Random ranting

So, another anime season has started, and the question begs itself even more: When will we get The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya?

Anyway, I've downloaded a few random episode 1s to watch and see what intrigues me. I might watch them tonight, I might not. It's been storming here, and our power is rather flaky.

My dad was watching some western movie on tv today that had Alan Rickman in it, so now I've got him on my mind. I think I'll have to watch a few movies with him (Galaxy Quest, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) just to put my mind at ease.

I've discovered a rather fun and hectic setup for playing Unreal Tournament 2004. Instagib CTF, with the Game Speed, Air Control, Quad Jump, Low Gravity, and Slow Death mutators. Game Speed and Air Control are turned all the way up. It's rather random who wins each match, as it's really hard to get a flag out of the enemy's base. The bots are especially mean, even on the lower difficulties, because they have much better aim and can make decisions faster.

So for breakfast today (at 4:30 PM or so) I had a diet dr. pepper, and then my dad made mojitos. Awesome breakfast was awesome. Then around 6 or so we had dinner. We were going to grill some chicken, but the weather was all like 'RAAAAAAWR SCREW YOU' and was raining profusely. So we had to cook the chicken inside. Oh well. We also had pinto beans cooked with Thai green curry paste, which was excellent as always, and some random frozen vegetables my mom warmed up.

Recent game announcements have been nothing short of awesome: Diablo 3, and Chrono Trigger for the DS. Chrono Trigger is going to be revamped to take advantage of the touch screen, and have an extra dungeon added, which sounds a bit wonky, but maybe they'll add some random new item to the game that you can only get by clearing the new dungeon or something. I'll start a new paragraph for Diablo 3.

Diablo 3 looks way too much like World of Warcraft, and fails to give off the same dark and gothic feeling of the first two. The gameplay itself looks sweet as hell though. The Witch Doctor looks like it's going to be a fun class to play, and the Barbarian got revamped. They've fixed a number of my issues with Diablo 2 in various ways, fixing potions by having enemies drop these health items that heal the party when picked up, thus allowing you to actually heal yourself in the heat of battle without having to burn a rejuvenation potion. They're also finally instituting a reserved drops system for multiplayer, so no more drop stealing is going to happen. It remains unclear as to whether or not they'll support DirectX 9, and my email to their support asking about it was met with a standard "We're not gonna tell you anything, screw off" form response. And then, a few hours later, I got a "Customer Service Survey" email asking how the guy who sent the form response did at customer service. I just laughed at that.

The art in D3 sucks so bad that there's actually a petition to get it changed. When I signed it, my signature was number 5200 something. It's over 34000 signatures as of this writing. Sign it, even if you don't particularly care for Diablo, just because the world does not need more games that look anything similar to World of Warcraft.

Since Diablo 3 was announced, I got all nostalgic and started playing Diablo 2 again. I updated to patch 1.12 after reading the notes and seeing that if you copy d2xmusic.mpq from the Lord of Destruction disc to your hard drive (obviously, if you live in a hole and don't have Lord of Destruction, this will be d2music.mpq instead), the game will no longer require the CD to be in the drive to play. I did this immediately, because I hate having to track down a game disc and stick it in my cd drive just to start up a damn game. I've been ripping ISOs of games and mounting them with Daemon Tools so I don't have to find the stupid game disc. Instead I just look in my ISO directory and mount the appropriate image. To not even have to do that (and be officially sanctioned, nonetheless) is awesome. Now if there was just a hero editor that was compatible with 1.12, so I can get some high-end set items that require 25 hours a day of farming to get normally.

I encountered something strange that, after googling around about it, other people are encountering as well. Whenever I try to start Warcraft 3 or its map editor, AVG pops up saying "Threat Detected!" about SIntfNT.dll, saying it's "Trojan horse Proxy.ACKA". I dunno what SIntfNT.dll does, but telling AVG to either heal it or move it to the virus vault does nothing, because it's back the next time I try to start the game. Also when it happens the game bitches at me to put the cd in the drive, even if it's already in there, which leads me to believe that it's part of the copyright protection bullshit. I sent an email to Blizzard's support about it, but they haven't responded yet. I'm tempted to uninstall and reinstall the game, just to see if that fixes it.

I think I'll leave it at that.