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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
atholbrose's LiveJournal:
| Monday, January 7th, 2002 | |
| 12:58 pm | Review: Final Fantasy X Time played: 46 hours Status: Stopped at next-to-next-to-next-to-last boss Overall: A very good game with some faults. ( Read more... ) |
| Monday, September 24th, 2001 | |
| 1:36 am | Please sign here, please. Poor Barura. I'd only unlocked Warn from his disc stone two weeks previously, and his Loyalty wasn't built up very much yet. However, Warn knocked him silly in less than 20 seconds. When they met up again in the official FIMBA tournament six weeks later, Barura withdrew rather than face certain humiliation again. Warn won his 2 remaining matches, clinching the tournament -- and gaining me a visit from the postman, bearing level-up notification. Warn is an Usaba (Plant/Worm). He was generated from His Name Is Alive's "Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth". What can I say? I got tired of just waiting for Monster Rancher 3 to come in the mail (soon, though, very soon!) and it doesn't help to refresh memories of the beginning of a series when getting the next game. Er, even if the game is a prequel like MR3 is supposed to be. Current Mood:  happyCurrent Music: Monster Rancher main theme (in head) |
| Sunday, September 23rd, 2001 | |
| 12:42 am | Yet another thing that must be seen... this movie. |
| Tuesday, September 11th, 2001 | |
| 8:42 am | "Hamster Club" There is a web site, http://www.comicsone.com, that sells translated manga on-line, in e-book and (only a few titles in) paperback form. Currently they're running a membership drive, so if you sign up for a membership (i.e., give them your e-mail and postal address) you get 800 points. 100 points == $1 worth of credit towards the site. You also have to download the Acrobat E-book reader, for either Windows or Macintosh. It's worth it just for Hamster Club. Two volumes have been released, at $2 each -- the site claims there are three but there's no date for the third. They are a series of four-panel strips, by different authors, about living with their hamsters. I've been sitting here reading the first one, "A-Grade Hamsters", and laughing. Plus, they have a fairly wide variety of other stuff, from scifi and horror to pachinko adventure tales to shonenai. Most of the volumes are $2.95 in e-book, so you can get one other with your order, and three first volumes are free with the membership. Okay, enough unpaid commercial. (Edit: link fixed.) Current Mood: happy |
| Friday, September 7th, 2001 | |
| 11:13 pm | I can't have anything nice... Got a CD player installed in my car for no good reason except that I want to listen to CDs while driving. The idiot who installed it drained the battery and gave it a charge, but didn't tell me before I left. I only drove for about 5 minutes, so the battery was dead when I tried to restart the car. They sent someone out to jump me, but it started afterwards; I had the battery checked at an Autozone, but then it wouldn't start. They jumped me. I drove around for about forty-five minutes, then went to a friend's apartment to kvetch, but they were asleep (eep!). Luckily, my car started and got me home. Sigh. All the expense and then all this trouble... just for a frill I might as well have done without, as far as I'm feeling about it right now. Grr. Current Mood: tired/upset Current Music: nothing -- don't want to SEE a CD right now |
| Thursday, August 23rd, 2001 | |
| 1:53 am | Ever wonder why you never seem to know anyone who wins a big prize in one of those McDonald's games where you have to collect all the crazy little coupons? Wonder no more. |
| Sunday, August 12th, 2001 | |
| 7:28 am | the BUG ...I've got it bad. I think it's all this sitting around doing nothing for the last four weeks... all of a sudden, I just can't leave the C++ compiler alone. I actuallly pulled an all-nighter from Friday to Saturday, coding like mad. I literally looked up, saw sunlight, looked at the clock and said "Oh. It's 8!" I didn't get to bed until noon. And now I'm working on a revision, already, correcting the things I didn't like about the way the first one came together, and adding comments, platform-independence hooks and real error checking; basically, treating it like a real project! Oh, well, it gives me a nice creative outlet... after 0.2 is finished up, it'll be time to bust out the scanner and the Crayola markers... Current Mood:  creativeCurrent Music: Torneko's dungeon delving music, in my head |
| Wednesday, August 8th, 2001 | |
| 2:10 am | too good not to share Okay, so on a web board I sometimes read, someone came up with this picture  and I wanted to know where the heck it came from and to find out, if I could, why someone took a picture of a rabbit with pancakes on its head. I never did find out the why, but the site is at http://www.fsinet.or.jp/~sokaisha/rabbit/r Current Mood:  sleepyCurrent Music: Gorillaz - Punk |
| Thursday, August 2nd, 2001 | |
| 3:10 am | the munchies There are no more 24 hour restaurants left in Cincinnati, I swear. The Denny's is gone. The Perkins is gone, and when it was around, it wasn't 24-hours Wednesday night/Thursday morning anyhow. Even Frisch's Big Boy now closes at 1 am. So when I awake so very hungry that it woke me up, what am I supposed to do? Well, there's always the Chili Company. The last time I ate there it was absolutely terrible, but that doesn't guarantee that it will be bad this time. Er, maybe, anyways. So I go to the ATM ... ... and the citywide ATM network for my bank is down. I try three machines; no result from any of them. I end up having to shop for dinner at the grocery store, at close to 3 am, when there's nobody in there but sleepy stock-boys who resent that you're there because they can't cuss when there are customers around. Mmm, mmm, a sub sandwich, a slightly overlarge bag of chips, a thing of chocolate milk (and why don't they sell Dean's Milk Chugs any more?), a 20 ounce coke, and half of a red raspberry pie. Eclectic, yes, slightly suspicious, definitely. Tastes better than manna from heaven? Oh YES. This might even negate the annoyance that comes from realizing that the fan over my motherboard's BIOS is rubbing, so I get five minutes of BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Current Mood:  hungryCurrent Music: nothing -- i'm too busy stuffing my phiz |
| Saturday, July 28th, 2001 | |
| 1:39 pm | wow... ...well, this is the first time since the 20th I've been able to SEE any journals or friends lists here, grr. Saw a support note about overloaded servers and they know and are working on solutions, so I didn't open up a ticket or anything... but two entries are missing :X Okay, it's well past lunchtime. I'm out. Current Mood: cross |
| Wednesday, July 25th, 2001 | |
| 1:04 am | Oh, whoa... ...found some concerts I *really* want to go to. Squarepusher and Plaid are playing at the Wexler Center in Columbus next month, and then in October godspeed you black emperor! are there. It's way too late to get tickets to see Radiohead in middle Ohio, though. I may be going to these alone, though; it's not the kind of music that M. really likes all that much. And Columbus isn't that far away; a concert without nine hours of driving -- what a concept! This isn't mentioning the Laurie Anderson show in Chicago in September. And I'm sure much more that I'm unaware of is going on... like Crystal Method and Cowboy Junkies next month at Bogart's, right here in town. In other music stuff I just found out, Aphex Twin's new album drujqs is now mastered and, I guess, ready for release. Most of the track names are worse than those on the Richard D. James album, random words spliced together or just junk -- you know, forceful keyboard-forehead interaction type stuff. Ah well, hope the music's good. Current Mood: excitedCurrent Music: Squarepusher - Theme from Ernest Borgnine |
| Saturday, July 14th, 2001 | |
| 12:17 am | oooookay, please excuse this entry I'm logged in via AOL, on a laptop I'm not used to, after a draining day also filled with driving, after walking around half of downtown Philadelphia trying to find a decent place to eat, after having two beers and walking back to the hotel, so if anythings incoherent, I don't really care. Tomorrow is Area:One in Camden, NJ. M. and I have planned to attend since months and months ago. I brought along the Palm and plan to post plenty of splendiferous low-res pics of M., me and a mouse's journey to and from the concert, just as soon as I manage to both get home and recover from the weekend. |
| Tuesday, July 10th, 2001 | |
| 11:03 pm | New Softies! Well, new to me... their eponymous first release on Slumberland. It's mixed AWFULLY, though; everything is a big blur of sound, in a bad way. Still, since I'm totally addicted to the other two of theirs I have ... ... one more to go. I also picked up Squarepusher's "Big Red Car" single and Brokeback's "Morse Code in the Modern Age". I love buying CDs! Current Mood:  bouncyCurrent Music: The Softies -- Snow Like This |
| 12:26 am | just a quick note... ...I think a-ha's "Minor Earth Major Sky" is going to be my favorite album of 2001. Even with *two* Radiohead releases and lots of other great stuff I've got and discovered this year... this album is incredible. It's well worth the $21 it'll cost you from amazon. I got it from a local CD retailer at a slight discount, so it was $17. Too bad the movie that featured a song from this album -- "One Night at MacCool's" -- was such a bomb. We might've seen a domestic release out of that, but no, the domestic Warner's is still scared of a-ha. Sigh. Current Music: a-ha -- Little black heart |
| Monday, July 9th, 2001 | |
| 11:19 pm | Talk to the animals... For some random reason, there was an animal show at the local shopping mall-let. I heard about it from J., so I headed over there with my PalmPix (the most useful thing I've ever purchased for the Palm -- which was supposed to help me re-arrange my life and instead gave me something to waste time with -- even if it does keep randomly switching resolutions). ( Pictures ahoy! ) Current Mood: happyCurrent Music: The Softies -- Holiday in Rhode Island |
| Sunday, June 10th, 2001 | |
| 8:52 am | I've never been so glad to hear bad goth music... ...because it meant that the configuration of the PC was done. I finally upgraded my computer, after wanting to for almost a year. Now that my machine is quite speedy, maybe the new games I don't really have all that much time to play anyhow will run that much better. To make the machine cheaper, I didn't get a video card and sound card to go along with it; I pulled those out of my old machine. The last thing I had to do was hook up the little cable that pipes sound from the CD-ROM drive through the sound card. For some reason that took me almost half an hour to get right. Sigh. The only CD to hand was one marked for the trash heap -- even the used CD store won't take it -- but at least now I have to keep it because it always makes me laugh anyways. (The CD? Do you really want to know? Please ignore the reviews on that page -- obviously written by depressed 14-year-olds for whom grey is a daring color choice in clothing -- and trust me: this is the worst CD in my collection. It's a perfect room-clearer, or inducer of mass laughter. MP3 samples on request.) So when I buttoned up the machine and heard the warbling of Macbeth's Head, I knew that my new toy was ready. Didn't sleep well last night; I don't think that kimchi noodle bowl agreed with me very well. *yawn* Current Mood:  tiredCurrent Music: Moby -- Heaven |
| Monday, May 28th, 2001 | |
| 9:56 pm | b-e-e-r Okay, so whatever that seasonal Sam Adams stuff was, it was nasty, thin yellow pissy beer. Thoroughly unrecommended. It had a bizarre unfiltered taste to it, yuck. It was more than made up for by the two excellent black-and-tans that followed, only one of which I had to pay for. Damn. I'm going to have to remember that when I'm driving, I can't have this much beer. I can, however, walk a few blocks in a straight line with no problems. Type, though? Whoa, that's asking a bit much... David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day" is pretty damn funny. I'm looking forward to seeing him at a local bookstore signing in early June. (What a day -- Radiohead's new album comes out, I see David Sedaris, and Worms World Party comes out as well. Ah, yes, life is nice sometimes.) |
| Saturday, May 12th, 2001 | |
| 4:36 pm | Shopping is fun... ...ran errandry today. Got a rather wonderful bar of soap -- Portuguese Breakfast soap, which smells like paprika and cinnamon and slightly of citrus. Couldn't resist the way it smelled and the way it matched my e-mail address. Errands took much, much longer than I thought they would. The aftermath of them is still going on... Current Mood: tired but goofy |
| Sunday, May 6th, 2001 | |
| 12:55 am | Things and stuff... It looks like I will be attending Area: One in July in Holmdel, NJ. (That URL really did work, once, so I'm leaving it in just in case it becomes active again. Basically, the show's lineup is Moby, Outkast, The Roots, Incubus, Paul Oakenfold and Carl Cox and, maybe, New Order.. Manish -- the guy I'm going with -- also insists that there's a second stage, but I've never really seen any mention of it anywhere.) It also looks like we're going to make a long weekend of it -- take Friday off from work, drive out, stay overnight in the historic district of Pennsylvania, go and see the Liberty Bell, maybe take in a museum on Sunday or something... sounds like fun. I installed Red Hat Linux on my second hard drive over the weekend. (Like a geek, that's the kind of thing I think is fun. Well, plus I couldn't sleep.) This is my first journal entry written with LoserJabber. Hell of a name for a journal client, really. I am impressed with how well this all hangs together, though. I remember the first time I put up a Linux volume was way way way before the buzz all started... strictly text-based and for hacker geeks only. Got two more of those $9.99 Playstation games that all seem to rule. Shooters, both of them; one's called Space Shot, and the other is Sanvein. Sanvein's the better game, so far, but they should provide some quick, excellent fun. I haven't thought about it in a long time, but a story set on Al Amarja wants to be told. (Al Amarja is the setting of Atlas Games' wonderful RPG Over the Edge. And looking at that page -- Atlas! There's going to be a new source book for OTE! One of the few RPGs I actually have EVERYTHING for...) I've always been kind of squeamish about writing any sort of OTE fan-fiction, after the wonderful Pierced Heart was published. But maybe, just maybe, you might see some of what's shuffling around in my brain come out here. (Oh, and for those that might be curious, the excerpt from Pierced Heart on the Atlas site, there, is from the least interesting storyline the book has... Of course, I'm not saying it'll be understandable. Just ... there. Tired. Too much beer, too many video games, too much ping pong. Gonna go to bed. Current Mood: tiredCurrent Music: Cryosleep - Zero Beat Guaranteed |
| Wednesday, May 2nd, 2001 | |
| 5:38 pm | BOOKS: Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series... ...I went back and read the first two (depending on how you look at things) books in this series, the last two books of which I recently read The first two books had the same kinds of writing and characterization that so enchanted me when I read them; they are just as good. (Well, I think it'll take a lot to top "A Civil Campaign".) So, there are nine more Bujold books sitting on the to-read cabinet in the dining room, and when I'm done with my current book -- the sublime "Inversions" by Iain M. Banks -- I'll dive in again. I won't post anything about them, though, unless they are exceptionally disappointing or unusually sublime. One can only drool so much. |