Weekend Update

[dr4b]

So, I spent Friday at work rebuilding my computer. My hard drive appears to be really dead, which sucks, because I had some files on it I hadn't checked in, but ah well. After work I got together with ayndin again, and took him to Uwajimaya. We went around Kinokuniya, where I failed to find anything I wanted (even the latest issue of ベースボール wasn't that interesting to me), but Evan picked up a bunch of manga. Then we decided to get non-sushi Japanese food... I remembered that Fuji Sushi had exceptionally good tempura, so we went there. It had a long wait relatively but it was WORTH IT because I got the tempura/tonkatsu dinner bento and I swear to god, it is definitely the best tempura I've ever had in Seattle. Just exceptionally perfect -- next time Carl visits I have to remember to drag him there.

After dinner we went back to Uwajimaya and raided the snack section and I bought a ton of きのこの山 and たけのこの里 (which I still blame alibash for getting me addicted to). Then we went to Illusionz since I was supposed to show up for kieferskunk's birthday party part 2, and Evan wanted to see it since he'd heard about it from me and Mark and Dave and Steve and whoever else was out here last summer. Unfortunately since I was there super-late I missed most of the people, I only saw Nykkel and Kiefer there. And since IZ sucks most of the machines are... gone or whatnot. KBM is gone. DM has a broken cymbal. The entire graveyard is gone. PPP had a wonky sensor. At least Pop'n'Music seemed reasonable. But, what sucks is that the place was packed with 16-year-olds, and not like, the Bemani BBS type. More like, as Nykkel pointed out, the "COME SEE ME FAIL!!!" airhead girls on Guitar Freaks. Ah well. I played 2 games of Para Para, 2 games of Pop'n'Music, and decided to leave. On the way back to Kirkland I said to Evan, "Hmm, good thing I didn't mention World of Warcraft in front of you and Nykkel or we'd still be there."

I spent a decent chunk of time on Friday floating ships to Nu for the Fandango blockade. Woke up Saturday, got showered and changed, and then actually took part IN the Fandango blockade. And oh man, we CRUSHED them. Misery put up some pictures of it, it's really kinda scary to see round 3 where we just have a literal wall of ships waiting to blow apart any entering enemy ship. Wheeeeee. Blam blam.

After that I went out to Redmond to hang out with Brian (not Railing) for a few hours. We went to Claim Jumper, had dinner, then wandered over to Borders and sat in the cafe playing Ricochet Robot and Lost Cities for a while. Good times.

Today I got up and did some errands.. I finally took two boxes of clothes over to Goodwill, that had been sitting by my apartment door for like a month. Oddly, the guy at Goodwill saw my jacket and was like "You went to Carnegie Mellon?" and started asking me all these questions about CS and stuff, which was sort of odd. He had a thick Indian accent, which was hard to understand. I guess that's about as blunt a statement as I could make as his statement of "Wow, I guess you didn't want to take compilers classes because you're a girl."

I stopped by Blue C, had sushi for dinner, mmmmmmm, then got groceries, also stopped in a used bookstore by Ken's Market that I forget the name of, where I picked up a really good condition copy of one of Jim Brosnan's books from like 1966.

Then I sat at home the whole night playing PP because I am stupid. I mean, really stupid. I pillaged with Carl, under one of our alt crews, which was a ton of fun, and then pillaged with my normal crew, which was also fun. Then I got really grumpy because it felt like everyone was picking on me. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. It's a lousy note to end the night on, but oh well.

Oh, uh, I have yet another PP icon of me and chirik wearing inverted outfits. Cute huh?

Comments

[arya.livejournal.com]

What is kinoninoyama (?) ?

[dr4b]

ko, not ni

http://open.meiji.co.jp/sweets/chocolate/kinotake/

[thunderbird8.livejournal.com]

I've got a small program that may be capable of restoring the data on that drive that I bought awhile back. I've not yet been able to give it a good test on a hard drive, as I've not had one go poof on me recently. One small issue is that the test I usually use it for takes many hours to complete, though it might be less with its recovery mode (or it could be more depending on how damaged the drive is).

[bpr.livejournal.com]

Did you play Ricochet in Claim Jumper again?

I think this is one of the only posts on LJ that uses my last name.

[dr4b]

No, we didn't have a big enough table :) So we played at Borders.
I should get together a bunch of the random Ricochet players in Seattle that don't know each other and we should have a huge showdown.

[chirik.livejournal.com]

I've been involved in several blockades at this point, and this is definitely gonna be one of the memorable ones. I've never seen so many ships in a blockade at once - and so many big ships, too - I think, at one point, there were 9 war frigates actively in the blockade. During a lull in loading the guns, I took a moment to look over the board and total the crews on the active ships - 412 players.

Papaya was the closest and most bitter, and I think the defense of Jorvik against TO was the best coordinated.

Got a link to Misery's screenshots? I found some, but not hers.

*giggle* Those outfits were so cute lastnight. I grabbed a couple screencaps of them but haven't done anything with them yet. It's the remnants of one of my Christmas outfits.

[miserxy.livejournal.com]

you can get a clickable link on my journal. =)

[chirik.livejournal.com]

Oh, yay! They're even almost the whole board.

I thought about setting up my system to do snapshots of the blockade grid, but it kinda requires I am prepared for it beforehand, and/or sit out the round. I think I'll do it the next time something this big pops up, though. When I have my script running, I can capture the whole grid every 30 seconds, which can be fun for reviewing the round.

I want a way to turn on ship names/might circles for all ships, though Kinda annoying to lose that information.

[miserxy.livejournal.com]

if you set up your script to take one every 30 seconds, but somewhere in there set it to take 2 in 5 seconds, you can get one with the blue rings, one with the red (pending it's 2 sides..)

i know it's not ideal but it's better than a completely one sided view or something.

i don't have a script, i actually blockade that big.. everytime i blockade.

[chirik.livejournal.com]

I can't, actually. This is running on a dual 500mhz system, and at that resolution, it actually consumes a fair bit of resources, plus the screengrab and such. That, plus getting the circles requires the mouse be on a ship, and I do this without any actual display.

(The technical details are that I start Xvnc on my other box, at 2500x1900 resolution, and run Puzzle Pirates inside it. I then connect to it with a viewer, get the window positioned right, close the viewer, and start the capture script. My system itself is only running at 1024x768 right now, though, so this doesn't work for normal play, sadly)

I guess, for my next trick, I should go quad-head, so I really can have the full blockade up in play.

Gah. GEEK! ;-)

[miserxy.livejournal.com]

ah.. my computer isn't a huge fan of maximised puzzle pirates but if i'm just coordinating and not navigating then it's not an issue, and my computer merrily churns out Y!PP at that huge size. i had so much crud open the day of the blockade, though, that i'm amazed my PC didn't crash.

one regular sized Y!PP client (Yresim), to transfer goods to navigators in the blockade, Despair's maximised client, PS, teamspeak, IRC, miranda, and excel with the shiplist.

..granted i also am insane and can and have floated boats on 4 clients before. i should get that looked at.

[the2belo.livejournal.com]

きのこの山　OH GOD, THOSE THINGS ARE EVILE. I suspect they must be injecting those things with nicotine and heroin and lightly braised cocaine, because how else would they be SO DAMNED ADDICTIVE?!?!

[dr4b]

Tell me about it. I already ate four little packets of them today, which would sound bad except that like, there's only 4-5 little mushroom chocolate things in each packet. I don't think they're really packaged for us big gaijin freaks.

[the2belo.livejournal.com]

We should have stopped at the supermarket when you were here, and picked up one of those big bags with 50 of those packets in them...



although you probably wouldn't have fit in your airplane seat afterwards. Urrrrp.

[mithramuse.livejournal.com]

But...but... the earrings and shoes are the same color! ^_- (Okay, yes, I'm nitpicking.)

Out of curiousity, have you (or anyone else here) heard about or seen the Appleseed movie? Just read a regretfully short article on it in a Hong Kong newspaper, and it sounds pretty cool and it's getting good reviews. I forget his exact comment, but Miyazaki was apparently very impressed. ^_- The technical side of it is that they have 3-D backgrounds, and blend the cahracters even though they are 2-D... I'm hoping the story & plot are good, too, though there was not as much commentary on that.

Of course, it's hard to do worse than the Appleseed OVA....

[dr4b]

Errr... I haven't really kept up with anime *since* we were both at CMU together, to be honest. And I never saw Appleseed. Some of the current Vermillion gang are on my friends list but they don't actually read my journal :) so I have no idea what to tell you.

[mithramuse.livejournal.com]

Then I'm prolly better off posting the question in my own journal (duh...) and seeing if msde will answer. He's still very much into anime, so I imagine he could....

I was more posting to your journal 'cause I thought you might have kept up, or someone among your friends would. ^_^ Mei wen ti!

[miserxy.livejournal.com]

i don't know that i'd say best blockade ever because we had some serious coordination issues, which we'll need to work on next time but.. that floating party kicked some serious booty.