Emptyeye

That second part is always a good thing.

So today was my cousin Danny’s wedding. He’s one of the cousins I don’t see all that often, being that he lives in the New London/Niantic area, so I see him at Christmas and…that’s usually it, really. So it was nice to see him and the rest of my mom’s side of the family.

I also learned something important today: I have approximately the alcohol tolerance of my aunt Kim. This was something I was pretty sure of beforehand, but suffice to say I confirmed it today. I didn’t do anything stupid that I’ll regret for the rest of my life (Other than apparently surpassing my limit in itself, that is), thankfully, but I went from “Ooh this is a fun happy place” to “What the Christ this is awful how can anyone purposely do this to themselves” with my last drink. This makes me sound like a hardcore alcoholic or something, but I’m pretty sure my brother (Who is under 21, by the way) could drink me under the table if for some reason we ever decided to hold a contest about it.

Jess and I also inspected the apartment a bit more closely on our way home today. Suffice to say that we just realized now the bedrooms have no ceiling lights (On all the other walkthroughs, either all the electricity was off, or it was bright enough out that we didn’t think to check this). Whoops. There are some other concerns we have upon a closer look at everything, primarily that we couldn’t lock some of the windows. I don’t know if this is the windows or if we were just too weak/short to close them all the way (Because we’re in essentially the basement, the windows are a bit higher up relatively speaking, making their tops in particular difficult to close completely), but either way, I’ll talk to the landlord tomorrow and see what’s up.

Imagine the title exclaimed in my best Brian Drummond impersonation.

So yesterday I officially signed the lease on the apartment. It’s a pretty nice place, more than reasonable for the price. For $800 a month, I (Well, Jess and I, but since technically it’s only my name on the lease, it’s “Me and any one other person I want” in the strictest legal sense) get a 2-bedroom, 1.5 bathroom apartment with an alley kitchen and a living room. It’s in the downstairs area of the place (I suppose “basement” is the technical term), so it’s a bit cheaper, and should theoretically stay a bit cooler in the summer. The best part is that it’s a practically-across-the-country 1.1 miles from my workplace. In other words, as everyone around me complains about rising gas prices, I can shrug and say “Don’t blame me, I walk to work….” (Yes, this is actually my plan).

The downsides? Well, I’ll have to get a PO Box, because the address is undeliverable by the Post Office. That’s no big deal, as there are a couple within a short distance of the place, and I was actually considering doing that anyway to have a safe mailing address for The Six Day Exile orders. The only other real one is that, being within walking distance from work, inclement weather will no longer be a convenient excuse to miss the occasional day of work in the winter.

Overall, I think the good outweighs the bad.

A more substantive post will be coming later–suffice to say I finally signed the lease on the apartment–but this SDA topic was too good for my speedrunning self not to mention (The actual video inside, not so much, but eh). The discussion actually reminds me of an old topic on the GameFAQs boards, which Bruplex might remember, where we created a fictional GameFAQs RPG that evolved into a “help topic” for the game. It was so convincing actually asked where to download said game…which didn’t exist.

Actually, no it isn’t. But oh well.

• Speaking of the meme for which this post is named, thanks to watching Let’s Plays by a guy calling himself Frankomatic, I now know pretty much everything I need to (And more) about Dragon Ball Z. How many times can you re-tell the same story in video game form? You already know the answer.
• For the past week-plus on Jeopardy!, a soft-spoken, rather cute woman by the name of Larissa Kelly has been destroying all competition (Okay, not quite true, but her average winnings per day are in the $35000 range.). Good for her; since the “five wins max” rule was discarded in 2003, she’s actually the very first female contestant to hit 6+ regular-season wins (Males who have done it include, but may not be limited to, Kevin Marshall with 6 wins, Tom Walsh with 7 wins, Dan Pawson with 9 wins, David Madden with 19 wins, and of course, Ken Jennings, with 74 wins [And people who are even bigger Jeopardy! nerds than I am have analyzed just how likely such a run really was. Conclusion: He was a darn good player, but he was also darn lucky.].) Suffice to say that I wouldn’t mind if she continued to win.
• If you’re curious, I go sign the apartment lease tomorrow night. And then I officially have an apartment, and have to really start considering how I’m going to move stuff. Hooray! I should really find out the exact address of the place…I know it’s on Canal Street in Plantsville, and I think the address is 500, but I’m actually not sure. Silly me.
• Lastly, apparently Australia has a “National Sorry Day”. This is awesome.

Today Jess and I went to her aunt’s house for a Memorial Day picnic. It was pretty fun, even if not a lot actually happened. Mainly, we played badminton and Mexican Horseshoes, but that was good enough for me. Thanks to liberal sunblock application (Which Marco, Jess’s aunt’s dog, apparently found very tasty), I managed to not get burned (Though I don’t burn as easily as Jess does to begin with), which is nice.

Also, given that it’s Memorial Day and all, let me take a brief soapbox moment here to thank all the troops in the United States Armed Forces, both living and deceased, who willingly put their lives on the line so that I don’t have to. Thanks, guys and gals.

Coming next scene! Can Emptyeye acquire personal lodging? Find out tomorrow!

Also, an imaginary cookie to whoever gets the “Coming next scene” reference.

This week at emptyeye.com, I put out the original Intro for The Six Day Exile. Beyond that, I’ll admit I haven’t done much to advance the project (Which is why I wanted to constantly work on it–I know myself, and I know that once I stop something, take a break from it, whatever, I don’t usually pick it up again). That should change shortly, however, as I pulled the trigger on ordering a new laptop (And wireless keyboard and mouse, and printer). After that, the big thing will be backing up all the project to my second external drive, and then trying to get my hopelessly outdated copy of SONAR to run on the new machine (I imagine Windows Vista may be an obstacle here). After I pull that off, I’m seriously considering moving to, or at least going with a dual-boot setup of, Ubuntu Studio for the purpose. Not that I don’t like SONAR, but let’s just say that there are certain unwritten rules of music software use that change when you go from making music for fun (SEE: The Musical Doodlings material, especially the DoD Entries) to actively trying to profit from it, and because of this, I really shouldn’t have used SONAR even as much as I did for The Six Day Exile.

Following up on this post about MySpace Karaoke, it seems that it’s not really a contest per se. But what I really wanted to discuss was the fact that, as I mentioned in that post, the biggest Internet phenomenon of 2007 (and it seems to still be going strong now) is not represented on the available choices. Thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is because Myspace, for all its posturing about how it’s a place for “cool young hipsters” or whatever to hang out, is owned by a corporation headed up by a crusty old dude (And please don’t take my linking to a Wikipedia article as an endorsement of the site as a whole) who is hopelessly out of touch with the Internet and its fads.

I’m still playing through Wizardry: Legacy of Llylgamyn. I’ve got two parties going now, one Good (With a Neutral character), one Evil (Also with a Neutral character). The Good party has something of a unique setup–thanks to this video, I found out that this particular collection allows you to easily re-roll your stats when creating a character. To that end, the Good party is set up Samurai-Samurai-Samurai-Priest-Bishop-Thief. I took the Bishop along to easily identify items on the fly, plus as a backup healer. Incidentally, the restrictions on Floors 2 and 3 don’t seem to include Neutral characters, which is good.

Until next week…

Hopefully someone does.

In preparing to move–which will hopefully be early next month–I’ve been taking stock of things that I can sell and/or give away to people to lessen what I have to actually transfer to the apartment. This includes my collection of video game magazines. I have no problem with getting rid of Gamepros or Electronic Gaming Monthlies, though Nintendo Powers, which I have a ton of (And which were an integral part of my childhood), will be a bit harder to sell/give away. Still, I think it’ll be the proper move to get rid of at least most of them (I may keep some of the collectors-esque issues, like some of the January blowouts they did during the early-mid 90s.).

So um, if anyone wants some old gaming magazines, let me know. I have the following Gamepros:
-August 1990
-105-107
-109
-113
-115-116
-118-119
-123
-126
-140-141

And issues 37, 47 and 48 (NOT 49, like I had said earlier) of EGM.

In the Intro to The Six Day Exile (Which isn’t dead, really), I discussed the original idea for said intro, which combined early FreeCreditReport.com commercials (Offer applies with enrollment in Triple Advantage) with this scene from Dragon Ball Z.

In case you thought I was just playing around in that Intro… I wasn’t. There’s said original Intro. I had gotten the idea from this YTMND, and…well, that’s the least embarrassing thing about some of the original album concepts I had. Maybe when I become an Internet legend, I’ll reveal some of the other stuff.

And in putting up the “Latest Song” pseudo-post, I hadn’t really thought about whether or not Into the Aether stuff (Which this most assuredly is) would go in that slot or not. If this were an Ancient Greek myth, I’d be begging my brother to bail me out of this situation right now. But since I’m in the U.S. in 2008, I’m just going to decide “No it isn’t” and be done with it.

Because I didn’t do it yesterday.

• So apparently MySpace has some kind of Karaoke contest going on. I was made aware of this by a Mr. Blade Braxton over at Wrestlecrap, who apparently wishes to rule this whatever-it-is. I looked over the song list, and am greatly disappointed that the solo debut of Rick Astley (RANDOM FUN FACT: Rick was evidently in a duo called, creatively enough, Rick & Lisa, which had a minor hit prior to Rick’s going solo) is not currently one of the choices.
• I managed to finish Wizardry I yesterday, and have started The Legacy of Llylgamyn (Which is the third game in the series, but for some reason called Wizardry II in Japan, even though it came out after Knight of Diamonds worldwide. Even more confusingly, it kept its proper title in “The Xth scenario”, making the full title of its Japanese NES release “Wizardry II: The Legacy of Llylgamyn: The Third Scenario”. Yes, really.). Going into this almost completely blind, it should be a lot of fun, as well as being insanity inducing. It’s pretty cool so far in that the enemies at least look completely different than in most of the series that I’ve played., and it seems as though you go up through the dungeon instead of down. A minor change in the big scheme of things, but cool nonetheless.
• I half-apologize for not getting this up yesterday. I say “half-apologize” because, as I said, I really didn’t intend for it to be a regular feature the first few times I did it (In other words, I’m not breaking the implied schedule because I never implied that there was a schedule in the first place).
• Jess and I are going to be totally lost next week now that Dancing with the Stars is over. Going to dinner followed by watching DotS (Yeah, that’s right, I’m admitting it) is essentially our Tuesday night routine, so who knows what we’ll watch now.
• I’ve been poking around websites for a new computer, with the intention of giving Jess this one (Even with its myriad quirks, it would be years better than what she has currently). Looks like I can get a pretty good deal at about the $600-700 range for another laptop, if I choose to pull the trigger sometime soon. I might even be ale to get a printer with one of them. Sweet!
• Lastly, I heard you like 9 and a half minutes of Mudkips!

Sometime in the future, I’d like to walk into a car dealership wearing my typical getup and announce that I to buy a car. It’s important that I wear what I usually do for this, because I want to see the look on the dealer’s face when he goes to check my credit. More precisely, I want to watch his face go from swarmy grin to a look of sheer confusion and terror as he realizes that the person sitting across from him (That’s me), who looks like he couldn’t land a job at McDonald’s, has good enough credit to not only buy a car, but the entire flippin’ dealership, if he were so inclined.

Discuss.