ichrisi

Well, break is going well, but I'm going back to school soon. It starts next Monday, but I'm leaving two days from now (Thursday morning) so I have a few days to move back in.

My time back up in Humboldt has been fun. I've hung out with friends lots, and done some cool stuff in the video game world too. I've seen Wario Ware and Super Mario Galaxy; Wario Ware is awesome for multiplayer, and Super Mario Galaxy is fun in single-player. I'd still like to see Metroid Prime 3. I hear it sucks, but I want to try it for myself. I borrowed another Dynasty Warriors game (Warriors Orochi) from a friend and played it a fair amount, and that brings my count of DW games up to 3: DW 4, DW 5, and Warriors Orochi. Super Smash Brothers Brawl got pushed back again, but I managed to finally do the Black Hole glitch in SSB Melee. It's kinda funny that Brawl got pushed back again, considering the date it got pushed back to (it has personal significance to me).

Heh, that was a whole lot about video games. There's not much else to talk about while I'm up here. I've priced out my school books, and they should cost $150-$250. I bought one book online, and the others wouldn't be cheaper enough to be worth it; I like buying from the school bookstore because I know the books are going to be the right ones. In other news I'm getting a new computer next semester. Well, this semester. I'll order the parts next week if all goes well. I'm spending $1000-$1200 on it. Yep.

That's what going on in the world of Chris lately.

I am enjoying this time both because I'm home with family and going to see friends soon, and because finals are over. I didn't get near enough sleep during finals week.

My trip home was uneventful, but almost very eventful. According to my schedule I had a 25 minute layover in Oakland. According to how late my bus was, I had a -45 minute layover. Turns out the bus out of Oakland wasn't late, so I would have had to wait for the next one going where I was going, which would have been the next day. I almost had a 24 hour layover. Luckily, they set up a second bus, so all of us that missed that bus because of other late busses (there were a lot of us) ended up being only an hour late.

On a related note, GBAs hold a charge for a long time. I haven't been playing my GBA much since I got down here, but I haven't been charging it either. I basically forgot about it since a month or two into the semester. I didn't have time to charge it, but it still had a green power light. Hooray for well built products!

Really, really, cold. I was wearing a sweater in class, and my top half was almost warm enough, but my legs were cold, inside my pants. Moreover, my feet were cold, inside my shoes and socks. It's cold enough to wear a sweater during the day, in the sun (the air is still really cold). Most evenings it's cold enough to see your breath. It's cold enough that in the mornings when I take my shower I feel cold. I go to turn up the water temperature, only to realize that it's a hot shower but the air is still cold enough that I feel cold. I have to wear socks around the house or else my feet will be freezing.

It's freaking cold. I could get a closet full of gloves, wear them all, and still be cold. I want to get a thicker sweater for Christmas. And gloves. And more long sleeve shirts. What was a I thinking, bringing short sleeve ones? I didn't know. I've almost, almost worn my sweater and my jacket on some days.

Well, I haven't made a post in awhile so I felt like I should. Major things that have happened since my last update:

• School is going well.
• I've got lots of meal blocks left, and they don't roll over to the next semester, so I'm spending 'em like crazy.
• For all the people around Humboldt County: I'm coming home for the holidays. I should get there right after finals week, right around Christmas. I'll be leaving mid January.
• I've started playing a couple of online games: Travian and Tribal Wars. They're both based off the same engine, but they play fairly differently. I like Tribal Wars a lot better than Travian. Travian just feels too restrictive. It adds in food to the wood/clay/iron requirements, and it separates lands from buildings. Tribal Wars keeps all your upgrades on one screen, and it shows different pictures for the various buildings based on their levels. It's fun seeing my village evolve. Look me up on worlds 11 and 12 in Tribal Wars. In world 11, I got in pretty late; I'm in continent 15 at 534|124. I got in early on world 12; I'm on continent 64 at 418|615.

I'm not going home for Thanksgiving. My folks never had big family gatherings, so I'm not missing much. Still, they always made really good turkey and I wish I could be there. I feel like I should stop talking about their turkeys; I've described them to a whole lot of people in the past week or two.

Almost everybody else around here is going home. Only Cortland will be here with me after the weekend, and he's taking off for a few days on Tuesday. I know a few people that are staying, but the campus will be pretty empty. It'll be pretty closed too. This place operates like a business, which kinda sucks. Nothing happens after 5pm, and nothing on the weekends either. For a holiday like Thanksgiving? Forget about it.

I know some people with plans for Thanksgiving, so I might go along with them. It'd kinda suck to be doing nothing at all on Thanksgiving, y'know?

Seek and Destroy is a tank RPG game. You play as a tank. All the other characters are tanks too. There are tank towns, tank soldiers, and tank generals. When I pissed off the enemy tank commander in a battle, he jumped (have you ever seen a tank jump?) and cursed me. It's got all the traditional RPG elements: optional bosses, infinitely spawning enemies until you trigger something, the ability to choose your equipment carefully and destroy the game balance, bosses that have multiple stages, and a boss rush at the end (I beat it in <24 hours real time, <10 hours of gameplay).

I don't think I'm emphasizing the tank element enough. You know how in most RPGs there are NPCs wandering around towns that you can talk to, and they'll say something like "this historic town is known for its great slopes" or "please protect us, {name}"? They do that in this game too, but they're all TANKS. And yet there are homes? The tanks would not fit in the homes. It makes no sense.

If you can find a used copy at your local Gamestop it's worth $2.99 for the laughs it provides.

Well, I got a care package from my folks today. Yay for feeling loved! It had some of the little pears I always got tired of and stopped eating. I had a few and realized they're really good...or maybe it's just that they remind me of home. I also got some powdered milk, which is something I guess I could've gotten here but I never thought of it. That's my parents, always thinking of solutions to my problems :)

"Snuffles is a term used to describe the symptoms of runny eyes, runny nose and sneezing in rabbits. The cause of these symptoms is often a chronic bacterial infection in the tear ducts and nasal sinuses. The bacteria involved are usually Pasteurella spp or Staphylococcus spp."

From http://www.vetsforum.com/lapis_snuffles.htm

What a cute name for a disease.

Every weekday I get up at 7am. Tuesdays/Thursdays I've got class, Fridays I've got work for my Service Learning class, and Mondays/Wednesdays my roommate has class. With a schedule this regular, I'm adjusting to it well. I woke up thinking "Isn't it around seven? Why hasn't the alarm gone off?" I check it, and it's 6:56. Great.

Better to wake up naturally than be woken up by the alarm, I guess.

Good thing about living on campus: There's always someone around to hang out with.
Bad thing about living on campus: There's always some idiot who sets off the fire alarm at 3:30am.

This morning I had a conversation between me and my roommate, Jun.
Jun: Did you have a dream?
Chris: Well, I can only remember bits and pieces of dreams. I probably had a few.
Jun: I dreampt the fire alarm went off at 3 am this morning.
Chris: That wasn't a dream. That was real.

Unrelated note: I wish I had some milk for my hot chocolate. I wouldn't use enough per week to justify buying a gallon or two.

- The teacher for my CST 300L class screwed up the deadline for Critical Response #2, so it's due November 11 instead of this Sunday.
- The second deadline (6/9 portfolio items) for my CST 430 class was going to be today at noon, but the teacher pushed it back to the Sunday next week. This means I didn't have to do a whole lot of homework yesterday.
- The DC shut down the other day. Firetrucks have been called to CSUMB a few times this semester because the dorms have really sensitive fire alarms. We can't make popcorn because it'd set them off. The DC really DID have a fire though, on their grills. I've seen flames shooting from burgers on those grills, and I've always thought "that's not good". Well, it finally happened. They were closed for the night (it was 5pm-ish anyway) and re-opened the next day.
- The DC's quesadillas are delicious.
- the cake is a lie
- The OBC's french cream sodas are also delicious. I tried a blackberry one. It wasn't as good as the orange&caramel. It had too much kick and not enough smoothness. I think the caramel really helps with that. I had another orange&caramel today and it was just as good as I remembered it being, so I'll try a blackberry&caramel next time. Or maybe I should try a plain caramel to see what base all these caramel&something mixtures are coming from? That way I'd know how much would be good, and I could order a something&caramel french cream soda with 2 parts something, 1 part caramel. I'd sound all rich and snobby.
- I got Timesplitters: Future Perfect. It's better than Timesplitters 2.
- I need to get a new Gamecube controller because my orange one is too bad to play with.

(I'm typing this up for the second time because the first time I tried it my computer crashed.)

Things I did yesterday:
- went shopping with a friend
- got a Costco card
- got a haircut [1]
- browsed Gamestop
- bought a new multiplayer game
- played SSBM with friends
- got beaten in SSBM [2]
- watched a few games of Magic: The Gathering [3]
- discovered new aspects of a dorm mate [4]

[1] I don't like my hair, and it's nice to not need to pull it back to wash my face, destroy brushes, and look like Napoleon Dynamite.

[2] I'm good at Melee. I'm the best among my group of friends up in Humboldt, except for maybe Pat. I like a challenge, and I don't often get one. Since I've been down here I've met two people who put up a good fight, and this guy tonight beat me handily. We played 3 matches, 5 lives each. The first match, I got him down to 3 lives left. The second match, 2 left. The third, 3 left again. Now just meeting somebody that can beat me would be fun, but he also said I was the best challenge he'd had in 3 years. That made my day. Well, it would have. There were several things yesterday that made my day. It was an overly-made day. He's a friend of a dorm mate, so hopefully he'll be back sometime. I asked if he lived on campus, and he doesn't. If he had I would've gotten his building/room number.

[3] I know enough about Magic to appreciate the clever uses of cards, the tricky moves, and the intense battles. I don't want to play it myself, but watching is fun. For example, there's a card that can be tapped to turn target creature into a 0/2 (0 attack, 2 defense) until the end of the round, and there's a card that can be tapped to switch a target creature's attack and defense. If you use them in that order, it becomes a 0/2, then a 2/0, and since it has no defense (life), it dies instantly. Mike used this on one of Alex's cards that was enchanted with +2/+2, but because it was enchanted, it became a 2/4 (instead of 0/2) and then a 4/2 (instead of a 2/0 and dying). Mike was like, damn, enchantments shouldn't still work. Later that game he tried again:

Mike: "I tap this and this. That's now dead." (he pointed to a creature that wasn't enchanted)
Alex: "In response to your first move, I use this card's ability to sacrifice a creature to give this +1/+1."
Mike: "Fuck!"

So basically, Mike tapped the first card to make Alex's creature a 0/2. In response to that, Alex used one of his card's abilities to sacrifice a weak creature he didn't care about to give it +1/+1, making it a 1/3. Then Mike's second tap happened and it became 3/1. It lived!

[4] I've got 5 dorm mates: Alex, Matthew, Nick, Cortland, and Jun. Alex is pretty good at SSBM, and he's willing to play it pretty often (unlike a lot of people). We play other stuff too, like Timesplitters. We're both in the Anime Club - for me it's more of a passing interest, for him it's a passion. We're both into D&D too. Last night (well, this morning, until 5am or so) I learned he's into simple action-based games, like me. A friend of mine (hi Lee) gave me Armadillo Run awhile ago. Think The Incredible Machine with more physics and less objects. It seems like a pretty obscure game - I'd certainly never heard of it before he gave it to me. Anyway, I played it a bit, and then got bored and moved onto something else. Last night/this morning I learned that Alex plays it too, and he's really into it. He's made levels and everything. I had some fun beating his levels in ways he didn't expect. I like working within the rules of the system to do things differently. I like games with physics engines, because they can always be made to do things they shouldn't.

Okay, so like I said before there are several places to eat on campus. There's the Dining Commons, which is a buffet-style place. You pay to get in and then you can eat as much as you want. You can take something small out, like an ice cream cone or a piece of fruit. You could theoretically take a desert item out, but they usually have cake and pie, and both of those require a plate. They don't let you take plates out.

There's also the Otter Express, which is a buy-and-eat type place. You grab some food, go through the register line, and either eat it at the tables or take it elsewhere. It's a better choice if you aren't very hungry.

If you aren't very hungry, but you like the DC, you can get a to-go box there. They hold your card, and you've got 10 minutes to stuff as much food as you can fit into a box. You get a drink cup too. If you take over 10 minutes they charge you double.

There's also the Black Box Cabaret, which isn't open except for events. I haven't been there, but meh.

The last place on campus to eat, and the reason I wrote this entry, is the Otter Bay Café. Me and my dorm mates were going to go last Friday, but we got there around 6pm and they close then. Every other week day they're open until 8pm, but not Fridays. This week we went earlier, and we got to eat. They have a higher class of food, but within that class the food itself is pretty crappy. The bread on my BLT was entirely too crunchy, and that made it hard to taste the rest of the ingredients. The fries were stuck together and some were too crunchy, some were too soft. The drink though, that was really good. I got a french cream soda, caramel and orange flavor. It's made with 7-Up, flavoring, ice, and whipped cream on top. After awhile the whipped cream melts and you can stir it in, which makes the drink a whole lot richer. It wasn't too rich though, there was a good balance of richness and flavor. I want to try a blackberry one.

I did 2.5 years at College of the Redwoods, and they finally got around to giving me my AA. Here it is!

Front cover


Inside. I even got honors! I got a 3.468 GPA overall, despite failing a few classes.

I'm eating a meal consisting of a hot dog. I bought some buns too, but it's very humid here, so they got moldy. It's got mustard and BBQ with it - I snagged the mustard from the on-campus eatery and the BBQ from outside somebody's door a few days ago (it was unopened and thus safe). The plate is part of a $20 set I got at Target*, and is the only plate from that set I've used. I've got some lemonade, made from a just-add-water, makes-64-ounces concentrated can, mixed in an applejuice container. It was too sour and I had to add more water; it's still sour but I want to get rid of it and I don't have any sugar. It's nice and lemon-y though. It's part of a $2-for-4 set from Target and is the only glass I've used.

I'd have something else with my hot dog, but I don't really have anything. I've got a box of crackers that I brought down with me (the animal crackers were good and I already ate those up), and a box of snack foods I got at Costco. Neither of those really work with a hot dog.

I wouldn't go hungry though, I could've walked down to the OE and gotten something with my meal plan, but I'm lazy. Truly, I am a college student.

* There was this set for $20, or a "hand made" version for $40. The hand made version was actually hammered out by hand by somebody, and it looked like crap. Uniform machine products, please!

PS: Time to go wash this plate and replace it in the drawer, ready for its next use.

You've got to get out,
Go off the beaten track.
Go out where nobody has gone,
Where nobody thinks of.

Find a place long abandoned,
A place set up but never used,
Or used and then forgotten.
Explore it. Find it. Learn it.

The beaten track won't work for this.
You and millions of others find it every day.
It has no nooks, no crannies, nothing unique.
All uniqueness has long since been destroyed.

The back roads, the forests, the hidden glens,
Those are where you should be looking,
Where you should be exploring.
They are unique. They are interesting.

Go find someplace where you can be you,
Where nobody will notice, nobody will care.
Find a place where your works will go untouched,
Untrodden, undiscovered for days, weeks, months.

That is what it means to truly be alive.
There's a place in your school, your town.
There's a place just calling out to be found.
Go. Get out. Find it.

I had a bank up in Humboldt County called Coast Central Credit Union. I've got one down here in Monterey called Central Coast Federal Credit Union. CCCU vs CCFCU. I've been having some trouble getting a check from CCCU deposited in my CCFCU account, and so I used a roommate's cellphone to call CCCU to find out what I'd need to get the check re-issued. I was on the phone with them, and the dorm phone rang. A few seconds later a roommate knocks on my door; I've got a call from CCFCU. So now I'm on the phone with Coast Central with the phone in my right hand, and Central Coast with the phone in my left hand. It was very entertaining.

I got the problem with the check almost worked out now, which is saying a lot, because I've been trying to get it handled for a week or two.

So last Friday I posted about the Pokémon-themed dorm on campus. People wanted pictures, so I got some pictures last night.



Click here to see the album. The first two pictures are of the second floor, which is Hollywood-themed. The third is a comparison, High Society vs Pokémon. The 4th-6th are of a game of air hockey we had, and the rest are of the Pokémon theme. I'd reorganize them if I had time (or knew how), but I need to get to an event on campus.

Apparently the RAs choose the decor, and one of the buildings is Pokémon themed. How horrible is that? Seriously. I'd ask to move.

I've been checking out the other buildings, and the one I'm in is pretty nice. They've got a few different kinds of housing, and the North Quads are the newest. They're four levels (all the others I've seen are three), and they have elevators. Also, the couches...oh man, the couches on the first floor are awesome. Some buildings have chairs, but nothing compares to our couches.

One of the three food places on campus is a buffet-style thing covered by our meal plan. Swipe your card to get in, then eat all you want. 120/150/200 swipes per year. I tried it out yesterday, around dinnertime. They had pizza, salad, drinks (they were out of ice), burritos, and some other stuff. I got some pizza and some salad.

I was sitting with a room-mate of mine named Cortland. He'd been there before and knew what all they had. He got a burrito, and it looked pretty good, so next plate I went to get one. I went over to the burrito counter and said to the lady "can I get some rice?" Sure enough, she put some rice on a plate. At this point I'm thinking, is she going to roll it all into a burrito at the end, or what? I told her I wanted some chicken too, and lettuce and tomatoes. She put 'em on the plate too. At the end, she just handed it to me. I think I'm the first person to ever get a burrito plate. It was pretty good, actually. I'm almost tempted to go and get another one.

When I got back to the table, Cortland told me she didn't understand English very well. One time, he was getting a burrito, and before he took it from her he asked if the sandwiches next door were any good. She heard the word sandwich, and dutifully cut his burrito like a sandwich. The fillings were spilling out all over the place.