Three Days

It's so exciting! Just three more days and I will be on my way up to Auckland, ready to depart for Tokyo and two intense days of overwhelming orientation.

Here's a summary of what I've been up to recently:

After flying back down from Hamilton, I spent a few days at my sister's house, just helping out with her and her 1-month old baby daughter and eight-year old son. Unfortunately I wasn't able to go online while there, but no big deal; I survived :p

I levelled a Harbinger in Titan Quest to level 22; I caught up on WotLK* stuff and played around with level 80 class builds; I started playing a game called The Crims, which incidentally resets on the day I leave; I signed up for the Stargate Worlds beta, knowing that I may not have private Internet access for another month at least - and even then I need to save for a laptop to use in my apartment in Japan; I contemplated re-activating my World of Warcraft account to play for four days and check out my characters in the beta, but decided against it; I started downloading the beta client so I can log Nick's account and play the game vicariously - me casa su casa, right?

Oh, and the Internet here atm is really ghey (ie. slow as a donkey in a swamp - no Shrek references intended).

Jonny and I watched the latest Stargate movie the other night, Stargate Continuum. Last night we watched the original 1994 flick, Stargate. Today I've been copying the entire ten season series to my portable HDD, lol. I doubt I'll find the time to watch it all while I'm in Japan, but it can't hurt to be prepared! Long live Teal'c, I say XD

Hmmm, what else. Oh, I watched an episode of Nabari no Ou and realised that it is in fact really boring, so I doubt I'll finish the series. I caught up on Bleach and Naruto as well. Unfortunately, [DB] are no longer subbing NS because of some retards that keep ripping their work off and uploading it to random places like YouTube -- so I'm up to episode 67. It seems I will just have to watch it live in Japan, raw, and hopefully make out the odd word here and there to try and make sense of what I watch. And episode 67 looks really good too :'(

I'm reminded of my time in South Korea. I sometimes watched anime on one of the cable channels that we had, but it had been dubbed in Korean. I think I watched the entire series of Full Metal Panic! without understanding the storyline or who was what. I also watched a really cool series called Scryed. After ten episodes I didn't even know the characters' names. Along comes this Korean guy I work with, he watches it for 20 mins and says, "Oh, so blah blah blah." I learnt more from his 20 mins of watching than the first ten episodes put together >< I really must watch the rest of that 26-episode series one day...

So yeah, language barriers, eh. I can't wait to be able to rip out some Japanese word-ninja skillz, but I know it will take a lot of effort and practice. And a lot of frustration, headaches and faux pas :o

I'm not worried that FFXIII is being ported to 360. I still intend to buy a PS3 in Japan, regardless of what RPGs are coming to Microsoft's puppy. I also want to get a nice LCD tv, much like what my sister and her husband got this week: a 46" HD Samsung beast :o I'll always be a pc gamer at heart anyway. Blu-ray content is for teh w1n, yo ^^

Timotheos

*Wrath of the Lich King