Yeah, yeah, I'm slow. I've got a million and one things I want to do, and don't really feel like DOING any of them at the moment.

I have a lot of stuff to scan in that I sketched last semester. Look for it in the next few days to a week or so. Plus I have ideas that I want to sketch now, but I dunno when those will get done.


Anyway, new year, new journal. But first, CHRISTMAS PRESENTS!

Atelier Annie (DS)
Avalon Code (DS)
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story (DS)
Scribblenauts (DS)
Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs (manga vol. 1)
Thermotex TTS Platinum infrared pad
Pampered Toes toe stretcher
$30 iTunes
Relic women's watch


The watch, unfortunately, is very...touchy. I wore it for two days, and in that time the silly thing randomly quite working four or five times. It acted like the stem had been pulled out, as if I just touched the stem it began working again, but I couldn't see the stem being pulled out at all; it looked totally pushed in. I also wasn't doing anything but walking around, eating, and other casual things; it's not like I was playing tennis or the Wii or doing anything that would cause massive trauma to a wristwatch. It got annoying to have to reset my watch every few hours.

The clasp is also nigh-impossible to open when it's on my wrist (shoot, it's nigh-impossible to open to get it on my hand the first time!). The clasp is too strong and the stem is too weak.

It's very pretty, though: [link] I have a hard time finding watches that I like because I have a tiny wrist and so even normal women's watches look huge on me. That and most of the small watches that they make are just ugly. I finally found one that I like, and the darn thing doesn't work right. *headdesk*


Avalon Code is addicting. I've already played through it and beaten the final boss, who was actually surprisingly hard considering I couldn't find a time to run up and whack him with the book so I could stick a whole bunch of illness codes on him (I did that to all the bosses XD). He also doesn't stand close enough for me to use my sword on him (favorite weapon, ha ha), so I just planted bombs at the edge of the platform and then ran around tossing little slow shuriken at him.

Now working on getting everyone's code aspirations and all the silly affection events with the guys. They are SO LULZY. I mean, first of all, as their affection rate increases, you get little cutscenes of them thinking dorkiness. Second, your character is an idiot who doesn't lock her door at night. So of course when they decide they love you, the guys just WALTZ IN and wake you up by asking you to guess who it is (it's voiced, and it's not hard since it's usually whoever you spammed with gifts the day before). Then they randomly shout "I LOVE YOU!" and run out the door before you say ANYTHING. Then if you go and talk to them outside, they of course act like NOTHING HAPPENED and don't say anything about it. XD

And then, if you keep gift-spamming, you'll get a second "confession" scene that's rather perverted. So far I've gotten it from two guys: Duran, the wannabe-hero, and Rex, your obnoxious childhood best friend. They're pretty similar: the guy comes in and declares his undying pixel-love for you (it sounds a lot like a marriage proposal, actually, but there's no ceremony), you can accept or reject him, and if you accept they hug (that's right, no kissing for you XD). Then the screen blanks out a minute, and then you get another short scene. Duran asks you to patrol town with him, which isn't terribly suspicious, but Rex just comments on the fact that you're making breakfast. I just about fell off my bed laughing as I realized they'd figured out a way to have teenagers sleeping together in an E10 game.

Then again, the game is by Yoshifumi Hashimoto, the same genius who created the Rune Factory series that gave us such gems as Max in a bikini and wanting to kiss you (thankfully at different times XD), marrying a pair of confused twins, and a whole bunch of Frontier shenanigans. So I really shouldn't be surprised.

Of course, even Harvest Moon itself has tried to be a little risque at times (despite being, for a long time, one of the cleanest series ever. Think like 50's-TV-married-couple-sleeps-separately clean. Walking-a-girl-to-her-front-door-and-holding-hands-is-a-BIG-DEAL clean). Who can forget A Wonderful Life's "miracle potion"? So I guess I really, REALLY shouldn't be surprised. XD


My brother got, and already beat, both the new Jak and Daxter and Ratchet & Clank. I didn't get to see a whole lot of JaD (looking over your brother's shoulder to see a tiny PSP screen gets cramped), but I watched him play most of R&C. The quality on the cutscenes is really varied, like they wanted to render them awesomely but had to cut it short for time's sake. When the game opened, the first thing I noticed was that you can see the fabric detail on Quark's green suit (check out the heavy woven mesh; it makes graphic arts nerds like me giddy with glee XD). But later, when you're watching at the arena as he "helps" Ratchet fight Snowball, the quality is WAY down. It looks like what happens when I turn down the quality settings on my raytrace renders in 3D Max and Maya to do a test run (my computer hates rendering anyway, so even low settings can take forever. Maya seems to run a bit better than Max, but that may be due to differences in what I was rendering in each).

I also noticed that when a lot of enemies get on the screen, it doesn't render Ratchet's shadow as he runs around (it comes back after you kill them all, scaredy-shadow). Ha ha, sneaky cheat there, Insomniac. But, if you jump during one of those times, it DOES suddenly draw his shadow. Why? Because players judge where they're going to land by where the shadow falls, and if they don't have a shadow, they may jump into the lava by mistake and get REALLY mad. XD

Not too many spoilers, since I dunno who's played it and who hasn't, but I also loved when the Plumber tells Clank, "Plumbers can't go around jumping down strange pipes all willy-nilly. That'd be ridiculous!" and then you hear the Mario-goes-down-a-pipe sound. Epic.

Also, I felt a lot more sad at the death of the final boss (not saying who...) than at the one six minutes prior. Just sayin'.


Also went and saw Avatar and Sherlock Holmes.

Avatar is pretty good, though the movie's reviews seem to be split based more on whether or not you care about the so-called subtext commentary on Bush and Iraq. I really don't care (I don't like war, but I also don't like having to worry about being attacked at home, either. That seems to be where the metaphor falls apart: the Na'vi really didn't seem to care that humans wanted to hang out on Pandora until they started wanting to rip up their home and totally trash the place. So long as they were just being decent neighbors, differences in philosophy didn't constitute a reason to march up and kill people). I actually didn't notice all the subtext until I went home and looked online to see what other people thought of it. Man, some people are just unpleasable.

Everyone agrees that the movie looks awesome, though. Completely. Freaking. Awesome. Everything looks and moves so realistically. You'd believe they ACTUALLY DID fly to an alien planet to film the whole thing. Like when they go to New Zealand or South America to film in a real jungle as opposed to setting up some potted plants in SoCal and buying a parrot from the pet store. Only more awesome, 'cause IT'S ALL CGI AND I CAN'T AUTOMATICALLY SAY WHAT'S REAL AND WHAT'S NOT (I actually thought the film was totally CGI when I first saw trailers, because the aliens and the humans have the same level of detail, and I knew the aliens couldn't be real, so the people must've been fake XD).

Loved the fact that their mineral was ACTUALLY CALLED "unobtainium". Totally made of win.

Also, the fighter pilot chick was cool. I forgot her name (pffth, I'm terrible with picking up names...okay, Wiki says her name's Trudy), and yeah, she gets blown up at the end (I'm not a fan of characters dying on us XP), but she reminded me, in a totally awesome way, of a cross between Ziva David (NCIS) and Felina Feral (SwatKATS). Win.

The whole mating-under-the-tree scene? Squick. I'm gonna have to go with the Internet on this one. That scene could totally have been cut and we wouldn't lose anything. I don't care if they were technically married (or whatever the Na'vi equivalent of marriage is...apparently it's kinda like a shotgun wedding type "you fooled around and now you're stuck with each other" thing, but they're a little more careful about their fooling partner than most humans). I just don't like watching those kinds of scenes.

Natyri also needs a shirt. I mean, according to TV Tropes, you have a maximum of three naked breasts in a PG-13 movie (not sure how accurate that is, but whatever). We use up those three scenes in the first five minutes she's on screen. And everyone could use pants (surprisingly, the only comment on this is when Jake attempts to pick a thong-wedgie the first time he's forced to wear one). Yeah, you eventually ignore it and you're just like "Blue people. Eh." (I think it's because I don't associate blue with skin, so if I don't focus on it, I read "blue" as "clothing"), but the movie probably should've been rated R. Just sayin'.

Totally called the ending. Right down to the point where he opens his eyes and the film ends.


Sherlock Holmes is pretty good, but takes a bit to get going (my mom actually dozed off at first, but then, she sometimes sleeps through CSI). I enjoyed his explanation of what was about to happen in slow-motion and then watching the real-time action again. That's fun.

The biggest trouble I had was that when you say "Sherlock Holmes", I think of this guy:

[link]

Yes, I used to watch Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century. I am a nerd. I admit it. XD

And if you say "Watson", I of course think of this portly robot in a mask:

[link]

Well, wouldn't you know it, the actors they picked to play Holmes and Watson...look like Watson and Holmes. So then I told myself to think of Holmes as a younger, less cranky House. Which worked...until I noted that Watson had blue eyes, like House, while Holmes had very dark brown. XD

I never actually did read the original stories. I intended to at one point, even found a collection of Doyle's works in the library in junior high, but never checked it out. I think I was too busy hunting down Dinotopia books at the time (they seemed to have different authors, so of course the library had them scattered ALL OVER. They need a section for "series by multiple authors" so you can find all the books in one place).


All in all, not a bad way to spend the end of 2009.

I of course set off fireworks with my family for New Year's (one rocket exploded inside the tube...oops!).

Now to get to work on my other games and my manga...

Okay, so I know there's at least one of you out there who considers themself to be mechanically inclined. So I want you to tell me what you think this sounds like:

Wednesday the second, I was driving home from class (I have to drive all the way downtown now, because I'm going for my bachelor's). I had driven about 10-15 miles with no problem at all when my accelerator suddenly stopped working. I use the cruise control on my car, and the cruise disengaged and my accelerator wouldn't work. If I pressed it, the car just made an awful lurching motion and choked. I coasted to a stop on the shoulder, put on my flashers, and called my mom.

She said for me to drive to a gas station near my dad's work, because it was lit (this was about 10:15 at night) and he has a mechanic he likes to use there who could look at it in the morning. I stepped on the gas pedal, and the car got up to about ten miles an hour and then started doing the lurching and choking noise (I don't really know how to describe it; it reminded me of an animal choking, complete with the retching movements). So I let off the accelerator and allowed the car to coast, and then pressed it again (and yes, like any silly female, I was totally talking to the car, too XD).

After a while (it was a couple miles to the gas station), I noticed that I was going fairly fast, forty miles an hour or so. That's when I realized that the car didn't care how fast it was going so long as the tachometer didn't get above 2,000 RPMs. And since the tachometer went down faster than the speedometer coasted down, I could get up to any speed that didn't require more than 2,000 RPMs to sustain (going the posted 65 takes nearly 3,000). The only problem was that if I had to stop or slow down for any reason, my acceleration was horrid.

Aside from the fact that my GPS had no clue where I was going (Houston is always under construction, so it kept telling me to take turns that no longer existed, or were a hundred yards away from their original position), I got to the gas station no problem. I went and sat by the pumps, turned off my car, and watched the people getting their gas.

When my family got there (they ALL came ), I turned the car back on. It worked FINE. No problem with acceleration. No problem with sustaining 65 MPH. Nothing. And the next day, the mechanic couldn't find anything, either. No loose hoses, no blown fuses, nothing.

So I'm gonna ask you guys: what do YOU think it sounds like?


Also, give me ideas for Christmas presents. I have NO CLUE what I want, and my mom is pestering me for a list. I'm considering the Inubaka manga series (at least getting the first book and seeing if I like it), and looking at Scribblenauts and Drawn to Life 2, and possibly a really old PC game called Yo-Jin-Bo (no relation to Yu-Gi-Oh! XD). But there's not a great deal out that I want right now, or at least that I know about. So what does everybody want right now, and have you heard of anything that you think might interest me?

Yeah, so massive art dump tonight. Making a new journal to let you know the following:

1. I'm not dead
2. Three and a half months is more than enough time for any entry to sit on the front page.

Check the scraps, too, if you don't watch them. Little bit ended up in there.

I've been accepted into the University of Houston for their Bachelor's program in Game Design. Going to start some time in the fall. See if getting a bachelor's degree and a proper portfolio will get me a job - or at least an interview.

I also applied for a "Partners in Time" thing for TimeGate Studios. I guess it's kind of like a contract job; they call you in when they need you. They're only a little distance from me, so hopefully I'll at least get some experience out of it, if not a full time job.

I haven't played any of their games. Anybody here ever played the Kohan or F.E.A.R. series?

One thing I must say for their website: their location page (all about the city of Sugarland and why you'd want to live there) vastly downplays the extreme HEAT of Texas summers. Yes, our winters are generally warm and mild compared to the north, and some snowbirds might like that (I personally wish it snowed more often, because chilly and snowless is no fun). But right now, when it's breaking a hundred in the shade and staying above 90 well after eleven pm (!!!), there is no excuse for not calling it what it is: blistering, sweltering, fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk HOT. AC bills are through the roof.


In other news, I need to draw more. And update my ID down there...it's a bit old. XP

Stolen from ~Nehszriah

You remember watching
[ ]-Kenan and Kel (remember commercials; never actually watched it)
[x]-Doug (and the Real Adventures of Jonny Quest)
[ ]-Ren & Stimpy (again, commercials but didn't watch)
[x]-Pinky and the Brain
[ ]-Rockos modern Life (commercials)
[x]-Animaniacs (my brother recently discovered them on YouTube and I had a lovely nostalgia fit)
[ ]-Gargoyles
[x]-Hey Arnold
[ ]-Out of the Box
[ ]-Bear in the Big Blue House

[x]-You’ve ever ended a sentence with the word "PSYCHE!" (and a journal entry X3)
[ ]-You just cant resist finishing this . . ."In west Philadelphia born and raised..." (...what?)

You remember:
[ ]-Step by Step
[ ]-Family Matters
[x]-Boy Meets World
[x]-Full House
[x]-You remember when it was actually worth getting up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons.
[ ]-You remember reading Goosebumps (no, but I did read all the Animorphs books)

When everything was settled by:
[x]-rock paper scissors
[ ]-Miss Mary Mack
[x]-When kick ball was something you did everyday (gym class was almost always either this or running laps for an hour...)
[ ]-You used to listen to the radio all day long just to record your FAVORITE song of ALL time on a tape. (no, but then, I wasn't much of a music nut; I listened but didn't freak out over songs/bands/whatever)

[x]-You remember Super Nintendos and Sega Genesis (SUPER Nintendo? How about an original NES? With Bubble Bobble!)
[x]-You remember The Original Game Boy (and Tetris...mmm...)
[x]-You always wanted to send in a tape to America’s Funniest Home Videos... but never taped anything funny. (actually, just remembering the name of the show was not always "AFV" should count here)

You remember watching:
[x]-The Magic School Bus
[x]-Wishbone
[x]-Reading Rainbow (I remember the school showing us these three)
[ ]-Ghostwriter

[x]-You remember when Yo-Yos were cool
[x]-You remember those Where's Waldo books.
[x]-You remember eating Warheads and Splashers Gushers (hated the Gushers, but I was queen of eating Warheads. We'd have competitions for putting the most in our mouths at once, and my ears would turn bright red, but I'd win XD)

You remember watching:
[ ]-Batman the Animated Series
[x]-Aladdin (and Ducktails, and Darkwing Duck, and TailSpin, and Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers...)
[ ]-Ninja Turtles (didn't watch; remember commercials, though)
[ ]-Ghost Busters

[x]-You remember Ring Pops
[x]-If you remember when everything was "da BOMB!" (whadda ya mean, "remember"? Everything's STILL da bomb!)

[x]-You remember boom boxes .vs. cd players.
[x]-Making those little paper fortune cookie things, and then predicting your life with them (I never could fold them right, but I'd play with my friends)

[ ]-You played and/or collected Pogs (no, but I remember commercials)
[x]-You had at least one Tamagotchi, GigaPet, or Nano and brought it everywhere you went (I had SEVERAL. They're all sitting in my bookcase with dead batteries at the moment...)

You watched the original cartoons of
[x]-Rugrats
[x]-Wild Thornberrys
[ ]-Power Rangers (no, but I knew several boys in class who did)

[x]-All your school supplies were "Lisa Frank" brand (ohmigosh, YES, I remember this XD)

You collected
[ ]-Beanie Babies
[x]-Pokemon cards (my seventh grade home room teacher, too. She was awesome XD)
[ ]-Carebears
[ ]-Silver dollars, which were cool to have

[x]-Everyone watched the WB
[x]-When everybody knew all the Pokemon by heart. (I got lost after GSC came out...)
[x]-When Digimon was still on.

[x]-If you even know what an original Walkman is... (you kidding? I had one of the old tape and radio ones. Kept me company on many long field trips)
[x]-you know the Macarena by heart (and I can do it on roller skates, too. The old four-square kind, too, as well as inline)

[x]-"Talk to the hand"
[x]-You went to McDonald's to play in the playplace and it was still sanitary (also, Dairy Queen and Burger King and a place called Kidz Depot)

[x]-Before the MySpace frenzy
[x]-Before the Internet & text messaging (found the 'net when I was 10)
[x]-Before Sidekicks & iPods (...what's a Sidekick...? )
[x]-Before PlayStation3 or X-BOX 360

[x]-Back before X box period

[x]-Before Spongebob

[x]-When light up sneakers were cool. (I had some)
[x]-When you rented VHS tapes, not DVDs (my mom keeps talking about converting our VHS tapes to DVD, but...XD)
[x]-When gas was $0.95 a gallon. (and the TailSpin episode where Con Industries is "price gauging"...at $0.75 XD)
[x]-When we recorded stuff on VCR (Thundercats. My mom recorded the episodes for me because they came on at 3:00, and that's when school got out, so I didn't get home in time)
[x]-You had slap bracelets!
[x]-You actually played outside until it was dark! (and I have the red clay stained shorts to prove it!)
[x]-Way back before we realized all this would eventually disappear...
[x]-Post this if you smiled at least more than 5 times. .
[x]-And if you remember at least half the stuff on here....


Ohmigosh, the nostalgia...

*goes to have nostalgia attack in corner*