been playing metroid prime 3 like it's going out of style.  in terms of number of days, i have exceeded my first run (started it about a week ago), but i'm playing it on Veteran mode, so it's harder to make long runs since boss battles take forever.  i was tempted to go back and start over on Hypermode, but the first boss battle was just challenging enough to keep me on veteran.  found some new stuff, too.  satellite thing in Skytown that will download data on the location of suit expansions for the various planets.

picked up ichimashi 5 and AiAo 17 a while back.  IM 5 was exactly what i was expecting, and i'm glad i read it.  it's always just funny enough and just soothing enough to make me relax just thinking about it.  AiAo 17 was...a bit of a letdown.  the previous two volumes spent a lot of time building up a huge stockpile of dramatic tension.  and this one came shrinkwrapped, with an Explicit Content label and a 17+ age rating.  i had no idea what i was getting into.  unfortunately the situation that the dramatic tension had been leading you into was resolved in the first chapter of the volume, and the rest of the volume was spent tying up all the loose ends.  all the warnings and the shrinkwrap was for a "about as explicit as it gets without being called porn" sex scene about halfway through the volume, which i kind of felt was out of place.  it's like Type-Moon games.  the ero scenes are in there somewhere, you know they're going to appear eventually, you don't feel any different after they're done (with the exception of Rin's ero scene in Unlimited Blade Works.  i hurt myself i was laughing so hard.  I'M GONNA POKE IT), and if they had been completely omitted the story wouldn't change a bit.  if those 10 or so pages had been stuck together and i skipped them, nothing on the other side would have been different, except i would have gone "ohhhh" when i saw them both sleeping naked.  on the opposite side of the coin, however, it was nice for a change to read a romance manga that doesn't pussyfoot around this situation.  but i digress.

i also picked up Rozen Maiden 4, which i was kind of hesitant to do because i thought i already had it.  not surprisingly, i not only had volume 4 but 5 as well.  the next day i returned it and picked up Genshiken 1.  Genshiken 1 was a dollar more than Rozen Maiden 4, so i figured i might as well splurge a bit and picked up GitS SAC 4.  SAC is really building up, i'm glad i got into it.  Genshiken surprised me.  i watched the first episode of the anime way back when it premiered, and it did little for me.  but now, almost four years and many hundreds of anime episodes and many thousands of manga pages later, i'm not only catching more references but i'm enjoying the series more.  i guess it really is a series that you have to "level up" for.  it's got a big backlog of english releases so i'm looking forward to reading more.

i was sad to see border's was completely sold out of Aria and Aqua, save the first volume of Aqua, which i already have.  and with ADV putting its manga on hold once again, i'm sort of running dry on slice-of-life stuff.

in other anime news, i watched the two subbed Kara no Kyoukai movies.  i had to rewatch a few parts to pick up on minor points, but all in all i'm loving every minute of them.  ufotable is really putting money into this one, as the production values are pretty high even by movie standards (and so help me, when Shiki activates her power i can't help but see Manabi).  the storyline is engaging, and the anachronistic ordering adds a bit of intrigue to the story at the expense of making it harder to follow.  but then again Nasu isn't the easiest of writers to follow in the first place.  the music is absolutely fantastic, and with a different composer for each movie you get a different flavor of ear candy each time.  the voice acting is spot on, Shiki's seiyuu in particular shines because of her (Shiki's) unique traits.  i rewatched the second movie a few nights ago, this time more attuned to her tone of voice, and i picked up on the subtle pitch and inflection changes as she switched between Shiki and SHIKI, in particular i picked up the "ore" and "watashi" which i glossed over the first time (probably not a spoiler, but since that isn't revealed until the second movie i figure why not).  i can't wait for 3 to come out.  also Shiki eating ice cream.

i finished off Haibane Renmei during my bout of insomnia yesterday.  i had forgotten how much the characters struggled to get to where they did, and i also forgot how well that series concluded.  the more i think about it, the more i am very, very glad i decided to pick that box set up.

i only intended for this to be a short little update on my gaming habits and it ended up being a dump for the anime and manga i've been reading over the past few weeks.  well at least i got it out of my system :3

i've been having trouble sleeping the past few nights, and it's kind of got me worried.  i'll go to bed yawning and tired, and the second i slide between the sheets i'm wide awake again.  i have a feeling i know what the problem is, too.  there have been a lot of fires in california recently, and the smoke from them is blowing over fremont.  because my grandma has developed bad asthma, i can't sleep with my window open.  and because i run my PC all the time now, if i don't do something to keep my room cool it will slowly turn into a sauna.  i run my AC, but it doesn't blow over my bed.  so my bed more or less becomes a heating stone.  it's really hard for me to sleep when my bed is this warm, so i tend to drift in and out.  i'm going to try setting up a fan to blow on me and see if i can't get some rest.

normally i wouldn't care, but this is the fourth or fifth night in a row i've stayed up past 3:30 because of insomnia.  as well there are repairmen coming to the house in ~four hours to clean out my grandma's AC.  i don't have to greet them, but they will most certainly wake me up.  and i have plans tonight.  hope i can keep them.  :

EDIT AT 4AM: nope, i cannot sleep.  i guess i will just stay up.  tomorrow will be a wasted day, and i more than likely won't be able to make it to the game night thing.

and ten days pass in idleness.  i have seriously accomplished next to nothing this entire summer.  it almost feels good to know that my doing nothing will cause nothing, since in the past doing nothing almost always meant more work down the road.

i haven't really done much.  i decided to replay metroid prime on hard mode, and i made the exciting accomplishment of finally defeating the omega pirate after three failed attempts in one day.  my first attempt was a failure from the get-go: within the first two minutes i had backed into enough phazon pits and mistimed enough quake-avoiding double-jumps to lose nearly half my life.  i immediately stopped the game and reloaded my save.  my second attempt seemed promising: i had whittled the annoying bastard down to less than half his life while still retaining a good portion of my own.  but then i found myself against a wall with his ugly face rearing down on me.  not only was i getting constant contact damage from touching him, but he was doing his melee attack at the same time.  the game finally let me use the morph ball, and after a few more contact damage hits i rolled to safety.  i was down to less than half my health, which meant he took away at least five energy tanks in the space of maybe 15-20 seconds.  i kept fighting, but the battle turned hopeless.  i was out of missles, and a few flubs with my weapon selection turned the tide in his favor.  the last thing i saw before my last unit of energy was drained was his body disappearing from my x-ray'd view, with his laughter reverberating through the chamber.  the final insult was that he only had a sliver of health left.  if i hadn't gotten trapped in that corner i would have won.

i put the game down for a few hours.  i picked up Wind Waker and restarted it, and after sneaking through the Forsaken Fortress i got right back into Prime.  the WaveBird i ordered on ebay arrived, so i was going to break it in.  the fight had a rough start: i hung back too much, and he whittled away two of my energy tanks right quick with his bomb cannon thing.  but soon i turned the tide in my favor.  the game, luckily, sent down some ice troopers, which i killed right off.  they each dropped a big health thing, so i was back in the game.  i was able to wear him down to about 1/3 health having lost less than two tanks myself.  after that i started ignoring the troopers and focused on him.  i lost a lot of health, but i managed to kick his ass.  hooray.

a while ago i got back into the Linux game, which i don't think i've talked about.  i installed Arch Linux on my thinkpad several months ago, and about a month ago i got inspired and did the same to my desktop.  i've made numerous changes since its initial install, the most recent being: a complete overhaul of my fstab and menu.lst files, using UUIDs instead of device points (after the fiasco i had installing new harddrives, i figure this will cause less headaches); a revamp of my partition structure - before, all the partitions were on one drive.  a few days ago i cut my anime drive down by 60 gigs and added it to my linux partition list as a storage drive (did so for steam, since wine + steam + NTFS doesn't mix).  in a burst of inspiration, i added a 1 gig swap partition to my new 750 gig drive and moved /home to that 60 gig partition.  so now swap, /home, and / are all separated.  things are moving along pretty quick now; removal of sudo - i've been using it since the ubuntu days, and i figure it's time to drop the crutch and start using su.  all in all i feel more better about it the more i tinker with it, and tinkering with it gives me something to do.

have made essentially no progress on anime.  any free time i have that isn't spent on IRC, knee-deep in terminals or watching Zero Punctuation videos over and over has been spent on Metroid Prime.  soon it will be spent on Wind Waker, GTA4, and if i lose to my impulses, Psychonauts.  i've also got a backlog of PS2 games to finish (notably, Disgaea 2 and Atelier Iris 2) and a small amount of DS games to slog through.  at this rate i may not be caught up with anything by the time my vacation ends.  but hey, i've still got two and a half months.

well the urge to continue rewatching Zero Punctuation is taking over so i'm going to get back to it.  except i want to mention one other thing.

please pardon the relative fuzzyness and the reflection in the image - my room is kind of dim at night so i had to use 1/2 second exposure time, and the Super Macro mode on my camera doesn't work with the flash.

but anyway.  i now own a BlackBerry.  whoo.

UPGRADES

about a week ago i got one of those annoying e-mails from newegg offering a few deals.  i decided to look it over and saw one of the offers was a Motorola cable modem with free shipping.  i checked the price and it wasn't all that unreasonable.  SOLD.  in the same stroke i read over another e-mail they had sent to me, this one talking about hard drives.  what i saw was a 750 gig seagate drive for an outstanding price.  so i picked it up as well.

they arrived yesterday!  i installed the modem and gave comcast a call.  i spent maybe 10-15 minutes on the phone with tech support, and my modem was recognized right away.  my connection seems a bit smoother, but that may just be rose colored goggles.  at the very worst, my connection is exactly the same.  except now i get a $3 break on the bill.

my drive was a bit more tricky.  i had to mod my power supply's cabling to include a third SATA power connector, since i didn't want to use a molex adapter.  i added the adapter a little too low on the cabling, but it's no big deal.  popped it in, spun right up.  arch refused to boot, because the device block IDs had changed so it couldn't find anything.  a quick edit of menu.lst and fstab and i was set.  got it formatted and spent about seven hours copying ~400 gigabytes of data from one drive to another.  my previous setup was a 500 gig hard drive for my regular data storage and a 250 gig drive for anime.  now the 750 gig i bought is used for storage and the 500 has been promoted to anime.  the old 250 now sits in my enclosure as external storage.  so i now officially have external storage again and my internal capacity has been promoted to over a terabyte.  had to struggle with windows and getting the drive letters set correctly, but after doing so everything loaded like a champ.

not the only thing i bought, though.  a close friend of my grandmother's sent me a $20 gift card for graduation.  i used it to pick up Lain 1 and GitS SAC 3.  haven't gotten around to watching SAC yet (what's wrong with me) but i watched Lain yesterday.  i forgot how trippy it is.  i also forgot how awesome it is.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE.  a few nights ago someone in #/a/ linked to this.  i...couldn't help myself.  i had to have it.

in other anime news, i caught up with subs of Soul Eater.  gets more awesome with each episode.  i wasn't sure if i would like Death the Kid, but so far he's proving to be a good addition to the cast.  and i am actually warming up to Black Star.  didn't think that would happen.