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Thursday, May 28th, 2009
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2:07 pm - New D&D Campaign - Need Players
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I'm starting a new 4th Edition D&D campaign in a few weeks, and I need 1 or 2 more players. If you (or someone you know) may be interested, shoot me an email.
Scheduling has not been finalized, but it will likely be weekly, on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
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8:52 pm - Random Science Fact
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Wikipedia: "Because the cross section in weak nuclear interactions is very small, neutrinos can pass through matter almost unhindered. For typical neutrinos produced in the sun (with energies of a few MeV), it would take approximately one light year (~1016 m) of lead to block half of them. Detection of neutrinos is therefore challenging, requiring large detection volumes or high intensity artificial neutrino beams." (emphasis mine)
It takes a light year of solid lead to block half of the neutrinos from the sun, and that's only challenging? Ridiculousness of the scale of such a thing aside, what then, does Wikipedia consider to be difficult?
current mood:  amused
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
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7:11 pm - yum yum ZZZ ZZZ
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The hotel's restaurant, of which blissfully I am the only patron at present, has a sign indicating a maximum occupancy of 31. There are, however, 16 tables of 4 chairs (for a total of 64 seats).
current mood:  tired
current music: restaurant muzak
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, August 6th, 2007
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12:59 am - iPhone Hacking
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I have developed a patch for the iPhone MobileTerminal that enables the beginning of proper event processing.
Part of the problem was a lot of trial and error, involving two major realizations:
1) iPhone apps don't get orientation-changed events unless they're launched from the GUI
2) Figuring out where in the __GSEvent structure the eventType parameter is.
This patch introduces a number of problems into MobileTerminal, namely causing it to not exit properly, causing it to exit on iPhone sleep, and causes it to (intentionally, because it's only temporary debug code) leak memory when printing event alerts.
current mood: happy
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Saturday, July 7th, 2007
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2:03 am - Back in town
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I'm back, and am at my parent's house now until sometime Saturday afternoon. Luggage is (hopefully) in St. Louis, because American Airlines is too lame to move luggage from one aircraft to another with a 20 minute layover. I'll condense trip into one post instead of the seven I was originally going to do, but in short, it was mostly lots of fun. Except for the eating too much, but I may have walked off all the extra desserts.
Now I get to switch back from Alaska time to DC time in two days (4 hours... ack!).
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, June 29th, 2007
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12:44 pm - Alaska Vacation - Day 2 - More Seattle
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Wandered through downtown Seattle on Thursday, but due to the weather threatning to "shower" for most of the day (and then actually commencing a light rain around 2 pm), we didn't actually do a whole lot.
Seattle has a whole bunch of pig sculptures, along the same lines as the Terp sculptures that are around Silver Spring, and the Elephant/donkeys that were in DC. I didn't get a picture of it, but the best one I saw was a bobble-head.
We went up the space needle and, though it's a tourist trap, we got a pretty nice view of downtown Seattle and the surrounding area, and I took a few pictures of seaplanes taking off from the lake.
The space needle has a rotating restaurant at the top, but it's so incredibly exorbitantly priced that it's not worth eating there, even for the novelty factor.
We rode the Seattle Monorail to and from the Space Needle. From the speedometer, it reached 45 mph, but the odometer goes up to 80. Hopefully, they never actually drive it that fast...
Afterwards, we want back to Pike Place Market and got lunch, then wandered around in the rain a bit. We were going to go on a tour of the old Seattle underground ruins from a big earthquake long ago, except that the tour was sold out and they were only running them every two hours.
We went back to the Seattle Museum of Art, where they have a bunch of Fort Taruses hanging from the ceiling with lights sticking out. We couldn't get into the actual exhibits without paying, though, even though the signage implied that you could get to some parts of the gallery without paying. Oh well. Not that it really mattered; we were too tired from the travel on Wednesday and the running around the city earlier in the day to really enjoy an art museum, so we just went back to the hotel.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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1:33 am - Alaska Vacation - Day 1 - Seattle
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Thanks to my car troubles, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) arterich gave me a ride up to my parent's house. Our Eberron game Tuesday night ran a bit longer than we were expecting, so we didn't get up there until shortly after midnight.
Got up at 3:30 am to get a shower and have breakfast before leaving for the airport at 4:20 so we'd have ample time for the 6:45 flight to Seattle via Dallas. We got there to find a long line and massive disorganization and confusion at the ticket counter because American Airline's online check-in system was broken, so no one could check in prior to getting to the airport. And, there were only four people at the ticket counter, so it took quite awhile to make it through the line. It also didn't help that one of the attendants was shouting things like "Anyone behind that woman is LATE!" and "All flights from Dallas are CANCELLED!"
Eventually, we got our tickets and made it through security to the terminal and sat down and waited for the flight to be boarded. it wound up being a short wait, because of the ticket counter delays. It was at this point that we discovered that my Dad's watch was running slow. Which is a good thing, because he was already somewhat anxious about getting to the flight on-time as we were winding through security, and it's likely he'd have been bouncing off the wall if he actually knew what time it was.
The flight from BWI to DFW was uneventful, but I was somewhat surprised that American didn't offer any free food at all to the non-first class passengers. There were free sodas, but a bag of chips, a cookie, or a bag of trail mix was $3. I caught up on sleep on this leg of the flight and just listened to my iPod.
We had about an hour and a half of layover at DFW, which, for some reason, my Dad seemed to think was only half an hour, so he was in a frantic rush to get to the terminal. We grabbed "lunch" at an horrendously overpriced TGI Friday's to-go, took the tram the long way around the airport instead of walking to the terminal by taking the advice of the person we asked, and then waited for an hour at the terminal for boarding the (delayed 10 minutes) flight.
The TVs at the terminal were showing the news entertainment, and revolved mostly around a police chase in LA causing a four-car accident, the massive wildfire at Lake Tahoe, and Paris Hilton's upcoming interview on Larry King Live. They also ran a quote from Obama, who reportedly said something to the effect of "I won't comment on Hillary Clinton's qualifications, but I believe that only her husband is capable of picking up the job on day one." Gotta love those politicians.
The 3.5 hour flight from DFW to Seatac was uneventful. I mostly continued working on the backplot for the D&D campaign I'm working on.
We waited around awhile for the luggage to show up, and it looks like I got lucky that it showed up at all. When I needed to actually use suitcases, I've been using really old suitcases my parents had long ago (before the advent of wheels, telescoping handles, and shoulder straps). One of them developed a gouge in the lid; the other lost its handle — with the tracking information on it — so I'm lucky I got that suitcase at all, and the both, I'm realizing just now, lost the identification cards we attached to the handles.
We got checked into the hotel in Seatac. We're not even there for half an hour and my Dad's already made arrangements for us to take a tour with one of the local tour operators. They must have already been on their way to pick other people up and we just lucked out, because the tour van got there about 15 minutes later.
The tour, conducted by a retired Seattle firefighter named Tom, was relatively interesting, and certainly entertaining. My Mom later commented that the city itself was relatively clean; we didn't actually notice any litter anywhere (save for under the sewer grates, which had thousands upon thousands of cigarette butts).
The second or third stop on the tour was the Pike Place Market, which is the oldest continually-operated public farmer's market in the US. The street level was primarily occupied by a number of different fishmongers and seafood venders, local produce vendors, and flower arrangement shops with huge bouqets of very pretty flowers.
Later, we stopped at Commodore Park, which included the Ballard Locks which connect Lakes Washington and Union to the Puget Sound, and an adjacent salmon fish ladder. The fish ladder was pretty neat, since it was designed such that you could view the steps both from above and from the side. We saw a great many salmon, but the good show of fish jumping six feet out of the water apparently isn't until later in the summer when a different variety of salmon returns to spawn.
We returned back to our hotel after five hours of touring around and went to eat dinner at a local place, Dave's Diner. The "help wanted" sign should have set off warning bells, but I guess we were too hungry to think about it. The food itself was great — I had a teriyaki hamburger (hamburger + pineapple ring + teriyaki sauce) — but i don't think I've ever seen such slow service before.
After that back to the hotel for sleep — barring a couple of short naps, I'd been up 22 hours.
current music: The Hut On Staffin Island / Johnny Wilmot's Fiddle / Frank's Reel-The Syncopaths-Rough Around The Edges
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 28th, 2007
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11:56 am - The Fickle Finger of Fate
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Quick update for those who weren't already aware; last Sunday was something of an interesting day. I'm still not sure whether it turned out to my advantage or not.
On my way to grysar's party on Sunday (and practically in his backyard, too), I managed to crash into an SUV while trying to turn around. The airbag actually hit me this time, because I was leaning forward a little, so I got kind of beat up - but I think most of it's because the airbag ripped my sunglasses off. As of Tuesday, they're not sure whether or not my car is a total loss. Hopefully, it's repairable; that'll be much cheaper.
arterich stopped by the accident scene to help out; turns out he hadn't gotten to the party yet, but was only half a mile away. So, an hour later, we finally got to Greg's party. Yay!
I had originally asked Omar if I could get a ride back to my place, since he was travelling roughly in that direction, but I wound up getting a ride back to my house from Andrew and Monica, since they offered, and it let me stay at the party longer.
Good thing too. Monica had never been to my place before, so I gave the tour, and found that a small water leak in one of the pipes in the basement caused the ceiling to collapse! In all likelyhood, if I hadn't been down there to show the house, I'd not likely have noticed the problem until after I got back from the trip, and if I did notice it, it would have been Tuesday evening during the Eberron game, and the water problem would have been much worse.
I got the pipe patched up Monday morning with some assistance from my parents, and the floor is cleaned up now, so I just need to get the ceiling replaced.
Since my air conditioning isn't working properly, Omar also volunteered to put his dehumidifier in my basement to help with drying out the carpet, which as of Tuesday night, was still pretty damp.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
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11:51 pm - "I underestimated the fiendish charm of the Waxman, and now Arthur is ensconced in the waxy, wax-like waxiness of her wax."
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"Would you not agree that, as the embodiment of America's commitment to truth, that Captain Liberty herself is subject to the Freedom of Information Act?
"You say that it's a disgrace to this country that its symbol can be seen in the flesh, but is she not also the symbol of an open society that is the envy of every nation on the earth?
"And therefore, as that very symbol I ask you, would it be appropriate for Captain Liberty to be photographed in anything less than the nude?
"In fact, isn't it an insult that she's not naked right now?"
-- Batmanuel, "The Tick"
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
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4:23 pm - Steve Jobs: "Thoughts on Music"
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Apple CEO Steve Jobs has written an interesting essay, "Thoughts on Music", in which he explains why Apple has refused to license its FairPlay DRM scheme, and calls out to the music industry to end copy protection. Jobs also points out that the vast amount of music on iPods is DRM-unencumbered, and argues that the 3% of music on iPods which is DRM-encumbered is hardly enough to lock users into the iPod platform.
It will be interesting to see the fallout from this essay, both from the music industry (which has recently shown signs of re-thinking DRM), and the European countries like Norway, which has declared Apple's DRM illegal.
(Also posted on AppleGeeks)
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, February 2nd, 2007
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11:39 am - Making Fun of News
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| Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
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10:45 am - Mandatory Draft for Everyone?
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If I"m reading HR 393 correctly, it has been proposed that everyone aged 18 - 42 will be required to perform two years of "national service", either in the armed forces, or in some other capacity as determined by the President. This would also ammend the Selective Service Act to incorporate women as well.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, December 27th, 2006
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9:24 pm - National Museums of Bag Search and X-Ray
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I wandered over to the National Mall on Tuesday and went through a few of the museums, spending most of my time in the Natural History and Air and Space museums, before walking over to the Capitol and the Washington Monument, before high winds and dark suggested I return home, which involved running into Shimin on the metro.
Overheard at the National Museum of Natural History:
Child (quite calmly): "I request that we go home."
Parent (puzzled): "Then why did you want to come?"
According to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, what passes for art today is a 3 ft x 5 ft tall solid black oil painting, and a 6 ft or so solid black sphere with one eighth missing. (I think it was solid black. It was kind of hard to focus on it, what with there being almost no illumination anyway.)
I took a bunch of pictures with my new camera, but the only ones I really liked are one of amethyst, one of a mammoth fossil, and one of the Washington Monument at sundown. I thought the amethyst was going to make a nice desktop background, but it's too busy for my tastes. If anyone wants the full-res version, let me know.
As I was going through the pictures I took, I was slightly amused to discover that several birds I took pictures of had actually been tagged.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, December 10th, 2006
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11:39 am - Son of Mechatable
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| Thursday, November 30th, 2006
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12:08 am - titan is back up
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Hopefully the last post on titan in awhile. For those of you with accounts, bizarro-titan is back up in a new box now, and mail has started to be directed back there. Mail received on vortex will stay there until you do something with it. Mail will probably continue to trickle to vortex for a little while while the dns changes re-propogate.
So far, the verdict is two dead power supplies, two blown capacitors on titan's motherboard, and possibly a dead CPU as well. Man, when stuff breaks, it really breaks.
current music: Concerto No. 1 in B flat major op. 23-Masterpieces Classical Collection-Tchaikovsky - The Best Of
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
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9:55 pm - titan is dead. Long live titan.
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The Important Bits:
Zort.net mail has been temporarially moved to vortex. This will only cover new email sent since titan went down this morning. Mail on titan's disk should be still there and is temporarily not available. Procmail doesn't work (sorry). Neither does the ERP mailing list (mails sent there will bounce). Hopefully, titan will be temporarially resurrected in a new body tomorrow evening, at which point, mail will be pointed back there.
The Story:
Got home this evening and attempted to revive titan. I was already suspecting the power supply, but I wanted to try and power it back up once more for good measure.
The PSU hummed. Then flashed, and the PSU let out its magic smoke.
Ok, so no big deal. I fetched the spare PSU I had and plugged it in.
Nothing happened.
Well, I still had one more available power supply, the one in eventhorizon, which I powered on for the first time in a few years to make sure the PSU was working. After much finagling (that case is the most poorly designed over-cramped case I've ever seen), I yanked out that PSU, and plugged it into titan.
Nothing happened.
Ok, so titan's motherboard must be bad. So I plugged eventhorizon's power supply back in, and tried to turn it on.
Nothing happened. Argh!
So now, my dead computer and power supply has now turned into three dead power supplies and possibly two dead computers!
I'm meeting up with an old co-worker, Mohammad Haque tomorrow to borrow an old system of his and stick titan's hard drive in it. I was originally planning on using vortex as a complete replacement for titan, but getting mail to work properly has been a PITA, and I don't really feel like fighting with it anymore. Especially after I nearly succeeded in nuking the mailbox I already had on on vortex. Gah. (Plug: go read his brother's webcomic, AppleGeeks if you aren't already.)
current mood:  annoyed
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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7:48 am - titan is down
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It appears that titan has suffered some kind of massive failure and won't turn on. I'm hoping it's just a power supply problem, which if it is, is easily remedied since I have a spare. I can't fix this until tonight, though.
The "only" thing affected is mail for the several domains titan hosts. Websites are all on vortex, and are fine.
Hopefully I can get it back up tonight, but in any case, I'm going to get mail services transferred over to vortex ASAP.
I'm reasonably confident no data has been lost, and in the worst case, I can directly attach titan's hard drive to vortex and copy the data.
current mood: annoyed
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, November 24th, 2006
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7:37 pm - Final Fantasy XII-2
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Still enjoying the game.
1) Guest party members make everything so much easier. Especially killing marks. And though the game sets you up for disliking the Ultan-Yensa, I kinda feel sorry for running through their territory and slaughtering them all. It's a slaughter. I run near one of them, and since they're hostile, my three PCs and the guest all run up and go slash-slash-slash-slash-dead-who's next?
2) An extension of #1: except for the plot, boss fights and marks, and wandering around looking at the pretty scenery, this game is really boring. I mean, with gambits, I don't even have to think in order to decimate the inhabitants of the world. I just have to run near them. I can wade into the middle of a tunnel filled with skeletons, go make dinner, come back, the party's killed everything and healed themselves. All the game doesn't do for me is move the characters on to the next area to do more bad-guy slaying. There's only been one area where I actually had to watch their health and pull them out of combat because the security guards were auto-respawning quicker than the party could kill them. I know the game's got a kill counter. I wish it'd show me the actual number. I may be single-handedly responsible for the near-extinction of a few species of animals and sentient humanoids.
3) And just when I was starting to congratulate the villains on having a complex, well thought out, and successful plan, without any hints of gross incompetence, it's time for another Good Idea/Bad Idea.
Good Idea: Testing the magic crystal you took from the good guys to ensure you don't return home with a dud.
Bad Idea: Testing the magic crystal you took from the good guys, against orders, in your airship's most sophisticated testing facility available: the engine.
The End.
4) I'm liking the place names in this game. I want to steal them and claim they were my own.
5) The skycity of Bhujerba, apparently located on a cloud, also apparently has giant wings. It is also the location of the Lhusu Mines, where they extract magicite from the mines. Also in the clouds. One of the city's random moogles made the comment that the magicite is what enables the city to fly, and wondered about what happens when all the magicite is mined. (The mines are almost depleted.) Quite clearly, this city is doomed.
6) Does Fran speak more later in the game? I really like her voice, though I can't pin down the accent. And Balthier's british accent has just the right amount of arrogance to make his opening quip "I'm the leading man" perfectly believable. This voice acting rocks, compared to the last game I played, Xenosaga 3, in which the voiceovers randomly paused in the middle. Of sentences, or at the end. Of a page of text.
7) I forgot about this, until Balthier asked the same thing: WTF is Vaan doing on the adventure? He's been drawn into things because when he was doing his noble thievery schtick he's a (noble) thief stealing from the castle, and just happens to fall into an on-going plot that he's only tangentially involved in because of his brother, and then becomes further involved only because his not-really GF gets kidnapped. But apart from that, why is he even there? He hasn't done anything particularly noteworthy, and nothing he's done has really affected anything anyway. He really does start this game as a nobody, even more so than Zidane or "This is MY story" Tidus. Why exactly are we supposed to like Vaan?
8) Maybe it's too early in the game, but aside from the pre-existing friendship between Vaan and Penelo, there hasn't been any sort of love interest mentioned on part of any character. Doesn't the main male character in FF games usually fawn over the main female character? Or am I only assuming that's the case because I've only played FF 9 and 10? (In any case, it's fine, because I see no reason at all for Vaan to get the girl. I'm just unclear as to whether the girl is Penelo or Ashe)
9) I know it's more "realistic" this way, but it's also really annoying that, in towns, in order to buy stuff, I have to go to seven different shops because they only sell one kind of thing (weapons, armor/shields, accessories, items, magic, techniques, and gambits).
10) I wish the game would tell me which tile on the license board I have to purchase to use a given piece of equipment.
11) I don't have enough money, to the point that I'm actually hampered by it. Don't really recall this happening to this extent in any other RPG I've played. Maybe I need to steal more?
12) On gambits: maybe that's the whole point of this game: develop a complex enough gambit rules list to ensure that your characters can take down bosses with your eyes closed? In that case, I need a "run around in circles" gambit action so my party restores their magic after combat, and a "crap, we're all dead, switch to backup party" gambit. I also need to assign additional conditions, e.g. "If ally HP <= 20%, Hi-Potion, but only in combat", so I don't use up my potions out of combat.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006
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11:54 am - Final Fantasy XII
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Dear Square-Enix,
1) The next time you make me run around town proclaiming "I am THE Basch von Rosenburgh of Dalmasca" to everyone, please come up with more than five different things to say, or I will find a way to make your computers say nothing but.
2) Gambits are more useful than I was expecting. But when I turn off Gambits, I'd like the game to prompt me for a character's next action when ready, rather than just assuming I'd like the character to attack.
3) On the other hand, when I'm running away, I'd much rather my characters still do things that might prolong the running-away, such as using their healing gambits. Also, stop putting my character's weapons away. It lets the bad guys catch up.
4) When I am making with the running-away, it is counter-productive to have one member of the party hang out far out of range, so that if I am in need of emergency healing, I can't tell them to do so. It is doubly counter-productive if the laggard is the healer, and almost dead because I can't tell them to heal themselves because they're too far away. It helps to follow the lead character's path (which I know the game saves, since it draws it on the map), rather than blindly running straight towards them. The sides of stairs and walls will thank you.
5) The license board concept is interesting, but it's also kind of irritating. Especially when the monsters only drop 1 or 2 LP each. And leveling up is too slow, unless the marks are intentionally placed well beyond my current capacity to fight them.
6) I have taken 75,307 steps in just under 14 hours of gameplay. Assuming a 3 ft. stride, I have run 42 miles in-game. I don't know why you bothered to put that counter there, but, cool.
7) Granted, the first things out of Vaan's mouth was "I wanna be a sky pirate!", but, airship this early in the game already?
8) The navigation controls are fine, until I start trying to run around town using only the on-screen map, at which point Vaan inevitably winds up having a seizure against a wall.
9) Some of the music feels like FF Tactics. Which isn't bad, but I've always thought the Tactics music felt delicate and likely to break in half on a whim, so it's a little odd to get that feeling too here.
10) Thek wordks "Magick" ankd "techniks" dok nokt kneedk thek lettekr "k" tok sounkd magickal.
11) It's neat that I can select a party of one or two characters, instead of the full three. Don't see the utility, unless it's for some single plot point later, or to facilitate levelling up one or two characters. (But better that than what I'd occasionally do, which is leave a dead member of the party in the party so that they'd continue to die and give more XP to the survivors.) But, on that note, why, when Vaan is dead and/or petrified, is he leading the party in town?
12) Thank you thankyou thankyou thankyou for solving the problem where, in every other RPG I've ever played, the entire reserve party commits seppuku when the active party dies. You're still killing me, but at least you've killed all my characters before game-over.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, November 13th, 2006
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1:09 am - Hushpuppies
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hungry
