complich8’s journal

Oh man, what a week what a week…

I guess I’ll rewind myself a bit and tell you a tale … a tale of how the last week and some change has gone for me.

It all began last Friday (well, two Fridays ago now, since there’s another Friday between then and now). So, Guitar Hero 2 came out last weekend, and, being the guitar hero nerds that we are, several people (Josh, Mike, Josh’s brother Mike, Adam) got together to … well, pretty much to play guitar hero all weekend. It was a lot of fun. Guitar Hero 2’s got some interesting songs (though, most didn’t quite immediately grab me like GH1’s track list did). The improved hammer-on/pull-off system is incredible, they’re actually useful now, and … well, we had a lot of fun that weekend. On the way back, I picked the game up at Best Buy, along with Final Fantasy 12. And so, crested the pleasant first hill before the roller coaster ride of nastiness that was this week.

So, the roller coaster ride. Monday started out ok, except that I was tired (I didn’t sleep as deeply as I’m used to because of the sleeping situation that weekend), so I ended up not quite making it through the shower and out to class on Monday (got out of the shower right as class was starting, realized that by the time I was dried off and dressed and there, class would be over). Missed some fairly important material, as you’d expect from that class (I don’t think there’s a such thing as “not important material” in CS 483).

Well, onward, I decided that since the day was already a wash, I’d take a little nap (another hour or so), then woke up and didn’t feel like doing anything. So I played Final Fantasy 12 all afternoon, and most of the evening. I didn’t think I’d like the game, what with the basically in-line fighting and the convergence with the mmorpg genre, but I was pleasantly surprised. The “gambit” system takes a lot of the tedium out of a lot of fights. In games like the Shin Megami Tensei series (at least, Nocturne, DDS1-2), you keep the pace up by learning the enemies and their weaknesses, and exploiting them to quickly demolish whatever comes up — you basically learn how to blow through things without thinking about them. Similarly, in a Disgaea-type game, everything pretty much breaks down to “go … slaughter” … there’s not a lot of thinking involved in most fights. So, giving a nice way to automate the “not a whole lot of thinking” part actually leads to some fairly interesting battles, and keeps the not-so-interesting ones from dominating your time. The “license point” system and the fairly shallow loot curve gives you good reason to auto-slaughter weak enemies as you run by them, where the “run” system gives you a legitimately viable option not to, if you don’t care about that. So yeah, FFXII … pretty good. Not that I’ve been able to give it as much time as I wanted during the week.

Which brings us to the reason for the title (other than a reference to season 5 episode 13 of the Simpsons ;)). Some might call it “Karma” … others maybe “Regression to the mean” … but other than getting FFXII and getting Guitar Hero 2, this week has mostly been shitty. I spent a big portion of the week studying for a psych exam (which was Thursday), and doing a particularly frustrating homework (mostly frustrating because of sleep deprivation). But more than that, Gotwoot’s disk finally ate it. And hard. Not a whole lot of data loss … a couple pictures, maybe a raw or something here or there, and two days worth of forum posts, but it took a dive Monday night, and caused me to get almost no sleep Tuesday or Wednesday. Thursday rolled around and I spent the morning at a meeting at work, the afternoon taking the exam, and the evening trying (and failing miserably) to do the 483 homework. Ended up once again waking up on less than 3 hours of sleep to do it in the morning before class, and only got about 2/3 of it done, again.

But, we finally got that server back up and running, I solved a bunch of random problems at work for random people, per usual, and then … the universe swung back into a favorable situation. Friday I get a letter in the mail saying essentially “your net connection has been upgraded”. I went from 4mbit/384kbit to 10mbit/1mbit. That’s … a nice boost. I’m finally able to build ratio on a couple private trackers that I’ve been leeching off of without abusing resources that I shouldn’t be abusing! And remote desktop is SO much nicer, now that there’s headroom for it.

So, the week started great, immediately swung “shitty” … counterbalanced out with “great” again. And this week, there’s only class … err, today, I guess. Tuesday class is canceled. I’m going to cram a bunch of hours in at work Monday and Tuesday, see if I can get another decent paycheck despite going home, and then going home Wednesday for the first time since … like, Christmas.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 11:18 pm and is filed under life and times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.