mDuo13.com - The Amorphously Collected Thoughts and Works of Rome Reginelli

I slacked a bit yesterday and didn't get around to blogging the daily kanji - but that's not to say that I didn't study them! It just happens that I was busy hanging out with some friends playing some Tales of Symphonia 2: Knight of Ratatosk and whatnot. It just happens that while on the way to dinner, my friend Tsubasa was repping the Bakemonogatari ending theme (by Miku artist Supercell, with Nico Video singer Nagi). Well, it happens to be very typical of compositions by ryo (woo, piano rock!), which makes it pretty dang listenable. The fact that it has a skilled singer rather than a computerized voice (even a computerized voice as charming as Hatsune Miku) only works in its favor. The song is so good it even made me watch the anime (actually I had been debating watching the show for a while; it just pushed me over the edge).

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I am actually kind of remiss in not mentioning this until now, but I guess technically today is the "official" release date for my talented friend Ty's new album, We're All In This Together. I've been listening to this album pretty much nonstop since Friday, so I can attest firsthand that it is good music.

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In association with my resolution to work on my Japanese more actively, I have decided that my next project will be to play Little Busters! in Japanese, using Rikaichan and AGTH to help me out. I started out with Blitzwing's assisted reading setup, but quickly ditched Wakan in favor of a simpler Rikaichan-only setup. I also found it cumbersome to go and open all the different applications and things in the right order, so I wrote a Windows batch file that launches them in order. Here's how it works:

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I can't fully explain it, but lately, I've been going to through this thing fairly often where I just feel disinclined from doing anything. I wake up with a bit of a headache, get up to do something, maybe make it through an episode of anime or something else not too trying, and end up laying back down to sleep for another couple hours before repeating the process. I have things I want to get done, but somehow I have a lot of trouble working up the effort. I blame it in part on the heat. Nobody can get anything done when it's so hot out. But the rest of it, I dunno. All I can say is, it took me a long time to write this post because I kept having to take breaks.

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It seems I've unintentionally continued a trend in this website, where I post a lot one month, skip nearly the entire next month, and then return. I dunno what the deal is with that, but I at least have a pretty good excuse for not posting in the past month: I got a new job. I am now an employee of social gaming startup Playdom, where I'm documenting internal processes and things like that (in the hopes of making the company more efficient and less confusing). So that's been taking a pretty big chunk out of my week, and besides that I've been keeping up with a reasonably large number of anime and hanging out with friends about as often as not... this blog kind of fell by the wayside in between. But I'm not satisfied with that, so here's a brief rundown on what I've accomplished in the last month.

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It turns out that the combination of my impatience to play the game and my doubts over whether it will eventually make it to the states were, together, too strong, so I ended up hacking my Wii to play the European localization of Another Code: R. I'll still buy the US release if and when it happens, but until then, I'm having a blast enjoying Cing's wonderful character designs animatedly moving around in 3D on my TV. The characters are all fun and distinct, and Ashley's interaction with many of them is really believable. I find myself sighing and getting annoyed with her dad - the good-intentioned dope that he is - as much as she does, being fascinated by the (perhaps excessively?) rustic Ranger Dan, doubting but sympathizing with runaway kid Matthew Crusoe... And the puzzles (with one exception) have so far been fun, slightly challenging, but not frustrating. As for that one, well, lighting a barbecue in this game apparently requires placement and patience, both of which I had but in the wrong combination. (I was also distracted by thinking I would need either kindling or lighter fluid to get the charcoal lit.) In any case, the game is just what I expected, and for that, I'm loving it. It wasn't even that hard to get it working, though I did encounter some stumbling points...

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