June 15, 2008
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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.
