Reflections and Self-Portraits in today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #116 is:

Ever since I was young I was fascinated by visual depictions of infinity. It’s such a strange concept to get one’s mind around and I’m a visual person. So I’ve always loved looking into parallel mirrors. I also used to love hooking up a video camera to a TV and then filming the TV. The infinite scene there was so awesome to observe.

Back to Otakon for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #117 is:

Confusingly, Lolita fashion has noting to do with the novel by Nabokov about a man falling in love with an underaged girl. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita) Instead, it is an emphasis on Victorian-age fashion. It is, according to Wikipedia (and substantiated by what I’ve seen), subdivided into Gothic Lolita, Sweet Lolita, Classic Lolita, and Punk Lolita. I think this girl falls somewhere between Gothic and Sweet Lolita.

So, I started working on my Nanowrimo partway through November.  I quit partway through because I fell too far behind.  So I reworked the story to have a better ending than the rambling mess it had become and tried to get some people to edit it for me.  They’ve been busy and I’m sick of seeing it on my TODO list.  So here’s my Nanowrimo Entry for 2010 as reworked -> NanoWrimo 2010 Reworked

Recently I was thinking about cataloguing my comic books.  Recent family events convinced me to get on with it and so I spent all weekend putting the information into the KDE collection database Tellico.  It had lots of useful fields to fill out, so I figured I was probably only going to do this once and so I may as well do it correctly.  I entered in the names of the writers, pencillers, inkers, and so on.  And I learned some interesting stuff.

[caption id=“attachment_4589” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Walking Around in Mass Effect”] [/caption]

I recently bought Mass Effect in a Steam sale that knocked the price of Bioware’s RPG to $5. Thanks yet again to the guys at the Giant Bombcast (seriously, this is the second or third I’ve bought because of them and fourth or fifth from podcast recommendations), I’d wanted to play the game, but was waiting for a sale price since I have tons of other games I haven’t even started yet. Having finished Final Fantasy X and the single player mode of Portal 2, I started on Mass Effect.

Here are some desktop background calendars for June 2011!  Just click on the image and then set it as your background.

[caption id=“attachment_4585” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“June 2011 - 1024x768 for square monitors”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_4586” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“June 2011 - 1680x1050 for widescreen monitors”] [/caption]

Just used preupgrade to go from Fedora 14 to 15.  The entire process took about 3 hours.  That’s not too shabby!  In the old days of disc upgrades it had to go for days.  Yum upgrade often had to work overnight.  This one was much faster!  After the upgrade, I had to turn off my dropbox repo - apparently they don’t have a Fedora 15 repo turned on yet.  That allowed me to run yum distro-sync which bought me up to more or less at least what’s in Fedora 15.  Otherwise you’re just upgrading your packages, but you may be missing some new ones that were added in.  That’s what messed me up on the last upgrade.  I still have to work on the rpmnew thing to get my config files as close to what they should be as possible and I have to figure out if the orphan packages I have installed are programs I should get rid of to make sure they don’t potentially cause problems in the future.  KDE is working just as good as before.  GDM looks very different - very similar to Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell.  I’ll have to sneak in there later on in the week and try Gnome Shell out.  Sound works and everything else works.  (I only use an Ethernet connection so it’s not too complicated of a situation)

This Photojojo consists solely of 365 Project photos.

note: this game came out ten years ago, so I’m going to speak about spoilers freely

I finished Final Fantasy X a few weeks ago. I’d started playing it a long time ago, but the horrible voice acting grated on my nerves and I stopped playing. But, as I was making a list of games I owned but hadn’t completed, I decided to give Final Fantasy X another shot. And I ended up getting sucked into a story that I enjoyed for its uniqueness. Final Fantasy VI and VII are essentially the exact same story. In fact, the reason I have always been mystified about the love for Final Fantasy VII is that Final Fantasy VI did the same thing with a larger cast and more emotion. And Final Fantasy IX was essentially a love letter to Final Fantasy fans full of inside jokes and references. Final Fantasy X is, to borrow a phrase from The Giant Bombcast, a Japanese-ass game.

There was a time when I loved video games.  I subscribed to EGM and EGM2.  I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news.  I read IGN religiously.  The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation.  Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions.  Most of the video games of that time period were still very arcade-y in nature.  Or they were platformers like Mario or Tomb Raider that had the flimsiest excuse for a plot.  Yo, the princess got kidnapped again.  Run through a bunch of levels to get to her.  No exposition or reason for anything going on.  You just needed to complete these tasks to unlock the final boss fight.  Of course, games were starting to have cut scenes between levels to keep the narrative going.  And I remember the great FMV flame wars that caused.  Were you just working to unlock expository videos?  This was better than the Mario case, but there was still just a small correlation between what you were doing to get through the level and what was going on in the story.  The biggest exception was the movie tie-in game, but those tended to have gameplay elements that were full of suck.