The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So this is a post all about how awesome and expensive my last night in KoL was, so, you know, if you don’t care, now would be the time to stop reading.

So yesterday I got out of Ronin by cocktailcrafting my last three turns of it away while falling-down drunk. Because you can apparently make more booze when you’re too drunk to stumble about and hit stuff with swords. So I set about doing things I had been meaning to do for awhile but never did. Since it was the Feast of Boris, it made it much easier to do, too! So that’s nice.
My first step was completing my set of Crimboffs. Although I’m likely to use my Naughty Fortune Teller most of the time, I can’t argue with the fact that pulling the appropriate one on day one basically gets me to level 2 for free. Also, they were still fairly affordable and wouldn’t be in the future. So I picked up a handmade hobby horse and a ball-in-a-cup to compliment the set of jacks i got for Crimbo. Huzzah for that! It was kind of expensive, though. Cost: 338,000 meat.
My next step was doing the content familiar content. These donation familiars drop items that unlock new content. They’re apparently really awesome or something, especially the Pixie, apparently. It lets you get an item called a not-a-pipe, which is crazy powerful. That doesn’t interest me, though. That seems like a boring reason to use a familiar, just to have access to zones where you do the same thing over and over again until you have 3 !pipes every day. So I just wanted to see this content and get the non-consumable rewards from each. So that’s what I did!
I started by purchasing 4 astral mushrooms, which is what the Astral Badger drops. I needed four to get the full Encephalic Ensemble outfit with two of the crossbows, in case I ever feel the urge to dual wield them. I have to admit the content was pretty neat. There’s something pretty awesome about fighting “The Urge to Stare at Your Hands” and “The Best Carpet Ever“, and I dunno, mapping out mazes always makes me feel all intelligent, even though in the end it’s just sort of trial and error, you know? In the end, though, I probably will only use the crossbows, as the other equipment isn’t TOO exciting, but those crossbows are pretty sweet. Still, it was a fun time. Cost: 8000 meat.
Next, I picked up three tiny bottles of absinthe for the Worm Wood content. These were also pretty fun, and the drops from the entertaining normal combats were also much more useful… I mean, come on… bottle of Realpagne. That’s awesome. Also, however, two of the three equips that I picked up (which was why I was doing this) are significantly more useful than the Cerebral stuff. The Fancy Ball Mask and the Can-Can Skirt are obvious equips for an early portion of a Moxie or Muscle run respectively. The Albatross Necklace is cool, but, of course, Mysticality isn’t as useful as one would hope. Anyway, the content was definitely cooler, but I can’t say I regret not getting a pixie. The actual familiar text of the thing just doesn’t thrill me, and, as I said, I wouldn’t want to run the worm wood over and over for not-a-pipes or whatever. Not how I roll. Still, since the bottles are cheap, I could perhaps run it more for some of those neat consumable drops. You never know. Cost: 1800 meat.
Finally, I still hadn’t gotten a Robogoose from Crimbo. That could not stand. So I started buying up Robotronic eggs. I had already wasted about 50 that I got from combats back in December with no luck. It took awhile now, too, but at least the prices had gone down significantly since then to a more reasonable 700 meat a pop. Still, I had to buy like a hundred or so of them before I finally got the thing… I’m thinking of trying a 100% Robogoose run after this one to recoup the cost by getting eggs to sell. Cost: approximately 70,000 meat.
Total Cost for this endeavor: 417, 800 meat. About half a mill, like I thought. But still, it was worth it. I have this virtual currency so I can do neat shit, you know? Not just to have virtual currency. Spend money to make fun. That’s the whole idea! And I did! So huzzah! Also, I suppose all of the Pepsi Points I sent to Skully for 10,000 meat a pop probably helped to fund this quite a bit.
Anyway, I wanted to ramble about that, and now I did. Back to… whatever the fuck I should be doing right now…

So I’ve been getting SHIT DONE.
It all started this weekend, where I GOT SHIT DONE. Well, I wrote my two papers, and did my interview, which was just… uncharacteristic of me, getting all that work done. Then, this morning, I work up at 6:30, and pointless panic kept me from falling back asleep. So I said “You know what? If I’m going to fuck myself over with pointless panic, then I’m going to get some shit done!” And I did a lot of catchup work this morning.
I am GETTING SHIT DONE.
It’s weird and kind of nice.

In other news, I bought River City Ransom on the Virtual Console. I haven’t been able to play it much yet, actually, but Kevin and Jonathan are playing it right now, and JUST from that I can tell it’s totally worth it. They are having a ton of fun. I can’t wait to play it with Jonathan or Spaeth or whatnot.
Wait, now I’m playing, and yes, it is completely awesome. I’ll do more of this awesome.

Okay, so I guess this is a Moody Day post. I’m definitely drifty and moody. But hey, Jick read my question on the radio show AND implemented my simple little idea. So huzzah. Or something.

I gotta write two papers over the weekend. Wish me luck with that. I can do it, I know. It’s just hard to focus sometimes… when I’m all whatever.

Bleh, this post is stupid. Oh well, perhaps it will motivate me to write something cooler tomorrow or some shit.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

So news on the internets from Talking Time’s inside source (who says nothing that might lose him his job, of course, but keeps us informed. He’s a great guy who helps make great games) is that there was a small reprint run of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. I was planning on buying Persona 3: FES next week, because, I dunno, I love the game so much I’d buy a second copy for end-game content I’ll never get to. That was the plan, anyway, but armed with this new information and the knowledge that, as I just said, I am almost positive I won’t get my money’s worth out of FES since I never beat Persona 3, I went with Nocturne. Ordered it from the internets. Should be here in a few weeks. Hope I enjoy it. It’s apparently harder than Persona 3. Hopefully the music will be awesome, too, though I’d bet it’s of a different style than Persona 3.

Okay, okay, I promise I’ll keep this quick. Browser RPG Update: I’ve got 4 Silver Stars from farming so far, and now I’m thinking about saving my farming stars for an empty picture frame. Thoughts? I also ascended in what was my fastest Normal Nonpath KoL run yet by several days. Here’s the rundown. Amazing what wanting to go fast to splurge on an item will do, eh? Of course, with most people making standard 3-4 day runs in speedrunning, I’m still way behind. That said, early thoughts about this early run: Everyone was right about the Origami Riding Crop being mediocre gameplaywise. It was great that first day, and the attack messages are awesome, but I bet tomorrow or Thursday I’m going to have better things to equip, and it’ll probably get folded back into a fortune teller to use while lucre farming. The Yuletide troll is doing fine, and I can see me defaulting to him quite often, just to have the sheet music to throw at people at random. I love doing that shit.
There, okay? Done with Browser RPG stuff. Man, I need to catch my attention elsewhere, it’s getting to be a bad addiction.

$24.99 is the cruelest Amazon.com price point, and that’s what the Sam and Max animated series box set is priced at. Dammit. The annoying thing is that if I had just realized I was going to buy it like a day earlier, I could have bought it with Jonathan when he ordered more Star Trek. Oh well, maybe he’ll order even MORE Star Trek in the future. Or I’ll think of something else to order from there. Maybe Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2 or something.

I haven’t been twittering much these past few days. I’ve been so distracted. I’ve still enjoyed watching the twitter feed on my desktop, though. I suppose that’s alright. But I dunno, it’s weird. I’m so pro-twitter.

Oh, in case you were on the edge of your seats, yes, we completed the Endless Setlist.

The Shadowrun stuff… continues. I don’t know, it’s so weird. I don’t understand me. It’s like… I can sit down for a game I’m interested in and absorb rules from here to tomorrow and love it. When it comes to this game, though, I can’t read them, and I really think a lot of it is kinda pointlessly complex for the sake of complex. I can’t put it together into a big picture. Yet, at the same time, we did this little mock fight to try to teach me, and I was correcting him about the rules and generally getting what I was doing. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens with that.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

This is the week of doing work.
Well, it was. Actually, I got everything done this weekend. I’m well-off.
But I still need to catch up on those stupid forum posts for my lit class, and I need to put together this portfolio to graduate.
Eh, I guess things are going alright.

I also keep worrying about the price of the Libram of Candy Heart Summoning. It keeps going up, right after I decide I’m going to splurge on it and right after I can’t actually buy it for at least 6 more days. Also, the current Mr. A exchange rate keeps going down, too. Arg. But I shall stay calm, do my work this week, and not freak out. At worst, it’ll just clean out my liquid meat while not costing me extra donation-wise. I can stay calm, dammit.

Rei was crazy nice and, using some sort of crazy magical work-related hookup powers, got me the new CoD4 Variety map pack at the very affordable cost of free. I love Talking Time, and not because I get free DLC, but because I am in a community that is close-knit enough to want to GIVE each other free DLC.
Anyway, the maps are actually pretty awesome. CoD4 is a great multiplayer experience with a few friends to die with, and these maps are just really cool. I still haven’t played Killhouse, though, but it looks neat. Broadcast is an awesome objective map. Chinatown is a sneaky remake of a CoD2 map I remember that’s horrible for objective games but great in deathmatch. Creek is a sniper paradise, which means I die like… all the time. But at least it looks pretty and has a very interesting layout. Anyway, it gets my seal of approval. I do hope they make them free after awhile like Bungie does, however.

Other than all that, I guess things are going well. Whee.

FUCK YES! I AM FINALLY OUT OF MY FUCKING SYMPATHY HARDCORE RUN! Man, that was… man. I’m so happy. Here’s how it went. 41 days! And the worst part is, like I decided I wanted to do things in the mall in the middle of it, before my birthday. Gaaaaaah… well, at least I Hardcore Permed Sympathy, like I said. That is never going to be useless. But man, no more pathed Hardcore runs for me… my next Hardcore run is going to be no path, I swear… and is not going to be for awhile. Normal FTW, mann. I am so not optimal or hardcore.
But yeah, so me getting out of it meant I finally got to splurge on those Mr. Familiars I wanted! So I did! I’m now the proud owner of Garland the Ancient Yuletide Troll and Richard Aldente, the Penguin Goodfella. I’m not sure on my penguin’s name, (let me know if you have a better one) but I quite like the one for my troll. As per plans I think I previously outlined here, I’m going to do an almost 100% Penguin Goodfella with “gentleman’s” magazine run this time around, and then next one is probably going to be back to the good ol’ Mayflower Bouquet with the Troll… probably a Seal Clubber run, too, I think, to try out the Origami Riding Crop. (By the way, if you don’t get why the crop is good (Okay, okay, just when compared to normal items and not other Mr. Store items, where it might be kinda lacking, but I don’t have those Mr. Store items nor would pay the high prices for them) notice that it has no requirements to equip is and probably a good 70 or more power over anything you can equip out of the gate, plus the added Sleaze Damage. The real benefit is the chat effect, Innuendo Shopping, though.) Yeah, might go normal teetotaller, too, and get Pulverize… or if not, one of their great passive buffs, like Hide of the Walrus… but that’s in the future.
For this run, I’m going with Advanced Saucecrafting and seeing what all the fuss is about with those buff potions and such. I’m also experimenting, for the first time, with +Monster Level stuff. I figure I can do this because the Penguin (which, when I have a good supply of hit contracts, delevels every fight for a good amount. This was apparently considered a nerf when it came out, but I found myself annoyed that he wasn’t deleveling sometimes when he gave me a contract, since I’d have to use the contract to survive at that point. I don’t think I’d like him as much constantly giving out contracts… then again, I KNEW what it did before I picked it up, whereas those calling it a nerf was using it in its previous form before where it gave out contracts like candy, so…) should keep it in check. I tried maxing it from the beginning, but that went bad… (Luckily, I had summoned a Personal Massager) so I’ve had the Mind Control Device to around 5 or 6 this first day and it seemed to work pretty good. Supposedly I was getting more stats, too, though I don’t pay enough attention. We’ll see what happens when he gets up to full weight, if I can put it to 11 with no ill effects… by that time I should be spellslinging anyway, so missing with melee attacks won’t matter much.
Another thing I wanted to point out is, as I was playing with the Hatrack, I kept wishing I could find a good Potato/Ghuol Whelp hybrid, and I just realized that the two Mr. Store familiar equipments I have let me give either Whelp or Potato capabilities to any familiar. (granted, the Bouquet does a lot more and is thus probably better in general, but, you know, it’s not part of a set of five different things you can switch between) I have good taste in Mr. Store equipment, is what I’m saying. I know what’s going to make the game more fun for me. Heh.
Oh, I also find I have over 2 million in liquid meat. That’s a custom title or half a Mr. Accessory. That’s exciting! Maybe in another year of play I’ll have enough for a free one. Heh.

In Twilight Heroes news, I guess I’m grinding for chips again. Heh. I’m out of merit badges I want to work for. (I’m just going to buy the baseball bats for Joltin’ Joe Sombrero because, I dunno, it sounds extra boring and I’m not working towards hitting level 50 that way like I was in the other zones with sort of relevant enemies) So, you know, I guess I work towards having enough silver stars to get a free IoTM sometime. At least I have significantly better farming equipment than last time I tried.
I do want to know what the hell the Amazing Technicolor Dreampants do. Because, I mean, come on. They’re Rainbow DREAMPANTS. They supposedly do random things in battle… healings… damages… I don’t know. If they’ll be entertaining to me, I’d get them, but I’ve not gotten a clear indicator as to what they do. We’ll see, I suppose.

And I guess that’s it, for now. I’ve been really tired and that’s been making me moody, but I have done my best to persevere! Also, in writing this post, Ecks has already given me half of a MUCH better Penguin name, so that’s awesome. Yay!
Bye!

Happy April Salad Day everyone. I hope your salad has been going salad! Mine salad has been.
Salad.

So I was going to write a full review of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, but then realized I didn’t want to, so here’s the short version. The game is good. It’ll tap into FFVII nostalgia that you didn’t know you had because you’ve since become a gaming hipster and FFVII is no longer in style. The combat system is really quite deep, being an improved version of Kingdom Hearts, basically. The Roulette wheel is completely random and not really a system like the game tries to make it out as, but I like random. It’s a good game. If only it wasn’t $40 bucks. Damn you, Squenix.

Quick KoL stuff I want to just say… I’ve abandoned Lucre for the rest of my run. This makes me sad, but I am sick and fucking tired of being in Hardcore. This’ll really speed things up. Today’s salad slowed me down a bit, though, but hopefully, like this, I’ll be done before the end of the week. I also picked up a Sp’n-Zor’s Grimoire of “Tasteful” Gifts, which is a new kind of Grimoire, obviously, and I look forward to loving it. But again, I am now oddly playing for speed, so besides summoning my “Tasteful” Gifts for the day, I’m probably not going to mess around with it much until I ascend. First impressions, though, are that the personal massager is completely awesome and that as someone who is suboptimal and does rest, the various decorations should get me to rest at the campsite instead of on my clan’s couch, so that’s neat. Also, it still needs to be spaded, but if what it’s saying is true, the Cheap Studded Belt could come in VERY handy during boss fights.

My current “Best of 2008 April Salad Prank” is probably this, and yes, it’s not about salad. Well, maybe a little salad. It’s just so… realistic. I could totally see Hollywood making that trailer.

I guess that’s all I wanted to say. Salad.

So I’m reading up on the rules for Dunwich Horror. Looks great, as a fan of Arkham Horror. Just more stuff all around, and some really harsh “kick them when they’re down” sort of effects that could really screw us over in the right situations, or be perfectly fine in others. I love it. We rarely have trouble with the base game with Curse of the Dark Pharaoh mixed in. I’d like more challenge.
In any case, this makes me go and look up about the other small card expansion, the King in Yellow, that’s out. It sounds pretty awesome too, I will admit, and it introduces these things called Heralds, which are alternate sets of rules for a greater challenge in which there’s a great monster or being whose appearance heralds the appearance of an Elder God. These Heralds are extra-deadly if combined with a certain Elder God, but really annoying otherwise… so they have the Herald The King in Yellow in the box of that one, and they’ve put more, free Heralds on their website for The Dunwich Horror and the Dark Pharaoh, to be used with those two expansions if you have them and want that extra challenge. Those almost look a little too hard, though. We’ve got plenty to get used to here, first.

Anyway, the reason I was rambling about this was to get to the point where I was looking up reviews and information on Board Game Geek, which is a site that could really be set up better but has a lot of info. Everyone on there was talking about how they don’t mix in the cards from the little expansion and find it much more enjoyable to use them from time to time using the “Traveling show/exhibit” rules in each set, and that just mixing them all in and playing with everything they found to be a really bad experience.
Now, all this is certainly personal preference, but I don’t get that at all. We tried playing Curse of the Dark Pharaoh in that “Traveling Exhibit” mode, and it kinda sucked. It sort of just removed all of the base stuff from the game that we liked, and replaced it with these other mechanics, not to mention a ton of these Exhibit Items, which, besides Parchment of Elder Sign and that one bell thing, all really kinda suck. Now, as something you get occasionally, those items are fine. The kickassness of getting lucky and getting a Parchment of Elder Sign is awesome, and the various masks don’t feel as useless when you only have one instead of 3 or 4. But basically, everyone decided “Let’s never do this again” and we mixed in all the cards and have been happy since.
Using these small expansions by themselves doesn’t really fix the one thing that I’m buying expansions to fix, and that is repetition. You’re playing with a much smaller card pool than the base game when you use these things in “Traveling” mode. Maybe it’s just the way we play, but it is not hard for us to flip through an entire deck of encounter cards in a game, so when you have even LESS encounter cards, you get repeat encounters, which just sucks. I want MORE things that can happen. That’s why I want more cards. I want to draw different things every game, and be surprised, having forgot about this or that when I pull it in a future session. By mixing all the cards in, I get that.
I guess the real issue is one of storytelling. If you use just the small expansion decks, you are telling a clear story. It’s not a vague Elder God threat, it’s “Cultists are stealing Egyptian artifacts, and bringing a curse upon Arkham” or “An evil play has come to town, and is driving all who see it crazy.” There’s a definite narrative involved. I can appreciate a narrative, and I could play for a narrative, say, in a position where it’s an almost full RPG experience, where we are telling stories to connect the encounter cards as we play. That could be cool, though the question then becomes “Why aren’t we just playing, like, the Call of Cthulhu pen and paper style RPG?”
That wouldn’t happen, though. That’s not how my friends roll. That’s completely fine. But that makes this more a game than a storytelling experience, and the gameplay is more fun if there is less repetition. Thus, mixing everything in is a “good thing”.
Man, I really rambled a lot just to say that, huh?

Smash Brothers is an exciting experience. No, seriously, it is. Just check out this comic, for example. Exciting. Also, I love all of Pikachu’s expressions during the whole thing. Makes me want to use them as avatars.
Anyway, I’m probably going to be playing that with the Talking Tyrants tonight, so I’ll enjoy myself.

So, it’s Easter. Yay! I guess! It’s a day before my birthday! Yay! I guess! I’ll probably write a depressing post tomorrow about how another year has gone by and I’ve accomplished nothing… except that I’m closer than ever to actually being done with school, which is huge… I have made progress this past year… and I can keep doing so. Hopefully. I just have to keep it together. I say that all the time, because my nervousness gets me so out of whack so often… Brer probably is right, it probably is something that’s past the point of normal and should be looked at by somebody… but eh, who knows.

And now, here are some goal lists.

Goals For This Week (By Day)
Monday: Make it to class, try to enjoy busy birthday, make it to work.
Tuesday: Make it to class, write at least half if not more of Shakespeare paper, lazily do research project while spending time with Brer.
Wednesday: Make it to class, critique poems during class as per usual, finish Shakespeare paper.
Thursday: Make it to class, write at least half if not more of other lit paper, make it to work.
Friday: Make it to class, finish other lit paper, laziness.

If I do everything in chunks and don’t let it overwhelm me all at once, I shouldn’t have much of a problem, I hope… I probably could wait till next week to finish up the other lit paper, but I should be good and do it this week, then I can spend extra amounts of time on my portfolio. Also, I think I have to give a presentation next week, which shouldn’t be too much work, but it would be nice to not have to do that and my paper at the same time, eh?
Oh, I guess I said “lists,” didn’t I?

Goals For My Next Ascension in KoL
1. Recover from being annoyed with this hardcore run by really enjoying the softcoreness of the run.
2. Perm… something. Either Tonuge of the Walrus/Otter (although that might be better for another Hardcore run, since it would make those runs less stressful in the future) or maybe Advanced Saucecrafting, so I could enjoy those potions and Milk of Magnesium.
3. Get the Tome of Transcendent Olfaction. I’m going to end this run just a handful of Lucre away, so it’s time to get that and start saving up for the puppy.
4. It’s time to enjoy the Astral Mushrooms and Tiny Bottles of Absinthe. They aren’t expensive, so I should buy a handful of each and get in there and get a full set of the equipment in each and enjoy the content therein. (Well, okay, they’re both more expensive than I thought, now that I check, but definitely not enough to keep me from doing them, especially when I can use guides to get me the items I want on the first try.)
5. Get two more Mr. A’s and pick up a Yuletide Troll and a Penguin Goodfella as birthday splurging gifts to myself, and do a 100% run with the Penguin equipped with the origami “gentlemen’s” magazine. (I’d use the Troll first, but I want to use the magazine, cause I haven’t yet, and the Troll already does ghuol-type stuff.)

There. Two lists. Whee. Now it’s plural.
Anyway, happy Easter. Eastar. Whatevs.

So I am currently having an odd conversation about pornography. It’s… interesting.

But the main reason I wanted to post, for no apparent reason, is to post this comic. Because it just makes me giggle every time I look at it. That third panel is just amazing. And seriously, Team Fortress 2 Spy Humor NEVER gets old. At least, it hasn’t nearly gotten old for me yet.

I should get to bed. I think I’ll get on that.