knic84's public diary

Damn that infernal clock. Ticking down the hours to a project I've been avoiding partly out of sheer lack of motivation, but mostly due to the fact I know how many roadblocks will jump up out of my compiler and into my cursing, tear-stained face. This isn't entirely my own ineptitude at work, however. Though in my perennial inconfidence I am tempted to riddle my self esteem with the bullets of blame, maybe this time it is the course material and its failure to infiltrate my brain or capture my wavering attention span that is the culprit. Really, a course in problem solving logic is not what I think when I'm signing up for intermediate c++. Useful sometimes and good to take the brain out for a spin, but we might as well be talking about the color of the asphalt in our traffic simulator for 10 hours given our current progress.

As for anything else, I'm not overflowing with smart-mouthed quips or obscure observations at the moment. I got glasses, which is an interesting change of pace from the previous blindness I'd been experiencing. My frames of choice were not the popular vote among my mom and the saleslady, but being the stick in the mud I am, I chose them. I like them too, though I get wobbly vision and a swimming headache if I swap them for my bare eyes. That only really happened once, the one day I wore them at school last week. It's all school's fault.

Well, maybe a more substantial update will follow later, OK? Time now to tackle those nefarious fish...

knic84 fears failure at 8:04 PM and beyond.

The lack of updates has gone on long enough, and I really hav no excuse. The schoolwork is heating up, but it's not like I'm hard at work on it. I acknowledge it in my own way - losing sleep, stressing out, etc. but I'll be damned if I actually do anything constructive about it.

Nothing evidences this better than going out and renting Viewtiful Joe for the Gamecube last night. With 3 midterms and 2 major assignments heading your way, you know you would've done the same. Games of late don't tend to captivate my hardened old heart, but this one comes close. If anything, it at least impresses my discriminating gaming eye.

In the early going I had a reaction I have to most new games - confusion. Though it's an old-school style beat-em up, the wackiness factor alone keeps you scratching your noggin for a bit. Lots of wild fisticuffs going on here, but eventually it starts to make sense, and when you fully realize Joe's superheroic powers, it's all the more enjoyable.

Which isn't to say it's not frustrating. Take the second boss, for example - a damned green biker rhino, 4 glorious health bars strong, who me and my friend Josh spent the better part of an hour cursing as he mocked our efforts in most painful style. Bastard. Just to get to the Harley namesake, you have to complete something of a skill-testing time trial during which he serenades you with his abridged edit of "Born to be Wild." Again and again. Hulk Davidson is born, born to be wild....

The most satisfying maneouvers in the game are, well... all of them. Slow-down, speed-up and zoom-in attacks are all executed in grand style. You can pull the ever-so-popular bullet time effect, but this time it's more than the standard overused, blurry slo-mo - nifty lights and profuse, flying enemy debris accompany each satisfying 'thwack bam kapow' of your fists and feet. In mach speed vfx mode, you can move so fast as to self-combust. You read that right - start yourself on fire. Your enemies too, who will suffer the effects you won't. And zooming in lets you strike a pose and spiral around every which way. All of it fun stuff.

I can say the game has great character, and I'm not even close to being done with it. Maybe it will worm its way into the realm of nostalgia one day. But for now, I've bid a hefty sum on Guardian Heroes for Sega Saturn, a similar and supposedly superior title that hopefully won't disappoint. For my bank account's sake, I should really trade in some of my dead weight games...

knic84 resorted to studying at 3:57 PM.

I hope you all are stuffed silly with turkey and the other holiday food staples. It was a relaxed and enjoyable weekend featuring a bare minimum of physical activity, which is to say I couldn't have asked for more. A quiet time to count my blessings and reflect on stuff other than the crap I usually think about. Nope, I'm fooling, I still bitched about everything and thought about why they put suede on shoes. It's just going to get ruined there, but I'll keep buying suede wherever they'll put it, I just love the stuff that much.

Let's see. Today saw me going out to Port Stanley for reasons of nothing better to do, and having some pretty sub-par chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream that tasted faintly of coffee. I could've had what appeared to be a red and blue Play-Doh flavored variety or some odd pastel-colored sherbet, but I stand by my decision.

Mackie's restaurant, where I got said iced cream, was outfitted in smashing seasonal refinery. One of those cool turkey standees with the colored fold-out tissue tails (that's the best I can do) and various effigies of Hallowe'en fright adorned the place. I've realized that nothing quite says Hallowe'en like black cats, with arched back and eyes big and phosphorescent green, preferably set against a spooky full moon and bat-filled sky. Not even the grim reaper garb-wearing and bridal gown-clad skeletons they had hanging from the ceiling. Actually, those were pretty good.

Yes, it's a pretty boring weekend to try writing anything about. Can you believe my shrunken apple head project that I started Saturday is showing no signs of progress? It's been sitting in a cup of salt water just like X-Entertainment said... but then, Matt the writer is a liar. I'm still not feeling the Hallowe'enyness of it all yet.

Well, with 31% battery left I bid you adieu.

knic84 toddled off at 9:35 PM.

For the past week or so, some creepy crawly wonders have been coming out of the woodwork in my basement. A hornet/wasp/other stinging and thus scary insect seems to emerge everyday, joining the permanent menagerie of spiders and millipedes just as they routinely did last year and possibly the year before in the Fall. This unfailingly scares the bejeezus out of me and warrants an investigation. Maybe they come in through the chimney, maybe there's a hole in the wall, or maybe they have a nice hive right under my chair. I think I hear buzzing.

In any case, everything seems to be coming back from the dead with the warming weather. Or being born only to be chilled more than a Loblaws frozen food section in the summer, which is mightily cold indeed. I feel bad for the ladybugs that are coming out of their larval cocoons after soaking up some unseasonal rays, only to be flash-frozen to the leaves on the very hedges they called home by my bus stop or infiltrating the bus itself in a desperate attempt at survival. They cling to my laptop bag and are probably the source of the rattling in my head when I shake it. But I really, really wish they wouldn't fly full throttle, smack dab into my eyes or the vast expanse of my forehead. Happened to me, like 3 times today. Their tiny minds must be addled by the heat and their retinas burned by the sun. I know it happens to me whenever I leave my sensory deprivation stasis chamber.

I do so love ladybugs, they're one of my very favorite insects along with butterflies and other pretty flying things. Who could resist those little red shells and black polka dots? I can when they're those imported South American biting lady bugs. They'll give you a hickey. But the regular kinds are cute cute cute. A fun fact: did you know that when threatened in the animal world, a ladybug will play possum and appear to piss itself? This is actually not the case - the yellow ooze emits a smell that deters their predator or whatever freaked it out from presumably making it into some ladybug chow. Fun fact.
Well that's about it. Oh, on a side note, a Sears outlet store was carrying an original Spawn action figure from 1994 that my friend Derek subsequently bought, served at the counter by Ursula the Scandanavian cashier and her lovely sister Olga. Why this is important, hell if I know.

knic84 should've used more italics at 4:45 PM.

Back in younger years, I collected with great interest the monetary runoff from many a relative's vacations to exotic locales. That is to say, foreign loose change - the likes of which included old, aluminum Cuban centavos and Austrian something-or-others, German Deutschmarks and Pfenning (always liked that name), and big fat whopping Polynesian beauts with palm trees.

Warmer places luck out in the currency department - Trinidad and Tobago had humming birds on theirs (that's right, cute currency) and I believe the Bahamas had starfish on an otherwise mundane British penny. I once had a 2 cent Australian coin that had 2 frilled neck lizards on it but that has sadly been lost to the ages. If I reached into my pocket to pay for something and pulled out coins with birds, starfish and miniature-dilophosaurus-like lizards on them, I would probably enjoy paying in cash a billion times more. Or I would hoard money even more which would put my net expenditures in the negatives, as I would sell off all my worldly possessions to be surrounded by said coins. Just like Scrooge McDuck's giant water tower with the '$' sign on Duck Tales. God I loved old Disney shows.

Anyway, the point of all this is that today, in change from Pizza Pizza, I found quite an antique - an American penny from 1923. I don't think I've ever seen change quite this old of any denomination from any country. Trying to take a photo of the penny itself proved reflective and flying saucer-like, and an attempt at getting a pencil rub of it was not very defined. So if you really, really want to see my collection you'll have to ask.

The wallet housing my money, on the other hand, is probably too embarrassing to take a picture of - a little green number with Mickey Mouse in purple and yellow, on a skateboard. Early 90's at its finest and likely source of my poor color sense. Or maybe that's why I had an attraction to it in the first place. I got it at the indoor amusement park in Quebec City when I was 8 and evidently a terrible printer and borderline dyslexic, as the backwards 7's in my phone number will attest.

Likewise too embarrassing to publish here is a photo of me I found in there at that age. I was wearing a dress, so you know it's old.

An old store around here that has long since vanished into obscurity, EMA Foods, ran an Official Cookie Eaters club and I was in its elite ranks. I don't think I was ever in a better club, even if I probably only once got a cookie out of the deal.

Anyway, that's about all I can blab about my 11 year old wallet.

knic84 ran out of steam at 7:33 PM.

Hey all, I'm overdue for a post. It's late, I'm tired, so the theme of the evening will be lack of coherent thought. Strap yourselves in for what may turn out to be a typographical rollercoaster.

So a couple days ago, class let out early (as it often tends to do, but not so often as it starts late or is cancelled) and so the natural impulse was to go downtown and fritter away valuable school work time. Aces arcade, local haunt for the gaming elite, had a new toy in since last time I went - Konami's Mocap Boxing. Mocap stands for Motion Capture, with plastic gloves feeling quite heavy to the primarily sedentary, and sensors galore. I'd seen this at Playdium in Mississauga but didn't get around to playing it. It turns out I'm a decent boxer and it's a lot of bang for your buck, but my arms STILL hurt. It's not often they're put to use above the second knuckle, as my atrophied muscles but blazing fast typing speed will attest.

Wizards arcade in my fine town here reopened a couple days ago with a tasty new treat. I'd thought and hoped it would be DDR Extreme, but the downtown excursion between classes that day proved too early to find out. Damn them for opening at a reasonable hour. But now it's become apparent that it's merely Korean 4th mix, which is all well and good as well. As well as being well and good, it's probably the machine they had in there before.. no wait, that was 4th Mix Plus, then 5th then Max2. Well well.

Ah, as for anything else of interest, I'm no further in DDRMax2 thanks to being too tired to stand let alone be rhythmic. School is not giving me enough to spin my mental wheels on, or maybe I'm just not paying enough attention. Probably the latter. Definitely. With a little bit of dumb luck I should be just fine. Achoo! Time for bed...

knic84 got a visit from the Sandman at 11:38 PM.