i finished up Twilight Grass Moon, Fairy Tale Princess today.  still gonna go through the Ten Nights, since the previous patches didn't let me see all of them and so i only really got to read A Story For The Evening, Hisui-chan, Inversion Impulse! and The Tohno Family Con Game.  managed to unlock all of the Ten Nights in two playthroughs (unlocked them all except Con Game and Hisui-chan in one run).  the game menu seems to suggest there's more to it than Twilight Grass Moon and Ten Nights (besides the hidden story and whatever easter eggs are hidden) but even if that's it i'm more than satisfied.

i really enjoyed Twilight Grass Moon.  it was hard as hell, but still very enjoyable.  i was under the impression that the relationship between Len and Shiki was something closer to a master-familiar relationship, i had no idea how deep the bond between the two of them was.  i honestly think that was the best part of the story, watching Shiki slowly unravel the mystery while deepening the bond between him and a forgotten familiar.

my only complaint is i think they used that one weird-sounding techno-y track wayyy too much.  it showed up everywhere.  Kagetsu Tohya came with the Tsukibako soundtrack and several other songs, they could have used other music.

also Akira is cute.

well, today was an adventure.

my friends and i piled into the car to head down to santa cruz.  we get there around 11:00.  we head down to the beach, swim in the ocean for a few hours, throw a ball around, and head for food.  after fumbling with finding parking for nearly half an hour we get into little caesars and ate, then headed back to move the cars (which had been ticketed, sadly).  we found that one of the cars wouldn't start.  after a quick jump start we head home.

did a little work on the irc server.

got ONScripter compiled and working, which means...

...Kagetsu Tohya in english on linux.

it is a good day.

spent a good portion of the day getting an IRC server up and running for a friend of mine.  i'm quite happy that i'm doing something other than code with my knowledge of computers.

probably spend the next two or three days getting it set up.  gonna write a nice little tutorial for people who don't have a lot of experience with IRC some time tomorrow.

but for now i sleep.

so

i have come to the conclusion that i have way to many freaking games.  more than i will concievably play before i get a job and a life and have way less time for games than i do now.

so tomorrow, inbetween catching up with some anime, i will clean house.

i haven't touched my PS2 bigtime in months, and consequently that is where my biggest cache of games is.  so i am going to make a list of all the PS2 games that i currently have in progress and i am going to hack it to bits.  at the very least i want to get rid of half of my games either in progress or haven't started.

my list will consist only of games that i have started and not finished but not games that are inherently unfinishable, like fightan games.

the thing that will make this rather hard is that i'll have to do something random.  if i try to pick and choose games to give up i'll end up doing one or two and stopping.  it will be kinda fierce, because all of the games i currently have queued up are some of my favorites.  that and i could end up giving up games that i've spent a lot of time on, like FFXII.  we'll see how it goes tomorrow

oh god it was worse than i thought

it must have been parked under that tree for close to two weeks to get that dirty.  i had to drive very carefully into the alley because the windshield was so encrusted with aphid poo i couldn't see.  one of my neighbors actually came up to me and said he had noticed my car sitting out there getting pooed on and was a little thankful i was getting it washed.

anyway here's how it started out (warning: these pictures may be offensive to people with clean cars):
front - back - left - right - hood - trunk - roof

i don't think it has ever been that dirty ever.  i could have taken it offroading and it would have probably come back cleaner than that.  those little splotches you see are areas where the aphid poo was so thick it pooled up.  the leaves you see are physically stuck to the car.  and the kicker is that i had bugs living on my car, ranging from larvae to full-grown insects.

;_;

luckily i had some good tools.  we invested in this rather expensive (read: $20) home carwash kit from Costco.  it came with a series of brushes and a wash handle that attaches to a hose so you can wash and rinse without having to switch tools.  combine that with a bucket full of a doubledose of soap concentrate and water and the aphid poo didn't stand a chance.

the aftermath:
front - rear - left - right

oh dear lord it's so beautiful i'm so glad to be an american right now

and the only real work i have to do afterwards is rinse everything off, put the hose away and wash the two towels i used to dry the car.  my car is all linty from the towels but that will blow off in time.

not bad for ~an hour's work.

i found out that if i allow overlapping subtitles the note shows up.  so yay, it's all good.

tomorrow i will be washing my filthy filthy car.  it has been parked under a tree for about a week.  and this time of year the aphids infest all the trees in the city.  aphids poop.  a lot.

and guess what i will be taking pictures oh boy.

hmm

tonight i was watching Potemayo and i noticed a line was left in romajii with two asterisks next to it.  so i opened up the ASS file and looked around.  i couldn't find any notes but i did notice one a few minutes down the road.  so i kept watching and the note didn't show up.  i opened the file in VLC and the note showed up.  so mplayer isn't rendering translator's notes in softsubs properly.  i tried a few frontends for mplayer which rendered the note but not only failed miserably at loading embedded softsubs but also frameskipped a 720p HD rip of Hayate no Gotoku, which my rig could play in its sleep.  so kplayer/kmplayer are out of the question.  my choice is between mplayer, which renders everything but translator's notes perfectly (which may not be such a bad thing) or VLC, which renders the note but makes the subtitles look like total ass.

i'll probably stick with mplayer, since not having the notes is a minor thing and if i'm really curious i have google.  but it would be nice if it rendered everything.  maybe i can tweak it or something

tomorrow, though.  i don't know why i'm still awake.

so i watched the Haruhi DVD and the first Galaxy Angel Z DVD today.

thankfully, very little changed.  Bandai is still using that really huge font for Haruhi and the normal sized font for GA.  other than that, vid quality, audio quality all excellent.  still not overloading the discs with extras so a normal sized number of episodes per disc (4 on haruhi, technically eight with galaxy angel since season 2 had two 13-minute episodes per broadcast).  i noticed some rather obvious errors in the Haruhi subs, like leaving out prepositions and such, but those are rather minor.  this disc had some of the best episodes in the series so i'm willing to overlook a few sub errors.

i fixed it!  whoo!

turns out i used the wrong backup.  when i reverted to the real backup and reran aticonfigure, the xserver started right up.  it still had a weird resolution bug, but after a quick romp through google i ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and told it which resolutions to use and it runs perfectly.  so i am back in linux.  i think i know what i did wrong, so tomorrow i'm going to get to work on getting my mouse configured properly.  after that it'll be the scanner and my printer and i'm done!  yes!

and as if this week wasn't going great enough, the boxset of Galaxy Angel Z arrived two days ago AND my special Limited Edition of Haruhi volume 2 arrived today, several days early.

the limited edition came in a large artbox, which has anime artwork of Yuki and Asakura on one side and novel artwork of Mikuru on the other.  the box itself contains a 団長 armband, a Bouken Desho Desho? CD, which also has Kazeyomi Ribbon, and the DVD itself.  inside the DVD is a Haruhi iron-on where she is pointing forwards (it won't scan so i can't show you and a pencil board with Haruhi (get ready for this) molesting Mikuru.  this is also the artwork where Haruhi gets a boob job or is wearing a padded bikini because she's only that big in doujinshi work (scans of the front and back).

the big shocker i found when i opened the box is that there are two DVDs in there.  DVD 1 is the next four episodes in Haruhi's order.  DVD 2 is the first 5 episodes in Kyon's order.  i think that's pretty awesome.  not only do i get what i think are the two best episodes in the series, i also get to watch them in the proper order without shuffling discs around.  great stuff.

bed time, i'll talk about the actual releases tomorrow when i get to watching them.

and so ends another short-lived love affair with linux

two nights ago i start digging around the ubuntu forums about dual-booting linux and XP.  i find out that if windows is installed first, GRUB will detect it and configure itself for dual-booting.  what's more the partitioner Ubuntu uses is non-destructive.  so i download an ISO of Kubuntu and get it installed.  loads up like a dream.  i download some software, get it running then hit the sack.

the next day i work with it for a bit.  i download mplayer, and to my dismay i can't watch video in full screen.  so i start digging around the ubuntu forums and find instructions for installing fglrx.  i follow them.  i break my install of linux.

reinstall #1

i get everything loaded, i follow a different set of instructions and it works.  i realize that i don't have 3D accelleration available, so i follow some instructions to fix it.  i break my install of linux.

reinstall #2

same thing happens as previous, except this time i manage to get it fixed.  i still don't have 3D support.  after a lot (and i do mean a lot) of tinkering i get it fixed.  so i get settled and start downloading software.  sleep.

today i start doing some configuration.  i get irssi configured and set, i get thunderbird set, i start downloading extensions for firefox, i start to work with amarok.  everything is going swimmingly.  i look at some instructions for configuring an MX1000 to work completely under ubuntu.  so i follow them.  when i restart the X window server my monitor gives me an "OUT OF RANGE" error and occassionally will show the login screen except split into 4 with fucked up colors.  i revert to my backed-up xorg.conf and it still doesn't work.

faced with reinstall #3, i boot into windows.

so yeah i am done with linux.  for now.  maybe.