Ok so Gametap added Rise of Nations on Thursday but it DOESN'T WORK, like, for me or anybody else, and none of the administrators are commenting on the forums about it and so I decided to replay Sacred instead and then I ended up playing it for 12 hours straight and I haven't really slept all weekend but not because of that.

BUT THIS IS AN ART JOURNAL! So I'll say, uhm, I need to draw something. Yeah, that's right. What're you gonna do about it!? Lock me in a cellar with a pencil in my mouth?

I haven't really eaten, either. Except for these awesome hashbrowns I just ate, oh man, those were awes- I mean, good.

Oh, right, art. Uhm.





=I

http://www.minecraft.net/

What? Don't look at me! GO! Mess around with it! It's cool and neat and free (for the moment) and it's a java applet so you don't even have to download anything!

Tried playing a spy.

Got my first backstab. Sapped my first sentry.

Felt good. =3

So, went golfing with  tazel again. I pretty much completely sucked! Didn't bother warming up beforehand and was subsequently UNPREPARED for the trials that lay ahead!

Then we went to a local comic shop and nerd emporium because HOLY SHIT IT WAS FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!! I had no idea! I've always wanted to get my free comic book on free comic book day!! But they were out of free comics. So instead the owner pulls us aside and goes "what's your favorite series?" Tazel goes "X-men!" and subsequently receives two issues. I, not having the time to really think about it, say "uhm, I dunno, I'm just tagging along." So the guy gives me a weird look and reaches into a festering pit of darkness a drawer on the bottom of the shelf and pulls out two comics, Cable and Captain Atom.

Now, I'm a little torn about this. On the one hand, I probably couldn't have picked a better comic if I tried. I mean, CABLE! Rob Liefeld! That's like, comedy gold! I'll have to draw an angry, overly-muscular fur with a thousand tiny pouches to celebrate! On the other hand, I'm afraid to touch them! Cable's from '95, and Captain Atom is from '89, and both are in mint condition inside cute little plastic baggies. Captain Atom has an ad for Bayou Billy on the back. Tee hee! On the gripping hand, they were both marked down to $1.00, so I guess it's not like it matters.

And then we met up at the theater with like ten other furs, local and not-so-local, to catch Wolverine. I can't even remember half of their names, so if you're reading this, like, COMMENT or something!

The movie? It was pretty good. I didn't go in expecting much, and found it to be a nice little action flick. I'm not a terribly big fan of X-men, so I wasn't raging or anything. Haha.

And THEN we went to ROUND TABLE for PIZZA and oh god I just realized I spent eight straight hours socializing yesterday. I'll have to spend like a week alone in a dark room to recover!

I twisted my back really badly last Saturday. Which is funny, because I was going to go golfing, right, but ended up not, and then that night I'm dying anyway, like my muscles didn't get the message and injured themselves just to spite me. So I've pretty much been convalescing this week. Playing Titan Quest. More Titan Quest than any mortal should have to endure. Dream mastery is delightfully overpowered. And a little Left 4 Dead. Survival is neat.

Came to the realization while playing a campaign that I have a bad habit of shooting zombies that are crowded around a pipe bomb, instead of say, shooting the ones that are eating my team mate's brains. They're like fish in a barrel! And I subconsciously want more kills than anyone else.

I've been having really bad insomnia lately. Sometimes takes me three hours or more to get to sleep. The only solution I've found thus far is to go to bed late, like 2:30 AM or later. Everybody else seems upset at the fact that I get up at 11. Yeah, well, maybe if I could fall asleep in ten minutes like you then I could get up at the ass-crack of dawn too, eh!?

Ohhhh gooood I'm a quarter of a century old. I can feel myself aging. It feels like pudding.

I feel bad for corrupting all of my characters. They used to be so innocent.

I haven't been productive in over TWENTY FOUR HOURS. GGggrraahaejhfsgfsfag. If I don't do something productive, I will DIE. Do you understand me?! I will CEASE TO BE.






Incidentally, I got a strange E-mail this morning. From some forum called DoujinStyle. Because someone sent me a private message to my account there. The account I didn't know I had. The account that was created in February of 2007, and hasn't been logged into since.

HMM.

I figured he was ..... I don't know. Dead, or something. But look, he has his own Youtube channel!

http://www.youtube.com/user/DonBluthProductions

So, yeah, thought I'd try Google Chrome today. Why? I don't remember. Something sparked a synapse in my brain, I guess.

ANYWAY. Uhm. It's nice. I like it. It's fast. Like, stupid fast. It's got all kinds of neat little features. Although, inexplicably, there's no middle mouse button scrolling. Like, you can't press the middle mouse button on a page and move the mouse around to scroll. I figured that was pretty standard in web browsers, but it's not a deal breaker.

Also, there's no big community of plugin developers, like Firefox has. Now, that doesn't matter much to me, I don't use that many plugins. Except for AdBlock, which, ahhh, that's the big one. I'm seeing ads again for the first time in years. But it's not that bad. They don't seem to be as obtrusive and obnoxious as they used to be. Except .... except for this one at Rock Paper Shotgun.


CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE OVER THE 1,000,000 VISITOR: CONGRATULATIONS YOU WON!!!!!!!!

Holy SHIT. And of course it's shaking and flashing and BEEPING, all in Flash. Those things are still around? That's like ... that's like MEDIEVAL-level shit.

I tried clicking it, making sure I was in Incognito mode. Oh wow, I could win an Apple iPhone! JUST RELEASED! All I need to do is enter my E-mail address!

Uuuuhhhhgh. Ads. THIS might be a deal breaker. But it's so good otherwise!

I saw Watchmen with  tazel and  fyrdrgon and uhm.




=I




IT WAS FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC! I need to go read the graphic novel now.

EDIT: Before the movie, Tazel and I were discussing Left 4 Dead. He mentioned that one of Francis' lines, in the airport under the statue of Atlas, is "I hate Ayn Rand." I responded with laughter so sudden and maniacal that the girl next to me apparently thought I was dying.

And that's the ZC Awkward Moment of the Day! =D

Apparently I've been playing Titan Quest all week? And it's Friday now? Huh. I have no memory of time passing. But maybe that's because I have the attention span of a doorknob.

Oh and hey, FA's favicon finally works now. It's been a YouTube icon in my bookmarks since I first joined. Wopeifjwoeifjwoeifjwoeifjwoifj.

I can't possibly have clocked over 24 hours of Left 4 Dead in four days ... That's just not ... I don't see how ... That's gotta be a mistake, right?

... And eight hours in Titan Quest in under a day?! The hell??

I, uh. I need a life, apparently.

I bought Left 4 Dead. Now quit bugging me about it! >=|

So, heh, I was browsing Reddit tonight and found this: http://theirtoys.com/sexblog/8-biza.....-fetishes.html I always like reading these things because I secretly hope that they'll mention my own fetishes. Well, hey, there's an entry for furries! And a video full of representative examples! And, uhm, the second picture is one of mine. Huh.

I mean, uhm. It's not like I'm all AAARGH COPYRIGHT, I'm just uh ... inordinately shy. Heh. Realizing that one of my pictures is one step away from internet mainstream is a weird feeling. At least it was fairly clean. And I'm left feeling relieved that this guy didn't actually credit any of the artists in the video, heh.

ALSO!! Apparently two satellites collided in orbit over Russia today. http://science.slashdot.org/article...../02/11/2318226 I was kinda joking about this at first, like, heh, what are the odds? But this could be the start of an ablation cascade which could potentially destroy every satellite currently in orbit and make space flight nearly impossible for generations to come. Scary thought.

Go check this out: http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh.....p;pagenumber=1 --- It's a SomethingAwful thread dedicated to making gaming boxart CLASSY, in the vein of classic literature. It starts out good and only becomes more epic from there.

Seriously, the majority of these are so awesome, stylistic, minimalist, so much better than the real thing. Makes me want to try my hand at some myself.

I haven't been able to log onto AIM, YIM or MSN for the past couple of nights. Pidgin keeps crashing on me. I guess I could try Meebo or something, but not being online has given me a great excuse to play TF2 at nights. =| Yeah, I'm not good at multitasking. Finally got the backburner last night. It was great. All dropping down from above and going CRI-CR-CRI-CRI-CRIT-CRITICAL HIT on some poor heavy. (And if that poor heavy was YOU, I apologize.)

Ha. I remember when I was disdaining The Orange Box because it came with TF2. I didn't want to buy TF2! I was going to just buy Portal, but  ailure talked me out of it. Now over a year later I'm playing TF2 almost every night, while Portal is all but forgotten. How about that.

Yeah, I dunno. I felt like I had to make a journal. I'm sorry!

EDIT: OH YEAH! I remember what I was gonna talk about! Tool-assisted speedruns! I watch them all the time on http://tasvideos.org/ , and it's like ... the effort that goes into these things is incredible. I'll often see videos that take the author YEARS to make, constantly optimizing, pushing the game to its limits, finding a new route that saves just a FEW FRAMES ... and then someone else comes by a few months later with a video that's three seconds faster, supplanting it. THE AGONY!

Not that I'd know. I've never made one. But it sounds like a thankless task!

Yeah, that's all.

http://www.side7.com ! Go there! Sign up! Use it as a secondary gallery! I don't care! And then go laugh at my ancient art at http://www.side7.com/ZombieCat/gallery ! But make it THRIVE. Yes! Raise it up from the ashes! Whatever!

ALSO what the hell is the bbcode tag for strikeout text here? I've seriously tried every tag I can find and think of and nothing works, and yet I see it everywhere on FA. OH GOD YES

Just got back from a meetup with ... uhm ...  tazel,  SokiTwopaw,  Fyrdrgon,  Valthonis and uh .... two other furs whose ... names I can't remember? God, it was insane. I hardly ever leave the house and suddenly I'm meeting every fur in a 100 mile radius.

Two hours of pizza and bullshitting. I'm such a social retard. I just kind of stayed quiet, laughed like I was psychotic on occasion and then had a nervous breakdown. Seriously, everyone's like "we should go get ice cream!" and I'm like "I'M GONNA GO HOME NOW HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA =D"

Ohhhh man.

Trials 2: Second Edition is for sale on Steam and you should totally buy it because it's only $2.50 until January 2nd.

=I

GUESS WHAT I'VE BEEN DOING ALL WEEK =D THAT'S RIGHT PLAYING TRIALS 2

So uhm. After some mild prodding, I met  tazel for lunch since he just moved nearby and whatnot. It was .... odd. I mean, I enjoyed it immensely, I had a great time talking with him, we had more in common than I realized ...

The thing is, I have extreme social anxiety. Or at least, I thought I did. I was DREADING meeting him more than you could possibly imagine. I was literally terrified. My palms were sweating the entire way there despite the cold. The night before I dreamed about it continually. I wasn't expecting anything bad to happen or anything, it's just the actual ACT of meeting him that had me so nervous.

And yet, when we finally met, it was great. It's like I suddenly went into autopilot and just shut down my higher brain functions.

We talked for over an hour. It was great.

I have an LJ. I never update it. It's at http://zombiecat2001.livejournal.com/profile . I need an excuse to update it with the trivialities of everyday life so that my memories don't go flittering away like butterflies in a black hole. So go read it. Or don't. It's pretty boring either way.

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e.....nAftermath.jpg

What do I do now =C

Gothic 3! It's fan-fucking-tastic!

Uhm. Lemme start over. Ok. Ever since  skidd got me into it, I've been a big fan of the Gothic series. It's an obscure trilogy of action RPGs that are expansive, engaging and BRUTALLY DIFFICULT. FUCKING ICE WOLVES.

Uhm. Ok. So it's like, Gothic 1 and 2 are free-roaming, persistent world kind of games. Kind of like Oblivion, but on a much smaller scale. I've actually preferred the world they take place in over any Elder Scrolls game because, despite being much smaller, they're INSANELY detailed. Whereas Oblivion is all heightmapped, Gothic 1 and 2 look lovingly hand-crafted. Densely forested cliffs, overhanging plateaus, caves everywhere ... REAL caves, not just doors leading to a new area.

But Gothic 3! It's like ... it's HUGE, it feels like an Elder Scrolls game in its sheer massivity, and yet it retains that lovingly crafted feel of the last two games! It's a beautiful game, not just because of its graphical prowess, but because the landscape itself is a work of art!

And it's epic in its scope! In Gothic 1 and 2, you basically had to choose between three factions, and then go through a fairly linear story to get to the ending. Here, there are apparently three possible endings, and something like half a dozen factions that you can freelance around in ... and it's fascinating, because you don't have to take the "good" route if you don't want to! See, because orcs have taken over all the cities in the central landmass, right, and there are a group of rebels trying to retake them. And in any other game you'd be working with the rebels and being the hero and all that, but here, you don't HAVE to! You could instead work for the orcs, gain their trust, and actually flush out the resistance! In fact, it's in your best interest to exploit all the groups as much as you can, working them against each other!

What's today, Thursday? I think I've been playing this every chance I get since ... Sunday afternoon, I think. Everyone else is playing Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead and Prince of Persia, and I'm like "I'm playing GOTHIC 3, FUCK YEAH" and they all look at me funny.

It didn't get very good reviews when it came out in '06. Mostly because it was buggy, I think. Even Skidd told me he was disappointed with it. But it's been patched! Granted, it's still glitchy on occasion, but ... but you've just got to look PAST that! Gothic 2 was glitchy too! And yeah, it's brutally difficult, and you'll die a thousand times, but that's part of what makes it SATISFYING!

It's ... it's SO GOOD!

*sniff* I love you all! *sob*

So yeah. I've been playing Spore again lately. And I want to love it SO MUCH. I really do. And I mean, it's oddly addictive, but there's always some stupid thing that seems like it'd be so simple to fix that keeps cropping up and making me hate everything.

Like, I remember bemoaning the fact that you weren't able to beam down onto planets and walk around in space stage .... but oh, wait, I was wrong! You CAN. The problem is that the tool you need to do so, the hologram scout, takes so long to get that I didn't even know it existed. I'm on my third game, I've clocked untold hours in the galaxy, and I JUST NOW realized that the hologram scout lets you beam down onto planets.

It's like, getting tools for your space craft makes NO SENSE. I had to do something like 50 missions for other species to even get ACCESS to the hologram scout, and then I bought it from some tiny spacefaring race with only two planets to their name. How does that even WORK? My race is rated as "omnipotent", yet I have to do strange, arbitrary, unrelated tasks to get access to tools. In any other game you'd have a tech tree or something, and you'd research different paths to get progressively more powerful tools which you can then equip from your own bases, but here it's like ... the REST of the universe has access to everything, but they won't let me use it until I see a certain number of cosmic anomalies, or terraform a certain number of planets, or start a certain number of alliances.

And another thing! I've been playing for all this time, and I STILL can't really sculpt planets to my liking. Yeah, you can buy the basic planet sculpting tools. They're tied to arbitrary goals like everything ELSE you can buy, but at least you CAN get them through your own will. The REST of the tools, the exotic sculpting tools and the planet coloring tools, are apparently just spread haphazardly around the universe. And this pisses me off to no end, because it's like ... Ok, you see a planet with yellow circles around it, awesome, there's something there. And assuming it's not a fake signal and you get attacked by pirates, then there's either a sculpting tool or a rare artifact on the surface. But it's like, the "rare" artifacts are nothing of the sort. 9 times out of 10, it's gonna be a scroll of order, or the fossilized remains of a chew toy, or some sort of geode, or WHATEVER. Which are all useless, except to sell to someone for pocket change. And if it IS a sculpting tool, then half the time it'll be a tool that you ALREADY FUCKING HAVE. What the shit?! This IS a Maxis game, right?! Space mode IS supposed to be kind of a sandbox, right?! Then why the fuck are 90% of the creativity tools more rare than lost relics?!

And then when you do get them, they barely work!! Remember how awesome the terraforming tools in SimCity 4 were? How you could just wave your hand and create huge mountain ranges and craters and canyons? Yeah, sure, all those same tools are in Spore, but good luck using them! You can only use each tool ONCE, and then you have to wait for it to COOL DOWN! What is this, Guild Wars?! Can you imagine trying to do anything in SimCity 4 if each time you clicked "raise terrain", you had to wait for ten seconds?! You'd never get anything done!

There've been, what, three patches for Spore now? These things seem like they'd be so simple to fix. Ditch the cooldown for sculpting tools, don't make it possible for me to get a tool I already have, and make them more common, or at least buyable. Getting tool acquirement to make more sense would be more of a challenge. I'd LOVE to have it so that you could spend spice to research new technologies, but that'd require an overhaul of the entire system. But still, 3 out of 4.

I love this game, I really do, it's just ... it SUCKS sometimes, you know?

I get words stuck in my head like other people get songs stuck in their heads. All day today I've had "valiance" running through my brain. I don't recall ever hearing it before, but apparently it's a real word. Yesterday was "anachronism" all day long. I'm building my dispenser and all I can think of is ANACHRONISM ANACHRONISM ANACHRONISM.

My right thumb is all swollen from holding an X-acto knife all day yesterday. I hope it grows a big horking callous. Then I can draw eyes and a mouth on it and call it Mr. Phillips.

I tried the Left 4 Dead demo when it came out. It certainly is a game. Fun, but I think it's a bad sign when the most fun I had was when me and my teammates were breaking it. We all decided to jump down off the building on the first level instead of braving the zombie-infested interior. I'm Louis, Twile is Bill and a couple other dudes are Francis and Zoey. Francis tries to jump down to the fan units on the next building, but somehow ends up getting knocked down. Zoey and I run off and manage to make it with light injuries, and work our way down to street level. Bill, on the other hand, somehow slips and is hanging off the edge of the building. So I'm laughing my ass off at Bill, Francis is on his back on the fan units trying to shoot him down, Zoey tries to make it back up to the top to help him up but alerts the zombies instead, who all come after me, and ... yeah. I dunno. I never really "got" zombie survival games, so I guess it's not really for me, heh.