.  One or the other.

It's Official...

...unixkcd breaks every other comic.

FIX YOUR SHIT RANDALL

Annoying Problem

Besides Windows, my computer has an annoying problem that manifests itself randomly. It's happening right now, and on a much larger scale than it ever used to.

When I click a window's button on the taskbar, it gets focus as normal. But if I try to click anything at all on that window, even on the title bar (say, to close the window), the window loses focus. The only way to make it regain focus is to minimize and restore it with the taskbar, which for whatever reason still works with the mouse.

How the hell am I typing this then? Keyboard events still work fine. I can change tabs in firefox with Ctrl+Tab (not sure if it's built in, Tab Mix Plus has options for it though), use Tab to move through the links on a page, and Enter to "click" links.

This is really annoying, as you can tell, and I don't know the fix for it. My only recourse at the moment is to reboot. Which I hate doing.

Edit: okay this is really weird. I wanted to link to this in an update on twitter, so I went to bit.ly to shorten the post's URL. Since they use web 2.0 faggotry I couldn't just hit enter on the shorten button and have it work. So I clicked it, and now mouse events work as expected once again.

Web 2.0 is anti-accessibility. Adding that to my list of reasons why I hate it.

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES FUCKING YES

I finally have everything I need for Obsidian armor for my necromancer!

60 Platinum, 350 Tanned Hide Squares, 35 Elonian Leather Squares, 105 Obsidian Shards, 105 Globs of Ectoplasm, 2 Perfect Salvage Kits, 4 Vials of Dye [Red], and 2 Passage Scrolls to the Fissure of Woe. Everything I fucking need to get to the forgemaster (plus backup in case of a wipe on the first try), craft it, transfer all my existing armor mods, and make it look even more awesome.

Oh and I joined a new guild that's actually active. Double win.

Many thanks to the random Margonite that dropped armor containing a Superior Vigor rune which went for 16 Platinum at the rune trader.

I feel violated.

The account name "eckstee" is taken on Twitter.

In related news, I now have a Twitter account.

this is supposed to be hard, isn't it?

Just in case anyone reading this doesn't know, in Hard Mode in GW, if you kill every enemy in the zone, you get a bonus and progress towards your Vanquisher title for that continent.  Hard Mode makes enemies move and attack faster, as well as giving them higher levels and faster skill activation.  Theoretically it's supposed to be hard, and in most cases, it is.

Not so much in the Desolation area of Nightfall.  There you have access to the powerful Junundu worms, which have 3000 health and a specialized skill set.  Enemies in the Desolation are balanced for humans and not Junundu, even in areas where you have to be in the Junundu to travel there because if you're not, you'll die.

The Sulfurous Wastes is one such area.  Perhaps most popular for being the area where you can farm Sunspear and Lightbringer promotion points the easiest (in Hard Mode), the vast majority of the zone can be cleared while in Junundu.  Even some of the enemies in areas of rocky ground, which Junundu can't tunnel through, can be lured close enough to the edge of a cliff where Junundu can take them out.

The rest, including a boss group, require a little strategy.  Since it was just me with heroes and henchmen, I took advantage of the ability to disable certain skills in each hero's panel to disable the one that makes them leave the Junundu.  Normally when you go into rocky terrain or use Leave Junundu your heroes and henchmen will leave their Junundu as well.  Disabling the skill on my heroes prevents them from doing that.

Also since Junundu have some close range skills, I disabled those as well.  I then flagged my three heroes near the edge of the one rocky terrain area containing the only groups I had to pull close to the edge to kill them, including the boss group.  I then got out of my Junundu and the henchmen followed suit (just as planned, I'd flagged them back as well so I could go pull).

Pulling was largely a success.  There was plenty of death when we got to the boss group, because I had to kill the boss twice since I neglected to take out the only enemy with a resurrection skill first.  It ended up being just me and the three heroes alive.  I ran back to the nearby wurm spoor and got back in my Junundu and we steamrolled the group.  Zone vanquished, half of the party dead.

Now might be a good time to mention my party composition.  I was playing my ranger.  I had three ranger heroes.  The henchmen were (in order going down the party window) dervish, elementalist, ranger, and paragon.  No healers!  Though the paragon henchman can heal somewhat, it's a losing battle.  On top of that, my primary purpose for being out there was to level up pets, and given that Junundu have their own skill set, I neglected to have real builds on myself and my ranger heroes.  The four of us only had Charm Animal.

Hey, what can I say, it works.

And here's a screenshot, taken just after I finished.  I was lolling too hard to get a screenshot with the HM vanquishing helmet on the screen, but you can see where I got the bonus and have the gold HM status effect instead of the red one.

Here's yet another screenshot. I was bored in a zone devoid of enemies, so I got out of my Junundu and ran out into the desolation to die. The desolation area puts the Sulfurous Haze environmental effect on you, which gives you maybe a couple of seconds to leave the desolation before it kills you. Also on your screen you see the text "No mortal can survive the Sulfurous Haze.", which is the entire reason for this next screenshot. As you can see, the pets are still alive. In the desolation. Whee.

lol.

yay AVGN's back

With Action 52, one of those shitty multicarts. Except that this one isn't your typical multicart with bootleg versions of actual decent games, this one is a total shitfest. Where does he find this stuff?

He also has a nintoaster. A working NES in the form of a toaster. Just watch, you'll see.

The episode's almost 27 minutes long, so make sure you've got some free time before watching it.

Enjoy it here.

so lol

Chahbek Village came back up as the zaishen mission, so I went and re-re-re-re-re-did it in HM on all my characters.  Pocketed the 740 Copper Zaishen Coins, which I converted up through Silver to Gold to get up to my sixth ever Gold Zaishen Coin.  Man, this Heavy Equipment Pack is never going to happen.

Especially because I spent two of them on an Elite Ritualist Tome so I could get Signet of Spirits on my ritualist.  Talked to my local Kurzick Bureaucrat and got Summon Spirits, and put myself together a spirit spammer.  Basically, what you do is, you use Signet of Spirits to get three attack spirits, then you add in Vampirism, Bloodsong, and Pain to go up to six.  Then right after that you have Painful Bond, an area-effect hex that increases the damage your spirits do to the hexed foes, and Summon Spirits, which makes all your spirits shadow step to you, and heals them.  The remaining two skills can change depending on whether or not you're soloing, but that's the gist of the build.

I'd seen people discussing spirit spammers and mentioning them as a viable solo build, but I had my doubts.  The spirits have low health and low armor, deal fairly low damage (high teens, low twenties), and have to be moved manually (i.e. using Summon Spirits to move them all in one cast).  After seeing them rip through enemies courtesy of Painful Bond, all doubt was gone.  That fairly low damage is first multiplied by the number of spirits you have (in this case six), and then Painful Bond just about doubles that.  It's pretty awesome.

back to guild wars I guess

I tried all last week to get 15 Naga Skins for Nick the Traveler.  He was taking them 3:1 for gifts of the traveler, max 5 gifts per account per week.  Doing as many runs through Boreas Seabed which has a fairly high concentration of them as I could, I only managed seven all week.  I took my two gifts and went to sleep.

This week seems to be easier, this time it's 3:1 Dredge Incisors.  The main thing is that there aren't any enemies in the zone hostile to Dredge, whereas there were groups of humans that would fight off the Naga in Boreas Seabed and take kills and drops.  My first run through the ones in Ferndale I got 5 incisors and killed several bosses, one of whom dropped two of the incisors.

I had a secondary goal for being in Ferndale.  I recently came across this team build for speedbooking with heroes and I want to set it up, since it will make getting the EotN reputation titles easy.  Naturally I don't have everything necessary to set it up, so I set out getting the three elite skills it needs that I didn't have.  The first two have been easy caps so far.  Moebius Strike was only tough because the boss with it also has Dancing Daggers and Factions bosses deal double damage, so it spikes people down really quickly.  The other one, Signet of Spirits, was the entire reason I was in Ferndale.  Secondary to that was that Ferndale contains tons of Dredge.

Anyway, being a ritualist skill, I needed to change my secondary to ritualist so I could cap it.  I figured I might as well run an old favorite build of mine, called Splinter Barrage.  It takes advantage of a ritualist weapon spell called Splinter Weapon that deals damage to foes nearby your target whenever you attack your target.  Barrage is an elite bow attack shoots arrows at multiple targets.  So if you picture me using Splinter Weapon and then Barrage and seeing a massive cloud of damage numbers pop up on screen, you're on the right track.

Anyway, as it turns out, Signet of Spirits is linked to the same attribute that Splinter Weapon is, so I had points in it and essentially had a second elite skill while I cleared out the rest of the Dredge.  Normally you're limited to only one elite skill on your bar, but if you do what I did and capture a second one, you can use both until you leave the zone you captured it in, then one will disappear.

What exactly does Signet of Spirits do that makes it elite?  It summons three ritualist attack spirits.  They can pump out the damage, and will attract the enemy AI since they're low armor targets, resulting in the party having an easier time clearing things.  Between the damage they put out and the reduced aggro it was a breeze clearing the rest of the Dredge.  Did I also mention that the spirits stay alive for 60 seconds and the skill recharges in 30, and being a signet it has no energy cost?  If it was a spell that costs 25 energy, activates in three seconds instead of one, and takes 60 seconds to recharge (or the spirits only lasted 30 seconds), it wouldn't be elite.  But then it would suck, and the name would be wrong since all signets in Guild Wars don't have an energy cost.  Some of them take energy from the caster as a part of their effect, but they cost nothing to activate.

So now I'm off to get the third elite skill I need, Signet of Ghostly Might.  It boosts the attack damage of spirits within earshot.  Then it'll be back to genociding Dredge until I have 15 incisors.  Since I'm already 33% of the way there after one run, hopefully it should go better than Naga Skins did.

Wait, was the rit elite my primary reason for being in Ferndale, or was it the Dredge?  I'm confused.

Edit: got enough Incisors for my five gifts, in as many runs.  Why can't they all be like this?

random bullshit (lol i haev imaginayshun)

So all that time we spent not playing Tales?  Yeah, it's coming back to bite us in the ass right now.  We're about two thirds of the way through the game and we have maybe two or three weekends left.  In before Tales weekend.

As far as Guild Wars goes, I'm still working my way through the Eye of the North dungeons.  I've actually had that on a bit of a hiatus due to too much shit happening in real life, but I'll get back to it.  I got my 100th ecto last night, which means my necromancer is only 5 ectos away from having obsidian armor.  Then I just need to find a party that can stay coordinated long enough to reach the forgemaster.  I also need to leave the inactive guild I'm in and join a more active one.  Perhaps I should do that before attempting the Fissure of Woe.

CAINE's trying to actually have its shit in gear, and as such is already planning for recruitment in the fall semester.  We're trying to solve some of our biggest problems, namely our lack of visibility in the activities fair.  We have a monolith planned that should put us on the map, and crazy people with tools and the free time to put it together.

The driver's side seatbelt in my car has been acting up lately.  It's one of those automatic ones that were all the rage circa 1990 before Americans got all American and started bitching about other people telling them what to do.  Either that or idiots kept strangling themselves with it.  Anyway, any time it's warm and humid (haven't had a warm dry day to try and separate those two factors yet) it has a chance of just not working.  As in, it stays in the forward position and doesn't actually act as a seat belt.

It's supposed to move back when I turn on the car and have the door closed.  Most of the time it works fine, but coming back from sakura matsuri a few weeks ago, and again last sunday coming back from a party at Tom's place in Waynesboro, it decided it was going to act up.  The weird thing about the most recent one was that it didn't happen right away.  It waited until I got back to CAINE house to drop people off and then it failed.

Going back to CAINE, because my mind is all over the place and that's why I've been posting less recently, another thing we're doing to try and make people feel more at home in the club is allowing any member to propose a presentation.  If it sounds like a good idea they can prepare it and educate the rest of us about something.  The first instance of this was a western comics presentation.  That's another area that CAINE is trying to expand to (or really, get back into).

Anyway, I have an idea for a presentation, but I don't know if I want to be solely in charge of it.  It's basically about importing stuff, which a number of us in CAINE do on a semi-regular basis, so I'm sure I could get some help.  Really I only had the idea so I could have an excuse to bring in everything I own that's been imported from Japan and show off my weeaboo level, but whatever.  I can't envision it being a bad idea for a presentation if it has structure.

vandestelca

So the battle with Van didn't go quite as I'd planned, but it worked out in the end.  Revive looked good on paper, and indeed both melee characters ended up using their auto-res, but I couldn't get it back on them as I'd spent too much TP healing people in the meantime.  That spell is hella expensive.

We killed Van pretty quickly even with having to resurrect a couple times.

Then party split...  which basically amounts to Luke moping about the manor for a month before getting the idea to go meet up with his friends again.  Eventually we had everyone back.

So...  then we did a shitton of side quests and a little story advancement.  We'd gotten sufficiently pissed off about not being able to land the Albiore on anything other than grass, and used the World Map on GameFAQs to find the flightstone that would let us land anywhere.  It turned out we had to go to Mushroom Road anyway since we had to get a shroom for Luke's mom to smoke so she'd feel better or something.  We grabbed the flight stone and the shroom and got the hell out of there.

We tried to get to the other flightstone that would let us fly through bullshit like storms and whirlpools but encountered a puzzle that we think we need Mieu Fire 2 to complete.  So bleh, back to sidequestan.

Shortly thereafter we went to the spa and got the swimsuit costume titles.  Jade is such a pimp with his.  You have to walk rather than run for the full effect.  Also, there's a hilarious skit for everybody once they've fought enemies while wearing a swimsuit.  "Why are you wearing that swimsuit?" "I was forced to!" "By who?" "I don't know!" "Why don't you just change?" "I...  I can't..."

When can I has Healing Force kthx

this kind of disturbs me

I won't be naming names, but depending on who you are you might be able to figure out who I'm talking about anyway. That and I basically make the identity of the person who actually said the disturbing thing blatantly obvious to anyone who actually knows me. (if you're here from Twitter, note the date above)

So last night, CAINE had its usual after-meeting dinner and store run activities.  After that, some people went home, and a small group of us went to one member's dorm room to watch movies.  The movie, though it had Bruce Willis, was rather predictable with its plot twists.  'Surrogates', in case anyone was wondering.

After that we were just talking about things.

Somehow the topic shifted to loli and this is where everything went wrong.  I didn't say anything at the time because I couldn't get the proper words to come to my head, but now having slept on it I've figured out what to say.

Basically, I was the only person in the room who actually likes loli.  CAINE has a few of us.  It's been one of CAINE's major principles that while you may not personally like what someone else likes, you don't ever under any circumstance persecute them for it.  This has been highlighted recently because we had to exile one specific person for doing what basically amounted to trying to rip CAINE apart from the core, all because we didn't follow her narrow-minded feminazi beliefs, which was mostly related to this principle.

One of the three of us (not the person whose room it was) made the worst comment he could possibly make.  I'm not going to quote it exactly, but it basically stated his desire to beat one of our members who likes loli with a shovel until he doesn't say he likes loli anymore.

The person making this comment so happens to be the person who was once my friend, who introduced me to all sorts of things that I like, such as anime and CAINE.  He disappeared for five years or so because he was playing World of Warcraft and couldn't be bothered to leave his mom's basement.  During that time I only ever really talked to him when the realms were down for maintenance.  He also only ever contacted me when he wanted something from me.  Then recently he quit, which is a good thing, and started coming to CAINE again, which I can't legitimately form an argument against as it's basically his own free will.

I don't know if he thinks we're best friends again or what.  Our interests are very different now.  He buys practically every new game that comes out for PC.  With, as far as I know, his parents' money.  We had a long AIM conversation a few weeks ago where I was basically having to shoot down the immature hardcore PC gamer whining argument of "there's nothing consoles can do that PCs can't, why aren't more console games released on PC".  I'm not going to delve into my rebuttal here, I'm just trying to illustrate that we are very different people now.  Basically the only things we have in common is that we're both fans of anime.

I recognize that we were once friends, long ago.  I will join in on reminiscing about things that happened in high school or anything up to when he dropped off the face of the earth.  I will not however restore him to friend status.  For some reason I accepted his friend invite on facebook.  I dunno really.  Maybe it's because I have to see him on a regular basis even though I don't really want to.

He still has this attitude of "my opinion is fact, everyone should agree with me or risk being ostracized for liking what they like" that old CAINE kind of relied upon before we came to our senses and realized if we were more accepting of others' opinions that we could increase our membership.

The issue here is loli, which a lot of people who can't differentiate between fiction and reality immediately assume anyone who likes loli is a pedophile.  This is not the case.  Just because someone likes it in 2D doesn't necessarily mean they like it in 3D.  In that statement, 2D implies anime/manga/games and fiction, and 3D implies the real world, actual people (live-action porn included), and, well, not fiction.  I don't think any of us in CAINE that do like loli actually like real-world little girls, at least not that way.

There's one member that doesn't like wincest.  He just doesn't.  We recognize that, and generally try not to bring it up around him or have the conversation when he's there, but at the same time it doesn't restrict us from talking about it.  It was completely hilarious (and I think he'd agree, to some extent) that a week or so ago we were watching Kiss x Sis episode 2 on the projector in CAINE house when he came in the room.  For whatever reason he didn't recognize it right away, so he was watching it.  He actually kind of enjoyed it and asked what it was, though none of us could really bring ourselves to say.  Then he figured it out and it was funny.

That kind of thing is, as far as I'm concerned, completely fine.  But what's not fine?  Saying you want to beat someone with a shovel over a petty difference in tastes.

the little things

So for whatever reason I decided to do Nolani Academy in Hard Mode earlier.  The only thing that really makes it difficult in HM is that you're still limited to a party size of four.  I went in pretty much all guns blazing, using a fairly balanced team consisting of myself as a ranger, and then a warrior hero and two monk heroes, one running healing and the other protection.

Everything went fine up until I went to go start the bonus.  Out of nowhere about five extra devourers ran in and steamrolled my party.  I made a timely retreat and resurrected most of the team but I couldn't fully recover.

So I tried again.  This time I got the bonus active with no problem.  Carried the book to the bonus area, started the long and arduous process of pulling and killing everything there.  Somehow yet again I managed to get some random devourers aggroed that I hadn't even known were there (probably due to the ledges in the area).  This time I got more than just myself out of there, the spirits took care of the devourers (lol enemies being hostile to each other) and I went back to killing spirits.  Turned the book in, got the bonus.

Steamrolled everything between the wall and Nolani and met up with Rurik.  Took him back to the wall, babysat him all the way to Stormcaller.  Killed the cutscene and went to go pull some Charr out of the mass below Horn Hill.  All of a sudden I'm swarmed with Charr (I'm guessing patrols + heroes running around) and I wipe.

I go back in with a slight team change, swapping my protection monk for a fire elementalist, and changing my warrior hero's build to have Wild Blow in it so I can get a hit in on the stupid Whiptail Devourers.  Made it back to the Charr at the end of the mission, wiped there again.

At this point I didn't really know what else to do, so I checked GuildWiki.  It suggested abandoning Rurik after taking him through the wall by going down the set of stairs he doesn't go down.  This lets you take advantage of the fact that NPCs that aren't on your radar don't take damage.  Seemed like it would work, but I had my doubts since Rurik's death ends the mission.

Went back in, steamrolled to the wall, and said "fuck you" to Rurik.  Kept him off my radar, walked a short distance and found myself in the end area of the mission.  Killed a group of Charr, went up the steps, and killed Bonfaaz Burntfur.  End of mission.

How on earth did I get Legendary Cartographer and not know about that shortcut?

tales tales tales

Since I doubt there are very many people left who would be interested in playing Tales of the Abyss but haven't yet, I'll go ahead and just mention spoilers.  So if you're in that exact situation I just ruled to be statistically not important (and you care about story spoilers), read no further.

Natalia finally levelled to 54 and I got Revive.  I tossed it onto my d-pad (I now only have two attack artes, lol) since we saved in the Absorption Gate literally just before the boss fight with Master Van.  I'll be tossing Revive onto Anise right at the beginning of the fight since she dies pretty quickly (I don't think Honya blocks much).  Just so my immediate TP cost at the beginning of the fight will be 128, I'll probably toss it onto our other melee character (either Luke or Guy, probably Luke so we can have master vs. disciple (and party) showdown) as well.  Then it'll be Sharpness for Anise/Other Melee and Scare Shot for Master Van.  That equals a lot of TP at the beginning of the fight.  Maybe I'll save Sharpness for later, since lowering his defenses is a little more important.

I'll have to arrowspam like crazy in the fight to make up for the immense TP usage.  Man, auto-resurrect status is expensive.  Also I'll have to take healing into account.  Hopefully it'll just be Master Van with nobody supporting him (I haven't bothered to read an FAQ to check).  If it really is just him, I won't have to heal nearly as often as the fight with Largo, Legretta, and Arietta where I was basically casting Heal again as soon as I recovered from the previous cast.  And we had to repeat the fight once because Honya wanted to steal an item off of Arietta and we didn't get it the first time.

Also I finally got a fucking capacity core that will let me get some enhance.  I don't remember the name, but it has physical attack and agility +2 and enhance +1.  My old one had physical attack and agility +3 (and that's it).  I kind of wish we could grind for a while so I could raise my stats up a bit and get one or two more of the AD skills that I really need (like reduced casting time or Spell Keep so if I get interrupted I won't have to do the entire spell cast all over again, which is rather important considering I'm a healer).

Then after the fight with Van I get to not do anything for a while since the party splits up and it takes a while before we get Natalia back.  Then we walk around for a bit and eventually I'll get my last arte, Healing Force.  I'll probably equip it, I dunno.  I'm still entirely unsure of how much health Heal gives an ally.  The game only uses vague terms, but I see several thousand health going onto the health bar with each cast.

Oh I know, I should overlimit right away (assuming I have the gauge for it) when we fight Van.  Since one of the properties of overlimit is decreased casting/recovery times, it'll help me get auto-res onto Anise and Luke, Scare Shot onto Van, and then I can follow up with Gallant Barrage->Astral Rain (mystic arte) for some damage.  Then I'll go into my usual routine of staying on the opposite side of the screen while filling Van with arrows and healing/removing status ailments periodically, trying all the while to get the last hit just so I can say "oh my, is it over already?" after the fight.

fizzy coke

I don't know why exactly, but with the last several 12-packs of Cherry Coke Zero I've had, every single can has been extremely fizzy.  I know they carbonate it, but the can hasn't been tampered with in any way (i.e. shaking, dropping) and while it doesn't rush out right away, it slowly builds up after I open the can.  If I'm not attentive it can head up and out of the can itself.

Once it dies down, the rest of the coke predictably tastes flat.

This is really annoying and I wish it would stop.

double KO

So the zaishen mission cycled back around to Augury Rock, the Prophecies ascention mission which must be completed solo.

I went through and took it on all my characters, even the ones from foreign continents that haven't gotten to the crystal desert yet.

Did it in Hard Mode on my ranger (balls easy), necromancer (balls easy), mesmer (kinda easy), and elementalist (tricky, but still fairly easy).  Tried fruitlessly on my warrior and monk.  If only they hadn't changed Renewing Smash in the hammer update, then my old build would still work...  I can't even remember how I ascended my monk to begin with except that it involved smiting prayers.

In the process of doing this, I got not just one, but two double KOs.  My mesmer got one when mistakenly going in on Normal Mode, and my elementalist got one on Hard Mode.  Naturally, as I was laughing my ass off, I took screenshots.  So here they are.

I went from never having gotten a double KO to two in one day.

As far as quest and mission progress goes, since I killed the doppleganger in both cases, the quest counted it.  Since I killed the doppleganger within the time limit in both cases, I got the bonus, which got counted by both the quest and the mission.  But since I died it didn't count the mission as complete (only verified in HM, but no reason to think it acts any differently in NM).

My mesmer went on to beat it in HM with a minor skill change (swapping in Empathy in place of Shatter Enchantment, if you recognize skill icons), and my elementalist beat it on her very next try with health to spare, changing nothing.

Working build templates for the four classes I've done on HM after the break.

lol

continuing on the subject of the last post, it's already been suggested that I get an oppai mouse pad.

Well:

1. they're hard to come by (I'd have to import one)
2. I'd have to find a character I like that's still in stock
3. they cost money (durr)
4. getting a good one that won't fall apart like my old mouse pad did may be impossible
5. there is a store near me that sells them (Spencer's, in Fashion Square Mall, and now that I think of it Ultimate Bliss (charlottesville's only sex store) might, though I dunno now that I re-think about it), but they're based off of real people and not anime characters

So yeah, not really happening.

arm comfort

A while back I got a mouse pad with wrist rest to use with my trackball.  Not to use the pad for my wrist, but rather my elbow.  My trackball has its own wrist cushion that while it does a great job with my wrist, makes my elbow contact my desk in such a way that it hurts after a while.  So I stick the mouse pad there and my elbow rests on the wrist rest, thereby not causing pain.

The mouse pad I'd picked up was $5 in the bargain bin at Giant, and I guess there was something actually wrong with it because the wrist rest broke within a month.  Then the cloth started peeling back.  It got to the point where I could lift up the cloth and see the broken wrist rest, where it had basically torn itself.

So a few days ago I went by Staples (the mouse pad was Staples brand) and picked up a new one, as well as a wrist rest for my keyboard.

This new mouse pad has a really good no-slide surface.  It absolutely refuses to move on my desk, whereas I was constantly having to reposition the old one.  The wrist rest is also beefier.  As far as the keyboard wrist rest goes, I have no complaints.  It's nice to not be resting my wrists on the edge of my desk anymore.

I guess this means I have no excuse to not work on and churn out the lulzbb->simple machines conversion script that I really need to start work on so that CAINE can migrate to forums that are actually feature complete (and have much more extensive moderation tools, have admin tools period, don't have weird bugs that result in posts becoming un-editable, etc.).

slowhero is back

But at a different URL, which means I'm in the process of going through every single post on my main blog tagged "Guitar Hero" so I can update any path or note chart links to be correct.

Fortunately I think there were only about three or four posts with links, but sifting through and finding them is going to be a bitch.

In case you're looking for paths for something not covered on SlowHero, I'll introduce you to PathHero.

agenda desu

• sleep
• wake up
• shower
• get dressed
• fill up gas tank
• clip fingernails and toenails
• get together things I need for sakura matsuri an entire day early so I have my shit in gear
• sunscreen
• coat (wind chill in DC city streets is a bitch)
• chex mix
• backpack
• find out when we're actually leaving since a uniform departure time was proposed but emphasis seemed far greater on car-dependent departure times
• find out who other than Paul is riding in my car if anyone
• write all that shit down so I don't forget it
• tales of fridays
• sleep
• sakura matsuri
• stab blogger for its suck-tastic wysiwyg posting interface that randomly adds line breaks on its own

updated firefox

I've updated to Firefox 3.6 now.

I did a dry test run in a virtual machine and it turned out that the only extension that wasn't compatible (Stop! Hammertime!) has a compatible version available for download on the author's website.  So, with nothing major incompatible (like, say, Classic Compact or Adblock Plus), I went on and updated my main install.

Now I can use those personas.  Not that I'd want to.  Using a persona means forgoing a theme, and I'm not forgoing Classic Compact.

At any rate, it's nice to not have Firefox bugging me every 6-12 hours to upgrade.

Of course, as soon as I looked in my extension list after updating, I found that Java had snuck its bullshit console extension back in there. Why the hell does Firefox allow external applications to install extensions without the user's consent?

Cost effectiveness

I'm used to getting 20 oz. sodas for around $1.50, whether from a vending machine or from a refrigerator case in a store.

Just a few minutes ago I got home from Food Lion where I got a 2-liter of root beer.

It cost $1.28, after tax.

Which would you rather have, 20 ounces for $1.50 or 2 liters for $1.28?

/w/ finally reached 1M get...

...yesterday.

It's not the slowest board on 4chan (that "honor" goes to /po/, I don't think any of the recently added boards are slower), but it still took for-fucking-ever.

Glad that's over with.

The main problem with browsers other than Firefox

Firefox was using a ton of RAM earlier, mostly because I had 45 or so tabs open.  Being lazy, instead of closing some, I closed Firefox.  Opened Task Manager, waited for it to relinquish the RAM and virtual memory it was using, and then started SRWare Iron.

The entire reason I was doing this was because I wanted to watch an old AVGN episode (the Magnavox Odyssey episode) on GameTrailers.  It was playing back in Firefox, but it was choppy due to Fx's RAM usage.

So I open up Iron, load up the ScrewAttack section on GameTrailers, open up the video page, and what's this?  An ad before my video?

I double-checked.  Reloading (even with cache-clearing reloads) didn't make it not show the ad.  The ad was unskippable (unlike the old GameTrailers, where you could just click the right end of the seekbar to get to what you actually loaded up the fucking page for).  The AdBlock extension for Chromium was loaded, but apparently its object subrequest blocking only works on YouTube or some shit like that.

Closed Iron, opened Firefox back up.

Went through the tabs (19 of them were various images on Sankaku Channel) and eventually got the number of tabs down to 20.  Went back to GameTrailers and loaded up the video.  No ad, watched the video, was happy.

This is the precise problem with non-Firefox browsers: lack of proper ad blocking and script blocking.  I see so many people posting on various websites complaining of ads messing with the site and I just sit there and say to myself "some moron's not using AdBlock Plus".

Oh and by the way, the official initialism for Firefox is fx, not ff.

lololololololololololololololol

Even though I don't use Internet Explorer, a lot of random applications use its zone model and api to access the internet.  A while back, I enabled IE's Content Advisor.

Now, AVG's annoying "buy our shit" windows are blocked.  Azureus' "we're extorting money from you" "donation" box is also blocked.  Firefox, Iron, and even Opera all work unimpeded.

I fucking love this.  Instead of seeing annoying windows asking me for money I see the content advisor, which is simple enough to hit Cancel on.

A giant middle finger to all who would force advertisements on me.

fucking hell

So I went and got my car inspected.  $16 for the state of Virginia.  I went with $20.

Except they decided to call me on my headlights not being absolutely perfectly aligned, which I'd noticed for a while but has passed inspection several years prior.

The cost of aligning them?  Another $20.  Which meant that I had to use my check card.  Which I didn't know the balance on.  Which when I tried to call the credit union and use their automated teller bullshit to figure it out, hung up on me because I couldn't fucking remember the two sub-account digits for the account linked to the check card.  Because they fucking change those digits too fucking often.  So I paid with my check card anyway (no other option really).

Got home and discovered that the account had been $13 or so short.  It pulled some from my other account to cover that difference automatically, but then charged me $5 for doing so.

So they charge me $5 for not having all my money in one place?  Doesn't make a fuck of a lot of sense to me.

At least now I know that the charge on the Mio figure actually did go through.  I saw the hold appear on my account almost immediately, but it went away and the charge didn't show up.  I was worried that they had thought it was a fraudulent charge.  Maybe something about making a purchase from a Japanese online store I'd never bought from before had triggered a red flag.  Except they never even contacted me and I was just left in limbo until today when out of curiosity I looked back through the history and found that even though the charge was placed on the 29th of January, it didn't actually appear on my account until the 16th of February.

What the fucking shit.  At least now I don't have to try and sleep during the day thinking that the good folks at Hobby Search didn't get the money they deserved after shipping me the product I'd ordered and had the money to pay for.

So my check card will have exactly $0 on it when this charge clears, and my other account that it drew from will have $40 or so.

inb4jobhunting

Guild Wars April Fools' Day screenshots

Yeah, I took some shitty screenshots.  And by "some" I mean "two".

Guess what?  Jump break, motherfucker. Click that shit.

april fools' day

So it's over.  Here are some of the things I noticed.

• Google changed its name to Topeka...  yawn.
• YouTube gave us TEXTp as a video quality option, bringing mplayer -vo aa to videos on YouTube.
• xkcd had a command line interface for browsing the site with all sorts of hidden commands and easter eggs.  It's actually still up if you want to play around with it.
• 4chan had (working!) Facebook connect as an option for posting, which would post whatever you were posting to Facebook as well as wherever on 4chan you were posting it.
• ScoreHero announced score tracking for Final Fantasy 13 (and indeed, you could go enter scores for it)
• Guild Wars swapped the model size of players with that of minipets.  Minipets were huge and players were tiny.  The joke update notes contained some things from previous years, as well as some new things that were pretty funny.
• And on CAINE's forums I applied the Unicode right to left override character (U+202E) to the beginning of all posts, effectively reversing their content.  Some people painstakingly reversed their posts so they'd show up correctly, which now means they're reversed for real since I've removed the filter.

I suppose I should begin work on next year's CAINE April Fools' Day bullshit now so it's something more imaginative than a wordfilter for the fourth year in a row.

al-fucking-most...

Since I can't play Guitar Hero, I've been playing other games lately.  Just yesterday (or was it this morning?  I forget) I cleared the arcade game Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa with the game set to its hardest difficulty via the service mode, while only putting in five additional credits.  The game isn't honestly all that hard, even on its hardest difficulty setting.  Normally arcade games have completely unforgiving difficulty in order to make you dump more money into the machine, but this one's actually quite reasonable.

But that's not the reason I'm writing this post.  I started up Melty Blood: Actress Again...  again and tried once more to get Archetype Earth Arcueid unlocked.  GameFAQs seems to have two differing opinions on how she's unlocked.  The first involves beating arcade mode with everyone, and the second involves clearing Boss Rush mode without losing a single round.

With the difficulty set all the way down and the damage set all the way up, I went into Boss Rush, chose Neko-Arc, and set in for some beam spam (and aerial rocket spam against the giants).  After a few attempts I made it all the way to G Akiha (the eighth match...  ugh) without losing a round, but she raped me pretty quickly.  She's so different from Re-Act Final Tuned.  In Re-Act Final Tuned the only way I could beat her was to take Kohaku and drop molotovs on her, exploiting the gratuitous amount of invulnerability on the aerial molotov move.  Well here I got her to about 1/4 health and then she killed me.  Neko-Arc is easymodo (it was three or four uses of the aerial rocket, which hits multiple times), but still...

Going through arcade mode a whole shitton is looking more and more attractive right now.

can't wait...

In lighter news, I can't wait for April Fools' Day (tomorrow).  The only holiday universally celebrated by the internet always produces some lulz.  Some sites do predictable things, others are random.

• Thinkgeek always has joke products.
• 4chan fucks with /b/.
• YouTube rickrolled everyone.
• Guild Wars usually swaps out your player model.  One time it was a gender swap, one time it was stick figures, and last year everyone turned into ArenaNet's Japanese mascot, a moe-fied Gwen.  They tend to also have fake update notes, though they're getting less and less imaginative with them.
• I can't think of any others at the moment, but there's sure to be some lulz out there.

I have what I'm going to do with CAINE's forums all ready to deploy at midnight.  Unlike previous years it won't make the site completely unreadable (read: I'm not filtering every single word to the same word this year, like previous years where we had a wordfilter swapping every word for "desu" or "bacon"), but it'll still be fun.

youtube fucking fails

So youtube, continuing their history of soliciting feedback from their users about new layouts and then ignoring it when it isn't to their liking, unveiled their new video page.

Holy fuck what is this mess.

Whatever happened to sorting comments by timestamp?  Instead they have to try and get all smart, grouping them by "highest rated" and whatnot.  Not only that, where the shit is the timestamp?  Where are the comment rating controls?  Oh wait, you have to mouse over the specific comment first.

Navigation around the site and your account is even less obvious now.  They hide everything you'd ever want to click in a menu, so that you have to click something else first.

The kicker: I was viewing a random video to see this shit, when I noticed it was playing back in their low quality format.  For whatever reason, that setting never permanently sticks, so I found my account preferences and went to playback options to set it back to high quality.

Except the "prefer high quality" option is no longer there.

I only get a choice between "prefer ass quality" and "choose based on my connection" which is exactly the same as "prefer ass quality".  I have a 7mbps cable connection, it can handle downloading their higher quality formats just fine when the server isn't loaded or acting up.

What the shit is this mess of fuck?

Seriously, go back to web design school and learn how to design an intuitive layout.  Here's a hint: Often-used options such as the subscriptions panel, account settings, comment rating controls, etc. and useful information such as how long ago a comment or video was posted should be easily visible.  Why hide everything until we mouse over or click on something?

I'm betting even fewer people will read video descriptions now, because it takes up so little room on the page by default and when expanded doesn't limit its vertical height and have a scroll bar.  Giving any block-level element a scroll bar is an elementary task in CSS.  In fact, I had a Stylish style that would do that for the older, better video pages.  I've modified it to work with the new one, but I shouldn't have to fix your fucking site for you.

What the fuck, youtube.  Why don't you fix your site's bugs instead of making new layouts that everyone hates.  Fix the "video's loaded to 75% but stuck buffering at 25%" bug.  Fix the bug where it suddenly just says "no, you aren't getting any more of this video".  Fix annotations so that they consistently show up at the proper timing.  Bring back the ability to add videos to the quicklist off of a user's channel.  Give us a report comment link so reporting abusive commenters goes from having to navigate a neverending maze of help pages that don't go anywhere useful to "click and report".

Finally, grow a backbone and defend Fair Use.  You've let WMG walk all over fair use.  Make an effort to verify copyright claims before disabling or removing a video.  Don't take action immediately upon accusation.  This is America, not Nazi Germany.  You're a video streaming site, not Big Brother.

uva gamers spring festival

I didn't go for the entire thing, mainly because I don't have the money for the parking garage at Newcomb Hall or a parking permit for any of the parking lots near it, so I had to wait until after 5 PM when the permit lots become free.

When I got there I was pleased to see Rock Band 2 set up.  Talked with friends a bit, played a song or two on bass (with a shitty RB strat...  sigh) and then the drummer left.  I would spend the next hour and a half to two hours on drums.  When my right arm was about to fall off, I switched to guitar (using a GH3 Les Paul thankfully) and after I got accustomed to the atrocious lag on the HDTV we were playing on (for whatever reason it wasn't calibrated) I started doing well.

If it weren't for the fact that we had the unlock all songs cheat on since the save on that 360 didn't have everything unlocked, I could have gotten two achievements.  I played the Beastie Boys' So What'cha Want on bass, which has the stupidest bass part ever.  Even on Expert, it's all green.  That's it.  I could have gotten the achievement for gold-starring a song (if it wasn't already unlocked, didn't check) and since I upstrummed it and hit all the notes, the Flawless Groove achievement.

Oh well.  I guess I'll care about that a little more when I actually have a 360 and my own profile to unlock achievements on.

The stupid part about it was that for whatever reason none of the DLC was working.  Every time we chose a DLC song it booted us back out to the character select screen.  We attributed it to the lack of an internet connection, but if that's really the case, that fucking sucks.  It already sucks that some XBLA games like I Made A Game With Zombies In It! require you to be connected to the internet to play, but DLC?  That completely ruins convention and festival use possibilities.  Or fuck, if you're traveling with your 360 and want to play, you have to hope there's unsecured wireless nearby.  That's completely retarded and while I hope the next generation of consoles fixes it, in my mind I know it'll actually be worse.  For some fucktarded reason companies are getting really paranoid about how people use the stuff they've legally paid for, and it's getting to the point where Fair Use no longer exists.  A generation or two from now, we'll only be able to play our games when they decide we should.

The sad thing is, nobody in a position of power seems to care about Fair Use.  Anyone who complains about tightening copyright restrictions is immediately labelled a pirate.  This shit is fucking ridiculous, and it's got to fucking stop.  There are completely legitimate reasons for private citizens to use copyrighted material.  If companies would just read Fair Use doctrine instead of pretending it doesn't exist, they'd realize that 90% of what they're clamping down on (WMG vs. GH/RB players on YouTube, for instance) is Fair Use.

Awesome MAME roms

I guess you could have seen this coming.

Being that I use a trackball instead of a regular mouse, I have intuitive input for trackball games.  Meaning I can play Marble Madness and feel like I'm in the fucking arcade.  (MAGFest's "everything set to Free Play" arcade of win had a Marble Madness cabinet last year, between that and the cocktail Pac-Man cabinet, shit was so cash)

One game that I keep going back to even after ragequitting from other games is Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa.  The story is kind of cheesy.  Moo Mesa gets hit by this energy beam from outer space, and all the cows on it mutate and become more...  anthropomorphic.  It's a western setting (well, duh), and you're playing as Marshall Moo and his party as they go around, shoot the bad cows, and try to rescue Lily Bovine.  It plays really well, movement is fluid and you can easily aim in any direction.  Kind of like Contra...  oh wait.  Both games were made by Konami.  No wonder.  I can beat the first stage and its boss without getting hit.  Not so much the rest of the game, but hey, at least I don't have to spend quarters...  Also, I love that beer bottles are your health powerup.

A classic that I loved in arcades is Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road.  I dunno who Ivan "Ironman" Stewart is, but the game is awesome.  Basically you race around dirt tracks in a truck and if you win you get to continue and upgrade your truck.  If you ever saw a cabinet with three steering wheels, that's what it was.  It supports the trackball in MAME, so I have fairly fluent control.

If you want decent arcade fighters, to be honest, look no further than the Neo-Geo.  There you'll find Last Blade/Last Blade 2, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Samurai Shodown, and more.  I actually own an import copy of Garou: Mark of the Wolves for PS2.  It's just that awesome.

Two non-Neo-Geo fighters that are pretty decent (and both made by the same company, Strata/Incredible Technologies) are Blood Storm and Time Killers.  Both have fairly similar gameplay.  Each character has a weapon, and with a well-placed hit (usually a counterhit) you can cut off your opponent's arms.  Everyone has a special move (that's damn hard to pull off too) that can decapitate the enemy and give an instant win.  Matches don't really last very long, but they're fun games.

Another classic: The Simpsons.  Konami brings us this beat-em-up which so happens to be the best Simpsons game ever made.  I remember dumping so many quarters into this in the arcades.

On the subject of beat-em-ups, we can't forget Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.  The arcade version is way better than the Genesis version.  You're going around blasting bad guys, synchronized dancing to the death, and rescuing kids.  This was before all the child molestation allegations.  Oh and if you find his monkey you can turn into mecha-Michael Jackson.  Sega...  you made some awesome games, and then this quirky stuff.

Now for weird games.  First up: Maruchan de Goo!  If the "Maruchan" part of the name made you think of ramen, you're on the right track.  It's a game about making ramen, eating it, serving it to customers, and other stuff.  It was made by Sega.

Next up: Dancing Eyes.  This is one of many adult-oriented arcade games.  You walk around on this grid which happens to be superimposed on the clothing of a female.  You can mark sections of it, and when you close off a section the clothing beneath disappears.  There's enemies and powerups.  ...Yeah.  Namco's responsible for this one.

Then there's Pachinko Sexy Reaction (and its sequel).  You're playing pachinko.  If you do well, you get to peek in on a female changing (you get caught, it's funny) and they put on a costume of some sort.  As the game goes on everything gets more suggestive.  The responsible company is Sammy (anyone who's played a Guilty Gear game knows of them).

There's plenty more, obviously, but that's a random selection out of what I've discovered at random/remembered from arcades.

Eye of the North dungeon time

So with nothing else left to do in Guild Wars on my ranger, I figured it was time to start doing the Eye of the North dungeons.

They're generally full of traps and hazards and things where you need to develop the right mindset to get through the dungeon in an orderly fashion.

I started with a one level dungeon that I knew I could get to without deaths, Ooze Pit.

Aside from one specific Ooze type (the Earthbound ones, which have powerful earth magic area of effect spells) and the very last battle, pretty much the entire thing can be C-spaced.

I've done it twice now, both times with heroes and henchmen (different party composition both times).  The first time part of my party (not including me) got run over by some rocks towards the end, and everyone but me died on the last fight a few times.  This was my first time entering the dungeon and my party build contained several skills that ended up being useless since Oozes aren't fleshy.  My burning poison build was just a burning build, and Koss couldn't ever apply deep wound because he couldn't apply bleeding (sever/gash lol).  The second time only one hero died (Livia got gangraped by Volatile Oozes using their self-destruction skill) and I had no deaths on the final battle.

I think I'm getting the hang of these things.  I'll have to look through the dungeon list on GuildWiki and see which one I should try next.

Oh and by the way, the new Blood Bond is fucking awesome.  Necromancer healers can be much more prevalent now.  Add Foul Feast and Plague Signet and you have the start of a build...

gonna get my MAME on

A long time ago I downloaded a full romset for MAME.  At the time it was 15 GB.  I think it was for MAME 0.110 or something (i.e. old).

I've been playing games with that romset for ages.

I finally got around to finding and downloading the full romset for the most recent MAME, 0.137.  I have MAME 0.137 sitting in my recently-reorganized download directory waiting to be installed.  Technically I could install it now but I'm waiting for the romset to seed the rest of the way back to 1.0 so I can stop the torrent.

The torrent is on a ratio tracker, so I have to play by their rules.  Not that I was ever intent on hitting and running, but since they have fairly stringent rules I figure it'd be a waste to get myself banned for downloading one torrent.  I generally seed things to 6 anyway.  Larger torrents like this one I usually only take back to 1 because 6 * 23 GB = holy fuck that would take forever.

Yeah, the full MAME romset is now 23 GB.  I really don't need all of them, but it's great to be able to just browse through the list and pick a game at random.

AVGN on hiatus

I can't help but think I called it.  He says he's burned out and is taking a break until May.  His last several reviews, while all good, have been notably less angry.

Maybe when he comes back he'll actually be drinking beer instead of water in a beer bottle.  It's been way too obvious in recent episodes.  On top of that, he's not even drinking in some of them.

I like the Nerd, so I hope he comes back from his hiatus full of new material and toting a 12-pack of Rolling Rock (though honestly I prefer Yuengling).

well, kinda...

I used a combination of Stylish, the DOM Inspector, and changing some Tab Mix Plus and Classic Compact settings in about:config to get label-less tabs.  Had to change settings in about:config because neither extension would let me lower the tab width below 22px and I wanted it at 18px.

I dunno how this will act when I restart firefox, but it's working now.  Also I dunno if opening either extension's preferences will auto-revert to 22px.

Anyway, I have tiny tabs now, which means I can fit every single tab I usually keep open in a fraction of the horizontal space they normally take up.  This will make it a lot easier to keep them organized.

Edit: well, if I open the extensions' preferences, it's fine, but if I change anything, the tabs get set back to being 22px wide and I have to change things in about:config all over again.  Weird.

firefox extension bullshit

First off, update notes.  Firefox has a nice button that will show what the extension author provides for update notes when there's a new update.  However, some fucktarded extension developers like Firebug's just say "oh lol you can read update notes here" and give a URL.  That isn't ever clickable or selectable.  Then they have the nerve to add "oh I understand that you can't actually do anything useful with the URL we put here, but tough shit".  Well, not that exactly, but that expresses the sentiment I feel.  Fuck you.  Put the fucking update notes in the fucking box they're supposed to fucking be in so I can fucking read them to see whether or not I fucking want to update your fucking extension.  Until then, I'm not updating.

Second.  I updated DownloadHelper and NoScript just a few minutes ago.  When Firefox actually appeared, some of Tab Mix Plus' settings had been changed.  Specifically, my tab bar had a close button instead of it appearing on a tab when I hover my mouse over the tab. The tab bar had scroll buttons.  Lastly, the all tabs dropdown was visible.  Going into TMP's options they were still set the way I had them, which makes me think it was something else entirely.  Changing them and then changing them back made it revert back to the way I wanted it.  I know that TMP has some issues with Classic Compact/Classic Compact Options that are as of yet unresolved, but I thought those were mostly due to the fact that the two have conflicting settings.  I set both of them to the same settings and went on with life.

Third, why does Mozilla permit extensions to open web pages on install/update?  I've got all the call home pages blocked using BlockSite, but I shouldn't have to do that.  The fact that extensions can do this is kind of a security hazard, especially if the extension has some extremely obfuscated malicious feature.  At least NoScript doesn't do that (well, it does, but it can be disabled in about:config, set noscript.firstRunRedirection to false), seeing as how its developer likes to update anywhere from once a week to four times a week.

There was this whole thing a while back with AdBlock Plus and NoScript.  NoScript's author has always tried to make sure his sites' ads are visible.  To further this, his four sites and his advertisers are in NoScript's default whitelist (along with a bunch of other questionable default whitelist entries).  It used to be much more difficult to remove them because they were marked as "protected" and you had to dig around about:config to remove the fuckers, but enough people bitched at him (including me) that he conceded.

Then he got his panties in a bunch about AdBlock Plus blocking his sites' ads and decided to fuck with AdBlock Plus instead of taking, you know, an ethical route to a solution.  For a while, every time you started Firefox with AdBlock Plus and NoScript installed, NoScript would add exception filters for its developer's site.  He eventually got pwnt by Mozilla and forced to remove his malicious code (which he had run through an obfuscator), but he still blamed the entire thing on AdBlock Plus even though he made the first move.

Firefox really needs a secure extension model.  One where each extension can't fuck with other extensions unless those extensions define a set API.  In the current extension model an extension can basically do anything it wants.  I encountered this issue a while back when I was still using Tabbrowser Preferences.  It makes some questionably legit changes to Firefox that, among other things, result in GMail becoming unusable.  These changes persist even after the extension is uninstalled.  To revert them you have to reinstall Firefox.  Luckily there's Tab Mix Plus which does everything Tabbrowser Preferences ever did and more.

As far as my compact setup goes, there are a few things I still want:

• The ability to collapse the tabs to just the favicon
• If I had this I'd use a tab bar close tab button
• Firebug won't let me inspect the browser chrome... Perhaps its only weakness? I could make a style for Stylish to do exactly this if I used the DOM Inspector
• I mean, I can cheat and load chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in the location bar to inspect it, but everything's just congealed into a single tabbrowser element and I can't get at the tabbar element at all
• Automatic grouping of tabs into a menu by domain or subdomain
• Should be configurable per-tab
• Each tab would have a dropdown arrow to show the menu
• If the tab is clicked instead it should show the last site on that domain/subdomain that was shown instead of showing the menu
• You can kind of do this if you cheat and load chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in a tab, but it's not at all what I'd like

star fucking stroke

lol

So anyway, we got further (durr) and I got that arte setup changed finally.  Learned Cavalry only to discover that it's next to useless as it only affects Natalia.  It would have been nice if the Arte FAQ on GameFAQs had mentioned that, but all it says is "Prevents staggering for a period of time." and that's what I was going off of.  Therefore I just figured it was a general use status effect much like Sharpness or Barrier.

Now all I need to do is figure out how exactly single target spells that become multi-target on FOF change work.  Like, for instance, Heal.  Do I get to target it, or does it just affect all allies, or what?  The only time we're ever in a situation where the entire party could need healing is in a boss battle, but it's still a good thing to know since it happens on some of her other FOF changes as well.

It's kind of funny reading some of the threads on the GameFAQs forum for Tales of the Abyss.  I guess most people just play the game by themselves.  It does have a lot of features to ease doing that, but overall the game is a lot more playable if you have all party members controlled by a player.  You can coordinate a lot better in battle with humans controlling all characters.  It's easy to develop strategies when you can change the basic behaviors of each character just by saying "hey, keep him distracted while I cast this spell" or whatever.

Also reading the walkthroughs for the part we just went through, it seems like nobody knows that in the Meggiora Highlands, you can turn off the flames on the blocks in the second entrance with Mieu Attack.  The puzzle is balls easy and Flame Burst is a way better spell to disable than Splash since Splash is more easily avoidable.

Four more levels and I get another arte, and then we have to get through certain events for me to get my final arte (which is a healing spell)...

I've said that I play Natalia more like a healer who also has a bow than an archer who can heal, but honestly her skills skew towards party utility much more than damage.  Having the ability to remove bad status effects mid-battle and provide good ones basically makes her a better healer than Tear.  At least, a better player-controlled healer.  Tear focuses much more on damage and making FOF rings, but has a healing spell and a resurrection spell.  Resurrection doesn't need to happen very often (I mean, if you don't suck), and targeted heals > AoE heals that unattentive allies can move out of.  We can live with using Life Bottles when Sync pulls his Mystic Arte out of nowhere and takes Luke and Guy from full health to zero.  God fucking dammit, I'd just healed Luke when that happened too.  At least Sync an heroes after that fight.  Spoiler warning: you just read a spoiler.

back to regular shit

Spring Break threw me a loop, since pretty much everyone I hang out with is a student and they all went home.  But now everyone's back, we had our meeting last night, we're having Tales of Fridays tonight, and the theme showing is tomorrow.

I still have a 12 pack of Mr.Pibb and a good portion of Red Vines left, so they'll probably make their way to the showing tomorrow night.  Tonight all I'm taking food-wise is the cheese.  Since if I remember correctly the first place we're going to be headed in Abyss is Cheesedonia, unless there's some sidequest faggotry first.

All this talking of food reminds me, I haven't eaten since I got up at 3 PM.  I'd better fix that.

frozen food directions

So I'd noticed recently that the El Monterey burritos I've been eating have a horrible cooking time:eating time ratio.  I attributed this to the directions specifying that a single burrito should be cooked at 375 for 20 minutes.  A single burrito.  For 20 minutes.  Kind of ridiculous, don't you think?

So I did some experimentation with cooking them at 450.  Turns out it doesn't decrease the cooking time enough to be a viable difference.  It was about 16 minutes.  Part of the 4-minute difference goes to the difference in preheat time, so that 4 minutes it looks like I'm saving isn't really 4 minutes.

They do have microwave directions, which I did try.  Once.  The burrito ended up like all other frozen burritos I've ever microwaved: soggy and with cold spots.  Microwaves suck for heating frozen foods, end of story.  Oven >>>>> Microwave.

A few days ago I saw Red Baron By The Slice in the freezer section.  I said "hey, the best frozen pizza in existence has a way for me to enjoy it without having to buy an entire pizza?  Neat!"  Today I got a box.  A box has two slices, both packaged in their own cardboard microwave heating tray.  The microwave directions clearly indicate what wattage they were formulated on.  So I followed them.  They worked really well, and in a couple of minutes I had a slice of pizza.

It still suffered from the same issue heating anything frozen in the microwave suffers from: it was soggy.  The cardboard tray crisped the crust a little bit, but not nearly as much as if I'd heated it up in the oven.  So I looked for the oven directions.  And I looked.  And I looked some more.  Guess what?  There are no oven directions.  Fail.

cell phone oddity

The signal I get on this tracfone (with TF64SIMC4 SIM card, indicating an AT&T network) has always been really shitty in my house.  Usually I can't get a signal at all.

I've discovered, however, that I can keep a low signal (one to two "bars") at my desk if I turn the phone on where it has a better signal (four to five "bars") and manage to not lose signal on the way back home.

The only problem with that is, I don't really know where I have signal.  It seems completely random.  Sometimes I have five "bars" in CAINE house, other times zero.  I got five on the front porch of a friend's place a few days ago, but immediately upon walking in it dropped to three.

I think I need to contact their technical support and see if I can get them to send me a T-Mobile SIM card (a TF64SIMT5).  I know nobody on the AT&T network, but I know a couple people on T-Mobile including one very heavy G1 smartphone user, and they don't have reception problems.  Man, those Android phones are sexy.

I hate this "bars" system of measurement for signal strength.  Obviously more is better, and they needed something to represent the signal strength to simplify it so non-technical idiotspeople can understand, but...  how many dB (decibels) is a "bar"?  Does it scale linearly (i.e. is one "bar" half of two "bars", and is two half of four, is one plus two three, etc.)?  What's my SNR (signal to noise ratio)?  Do "bars" take SNR into account?  I guess if you know me you could probably have figured this out about me, but I hate arbitrary and meaningless things.  Some arbitrary things are arbitrary but unique (like the row id of a record in a database), and thus meaningful.  Other things (like these "bars") just serve to hide the actual measurement system and are better done away with.

someone seems to like taking over my email accounts

A while back, my Yahoo email was compromised.  I knew this because Pidgin kept throwing errors at me saying that my Yahoo account had signed on at another location.  When I logged in I had a ton of "delivery failure" messages from random mail servers.  Fortunately my password hadn't been changed so I changed it and my password recovery info and that was that.

Now it seems as though the gmail account I registered a while back but never used got compromised.  I logged into it today on a whim and saw a message in my inbox about registering for the beta of Heroes of Newerth or some shit like that.  I went to change the password but it forced me to log out and my old password doesn't work.  So I filled out the "my account has been compromised" form, and we'll see if I can get it back.

God fucking dammit.

Edit: looking through the password manager for firefox, which the gmail extension uses, it seems my password was something other than I expected it to be.  It still looks compromised though because I never signed up for the Heroes of Newerth beta.

Edit 2: Changed the password on my main gmail account just in case.  I'd change the other one, but at this point it might set off red flags in the "account compromised" report I submitted.  So I'll wait a bit until that gets resolved.

Edit 3: I really need a system for generating and securely storing secure passwords.  I've already lost accounts because I changed the password to something more exotic (and therefore more secure) and immediately forgot what it was.

Edit 4: On top of all of this I found out why I hadn't been receiving the majority of the emails sent from the CAINE mailing list.  I've been using my gmail account for that mailing list since I started having the issues.  Thunderbird had been helpfully marking them as junk, marking them read, and moving them to the junk folder for me.  Even though I had (and still have) a filter set up to move them to a specific folder.  In addition to that it had junk filtered a legitimate email from one of my parents' friends.  I changed the filter to specifically mark CAINE mailing list emails as 'not junk' before moving them to the folder, and then went into the settings and told it to not mark auto-junked messages as read.  Hopefully now I'll actually know when it junks something.  The fun part was there actually was one message in my junk folder that actually was junk.

whoa weird

These posts have 90% opacity, and images therein inherit that opacity.  Looking at the Guild Wars screenshot, you can see Churuya in the background.

It's kind of fun.

Sadly I don't think an element with 90% opacity can have a child element with 100% opacity, so there's no real way to fix it.

dervish ascention complete

This only took forever.  I did the entire Crystal Desert in one effort, but getting there took a while.

All secondaries available on my Dervish, and he's still a survivor!  Yay!

formula 1 FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-

Well, after releasing the friday practices, CellorDoor seems to have disappeared and doesn't have a website.

So with Darmeth not releasing F1 this season, it looks like I'm going to have to watch it on SPEED.  With no pre-race or post-race other than maybe one grid interview (Bahrain's was Adrian Sutil) and the podum press conference.  We don't get to hear from anyone that finished lower than third.  Because SPEED only has one person actually at the venue and the rest are in a booth in California somewhere.

The BBC (previously ITV) has an entire crew that goes to each venue and all of the commentary is done from the venue.  They have extensive pre- and post-race coverage, an entire hour for both combined.  As F1 races are time-limited to two hours, this means a three hour broadcast.  They also don't have commercials during the race.  Their entire pre-race coverage, race coverage complete with interviews during the race, and post-race coverage goes for three hours completely commercial-free and uninterrupted.  The focus is where it should be, on the racing.  They usually have some opening bit during the pre-race where they explain how something works on the cars or show the track in greater detail or something.  It actually feels like they care about it.  SPEED's just like "okay, time to comment on an F1 race and see what David Hobbs is smoking today.  But first, some commercials and flashy graphics covering up half the screen to show the top four drivers or some bullshit."

Is the BBC's broadcast even available in the US?  We have digital cable, and I think we get BBC America...

Going through Sankaku's recent images box

On the main site, there's a javascripted iframe showing 20 images recently uploaded to Sankaku's slow-as-shit Danbooru instance.  Browsing through this and searching each image's tags for the source tag, I usually find myself seeing something like this:

"Touhou...  Touhou...  Touhou...  Vocaloid...  Vocaloid...  Touhou...  Vocaloid...  Vocaloid...  Vocaloid...  Touhou...  Vocaloid...  Vocaloid...  Touhou...  Fate/Stay Night...  Touhou...  Vocaloid...  Touhou...  Touhou...  Vocaloid...  Vocaloid"

Occasionally there's something other than Touhou or Vocaloid (as I alluded to with Fate/Stay Night in that example), but the vast majority are one or the other.

I understand that it's an image database and these images tend to come out in sets or other large batches (there was a huge flood of Tohsaka Rin a while back (lol Fate/Stay Night), and when K-On! came out it was nothing but Mio), but still...  lrn2varietymoar.

ok whatever

I'm going to go with CellorDoor.

RSS URL is http://www.torrentreactor.net/rss.php?search=CellorDoor

regex filter is F1..+.2010.Sunday.Race

the moar you know

Formula 1 torrent problem

Yeah, there's a problem.

The torrentfags I'd been getting F1 from, darmeth, were using mininova after the demise of the pirate bay.  Well, mininova had some faggotry of their own and no longer have any tv torrents.  My account on darmeth's forums got deleted because I only had three posts, so I can't just get their torrent links from there.

This weekend is the Bahrain Grand Prix.  I need a torrent or something.  I see a release of the Friday practice from some group called CellorDoor, but they're in suXviD.  Well, it says suXviD, but the description is "sorry I did it wrong its h264 in an AVI" which screams multiple levels of fail.  First for doing it wrong and second for putting h264 in an AVI, then the fail attempt at putting HTML in the description, bad english, etc..  I don't have a lot of confidence but I'm going to download this practice anyway to see what it's actually like.  Also the description says "anyone knows why darmeth isn't releasing anything?" which gives me a sadface.

Also recently Azureus has been acting up and occasionally does not show downloading torrents.  They're there, they're downloading, but they don't show up in the list.  I don't get to see them until they're seeding.  It's a strange issue because when I notice it, the column headers in the Incomplete Torrents list are gone.  Restarting Azureus fixes it.

Why do I call darmeth "torrentfags"?  Well, let's see.  They complain.  A lot.  About everything.  It's almost like they don't want people downloading their torrents.  They restrict their forums so only registered members can see the torrent links, and then delete people like me who disappear between seasons that only had three posts.  Never mind that all of their policies are for europeans with tons of uplink, and while there are people from the US on their forums, you can't help but feel alienated.

I did my best to seed their stuff as much as I could, but they have (european) members who brag about getting a 56 share ratio on every release in about the time it takes me to get a 6 share ratio.  Their first policy is "OMGZ DONT CAP UR UPLOADS".  I've had very, very bad experiences with the BitTorrent protocol running uncapped uploads.  As in, I can't do anything else with the internet because the BT protocol is designed to use every last bit of bandwidth it can get its grubby little hands on, and thus my upload is completely saturated with BT traffic and I can't even get a simple HTTP request out.  Capping my upstream eliminates that issue entirely.  So no, sorry, I won't be uncapping my upstream.  I'd like to be able to use the internet while I download a torrent, and so would my parents, who I live with and share an internet connection with.

They have all the earmarks of a group that releases only on private trackers, yet they release on public trackers and feel as though they have the right to complain when something goes wrong. (as in, someone downloads their torrent)  Every time I saw them complaining about something my reaction was "oh BAWWW some more why don't you?"  Their definition of a good uplink excludes even the best connections available to consumers in the US.  It's a shame because their releases were high quality h264 matroskas of the BBC broadcast, which has a lot more effort put into it than SPEED's broadcast here in the US.

easiest guitar chord change ever

E major to E minor.  Just lift your index finger.

I dunno how much use this has, but it sounds neat.

Honorable mention goes to the C major to Cmaj7 change, which does the same thing, but sounds weird.

It's videos like this that are the reason I love The Onion

Okay, so jump breaks don't work very well on posts with embedded content on blogger. Or to be precise, embedded content before the break doesn't work when the content after the break isn't shown. So instead of this post only showing one video initially but showing the other two after "Read More" is clicked, it's now a mess of embedded videos. Thanks for killing all of my hopes for what's a useful feature on *ahem* ALL OTHER BLOGGING PLATFORMS INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WORDPRESS.

These are along the same vein as the first:

I think I just translated something

Despite not really knowing Japanese all that well, I know my kana...

In my travels on Sankaku Channel I came across this image which was untranslated when I found it.

Looking at it, and noticing the "translation_request" tag (which I changed to "translated" when I was done), I said to myself, "well, it's entirely katakana and hiragana, let's see what it says!"

For the lesser-informed, the title （ういちゃんのラブリごちそうレシピ） romanized would be "Ui-chan no raburi gochisou reshipi".  "Raburi" and "reshipi" are katakana and correspond to the English words "lovely" and "recipe", respectively.  I had a good idea of what "gochisou" meant already ("gochisousama" is traditionally said after a meal), but the power of the internet confirmed that it meant "feast".  I used a synonym, "meal", since "feast" didn't sound quite right to me.  Yay, translator's liberties.  Lastly, "no" is a particle indicating posession or ownership.

Putting it all together it would be "Ui-chan's Lovely Meal Recipe".

Really not all that difficult, yet...  I get a sense of accomplishment for it.

timesink get?

I accepted a friend's invite to Starfleet Commander on Facebook and I've been playing it.  It's a massive waste of time.  It's kind of neat because it's playing even when you aren't at your computer, and you can start stuff that takes a long time and then leave, log out, close your browser, or even turn off your computer and it'll still finish.

The game has a tutorial to get you through the early stages, which basically walks you up to being able to build ships.  Towards the end of it I was gleefully ignoring it for a reason I'll explain below.

I have some issues with the game.  First off the prices.  They start out reasonable, but then you hit a brick wall approximately 54% of the way to your first ship when the prices suddenly skyrocket.

The next issue: To get certain things in-game you have to invite friends to play it (and they have to accept your invite).  Any time someone accepts your invite you get three Crew Points and one Crew Member.  Crew Points are required for certain things, and Crew Members can be used to speed up production of nearly everything.

Further, to get resources you have to micro-manage.  You can't just say "okay, go get me some crystal" and have your crystal value go up periodically.  You can build mines to get resources automatically, and upgrade them so they give you resources more often, but the amount you get is very small compared to the prices you have to pay for everything.  So to get resources, every two or so minutes you have to click a button.  This makes it very hard to do anything else, such as typing a blog post.

There is an exception to the "you have to invite people" rule to get crew points and members.  You can build droids that do the same things.  You'd think a droid would be more effective at any given task than a human would, but this isn't the case.  In fact, humans are twice as effective as droids for increasing production and three times as effective at increasing your crew points (and a hell of a lot cheaper).  I was just going to eschew social interaction on a social network entirely and simply build droids to do my shit for me, but they're basically not worth the money and time it takes to make them.

I found an ultimate solution to the crew issue, though perhaps unwieldy.  Simply log out of Facebook and make a dummy account, set it up with the bare minimum stuff, and then invite it and accept the invite.

There's a partial solution to the micromanagement issue.  Once you get multiple cargo ships and the ability to fly them all separately, you can tell it "hey, send this number of ships to get crystal".  You still have to click once every couple of minutes, but you get more resources per click.

The last issue with the whole friend invite thing is that to be able to send a cargo ship to get the resource you need the most of, hydrogen, you need one crew point.  Either build a crew droid, which serves no other purpose except to get you crew points but takes forever to unlock and build, or make a fake account to invite.

It sucks that this game is designed to be a time waster, because if the costs and build times were more reasonable it would actually be kind of fun.  In fact, this game reminds me of a much better shareware-turned-freeware game for Windows (it runs nearly perfectly in Wine in case you're on Linux) called Warpath 97.  The galaxy was a bit smaller (divided into eight octants with 16 planets each), and it isn't massively multiplayer, but its gameplay is much faster and more better.  Also 90% of the people in Starfleet Commander are inactive.