Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in rynesnowleopard's LiveJournal:

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Friday, August 21st, 2009
10:52 am	I Lie Awake at Night Listening to Their Disconcerting Melodies Ack!  Out of things to do and I have forty minutes until I have to go to class.  Time to give this thing a poke. The campus bookstore sold me two books it turns out I don't actually need for PolySci, but they did it to the whole class so I don't feel too bad about it.  One of them was The Prince, which I will be keeping.  It feels about pamphlet-thick, so maybe I'll read it really fast and return it.  I have until Tuesday, so with the right motivation I could have it read eight or nine times by then. PolySci rekindled my interest in Civilization 4.  On my computer the game is only playable until you're winning, and then there's so much going on that the graphics start to chug.  I'm okay with cutting out early most of the time.  If you have computers and satellites in the 1800's you can pretty much assume you've won.   Also, I acquired and sent Picasso to help with the war effort.  He was surprisingly effective.  I will remember this.  ^.^ A friend of mine has been trying to get me onto WoW recently and another wants me to run his second account for him, but, thanks to a third friend who's much more sane than I, I will be resisting.  MMOs have a way of eating me socially and I'm pretty much a homebody to begin with.  I've lost several friends to WoW, come to think of it.  Always too busy to talk online and raids are scheduled for the weekends so there isn't any going out.  RIP, guys.  (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
7:36 pm	Finally awake! Well, actually I started feeling alive again at 5:00ish in the pm.  ...In the pm.  Hee. A splitting migrane started for me at 11:00 at night last night and fell to a dull hum at the back of my skull late this afternoon.   I got just about zero sleep and have been a grumpy leopard all day.  I'd feel a little bad about being short with people, but when it's bad enough that it affects my vision I get a little bit guilt-free of leeway.  ^^ The screwy vision was actually neat to play with.  Without the pain I might've enjoyed it.  There was a long, blank tear or blur about one word worth of distance off of the center of my vision, so when I went to read anything I could see the word I was looking directly at but not the next one.  I had to read forward on faith that the next word would appear and frequently lost my place.  I'm way too easily amused. For not committing suicide during the night or removing an eyeball to relieve the pressure, I've decided to reward myself with a small pack of donut holes.  I'm also hoping the sugar buzz drowns out the headache hum for a little while.  We'll see...   ^^ (Comment on this)
Friday, August 7th, 2009
2:06 pm	First, because I have to say it, I've never seen a more breakable game for powerlevelling than Wild Arms 5.  I went from a party of level 70's to party of level 100's in less than an hour.  I found a way to double my experience gains, then double that, then double that, then increase that by 1.6x, and finalllllly double it again should I feel like overkilling.  And I do.  Based on the enoucnters in the final dungeon, I think the endboss is level 60-65.  At least the sidequest bosses still kill me in one round.  ^^ Someone pointed out to me the other day that I always have something to play with.  This is something I knew, but I didn't get the full extent of it until I examined my desk.  Just a few of the items sitting here now that I fidgit with or toss in the air to catch or whatever are a broken piece of a black platic hangar, a set of matches, scissors, one of those tiny bouncy balls that become lethal if you fling them at a wall, and a deck of cards. Yes, I play with matches.  Doesn't everyone have a bit of pyromania buried somewhere deep inside?  Now I think I'm going to grab my scissors and run over to the gun cabinet.  They probably aren't loaded, so I'm not going to bother checking before cleaning.  Yeah!  I live on the edge.  ^^ ( My relationship with the internet found in a random comic. )</div> (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
1:15 am	Screwy dream... I first remember thinking we were trapped...  or maybe caught.  Dreams details tend to fade like that.  We, in this case, included myself as some sort of guard and a young woman who was important just because my dream told me she was.  The setting was fantasy-ish.   We were in a castle corridor standing in front of what the dream told me were a dark sorceress and her underling knight.  The knight grabbed the girl I was supposed to be protecting and dragged her away before turning back to me, only to be halted by the sorceress.  "I know how to deal with this one," she said as she stepped toward me.  With a wave of her hand I was awake, back in bed staring at the underside of my blanket.   What a cool unsleep spell!  Cast me right out of their world.  I'll have to remember that for a future story. I tried to go back to sleep quickly because sometimes I've been able to pick up a dream again if I nodded off right away, but I was too amused and kept playing the scenario over in my head.  Sorry princess or whatever you were.  Looks like you're screwed. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
7:17 am	Wild Arms Stuff and the Reason My Ears Might Be Bleeding This is one of those odd times where I have eight or nine things I could put down on the page and really flesh out.  I feel oddly awake, alert, and clever for it not being sometime late in the afternoon, but I'm going to choose to dwell on something nerdy that only I care about.  Perhaps the other ideas can come in a series of nightly entries to give the illusion that I'm putting in effort on this thing...   ^.^ I had a very Wild Arms themed weekend, starting with randomly finding and buying Wild Arms 5 and ending with a few episodes of the Wild Arms - Twilight Venom anime.  I almost feel like a fanboy.  Perhaps next time you see my icon it'll have a cowboy hat shopped onto it. ( An Anime and a Game! ) Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
9:06 am	Stuffed of Dreams Two nights ago I woke up at 3AM with a craving for chili powerful enough to make it difficult to get back to sleep.  Instead of making breakfast the next morning I scooted off to the store and hastily threw together a pot.  I know it's Summer and all, but it turned out to be worth bearing the heat.  I thought it was just the satisfaction of the craving at first, but two days later I still think it's best batch I've ever made.  Also, I had to use a metric butt-ton of chili powder to get any flavor from it at all.  Does it lose potency over time or something? I get to have a mucocele removed from under my tongue near the end of this month.  I only hope I can speak normally while it is healing.  The whole-scalpel-in-my-mouth thing has me a touch worried, especially since the only doctor I know (unprofessionally, that is) is one of the least confident people I've ever spoken with.  One little slip and I won't be able to form words or taste things right or... something.  At least I get to be gassed and driven home while loopy.  I should try to write while still out of it.  That'll be amusing. It's time for me to begin my game/musical.  All the companies with the money and talent to do really interesting things are instead making commercial garbage, so it's time for me in my infinite arrogance to step in and steal some business away.  Either that or just vent by joining the horde of online video game reviewers.  Current Music: Venture Brothers Background Noise! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
4:37 pm	In place of an actual title I have nothing, sorry. Hey, I remembered I have a livejournal!  Thank you random Furcadian who linked me to yours.  I hate that I pop onto Furcadia now and then, but as less and less stuff wants to work on my computer my options for gaming late at night become more and more limited.  I'd remedy the situation by picking up a new 360 game or something, but I don't feel like spending money on a samey FPS or a game about space marines right now.  :P It seems to me that I'm more and more often not using the computer so much as tricking it into doing what I want it to do.  Last night IE7 screwed me over for the last time, so it was time to switch to Firefox as the default browser (Yes, I was one of those lonely holdouts who stuck with IE even though it was notably inferior).  By this point I was pretty much used it for everything already, but anything linked to me would open up in IE7 by default.   I had to go and change that.  I think it says a lot for IE7 when google's autocomplete picked "changing your default browser" when I had only gotten through "changing your d."  It was two words ahead of me!  People must be switching en masse.  Number six on the list, "changing your dna", got a chuckle out of me.  Deoxyribonucleiplasty for the win!    So it turns out there's no way to use the control panel to change your default browser.  The only way I could find to get around it was to turn on Firefox's startup alert to tell me that it wasn't the default browser and then restart Firefox to let it do the change.  If Windows had its way I'd be stuck with all crappy Microsoft programs without any options.  Ugh... Oh, and here's the best part:  IE7 has decided it has no add-ons ever since I dropped it.  Anything that isn't plain text or a picture is now completely broken in IE7 because it has decided to throw a hissyfit.  The more cruel part of me is glad I hurt its stupid electronic feelings.  Screw you, IE7.  Seriously.  You're just lucky it's impossible to uninstall you. On a happier note, I have a stockpile of frozen blueberries and have discovered the joys of blueberry wine.  Who knew there was wine fermented from blueberries?  I wouldn't recommend them together, though, as either is likely to dull the taste of the other.  I'd stock up on the wine, too, since it turned out to be much cheaper than I initially expected, but stockpiling alcohol seems like a one more step toward being an alcoholic than I'd like to explore.  I'm happy with a couple of drinks semi-monthly, thanks. I didn't think about it at all until earlier today, but 52 weeks to make a year isn't right.  I suppose a year technically contains 52 weeks, but there's a remainder of one day.  It makes me wonder what else I might've taken to heart as fact as a child without ever really examining.  :P (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
12:33 am	Dreaming of Viruses and Passwords I hate sites with password requirements.  What's with requiring at least one number?  This bugs me.  If someone can crack a plain text password given all the combinations of letters then the same person using the same algorithm is going to do just as well against all the combinations of letters and numbers.  Or maybe I don't know anything about security and the numbers idea is pure genius.  Perhaps the only reason I still have a blog is because the number forced on me here kept the legions of evil hackers of doom away.  Okay guys, no one tell them we all have numbers now...  I'm trusting you! I found a recipe for insomnia that doesn't require caffeine or sugar and has zero calories!  Try dreaming about an ex you haven't thought about in forever, then wake up play the what-if game for a while in the dark.  Loads of fun and fantastic prizes, plus it's a great way to stay in shape.  They say time heals wounds, but I think that's pretty inaccurate.  Time only distances you from wounds, making it less likely that you'll encounter a bomb from the past and if you do you're only on the fringe of the explosion.  I guess it could just be me.  I have a weird approach to things and I'm pretty decent at digging things up if I really try.   It really is fun to look back now and then, though.  At the same time I started noticing striking differences between the old me and the current me.  A vivid memory serves me well in that area.  Poor old me...  Thought he knew so much more than he did.  Somehow he managed to be both arrogant and without confidence, always anxious whenever he lost control of something.  He really needed to learn to relax.  Well, I guess he did, so... um, yay him.  XD Speaking of calming down, I had a niftly little virus yesterday that was locking up explorer.exe shortly after startup.  Normally I get a kick out of computer problems.  They're puzzles I always manage to get solved one way or another.  This bit was much more difficult to diagnose since all I could do was get to my desktop and look at it before it'd lock up.  Safe mode wasn't even working for me!  Good ol' reliable safe mode was letting me down.  I really couldn't believe it...   What's worse, we had a thunderstorm with some very loud, very nearby lightning hits the night before all this went down, so part of me was scared to death something vital had gotten fried in spite of my surge protector.  Reinstall of explorer seems to have wiped out the problem and my scanners are picking up nothing, but I'm still paranoid.  Coming soon:  Zombie virus. Hm, lots of text this time.  Let's end with an image. ( Burnin' again, but with subtle improvements. ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
12:31 pm	DDR! It's been a while, but I've been practicing hard.  I almost got a perfect today. ( Annoying Screenie ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
12:44 am	Shattering the Routine I think it's funny to note, in spite of the title here, that I rarely post unless it's some ungodly hour of the night and here I am doing it yet again.  ^.^ As I finally laid Braid to rest earlier tonight, it occurred to me that the game had lodged itself squarely into part of my daily routine.  It got half an hour to an hour of play daily always following dinner.  I can't get over how weird that realization made me feel.  Immediately jumping to mind are the recent Terminator ads where one of the human characters discovers he is, in fact, a machine.  Ruts must be a common problem.  On the net especially it's easy to run into people who're ready to tell you how their life is terrible or why they're perpetually unhappy.  I can recall a few years ago when I did much of the same, so I try not to stand in judgement.  I'm easily amused.  I like people in general.  It's easy for me to be happy as long as I inject a little change into my life now and then.  I can't decide if that makes me lucky or if it just makes me boring and simple.  I suppose as long as I'm content it doesn't matter what the right answer actually is.  It might not be routine-shattering, but I've decided to fill the empty time with a drawing I've had in my head for a good while now.  I haven't done any art in years and I'm extremely picky, so it'll be a miracle if the finished product ever sees the light of day.  It'll be a good exercise.  (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, May 29th, 2009
8:41 pm	Tragedy... 30:35 for Braid full-game speedrun time.  That's 11th on the XBL leaderboards and 5 seconds short of the 10th place spot.  One more insanely immaculate iteration and I'll finally be able to move onto a different game.  If I were a little more nerdy, a little more crazy, and female I have the perfect idea for a tramp-stamp:  </body> Also, I hate poison ivy. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
12:41 am	Among Other Things, Infinite Crazed Clockwork Cats Riding Elephants Barring medication that turns my mind to mush, I think my life will always be marred with an obsessive need to be anxious about everything.  On a happier note it seems I can usually just tough it out and few people notice I'm shaky and uncertain.  I'm staring at the word shaky trying to make it feel right in my mind.  I looked it up to convince myself that it is correctly spelled, but I can't help but think it looks wrong in the dictionary as well.  I hate when this happens.  I had a joke backfire on me early this week.  I play a game where anyone can start a guild without any costs, in-game or otherwise.  After two weeks of existence it becomes an official guild.  This transfer is done by hand because the game isn't very big.  My plan had been to pick a new joke guild to attach to my name every one and a half weeks or so, but for some reason my guild was given official status after the first week. Infinite Crazed Clockwork Cats Riding Elephants.  I like it, but now I'm stuck with it and can't help but think I could've named it better.  At least I'm two characters short of the longest possible guild name, so I'm thinking I'll have the longest guild name for a long time to come.  And, in the end, isn't that more important than the actual reputation of the guild or actual victories or even having members?  I choose to believe so.  ^.^ (Comment on this)
Monday, May 18th, 2009
12:44 am	Worldcube My rubix cube ends the universe when all the colors are in their correct positions. No one can prove me wrong.  This thing is impossible.  ^^ (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
12:16 am	I Can't Wait! So I was on a chat site earlier and the following appears in a private message on my screen:  "Hey Im looking for some hot sex and a friend. I really want you give em your number i want to have hot sex now." Needless to say, I was completely wooed by the charm of the finely crafted come-on and was out the door faster than you can say sarcasm.  In that one message he utters the words "hot sex" two times.  My brain zeroed in on them.  Hot sex?  I can't see why he has to qualify it as such.  I know when I'm headed into a sexual encounter I'm planning on being totally mundane unless requested otherwise, but that's not the norm as I understand it.  To me, that's like going to a restaurant and ordering the delicious steak as opposed to the ordinary one the cook makes for everyone else.  Of course!  That must be the trick to getting the good stuff.  I can see it now!  A beautiful woman and I are winding down after a romantic date and dinner in front of a fire place with a bottle of wine.  Buzzed kissing slowly leads its way to drunken fooling around (I knew that third glass was a mistake, but the wine was damn good).  My mind suddenly touches back on a short conversation I had with a very wise man on the internet.  I make a point to kiss at the base of her ear, opening up an easy transition to a delicate whisper,  "By the way, scratch whatever it is you were planning on doing and try to be...  you know...  hot."  It's the perfect plan! ...or not. Perhaps I'm looking at it wrong.  Maybe he was advertising his own prowess and not so much setting a requirement.  Surely the promise of hot sex is infinitely more enticing than the promise of sex.  Sex is just sex, after all, but you throw some hot in there and how can you go wrong?  It wouldn't even matter that his definition of hot includes random men on the internet and mine does not, would it?  :P Sigh.  I can't fault him too much for trying.  We all just want friends and love, after all. Current Mood: sympathetic (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
1:03 pm	Trying out a new default pic As much as I adore (and had a crush on when I was little) Lynx, he has a severe look about him that clashes with who I am.  This new one is cropped from the most amusing picture among my snow leopard collection.  It is off-center on purpose, but the more I look at it the less I'm liking it that way.  Damn my pickiness...  x.x Side note:  Chrono Cross is not the epic game fans of the series will pretend it is.  It's just okay.  You've been warned. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
8:29 pm	Bottomless Pits I'm certain I'm the only one who thinks about these things.  I love the concept of bottomless pits in video games.  Having spikes or saws or sharks or snakes at the bottom of a shallow pit as a hazard is fun and all, but it pales in comparison to the horror that is a bottomless pit. They're magnificent in their impossibility.  The first Mario I ever lost to a hole (roughly 18 years ago) is still falling!  He is alone, the walls of the pit wizzing by faster and faster.  Just for fun, let's imagine him accelerating at a constant downward acceleration of 32.2ft/s^2.  ( The math continues... ) Current Mood: nerdy (Comment on this)
7:46 pm	Chain Reaction of Doom! Also, I'm aware how pointless how pointless this stuff is. ^^ So I go to visit a friend and he shows me a Megaman 2 rom hack that whips my butt hardcore.  It's designed to be insanely difficult, but even so I'm obviously out of practice.  I basically bound savestate to the controller to have any prayer of getting anywhere.  That's just not cool. Returning home with my mind on Megaman, I choose to download the soundtrack to my recent favorite.  It plays in the background of everything I do on the computer for a few days, from writing papers to random hops onto Furcadia, everything is tainted by it and finally I cave in and have to play. I have Megaman 9 here, so that's been the thing hungrily devouring extra time and leaving teeth marks in the rest of time that isn't extra.  Having finished the game from start to finish upwards of twenty times in the past, I was left with little new to do other than compete on X-Box live against the nuts who live the game.  So begins my Time Attacks.  It's all about how fast you can go, how exactly you can repeat good runs, and how pixel-perfect precise you can be.  Yet another reason it would be awesome if I were a robot, but that's a thought for another day... Over the past week I've logged four hours worth of attempts on the Hornet Man stage, but I have 10th on X-Box Live to show for it.  I'll be done when I'm 5th or 6th, safely locked in the top ten.  Just leaving my name in the 10th spot is just begging to be knocked back off the board like the poor chump I removed to take my position.  XD I'd say that makes me the 10th biggest Hornet Man stage nutjob, but the board fails to include PS3 and Wii.  I assume without any research that that puts me around 29th-31st biggest nutjob.  All that because a friend showed me a romhack.  In a way it makes me wonder how much of my life is influence and how much is choice, but if I was going to get all existential in here I'd be better off talking about Mario Brothers.  ^^ (Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
2:59 pm	Random Trivia Thanks to having both pot-smoking friends and friends who are internet trolls, I'll never forget that 4/20 is Hitler's birthday.  So I'm making brownies later and, within the bounds of my house, I'm finishing off all the juice. Yay for jokes in poor taste!   ^.^ Current Mood: nerdy (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
5:47 am	Who needs alcohol when not sleeping is free? No, nevermind that title.  I'd miss wines.  I just learned the word for the type of wine I most like, so now I'm anxious to put it to use to sound sophisticated, pretentious, or both.  Let's see what this place has in terms of blush wines, I'll say.  I'll get lovely blank looks from my group before we scamper off in our own directions; one of us will be after his Jack Daniels, another after his pisswater light beers, and I imagine a cheap vodka and rum will be thrown into the mix along with at least one thing I've never heard of nor will again.  In the end it's all the same.  Beer guy and I will be the last to reach our goal of buzzed.  I feel an odd kinship with him. Speaking of odd, I went to sleep at 1:00 and my allergies decided it was time to wake up at 4:30.  Like demanding parents, they would not be ignored.  My mind is in a weird place.  I had a bad fuel injector in my car once.  It would randomly add too much or too little fuel to the engine in short spurts, switching uncomfortably between too much power and too little.  I am that engine, except this probably isn't going anywhere.  I am, however, producing carbon dioxide, so there you go.  I finally figured out where I stand on video games.  My position has been puzzling me for a while, but sometime last night a new idea struck me.  I'm a social gamer.  I've grown out of being one of those dirty game-aholics, spending copious amounts of money to feed an addiction.  No longer do I sit down with a game intending to just do one or two levels and end up finishing the whole thing.  I have not missed a sunrise finally dragging myself to bed in a daze in longer than I can remember.  Oh no!  Now I just game a little at parties.  It's amazing how fast night turns into morning once the process begins.  I suppose it makes sense, what with the Earth spinning at roughly 1000 miles per hour (at the Equator, at least).  Still, the change is awfully dramatic.  I'm not afraid of the dark or anything, but night has always been a looming presence for me, like a Do Not Enter sign has been placed upon every exit and I have to brave some kind of retribution if I'm to get out anywhere.  My favorite part of the day is the in-between stage after night but before you can actually see the sun.  The stars fade as the sky's color begins to return, every Do Not Enter being flipped to Welcome pasted on the opposite side, but there's not yet a glaringly bright Sol stealing away the morning chill. I get the feeling I'm going to reread this later today after I've napped properly and be highly embarassed that it exists.  Take that, future me! Current Mood: exhausted (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
5:31 pm	Braid is finally on PC! Poor Jonathan Blow.  He'll never top Braid. Also, http://xkcd.com/563/.  Population density for KC, MO is 1397 persons per square mile (Well, at least in 1990.  Slightly higher now, I'd bet.).  Use your own calculator.  :P (Comment on this)