A couple of Persona 4 comics I found out about, a very spoiler-heavy condensed coverage of the first few hours of play, here and here.

I started watching the Giant Bomb endurance run (Let's Play) of Persona 4 earlier today... pretty funny so far. The best part so far...

( ...is behind the spoiler tag! )

When I'm feeling a bit more centered, I think I'm going to write a series of stories that've been running through my head lately. The theme?

Disgaea meets Touhou.

Yeah. There's some choice interactions available right there. :D

First, though, I wanna put something in for the CoH Architect Contest they announced. I have a couple of existing ideas that kinda work with the 'hero doing evil for the greater good' theme, but not really perfectly. Will have to give it some thought.

As some may know, I was told last Tuesday that the contract position I'm currently on was going to be ended this Friday. This... kinda hit me at a bad time, emotionally speaking. Anyway, I went in to my temp agency last Thursday and tested for another job opening (apparently the only one they had available), and I was told today that I'd been accepted. It's at the same company and building, too; I almost suspect my agency doesn't work with hardly anyone else.

It's... weird. Yesterday, I was a total wreck. Even started hyperventilating a bit at one point. This morning, though, I came in to work unusually... focused. Dunno why, but I was able to concentrate on things more than I usually am. But after I was told I would still have a job after all, I nearly fell to pieces again. Just the emotional whiplash hit me pretty hard, I guess.

Anyway. I'm back on track, more or less, though I'm still far from 'okay'.

I've been spending my time offline this week, just because I'm in the mood to catch up on my huge backlog of unfinished games. Currently in rotation are Diablo 2 - going with a Summonancer, which is a highly lazy playstyle - and Disgaea 2, though bets are being taken as to how far I'll actually get before getting distracted by something else. One day I'll finish an NIS game. You'll see.

So tired of feeling like this all the time. So very tired. It's like if anything goes wrong, any tiny little thing turns out different than what I wanted, it sends me into this downward spiral where I just feel like total crap. It's stupid and it's pathetic and I'm sick of it.

I jumped in on the Champions Online free trial this weekend, and... I think I'll get it, it's pretty fun in its way, but it's probably not worth a long-term subscription.

One of the main problems is that it *feels* like a video game, even more than other MMOs. In WoW, you have this huge sprawling world with thousands of places to go, and in CoH you have huge city zones with people walking around, mobs who almost seem to have their own life, and so on. In CO... you have a choice to start in what pretty much amounts to the Desert Level and the Snowy Level. The cel-shaded graphics work against it in this, I feel. I dunno if I'm explaining myself well on this, but that's my impression.

Second, the fact that it has only one server is a mixed bag. Sure, it'll cure the perception of some servers being better than others, but thirty or forty instances of a single zone with 100 people each means that there's not much chance of building up a community. And you have lots of choices of powers to take, but that just makes it easier to shoehorn yourself into a bad combo. Admittedly, the respec feature counters this and lets you remake yourself up to and including your initial power choices, as long as you're willing to pay through the nose in game currency.

So... yeah, fun, but CoH is the better hero game, I feel. But it is fun to walk my literal tankmage (Power Armor/Sorcery combination) right up to a supervillain and drop my Disc One Nuke (Sigils of Arcane Fire) right in his face.

So.

In the middle of getting caught in a rainstorm... no, wait, that isn't entirely accurate. While being mugged by the heaviest rain I've seen in a while, part of my already-broken car door handle - specifically, the bit I was using as a handhold to open it - decided to break off even further. Opening the door from the outside has become twice as hard, and opening it from the inside (the inside handle broke off long ago) is impossible without twisting around in the sheet and using both hands to scrabble at it. In, as noted, the rain.

Whee.

The classic easy way to replace something like that, I'm told, is to scavenge one from a junkyard, but I have zero automotive mechanics skill; I wouldn't even know where to begin. I highly down Pep Boys keeps model-specific door handles in stock, so I'll probably have to go to a dealership, which will take money that I don't actually have.

The other option is to try to jury-rig a handle by gluing/screwing something into the remaining bits. But given my past history with such things and my tendency, despite all intentions, to give up when I get tired and say 'good enough', this route is fraught with danger.

My life sucks.

So, just a few days until NaNoWriMo starts, and I haven't even decided on an idea, much less developed it. So, as usual because I'm stupid and lazy, I won't be participating this year. Not that it matters because I'd never finish it anyway, and even if I did nobody would want to read it. So yeah.

Not for a game of my own (yet), but the 4e game I play on Sunday evenings is currently running with 4 players and could use one or two more. We've recently started a new campaign (one of the players took over DMing) and it's going okay so far. Just thought I'd put it out there in case someone wants to join; we play Sundays from about 6-9 Central time, using Ventrilo and Maptools. We're level 2 currently, and the party consists of a Tempest Fighter, a Rageblood Barbarian, a Cosmic Sorceror (me), and a pacifist Cleric. Let me know if any of you'd like to know more, and I'll give you more info.

So, logged into CoH for a bit just now. Nobody noticed, even after I said hello, but that's kinda par for the course. Been too long since I played, it seems; the controls don't feel right. Power customization is okay; did some tweaking on Chap, who now has orange brain lasers, yay.

Mainly, though, I accomplished little except for deeply depressing myself again. Watching everyone chat and make plans and a bit of TEH DRAMA and have fun... I suppose I could've said hello again, but as I have for, oh, the last year or so of active playing, I just feel like an outsider, not really, really part of anything the group as a whole does. So... yeah.

Interesting to note, though: published stories remain available even if your account is cancelled. I had wondered about that.

It's a month-old link, but be warned: Puppy-Amaterasu will make your head a splode from cuteness.

...

...due to the aforementioned bowl-stealing incidents, I've been leaving the food for the mama kitty in hiding behind the front door of the building. Someone's been using that space for dumping their junk mail recently, which has been annoying but no big deal.

I went out there with a bowl of food this morning, though, and find what is undeniably... a vibrator.

There being only two people living in this building, it's gotta belong to the landlord's daughter. What the hell it's doing out there, we may never know. I left it right where it was, though I'm still oddly stunned by the discovery.

All City of Heroes and City of Villains® players who maintain an active account from 15 August 2009 to 16 November 2009 will receive special rewards for their loyalty:

- Exclusive loyalty badges: "Vigilant" for Heroes and "Determined" for Villains

- Closed beta access for City of Heroes Going Rogue™

...well. Thanks for telling me, Cryptic. Thanks so much for telling me ON THE EIGHTEENTH OF FREAKING SEPTEMBER. I might've reactivated just to get to the Rogue beta if I'd known.

Bleh. After about a month of being okay, I had to leave work pretty early today due to my shoulder kicking the crap out of me whenever I moved my arm. I hate doing that, not least because I can't afford to lose too much work.

I think I'm going to try NaNoWriMo again this year. Well, that's not a completely accurate statement, as it implies I actually tried in previous years. The closest I ever got was lots of ideas that never even made it to paper. This year, I need to plan ahead, which is why I'm starting my brain to working now.

I already have one idea which is fairly fleshed out and would be fun to write, though it's darker and less comedic than my usual fare. The only problem is that it's, technically, fanfic; set in the Fallout 'verse, in fact. Not that there's any rule in NaNoWriMo against that, but I kinda want my finished product to be, with luck, marketable. The experience would be good even if it isn't, but still. Oh, I know the obvious solution is to set it in a Fallout-inspired setting, but my brain is defective and doesn't work like that. For one thing, once I come up with an idea I get stubborn about it, and transplanting it would be tough. And second - and more importantly - is that I suck at from-scratch creativity. This has been the case ever since I started writing; I can do fanfic fairly well, I'd say, but I just can't make a compelling, believable world and cast of characters from nothing. It's annoying. So, the choices are 'Fallout' or 'something like Fallout but crappy'. Bleh.

This isn't to say I don't have other ideas that take a swipe at originality - I've got a YA fantasy story I've been fiddling with for a while - but I just know that in the end they'll look flat and lame.

In other news... I've discovered Nanaca Crash probably three or four years after everyone else, via TVTropes of all things. My record so far is 5.3 km. Fun.

Hrm. I decided I wanted to replay Fallout 3 lately, and maybe try the DLC, but after reinstalling I noticed a lot more stuttering, both in graphics and in sound, than I remember. The only difference is that I loaded it on a different drive, which shouldn't matter (theoretically). I don't think it'll be gamebreaking, but it might be annoying enough to keep me from playing. I remember having to tweak the settings a bit last time I installed, but I can't recall the details.

Seen on YouTube, concerning a fictional sentai group in an anime:

Star Rangers?
Is that the Japanese version for Power Rangers?
LOL!

I locked myself out of my apartment earlier, due to a consistently-recurring key ring issue. (If it happened without my knowledge, that would be one thing, but I *saw* the key land on the floor yesterday, and got distracted.) However, I also found out that when I last fogged the apartment, I left a window unlocked.

It's... pathetic yet amusing when two stupid mistakes cancel each other out.