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Finished Final Fantasy VII, yay! Read my thoughts about it in my forums (if you haven’t finished the game and you are currently playing or planning to play it, then don’t fuckin click on the link! hehe).

Awesome episode of Smallville last Tuesday. I think the most awesome thing about it, apart from Christopher Reeve’s character giving Tom Welling’s Clark Kent a fantastic amount of revelation about his past, was the music in the background. It was the theme from Fortress of Solitude by John Williams, altho it was rearranged to include the 8-note intro to superman fanfare before the commercial break, while it was closing up on Reeve’s face. That part gave me shivers. Call me a sentimental geek, but the Superman theme gives the Star Wars theme a big run for its money…

Anyway, I’ll be putting up a couple DVD reviews this weekend – hopefully jumpstarting my movies section and prompting me to do regular updates. Tagalog Word of the Day would also be coming back (altho it would realistically be the Tagalog Word of the Week). I’m watching Airheads right now (believe it or not, I haven’t watched this thing yet) … seems cool, the intro song is “Born to raise Hell” … by Motorhead, I think… or it sounds like em, anyway…

Oh, did I mention that this is the eight straight month that I haven’t smoked a cigarette? Yeah, go me!

Technorati: 7, cigarette, fantasy, final, smallville

Monday… (picture me saying that with a raspy voice that is a smidge between groaning and gasping)

I’m thinking of finally putting some content in the Movies section. I have been procrastinating for more than a year now, and I think it’s high time that I get off my ass and do some stuff for my own site. Which reminds me, I need to update the Sites section too … the people I designed sites for have changed their site layouts since then (usually for the worse), and I wanna preserve my layout ideas for those sites, so I’ll just do mockups of my earlier layouts instead of linking directly to them … also saves me the embarrassment of people seeing those nasty new layouts and thinking I did them too… bleh…

Of course, I’ll have to do that right after I finish doing the Calendar site for my mom, and updating my brother’s site. I just finished the new layout for the site my dad told me to renovate … you can check it out here. Notice that there’s nothing flashy about it – I went the minimalist route, coz less is more … I hope…

The activity has slowed down a bit at my tech support site. It may or may not be a bad sign, but it doesn’t bother me much. Gives me and the moderators some rest, while we wait for the next surge in activity … there are just too many things to do and I hate doing bits and pieces – when I sit down I want to work on something until it’s done, coz I’ll end up procrastinating on it if I say I’ll finish it later… Oh well…

It’s a somewhat warm Saturday … here I am, doing some “power burning” – meaning I’m burning 50-60 copies of a wedding accompaniement CD. Why they would need that much copies, I don’t know – maybe they’re gonna give it away to lucky visitors in a raffle, or maybe they’d toss the CDs instead of flowers … or instead of rice … ouch.

Anyway, I got two DVDs from Netflix. These are actually at the bottom of my DVD queue, and I dunno why I didn’t replace them with something better. Anyway, one was Mystery Alaska, and the other was The Sweetest Thing. The latter is a chick flick, and I dunno what possessed me to put it in my rental queue – maybe the idea of seeing three grown women in skimpy suits all running after a guy? Damn, I’m lame.

Mystery Alaska is somewhat decent … kinda like Mighty Ducks meets The Hoosiers meets Rocky or something… anyway, it’s a hockey movie so it can’t be all that bad… I hope…

I also still need to finish the site my Dad asked me to do for an LA County organization. I got the layout all nailed down – all I need to do is to slice it up, slap em onto HTML tables, and pour the text …so now the multitasking begins – burning CDs, slicing images and watching/listening to Mystery Alaska all at the same time… oh shit, and there’s laundry, too…

Fuck…

Hmmm, wtf, my weblog now has a title!??!  Well, this is an anomaly of bibilical proportions (not quite the “dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria” kind of thing, however) … but it is indeed a first. Will I continue to put titles on my journal entries? Is Rinoa really Ultimecia? We’ll find out…

Anyway, what’s new? Well, I was surprised to find out that there was an egroup dedicated to the 1997 pilot batch of AB Communication students at my alma mater. Of course, I was part of “batch” 96, but we were a ragtag group of seven students who all shifted from other courses, so we didn’t really “count” as the pilot batch But anyway, the discovery was good, since I can now get in contact with old friends in the Flip lands without always having to resort to email (and god knows how much of a slacker I am when it comes to emailing people).

Notice how I am emphasizing some words in that paragraph? Is it a lame attempt to justify the title? Or is it just some random spur-of-the-minute crap I thought of?

Eek, there we go again…

It’s all fine and dandy … I finally found a newsgroup I can post to where I am (a) not the moderator/administrator, and (b) personally familiar to everyone who participates in it. None of this internet anonymity bullshit. I can be myself without anyone misinterpreting me

So what’s new in my quest to beat FFVII? Well, I actually spent a good part of Saturday breeding and racing chocobos. I finally got a gold chocobo by the afternoon and retrieved the sough-after Knights of the Round materia … first time I’ve seen the summon animation, and it’s freakin’ kewl … it’s also freakin’ long, though … wonder which is longer, KotR or Eden from FF8 … where’s my stopwatch…

Anyway, I am already at the point where I am entering the North Cave – almost to the final confontation with Sephiroth. Of course, I didn’t enter yet, coz I needed to get the ultimate weapons for each character … and of course, I need to try and beat Emerald Weapon and Ruby Weapon, so I’m buffing my characters up…

The backstory behind Cloud was remarkable. Who would have thought… In terms of “whoa” factor, this one beats the other Final Fantasies I have played. By a mile…

Valentine’s Day is almost over…. seemed like a typical Friday to me…

I was meaning to send Marlet an e-card earlier this morning, but the Hallmark website was clogged up the wazoo – too much server load from geeks like me who have abandoned paper greeting cards, or treehuggers who think greeting cards are crimes of humanity against nature. (Ever tried sending a treehugger a thick, multifolded greeting card, inside two envelopes?) Anyway, I tried going there probably seven times today, but it was always busy. So I decided to just send her the card tomorrow … it’s always weird to send your ex-girlfriend a greeting card… on Valentine’s Day … especially when you’re the one who broke up with her… Yeah, I’m a pig, so what?

Anyway, I spent a good part of the day playing Final Fantasy VII. I have now reached Wutai and Yuffie stole all my materia (fuckin’ bitch!). I also pigged out a little – ordered two boxes of those new Dots from Domino’s Pizza, along with some Chicken Kickers. Those Dots remind me of Munchkins from Dunkin Donuts back in the Flip Lands when I was in college. The only difference was, Munchkins were chilled and had frosting by default. Dots are baked with hot cinammon and the icing is placed on the side. It’s a sugar-fest, for sure, and I only finished one box of it today … I saved the next one for midnight snacking.

I have also been working on OTS a bit … I installed a new warning system on the test forums and I’ll be testing its functionality early tomorrow. This is gonna be one of the final modifications I will be doing to the vBulletin script, so that I can move on to finishing the Punumbra layout, as well as move onto managing this site and my brother’s … my mom also wants a calendar site made, so that’s another thing on my TO-DO list … maybe you have something for me to do? Hehe, yeah, I need the money alright…

So, well, it’s almost time for me to get back to my PS2 and assume the role of a lonely geek. Not that I mind, tho … it’s one of the few Valentine’s days where I can be by myself – and not have to worry about anyone but myself.

Now, excuse me while I get my materia back from that ninja bitch…

Technorati: 2003, day, valentine

While I was surfing Amazon today, I came upon the book that was instrumental in shaping my interest in literature. The book is called The Sleeping Dragon, by Joel Rosenberg.

I first read this book when I was a highschool freshman. It has actually been in my dad’s shelf for two years, just gathering dust, until one day I got bored and was looking for something to read. The book had a very cool cover (a dragon with people in front of it), so I took it from the shelf, dusted it, and began reading….

… and seven hours later, I was still reading it. I didn’t put the book down for more than an hour (unless I was sleeping, of course). After I finished reading it, I read it again.

The Sleeping Dragon formally introduced me to the world of fantasy literature. Before that all I was reading were Hardy Boys, Three Investigators, and other adolescent bubblegum books. The only book that had an escapist quality to it that I have read before The Sleeping Dragon was the novelization of E.T. The Extraterrestrial (one of the books in my dad’s shelf). The Sleeping Dragon was a wakeup call to me, and it opened my senses to a bigger world of literary appreciation – a new literary universe that was not discussed in school.

The Sleeping Dragon, in a nutshell, was a story of a group of college friends who played Dungeons and Dragons every night in campus, until that night when they were transported into the supposedly fantasy campaign they were playing, and assuming the roles – and appearances – of the characters they were playing. And realizing that it was not a game anymore.

During that time, the theme itself was not really original (there have been a couple of films and even an animated series of ordinary people being transported into an imaginary world), but what made Rosenberg’s book different and more endearing was the fusion of mundane life into fantasy. Imagine college kids talking about how to get away from the Slaver’s guild, or rationalizing on their decision to save a chained dragon in the sewers. We got young cynics discussing life and death in a world where dragons and sorcery are commonplace. The thing I liked about it best is that it is very easy to relate to the young characters, as they try to find their way home – if they can.

The Sleeping Dragon was the first book in Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series (which is comprised of seven books so far). This beginning foray into the series was undeniably the best, and is still the most memorable book I have read. It paved the way for my appreciation of fantasy and science fiction, not only in literature but in movies and gaming…

The book itself was selling for as low as $3 (used) at Amazon … Did I buy it? Of course…

Technorati: amazon, dragon, flame, guardians, joel, rosenberg, sleeping