A friend in Japan sent me a link to this, what he claims is the latest trend in Japanese doujin culture: Using the “Hatsune Miku” voice in a speech synthesis package called “Vocaloid”, fans are producing cover versions of popular music… or, in this case, of a Finnish Polka.
It’s one of those things that will either drive you away or make you compulsively re-watch it.
Well, I’m critically behind on my studying, and honestly I was thinking about wimping out this year, but – damn it – I’m going to do my best here.
Signed up for the JLPT Level 3. It’s held December 2. That gives me a little over two months to get ready while at the same time hopefully pulling down good grades in my Literature, Statistics, and Economics courses.
I can do this.
Spoiler-free Halo 3 ending information follows – and this will be my last Halo-related post for a while because I’m starting to feel quite the fanboy.
When you finish the campaign mode and watch the ending cinematic and are staring at the “thanks for playing!” screen, do not – for the love of whatever deity you follow – do NOT press “A” to get back to the main menu. After a bit of a pause, there will be a long ending credits scroll.
AFTER the credits, you will see the REST of the end of the story.
If you’ve played through on “Legendary”, there’s even more ending after that, but even on Normal, there’s stuff you’re going to want to see.
…or, to put it another way, I don’t have to worry about the gits that make it their mission to post Halo 3 ending spoilers. Fortunately, it’s not as easy to spoil as “Snape kills…”, so every time I’ve run across one of them, I’ve realized what I’m reading before I caught anything pertinent.
At any rate – deeply satisfying ending.
Now I have a couple of discs worth of extra content to look at, and then I can try out some of the multiplayer… maybe even go back and play the campaign on the harder difficulty levels. I played through on “Normal”, which I think makes me more of a man – I could, after all, have gone with “Easy” 🙂 – but I see people on my friends list playing in Heroic and this shames me a little.
In our test sample, 100% of cats we tried putting the replica Spartan helmet on gave us a rather put-upon look and patiently waited for the humans to take the helmet off them.
Note: We didn’t try getting our sample cat to actually put her head INSIDE the helmet, as we like not being maimed.
The internet: It’s for posting photos of your cats.
…no midnight launch madness, no trading of my first born, my soul, or my cats…
…just a matter of walking in to Fred Meyer this morning and asking “Hey, do you guys have the new Halo?”
And getting a response of, “Sure, which version do you want?”
The thing that sold me on the Halo 3 Legendary Edition, I have to admit, was the cinematics disc – something I didn’t know existed until this morning. Darn that Bungie!
Inside the box… I’d heard this called the “cat helmet”, with the implication that you could put it on your cat if you, you know, hated your cat, but I think you’d need a really, really big cat to wear this thing.
Now of course, I have to go to work. I am a sad enough fanboy to pay twice the cost of a regular game for this thing – I’m not a sad enough fanboy to miss a day to stay home and play it.
So, I’ve done a Japan trip two summers in a row now, and the first time I got a request passed to me from one of my wife’s co-workers. She wanted some Japanese Pokemon cards for her 5 year old son.
These weren’t that hard to find, so I picked him up two packs of trading cards and passed them to him through my wife. I heard back that he’d liked them a lot.
This year, I was sitting in the hotel on a Sunday morning watching morning TV programs and getting ready to head out to Comiket.
“Pokemon Sunday” came on. This seems to be a live action variety show featuring bouncy, energetic hosts and the voices of assorted Pokemon. I really can’t tell you more than that – I am not familiar with the series. Let me put it this way – I can, 9 times out of 10, accurately identify Pikachu.
However, it was kind of fun to watch in a “I have no idea what’s going on, but man, those Japanese are good at getting their merchandising hooks into kids” way.
The first half of it seemed to be a presentation about the Tokyo Pokemon Center and all the stuff you could buy there. Oh, and also you could trade Pokemon with people. But mostly it was “Hey, look at all the cool stuff you can buy and how it ties into the new movie.”
At the end of the sales pitch program, they gave directions to the place, and I was a bit shocked to realize that it was apparently a 2 minute walk from the same train station I was taking to go everywhere else in Tokyo. With it being that close, I decided that I would check it out and – here’s the justification – I’d get my wife’s coworker’s kid some new Pokemon stuff, since I’d just watched a presentation on what the new hot stuff was and in theory I’d be helping him trump American first graders by having that stuff before they did.
So: Plan of attack. I stopped preparing for Comiket and walked over to the station. Then I picked the first small child I saw:
And I followed him and his father. I figured this was the easiest way to actually find the place.
They led me right to it, just before the doors opened. The line wasn’t too bad – I was maybe the 50th person in line. The rest of the line was entirely made up of small children and their parents. I felt a bit, I don’t know, conspicuous.
Inside was, um, a bit mad. I didn’t want to look too creepy, so I didn’t take photos, but it was a sea of kids dragging their parents from display to display.
I picked up about 3000 yen worth of trinkets – a couple of packs of the latest trading card series, a “Monster Ball” pokeball full of, I am sure, yummy candy, and a couple of pins. I figured, well, I’m here, I’ll get a pin for myself and one for this kid.
Then I fought my way to the cash registers – they put everything in a nice green Pokemon Center bag with a turtle-looking thing on it and added some free stickers – paid, and ran, not quite screaming. I found it kind of interesting that the Pokemon Center accepts Suica as a payment method. This is basically like being able to use your bus pass to buy stuff. If Japanese kids didn’t ride the train for free, I suspect that a lot of them would be blowing the month’s bus money at this place.
I got back to this fine country, took my pin out of the bag, and handed the rest to my wife with instructions to deliver it.
A few days later, I got this back. Apparently, while he had to ask his mom for help with spelling, the idea to write it and all the words were his own. I’m a bitter, cynical guy a lot of the time, but I found it cute enough to share with you all.
So – side benefit to my latest crazy trip to Japan: I made a kid’s day. I like that.
OK. I’m not GREAT for the environment, or even really that good, because all I really did was take something incredibly wasteful and make it slightly less so.
A few years ago, I designated one PC as the “Media” PC, with the fairly ambitious goal of ripping all of our CDs to its hard drive.
This took a while to accomplish, actually, but eventually I got through them.
With the primary chore done, it became the PC that we could offload tasks to so they wouldn’t bog down our main computers.
It got a video capture board so I could convert Laserdiscs and VHS to digital formats, and a Sound Blaster Audigy with the optical IO daughterboard so I could import minidiscs.
Then I needed a bit more RAM to handle the huge WAV files that importing minidiscs was making…
Somewhere in there it got upgraded from a P3/450 to an Athlon 1100 and I installed a DVD burner while not removing the CDRW drive.
And then, it started getting left on all night as a download PC.
And all those components were sitting in this PC burning electricity.
But, I really didn’t have any way to do any thing about it.
Then, earlier this year, I upgraded my main PC.
The old PC kind of sat idle for a while as I didn’t want to migrate everything over. Also, it runs a 2.8GHz Pentium 4. This is not a processor you want to be leaving on all night.
It was a bit of a frustrating situation, since I hate seeing hardware that doesn’t have a purpose.
Today I decided to see what I could do about the situation. This involved getting out my Lucky Screwdriver and going elbows-deep in PC entrails.
The end result: The “Media” PC lost its CDRW drive and its DVDRW drive. I’ve got an external DVDRW drive hooked up to it – when I need to burn large files, I can turn that on.
I pulled the video capture board and the Audigy, and pulled out a stick of RAM so it’s only sucking down electricity to power 512MB. Then I hunted down enough casebacks to seal up the gaping holes so airflow wouldn’t be impacted too badly.
It’s left with just enough hardware to be a download box.
The displaced hardware has a new home in the form of the other PC – so I can still do VHS-to-MPEG conversions and such, but it won’t be left on longer than a couple of hours at a time.
Everything has a purpose, and it’s been customized to better suit that purpose. On a scale of geek happiness, that’s at least an 8.
I recently hooked up my TurboDuo again. Because I’m organized, see, and I can make a space for more game consoles that I’ve been neglecting.
This was a great system when it came out. It combined a TurboGrafx-16, the CD add-on for the system, an upgraded system card, and a fistful of games for $300.
It also looked damn cool for the time — sleek, black, with an integrated optical drive and cartridge games that were released on the slender HuCard format instead of the massive bulky Nintendo carts.
Here’s a picture:
Even looking cool, and including something like 7 free games – It didn’t sell well at $300.
I certainly couldn’t afford one at the time – I was 18 or 19 years old and making a whopping 7 bucks an hour doing technical support.
Eventually, it got closed out for $100.
That I could manage. I didn’t drive at the time, mind you, and the nearest store selling them was the Incredible Universe store in Wilsonville – 80 miles away – so I conned a friend from work into taking me.
He’d never been to Incredible Universe and wanted to see what it was like, so it didn’t take a whole lot of convincing.
The Turbo really started a trend with me that continued for several years with the Saturn and Dreamcast.
I’d fall in love with a games console, feel like I knew some great secret that nobody else understood, rage against the super cool Japan-only games that would surely save the system if the parent company was ever smart enough to release them over here, and eventually watch the thing die.
(Actually, I got in kind of late in that cycle with the Turbo. It was already dead, really, but I hadn’t been through enough console generations to realize this.)
Anyway… I went to hook it up, and no sound came out.
Turns out this is a pretty common failure for the Duo – the capacitors on the system board just eventually fail, and now I’m left with the options of try to fix it myself – unlikely – or send it off to get fixed (and let’s face it, it’s got a 14 year old optical drive in it. Even if it comes back with working sound, it’s got moving parts that are well into their second decade.)… or put it back in its box and settle for playing the games on an emulator.
I guess having the box out of storage and in the picture kind of tips my hand there 😦 It was a good console, and it’s a shame to let it rot away in the closet, but I just can’t justify otherwise.
When I said I’d finished Trace Memory, that was a statement made of lies.
I went back and played through it again. Turns out that I’d not only gotten the bad ending the first time, but by missing a critical early puzzle I’d also missed out on about a third of the actual story. See, each conversation seems to build on earlier events – since I’d missed triggering a certain event very early on, I’d missed out on every conversation that built up from those events.
My wife played through the game before I did, and she did everything properly, so she was a bit confused about my complaining during the game that things didn’t make sense, that we weren’t hearing enough about a certain character, blah blah blah… and now I know why my bitching didn’t make sense.
At any rate, on the second go around, all is well, I get the good ending, my wife gets to feel a bit smug about things, and I found myself involuntarily adding the Blossom Culp books to an Amazon order. Since the majority of the order is for her – she gets a Connis Willis book, a Nancy Drew game for her DS, a DVD of the Da Vinci Code, and a box set of Stargate Atlantis – I feel no shame in padding it out with some books from my childhood and the latest Terry Pratchett novel.
In other events… as this is my last weekend before school, I’ve made a list of organization projects.
Many of them can be summed up as follows:
I started x, y, or z project ages and ages ago, accumulated supplies, never got around to it, and I’ve had boxes of half-done project festering in our storage closet ever since.
Several of these projects have now been uprooted from the closet and tossed unceremoniously into the nearest dumpster. If I ever get the urge to try one of them again, I’ll make sure I have time, energy, and space for them before I start.
Honest.
Baud Attitude 