The mountains are not mountains

My eyes went green.

I've been massively enjoying Final Fantasy VII of late. Trouble is I'd been playing for the story and not paying enough attention to other elements of the game.

There's a point towards the very end where you can set a save point where ever you like, which is handy as there aren't any pre-existing ones as you journey to the centre of the planet to confront Sephiroth.

Here were my troubles:

1. I put the save point far to early on in the stage and didn't make enough save files for me to go back and re-do that part.

So everytime I wanted to attempt the final boss, I had to tromp through almost the entire stage to get to it, then die and start over.

2. I couldn't beat him. I could beat Jeonova, and Sephiroth in the first form but not in his final form. I didn't have the hp, my weapons didn't do enough damage and I wasn't leveled up high enough, even if I could wear him down, he'd wipe out my party with the kind of insane hp destroying attacts that end bosses tend to have,

So I was fucked. I watched the ending on youtube and listed the game on amazon. It sold in about 3 hours.

But I wasn't very happy with myself. I had started playing the game in high school and quit because I was depressed and insane and in doing so cheated myself out of a really great story.

I didn't have to post it as yesterday was a bank holiday.

Firstly I explored to see if I could get out of the labyrinth and back to my airship. I could. Had i placed the save point a tiny bit further along, I'd have been past the point of no return. But I wasn't. Massive stroke of luck.

Now my issues were as follows:

I need a kick-arse sword for cloud.

I need my health points up as high as possible.

I need to level up all my characters.

The health points I knew how to address, I bought a load of health plus materic in cosmo canyon and equpied them.

There really are no good places to level up in FFVII. Weirdly.

I looked up the most powerful weapon for cloud, which is the ultima sword that you get for defeating the ultima monster who flys about and hides and is generally a twat. You have to hound the thing in your airship untill it's at the right position on your map, then you can fight it and kill it.

So I had my health pretty high and an amazingly neat sword.



AND, when you destroy ultima, he's massive so he destroys a mountain which gives you access to a forest which, amazingly enough, turns out to be a really good place to level up. Also there is a great Shotgun you can equip Vincent Valentine with.

So I leveled up to around 60 and since I had the health up materia I was at the 9000hp mark and I beat Sephiroth and watched the ending sequence the proper way.



I feel dumb writing all this as it's probably more significant and makes more sense to me and also it's lothesomely nerdy but whatever.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/29/boing-boing-tv-lesli.html

So that's who Leslie Hall is. She's neat.

What is best in life?

"To crush your enemies, and see them fall at your feet - to take their horses and belongings, and to hear the lamentation of their women. That is the best life."



I thought the writers of conan came up with that. Turns out it's a quote attributed to Ghengis Khan. He also killed 40 million people, and (to date) his lineage consists of roughly 16 million people.

Also he was good in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Ghengis Khan!

Bianca invited me up to Edinburgh for my birthday. Which was nice, we got along very well this time and she gave me a cool bag. And a box or cigarettes from china with red hearts on the tips of the filters.



Mum didn't say so much as a word to me, which is probably a good thing.

And I have £1000 saved for moving back to Canada. Woop!

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/alcohol-abuse/toxic-brew?print=true

-Can only guess what normal behavior is
-Have difficulty following a project from beginning to end
-Lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth
-Judge themselves without mercy
-Have difficulty having fun
-Take themselves very seriously
-Have difficulty with intimate relationships
-Overreact to changes over which they have no control
-Constantly seek approval and affirmation
-Usually feel that they are different from other people
-Are either super responsible or super irresponsible—there's no middle ground
-Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved
-Are impulsive. They tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviors or possible consequences. This impulsively leads to confusion, self-loathing and loss of control over their environment. In addition, they spend an excessive amount of energy cleaning up the mess.

Yeah, most of those.

So, I've been playing Final Fantasy XI a lot. I'm rather taken with it. You know when you're reading something and you stop for a second and think 'wow, this is a great book!' like that.

Anyway, because of this I decided that I should go out a bit. And since there's nothing to do and I don't know anyone here, I decided that I'd get my bike out of the garage, fix the tires and go for bike rides. Which is a lot more fun with another person, but I think I already covered that.

Mum gave my bloody bike away.

I need more money so I can move.

My playstation 2 finally got here. According to the stickers that the package had accumulated by the time it got to me, the rocket scientists at Royal Mail sent it to glasgow for some reason.

But it was worth it becuase I only paid £21 for it because I'm just that good at ebay.

Once I'm done with final fantasy 12 I'm going to get that rpg where the japanese school kids summon deamons by shooting themselves in the head.



Japan is so awesome.

marriedtothesea.com

It's been almost a week. Still in pain, but they gave me a lot of meds. Getting sick of being high on codeine all the damn time.

My mother (the counter-mother) is making my life very difficult and generally being a cunt. Not that this is anything unusual but, I'm recovering from an operation, and that apparently pisses her off. She kicked me out of the house for 8 hours the day after I got released from hospital for NO reason, something about my having put pasta in the wrong cupboard. And what kind of rationale can you even give for doing that?

Wandered about the park coughing up blood from time to time.

I am going to go and get some ice cream from lidel tomorrow. Or Iceland, whichever is cheaper. And gooder.

And I'm getting my voice back, but it's different. WHAT THE FUCK.

http://www.katz23.de/fritzcam-galerie.htm

The cat has a camera on its collar and the collar takes pictures! All day! EVERY day!

PS: All I ever wanted was for L from Death Note to get his own spin-off film where he goes to America and solves crimes/runs from explosions/stops a killer virus.

http://wwws.warnerbros.co.jp/L-movie/

Luckily I am not the only one, Justice will prevail!

Is a pretty good web browser. I think I like it better than firefox. The speed-dial feature is pretty neat. Then again, I have a fever and I keep passing out.

...the baseball hat, the yellow sunglasses, the bleached yellow hair, the lack of a shirt yet presence of of a parka, the incredibly gay solo nipple ring.



Though I like the presenter telling him off. She's very sexy in an authoritative way.

Ps, babies:

I got to see puppies AND kittens. That is all.

I bought red buttons to do up the winter coat I got when I was in chinatown with Lauren. Trouble is they're about 1/8 of an inch bigger than the ones already on the coat, meaning it's a bit of a struggle to get them through the button holes when I put my coat on. But I can do it. And they look really nice. So I don't know what to do...

I think I have seasonal affective disorder.

I have intention of doing things, but I sleep as much as I possibly can, and when I wake up all I see to do is lie there. Shall ask a doctor.

It's daylight for about 6 hours a day and even then it doesn't seem bright enough to get up and do anything. I feel like I need a torch even when I'm outside, the sky is oppressively grey.

And when I say torch, I mean so in the north American sense, not a ‘flashlight’, because this town bears and uncanny resemblance to the village in resident evil 4; decimated church down the road, unfriendly, identical faces, woods surrounding me. I’m getting a bit unnerved.

If the local populous all flip out, develop a psychotic hive mentality (which they inevitable will at some point) and start trying to kill me I’m worried that I won’t have the energy to fight them off.



I need to start working on an escape plan. Does anyone know any books/films/albums where this sort of thing happens?

So I was thinking. When I went to school I hated, hated having to wear a uniform, and I think that resentment was pretty commonly held and only grew over time.

This state of affairs was made all the more irritating by the fact that we all knew that kids in america didn't had to wear uniform. We also seemed to be under the impression that Buffy the vampire slayer was a pretty accurate depiction of the lives of teenagers in north america.

What only later I discovered was that while schoolkids in the uk all dress the same because they are forced to, schoolkids in north america have a huge deal of aesthetic expression at hand and dress in perhaps even a more identikit manner.

Uniforms are probably a good thing. If you want to establish any degree of individuality you have to be creative, and more than that, it made a lot of people aware that there was some kind of social system in place that wanted to encourage certain views and beliefs.

If you're given complete freedom to do whatever you like, the result is usually pretty boring. Like the phantom menace.

See, it applies to lots of things.

Please watch the film Dear Wendy without reading any reviews first. I kind of loved it.

I was in the queue for this really bad gig at this terrible stadium-ish venue and the queue was being split into two rows seemingly arbitrary definition.

I end up in the one on the right with german girl, we get to the admittance person (male), who moves us both to the left where the admittance person (female) keeps Bianca and moves me to the right.

At this point I realise that the line on the right is entirely male and the one on the left entierly female. I get to the male admission person again and he moves me to the left again.

Here's what was going on:

The line on the left was for checking people with bags, the line on the the right for checking the bagless. Women don't always carry bags (not did most in the queue) but bags are only carried by the women.

So that's gender sorted then.

Also Bianca says that in China when couples are walking down the street, boys carry their girlfriends handbags for them. Which is probably the most adorable thing I've ever heard

Oh the story makes more sense if I make it clear that I had my lain bag with me.