mDuo13

Ah, sleep. One of the great mysteries of life. A state in which we spend a third of our time, doing seemingly nothing. A necessity and yet the first thing to get trimmed from our schedule when push comes to shove. Wild plans exist for those who want to do more with less. But nothing can do away with this essential dead spot in every day.

I think it was about 4 or 5 years ago, around my freshman year in college, that I noticed how my sleep schedule worked. No matter what time I went to bed, if left unattended, I spend about 9 hours, including the time it took to fall asleep and to get out of bed. If I cut that short with an alarm and something to do, it would come back later. I would get out of class feeling hazy and end up dozing off for just about long enough to make my total sleep time 9 hours. I read that the best way to reduce wasted time sleeping was to stick to a consistent schedule, but with the dorm experience, that was not particularly viable. There was one up-side to this, however; I discovered that when my sleep schedule is broken and insufficient is when I have the most interesting and memorable dreams, a fact that remains true today. (Last night's, or rather, this morning's humdinger involved a huge condor, nearly getting attacked by a wild tiger, $5 gas, and a prototype 17-inch iPad. Go figure.)

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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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It's strange, the influences small things can have on us. About three weeks ago, I lost my phone. After 9 days without finding it, I finally replaced it. Three days after that - on the same night I recharged my new phone's battery for the first time, when it was certainly too late to go back - I found it, buried under the mattress in our hall. Sometime in between, I started taking pictures of the view from our patio using the new phone's camera.

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Finally, after everything I've been through, I managed to finish playing CLANNAD. I installed the game on September 1, so that puts it at exactly 3 months to finishing the game, though realistically, I wasn't playing for most of those. And, the last few paths, I played in marathon sessions, roughly one night each. So it's not unrealistic to say that this game has been consuming my life for quite a while now. Yet, now that I'm finished, I don't feel relieved to be over it or anything. I just have this drained, anachronistic feeling: I feel like I lived my entire life last night, and the "after story" is what happens now.

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UPDATE 2: I figured out what was causing the game to freeze up in After Story, and fixed the patch. Skip to the bottom for the updated link. I still haven't tested it on the school life section, but I can now confirm that it is possible to finish After Story, including the True Ending. If you've already unlocked After Story using a previous unofficial patch, you can definitely get 100% CGs and music this way.

UPDATE: The patch uploaded here still has some glitches (it freezes up fairly early in After Story) so it's probably best not to use it until further updates.

As I've mentioned before, I've been playing CLANNAD recently. To be more precise, I've been using an incomplete patch that was compiled from the CLANNAD Translation Project. However, after finishing all 10 routes, I discovered that the unofficial patch doesn't include the translation for After Story (the concluding arc of the game). That's pretty important for me, so I created a patch that provides an updated translation of the game, including After Story.

Currently, the team translating Clannad has posted their translations on a wiki, but they have not officially given out anything that can be used to play the game. So, I downloaded their translations, learned how to use RLDev, and created a new SEEN.TXT file that is (for the most part) up-to-date with the project's translation as of November 11, 2008. For those who are curious how I did it, read on. (Otherwise, you can skip ahead.)

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As I was packing up to return to school after this break, I spotted my old laptop, lying all by its lonesome against my desk. When I spotted it, I recalled the things left unfinished with it - most importantly, my save from Ever17 - the out of infinity. Now, some time ago (perhaps a year and a half?) the laptop had broken, just stopped turning on. So I thought I might take the hard disk out and bring it to school where ITS has an enclosure they could use to copy my data. But since I don't have a screwdriver with which to take the computer apart, I couldn't simply do that. So instead, for no particularly good reason, I plugged in the computer and turned it on, when lo! and behold... it worked.

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