Changed my title back so this cannot be connected to other things. I am mostly on Twitter now, which uses the same name as my last LJ title. May return here eventually but right now I much prefer Twitter.

Oh yeah, I am loving Platinum. I just got back from a school trip where I had no internet, but I DID have my DS, and I played Plat whenever I had a spare moment (which was often). Currently in Solaceon town, and I have acquired four of my permanent first-run team members, have the egg for the fifth, and am sadly still stuck with FUCKING PONYTA until I can get the sixth.

I'm not ready for online battling just yet, but I will be. Just you wait.

Also, I got my first-ever Acid Weather glitch. That was pretty cool. And I forgot to mention, but while I was trying to round up some Pokemon on Diamond to bring over to Plat, I found A SHINY YANMA IN THE GREAT MARSH. But it ran away before I could catch it. This marks the third shiny I've seen (after a shiny Zubat in Silver, and a shiny Tentacool in, Sapphire, I believe it was), and the second that got away (I only managed to catch the Tentacool).

It's more fun than I remembered, putting effort into Pokemon while still doing it the legitimate way. Not that I ever hacked a lot, but I hacked near the end of my Diamond game, and so it took a lot of effort not to pull out an Action Replay to get a few of those Pokemon I needed for my Plat team. But it's worth it. I'm going to do this right.

Except maybe Jirachi. I might bring over the illigetimate Jirachi in Diamond that I hatched from the illigetimate egg of a Ditto and a LEGITIMATE Jirachi. But that's it.

I reserved Platinum. I felt obligated to. I've been a Pokemon fan since I was like ten years old. But I wasn't really excited about it, because I kind of hated Diamond, as I'm an oldfag who sticks to their principles and will always think the older games were better. So today rolled around, and apart from a phone call saying that my game was in, I didn't give it much thought. I spent the morning browsing around SA, reading random threads. And then one caught my eye.

Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum: Platinum's out.

Holy shit. Holy SHIT. You mean to tell me there is a whole community of goons who not only still play Pokemon, but admit to it?? I was surprised, but still a bit apathetic. Until I started reading the thread.

Now. I am fucking excited. Let's do this.

The mall is closed by now, and I won't have time to go tomorrow, but I will be able to get my game on Tuesday. Until then, there will be time to think about what to do differently from my play-throughs of Diamond. Which is:

1. Accept the learning curve. I was too resistant to change when I played Diamond, and scoffed at its new features as being 'useless distractions'. Now I realize that maybe it's possible to enjoy this after all. I also need to learn a bit more about the species in the Sinnoh region, so I don't end up like last time, with a poorly-planned team and no idea what to do. Speaking of:

2. Plan the team. I always plan the teams nowadays, but there were so many species in the new generation that I just gave up. Now, after two partial play-throughs, I vaguely know what kind of Pokemon I should have on my team. I hear they added the Houndour family, so I won't get stuck with FUCKING PONYTA this time.

3. Learn the old stuff too. I never really cared about natures before, or EVs, because it was all so complicated. But hearing the goons talk about it, well, now I'm excited too. 

4. Be less impatient. I always, always, always have gone for the "glass cannon" approach when it comes to Pokemon: a team full of species with high offense, low defense, and superpowered attacks. This is great for sweeping easily through the AI trainers encountered in the game, but in order to make my next resolution work, I will need to change my method.

5. Get into competitive battling and other assorted social events. I haven't had a battle against a real person since I fought my sister way back in the G/S era. Times have changed. The same goes for trading, which I haven't done for ages and ages. I honestly never even went into an online trading room while playing Diamond. Now I feel like I've been missing something.

If I can stick to this stuff, maybe the new regions of Pokemon won't be dead to me after all. I hope it works.

This time, I am going to start with Piplup, use Houndour as my fire-type, and stay the fuck away from fucking fucking Bronzor. Bronzor SUCKS.

So I got Steam, that program that lets you buy and play all these PC games online. First thing I downloaded was Half-Life, because it is awesome cheap awesome.

And boy, is it awesome. I feel like such a badass, moving slowly and steadily around to figure out how to get to the next area, then running and taking cover from a sudden ambush, shooting all the monsters away (actually, I usually just hit them with a crowbar-- I am the most ammunition-conservative person ever, and only use my guns against turret guns, the monsters that hit you with energy/slime, and the military. And I never use grenades). The game was, by default, set to "easy" mode, which insulted me for a moment, until I remembered that games from the 90's are fuckin' hard and I would have needed to set it to 'easy' anyway. As long as I don't think about that, I still feel badass.

And I haven't needed to turn to the Internet or my friends for help yet. Well I did ask Chris about this one part but I hadn't given up on it yet and he didn't have a solution for me anyway so it didn't count.

The atmosphere is so wonderful, too. I'm a sucker for the whole "normal environments suddenly turned into a survival/horror gorefest battlefield" thing (which is why I loved Fallout 3 so much) , and Half-Life does it so well. Crawling through ventilation shafts, running through hallways as fluorescent ceiling lights explode, watching old scientist guys get killed by falling lamps and vending machines and monsters that suddenly break through the walls... The greatest part so far was when I climbed up the ladders of an elevator shaft (watching the old scientist guy fall off ahead of me), and I landed on top of the elevator. It looked like a dead end, but I then spied a vent in the top. I crouched on top of it, smashed it with my good old crowbar, and immediately dropped into a pitch-black and seemingly inoperable elevator. I expected an ambush, but Half-Life was too cool for that predictable scenario, and the elevator was empty, which was just as unnerving. I love moments like that. The game is intense, but it's just calm enough when there are no monsters to keep me from having an anxiety attack and shutting it off. It's like you go into a meditative state while wandering around looking for how to get to the next area, so by the time you reach the next area with monsters you're all psyched up to kill them all.

Why am I telling you people about Half-Life? Everyone else has already played it. Oh well, goodnight.

I like the pairing, okay? Now leave me alone. Stupid fangirl conscience... -goes to bury self in sand-

Neil Gaiman was awesome, though. He made everything okay.

Portal.

"Yeah, I know it's got to be good, for everyone to like it this much, but I mean, it's just a game, it can't possibly live up to all the hype..."

Screw you, doubtful self of two hours ago.

Quite possibly the most amazingly innovative game I've ever played. Oh my god. Amazing.

As I suspected, and an internet-browsing session with my friend confirmed, Japan has indeed gotten their hands all over Watchmen.

うぉっちタン

Crappy Google translation: Tan U OTCHI

Also referred to as the best writer ever AMERIKANKOMIKKUSU, led the British genius Alan Moore.
Since 1986 a year on the UOTCHIMEN is, as it is his,
Boasts the highest-ever finish in World Comics, which is very historic masterpiece.

It's like a haiku... I don't know wtf either, but it's worth checking out. Japan is always good for a laugh.

Uh-oh. I just discovered Twitter.

This might become an addiction.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK.

I thought that guy was dead. I thought he died like a million chapters ago at the end of that one story. Actually I thought they were both dead. I was sure at least one of it had it specifically stated, and for the other, I just kind of forgot about him-- no, I didn't forget about him, but I figured, he's a minor character, he's served his purpose, and he was a bad guy, so they probably killed him off, right?

Not so much.

FUCK. And I just realized why that pairing was kind of hot to me in that one picture even though I didn't like the pairing before because it was too 'vanilla' and besides they're just minor villains from a show I hate-- fuck it all, they look exactly like the people of that hottest pairing ever, the one pairing out of like six million I've followed in my fangirl days that I've been able to think of slashfic for as recently as TWO FUCKING DAYS AGO granted it was only for like five seconds but ooo it was still hot to me. I HATE THAT SERIES TOO BUT THAT PAIRING NEVER FADES.

I NEVER LIKED THE PAIRINGS IN THIS GODDAMN SHOW. I ALWAYS BELIEVED I DID BUT SINCE THEN I'VE COME TO TERMS WITH THE FACT THAT I COULD NEVER SLASH EVEN ONE GODDAMN PERSON WITH TRUE PASSION BECAUSE EITHER THE SUBTEXT CAME THROUGH TOO STRONGLY OR THE CHARACTERS WERE TOO BLAND OR THE EPISODE WAS TOO BORING. For so long I'd pretended that ONE pairing was my truest love, but goddammit, it wasn't. It never was. And now that I've cut some of the slash out of my diet (out of necessity; do you REALIZE how many pairings a girl like me has to follow if she wants to be called a fanatic? You can only keep up that energy for so long) what does it say about me if I regress?

Fucking worse. I started appreciating one of the CANON FUCKING PASTED-ON WORTHLESS NONEXISTANT PAIRINGS THAT WAS THROWN IN THERE TO APPEASE THE LOVE-STARVED FANGIRLS OF THAT ONE OTHER MINOR CHARACTER. THAT one! THAT ONE! I was thinking about it the other day and I found myself going "I guess it's not that bad, it's kind of cute actually" AND THEN I REALIZED WHAT I WAS SAYING. It's ONE THING to appreciate heterosexual pairings in a show, but there is MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF SHAME a person should feel at appreciating the TACKED-ON WORTHLESS ROMANTIC SUBPLOTS THAT HAPPENED OVER TWO PAGES AND ONE PANEL.

Wait. That's why. The reason I like these things is because they don't appear at all-- of course. That's the answer. I was in love with that one guy until I watched every episode he was in. Then I was just tired of him. How could I have forgotten? I'm a minor-character, forgotten-subplot kind of girl. Even that one other slash pairing I liked from that other show only sticks with me because the guy was never there. If he'd been there more, surely I would have...

Overexposure is the answer.

If these boys aren't dead, they've been in more episodes.

I can watch them and get tired of them AND this show!

But if I do that, then...

Goddammit. I have to stop looking through fucking goddamn fucking PHOTOBUCKET. It's having kind of an ill effect on me.

I'll just go back to zombies... I liked those a lot last night.

Apparently it's one of those points on the curve of the graph of my fangirl path through life where my guilty pleasures come back to haunt me. Let's just say that a certain fandom, which I liked a few years ago but have "successfully" severed myself from now, has reentered my mind. "Successfully" is in quotes because, well, it's still not gone, is it? Fuck.

The reemergence of thoughts pertaining to this has cast a certain new clarity on the series, allowing me to realize several new things. Namely:

1. This series was good for fanfiction after all. I had always wondered how people wrote fanfiction for it, but now I see. It's so easy and beautiful. I haven't been able to think up fanfic this easily since I was a fourteen-year-old naive girl writing YYH-Sues. It was the fanfiction that got me back into it, dammit; can anyone be blamed for something like that?

2. I feel a certain understanding towards the creator(s) of the series. Yes, they are lazy fucks who excel at the method of pulling the stock characters from the well-worn casts of other series and slapping new names and powers and recolors onto them and hoping nobody notices; yes, the plot is half-assed (when it even exists) and standard and anyone with half a brain can see through it and get bored and move on... But you accept it when you move into that genre. And at this point I wonder, did the creator(s) even like what they were making? Maybe once upon a time, but certainly not now.

3. I have a certain appreciation for any fictional world that allows you to strip it of any and all canon characters and plot, and then rebuild it with an entirely new story and cast of characters using only the scenery and fighting/magic system as a guide. This is one of those worlds.

My horrible urges to indulge in this fandom have brought me back to the parts of the internet I've tried to forget. Gaia. Photobucket. As I browse through them, saving links and images to throw into an Excel spreadsheet of my fanfiction's cast of characters, I feel parts of my soul slowly dying. But the great part about indulging in a horrible guilty-pleasure fandom is that the guilty pleasure allows you to forget how much you hate yourself for doing it. Until, in your browses through Photobucket albums, you come across a kind of picture that evokes the ancient fangirl in you, and all you can think is "OH FUCK OH FUCK THAT'S HOT oh fuck I hate myself", and then you go to hang your head in shame and write posts in your journal about reluctantly being back into a crappy fandom.

So my friend emailed me the other day, saying that she'd downloaded a GBA emulator and was playing Pokemon Blue. I decided that I must obtain an emulator for myself, and so, after navigating through a series of more redirecting pop-up windows and ugly hentai ads than any one person should have to endure, I secured myself a VisualBoy Advance and ROMs of Pokemon Yellow, Red, and Green. I started out playing Yellow, because that was the first game I ever played and I missed it (also you can get all 3 starter Pokemon in that game, which I like). I tried playing Green, but it was very poorly translated. I can deal with Engrish, but this...




Not as bad as RO2's direct-from-Babelfish translation, but I still get the feeling that it would get irritating after a while. Anyway, I love playing Pokemon Yellow, though I wish it was possible to somehow trade with people while using an emulator. I'm currently in Cerulean City, and I have yet to bow to temptation and use any cheats, though I do occasionally use the spacebar to speed things up. Next, I plan to download a N64 emulator and get Pokemon Stadium.

I just realized that, was I still on Gaia, my fourth "Gaiaversary" would be in two weeks. Since I'm long past caring about Gaia, though, I shouldn't care.

And I don't. But it got me thinking. I do wonder what dear old Scotty would think of the transformations our dear old bat friend has gone through, and of the purposes for which I intend to use him.

I'm pretty sure I haven't mentioned this here before. Let me preface it with some explanation: I fucking hate furries. And before anyone goes off on me for saying that, let me explain further. I don't care that they want to have sex with anthropomorphic animals and have weird fetishes and all that. As I grow more attracted to anthropomorphic creatures by the day, it would be hypocritical of me to say that. In fact, I love that furries are so largely responsible for some of the weirdest stuff on the internet. They make the place interesting. But I still hate them, like any sane and intelligent person does, for their community, for their goddamn "fursecution complex". They would be such a cool group of people, it seems, if they knew how to live life without drawing attention every five seconds to the fact that they are, indeed, a furry.

Which leads me to believe that the best furries are the ones that keep their fetishes in their respective corners on the internet, and leave them out of irrelevant conversations with other people-- ideally, the best furry is one that you would never know is a furry at all. (And no, I do not believe it is hypocritical of me to say that, because while I talk about my weird things here, I don't mention them to every stranger I find on the internet-- it's not like this journal is exactly well-read.)

Not that I haven't known any cool ones. Asyd, another old Gaia friend that I haven't spoken to in ages, was the one who got me into the whole thing. She was awesome. Then again, she was a genuinely talented and interesting person, which is more than you can say for most of the people on the internet, let alone the furry community.

Which makes me wonder why, of all the forums on the internet, the one I'm looking for is the kind I hate.

I don't know why, for the past couple months, I've been inexplicably drawn to the idea of a furry forum. I think it was that "How the Be a Furry" parody guide I read, which actually gave me a great idea. But I don't know my motives-- do I want to troll them, or become notorious, or just find a nice system of dull-minded friends and acquaintances to make up for the fact that I basically have no friends on the Internet? 

Most likely, I just want a place to indulge my guilty pleasures and unwarranted self-importance. Furries can be an easily impressed group. It probably wouldn't take much to blow the minds of some of them. And maybe the smarter ones could actually have some interesting thoughts on, I don't know, something or other. But my sister says routinely that the only reason I like "all this weird stuff" is because I like to impress people or throw them off by talking about it-- and while that's not my only reason, I would be a liar if I didn't admit that was part of the appeal.

So for the past few weeks, I've been occasionally, covertly, sneaking out a site. As I read the furries' articles on ED, I will follow the links to where they've left posts, and maybe check out the site for just a little more than the loser's posts. But I can't seem to find any that suit my tastes.

I might know where to find directions to one, though. Which brings me, unfortunately, back to the title of this article. Like I said, furries and Gaia are pretty much synonymous...

God, no, I'd never do that, though. The last thing I want is a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls giving me site recommendations. I'll find something some other way.

I haven't taken Robitussin in a long time, because I don't generally get a bad cough when I get sick. Well, I took it today.

It is still the most disgusting and vile thing I have ever ingested. Some things never change.

From:	YOU WON USD:2,100,000.00 (mrs_kadilambong@virgilio.it)
Sent:	Mon 2/16/09 1:41 PM
To:

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---

I don't know who keeps giving the African scam email guys my email address, but at least it's still more amusing than annoying.

First, I would like to confess-- I cheated on Chie. She and I are at S.Link rank 6, so I think we're counted as girlfriend/boyfriend at this point. And yet, I have decided to switch. During the Summer Festival, when the girls showed up in kimonos, I tried commenting to Chie that she was "sexy", hoping she would respond with the appropriate expected outrage that her stock character is supposed to show. Instead, she was unquestioningly pleased. Chie, that's not the girl I was chasing after.

So despite every bone in my body telling me to hate the girl and throw her out of windows, I've switched to Rise. I don't know why. I think it's that I like the support girls-- I tried pursuing Fuuka in P3, until I realized she was just going to do the stupid cooking thing all the time. And it's partially that I'm bored of Chie, and partially that there are no better options-- Yukiko's got the annoying cooking thing, I doubt the game will let me date Kanji or Saki's brother, and I don't think there'll be enough time to go after Naoto.

Speaking of: I should be really mad that I just figured out Naoto's a girl. It wasn't from the game; I wanted a P4 icon (-points above-) and when I went to a page of P4 icons, there was hot tub image!Naoto, towel clasped to girly chest. Like I said, I really should have been angry. But the game's been so much of a letdown with that guy already (oh, let's put him in the SCHOOL like everyone ELSE, that'll be original!) that I'm sort of glad he wasn't a guy after all. This allows me to clearly cut a defined line between my!Naoto and canon!Naoto. my!Naoto will be a very interesting and complex character that is older than fucking fifteen. And canon!Naoto can just go on sucking as much as he wants.

Besides, it's not like I didn't half expect it. If they don't want you to seriously question a character's given gender, they shouldn't voice them with someone of the opposite gender.

Really, Persona 4 is really annoying me with the stupid ages. It's like they can't decide whether they want to endorse pedophilia, so to cover all their bases, they just make every female the same age. Here, you can try to have sex with Ayane, but she looks like a six-year-old! If you like more mature women, we'll let you go after Rise, but now we're going to say she's fifteen even though she's clearly not! I liked Rise a lot more before they decided she was a freshman in high school. She would be a better and less annoying character if she was older. I rather liked her when she was apathetic in the beginning.

I'm on rocky ground with P4 at the moment, because the whole thing with Naoto irritates me (again, not the girl thing, just the fact that they made him so boring and standard when he had such potential in my head). I definitely still love it though, and I am still sad that there's only about five months left to go before the inevitable end of the game.

I would love a game of Persona that never ends. That's why I hope what that Jeremy boy told me is correct.

Since my hours at work were recently cut due to Mock Trial/the economy, I've found myself with some extra time on my hands. So when I'm not sleeping, I'm bored. Therefore, I decided it was time to hit up Teejie for some more MMO fun. I've missed that guy.

We're planning to play Ragnarok (EssenceRO server), Ragnarok 2 (DiviniaRO2 server), and ROSE Online (if I can get that working).

I think I can say with some authority now that I officially hate Vista. It seems like every time I download a new game, I have to go through a twenty-step process to trick Vista into letting it run. Morrowind was bad with compatibility, but at least the basic game worked. While trying to make RO2 do so much as start up, I had to open ports, rename files, convince McAfee that the oh-so-scary launcher file was not a Trojan virus... Just a lot of stupid stuff. And having to thrice confirm pretty much everything I did didn't make me any happier. And now that I've actually gotten into the game, I'm pretty sure Vista is the cause of many weird errors I'm getting.

Ugh. That's all I can say.

Aggh, Morrowind is impossible to mod. It's bad enough that I can't open the console, and can't modify the ini file, but add this in, and what's the point of even owning the game?

I don't know what it is. I've tried installing several mods, usually aesthetic stuff like body mods and textures, and I've only gotten one to work (believe it was Darknut's Morrowind Creature Texture Replacer or something like that?). That I've gotten one to work only makes it more infuriating. What am I doing wrong with the rest of them?

I've been thinking, and these are the only possbile answers I can think of:

1. Fucking Vista. This is probably the most likely. Vista doesn't let me unzip files directly into the Morrowind directory, and it wants me to give admin permission for every action under the Program Files folder, etc. There might be weird permission issues. But then why would one mod be working?

2. Incorrect mod installation. Since I can't directly unzip the files I download, I need to manually copy-paste all of them into where they're supposed to go. I might be putting them in the wrong place. I'm pretty sure this isn't it, though, because I hardcore read the Read Me, and I put them all where they're supposed to go.

3. Incorrect .esm/.esp files. I've tried experimenting with Elder Scrolls Construction Kit, but can't figure out how it's supposed to work. I also, therefore, don't know too much about these file extensions. It seems .esm is the one for the mods you apply, and .esp is for the mods you're still working on? But both are used, and neither works more often than the other.

4. Program Files (x86). This is the folder that Morrowind installs to by default on Vista, rather than Program Files. A lot of mods were made for pre-Vista, so they would use Program Files in the path, probably. But this shouldn't be an issue, as long as I've got everything under the Morrowind folder. Or so Ben tells me.

5. Incorrect Morrowind installation/lingering errors from running Compatibility Mode. Welp. I might just be fucked.

I don't know what the hell is going on, and it's driving me crazy. There are no helpful forums on the Internet. Forums didn't help me with console issues, and they don't help me with this. If Bethesda has a free help line or something, I'll have to try that, but I doubt that'll be useful at all, either.

Fucking Morrowind.

I really wanted to hate the man in blue with the hat. Really I did. He's such a standard, uninspired stock character. But now I'm sort of fantasizing about him... He'll get captured and join my team soon, I'm sure, but I don't actually want him to. It's more fun just to imagine. I'm sure my fantasies make him out to be a much more interesting guy than he'll actually turn out to be.

Don't want to compare him to Shinji. He's definitely not as cool as Shinji. But since he's the one guy I've honestly been intrigued with so far, it looks like he's lined up to become this game's Shinji.

Or maybe I'll start hating him again. I dunno. Then I'll have to go back to looking at Saki's brother, who is the only other vaguely interesting male in the game.

I just got into college. The one I was hoping to get into, too. Thank god. Now I can sit back, relax, and begin the new agonizing process of looking for financial aid. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship from the college-- the one I just barely got, because they lost my transcripts and couldn't find them right up until they were sent in again the day of the deadline for the scholarship.


It's a load off to know that I've been accepted. Now I finally have a valid reason for senioritis.

----

The first real scam email I've ever received! And to make it even better, it's the one I've heard about so many times. It's pretty awesome. I always wondered, why don't I get interesting scam emails? And now I do.