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.