hello friends

So. Um.

I am reading World War Z by Max Brooks, the same guy who wrote the Zombie Survival Guide. It's good. A series of "oral accounts" of fictional survivors of the great worldwide zombie outbreak. I'm not even a quarter in yet and already he's brought up all sorts of interesting things that probably WOULD happen in a zombie plague scenario, but that I never even imagined myself (even though I think more about zombies than is probably healthy). Like: what happens to the organ transplant business?

I am also playing City of Heroes (on Victory, if anyone out there is still playing a MMO that isn't World of Warcraft). I got a free two-week acount to mess around in it a bit with a friend, and then mecha got his own free account, and the two of us realized that we both liked it a lot. So for a little while, anyway, we're going to keep playing. Went out and bought two copies of the Good Versus Evil edition and everything. Of course, we had to hit SEVEN STORES before FINALLY finding them in stock at WAL*MART of all places. But.

I am also also in love with this video, which is a pairs skating adaptation of the Million Ways dance. I used to love watching figure skating when I was younger, and then it started getting really boring because really all the skaters do basically the same thing over and over again, with a few exceptions. These two have made it interesting again, at least for the span of four minutes.

I am also also also generally feeling a bit better about stuff than I was a month or two ago. Part of this is because we are getting a handle on the whole going-back-to-school thing. We should be getting our financial aid packages in soon, and there should be enough money to survive on; we'll be getting our old bursar bills paid soon and then we should be able to actually register for classes; and, perhaps nicest of all, we've secured what looks to be a very clean and quiet two-bedroom two-bath apartment that is on a bus route to campus and is affordable. Probably the last one of those left in Bloomington. Ours now, suckas!

Oh, and I've also started taking a daily vitamin, which is just a good idea anyway, plus if I was sad and listless because of any deficiencies then not so much any more. "Deficiencies" does not look like a real word. Maybe I spelled it wrong.

So that's about it until the next time I post, which will probably be in, like, five years. Or not. Either way.

PS: Mike's Halloween costume fills my heart with malicious glee. (He is the guy in the first three pictures!)

Mecha bought Shadow of Destiny used for ten bucks a couple days ago. It came with the cover of the manual. Not the manual itself, just the front cover. Kind of creepy.

Here is what I think of it so far (I am up to chapter 8; I do not know how many chapters there are), pasted from SocialMUX:
Jenny says, "Ugh. This is certainly one of the more frustrating games I've ever played."
Jenny says, "Each chapter has something like half an hour just of cutscenes, in between the running around achieving goals that cannot be done in any abbreviated or out-of-order manner, and you can't save in the middle of a chapter."
Jenny says, "So just now it started doing the "you are about to die unless you do something, usually use an item that prevents your death" countdown, for no discernable reason, and I didn't have anything new to use to save myself. But usually it does the countdown twice... once, and the guy giving you time-travel powers scolds you and sends you back to get what you need, and then you go back and are able to defend yourself against countdown death."
Jenny says, "This time I got countdown, and then game over."
Jenny says, "So when I feel like it tomorrow I'm going to have to redo 45 minutes of running back and forth between time periods, interspersed with unskippable cutscenes."
Jenny says, "I already had to redo 3/4 of a chapter once today, because the time machine decided it was going to scramble my atoms, and gave off a slightly different-looking countdown that didn't actually have numbers so I had no idea how long I had left, let alone what I was supposed to be doing to stop the atomscrambling."
Jenny says, "Don't really have the energy for that again."
Jenny says, "Aside from the "hey let's put in hours of unskippable cutscenes that you have to rewatch every time you redo a chapter" factor, this is actually a fun game."
Jenny says, "I have to use time travel craftiness to prevent my own death! Leaving town is apparently too much work."

Also: Four Panels has updated again, and after almost making it through the winter unscathed, I have finally succumbed to the plague. Plague symptoms include occasional sneezing, awful headaches and even worse sore throats.

I am at mechamom's again, which means the twin horrors of dialup and The Spacebar That Does Not Work.

Mecha toldmeto post about how themove is going, except to be honest I'm not aware that it really is going,any more than the last timeI posted. He finally got me some boxes so I can start packing up today, and we saw the model of the new place's floorplan,and that's really all that I can thinkof.

Also, everything looks really, really bad in this version of Netscape. Said version being... lemme see.. 4.73. Jeez. Did I mention that this is also a win98 machine? Silly old people, being incredibly, painfully resistant to change. Supposedly they were going to upgrade when Microsoft stopped supporting 98, but boy, that sure didn't happen.

And... um... yeah. I've been playingFinal Fantasy Tactics a lot, have I mentionedthat yet? I love it. I love the style of game, the tiles and stuff. What are other games like that? Mecha said that the people who made Disgaea made abunch of other games inthe same style, but are there others? Tell me, tellme. I want more whenever I finally finish Tactics (I've racked up over 100 hours by this point,a nd still haven't gone to Orbonneto enter the freaky hell dimensionthing with thefloating crap, and since I'm planning to hit the Deep Dungeons for all their lovely items (yay for walkthroughs!), it will be a long time before I finally do go there) and expect this post to be brimming with helpful suggestions when next I have access to teh Intarweb.

ARGH I HATE DIALUP SO SLOW KILL KILL ARGH plus half the timewhen the page finishes loading it doesn't actually display anything but the backgroundcolor because Netscape is so ancient, so I have to reload and wait for another five hundred years. *cries*

And yeah.

La la.

Trying to rememberif there was anythingelse. Plus typinggives me something to do while I wait for this other page to load WHICH IT NEVER EVER WILL YARGH

Did you know that Beowulf's Chicken ability really does turn the target into a chicken, if it results in a Brave below 10? A tiny, incredibly adorable chicken. I am going to get screenshots since our TV is in fact Giga Pocket running onmecha's computer and said program has a screenshot utility, and probably make a little animated userpic type thing of a TINY ADORABLE CHICKEN. Yes. SO CUTE. I started just having him Chicken enemies over and over againjust so I could squeal over how incwedibwee adowabuw they were.

Okay, so now I finally got everything to load that I neededto load. 14minutes to load my LJ, open a comments page, reply to one comment there, reload my LJ, open another comments page, and reply to onecomment there. >_<

<voice="Eddie Izzard">Ciao.</voice>

I've been playing a lot of GTA: San Andreas lately. Like, a lot. Borrowed SarahandTed's rental copy on Friday I think it was, and have discovered it to be most delightful.

My favorite weapon to run around wielding is the giant purple dildo I found in a POLICE STATION. This says something both about me and about the local police force. Although the firebomby gas can things I found in an alley in Montgomery are pretty cool too. I stuck one to an old woman, waited till she was surrounded by people, then detonated. Aww yeah.

My favorite thing to actually do is grab a motorcycle and just go exploring. All through Red County and Fern Ridge and such, all the pretty green areas with tracks that go nowhere in particular and hills to go crazy jumping off of. Or just zooming through the city part, that's fun too. Or killing rival gang members. Or old ladies. Or just people I decide I don't like.

In short, this is a very fun game and I don't get why Sarah didn't like it, although I am glad since it meant she let me borrow it instead of continuing to play it herself.

Is there any particular reason why swimming over to an area I can't get to via roads results in my instagetting four stars?

Megas XLR people: http://freewaymonkey.no-ip.com/megas -- got Battle Royale up there. I had to download WMP10 to view it, so either it's on a funky new codec or I was just behind the times. YMMV.

Stuff will get added to that directory as I finish downloading it. Be warned that my upstream probably sucks; also, you probably want to use a download manager like getright, because that directory is sitting on my local machine which has a habit of being rebooted, crashing, getting kicked from IU's network, et cetera. Also also, if you use something like getright, don't do that thing where you ask it to segment it and download it in pieces all at once or whatever. That massacres my computer's performance, and if I start thinking that downloadage is slowing me down, I WILL move the files off the server.

Yeah. I feel like a playground monitor for some reason... but you never can tell when you'll run into one of those Everywhere I Have To Be Is Important people who figure they're the only ones what matter.

In non-Megas news, today we got assigned groups for the final project in english class. Groups. Ugh. I hate groupwork, especially when it's for something IMPORTANT like, oh, THE FINAL PROJECT. Instructor split us into gender-segregated groups, which means I am stuck with two other girls. Oh, I've got nothing against either of them personally; they both seem like nice enough people. But... I just don't get girls. They, I dunno, shop and stuff. Makes no sense. I work better with guys. They make sense, for the most part, and the caring about what overpaid men do with various ball-or-ellipsoid-shaped items, I can overlook.

He told us that the first thing our groups should do was make up names for ourselves, like apparently they do on The Apprentice or whatever that one Trumpy show is/was/whatever. He said our group names could be anything we wanted. So I immediately raised my hand and asked "could our group name be a profanity?" Amusingly, he said yes. If we're willing to say it in class, it can be our name. Damn. I was hoping to call him on that "anything." Heh.

And stuff, and things.

My finger itches. Plus these damn cows take too long to grow up. Their names rock, though: Food, Meat, Beef, StAk (capital A as in long A), and Brgr. Damnéd four-character limit.