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Monday, November 01, 2004

so tonight, I'll kill blogger 

I had a different topic title. Oh wait. It's down below.


Good thing from now on all my updates are in word, until I FUCKING COLORIZE THEM AND POST PICTURES AND LINKS AND TABLEIZE IT HERE! WHAT THE FUCK! SO HERE IT IS<> I HATE YOU. i'm listening to oc-remix chorono trigger at max volume. it's killing my ears. ANYWAY

http://www.baomon.com/board/gankutsuou.mp3 - see Anime section below for more details)

So, I wanted to go home last weekend, but Alan didn’t, and Duy didn’t care, so we didn’t go. My parents volunteered to come pick us up, but without Alan driving us back, it’s too much work for my parents. Also, I didn’t really mind staying. However, this weekend I couldn’t go back because I had a VSA meeting on Saturday, although it was cancelled last minute, so oh well. I could’ve gone home then, but I didn’t know. I should be home next week… gotta pre-order Halo 2, hehe, and then come back the weekend after and pick it up.

Anyway, this weekend, on Sunday, my parents came to visit. Then they realized I had an xbox, but surprisingly, they didn’t make a big deal about it. So that’s good. Went out for Swiss Chalet, and… well, that’s about it. Not much else to say about the parents.

So last week was the week of death. I had a Stats quiz on Manday (about Stratified and Claster Sampling), Psych midterm on Tuesday, and Graph Theory midterm on Thursday. Not sure how I did on the Claster Sampling, but I’m sure it was better than my first quiz but worse than my first or 2nd assignment. Psych Midterm, meh, got the mark, wasn’t too great, but at least I passed. And I have 2 psych experiments on Tuesday, yay for bonus marks. As for Graph Theory… I think I did better than Duy. But not by much. We’ll see. Enough about exams.

Let’s see… what else out of the ordinary (non videogame, non anime, non magic) has happened? Well, talking about school… more specifically, about Psych class… Psych is fun! Studying is not. Anyway, psych class has the best flies and best sneezes. Hehe… man, that sneeze is the best (yeah, this part only makes sense to Alan, Jason, and Duy). Did you guys say that it was Tina? Or someone else? If it’s Tina, then that’s pretty awesome. We know the person who has the best sneeze.

Nowadays when I get a Déjà vu, because of Psych, I just dismiss the idea right away… it takes away all the fun and pondering “I did this before! WHEN?” … so it makes Déjà vu’s pretty boring. But oh well, I guess it’s better that we know than that we don’t.

Anyway, enough about school… what else have we done…

------------ food
We’re making more food, yay. Chicken and pasta, and… another time with chicken and pasta, different sauces like tomato sauces or pesto, different chicken pieces, etc… today for dinner I made fried rice, but it tasted kinda funny.

Went back to chill and grill. To be honest, I never thought of them to be expensive. After student discount, a single burger is less than a Harveys chicken burger, or Harveys Double burger. And you get your choice of toppings! The burger tastes good, along with a few slices of tomato, the mushrooms, fried onions, and barbecue sauce, it tastes great. The BBQ sauce is of the Wendy’s-variety, so it’s better than regular bbq sauce. Alan and Jason don’t really like it still, but I find it fine. Anything else might be too expensive, especially the combos, but a good burger for $4.09 after tax is pretty good.

Last Friday VSA had a Halloween party, with an attendance of about 7. I guess it wasn’t well advertised or whatever, but we still had fun. Prior to that though, I went to Shoppers Drug Mart to buy candy. And Candy I did buy. Lots of it. I also bought a vampire costume, but mostly because I needed a cape. The cape kinda sucked though, cuz it was too small, but it still worked okay. I also bought about $40 worth of chocolate, cuz it was pretty cheap! I also visited the dollar store, which I should’ve visited first, but it was a great big dollar store. One day I’ll go back and spend lots of stuff there, but that day I didn’t buy anything.

After the Psych midterm last week, we went to Bubble Tease for wings. Their service was exceptionally bad. First, we talk to a girl there for a few minutes, deciding whether or not we should stay, so then we say we stay. Then, the girl went off somewhere, chatted with a friend, and nobody came to wait on our table, until 20 minutes later, when we started a commotion with our menus, and then some dude finally came.

We ordered Wings (half price Tuesday special), but then 5 minutes later the guy came back and told us that “BBQ” and “Teriyaki” were actually the same sauce, so we tried Teriyaki and another sauce instead. Some odd time later, we get our food, but not enough plates. And then some infinite time later a girl comes and asks us if we want the bill, and we say yes.

20 minutes later, nobody came, so we put down exact change (maybe +4% tip), and left. So we swore we would never go back. Shitty service indeed. Anyway, after the Halloween party, it was Elizabeth, Son, Jeff, Alice and myself, so first we did some cleanup (Duy was there too, but then he left early), and then we went to eat; I dunno if Son was crazy or not, but he wanted to pay. So we went to Mongo gri… no we didn’t, we went to BubbleTease.

This time service wasn’t horrendously bad, so that’s good. We bought one of those “set-meals”, or almost set-meals. We bought a set of 4 bowls of rice (+1 for free, since they were generous and we had 5 people), and 4 entrées; so a plate of bbqpork and chicken, a plate of kung pao chicken, a plate of chef’s sea food special, and a plate of black pepper beef. Overall the meal was pretty good.

Oh yeah, we also bought drinks, but instead of buying our own drinks, we had the person left of us buy drinks. So Elizabeth fed me Almond milk-bubble-tea or something. I was gonna give Jeff a nice Mango-papaya milkshake, but then I read the opposite page and I wondered what a Ruby Red slushie was, so I fed him that instead. Turns out Ruby Red was like OceanSpray grapefruit or cranberry or something. Milk Almond was okay. It’s a nice way to get to know new drinks. Jeff fed Son Hot Taro. Etc.

Overall the meal was pretty good, I liked it, and BubbleTease is no longer in my blacklist. Or whatever. So anyway, the VSA Halloween party was fun. We had a projector, we even had a slideshow of scary pics and I made a few soundtracks of scary songs. Maybe I’ll upload them later. So I was a half-vampire, and Jeff was a crazy mental hospital dude, Alice was a… she says “goth princess”, but she wasn’t really gothy… more vampirely or… something. Black Princess. And Elizabeth… she had the best costume. Here’s a picture. If you can guess, you win!



Lastly (non-food related), yesterday Jia got me to watch Survivorman. I didn’t think it was actually called survivorman, but it is. Jia really likes it and apparently has gotten everyone at Mac (at least those who blog) addicted to it. It’s pretty cool. It’s about a guy who gets stranded in a location (for example, a swamp or a desert) for a week and he has to survive for 7 days. All he has is his cameras (no camera crew), and… like, rope, and stuff. It’s a neat concept, and apparently I have to watch the desert episode or “Castaway” episode, so I’ll look out for those. Sunday 11 pm OLN (outdoorlifenetwork, maybe ch48). It’s on at other times too, ask Jia.

I had a dream about a videogame team, and Duy and Jason were in it, and we were in a Halo-type environment. I also had another dream where I was in a class and it was about solving crossword puzzles. The other day I had a dream about the UWPoker Club, because I haven’t played for 2 weeks, but this dream also involved Project Gotham Racing 2, and other weird videogames. Lastly, I had a dream about owning a food franchise. I was thinking how we should sell pizza, and if people buy our hash browns (the cheap ones Alan bought from Sobeys) we can give them free iced tea, as a special deal, but then I thought about how I would run out of Iced Tea and how I like it, so I shouldn’t do that. And Lastly2, I had a dream about magic cards this morning, because we played Apprentice yesterday; in my dream, Jason had this 2/2 guy who pings for 2, so I kept attacking him with a 2/2 and he blocked it and traded, but the 2/2 pinger kept coming back…

----------------- anime
Since 2 weeks ago, or before that (since last time I only blogged about Xbox), I’ve watched more anime. I have my term-ly VSA Anime-a-thon + Gaming competition, so I’ve been ‘hard at work’ screening new anime, to see what’s good and not. The song of the day is the opening theme to Gankutsuou, one of the new anime. For some reason I really like the song… or maybe it fits the mood of the anime, or totally contrasts it, or it sounds nice to my ears, and I can sing along to it… I’m not sure, but add up all these factors, and I like the song. http://www.baomon.com/board/gankutsuou.mp3 Enjoy. Oh yeah, the title of the blog is the first line in the song. Anyway, back to Anime.

Saw the last episode of Sailor Moon Live! So I saw eps 1-20 or so, skipped about 20 and then just watched the last episode. It was a pretty good last episode. Sailor Moon destroyed the world! It was cool (she went crazy and stuff after she realized… stuff). But then of course the Moon Crystal created a Disney-esque ending and everyone came back to life and stuff. And it was a happy ending too, where the Sailor scouts still remembered who they were, rather than those animes were everyone forgets everything that has happened since the beginning.

Saw Elfen Lied 12 and final episode, 13. It ended a lot happier than I thought it would. I expected the Dicloniouses to die. But they didn’t. So it was a happiER ending, not the happiest, not the clearest, but it wasn’t a Disney ending at least. The last episode opened up some spots for a sequel or OVA, and some people might invent unanswered questions, but really, I don’t care that the boss of the organization is _________ … maybe he’ll meet the same fate as his son. It doesn’t create new problems, I just thought it was dumb. The last few seconds of ep 13 ended the series quite nicely, a bit mysteriously, but neat.

Bleach eps 1-3, School Rumble 1-2, Gankutsuou 1-2, Beck 1.

Jason and I started watching Bleach. I’ve heard of Bleach for a few weeks, heard it was famous, but I didn’t know what it was about. Anyhoo, I’ll be showing eps 1 and 2 at my Anime thing, so you others, don’t watch it yet. It’s an action/comedy, about Evil spirits and Soul healers, and ordinary school life and responsibilities and stuff. It’s not another FMA, but it’s quite fun and funny and it could have a lasting impression and good potential to be another blockbuster.

School Rumble’s pretty good. Like Azumanga and Sensei no Ojikan, it’s about highschool and people. The story revolves around 2.5 people; Girl Y that likes Guy X, and Guy Z that likes Girl Y. So it’s a love triangle kinda thing, but purely comedy for the most part. It’s not similar to Azumanga or Ojikan or anything. But it’s pretty funny, so it could potentially do well. (I’m showing 2 eps of this as well)

Gankutsuou… wow. It’s pretty. It’s really artistic. At first, I was wondering if I should show this at the anime-a-thon, because maybe people will get sick looking at the art… haha, but it’s not sickling, it’s neat, and it somehow captivated me. Taking a step back, this anime is okay; but the style is great, and it has potential. The first episode was filled with mystery, and I really liked that.

First time I saw 2nd ep, I didn’t like it as much, but then I watched it again and saw the good parts of it, but I won’t show it at the anime-a-thon. It had its endearing moments though. Anyway, I really like Gankutsuou, for some reason or another.

Beck. It was okay. I liked the use of both English and Engrish. I found it funny when the American didn’t understand what the Japanese guy said except the word “Baka.” And I love it when Japanese girls speak English, it’s so cute. It’s about… people and music.

Okay, this update’s spread over a few days, so since then, I saw Gankutsuou 3, Beck 2, and Viewtiful Joe 1. Gankutsuou 3… every episode seems to have a different vibe. Ep 3 starts out happy, back in, um, Paris or something, back at Albert’s home, and we meet his friends and stuff. The count comes to visit, and his friends start speculating whether he’s weird or whatever, and they find stuff out. Looks like things are unfolding very quickly.

Beck 2 continues its story. So basically, there’s a guy and a girl, and they meet another dude who used to be in a rock band. The girl likes music and stuff, so they get well together, but the guy and the girl were childhood friends and now it seems like the guy is losing the girl to the dude.

Anyway, Beck seems like a half-americanized view of Japanese culture; well, no, that’s not correct. But I feel like some of the characters… as I said before, the American didn’t know what he said except for the word Baka, so that’s like me! And I too find it odd when a younger guy might address me with –kun, which sounds pretty romantic. So I find that kind of weird.

Viewtiful Joe was okay. It’s like the game; it looks like the game, less fluid though; the story so far is the same with a few new characters. It looks slightly Americanized, in the sense that I won’t be surprised if it appears on the Foxbox soon.

So, that’s enough about Anime for this update.

Wen has a sarcastic despise for me, with me spending all this money and stuff, or getting expensive stuff, but well, it happened again. Long story short, Friday morning my parents wake me up at 8:13 am with a phone call, because apparently Dell was having a sale that day, and they asked me if I wanted to buy a computer!

Long story short (continued), I said yes, and then I proceeded to Dell’s site and customized me a computer. Now I’m thinking, I don’t really need this computer. I don’t really want it either; however, I was gonna get a new one say in June 2005, but if there’s a sale now, then I can get one now… So yeah. Quite frankly, I actually really want a projector ^^. But yes, a new computer would be cool too. My computer’s fine the way it is now, but oh well.

Last but not least, here’s XBOX related stuffies.


So, I’ve been playing Xbox a lot during the last 2 weeks, along with Jason, Duy, and Alan. Duy’s switched back to the cube once, but us others haven’t touched it recently. We’re still playing with our novelty toy. We haven’t tried XBOX Live yet, but we might do that soon, just to download extra content for some games, and sure, we’ll try playing a few games online against others.

Burnout 3 is awesome. Loading time is okay, however a bit higher compared to most other games we have; or at least, more noticeable. Reviewers are right, Burnout 3 is a great game. True-to-arcade driving, very fast, very pretty, very arcade-y. Crash mode is fantastic, the game’s very stylish, I’m not sure what else to say. It’s compatible with custom soundtracks, so that’s always a plus.

Overall, it’s great, but lately we haven’t touched it at all. Then again, we haven’t touched a lot. It plays amazingly well in single player, but multiplayer lacks a bit. Team crash or Double impact or whatever other crash modes there are, those play quite well. Racing isn’t as spectacular, and music is not supported in multiplayer (why is that??) The game’s not the easiest, nor the hardest, and track variation’s not bad.

It’s somewhat rewarding to unlock new cars, but it’s somewhat of a linear unlocking progression. Also, as one review said, “eventually you don’t feel as much of a reward when you unlock ‘Custom sports car’”. …

Surprisingly, Magic Battlegrounds has gotten a lot of playtime. Alan and Jason like it a lot. Loading time’s not bad; it’s less noticeable. Like, it has a loading screen with a game hint, so you know it’s loading, but for some reason the wait is expected, and it’s not too long, and it’s just right before a match, so it’s like a calm before the storm.

As you play through the game, you get to unlock new spells, so that’s what drives us to play single-player; Xbox live would be cool, since we now know what cards we can obtain. So overall it seems to be played a lot, which is cool.

We bought Halo to play Co-op, but we haven’t played much Co-op actually. We mostly play Multiplayer now, 2 on 2 or FFA, and it’s fun for the most part. Loading… is okay, somewhat long when starting a mission, but that’s alright. The controls are surprisingly pretty good, much like how Goldeneye’s controls were surprisingly good.

Halo PC was missing co-op. Halo XBOX does not have banshee’s in multiplayer (non-co-op), and right now we’re missing some levels, unless we have to unlock them. Maybe you can get more levels on xbox live… I haven’t thought of that… oh well. A few more weeks…

We haven’t played Amped 2 much, but it’s a lot like Tony Hawk, but for snowboarding. I went through the tutorial, but it’s still a hard game and it’s not as innovative or fun as Tony Hawk, but it’s not so bad. Custom soundtracks works with this game too.

Top Spin is fun! We play 4-player, 2 on 2, and it’s pretty cool. Nowhere near as fun as Mario Tennis (which is coming out for cube soon), but pretty good for a realistic tennis game. So we play this game sometimes.

On one of the discs, there’s a demo for a game called Fusion Frenzy, I think, but we call it Jump-duck; basically, it’s a collection of minigames, like Mario party. So the demo had about 7 games for us to try, and that’s kinda fun for a short period of time.

Guilty Gear X2 Reload is awesome, I really like it. Unfortunately, I’m the only one who plays fighting games in this house. Duy plays sometimes, but not often enough. The game’s a mix between Capcom vs SNK and Marvel vs Capcom; it’s colourful, and it’s a bit crazier than CVS but less crazy than MVC. Some characters are serious and some are funny. The game’s pretty cool, and I hope more people would play it. Unfortunately also, it doesn’t support custom soundtracks, but it’d be perfect for a game like this.

Am I forgetting anything… oh yes. Of course.

Project Gotham Racing 2 is the most played game within the past 2 weeks. Graphics are good, loading time is usually really good. Custom soundtracks work with this game.

First of all, the game plays really well. The physics are one of the best driving physics ever, and each event has 5 difficulty modes, ranging from very easy to very hard, so we’re always improving. And yes, the game allows for a lot of improvement, so we can always… well, get better.

There are a lot of things to unlock in PGR2, such as new cars and new tracks, and it’s fun to play with cars with names from real life. Granted, on Saturday we pretty much unlocked all the tracks, so now we’re just getting more points so we can unlock more cars. So overall, we’ve been playing this game because there’s so much to unlock, and it’s very rewarding. Also, the game’s always pushing us to get better without making us too frustrated, and that’s a good sign.

PGR2 is awesome. Also, the other day I read a faq, and there’s a secret minigame in PGR2, and it’s awesome. Well, the graphics look like Commodore graphics; you control a ship that shoots at geometrical shapes; you use left analog stick to move, right analog stick to fire in different directions, and Left or Right Trigger to bomb. It’s so simplistic, but the difference between a game like that on the Commodore and on the Xbox is the framerate. It moves at a beautiful 60 fps, and the basic effects make it so much fun. I don’t know why, but I really, really love this “Geometry Wars” minigame.

SKINS
So that’s all the games, but one more point about the xbox. The other day I found this Halloween-themed PS2 controller, which is a PS2 controller but it looks like eyes and pieces of flesh and stuff together. So I look around, and I come to this site with Xbox Skins. I’ve heard of Skinning before. I never though I would do it, but I want this!



Compared to the boring black xbox, this is definitely… pretty. I also need to have a skin for the middle green xbox logo, probably a blue crystal on the same site. I figure, I already invested in an xbox, should I invest in it more? It’s not cheap, but it looks pretty darn cool. So I’m thinking about it. Maybe later, when it looks like I haven’t spent infinite money the month before.


So, that’s the end of the update… a few quick points before we go.

We obtained Frozen Throne, so we play that a lot. We also installed UT2004 on all computers, so we’ll start playing that too. Tomorrow I have 2 psych experiments to go to, yay for bonus marks. This weekend we’re coming home, next weekend Ambrose will be back, and we’ll either be in ‘Sauga or Waterloo. Technically, I want to go home this weekend and pre-order Halo 2 in ‘Sauga, and next weekend come back and get it :P

Downloaded and played NFSU2 demo, and it’s fun. So, November’s gonna be an expensive month. Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2, NFSU2, probably Viewtiful Joe 2, and magic expansion Unhinged. Oh well.


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