I've been looking, but I haven't found any translated dating-sim games where you play as a tentacle beast. Are there any?

Someone told me there's a live-action La Blue Girl. I must have it.

I've been messing around with Linux lately. I just installed Mandrake 8.2 on another computer, only I decided that since this one isn't painfully slow, I'd actually try to do some stuff on it. I found browsing the directories to be extremely painful. During install, I heard something about Midnight Commander. Well, that name is similar to Norton Commander, and I know that someone made a similar program for Linux, so I checked it out.

Bingo! Now let's pray I never use the word "bingo" again. Anyway, now I can find files, and browsing directories is easy. Now, while this is a promotion of the software in question, keep in mind that it's free it's not adware or anything like it. It's just a program some cool guy made and released for free because he's cool. If you're trying to get into Linux, I strongly recommend you go pick yourself up a copy. If you look carefully, there's an RPM that makes installing rather painless.

I swear that this all has nothing to do with the nostalgia of the old DOS days when Norton Commander was my GUI.

I haven't really found any good corn on the internet recently. I know there's a lot of corn out there, but I haven't been getting any lately because it's mostly just the same kind of corn, and I don't really like it. They need new corn to spice it up. They need new styles of corn. You'd think that someone would have an original, yet easy to reproduce idea at one of those corn conventions out in LA. It could win awards at those corn award ceremonies.

Original ideas are rarely found in the more amateurish industries. The corn industry is full of amateurs who don't really know how to make good corn. Sure, they've probably seen all kinds of corn, maybe even worked with others in the production of some corn, but they just don't really get it. You can't just say "Here's some corn, like it!" and expect people to react accordingly. That's why I refuse to spend money on corn. I mean, why buy corn that sucks?

Have you ever watched a corn documentary? I watched one, but it just isn't the same as regular corn. It left me feeling awkward and uncomfortable, but strangely satiated in a way. While it was interesting and entertaining, it wasn't real corn. As you can imagine, real corn is very different from a documentary about corn.

Wait, did I say "corn"? I meant "porn". My mistake.

I figured I'd take a moment, for lack of a better subject, to talk about this new mechanic in Magic: The Gathering. It's retarded, and it's called Morph. For 3 mana, you can play a card with Morph as a 2/2 creature. Then, at any time, you can pay its Morph cost, and flip it over, revealing what it truly is, changing it from a 2/2 into God knows what.

Why is this retarded? Say your opponent has two face-down creatures on his side, and he attacks with both. Which do you block? It's a game of chance. It's basically a coin toss. On that note, coin toss cards are still around. What the Hell? Those are just as retarded.

I hate it when random elements are brought into a game of strategy. I hate the random damage assignments in Warcraft 3, and I hate the randomness added to this game. As if mana-screw wasn't bad enough, now we have all new ways of losing to dumb luck. This pisses me off the most, because as everyone knows, I have terrible luck. I'd say I lose about 60% of my games solely to luck. Basically, if you increase the chance element in any game, you decrease my odds of winning by about that much.

Maybe I should just give up on the game. God only knows what retarded mechanic they're going to introduce next. At least they brought back Cycling.

Back in the day, everyone was covering everyone else's songs. During the 60's, everyone was covering The Beatles. During the 30's and 40's, everyone was covering Duke Ellington. Throughout the century, everyone's been covering Robert Johnson. Hell, my favorite Bob Dylan songs were those performed by Jimi Hendrix. Nobody seemed to mind back then. Nowadays, someone uses three notes out of someone else's song, there's a lawsuit about it (what's worse is most songs only consist of three notes).

Nobody wants to be friendly or open anymore. Okay, the Linux and Open Source communities do, but that's about it. I think some people put something out there just so they can wait for someone to infringe upon their copyright, drooling over a potential lawsuit. Court's a popular place to be.

Now, of course there's people like Vanilla Ice and The Verve who just go out and use stuff without asking anyone. I think those kinds of people may have ruined it all for the rest of us. Still, that's no reason for every copyright owner to suddenly become a jackass, even if it is the popular thing to do.

No, I haven't been sued for anything, or even threatened about anything. I've just been thinking about it while listening to my newly found half-billion versions of Duke's "It Don't Mean A Thing". Seems like everyone covered that song. Can you blame them?

Even with all of the processor-pushing, 3D, state-of-the-art games out there, some of which I actually have, I've been playing Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance lately. It's not as good as Symphony of the Night, what with it being on a hand-held system (Gameboy Advance), but it's better than playing the original yet again. It's done by the same team who did Symphony of the Night, and is in very much the same style. It even has two castles, except in this one the second castle isn't upside-down, it's just kind of different, which is kind of lame. But, it's a good game regardless.

I've been playing it on an emulator. You can't really see anything on the actual Gameboy Advance with it's lack of back-lighting. Playing it on an emulator you get a few advantages, such as that I get to use my Playstation controller, and at the touch of a button, play at an increased speed. Since it was made for a portable game system, you can already save anywhere, which cancels out most of the point of state saving, but it's still there for convenience.

I also got a ROM of the Metroid game (Fusion, I think, I can't remember), but the sound is all screwy on the emulator. I haven't actually played it yet, but according to the guys at Penny Arcade, it's pretty good. After I finally made it through the hour-long intro, it locked up right before I was going to play, and I haven't felt the endurance to go through the intro again. Well, if I do, I'll use that speed button for certain. I don't think I could handle it again, otherwise. It's a very boring intro.

So, Fred Gallagher (aka Piro) of Megatokyo got fired from his job, and has decided to turn his webcomic into a full-time job. He was actually planning on doing this, just not for another year or so. Well, it seems like a good way of turning around a negative. As such, we get an actual comic three times a week. Also, there will be a lot more merchandising, which I see as a good thing. He doesn have to make money off of it after all.

Piro is reaching for his dreams, and that inspires me to do the same. However, I'll do it differently in that I keep my current job, as I don't really have anything to abandon it for at the moment. I'll start working toward that end, though. I've got some T-Shirt designs I thought would be interesting. I may open a store with CafePress or a similar company. I've had some clever ideas. If I can ever decide on a Dark Seam logo, I'll put that on a shirt.

Everyone should support Megatokyo in their own way. Me, I have no money right now so this is my way of doing it. My finance department took a massive hit recently, thanks to other people anally fucking me (metaphorically). They'll all pay in the end. Oh yes, they'll pay... Hopefully me, with lots of money.

I'm doing some work on the info section. Sadly enough, all I've done is added Pink Floyd to it. I figured that since I had linked to it from the Infectious Grooves page, there ought to actually be one. I'll probably do Eric Clapton next, as I think I actually wrote something up on him already. Then Robert Johnson, because I have a picture of him, and he's got a cool story.

So I've been digging on this new show called Platonic Chain that's showing in Japan. It's a series of 5-minute dialogue shorts, all 100% 3D CG. It's certainly a different show, which is one thing I like about it. However, the characters are all rendered with a cell-shader, so they look like regular anime characters. The character design is much better than that of Urda, although I'm not sure about the animation at some times. I think the arm movements need improvement, mostly.

The opening to episode 3 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand-alone Complex is fully 3D, too, but they don't use the cell-shader. It's still worth mentioning, though.

While the cell-shader is cool, they tend to render the backgrounds normally, so the cell-shading doesn't quite match. They should probably render the backgrounds separately and apply some filters from After Effects or something before overlaying the cell-shaded stuff. I might play around with the cell-shader some and try it out. Well, until then, I can speculate.

Yesterday I got the new Doom III leaked alpha that was displayed at E3. The first thing I noticed was how it used up all my memory (physical, 512, and virtual, also 512). The second thing I noticed was, as a result of the first thing, it took about 5-10 minutes to load a level, even on my Athlon XP 2100. I first tried to load the bathroom level, but, as I was warned, it didn't work.

I have to say, considering the resources involved, the graphics weren't all that impressive. They were nice, but nothing I'd shit myself about. The gameplay was also very basic, which I guess is what you'd expect from a Doom game. I just couldn't help but think "I wish this was System Shock 3". When the final game does finally come out, someone should make a System Shock mod for it.

After playing the demo for about two minutes (and about 20 minutes waiting for it to load), I found the six total rooms I could actually play through to be a bit lacking. I'm pretty sure that id Software is pretty pissed about this getting leaked out. I wonder how many technical support requests they've gotten.

Unless you desperately want to see the new game engine, which, as I've said, is nothing spectacular at the moment, don't bother downloading the alpha. Wait until id actually releases something on purpose. It's more trouble than it's worth.

Somebody needs to make a Battlefield 1942 mod for Neverwinter Nights. It would just be team-based NWN with some flag points, and whenever one team has more flags than another, the other team starts losing points. Hence the Battlefield 1942 reference.

I don't think the subject needs elaboration.

The desktop of my computer is set to a bunch of really dark colors. The background is black, the buttons are all really dark gray, even the background on my text areas is a moderate grey. That last part in particular has some adverse effects on my web-browsing experience. You see, many web developers assume that everyone has a white-background text area, and will often leave the background of text areas in web pages as default. Then they customize the graphics for a white background. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), it doesn't look all that wonderful.

Granted, I'd prefer to have my gray backgrounds than be forced to deal with blinding white. Perhaps the web developers were just curtious enough to recognize my preferences. However, if they were all that caring about me, they'd use black backgrounds. Darker colors are better for the eyes. The darker the colors, the less light your monitor is blasting you with. It's really necessary if you want to use your computer in a dark room.

I also have the brightness on my monitor turned all the way down. You'd think I'd barely be able to see anything, but then if you looked at my monitor you'd never think the brightness was all the way down, either. I kinda wish everyone did that. It'd be better for me. Uses less electricity, too.

Sigh