It's redundant at this point to talk about how great DA is.

Finally finished my playthrough last night. Low completion, mostly because I realized that I'd made some extremely poor decisions about peoples' skills and attributes, and that rogueing it up had lost a great deal of appeal. So, I just whipped through the endgame (which was great) and finished it up.

Started a mage playthrough on Hard, armed with knowledge of how to be competent, and so far it is way easier than my Easy game was at the same stage. So... good skill selection and party management for the win, I guess?

(Best combo so far: Warrier uses Threaten and Taunt, mage throws Force Field on him. Sure, the warrior at that point can't attack, move, or basically interact with anyone in any way. But he's also invulnerable to damage, and Taunt keeps everyone attacking him. Go forth and murder, my loyal canine minion!)

I have it. I've read it. I like it.

It's possible I'll have more to say later.

(3 hours, 20 minutes.)

mood: satisfied tags: books

So, tomorrow I'm making gumbo - a friend is moving out, and I promised him I'd make it at some point, so it's time to pony up and make with the cajun.

And since Dave's doesn't seem to sell wooden spoons, it looks like I'm going to have to sacrifice another plastic one to the Great Gumbo Gods.

(Those of you unfamiliar with the way I make gumbo may not know this, but I destroy a spoon every time I make it. The first time, it was a cheap metal one that detached from the handle. The second time was an equally cheap plastic one; the roux got so hot while cooking that the spoon actually started to bubble. That was fan-fucking-tastic gumbo, though. Maybe plastic adds flavor?)

Anyway, anyone who hasn't heard yet and is in the Cleveland area, tomorrow, starting at 5/6ish, my place (and drop me a comment or an email if somehow you don't know where that is). It's gumbo and fighting games. And more gumbo. Please come eat it, or I will have nothing else to eat for days and days.

Also, Iron Man tonight. Woo.

location: home tags: food, life

Yes, this is James. Formerly "otakudesu". Have changed username because frankly, I haven't been really active in anime/otaku-dom for a while now, and it seemed like a good idea.

LowBeyonder is also my Xbox Live handle, for anyone who doesn't have it.

May have more to post later, depending on mood. May not.

So, I'm re-watching Buffy with some friends, and we just finished "Surprise" and "Innocence".

I tend to forget how awesome those two specific episodes are in the general wash of "Buffy = awesome". But they really are amazingly well put together in every detail. I think "Fool for Love" might be a superior episode, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of "Band Candy" and of course, "Once More With Feeling".

But "Innocence", especially, should be used to teach classes on television timing. Spot-on.

(Also, I've drank most of a bottle of the Cherry Creek cab sav I picked up on the wine tour at the last DFS. Good wine.)

If I really wanted to finish the night depressed, I'd watch Voices of a Distant Star next. Maybe I will anyway.

I am back from the out of town where I have been for a week. All is well.

Finished the Bakker "Prince of Nothing" trilogy.

Was impressed, but not really entertained, honestly. It's well-put-together stuff, but I spent a lot of the time being annoyed. I would happily trade these three books for a three-volume trilogy titled "The Wacky Adventures of Drusas Achamaian", who I found WAY more interesting than every other character in the series.

Also, as I believe has been mentioned by others, they have this issue where practically every female character with a speaking part is a whore or former whore. That's something of an concern, perhaps.

EDIT: I should correct that. Not all of them are prostitutes. Some of them are rape victims, captured slaves, or harem wives. The point is, it was obvious and consistent enough to raise a couple of flags.

Conclusion: As epic fantasy goes, it's well-constructed and blessedly complete - I think all three of these books came out between Martin releases. I'll re-read it at some point, which may cause me to rethink my judgments. But the several reviews I've come across lauding it as The New Hotness, I have a hard time understanding. Is good trilogy to fill time between Erikson releases.

It reminded me a lot of the Thomas Covenant books. Make of that what you will.

Erikson must write faster. Need my Malazan fix.

My old 360: Busted! Replaced it.

My new 360: Totally working! Until I tried using this hard drive backup restore device I picked up (to transfer my saves from Busted 360 to New 360), which caused it to stop recognizing the hard drive.

CodeJunkies X-Port device: Totally fucking stupid and breaks hard drives! Don't buy one.

My new 360 with a new hard drive: Working once again! Since I don't play the 360 very often, I'll eat the loss of saves (or try swapping them in later via a memory card, which said X-Port thing also plugs into and maybe won't eat). Is irritating losing the mechs I'd assembled in Chromehounds, though.

Gears of War: Fun! Shockingly entertaining for a shooter, and very hard. Or, for anyone who doesn't know how I roll: As shooters go, pretty much the Second Coming of Jesus With Donuts, because I hate most shooters, and probably easy for anyone who actually, y'know, plays a lot of shooters.

My Spare Time: Gone! A friend has convinced me to temporarily re-up my World of Warcraft subscription, since there's apparently some sort of expansion-y thing coming out tomorrow that all the internets are talking about. We'll see how that goes...

New LJ icons: Exist! Again with the bored.

tags: games

It looks like a lot of the issues with NWN2 are related to it being shoved out the door, a problem somewhat endemic to the computer game industry. Looking through the forums, a lot of fixes will be coming down the pipe, and community mod support should pick up the slack.

Which doesn't by any means excuse Obsidian from the issues with the game, but it does at least assure me that it will be playable at some point.

Interesting: Been playing lots of Final Fantasy 12, with its wacky Gambit system. For those not in the know, it's basically a procedural list of actions in combat, of the form "For targets that meet condition X, do Y", where X can be anything from "Self: Status Effect Poison" or "Ally: HP < 50%" to "Enemy: Type Undead" or "Enemy: Weakness Fire" or whatever. After enough time with it, not only does the crappy, unconfigurable companion AI in NWN2 drive me nuts, but playing FF12, I'm starting to resent anytime I have to manually override a gambit in combat, because it indicates poor planning on my part.

It also happens to be a really neat system in action, though I was skeptical when I first heard about it.

Now if only it had, say, an Uematsu soundtrack. I'm satisfied with the non-Amano character designs, but the music is just kind of dull.

tags: games

Poll #816064 For my edification
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

When sending a topic-specific email, [] tags in the subject line (such as [Anime] for a campus anime club, [D&D] for notes related to a specific game, etc) are:

Clicky?

A week ago, I placed an order for DSL.

Today, they finally turned it on. And the goddamned line won't train up. So I'm still behind the junkiest piece of shit router ever made, two floors down on wireless (so it goes out approx every 15 minutes).

Gods, I hate telecoms.

mood: angry music: .hack//SIGN OST

Feeling marginally better on awakening, and much better after some drugs. Ah, pharmacology, how I appreciate thee. Back to work tomorrow for more Java screen scraping.

Oh, the reason that our entire screen-scraping system needs to be re-written? Because a few years ago, the guy who wrote it (in what I am told is a godless amalgamation of C, Perl, and FORTRAN, ferfuckssake) got laid off, and took the source code with him. It's taken the company this long to notice, and decide "Hm, we may want to do something about that." Of course, the inevitable response was "Let's put the intern on it, he's not doing anything useful anyway."

At least the pay's good.

mood: better music: The Fiery Furnaces

Further news from me:

The good: Last weekend was my brother's high school graduation. To celebrate, grandparents (the side I like) took us out to swanky restaurant. Had a 10 oz. Kobe steak. I may never have another steak again, because it will never be that awesome.

The bad: Occasionally, I get headaches. This is usually no problem, I take some Excedrine and I'm off. Today, my frontal lobes laughed at the Excedrine, and proceeded to tap-dance on the rest of my brain. In badly fitted shoes. Ow. Probably taking tomorrow off, especially if I feel this awful when I go to sleep.

mood: in pain

I've been very bad about keeping in touch. And it's not getting better for at least a week, since a lot of it has to do with the incredibly flakey router I'm stuck behind at the moment, and I can't replace that until I get paid.

Still not dead. Job in Denver is... interesting. Major thing I've learned: The telecom business is deeply, deeply fucked up. And I get to debug the legacy screen scraping API. Fun stuff.

mood: busy

I choose to take it as a good sign that on my way out of the exam room, my iPod chose to play the FF6 victory fanfare. Once again, I win school.

mood: happy music: Victory!

Well, the semester progresses. I'm still not dead, although I've been spending an unhealthy amount of time playing City of Heroes. Ah, well, my workload this semester is light enough that it doesn't really matter.

So myself and my suitemates are looking for places to live next semester, and there are two flats, immediately next door to each other (and nearly identical), of which we can probably have our pick.

One of them has a dishwasher and a finished basement.

The other has a much more conveniently laid-out kitchen.

I seem to be alone in preferring the latter. I'm getting the sneaking suspicion that missysedai has been a bad influence on me. Although I do like dishwashers, too.

Speaking of which, sorry I missed the social - couldn't get the car, brother had some sort of play-off-ish football game, etc. Gods, I need my own car.

Found a job for the summer. Codemonkey internship for Qwest. I have decided this is a Good Thing, because it means I don't have to deal with retail, a prospect that filled me with terror

mood: content music: VNV Nation

I've had more than my fair share of alcohol at the moment.

See, one of my suitemates turned 21 very recently, and this needed celebrating. Also, we all pretty much finished our midterms today, and this also needed celebrating. Which we did. The upshot of which is, I had a lot of Black Bushmills. A very fine Irish whiskey.

So I'm a little tipsy as I type this.

And I'm pondering RPGs. For the last several years, at the end of each semester, I've run a one-off RPG campaign, in system/setting combinations ranging from a Big Eyes Small Mouth game with totally unrestricted chargen, to my Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade game set in roughly 1600-ish Europe (titled Porthos of Penzance).

And I think my next one-off is going to be an Exalted: Fair Folk game. This evening, while drinking, I had no fewer than eight discrete ideas for this game, which are sure to terrify my players (some of whom read this).

The real point of this entry is that I am, in fact, very, very drunk (although not so drunk that I don't go back and correct my own typos and grammar issues), and that this aids my creative processes. Also, I'm not dead.

I think I'm going to go to sleep now.

mood: tipsy music: Nothing in particular

Let's see. I got home, sat down, grabbed a drink, put in Xenosaga Ep 2...

Oh. It's 4 am, you say? Huh.

New game fun.

Side note: My chances of getting anything done for at least a month and a half? SO hosed.

Ohayocon was fun. Would have been more fun if I hadn't had to borrow money for basic necessities, due to aforementioned paycheck issues (thank you VERY much, Case...).

Highlights:
* Versus - A Japanese action/horror flick, which might alternately be titled "Guns and Swords on Zombie Mountain". Awesome, awesome fight choreography, whether guns, swords, or unarmed (and all three get plenty of screen time). Fun ending, too. Highly recommended.
* Anime Hell - Always fun. A little light on the Heino clips, which is too bad, but still, plenty of random hilarity.

To Avoid:
* Gasaraki - I like mecha series, but this was a little silly, even for me. I'm sorry, Sunrise, but I've seen Noh theatre performed, and your attempts to convince me that Noh dances have the power to alter local space-time are, well, lame.
* The Dub Room - Uh, Ohayocon? Maybe you missed the memo, but most people attending the con aren't going for dubs. Don't do that again.

Also, on the List of Things that Annoy Me - Bank ATMs that are out of deposit envelops on federal holidays. Especially when they're the only National City ATM on campus. Gr. Hate.

That is all.