This is probably abnormal, but I love tests. Or, if you prefer, exams. With the possible exception of ones involving lengthy essay questions. Why? Well, it's pretty simple. I am, with all due modesty, fairly bright. As long as I'm there in class, and do any assigned reading, I'm usually in possession of a pretty good command of the course material. Some classes I might also need to do the homework, which is more of a problem. Either way, I've never needed to study for an exam in my life. If I do poorly, it's because I didn't do one or more of the above, but most of the time I do very well indeed. Better, usually, than I do on my homework because I'm there, in class, not at home with distractions. I have fond memories of my French 2 class in highschool, where getting an A+ on tests got you a pass that excused you from having to do one homework assignment. We had tests pretty much every week. With almost no exceptions I got 100% on every one. So little homework, so much bliss.

Now that I'm in college it's even better, because I can plow through most tests in under an hour and get the remaining 2+ hours of classtime off. Which is why I'm home this time of night today.

One reason why I don't finish many games is eventually, with most games, you've seen pretty much all they have to offer in the way of play and I just get tired of them. I was having that feeling with Fatal Frame towards the end, but it's finally done and I can send it back in to Gamefly....a mere 4 months later. I should have just bought it off eBay. Would've been cheaper. Ah well.

You know, although I've had my problems with Gamefly, I wish there were more rental services along that line. It's just..better being able to try things before you buy them. PC game publishers complain about piracy, when half the time they don't even let you play a demo version (and why should they, when demos take time and resources to develop that could be used on the full game), and when they do the demo is never enough to give you a good idea of whether you'd enjoy the full game. For example, I tried the Age of Mythology demo, but that only allows you to play as the Greeks in a couple of very basic levels and the Greeks are the faction that differs the least from the Age of Empires games (which, unlike most people, I hated.). The Egyptians were the set of factions I'd thought might actually interest me, but of course they were unavailable. Nowadays I suppose I would just download the thing, illegality be damned, but AoM I wound up buying. And oops, I hate it too....

Anyway. The point is that right now I wind up pirating games simply to see if I like them, and then once I have them there just isn't much impetus to actually secure the proper, legal game. I do for games I really like, mostly, but I tend to wait until I score a used copy, which hardly benefits the publisher. A PC game rental service would give me that all important taste, but I'd need to either pay for the game or have it occupy a slot in my queue, thus essentially costing me money every rental period, so the publisher would make money off the process also.

I'd also like to see similar programs in other areas. Board games and collectible card games, for example. I can certainly try them if other people I know own them, but if I'm the pioneer, so to speak...it can represent a very significant investment for a game I have no true idea if I'd like. Today I selected as a very belated birthday present a learner's set of Spycraft: The CCG (The Shadow Academy). The game certainly looks cool, with its flashy art and mechanics involving deception, high tech gadgets, and plenty of gunplay/chases/intrigue...but I was unable to convince anyone to even try the game with me tonight, so I still don't know if I actually enjoy playing it. Sigh.

Oh..and I finished the first book of Constantine's Wraeththu trilogy, The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit. Quite lovely on its own. I do want to continue, but I own the book and I've got a clock ticking on several others from the library, so they need finishing first.

I can kind of understand why they only let you have five "favorite" SGs. But my problem is with hundreds and hundreds of SGs, and now *4* sets going up a day, it's getting awfully hard to keep track of the girls whose sets I find the most attractive. I can't friends them, because I don't know them. I could bookmark them, I suppose, but the bookmarking system seems journal-oriented. The girls whose pictures I want to look at are not necessarily the girls whose journal posts I want to read whenever they update. (There's an occasional exception, like Venice, who is hot and interesting (to me) both, but then, she's in my favorites. So.) There's favorite pics, but you can't link directly to the girl in question and I'd rather use it for pics that I find absolutely jawdropping, rather than simply as ways to remember whose sets I like. There needs to be something in between. Maybe just "Favorite Sets".

In other news, Neil Gaiman blurbs continue to be an eerily accurate guide to some of the best writers out there today. Through his recommendations I've found writers like Caitlin R. Kiernan, who writes some of the most beautiful, immersive horror I've read, China Mieville, whose novels of Bas Lag are both amazingly inventive and amazingly deep and well-characterized,..even some writers who initially put me off (Gene Wolfe, M. John Harrison, Storm Constantine) but, given a chance, wowed me.

Specifically, at the moment, I'm reading Storm Constantine's Wraeththu trilogy. I believe these are her first books. I'd say the books that made her successful, but I have no idea if she is that or not. These hooked me a lot easier than the trilogy I'd previously read (starts with Sea Dragon Heir). The plotting gets going sooner, for one thing, and I think the first person narration helps me warm to the setting and characters easier than the other trilogy's third, though I'm not normally a fan of one or the other in particular. I suspect it shall be well worth the 7 bucks or so I spent on it at Half-Price Books. (A wonderland of treasures that place is.)

Sigh. I preferred the old layout for the front page. This one feels too busy, yet doesn't deliver as much content in most arenas, particularly the news. I guess I'll eventually get used to it.

Spent a lovely evening playing Arkham Horror. It's really rare when a board game this well designed comes along. So many decisions, so many win conditions, so many characters, so many enemies, so many encounters, so many..

And I honestly don't have a problem with 99% of the rules or characters or encounters or what have you. They all work pretty much as intended and well at that. It's really neat when the character's special ability isn't the only thing that makes them work. I played a private eye tonight who had a very nice special which came into play almost never due to it relying on a game element I did not really manage to acquire very often. And I still managed to be First Citizen of Arkham by virtue of my having big guns among my starting equipment and being able to very quickly change my skills around. Flexibility is killer.

If you liked the old Arkham Horror, play the new one. If you liked Talisman, I think you well might like this. If you liked the Lord of the Rings boardgame (for the coop play) you might like this. Heck, if none of the above apply, you still might want to try it. It's expensive, but it's a heck of a game and I can imagine playing it virtually every week, as situations shift so much depending on the Ancient One you're facing, the Mythos events you draw, and the characters in your group.

Ich habe keine geld und du hast kein geld
Wer hat den mann mit dem koks bestellt?


I was dubious about Stahlhammer's middle album, "Feind Hort Mit". Their latest release, "Stahlmania" is definitely growing on me, but there's maybe three truly great tracks on the album and the rest kinda blur together for me. Not quite up to the standards of Rammstein or Megaherz. Knowing the singer on "Feind Hort Mit" was the Georgian one who was into hiphop I wasn't sure what to expect, and the hit song from the album "Der Mann Mit Dem Koks" just sounded...dirty. But heck, some guy on Amazon Marketplaces is selling the album new for a grand total of about 5 bucks, so I bought.

Good choice. Overall I think it's a significantly better album than "Stahlmania" and, although I'll have to listen to it more to be sure, quite possibly up there with the best German music I own. "Der Mann Mit Dem Koks" turns out to be "The Man With the Coke", and that's coke as in heating fuel, not as in cocaine (which, thanks to Rammstein, I know is "kokain" in German. Yay me.), and is a really excellent song. Lots of stuff going on, catchy refrain, interesting (once translated) lyrics.

I do have to wonder what it is with German songs about flagellation. Rammstein's got "Bestrafe Mich", now Stahlhammer's got "Schlag Mich".

(And thus concludes my first official journal post. I guarantee no guarantees about regularity of posting. But I might do it again.)

...right. I'm obviously not adept at the art of photo-editing. But at least this is a better photo than the crappy, tiny, dark slightly pre-highschool-graduation one I've been using for years before I got the main image from which this is cropped and snipped and pixellated.