The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Heyyyyy it’s Spring Break! I’m off of school! I guess!

It’s kind of a fleeting break, though. I work constantly throughout and I have at least two papers and a speech to write. (Granted, the speech will take me all of 10 minutes to write. I’ve got it all planned in my head. It’s more the papers that are the issue. Especially the one for my novel class.) I told myself Friday that I would write one of those papers Saturday so I wouldn’t have to worry about it! Ha ha, I’m so funny! Thinking I’m going to do work. Crazy.

But yeah, I’m trying to take a break. I gave in and bought Mad World to play over the break, and am trying desperately to pace myself on it so it lasts the whole time. I’m sure I’ll write more about it later, but here’s a preview: IT’S FUCKING AWESOME. I also plan to continue to work through World of Goo and the UT3 campaign, since I bought them during a Steam sale. More on those later, too, of course. There was also hope about playing some Dungeons and Dragons, but that doesn’t really seem like it’s going to happen. I can dream, though.

In any case, please try to keep me on the level with my assignments, I suppose. This is really more of a “hey, the semester is over half over” milestone more than a break… but I can dig it. I’m almost done. I’ve almost graduated. That’s a good thing, right?

Yeah…

OBJECTIVE FAILED.

Hey, remember back at Christmas, when I got Fury of Dracula? And then we gave it a try on New Year’s Eve and it was kind of complicated and took awhile? Well, I finally got around to trying it out again on Friday. This time we had Jonathan, a complete newcomer, and me and Spaeth, who barely remembered what was going on. I was Dracula again.

The game went significantly smoother this time, though. As expected, knowing the rules (well, all the rules but the honestly kind of incredibly confusing combat rules) really made the game move at a solid pace. The game only took us a little under 2 hours this time. That’s a good length for a game like this.

I really wanted to use my knowledge I gained from our previous game to be a more effective Dracula. I was looking forward to actually using “New Vampire” encounters to my benefit instead of throwing them away like I did in the other game. However, I never drew any New Vampire encounters until it was too late to use them. I was doing pretty good for quite some time… until Spaeth pulled and played a Money Trail card while I was on a boat, giving away my current location. Then it was some really tense stuff there, with me moving around and trying to get away while everyone closed in on me. I honestly should have used my Double Back card to get BACK onto the sea and away from the hunters, but I decided to push it and wait until I had multiple options to Double Back to. That was really kind of my downfall. They cornered me and kicked my ass during the day. Bastards.

I did get pretty close to winning? But it was mostly because of Spaeth’s Kamakaze Mina Harker maneuver. He used a card to take away most of her life to teleport to my location, then used a card where we both roll a dice and lose that much life instead of having a normal combat. He rolled high enough to kill himself, which upped my Vampire track by 2. Without that, though, I was doing a bit worse. I needed those New Vampire encounters!

All in all, though, the game was significantly more fun the second time, I felt. Having to slog through rules is always tedious, even when you’re someone who loves rules like myself. The game flowed a lot better. I also agree with our previous assessment that this is the perfect 3-player game. You gain something by having two Hunter-players who can bounce ideas off of each other and plan, and you gain game speed by having a smaller number of players at the table. 3 seems optimal.

Next time, though. Hopefully I will win. Insert Bad Castlevania Reference Here.

So, I’ve been grinding in Kingdom of Loathing! This is so we can actually beat Hodgman now that he’s all… the way he is now that there isn’t a bug involved. So we need a really high Seal Clubber, and I was already a Seal Clubber and I didn’t have any time to play my turns anyway… so grind grind grind!

However, that means I can’t actually, you know, use this month’s IoTM until, you know, after this month. I picked one up, because it seemed neat, but I’m mostly just going off of the wiki for attempting to judge its value. I may have to write another one later, after I do a 100% run with it, or something.

Still! Frumious Bandersnatch! It’s a volleyball!

Well, it’s a little more than a volleyball.
It seems like this would be a fairly useful Volley for speed ascenders, due to it’s “tuning” mechanic. Basically, depending on which color equipment you equip it with, it gives all of its Volleyball boosted experience to a particular stat. So you can have the Bandersnatch give you all Mysticality points, for example. That seems useful! However, the fact that you have to run 10 turns in the arena to get the equipment in hardcore may put a damper on it. I don’t know how much of a setback that is. It’s very possible that, over time, the more focused stats would speed things up for it to be worth it, but then again, since you have to bounce between the Llama, probably, and the Green Pixie… I dunno.

Still, the part that I think is cool is mostly the other part! Which is the fact that the familiar does special effects in response to what standard combat skills you use in combat. That just seems like a lot of fun, and would seem to be a good reason for me to actually use combat skills more often! Because I often don’t, if I can help it. I save MP too much. But seriously, just look at some of these effects. They’re seriously useful… extending the duration when you cast Entangling Noodles… giving you MP when you use Saucegeyer… (as if Saucerors didn’t already get too much MP from Burning Soul and such!) adding a stunning effect to Lunging Thrust-Smack and Shieldbutt? Those are really strong effects! Well, to me, anyway. And since I understand that people use Shieldbutt like… all the damn time, surely that stun effect would be useful to them too, if nothing else. A lot of the rest just gives you extra damage, but extra damage is good, too! That just seems like a lot of fun. I can’t wait to try that for a whole run. I’ll probably be a Sauceror for that one.

The thing has one more effect that I will likely never use, but I’m sure people will like. If you have Ode to Booze on when you go into battle with the Bandernatch, it gets drunk. When drunk, it won’t give you any combat skill bonuses, but if you run away, you can get a “free” run away, not spending a turn for the combat, as you can with, say, a Divine Popper or a tattered scrap of paper. Speed runners find this extremely useful! Less turns spent on pointless combats! I, however, never use these things. So, you know, this doesn’t effect me. Still, it’s a nice bonus on top of everything else cool about the familiar, I suppose. It just seems like, most of the time, if you need that effect you’d use one of those items, or Creepy Grin, or the effect on a navel ring of navel gazing if you’re already, you know, loaded up with Mr. Store gear.

Still, overall? It seems like a pretty fun familiar. I’ll let you know when I actually get to, you know, try it out!

This is a followup to this post here. That all still happened. But yesterday? I got an e-mail from the guy.

Basically, he told me I could have just asked him nicely for the old version, and I didn’t need to be so angry. And attached? An old version of the program. A few minutes later, I could get into my passwords again.

I still feel my anger was completely justified. The way his program worked was still kind of dickish and still created a hostage situation, whether that was his intent or not. But the fact that he did help me, even after I wrote angry things at him, really shows he’s a pretty good guy, I suppose.
I wrote him an e-mail saying as such. That I’m not going to take back what I said, because it would be a useless gesture anyway, but that I really appreciate him helping me out anyway.

Still, I doubt I’ll be using his program any more. I got all my passwords out of the file, and that’s that, you know?

So, in one of my classes, Essner and I were tasked with re-writing a joke to make it better. This is what we were given.

The bartender who fools the snob who ordered a shot of 12-yr-old scotch into drinking something nasty, and when the snob spits it out and says “That tastes like urine,” the bartender says, “That’s the easy part. Now, tell me how old I am”?

We sat there and brainstormed, and, eventually, Essner wrote down the fruits of our brainstorming session. And now, I type it up and share it with you. Warning: This joke could have you laughing uncontrollably.

And now, the joke.

A man walks into a bar. He doesn’t like the taste of urine. He says to the bartender, who is a homosexual, “Barkeep, I would like your finest glass of 12-year-old space scotch.” They are in a space bar.
The bartender pours him a shot of scotch, knowing full well that it is not 12-year-old space scotch, but that it is in fact 12-year-old double space scotch.
The man drinks the proffered beverage, then spits it out in the bartender’s face. “You deceitful old queen! How dare you sully my pallet with this swill! I demand that you give me the 12-year-old space scotch that I have ordered.”
The bartender, who was quite offended by the “deceitful old queen” remark, despite the fact that it was an accurate description of him, (sometimes the most hurtful remarks are the ones that are the most accurate) says to the man, “I apologize, sir. Let me see if we have any of the 12-year-old space scotch in the back.” at which point the bartender takes an empty glass from behind the bar and walks into the men’s room.
After a few minutes, during which the contentious young man plays a game of “space photo hunt,” the bartender returns from the men’s room carrying a glass filled with what was unmistakeably his own urine. “Sorry it took so long. There was a line in the can… I mean the storage room. Here it is, a glass of 12-year-old space scotch.”
“Thank you, sir! At last I can quench my thirst for this delicious beverage,” says the young man who is under the impression that he is not about to drink a stranger’s urine. He drains the glass in one gulp, at which point he spits and coughs ferociously.
“That, sir, is not 12-year-old space scotch. That is, in fact, your urine.”
“Yes, it is. Now tell me how old I am.”
“You’re 47, and you have testicular cancer. I’m sorry.”
“Oh god, how long do I have?” asks the bartender.
“Three months, at most.”
“Oh my god.”
“I’m sorry.”

What operating system do games run in?
Answer: Microsoft Windows.

What mode should ALL games run in?
Answer: WINDOWED MODE. Because it’s running in WINDOWS.

I really can’t get over this. Why in the world don’t developers do this? I’m fine with things not defaulting that way, but not having the option is just retarded.

My computer isn’t a dedicated game machine. It is a computer. I chat, I research, I do so much. I don’t want my gaming to keep me from that. All games should play windowed, and be alt-tab friendly, or they should get the fuck off of my machine.

Yeah, this is an old rant, I guess… but as I’m attempting to try new things to try out the new computer, I’ve run into it twice. First, I redownloaded Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and decided to give that a go. I never got very far in that the first time because I couldn’t run it windowed. My memory told me that that was because my computer couldn’t handle it windowed. I was wrong. It’s just locked away for no fucking reason. They unlocked it for MULTIPLAYER, but not for the single player I wanted to play. Bleh.
Second, I tried the Company of Heroes demo. I should talk more about that later, but let it be known that there is no Windowed option in that game either. Luckily, you can force it into a window via the command line, but it doesn’t work smoothly. It would be much better if it actually supported it. I hear Dawn of War II is like that as well. Not surprising. Same publisher. But it could work a whole lot better.

Am I alone in this stuff? I mean, I know I am not everyone. Full Screen should not go away. Some people do use their computers just for gaming. But come on. I can’t be the only one with two monitors. I can’t be the only one wanting this. And is it really so hard to use Windows in its normal mode? In a window? Bleh.

What a useless, angry rant. But it’s frustrating. To me.
World, revolve around me.
PC Gaming, work exactly how I want!
Come on.
Come on!

Yay! Merry Festivus!

So, I get home from my classes today to find a mysterious box!
Normally, I get boxes all the time. Even more often, now that I have Amazon Prime! This box, however, was different. It was from Fed Ex, for one. My boxes normally come through the normal mail or from the Ups man. It was also heavy. I carried it upstairs.

It was full of stuff!

It turns out that it was my Festivus gift. You remember? Back in November and December? When Talking Time was doing an exchange! I wrote a lot of poems and sent out my gift on time, but never got one! But now I got one! And then, even though it was late, I posted about it on the boards, like I was supposed to.

I do admit I was kind of surprised it got here! Not because I, I dunno, dislike Ample Vigour. He’s a good enough guy. But it was mostly that he told me he was going to send it out like… in January. So I’d kind of written it off at this point. It was a very nice surprise, though, and a very generous gift.
My main issue is going to be figuring out what to use the iPod for. I’m… having trouble figuring out when I could put a Shuffle to use! I’m a podcast person, not a music person. I refuse to let it go to waste! It’s a great and very generous gift! I just gotta think outside the box, that’s all.

But yeah, Festivus in March… who would have thought, huh?

So! I built a computer! Hurrah!

I told you I was going to, didn’t I? And dammit, I did. And I was much less frustrated putting the thing together. It all worked like clockwork, hardware-wise. I made it all happen without any frustration. I guess I did learn something from my expletive-inducing experience building Jonathan’s computer.

But yeah, hardware? No frustration. I had much easier parts, too, so that helped. No, the frustration came from installing Windows. Brer, in an effort to make things easy for me, lead me to this “Johnny’s Ultimate Windows XP” distro, a custom built distro that was supposed to have all the drivers and such already built in. And it did! But it also decided that it wanted to have “cosmetic enhancements.” Things are renamed for no reason, icons are changed, all kinds of bullshit is tweaked. The benefits of not having to install SATA drivers and have it automagically install AVG is, perhaps, not worth the frustration of fixing everything of those. Still, if those don’t bother you, the distro works fine, installed great, and I’m already up and running, having most everything already fixed and set up. It’s nice.

Of course, though, the weekend when I build my new power machine, Steam goes on the fritz, so I can’t test it in any new games. All of the games have downloading issues and half the time, when I launch them, it says they are “unavailable.” It’ll be fixed after this UT3 free weekend is over and the servers stop getting pounded, I’m sure, but it’s just kinda frustrating. I want to see what the new machine can do!

What it can do, though, is be REALLY fucking quiet. Every time I walk into the room now, I fear that my computer has been shut off. My last computer was pretty loud. I got used to it, of course, being in the same room as it the majority of my days. But compared to this box, it was screaming all the time. I think the big difference is, instead of many little loud fans, the box has one huge fan on the side, which works quieter because it’s bigger? I guess? But seriously, it’s silent. It’s kinda cool.

Anyway, Yuuko-san is up and running. (My last computer was Tomoyo-chan, so I decided to keep the “naming after CLAMP characters” convention.) And I barely had to ask anyone for help to make it happen. Huzzah for me!

So, instead of doing my homework, I was playing around with my iPod. (Shut up, I was tired, and in need of relaxation. I have time to get things done still.) I was enjoying Zen Bound, a game I’ll probably write up in a day or two. So I’m playing that for an hour or so in the library, and then I look at my iPod and notice that I have burned through over half of my battery power with one hour of play. I stopped so I can still listen to podcasts for the rest of the day.

But dammit, can you think of how screwed I would be if I had an iPhone? If I had run out most of my battery power playing games, then I’d be disconnected from my phone. That’s just unacceptable. Losing my “fun” thing is okay, but completely losing my communication center? No.

Granted, I could be having a lot more fun with games with a full connection to the internet and such that the iPhone would give me, but I really don’t think that separation is worth the tradeoff. Part of the reason I wanted one of those two was to play these games, and they’re cool little games, and frankly, they’ve stopped me from carrying my DS everywhere, since I always have fun games to play and most of them are podcast-friendly, so I can listen to them while I’m playing as well. It’s awesome.

It’s a shame these really hardcore games drain battery power so much. I’d think it would make iPhone owners have to make really tough decisions about when they play, which is… unfortunate. But yeah, this is why I made the right choice. When I get a smart phone, it’ll be a communications center. I’ll have chatting and internets and phone power and it’s all separate from my fun, so they don’t kill each other. That’s the ticket. Yeah.

So, in order to upgrade my computer (which is happening Friday. Wish me luck.) I have to save and backup all my shit, and so on and so forth. Makes sense.

One of the things I have to back up is my password vault.

See, back in the day, someone got one of my passwords to Mama’s sites, so I had to change it. I then realized that was my password like everywhere, so I went and changed everything then, to make it safer. But I realized I needed something to store all these passwords safely, so I looked around on the internet for awhile, and ended up with this program, called Password Vault. It worked well! I put all my passwords in there. It was nice, and it had served me for quite some time.

Fast-forward to now, I need to have a copy of this program so I can put it on my newly built compy and still access my passwords. I go and look for it, and find it over at this site. I realize it’s upgraded, and it’s talking about new features. I don’t see the old program anywhere, so I’m like “Okay, I’ll test it.” I download it, and run it. It updates my install.

Then I go to run it, and it says “Oh, input your key.” I go “No thanks, I’m using this the free way like I have been for a long while.” Then it says it needs to update my password vault. Alright. I make a backup and let it go to town. Then it says, for the trial, I can only save 10 passwords, and all the passwords over that will be lost.

What the fuck.

Well, obviously I don’t want to do this… but then it hits me. I just updated the program. I don’t have the old version anymore.

I frantically search online for the old version. Brer and Val both try to help me. We try just about everything we can think of.

Nothing.

My passwords are gone.
Unless I pay this asshole 15 dollars, of course.

I sent the man an angry e-mail, but I doubt anything will come of it. I’m never using his fucking program again, that’s for damn sure. I’m just screwed.

Bleh.