Chrono Fever on hold

Yes, technically I was going to play Radical Dreamers.  I actually started it up and got pretty far before losing horribly to Lynx and having to start over because I forgot to save state.

Anyway, a while back I started playing Secret of Mana, got a little bit into the game (two elementals, some level two weapons), and then for whatever reason forgot to continue playing.  I think rather than me forgetting to play, it was more like I was thinking "well, every time I start up Secret of Mana, 10 hours pass by without me realizing it" and trying to fit it in with everything else I do.

Earlier tonight I started it up, figured out where I was supposed to go, and continued.  Every time I got a new weapon orb, I stopped, got the new weapon forged, and ground it up a level on everyone before continuing eith the story.

Eventually I got sent to the upper lands.  Everything there initially was kicking my ass, which was interesting because I was overlevelled for the areas I'd been in up to that point.  Anyway, I managed to get going, with the help of every single Cup of Wishes I had (they're the resurrection item).  Defeated a giant mutant chicken in a few casts of Earth Slide, then got to the Wind Palace where I could finally talk to someone and get healed.  Now that I had a base to work from, I got as many levels as I could while grinding up some level 3 weapons and all three elementals that I have available.

This brings us to the present.  My characters are level 26, all three of them have all weapons except the Javelin at level 3, and both the girl and the sprite have Undine, Gnome, and Sylphid at level 3.  I can survive long enough to move several screens, which is my indicator that it's time to progress with the story.

The higher level weapons are really neat.  In addition to, you know, dealing more damage, they do different things to the enemy.  The level 3 spear puts Balloon on the enemy (Balloon is the paralysis status effect, mega-useful), the level 3 gloves put enemies to sleep, and a couple of them slow enemies down.  I mean, I could cast Balloon, but why bother when I can inflict it for free by whacking something with a spear?

Advanced Renamer

I realize now that I mentioned Advanced Renamer in passing a while back, but never made a post specifically about it.

We've all been there before.  You have a directory full of files and need to rename every single one.  Not anything drastic, but just simply reordering parts of each file name or replacing certain characters with other characters.  The last thing you want to do is rename each one individually.  That takes forever and is extremely repetitive.  This is where Advanced Renamer comes in.  Simply select the files, tell it how you want them renamed, and then hit Start Batch.  That's it.  Here's a screenshot of its interface.

Backlog almost gone

I really should be going to sleep, but I felt the need to type this.

I marathonned all of Rozen Maiden overnight.  This brings my backlog down to the following:

• Kiss x Sis OAV (4 episodes) and TV series (13 episodes) - Waiting for the last Blu-ray release of the TV series to come out
• Sekirei (12 episodes), Sekirei OAV (1 episode), Sekirei ~Pure Engagement~ (13 episodes, still airing) - Have Blu-ray of the first season and the OAV, waiting on ~Pure Engagement~ Blu-rays
• Shingetsutan Tsukihime (12 episodes) - lol
• Gundam Unicorn episode 1

Yeah, it's really that small.  LOL THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID

I'm re-watching Sekirei's first season because it's been so long I have no clue what was happening at the end of it.  I do remember that the OAV was 10 minutes and didn't advance the plot, though.

Being that I'm waiting on Blu-rays for two things, I guess next up are the two I'm not waiting on the Blu-rays for.

Tales of Fridays?

So, for whatever reason, nobody's been around to play Tales for the past couple of Fridays.  The few of us that have been there have been playing the Scott Pilgrim XBLA game.  I've ground two characters up to max level and stats now, which I have to do by myself because when I play with other people I seem to get the short end of the stick.  100 speed is way too fast, especially when hyper mode is on.  All I need to do is get them to level 6 and buy the hidden move...

I haven't been doing my grinding in the most efficient way possible either.  Basically, I grind money and use the hidden store in Level 1.  Yeah, I haven't been paying off Scott's late fees.  Two bionic arms, three never-ending fantasies (and random WP+DEF items from other stores to get the remaining 10 of each), and two speedy the porcupines.  It's expensive, but whatever.

I should actually play through the game with the characters I've maxed out now.  I've maxed Ramona and Stills, and started money grinding for Kim but don't have enough to buy anything yet.  I really like Ramona's striker.  Full group hyper mode go!

The Invulnerable achievement is really easy to get.  All you have to do is have a friend go in the game with you (and both of you can get it!).  Go into level 1, one player blocks, rolls around, and avoids the big enemies; the other player kills everything.  Use the shortcut, avoid busses/cars, etc.  The achievement unlocks before the fight with the boss, so you can fight him without having to worry (it's not like I haven't OHKO'd him with Ramona's dashing hammer attack...).  Then go through again with the roles swapped and both of you will have it.

I'm going to have to remember the codes on GameFAQs' codes page.  How do people find these things anyway?

Flatbread Melts

So for a while now I've been eating the California Pizza Kitchen ones.  A friend of mine said the DiGiorno ones were good, so I got a couple to try.

The first one, I believe it was the Italian Meatball variety, was great except for the bread.  The bread was without a doubt the blandest bread I've ever tasted.  I was about to just write off the product as the same as the rest of DiGiorno's stuff, but then I discovered a different variety with a different box design entirely that I hadn't noticed before.  It's the Chicken and Bacon Ranch variety.  It says it has artisan bread, much like the California Pizza Kitchen ones do.  I'm not entirely sure what makes artisan bread artisan bread, but I see herbs and spices in it and it tastes really good.

I had the second one before going out for my usual Saturday night events.  The bread was better, but overall, I think generally I'll just stick with CPK.  It kind of sucks that Giant doesn't carry any other varieties of either brand than the ones I've already had.  I haven't had the CPK spinach one, but fuck vegetables.

Actually, I need to eat something right now.  I just got home from a party where I had a fair amount of alcohol, decided I'd had enough, switched over to water to avoid a hangover, and as usual I forget when I stopped drinking but I know it was well before midnight and I didn't drive home until 5 AM so I think I was fine.  I dropped friends off at their dorm (including a sober friend who obviously felt like I was sober enough to drive), didn't run into anything, and didn't get pulled over, if that's any indication.  I had a rum and coke, a second rum and coke made with Captain Morgan's rum instead of Cruzan (because Cruzan is shit and there wasn't any Bacardi), the last shot's worth of the Captain Morgan's (it was 100 proof), and a beer.  So, not too much, and not nearly as much as some people had.  I'm one of the statistical minority that knows their limits and retains cognisance while intoxicated, which makes it difficult for me to know when it's safe to drive again.

Fuck, is it really spelled "cognizance"?  That's what Firefox's spellchecker wants to change it to.  I personally like it better with the "s", even though it's pronounced with the "z" sound.

Twitter's New Link Shortening Service

Twitter sent out an email a few days ago detailing their new link shortening service, using the URL http://t.co/.  Reading through it, I thought it was nice at first, but after finishing reading the email, I have some concerns.

• First off, its use will be automatic and therefore mandatory.  Will this be the case even if you've already used another link shortening service to shorten the link, as I do with bit.ly?
• Second, are they trying to destroy all other link shortening services?  The number one reason there's so many of them is Twitter's retardedly low character limit.
• Third, the only thing I really like is the preview feature, which is something all other link shortening services lack, save for TinyURL, which is ironic because it produces long links in the spectrum of shortened links.  Bit.ly has a Firefox extension that adds previews to other shortened links, but it has security issues.  Since it remotely loads a CSS file from their servers on every site you visit, bit.ly gets a nice list of every single site you visit, whether it has any shortened links or not.  They claim to not store this information, but I don't believe them any more than I believe Facebook when they say beacon data isn't stored for users that turn it off.  Those beacons still get sent, the setting only "controls" whether or not Facebook ignores the data.  It's probably a placebo switch, given the appearance of doing something while in reality not doing anything.
• Fourth, and possibly most important: Twitter stated that link clicks will be logged "to provide better and more relevant content to you over time."  To me, this means data mining for the express purpose of tracking their users' activity for marketing and advertising.  No thanks, I don't want to be tracked or advertised to.
• Last but not least, how exactly will the automatic shortening work?  Will it happen as I paste the link into the tweet, or after I hit the Tweet button?  This pertains mostly to the remaining character count.  Will it be accurate and shorten the link on paste, or will it be inaccurate and force me to stare at a negative number, unsure how long my tweet will actually be with the link shortened?

Link shortening integrated with Twitter would be a very nice thing to have, but it really should be optional.  Furthermore, if they made changes to the way they process and store tweets, the length of a URL wouldn't matter.  URLs have some required formatting, beginning with the protocol designation, and needing spaces to be encoded in order to contain them, so therefore a simple regular expression can find any link and exclude it from the character count.  They could then selectively shorten the link depending on a user preference or for mobile browsers.

Kind of unrelated, but it makes about as much sense so I just have to rant about it: Why do people think it will actually work when they try to retweet a message with their own commentary added?  It doesn't.  It doesn't register as a retweet.  In order for it to do so, the retweeted message must be identical, just with RT @username in front.

A Lesson in Intuitive User Interface Design

A week or so ago I installed the Firefox extension BetterPrivacy, which lets you easily keep track of and mass-delete unwanted Flash cookies.  After flagging my savegames on Newgrounds so they wouldn't be deleted, I went about my business, periodically checking it and deleting any unprotected ones.

The dialog for confirming the mass deletion is the subject of this post.  The button you click to bring it up says "Remove All LSOs", and the dialog itself is asking whether or not to also delete the ones you've flagged as protected.  Here's what it looks like:

Does it look intuitive at all?  Not to me.  Yes is the default button?  Seriously?  I've never just brought this up and hit Enter, but doing so would delete fucking everything.  I use the mouse on this dialog.  A couple days ago, I accidentally clicked Yes.  Most of the Newgrounds saves were from games I'd played once, maybe twice, and forgotten about, but some represented a fair amount of hard work.  I've got a few of them back now.

I think that this dialog needs to be changed.  Here's how I'd change it:

Note that the default button goes from deleting fucking everything to only deleting unprotected Flash cookies.  In addition, with this design, the buttons are completely clear as to what they'll do.  You'll know that by clicking Delete ALL, you're going to delete fucking everything.  I particularly like that ONLY UNPROTECTED is right in the middle of the dialog, so if you're looking for it, you'll probably find it first.

Also, I removed the keyboard accelerators, because deletion confirmation dialogs really shouldn't have them.  Deletion shouldn't be a process that's easily done with a simple keystroke, you need a proper barrier to prevent accidental deletions.  Things like automatically selecting the choice that won't touch anything are elementary.  However, it's reasonable to expect that a user would bring this dialog up with the intention of only wanting to delete the unprotected Flash cookies.  Sites tend to dump a ton of them and deleting one by one is a pain.  I set the Delete ONLY UNPROTECTED button as default so we don't delete anything the user doesn't want deleted if they just hit Enter.

Also, I'd probably stick a confirmation dialog on the "Delete ALL" button just to make absofuckinglutely sure the user wants to delete fucking everything.

Now, the better subject: What does LSO stand for?  Can't we just call Flash cookies "Flash cookies"?