AND THE LACK THEREOF*

*we put the "mmm" in communism

about

This is the personal blog of Tim. Here, Tim writes on anything he has enough inspiration to finish a post on. That usually ends up being matters of science, pop culture, technology, religion, and philosophy.

This blog is around nine years old, which is over a third of Tim's current age. Back in 2003, it was called "Of Tim: Tim's life - or lack thereof", and it was as bad as you might expect the blog of a freshman in high school to be. Tim hopes that his writing is a little better, these days.

Tim welcomes any input that you, the dear reader, might have. Comments are very much appreciated, especially if you have a dissenting opinion. If you'd like to learn more about Tim, you might want to see his facebook or google+.

Also: Tim is a very avid consumer of various sorts of music. You may be interested in his playlists!

O.o
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I. Need. Sleep.

My eyes hurt.

They feel like they're BLEEDING. Sorry, disgusting imagery there.

I'm doing very poorly in school, bad grades on all my tests thus far, so, I'm not happy with that. I'm trying to improve, but this lack of sleep really makes it hard to remember anything.

Oy.

Nighty night all.
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O.o
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Zach and Paul came over here for a little bit, Zach left to do homework, and Paul and I ate pizza and I owned him as Sweden in a soccer game. Hehe. Fun.

I was particularly interested by today's Penny-Arcade ramble. I am not not normally fond of Gabe's semi-spastic ravings, but he really nailed a popular misconception about charity. I'm not gonna explain it here, just go read it. The other part of the post that perked my interest was the mention of Splinter Cell 3. Obviously the webmaster there is grammatically deficient, but we'll look past that. I have been checking in on SC3 every now and then, and it's looking very nice. Gamespot has a fair amount of gameplay movies showing off the new combat knife, a lot of the new abilities, but none of the co-op play or versus play have been demonstrated. The release date got pushed to March, which is jsut in time for my birthday. I'm set for games for a very long time - I'm gonna get Live soon (meaning I can get the new content for Ninja Gaiden, supposedly quite good) and also do SOMETHING with Fable over live (not really sure what). That should entertain me till November 9, and so on. And I thought I could save up for a computer - HAH! OH WELL.
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O.o
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Oy, I'm bored. It's 8th period here, in my only study hall every 6 days. Sho was supposed to come with me, but as luck would have it, she was one of like two people who didn't get a pass. *mutter* I don't have any homework I'd really wanna do here (I have English, in which i have to write 5 vignettes, but I only write when I have music. Techno. You get the idea. Apparantly my dad is gonna take me and Paul to see "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" sometime during the week, which looks corny, but supposedly it's not bad. Anyways, that's all I have worth writing.
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O.o
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To my utter dismay, I've found the Internet explorer is screwing with me again. I swear, if IE were a real person I'd kill him/her so many times, it wouldn't even be funny. No, I'm serious. The incompetence it must have taken to produce such a crappy product is mind-boggling.

My greatest apologies to you Internet Explorer users. Among the errors that IE has with my page, here they are, including but not limited to:

-Text is screwy, displays too large or too small, depending on resolution and IE settings.
-Sidebar and Header are not aligned correctly despite the fact I have them correctly calibrated with precentages.
-Header is covered partially by the overhead Blogger bar.
-Various issues with text formatting (will often make entire blog posts bold or italicized).

I'm really sorry, but I'm done with my blog-fixing phase, I put a whole lot of time into it over the summer, and it looked great before, but if you really want it to look correct, go get Firefox and become a better person. Once again, my greatest apologies, but I don't have the energy to fix it.
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O.o
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My reflections on Fable: was it worth the wait, the hype, and all that jazz?

EDIT: You better appreciate this. It took me two hours. Enjoy all 6 pages, 20 paragraphs, 232 lines, 3,730 words, 20,627 characters of it. Enjoy it, or you owe me two hours of my life back.

I blabbed to you people about Fable for nearly a week in a row a month ago, and now that I have it, I've beaten it, and am already halfway through the game again, (I've spent almost 30 hours on the game thus far, I'm sure I'll suck more out of it) I'm pretty sure I can give some accurate reflections on how the game really came out. When I first played the game I didn't see the problems I had as the fault of the developer (Big Blue Box), but as I progress, I'm seeing more and more that really just seems like they spent too much time on parts that need not be attended to. The general feel you get when playing in Fable is that of being a hero. They accomplished that - you do feel like you're controlling a hero that you've formed and created, however, it's what you can do with that hero that really matters. I'm gonna make this easy to understand by using bullets. All the positive points I have about the game will be +, and yeah, you get the idea.

+ Character Customization (Clothing): It's very apparent that they spent an enormous amount of time on this - and I'm glad they did. Your character has a choice between 23 different suits of clothing - and they all look significantly different. If you wanted to be picky, you might say there were only 6-7 suits of clothing. This is because there are always three variants of one model of clothing. Example: Chain-mail has a normal set of armor, and then a bright set, and a dark set. These bright and dark sets have differing modifiers to attractiveness, scariness, and alignment. The coloring is much different, but, the model is still the same. However, the coloring is different enough (to me) not to worry about that. The thing that astounds me about all the clothing is that everything but three suits (plate-mail) has perfect collision detection - there are no visible errors or clashes with collisions between your weapons, body and armor.

- Character Customization (Weapons): I was rather dissapointed in this category. The weapon types are rather basic, and the sheer number of weapons is very small. They made approximately 50 different weapons - in total, no more. There were a few levels of weapons which were simple and nondescript. Iron < style="font-style: italic;">liked about the weapons was augmenting. You could find or buy gems to augment into your weapon to produce a certain ability, most of which were fairly basic. There were fire, lightning and silver augmentations (no need to explain, RIGHT?) as well was sharpening, piercing , mana, health, and experience. Sharpening just increased basic damage, piercing reduced your enemy's armor effectiveness, mana continually restored mana, health did the same, experience increased your experience intake. Kinda cool, but all weapons have a limit on how much you can augment (the best weapons had a max of 3 augmentations, and the legendary weapons were already augmented). Augmented weapons would glow and glitter based on what you augmented into them. Arrows would also reflect the augmentation, which was cool to watch in first person.

+/- Character Customization (Appearance): This was one of the prime features presented when the game was in early development - you could go to a barber and get a haircut, get a mustache, or a beard, as well as get tattoos from a tattooist, either on your leg, arm, chest, back, or head. Each barber or tattooist has a basic set of tattoos or haircuts they can give you (around 8 or so), and if you want more, you have to find barber or tattoo "cards". Finding these cards allows you to get the specified tattoo/haircut from any barber or tattooist. It's not a bad idea, it just doesn't really make sense. It would really be much cooler just to be able to have the entire list at the beginning of the game. I believe I've found all the haircut cards, and there are approximately 7-8 mustache cuts, 7-8 beards, and 11-12 haircuts. The tattoo selection isn't as good - probably 4-5 arm, 4-5 leg, 7-8 face, 9-10 chest, and 9-10 back. Considering tattoos have much greater room for creativity, I would expect at least twice that amount. I wasn't terribly found of the majority of the tattoos, I only liked 3 or 4 enough to ever apply them. I suppose also fitting into this category are scars. If you are hit, you will develop a scar, which reduces attractiveness and increases scariness. This is a fun addition - it's cool to see how well your skills have maintained your character. I am not sure whether scars reflect actual hits, or just area of strike. Age also plays a big factor. As you grow older, your hair may grow gray or white, and your skin will wrinkle. Being a heavy magic user will cause your hair to gray or whiten much faster, or investing a lot into strength abilities will cause you to become taller, more muscular, and hairier. Skill abilities will cause you to become more lithe and agile. Its all in how you play, and that's the part I like most about appearance.

+/- Character Customization (Alignment + Renown): The cornerstone of what made Fable so famous in the first place, it came under very heavy scrutiny, and it sort of held up. It depends on what you're looking for. The good and evil system is fun and well-done. You gain evil points by killing innocents, stealing, breaking doors and windows, and certain plot elements give you a choice between good and evil acts. You can also donate to the evil temple by sending them sacrifices of blood! Good acts are mostly just killing enemies - I don't know of any other way to become good, besides donating to the good temple with lots of money! I think they could have been a little more creative, but it's not a big deal. People will react to you different based on alignment - they won't necessarily fear you if you're evil, or love you if you're good. But if you're good, you'll receive comments like "I wish everyone were like you!" or they might clip and whistle for you. If you're evil, people might cringe and go" Eww!", (all depending on attractiveness and scariness, still) or run away, or scream, it's all pretty cool. Some reactions are a little over-used, but I suppose If I don't change alignment for two days of playing and wear the same clothes, too, I shouldn't really expect much else. Renown is based largely upon quests. Renown isn't changed by alignment - people know you or they don't. Unfortunately, I never noticed a real change in reactions as I became more renowned with my first character. You initial status is "unknown", and after a while rises to "familiar" then to "well-known" "famous" and so on. With my second character, I noticed many audible changes in reactions to me as I grew more famous - people would call out my name (well, my title, at least. you cannot have a name, only a title, which I chose to be Piemaster) and randomly clap, it was rather satisfying. You can boost renown by showing off trophies you gain from quests. However, both systems were rather shallow. They didn't really change much, and renown was easily maxed before the end of the game. Even though I played through the game as evil as possible, I could donate enough to the temple and because a saint. What's with that?! It would be one the if I could somewhat change my alignment, but there should be a limit, considering I killed my OWN SISTER so I could rule the world. Oh well.

+ Character Customization (Leveling Up): The system for leveling up in Fable was extremely well done. It's definitely a different system. There are 4 categories in which you have experience - General, Strength, Skill, and Will. Any time you kill an enemy, it drops General experience. Strength, Skill, and Will are gained by using skills specific to each category. For example, using a sword will give you strength experience each time you hit the enemy, because melee attacks are under the strength category. When you want to level a skill up, it uses its specific category first, and then uses up the reserve of general experience. This really makes it easier to make a less-specific character. Personally, I prefer to make Strong, Agile heroes, so I'd invest in Strength and Skill, and this system lets me do that easily. All the different skills you can get from each category are well made - the spells for Will even have a visual demonstration of what you'll get. Overall a solid system. Unfortunately there are level caps, so that prevents truly area-specific heroes.

- Mobility: This is probably my greatest grief with the game. You just don't have mobility. If you've ever played ANY Zelda at all, you know that you have a lot of room to breathe and explore - it's a part of what makes it fun and replayable. The problem with Fable is that you don't have a choice in how you go about getting to where you want to go. At best, your choice is a) go around the left side of the rock or b) go around the right side of the rock. It's not an exaggeration. The towns are not quite this constrained, but I often find myself sighing as I cannot explore. My nature is to go check every nook and cranny for a chest or item or whatever you please, but you really can't explore. I can probably guess at the reason they did this - the graphical quality was too high. I'll get to that in a minute, but they could only make the area so big or the framerate would drop. Back to the point - there's also an excessive amount of loading times. Notice I said loading times, not loading time. The loading times in themselves are short - never more than 10 seconds. However, they are very common. If you decided to run from one end of the world to the other, I count at least 15 loads, possibly more. This is why they created teleporters from town to town, but, that sort of takes away from the feel of being in a living, breathing world. The only plus side for mobility I can mention is the speed at which you run - they allow you to run at a rather brisk pace, so you don't have to snore as your character runs from one end of town to the other. Rather refreshing, but definitely does not cover for the loading times and strict borders.

- Quests/Storyline: This is a major pitfall in how the game feels. The plot is very....uninvolving, uninteresting, uncreative, it really just doesn't suck you in like the rest of Fable can. The plot (don't yell at me for spoilers, ok?) is about, well, you. You start off with your home and village burned, and you're rescued and taken to the Heroes Guild for training. Once done, you go out into the world and discover your sister is alive, and that she's a seeress, and had her eyes cut out when your town was burned. You then discover that your mother is alive, so you set out to rescue her (no choices here, for some reason) and you get captured (no choice again) and the only way to get out is to steal a key from the warden (woo for lack of choices) and then you set out again to stop the evil dude who imprisoned you, and you race around the world stopping him from activating these "focus" sights (which were never mentioned before, you saw them, they just looked like ruins, really kinda random) and you fail (guess what, no choice!) and then you chase him until he kills your mother (guess what I'm thinking!) and you kill him and then FINALLY you get a choice - you take the uber powerful sword and kill your sister....or throw it into a vortex randomly created by the dude you killed. Now remember in all of this you never get a valid reason from the dude as to why he wants the world to burn and have a lack of living things on it, he just does it. Overall, a boring and not well thought-out plot. As for the quests themselves, they're not as bad as the plot. You have an option of "boasting" on most quests, which makes them slightly harder but gets you more renown and money, if you accomplish them. Most boasts are either too easy or too hard. There's always two or three that are available for any mission, these being "Fist Fighter" (fight with just fists and no aggressive spells), "No Protection" (do the quest naked), and "Without a Scratch" (never get hurt), none of which are fun or interesting. There's usually 1 or 2 others which are easy to accomplish. In total there's between 40-60 quests, it really depends on what you count. There are about 15 main quests (AKA "gold" quests)which are all plot involved, and then about 20-25 side quests (AKA "silver" quests)which you can do whenever you please - most of which are more fun than the main quests. There is a final branch of quests which are found by talking to people throughout the game, things like finding a hidden treasure, completing various tasks to marry a mayor, and these are "bronze" quests. They do not significantly boost renown or money and cannot be boasted. They are mostly what you do at the end of the game - there are about 10-15 of these. With all these quests alone there's easily 40 of them, so I don't understand where some reviewers get the number 30 from. My approximate guess is 50, but I would add a few quests they didn't directly list (like finding "demon doors" and unlocking the silver chests, minute stuff like that, that when added together forms a sizable task as a quest). But I degress. Quests are all handled by going to the Heroes Guild and getting Quest Cards. Kind of akward, as there's supposed to be this dire situation, and you have to go back and grab this card...very weird. Could have been handled much better. The quests are fun, and since there's approximately 50 (to elaborate again, by my standards, if you did all 50, you would be 100% done with the game and nothing more could be done at all to further or advance your character in any way shape or form, so, yeah) you can have a good amount of entertainment. Not to my satisfaction though.

+ Visuals/Audio: The game is simply beautiful - you can't top the graphical quality you'll see in Fable. As I mentioned earlier with collision detections - they did a tremendous job on that. The lighting is astounding, the world is just a sight for sore eyes. However, I feel that this beauty is the cause of restricted environments. Personally, I'll take a crappy generic ground texture for some room to explore over a beautiful, linear...path. At this rate, games will end up being a box. It will be the most beautiful box you've ever seen! You can do anything at all in this box, anything you can think of, except, well, leave it. We obviously won't ever reach that point with games, but, I'll still take expanse over restriction any day. As for the frame rate, it ran rather well. (My guess is about 35 FPS) The only noticeable drops were before and after load points, cut scenes, basically anything that switched from standard view. There was also one point where there were 15 people on the screen, it dropped to about 10 FPS there. Beyond that, it was solid. As for the audio - equally astounding. The ambience is just jaw dropping at some points. The music is very pleasant, I've found myself stopping and just listening to it once or twice, and fits the feel of the game very nicely. The voice acting is surprisingly well done - at least, all those outside of the cutscenes. (I found all plot related dialogue to seem kinda corny/fake, for some reason) The surrounding people's reactions are very well articulated and the variety of responses is also good - my rough guess is that if you just walked up to any old person, you'd get 20-25 different reactions just off the spot from using expressions and talking, perhaps another 20-25 by changing armor (and using expressions afterwards), and probably another 20-25 by changing alignment, and then you can probably get about 10 new responses from each title you can buy (There are at least 25 titles available to buy, so, you do the math). Certain characters have too few - traders being the worst of the lot. A short-sighted mistake on their part, but minor. In any case, all of it sounds good.

+Combat: The combat was well implemented - it looks good, it doesn't get old, it's satisfying, it really just pleases all around. Melee combat has a few elements - blocking, rolling, and (duh) attacking. There's a targeting system much akin to Zelda's, and you can block which will stop all damage coming to you (back and front, but there is an animation for deflecting a back attack) and you can roll around your enemy. You can't block arrows, only dodge, which I kinda liked, but can get annoying in big battles. If the enemy blocks your attacks enough times, you'll gain an attack called a flourish, which is really just more powerful blow than goes through your opponent's blocks.Ranged combat is all bows, you can go first person and try decapitating your enemy with a headshot, or use the targeting system and power up your shots and all. It's nifty - they made use of the touch-sensitive buttons so that pressing harder allows you to do more damage and such. Very few games utilize that. Magic is pretty self explanatory - I would like to note that all the magic is EXTREMELY fun to use. All the spells have very unique animations, and in themselves are not standard (aside, from of course, lightning and fireball). Slow time is a fun one - at mastered level everyone nearly stops - you can run around your enemy, smack them up a bit, run to another enemy, smack em up, it's really great fun. The system for using magic is also good - I'll cover that in a second though. The variety of enemies is a little low for an entire game. Compared to the size of the world it isn't, but for the length of the game it is. I think there are only 18-20 different enemies, but, in defense, they're all different and require different fighting techniques to battle. The final thing about combat that I liked was the "combat multiplier" feature. Each time you hit an enemy, you would get a higher combat multiplier. If you were hit, you would lose the multiplier, or it would round down to the nearest number of 20, 10, or 5. The multiplier multiplies how much experience you gain, and really challenges you to do well in the battle. The amount your multiplier goes up is based the number damage you do to your target. Ex: If I do 500 damage to any enemy, my multiplier will go up to about 5 or 6 instantly. After that, It will probably take 4 more hits to get to 10, about 10 more hits to get to 20, and from then on it increases exponentially. For an idea of how hard it is to get above 20, my highest multiplier is 26 - and I fought for 5 minutes straight, with a lot of hits to me, but my point still stands.

+Interface/Other: As I frantically try and wrap this up (I've been writing for two hours), the interface was good. Very functional, not too cluttered, and displayed everything you wanted to know, The spell system was good, you had 6 sets of three spells you could quickly scroll through, and the functionality of using the D-Pad for expressions and items was very nice. Very well thought out. Interactions were made easy by having enemies outlined in red, important characters in green, and standard characters in blue. Other things I wanted to mention but don't fit in the other categories are the statistics menu, marriage, and pubs. The statistics menu records TONS of stuff - how many of each enemy you've killed, your farthest chicken kick, your favorite spell, how many houses you have, the list is huge. Very nice. Marriage is possible and is all based on the attraction system. Girls (and guys, ugh) can fall for you and if you give them a wedding ring, they'll marry you (if you have a house). Rather short and weird, but, just another thing to note. Bars are cool - you can get drunk, drink till you throw up, get other people drunk, or play bar games which are all little mini games in which you wager money. You can play stuff like blackjack or coin golf, kinda cool, not super interesting, but cool. FINALLY, you can also buy houses. If you kill the owner of a house, a for sale sign appears out front, and then you can buy it for a marginal amount of money - you can own an entire town.

My gosh. This took me exactly two hours.

My score: 8.9/10

Positives: Fun, easy going, soothing, generally just an enjoyable play.

Negatives: Limited, not fully creative, superficially based.

Most comparable to: Zelda, Vice City

Time Value: For someone with an imagination and enjoys RPGs, probably 30-40 hours. The average Joe will probably get 15-25 hours.

I AM DONE.
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O.o
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Ah, fridays, we do love them. School is ok, i'm really not doing well grade-wise. My math teacher sucks. We keep learning something new and thena week after learning it, get a problem harder than ANYTHING we had on homework or in class, its like she enjoys watching her students fail. Honestly, when 25/30 kids fail a math quiz, that's not normal. She's fresh out of college, and really inexperienced. The only reason she can handle the class is because everyone is so tired.

Oh well.
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O.o
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A good day of school, I went to the first Debate Team meeting, which seems like it will be a nice side thing. It only meets once (at most twice) a week and competitions are one saturday a month. :-)
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O.o
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Twas a good day. I stayed home yesterday to mow lawns, sleep, and play a little Fable. It was nice - it was a really pretty day, definately worth the mockery I recieved today. In any case, we had a quiz in Global about the European countries - I got the 5 capitals, definitions, and seas right, but I couldn't remember ANY of the minor countries (post soviet), so I'll probably get like a B on that. But anyways - I was back up to 132 pounds last night, although I wieghed 127 today. This can't be normal, really. O.o
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Quiz!!!

LonelyPiccy
You are lonely!!


How Social are you ::Anime Piccles::
brought to you by Quizilla


I like that picture.
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O.o
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Classes have been going well - I'm really enjoying learning Java. It's fun, even though I'm doing very minimal stuff. I failed a math quiz, unfortunately. I don't get it - I understood everything perfectly, but the 5 questions on there were extremely hard - much harder than the ones we'd been practicing. I only actually answered one of them. *sigh* I don't really like my math class all that much. English has been pretty good, not awesome. Global is great - Ms. Rumney is a really great teacher. I'm not doing very well in Chemistry - I can't figure out this Scientific Notation (yes, it's simple, but I suck at it, there's a reason I'm in Course 2 Math) and I've slipped up on a few assignments so far. I just need to get on my feet.
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O.o
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UPS sucks!

I got free 3-day shipping for Fable...and now I must wait over the weekend! *tear*

Zach was telling me about DHL, I guess its another rising shipping service.

And please, I don't need to hear that I should have had it shipped to the EB in town. *mutter*
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Contuining in my rants, I have a little blurb on Fable, and about the outcries of dissapointment most audible of Penny Arcade. Fable ahs turned out to be a big dissapointment to many because of the extreme hype thrown out about it. The problem is, they had to drop so much stuff due to time and budget restraints. Mostly time, though. They spent 4 years on the game, so..

Here is a bulleted list of sutff they dropped:
-Two player co-op
-Heros as adversaries (heroes would eventually track you down and fight you for reputation and stuff)
-A whole lot quests
-A bundle of various/minor things (like taking clothes from people you kill, kids getting haircuts after you, etc.)

In short: Fable's vision didn't live up to Fable's reality. (Stolen from Tim Buckley)

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O.o
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hsnh
You're a "Yellow Angel" which means
you're probably really motherly. You're not
like a soccermom or anything but you're
protective of those you care for and you'd do
anything for them. You're usually the wiser one
in your group of friends and you're a good
psychiatrist because you've been through a lot
of stuff and know the best thing to do in every
situation. But you don't take any crud from
other people and they respect you for your
ability to stick up for yourself and others but
you don't pick pointless fights just because
your mad. You're very controled and can deal
with anything with a calm smile. (If you cannot
see the picture, go to my homepage and scroll
down near the bottom. I have the results from
all my quizess that have pics)


What Color Angel Are You? (PICS)
brought to you by Quizilla


You know, there's all these quizzes I want to take but they're all like "Girls only!", so I'm all left out. *sniff*

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O.o
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A fair amount of sutff has happened in the recent days. I have a lot of rants to make. Hehe.

First: the principal. Everyone knows he sucks, and I'll explain why.

He's enforcing the dress code. Probably a good thing, right? Well, not the way he's doing it. First week of school, no warning, very sudden. I've also heard that they don't actually make clothes that suit the dress code (they have three tests - if you stand up straight with arms slackened at the side, and you can feel skin on your fingers, you need a longer skirt/shorts/whatever. if you put your hand on your shoulder and you feel skin, you're violating the dress code. you also can't have any of your belly or back showing.), but the thing is, its not gonna help anything. His reasons were "to create a distraction-free and safe environment" - and unless every guy in the school is an obsessed pervert, that's not true. I don't sit in math class and miss the formula for slope (or whatever) because the girl across from me has her shoulders showing. Please.

He's forcing much tighter rules on passes throughout school. Which, I can explain very vlearly why it won't help. Before him, during your lunch period you could go a few places without getting a pass or permission, like the main office, attendance office, most of the classrooms in E building, and the library. The way he has it now, you cannot leave the cafeteria/quad for any reason without a pass. When you can't walk 20 ft from the quad to the guidance office to change you schedule becuase you don't have a pass, that's just beurocracy. You can't go to the library without a pass. Nothing, nada.

He doesn't allow any electronic stuff to be used on school. Sounds fine, right? The problem is when it comes to stuff like study halls and lunch. Study halls can be deathly boring if you can't go anywhere. So basically, you have to sit and do nothing. Funny thing is, he thinks the same rule can be applied to teachers. My German teacher was telling me what he did to a teacher who was in a study hall (that is, she was the one taking care of it), and she was on her laptop, doing work, which, I might mention, all teachers do. The principal comes up to her and says she has to get ogg her laptop so she can make sure her study hall is safe and in check.

Bull. Beaurocracy.

He's overworking teachers - he's taken out some of the rules set to keep teachers from being overworked. My German teacher is a prime example of one those who has been shafted by this whole thing. She teaches 5 classes of German, which should exempt her from having to take a study hall, but under his new rules, she gets to do that, plus, her room is taken by a spanish teacher 1 period every day, and she's handling the German exchange.

He won't allow food outside of the cafeteria. Not even in the quad. It's understandable to ban it from being in the halls, but that's easy to do! There are hall moniters everywhere, they can just tell the student to go eat in the cafeteria. The problem is the classrooms. For those of us who do not have a lunch, we have to wait forever to get a pass so we can eat at all in the classroom. His reasons were retarded - he wanted classrooms to be safe and clean. Teachers can handle that, they always have. More beaurocracy.

He's switching homerooms to first period, which takes away my chance to see a lot of people before school, and it adds 10 minutes to my time with my German teacher. Icky.

So that's my rant about the principal.
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An okay day, my classes aren't as awesome as they were yesterday, for a number of reasons. My chemistry class now sucks. I just have no friends in there, at all. It's weird thinking about the fact that I had no friends in most of my classes at the beginning of last year. But this really annoying kid, whom I'm sure a lot of you know, Greg Galyanov moved into almost all of my classes. The only classes I don't have with him are Global and Programming. A minor thing, but he's pretty obnoxious.

I'm planning on getting a decent amount of sleep tonight. I haven't had enough lately, and it's caused me to slip in Chemistry. Which doesn't help my opinion of chemistry.

To add on to that, I've been losing weight, which, at this point, just isn't healthy. At the moment I weigh 123 pounds, so at my current rate I've been going down a pound a day. :-/ I don't feel sick or anything, I just haven't had time to eat and such. Plus, we don't have much food that I'm interested in eating. But I'm not that worried about it, I just don't wanna be a super stick. Anyways.
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O.o
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*reflects upon today's date*

*realizes it's past midnight*

*discontinues reflecting*

Friday afternoon I walked home with Ben, Paul, and Zach, and we temporarily parted ways so that Paul and I could get pizza. It was good pizza (sammy's) and we walked to my house, chilled, and we all spent the night at Zach's, though Ben walked home just before midnight, so technically he didn't. It was fun, we watched TV, played Apples to Apples, and ate pizza, watched videos and sort of played games. I got home about noon and Paul left my house about 1:00. Twas all good.

I'm very hungry for pizza right now.

EDIT: I guess as any diehard fan is obligated to do, I must mention that new screenshots and several more previews of Halo 2 have been released. No, I'm too lazy to give linkage, but I will say I was tricked by those fools. It's all the product of a media embargo that was lifted 12:01 AM Friday, which I failed to realize was under Pacific Standard Time. So Thursday night I stayed up till 12:30 AM wondering why the new previews and shots hadn't been posted. I was rather sad to hear they ditched the ATV (APC) for multiplayer, at least. I was also slightly irked by the symmetry between the Covenant and Human weapons (carbine/battle rifle, beam rifle/sniper rifle, plasma rifle/SMG, brute shot/rocket launcher [the differences for that one is obvious but the point still stands]) but I trust Bungie enough to smooth it out. Plus, the build they were demonstrating is at least three months old....very, very comforting.
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O.o
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New schedule:

1 - Honors German 3 (Bronfenbrenner)

Note: I had every intention of dropping this but my dad later found 3 colleges that do requires 3 years of one foreign language, and I wasn't sure how I was going to explain myself the the teacher or to my guidance counselor.

2 - Honors Math 10 (House)

Note: I really wanted to get a different class, but, such was not possible.

3 - Principles of Engineering (Peters)

Note: I had to drop Digital Engineering and take this so I could fit programming in.

4 - Honors Global History 2 (Rumney)

Note: I had Pipia before, and she was bad. She was a first time teacher. Huzzah.

5 - (semester 1) Introduction to Programming 1 (Teukolsky)

5 - (semester 2) Introduction to Programming 2 (Teukolsky)

6 - Honors English 10 (Asklar)

7 - Physical Chemistry (Smith, B)

8 - (day 1) Study Hall

Note: My guidance counselor didn't actually put this on my list, so as of right now I don't know who it's with.

8 - (even days) PE

8 - (days 3, 5) Physical Chemistry Lab

Comment if you have a class with me. I'm annoyed that I had to move Chemistry, because I was in it with Zach and Jared, which includes PE and study hall, but, maybe I have other classes with them. Chances are I do. I had two classes with people I knew and that was it. Chemistry, and sort of German, but that class sucks anyways.i know I have classes with people in programming, though. And hopefully PoE (principles of engineer) too. Huzzah.
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-.-
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This was quite possibly the worst first day of school, ever. It was crap. My schedule is insanely retarded, I have no programming and I can't get out of German. German sucks. Math sucks. Global sucks. Lunch sucks. English sucks. Everything...just...sucks... the ONLY two classes I can enjoy are Chemistry and Digital Electronics. The only two classes I have multiple friends in is...Chemistry...and...NOTHING ELSE. I have an appointment with my Guidance counselor to change the schedule, and I'm thinking maybe if I switch to combined I can take programming. I need to switch this schedule around.

I cannot go through school like this. I just can't deal with such terrible classes.
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O.o
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You are Blue
What color are you? (Anime Pictures)

brought to you by Quizilla

If an Electric Dragon flies by your house, all the electic appliences over surge and your TV flickers...
Your an electric Dragon! Well, Well, Well, Speedy!
Electic dragons are just do darn quick, which
means you must be quick at something. Whether
its running, swimming, or answering questions,
you are super speed. But of course, you have a
craze for video games or computers. You can
play amazingly at any game or at least try to.
Go you!


What elemental dragon are you?
brought to you by Quizilla


Artistic
You are naturally born with a gift, whether it be
poetry, writing or song. You love beauty and
creativity, and usually are highly intelligent.
Others view you as mysterious and dreamy, yet
also bold since you hold firm in your beliefs.


What Type of Soul Do You Have ?
brought to you by Quizilla


vamp
You are Form 9, Vampire: The Undying.

"And The Vampire was all that remained on
the blood drowned creation. She attempted to
regrow life from the dead. But as she was
about to give the breath of life, she was
consumed in the flame of The Phoenix and the
cycle began again."


Some examples of the Vampire Form are Hades (Greek)
and Isis (Egyptian).
The Vampire is associated with the concept of
death, the number 9, and the element of fire.
Her sign is the eclipsed moon.

As a member of Form 9, you are a very realistic
individual. You may be a little idealistic,
but you are very grounded and down to earth.
You realize that not everything lasts, but you
savor every minute of the good times. While
you may sometimes find yourself lonely, you
have strong ties with people that will never be
broken. Vampires are the best friends to have
because they are sensible.


Which Mythological Form Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

You represent... anger.
You represent... anger.
Mad at the world, eh? You have a tendency to...
freak out easily. Overly emotional about
everything, you're most prone to bouts of
cruelty and moodiness. Other people may be
afraid of the fact that you explode so easily,
but at least you're honest... even if you're
honest about not liking anything.


What feeling do you represent?
brought to you by Quizilla


Wow. I love quizzes. Especially that mythological creature one. Vampire...mmm...I don't imagine vampires in the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Blade" way, I think of them more as outcasts, a thick, heavily armored king off in black, majestic castle, sitting at his throne, leaning on his knees, holding his sword in dismay, alone. And of course at night he goes out to find a bear for a snack. None of that human eating stuff. Yickth. I tried finding a picture to illustrate my words, but, oh well. I still like that vampire one. Heh.
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O.o
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Apologies for not updating in such a long time. Especially Gwen, who informed me at least half a dozen times that my blog was "boring" for the past week.

-.-

In any case, I've had a rather null week, basically tonight's sleep will end it all with a big question mark and begin the school year. I might not sleep, I uually have trouble sleeping on the night before school. Summer hasn't been what I had hoped for - I mostly get the feeling ebcause of the two weeks a bit after camp (the one right after was wonderful), spent waking up very late and doing very little. Summer hasn't been bad, I just wanted to end it better. Sam's absence will be....very noticable....tomorrow. It's not gonna be the same.

We miss you man.

I've basically been playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind all week. Fun game, not the best RPG ever made, but continually entertaining. For those of you who don't know, Morrowind is essentially the first open ended RPG ever made. It has some 10-12 factions and guilds you can join, which make up probably 250-300 of the quests you can do, while the other 100 or 150 are just out there for you to discover. The only problem I find with the game is that everything is minimalistic. The interactions are basic and very black and white. The characters and buildings are not very unique from eachother, and all the names are very random and not easy to remember. In any case, it's still a game worth playing.

I'm ready for school to start.
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O.o
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I know you're all bored of these Fable posts, but I promise, this is the last one until The 17th or 18th. Gamespot did an interview of Peter Molyneux, the lead dev on the Fable team. This was an absolutely FABULOUS interview. It gives huge insight on all kinds of things - the gaming industry, British culture, the development of Fable, and it's really very cool.

Linkage

This really prompted me to do a little blurb on gaming and the like. Molyneux is really a great guy - you can tell from the interview. Something that he mentions in the interview is that Fable was brought up with very grossly exaggerated expectations. They were expectations that Molyneux said himself that he planted, and later regretted because he knew his team couldn't fulfill. He talked a lot about how the project evolved as time went - they set out to make the greatest RPG of all time. That's what every team making an RPG sets out to do. Because if you shoot for anything less, you're gonna get less. He doesn't believe they made the greatest RPG of all time, and I find that a very brave statement for him to make. This interview alone has restored my faith in Fable.

As for the gaming industry in total, I now feel a lot more enlightened on the whole process. The gaming industry is often interpreted as run by single men, who can afford to stay at work for 12 hours each day - because they want to, because they have no responsibilites. Molyneux touched on the fact that over the course of 3 1/2 years, 20 babies were born to families on his team. The gaming industry has changed. Maybe that's what it used to be, maybe there are still a few companies out there still like that. I don't know. As the makers of games have changed, so have gamers. Gaming once used to be a very limited field of people. Up until about the time of the Nintendo and Sega consoles, not many people were into video games. PC games were non existant until Windows 95 came out. Computers weren't nearly as user-friendly 10, even 5 years ago, and thus that has opened up the PC world to those not as much into gaming.

The whole point of this, really, is that I'm amazed at how the whole industry has advanced. Molyneux said he wanted games to become on the same level as books and movies. I think we're almost there. The only thing left is for the press to embrace what is now equally important to our culture as books and movies.
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O.o
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Gamespot has posted by far the most helpful review on Fable thus far. Definately worth a read, since it's only 3 pages. (boy do I hate IGN's excessively long reviews)

Linkage

It gave Fable an 8.6. At this point I'm still looking forward to it, but I'm hoping it was all an attempt by BBB to figure out how to improve the game.
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O.o
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Ben made this...so...

01) Name? ...i'll amuse you. my name is tim.

02) Starting comments? that first question was retarded. i mean, everyone knows MY name! or they should.

***HYPOTHETICAL***

03) If you could have 2 super powers, what would they be? teleportation and transformation

04) If you were a super hero, what costume would you have?
tight black leath---ahem. black silk cape, green + black carbon fiber/kevlar vest, black long sleeve shirt (silk), black baggy silk pants, black kevlar helmet, and excessively thick and durable boots. black and green. and a riot shield (black and green). and a bandana. that's green too.

05) If you could choose the color of the sky, what color would you choose? green

06) If you could choose the color of the SEA, what color would you choose? black

07) If you were an adventurer, what would be your weapon of choice? a flail. unless it's a modern day adventurer, then I'd have to choose a G3SG/1. (H&K sniper rifle)

08) Pick a place in the world that, if it sank into the ocean and was never seen again, you wouldn't care about? CANADA.

09) If you could transform into an animal, what animal would it be and why?
flying squirrel, because squirrels are cute and they're probably about as nimble as mammals get.

10) If you could kill the makers of a certain commercial on TV, what commercial would it be? those stupid, retarded time warner cable commercials. all of them. I hate them all.

***FAVORITE***

11) Word? ...penguin...(heehee Colette!)

12) Flower? potato. not really, probably a tulip..

13) TV show? ooh, tough one. Cosby Show, possibly Family Guy

14) Video game? FFVII

15) Place to eat? CHILE'S!

***WHAT COMES TO MIND WHEN I SAY***

16) Potato? a potato.

17) German? everything that comes to mind involves hitler. it may be because I just watched a documentary on greece and how it got invaded in WWII

18) Pooch? a dog.

19) Lion? kenya.

20) Skeleton? a skeleton.

21) Pop-tart? toaster

22) Menstrual? ...

23) Fluffy? a very furry poodle

24) Nothing? cake.

25) Cellular? a cell phone.

***NEAR WORST CASE***

26) You're tied up in a sack, along with some potatoes, some twisty-ties, and a small American flag. You're in the back seat of a car being driven off to somewhere by an armed kidnapper. What do you do?
eat potatoes until you have anough room to move semi freely. gnaw through the sack with your teeth and make two slits for your hands. take the american flag and twisty ties, looping them together. choke the kidnapper with makeshift rope-thingy, sell the car, buy an HDTV and go home.

27) You're stranded on a desert island, except that the sand is made out of needles, and you have a sword in your stomach. Also, you spontaneously combust every 5 minutes, and the undead red baron is flying in circles overhead, waiting for his chance to strike. What do you do?

well you obviously wouldn't know that you'd spontaneously combust every 5 minute unless you'd gone through it, so, we can assume I'm undead. that reduces the threat of the red baron, and makes him a target to maintain survival.

***END***

28) List these on a scale from least to greatest: . (?!? i dunno what I'm supposed to be listing...)

29) On a scale of 1 to 10, pick something and rate it, make it clever! woo...ummm....life. life is about an 8 right now. yep.

30) Ending comments? i want more of those "worst case scenarios" and "what comes to mind" things. otherwise fun.

31) What you wish your name was? i actually like my name.
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