Shriek Elegance

I was finally able to get my hands on the original score for Eternal Sonata – and not through a torrent, either. I found one, but the download speed was so laughably slow, it didn’t even register an ETA. I did find a direct download, though. I don’t think I can describe how beautiful the score for this game is. Everything is orchestrated and [almost?] everything contains piano. My utmost favorite right now is Captured Phantom. So amazingly pretty. So, so, so pretty. Absolutely brilliant. Now imagine the rest of the game being scored equally as brilliantly. OOOOH MAAAAN I can’t get over it.

Anyway, all I’ve done since my last update is play more ES. I am on the last chapter of the game, which saddens me because I wish it would last longer. The battles are becoming increasingly more fun. The damage registered is huge and it’s just so pretty. I think all I have left is the final dungeon/area/whatever.  There is a chance I could beat it tomorrow before people come over, but probably not. I have a feeling it will take a while. I had a quick glance ahead and it looks like I’ll be re-fighting a lot of the area bosses from throughout the game again. Ah well. Thursday for sure.

Craig went home this morning, so we said g’bye last night. No more “deal with it”. :( I’ll still have Tyler for that joke, at least. But I won’t be able to randomly say “Oh man, it’s Dolce again.” ‘Cause Craig won’t be here to ask, “Who?” HAHA.

Anywho. Going out to the clinic tomorrow morning to get poked and return Mirror’s Edge. Then people come over. People that I haven’t seen in forever :D I’m excited. I misses dem.

I suppose that is all.

Well the reason I haven’t been updating is because I don’t really have much to update about. My days have been spent hanging out with Craig, for the most part.

Ummm. Boxing Day, I went out with Dad and he picked up some things. We went to Walmart for a bit and I picked up Eternal Sonata, which is a lovely game, by the way. Interesting battle system… that just gets harder as you go D:! Buuut that’s alright. I love the fact that they defy the 9999 is the limit law. Viola did 18,000 damage with one normal critical bow hit. She also did 50k+ damage in one turn when I was fighting a boss. Viola. Marry me? Have my babies? She murders things dead. With an arrow. Awesome. Anyway, it’s an excellent game and I do love it. I also love the music that comes with it. I’m currently in a swamp and it has the prettiest piano ballad playing. <333 Anyway, I also stood in line for like 45 minutes at EB Games and bought Persona 4, which I haven’t started yet. I want to finish Eternal Sonata first, since, y’know, I’ve started it. I waffled for a while when I was in line and came to the decision that I would buy Mirror’s Edge just ’cause… I was there. Why not. I’m allowed to return it within 30 days as long as it’s not opened. I came home and downloaded the demo for the game and have decided that I will be returning it. I don’t dislike it, I do like it, I just don’t like it enough to pay $50+ for it right now. Not when I’m trying to be stingy with my money (I’m doing a decent job, which is why I splurged just this once). So I need to return that. I could do that on Wednesday before people start coming over. I have to go into town anyway for injections.

Short shift yesterday in home entertainment actually wasn’t bad at all. Not nearly as busy as Friday was, apparently. I didn’t know what to do, since I normally don’t work in that department, so I started ticketing all of the video games in the video game cases since I knew they needed to be done (not urgently, but it’s really all I knew how to do for sure in there). I almost completed all of them. I finished the DS, Wii, PS2, and PS3 games, and like the top two rows of the 360 games. I wanted to do the ones sitting on the bottom, but there just wasn’t quite enough time. People kind of came in small waves, so they kept me busy toward the end of my shift.

Today was movies with Brianne (and Craig) :3 on Christmas Eve, she drew me a picture :D! It’s a picture of Hei holding his mask, lookin’ all… Hei-y. And it’s beeaauutiful (even though it’s with pencil and pencil crayon, I don’t care, I think it’s pretty). I donno what to do with it. Contemplating buying a really cheap picture frame from work before I lose my discount. I also want to buy a cheap frame for the painting that Shay gave to me a long time ago for my birthday. I don’t know if I can find one that’s the right size, but it would be nice if I could. Then I could hang them on the walls. And actually feel like a normal person ’cause I’ll have more on my walls than storage cubes. My room needs some personality, anyway. All it’s got going for it is “regalness”. Anyway, I digress. We watched Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. We called it quits after that ’cause, well, they’re long movies so that was like four hours of movie watching right there. Afterward, we just kinda sat around and watched a couple of funny YouTube videos and talked about silly things and then Brianne left to go have dinner with her family and a bunch of people she doesn’t know.

Craig and I didn’t really know what to do, so we played some more LittleBigPlanet, which we apparently beat today. So… I’m finished LBP. I feel like it was a short game, but when you actually look at it, I guess it really isn’t. I mean, I haven’t completed everything to 100% (I need people for the 3x and 4x tasks) and when you think about it, Tyler, Craig and I did play for quite a while that one time. Anyway, there’s always the online play. Meanwhile, I was downloading the FMA movie (Conqueror of Shamballa I think is what it’s called… I can never remember) and it was almost finished, so we played a bit of Brawl to pass the time. It ended up finishing and we streamed it on the PS3 and gave it a watch. Finally. After all the years I’ve been meaning to watch it. I will say that I am happier with how the movie ended over the series (I’m trying to keep this spoiler-free for people who haven’t seen it but might care?) in every regard, except that they didn’t exactly end up where I wanted them to, which was a little lame because… just because. I can’t say any more without giving stuff away. Dece movie, I s’pose.

Oh, I also downloaded Ouran High. It finished in like 12 hours. Which is actually rather impressive. Hurray. Another series to add on to the list of series that I have to watch. -sigh- my to-do list just keeps getting bigger. If I didn’t have to go to school or work, I’d have time to work on it ;-; whine whine whine.

It’s freakishly warm outside. Which is not good. The snow is melting. And it’s not going to stay this warm for long. It’s only December, it will get colder again. Which means that everything that’s melted will freeze and we’ll be driving on sheets of ice again. I got stuck dropping Craig off tonight ’cause the neighborhood streets haven’t been ploughed so there’s huge deposits of that gross, greasy, melting snow all over the place. It’s super easy to get stuck or slide in a direction you’d never expect. Stupid weather. I know I complained about how cold it was before, but I’d really rather you stay at about -7 (~19F) or lower in the winter until you’re ready to give us spring, mkay? -7’s a good temperature. Still cold enough that nothing will melt, but not body numbingly cold.

I’m not sure what else there is to update about. Craig is coming over again tomorrow. I’ll probably play more ES or something. Yeah, we aim big.

I guess that’s all.

I suppose I owe you an update of sorts.

Monday, Craig and Tyler came over again and we pretty much played SoM all day. We ended up finishing the game around 10:30 or something like that. Success! After that, I tried to glitch my file of SoM to get me the sword orb I’m not supposed to get, but it turned out failing and instead, the save files are glitched and they won’t load. So I’ll have to take Tyler’s advice and soft reset during another new game at a different point in time to get my file up and running again. Ah well. Anyway, after that, we played more LittleBigPlanet. We did that until like 2am or something, which was silly and stupid of me because I worked at 9 the next morning. It was a very tired day at work, needless to say. After work, I picked up Craig again and we came back here and watched Earthsea. Then after that, we watched Speed Racer, which was actually fairly good. I mean, all parts involving the younger brother (Spridal or whatever) were extremely annoying, but the driving sequences were pretty much amazing. And even though I ragged on the brilliant colors everywhere, I did enjoy them. Anyway. I liked it. After that, Craig developed a fever that struck with the speed of something extremely fast and I promptly took him home so he could rest. Also so I would not contract this death disease.

Yesterday was just… another day at work. I actually got things done, though, unlike the day before, where I spent my entire shift on cash or covering breaks except for one and a half hours at the beginning. After work, I picked up our dinner from Hong Kong Buffet (or… whatever it’s called >.> I don’t remember… the one by Cooper’s and CIBC in Westbank). ‘Twas delish. I spent the rest of the night finishing the second volume of Ouran High and watching Lost with Mum. She’s finished season 3. I’m downloading season 4 for her right now so that hopefully she can watch it in time to start watching season 5 when it airs in January or whenever.

Nothing special going on today. We ditched the one present per person idea and just stuck with stocking stuffers and stuff this year. I got warm fleece-y-like yoga pants, a chocolate orange, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard (for once, I prefer the UK/Canada cover to the US cover of a Harry Potter book). I’ll probably finish reading Beedle in two hours at most today. I am wearing the warm yoga pants. Woowoo. I’ll probably go out tomorrow to EB Games to buy Persona 4.

Anyway, John and Chris (Clarke) are coming over for Christmas dinner since they had theirs last night ’cause Allie has to work today. Other than that, I think that’s all we’ve got planned for today.

Brianne and I might have our nerd day on Saturday. It’s still in the works. If it is Saturday, Craig can probably come.

[2:02pm]

Finished Beedle in less than an hour with distractions. Dunno what to do, now. Guess I could make lunch.

[2:33pm]

Just read up on Persona 4 and any potential compatibility problems with my PS3- looks like there are only two glitches they’ve run across so far, but they’re nothing too horrible. The first one is apparently during a dream sequence, MC’s running speed increases like 3x for a couple of seconds, then returns back to normal, but that’s the only instance. The other one is that there’s a black box in the corner of the screen when you’re going through the dungeon (whatever it is in this game that replaces Tartarus) that is supposed to display what floor you’re on, but for some reason, the PS3 just can’t emulate that floor number, so it’s just a black box. So I suppose that could be potentially annoying because I won’t know what floor I’m on. I suppose I could count, but I’d probably forget. I’m hoping that when you access the menu or something, it will tell you what floor you’re on. That would be nifty.

Small things like this make me wish I had the 60GB PS3. But I will perservere. It ain’t so bad, this will only be the second game I’ve run across with a glitch and I doubt I’ll be picking up many more new PS2 games.

Dad sure knows how to ruin my perfectly good mood. I haven’t been this down since school. So fucking stupid. Whatever I try just isn’t good enough.

Anyway. By a turn of events, I guess I’m not going outside to shovel since we only have two shovels and Mom and Dad are already out there. I s’pose I could go for a shower.

Tyler and Craig came over yesterday for our Secret Secret of Mana Day. Which half turned into a Secret Secret of Mana and LittleBigPlanet Day. Tyler has tomorrow off, as well as I, so we only played through half of SoM yesterday and have decided to finish it tomorrow. The rest of the time yesterday was spent playing LBP, which is eight million times funnier to play with other people. I’m not even exaggerating. I mean, yes, the game is fun by yourself, too, but oh man. Playing with Craig and Tyler pretty much made yesterday amazing<3 My sackgirl’s outfit of preference right now is white cotton sack material, white bunny ears, senorita hair, a cat nose, a bunny tail, eyelash eyes, and I alternate between the white wedding dress, the white fancy dress, and the black lacey dress. I like her. Craig and Ty’s sackboys often play tug of war with her on the finish line. Craig’s was usually a zombie boy wearing a wedding veil… XD And Tyler’s is a blue denim professor with antlers. Although, they did change their outfits a couple of times. Tyler’s usually involves antlers. And afros. Long story short, it was a hilarious day.

Maybe getting together with Craig again today to watch Speed Racer and Earthsea and other such things.

I guess that’s all.

What else is it? 12 degrees in my house. I’m making breakfast in my heavy coat.

This song makes me happy. :) It would appear I have a thing for Christian bands. But not because they’re Christian. Actually, I don’t see the Christian at all, I usually find out they’re Christian after listening to them for a while and look it up on Wikipedia. Like Demon Hunter. :D. Although they’re not technically a Christian band. Close enough. Now that I listen to the lyrics of “Unbreakable”, I see how it is quite Christian. But I don’t choose to interpret the lyrics that way. And that’s why music rawks. Anyway. I like this song. It makes me feel happy.

I don’t have to work at 6am on Saturday anymore. :D Also, I work Christmas Eve. Which means I get Boxing Day off. Hells friggin’ yeah. So awesome. SO AWESOME.

Brianne is one of my favorite people lately <3

Two more days of work until two days off. My foot survived pretty well today, actually. Although I think I’m just getting a little bit used to the pain. I don’t seem to be registering it as much as before. Which really isn’t any better, since it means there’s still something wrong.

Driving today was hell and I wish to never repeat it.

Picked up Craig from the Greyhound. He’s looking the same as ever, sans the Jesus viking hair. He finally met Danny, so it’s finally happened. Speaking of Danny, he goes back to Mexico in… three hours and fifteen minutes. Godspeed, my Mexican hubby.

I got some money from my “grandfather”. I don’t actually know if it’s from him. My parents often just give me money and say that it’s from him. Like they’re trying to give me an incling that he somehow cares or something. I hope it is from him, if only for the fact that I don’t want to take more money from my parents than I have to because they’re a bit financially tight right now. Anyway, I’m going to use it to buy LittleBigPlanet, I think. It’s the more expensive game out of the ones that I want. So I’ll pick it up tomorrow. I’ll tell my parents to get me Persona 4 for my Christmas present. It’s cheaper. I don’t want them to spend much.

For some reason, I just don’t want to go to bed today. Hrm.

So I have an argument for businesses. The general policy at stores is that employees are not allowed to wish customers “Merry Christmas” because we are required to acknowledge all religions, not just ones that celebrate Christmas, which is totally fine, I get it. So if we’re not even allowed to wish people Merry Christmas (the alternative is “Happy Holidays”, etc.), then why do we listen to Christmas music? Isn’t that acknowledging only one religion, in a way? Shouldn’t businesses play the same music they’ve been playing all year in order to acknowledge that not all religions celebrate Christmas? Why change just for this one season? I dunno. It’s not like it’s a huge thing, I’m not offended or anything, I was just thinking about it the other day. I mean, if businesses are going to be “accepting” in one way, shouldn’t they be “accepting” in all ways? I realize that not all “Christmas” songs have to do with Christmas (i.e. “Let it Snow”), but a lot do (i.e. “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”). I’m kind of interested to bring it up with my managers to see what they have to say to justify it. Shouldn’t they be consistent? If you make an exception in one area, they’ll have to start making exceptions in other areas. It’s only fair. I dunno. Again, I’m not like… against Christmas music. Yes, it annoys me after a while, but I wouldn’t try to get rid of it forever just because I don’t like it because I realize that other people do. I’unno. I’m curious. Maybe I’ll strike up a conversation about it tomorrow or Saturday. I really am curious as to how they’ll justify it. I’m sure they’ll come up with some bogus excuse that makes no sense. They always do.

In other news, my driver’s side window is frozen shut. Just that window. Which is a real pain when you discover this when you’re stuck in a drive thru line. The Timmy’s people chuckled at my misfortune of having to get out of my car at the drive thru. It was so cold.

I need to stop procrastinating. Bed now.

[1:17am]

OH YEAH. Technically, it is Tyler and Chris’ birthdays. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TYLER AND CHRIS. HURRAY.

So I guess I haven’t updated for a while. A while being since Sunday night. Let’s see, what’s happened since then…

Monday night was the BinaryChaos dinner. Lupich, Machegav, Scott_Karana, Fishuu, Nick and I were there. Good times, lulz and hand tracing montages ensued. Also, it was really, really, really friggin’ cold and I was not so much a fan.

Yesterday I was supposed to spend the day studying for my Japanese exam, but I really didn’t. And I wish that I did, but I was so burnt out that I just couldn’t. It made today’s test suck a lot. But at least it’s over.

Which brings me to today. Wrote my last exam and I’m done forever ever. Which means like two weeks. But I feel so much better now. No more commitments. Just work and then I can play games when I come home. I’m so happy :) I’m hoping to buy Persona 4 sometime in the next few days so that I can play it when I finish KH:COM. I’m not sure if I’ll start P4 after I finish Sora’s story in Chain or if I’ll tough through Riku’s story in Chain first, then delve into P4. Depends what I’m feeling when I finish Sora’s part, I suppose. I kind of want to plough through Riku’s story so I can just be over and done with it (I’m assuming it’s Riku’s story, anyway, I mean, I don’t actually know, but it makes sense). ANYWAY. That’s muh plan.

Craig comes to town tomorrow :D I’m gonna pick him up from the Greyhound and Cam is gonna pick up Danny, then we’re gonna truck over to Cam’s house and they’re gonna friggin’ meet D<! Then Craig can stop saying that Danny isn’t real. Then I have to go to work at 3 in which I will take Craig to… wherever. Then I work until 9:15. Which is better than the orginally planned 10:15. That extra hour makes a huge difference. Siiiiigh. Getting closer to Christmas. I really, really, really hope I don’t work Boxing Day. I will work as long as they want on Christmas Eve. Hell, I’ll work from open to close. But I really do not want to work Boxing Day. But I have a feeling that I do. Which is a shame.

Anywho, Cam and Danny came over today after exams and such ’cause Danny needed to reformat his computer and needed to borrow my external to back up his files and stuff. So that’s the story there. We brawled for a record breaking short amount of time. We only played two matches I think? Two or three. Something like that. The rest of the evening has been Danny fixing his computer and TV. GREMLINS :D

Dat’s all I s’pose.

I had a couple of things I wanted to blog about yesterday, but I was tired and not in the mood and now I don’t remember what they were. Oh wells!

My foot has gotten worse, as if this is news. It’s pretty awful. Walking differently and so much has pulled something involving my second and third toe, so now it hurts on top of my foot. As well as in the bone. I have three days off starting today, so I’m going to do as little walking as possible and hopefully that helps. I am also going to shove it in hot water, then cold water, then hot water, etc. to get circulation up, ’cause feet have the poorest circulation out of every area in your body. FIX ME, BLOOD.

I am supposed to be studying Japanese right now, but it’s hard to get motivated. It’s so late in the exam period, plus it’s my last exam. And I really do need to care about it because I need to do well. But it’s just hard. This is why I wish they wouldn’t make it so late every year. But I guess they have to. For some silly reason. -sigh- I guess I’ll work on my Kanji charts today, to at least finish the charts for this semester so I can practice them later. I also want to make a giant vocab list because I am super fuzzy on the vocab.

Dinner at Kelly O’s tonight with the BinaryChaos folks. Mmm pachos. This will be the first time I’ve seen Nick outside of bus rides for a long time :D HURRAY. And I’ll get to see Christina again, who I haven’t seen for like five and a half months. I’ll tell her you say hi, Tyler. Hi, and 2%.

My house is dreadfully cold these days. Yesterday morning, it was 15 degrees in the house when I woke up to go to work. It was even colder (13 or 14) in the kitchen. Thank god I didn’t have to shower yesterday morning. I’d have froze.

Well I guess that’s all for now. I should… I should… study. Wah.

[4:00pm]

I am such a bad student. I can’t focus on Japanese today. Hopefully I’ll have better luck tomorrow.

Dinner in two hours. Woo. I’m hungry.

I got a ‘B’ on my Spenser paper. Which is alright I guess. I would have liked more, but looking back, that’s about all I could expect from it. It wasn’t actually very good. But! At least I know my mark so far for the class (ish) so I feel better about my final.

I really don’t want to go to work. I think it’s Lorie’s weekend off though, so that’s nice. I mean, she’s a nice lady and all and really does just want to help you out, but really she needs to just leave me alone and let me do what I do. I know what I’m doing. And usually I really don’t have the time to add whatever she wants me to do on to what I’m already doing. Unless it’s the Friday midnight shift. >.> Nothing gets done there.

I need to stop watching Seinfeld. lulz.

I wanna go to Califooooornia.

Alright that’s enough for now.

[10:08pm]

Work was alright until Sue did that whole “you and Kelvin need to stop working together because I don’t trust young people to work together because they’re just no good and get nothing done.” Obviously she didn’t say that, but you could tell that’s what she meant when she said that one of us needed to go clean while the other kept working on moving the lights. It isn’t our fuckin’ fault we didn’t get much done. The phones wouldn’t stop ringing. And, y’know, we were doing the OTHER halves of our jobs. So fuck you, Sue. This is exactly the reason I left.

Other than that, there is a pain in my head right above my left eye. It’s making me dizzy and if I move around too much, I almost pass out. It is a very unpleasant experience.

One more day of work and then three days off. For studying and testing. And then I’m free.

Shoot me in the head. Nrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

So I got a Twitter. I dunno why, I just did. Felt like it. So there is a new widget on the side of my blog (along with a new theme ’cause I felt like it) where you may observe my Twitter updates. Good times.

So we figured out that whatever is wrong with my foot has to do with my metatarsus. Which is stupid. So I’m going to be eagerly trying to figure out how to fix it over the next three weeks of work or whatever.

Speaking of work, today was just ridiculous. First off, I spent half my shift doing fifteen minute specials which were dismal failures in the end. Kelvin got to go home at 10 instead of 11. That was upsetting ’cause he was my company. We literally did nothing at work today. We couldn’t between all the specials. Then once 9 hit, we just stopped doing things altogether. I sat at MHF to make some signs for Kelvin and Dominique and we just kind of never left. Talked to Leonard for a while since he got off work at 9:15. After Kelvin left, I stayed there and watched HE for Dominique ’cause she had to run to lockup like eight million times. Before I knew it, it was time to go. Also- whatever Leonard says about me annihilating my banana, I DIDN’T REALLY ANNIHILATE IT OKAY? I just wanted to open it, so I yanked the top part down which apparently wasn’t strong enough to withstand the yank so… the whole top part of my banana kind of came off. Shut up.

The snow has made it ridiculously difficult to drive anywhere. The highway is slippery, as is my driveway.

OH, I learned something really… ummm, unsettling today. And I won’t blog about it because… well, I guess it’s not really any of my business? Although it kind of is because we used to have an affiliation with this family, which makes it like ten times worse. I dunno. I heard about it from Kel and it was… actually, I think it was one of the very few times I’ve ever really felt that shocked. Anyway. I won’t blog about it ’cause most of you don’t even know who it’s about, if any of you at all (okay that’s actually more of a reason that I can blog about it), and it’s not exactly a very nice subject to talk about and it actually makes me feel uncomfortable, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Oh, we got our Christmas tree today. It is behind me and I am being ambushed by the gentle scent of Frasier fir. Nom nom nom.

OW. I just leaned against the arm rest of the couch without a pillow between my ribs and it for like 20 minutes and just now moved away. OW. MY RIBCAGE.

Also, if you haven’t read my latest dream, you should. It may seem kind of dull at first, but it’s totally worth it for the very end. I felt awesome just dreaming it. You should feel awesome for reading it.

I s’pose that’s all. Let’s hope that it stops frickin’ snowing sometime soon so driving doesn’t have to be so ridiculous.