Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Blargh. Those were some crazy-ass dreams this morning, ranging from vivid Walking Dead-ish zombie apocalypse to some sort of alternating playing and being in an 8-bit video game dealing with trying to save people from quasi-immortal mage-types while gathering some strange energy crystals.

Well, I asked for an anime recommendation, and this is what I got. I wanted something to watch after having finished Valvrave. "Maoyuu" has a lot of interesting ideas and perspective, but the implementation is sort of... weak, in my opinion. It shakes up the usual fantasy tropes with a "Demon King" who's female and waiting to meet the Hero (yep, names of major characters are their professions, essentially) in order to convince him to help her establish peace between humans and demons - opposed by those who would use a war between nations to profit. It's a neat idea, especially when her plan is all about macroeconomics and international strategy. While several of the main characters are extremely powerful (Hero can teleport vast distances and level mountains with some of his magic), most of the "action" is army engagements and trade agreements. Unfortunately, that's where the issues start creeping in. Overall, it feels pretty slow. And just

Well... a year and a couple months ago I was concerned about having a new manager. It turns out he changed things in my life relatively little and probably for the better. My schedule didn't change. He encouraged taking some time off. He pushed for salary over wage, which hasn't been a bad thing so far. He handled a lot of higher level stuff I didn't really want to get into. And, while occasionally distracting, he was fun to be around. And today, I find out he's leaving at the end of the month. The board of directors for the company wants to cut costs, and the favored way to do that has ended up being cuts in the layers of management, including our IT Directory and the Circulation Director. Along with that, there's some shuffling of people around. My co-tech will officially become my supervisor and take on more managerial duties. I don't have a problem deferring to him, as I generally view his seniority as reason to do so anyway, though I have a little conc

It feels like all the conversations are elsewhere, but I guess I'm just resistant to change, so I keep posting here... Car registration - taken care of. I seem to have weathered the week off my co-tech has taken without too much trouble, though last Wednesday was hectic as all getout. Probably gaming Friday night, unless something comes up. I sampled a little of the escape from Lion's Arch last night in GW2. There's some impressive and flashy stuff going on, yet I find myself disappointed, frankly. Scarlet has overrun Lion's Arch and started drilling for... something. That's basically the extent of the narrative development in what is supposed to be the penultimate release for this living story arch. It feels to me like there are still a lot of questions, plus a big reveal, that all have to be crammed into the next release in about 2 (?) weeks (or ignored). Mechanically, it's mostly functional. There are hourly raids back into the destroyed city zone with

Well, it looks like the NDA is lifted. Of course, the game isn't so fresh in my mind now, but... When I heard about the game, I was exceedingly skeptical. The Elder Scrolls are awesome open world games, but converting that to an MMO? That seemed like a pretty big leap to me. Then I got into playing for my first beta weekend. It worked much better than I expected. Though that weekend was rough, with disconnections and a lot of voice packs not installed (leading a default robo-voice for many NPCs), the game played reasonably well. Most of all, it actually felt a lot like Skyrim with a bunch of real people connected at once. I don't know how best to explain that, but it was about the best overall feel I could imagine for the game. Most of TES flavor is there. There's a central story of conflict against Molag Bal, but when I only got through about 10 levels, I only saw the beginning. There's also a "main" story for each faction, it appears, dealing with its c

I started my taxes today, which is great and all, but along the way I realize the last vehicle registration slip I have is from the year before. Sure enough, my tags are expired as of the end of November. I certainly don't recall getting any renewal form in the mail. Grrr. One of those things you generally don't think about, but it doesn't take much (one misplaced piece of mail) to be screwed. Gonna need to get into the office tomorrow and get that taken care of, possibly with late fees. Feh! Monday Edit: Mrrf. And today is President's Day, so it looks like the registration office is closed.

Recent talk about some anime series sent me looking for something that felt worth watching to me. While other suggestions were made, they all felt "meh" in one way or another. I finally settled on Valvrave the Liberator, viewable online in subtitled form in various places. This is what you get when you take the core elements of a Gundam series (international war and mecha piloted by high school kids), add in some elements of realism not usually addressed along with a dose of quasi-supernatural, mix in some of the slow-burn mystery elements that have come into TV series in recent years (like BSG, Heroes, or Lost), and yet you manage to tie things together pretty well by the end. I've seen a lot of mecha-based anime put in a little mystery of where the super-mecha come from, then end up going off the rails to existential BS crazy-town at the end, while most of the TV series I mentioned as examples also reached a point of feeling like they were aimlessly adding mystery fo

So recently I went back and picked up Valkyria Chronicles from the earlier days of PS3 play. Heck, I looked at my saved games and they were from right around five years ago. Sheesh. I petered out around chapter 10 (of 18) last time, but I was relatively determined to make it through now and finish that out, even if it meant restarting so I knew what the heck was going on in the story. And I think I'm glad I did, though I was reminded why I gave up before. I really like the tactical gameplay. There are some tweaks I could wish for (maybe a move radius indicator and a way to see the field at unit level without actually selecting a unit), but I like how moving units puts you into direct control and how you have a map view. The interplay of units is pretty good (even if lancers lose some value later and your own tank is ignorable in a lot of maps). The weapon R&D does add something, though it's less useful in the endgame and starts to get into the down side. Juggling ever

So I met with my doctor again this morning to discuss being on the antidepressant. Very brief overview: possible decrease in libido, one day of weirdly brief and scattered headaches, a few days of trouble sleeping and blunted appetite, about a week of subtle (yet somehow euphoric) mood improvement, and three weeks of "feeling pretty normal, which may or may not be better than previous." It's hard to say that's medication and what is just happenstance. After some discussion, he offered about what I expected: trying a higher dose, going from a cautious starting 10 mg/day to 20. And I'll go back in about four weeks and we'll see how things are then.

Day 1: 1/17/14 Picked up prescription before work and popped a pill around 3 pm. I suspect the minor headaches and euphoria in the first 1-2 hours may be psychosomatic, because that seems a really, really short onset time... 5:30: Antsy, but that could totally the office getting quiet and having no particular projects on my plate for the evening shift. A certain amount of that isn't abnormal when hitting a point of boredom at work. End of day: Lots of "maybe this is the medication and maybe not." Possible altered levels of energy/anxiety, but not sure. Possible odd feeling to stomach, but not sure. The only thing that feels reasonable definite at this point at the fleeting, generalized headaches over the last several hours - not localized, relatively minor, and they come and go. We'll see how sleeping goes. Day 2 Woke up more or less in the realm of "normal" with questionable subtleties still. Seemed like a lot of dreams over the night/morning. Came t

As I've had some discussion about before , I'm not real happy with Scarlet in GW2. The latest content patch provides sort of a summary of her actions and offers a little bit of clarity about the goings on. It's good, especially for people who have missed parts (myself included), but it doesn't address the points that bug me to my satisfaction. I still feel she's too "perfect" - something that gets even worse as we're offered up another example of "oh, she planned this all the time." I still feel the gathered disparate factions up far too easily, especially for someone who comes across as crazy - something which is, at least, addressed, just not well enough to satisfy me. So what do we get? We get a recap of all the alliances and events along the way, with some theorizing by friendly characters and a few behind-the-scenes recordings of Scarlet addressing her conspirator/minions. Not much actually new this release, save 1) she has the Ae

... er... Debate! The big web event of last night seemed to be the debate between Bill "The Science Guy" Nye and Ken Ham, Christian young-Earth creationist. I tuned in for a fair length of it. At some times, it felt like a typically disappointing public debate, with questions being danced around rather than answered, but it has some interesting points and might provoke some thought here and there. First, I have to say that Ham came across as a more confident and charismatic speaker. I suppose that's natural and unavoidable, given his "profession" is based more around those traits. Nye, by comparison, gave (IMHO) good and sometimes lovingly-rambling answers, but felt less focused and on-point. I don't think it will really sway anyone, demonstrating rather directly how strongly people can cling to beliefs. I'm sure the video is available in several places for the curious. One point that seriously bothers me with Ham's view is he puts forth the

I'm not a big giver to "charitable causes." There's one I donate to on a yearly basis partly because of the timing involved in their first solicitation to me - a law-enforcement-based fund that called when the death of my step-mom's father, a volunteer with a police force, was fresh in my mind. With rare exception, I pass on others. I'm not exactly struggling, but I'm not so flush that I feel like throwing money around either. And every now and then something pops up to remind why I dislike just tossing money at some of these things. Today, I opened mail from the Hospice Fund of America. Home health care for the elderly, that's a good cause, right? Rather than just throwing it away, I read some of the print on the back. An excerpt: "Hospice Fund of America does not have an audited financial statement. It is estimated that of the contributions received in its first fiscal year Hospice Fund of America will spend 60% on fundraising, 20% on admini

Ramblings upon roleplayings... Let's see... Offline, our Aeranos fantasy game reached a break point, so we've shifted gears elsewhere for a while and the Order of the Swan is on hiatus with some loose plans to pick up ten in-game years, give or take, down the line. The overall mission rates a success, though we lost of the the NPCs we were trying to save along the way, and out last-minute desperate manuever rendered both party healers unconscious and one very nearly dead. Woo! So we've turned out attention there back to our modern urban fantasy Northport game. Considering we haven't played that in quite a while, there's been some catching up. We re-converted out of Dresden Files RPG to, more or less, the same system as in use for Aeranos. That took some sort for all the characters. Mine was easy enough translating stats over from the original Unisystem, but he's gone from having a handful of invocations in Unisystem to high caster stats in DFRPG to a really

Backdating a bit... Yep, the movie was probably the highlight of my birthday, which is not to say anything bad really happened, but the rest of the day was... hmm... lackluster. It's not surprising when I don't even know what I want , short or long term. And Sunday proved quiet as well. With the Super Bowl on, AW canceled guild missions in GW2, and our ARIN leader wasn't feeling up to things, so I barely even logged into the game over the weekend. I was antsy for something to do/play and ended up reloading Valkyria Chronicles, which I played about halfway through five years ago, but never finished. I'm sort of remembering why. As much as I like tactical games and the story has a certain charm, it's a bit of a slog to get through things. Overall, the weekend offered a lot of time to think and reflect, and that usually isn't a good thing in that way. Definitely the lowest point in the last couple weeks - I daresay depressing. Hmm. Not the lowest I've be

After some insistence and with a desire to do something with my afternoon, I went to see Frozen. No regrets there. Disney had me with their releases for several years, but I got older and it became less of a given. This one isn't perfect, and the music doesn't measure up to most of the "big" animated movies that come to mind, but I generally find the characters and messages vastly more appealing. I do think it's worth seeing, though to say more gets into... As a story of tragedy and emotion and the power of love, it calls to mind Beauty and the Beast. But where that one may have a more memorable score, it also ends up rewarding the prince for Belle's emotional journey. Not so in Frozen. While it teases the "true love's kiss" trope, Anna isn't saved by a prince. Heck, for a section of the movie, I was expecting her sister's kiss to be the one to break the spell - though I can see how that might raise some incestuous undertones that mig