Vanguard Princess

Sprite work is HOLY CRAPPPPPPPPPP

Rage

So Brady freaking Chan wanted me to install Magic Online.
Thing is, doesn't work!
Disconnected!
I'm behind a router but I'm the DMZ so I'm straight on the world anyway, all ports forward to me.
Brady suggests a restart, which I haven't done in something like a year.
And of course the system decides to delete the Microsoft UAA Bus on restart, thus I have no audio.

And now the driver is downloading at a whopping 20k/second, it is 30MB.
Rage.
Plus Magic Online still doesn't work after the restart.

WE TALKIN' BOUT...practice

Michael Jackson dead?

This'll change if it's wrong, but that's what everyone is saying.
So instead of rehashing links I'll just throw out my own Michael Jackson memories.
CTY talent show, our hall, doing "I want you back."
Fucking up the synchronized line we had planned.
We got third.

I think some crazy awesome hot diva girl doing Like a Prayer with her entire hall just being backup got 1st, they deserved it I remember just thinking "holy shit."

Updates

I am going to Evolution 2K9 in Las Vegas.
It cost me way too much, I plan to recoup the money lost by betting on Justin Wong and heartnana in everything they play.
Speaking of heartnana I convinced him to go to one of the Kansai area IaMP tournaments for fun, I hope he enjoys this one and goes to more of them, as Kansai actually has a shitload of IaMP tournaments.

This Saturday I went down to the city for the first time in a long while.
Blitzkampf tournament, twas awesome, I forgot how much fun it was to hang out with NYC crew.
Rithli probably got tons of lolfootage to make really hype videos for a group of dorks by a Snapple machine (well actually we had use of the actual gazebo this time.)
I've never seen jiyuna so gone, usually he plays better when he's drunk but he was completely off in moonland by mid tournament.
Like he lost to zaelar and kept falling off his crate it was quite hilarious.
Oh yeah I got 4th, relatively easy bracket, rithli and zar were on the other side.
Went through nas Fritz (last round last match), legendary blue shirt Kanae(last round last match but I fucked up second match he should have never seen a third), lost to Ken Akatsuki in top 4 winners, beat chibi Adler/Nun (I was actually happy he switched to nun, I hate adler), lost to Rithli Adler (I took a match off his Adler though, I think that was the first time I ever did.)
So not bad for someone who plays this game...not so often.

Lastly this game is hilarious, Konami going back to its Tokimeki Memorial roots.
They had all three voice actors say something like 9000 names too so there's a high chance if you're Japanese she will say your name.

Insurance companies

So I got a "surprise" bill over the weekend from my dentist asking for 250 dollars.
Checked it out yesterday morning, turns out for some reason or other my insurance didn't cover something they claimed they would, which was non-metal fillings.
Fucking hell.

In Progress

Sorry, upgrading this thing, it's been a long time and Utawareru Mono is no longer cool and hip!
(Nah, just want to upgrade the template and I guess change the scenery.)
The lack of an older posts button was bugging me like crazy also.

Giant Raymoo

Hyuge.

New Housemate

New housemate moved in yesterday.
Seems pretty cool, on the same wavelength.
As in the not going to get me evicted not going to get evicted or arrested wavelength.
Talking to someone for a while generally indicates to me certain things about their personality, and I have a good vibe about this guy.

USA Denjin Arcade SBO qualifiers

Arturo is godlike, I hope him and Joe wins.
Pringles: It means you break easily.

Edit:
FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
COMBOFIEND WHY YOU SO CRAZY AHHHHHHHHHHH
Godamn those were some of the hypest matches I've seen in my life.
I'm mad salty though over east coast's loss to combofiend.
They say Valle was sandbagging but that's bullshit, if he really did sandbag against East Coast he doesn't deserve to go.
combofiend is fucking nuts though, the guy knows no fear just rushes you down over and over.
He deserved his spot, so clutch.
Unfortunately the Japanese counter his style so badly but hey whatever, he won.

Bayonetta

Bayonetta Gameplay Trailer
I won't lie I will be getting this most likely.
Cheesy hotness!

I always get shitty housemates part deux

So I came home today and there were like ten cops or so outside my room/inside the house.
Seems like one of my housemates was arrested for dealing drugs.
I really have the best luck.

Haruhi Season 2

It's been what, three years?

All the little touches are still there, like when past Nagato synchronizes with her present self and removes her glasses as a result.

MBAA Ryougi Shiki and Schoolgirl Akiha footage

WHY SO LOLI?


So yeah Ryougi looks plain and nice.
Schoolgirl Akiha looks like she deals 5000 damage off a BnB on someone at half life.
Aka broken as shit.
She stole Warc's blood rings too except they're like...midair!

Akatsuki Blitzkampf - KANAE TUTORIAL

Rithli does it again, this time for a character he actually likes :3

Meet the Spy..."leaked?"

Seems awfully convenient that the SPY video of all things was leaked, I think Valve is just having fun with the release here.

DAEMON BRIDE...does not look as bad as I thought it would

Sure beats MKV in looks at least.

Big Bang Beat 2

Uh yeah, what can I say lol.
Maybe it'll be better.

KOF XII console characters

So Mature and Elizabeth are confirmed in so far.
I bet Rithli is happy considering the types he likes. :V

Playing Terrible Games

Million Knights Vermillion is terrible!
Suggoi! Arcana Heart 2 PS2 port is terrible!
Yet I am playing these tragedies more than anything else currently.

電波的な彼女 Denpa teki na Kanojo

imaginary_num6er posted a random nico link in chat which lead to a random 40 minute anime OVA thing.
It was...decent, had a premise that caught me.
So I decided to watch it before going to sleep.

Um, the title is hard to explain.
Literally it means, "electric wave-like girl/s/friend."
Figuratively? It means "crazy bitches."

Let me explain the term "denpa," or "electric wave."
This term originally was used to describe radio signals or other types of transmissions.
Somewhere along the line it got a hidden meaning of "electric waves fucking with your mind."
I think Leaf? might have been the first to use as an actual basis in a story (Shizuku) where a robot?/android schoolgirl or something was unintentionally giving off electric waves and thus students were cutting themselves up and going insane.
Either way, it came to mean "weird as hell."
As a side note, when this term is applied to music, it means really catchy or infectious hyper music.
Miko Miko Nurse would qualify as denpa music.

So yeah basically, if the title says weird girls, then yes, all the girls are weird.
A relatively normal yankee-looking guy, Juu, just goes about his life, until he gets a note in his shoe locker that asks to meet him under a tree.
And there we meet extremely weird girl number one: Ochibana Ame.
A rather short girl whose bangs completely cover her eyes, she speaks in ridiculously formal Japanese.
She believes she was linked to Juu in a former life and thus has come to seek him in the next as his bodyguard, going so far as to kneel and kiss his shoes.
Needless to say Juu has never met this girl and is completely freaked out.
At the same time, a bunch of murders have been occurring in the town, generally by strangulation.
The rest of the denpa girls are spoilers but suffice to say everyone is pretty weird.
I'll probably watch the other two OVAs too just cause it's caught my attention.

Ok I lied iincho (class president) is not crazy.

Ame is pure denpa though.

Satsuki is denpa too.

They didn't say anything in this episode but they're friends of Ame, they must be denpa.
Japanese wikipedia says their names are Yukihime and Madoka.

Ochibana Hikaru, weird as her older sister, but in a different way.

CONGRATULATIONS!!!!

To Anna and Allan for getting married!
Unfortunately shitty phone camera pictures only, you'll have to go to Facebook to find people with real cameras.

I feel sortta bad that I took probably more pictures of crawfish.

New KOF...shooter?

He's shooting fire out of his face!

SFIV tournament results last weekend.

Besides Heartnana winning his SBO spot, several other big things were going down.
The 4 round gamestop tournament finals were held, anyone expecting Justin not to win that arcade cabinet left disappointed.
In the end it was JWong vs Mike Ross, Justin being pretty rude haha and getting in Mike's face after destroying him 4-1.

For the international exhibitions they flew in Poongko (Korea), Iyo (Japan), and Daigo (Japan) to play.
Daigo got to go because Europe had absolutely no one to send dohoho!
Poongko lost to Daigo 4-1, lost to Iyo 4-2, lost to Justin 4-3.
Jokes in the commentary about he was "going back to Starcraft."
Iyo lost to Daigo 4-3, lost to Justin 4-2 (Daigo vs Iyo was insane.)
Justin lost to Daigo 4-0, I guess Daigo still is an anti-Justin machine.

On the Texas front, team Fubarduck sits and watches his teammate win everything won SFIV SBO qualifiers. (He literally didn't have to play a game.) SK got second in a five person Tekken 6 BR tournament el oh el while Fubar got first. Pozerwolf won Arcana Heart 2 Suggoi!! 2.6, man I should have gone...just wedding this week.

On the non San Francisco non Arcade UFO front, Sabin got thrown into the losers during Digital Mayhem, clawed his way back to the finals, beat Nestor's Sagat into the ground with Sim, then lost to Nestor switching up with Viper at the end. Guess Japan is right in rating Viper a bad matchup for Seth. Also, Min (he's alive!) and DS tied for fifth.

And that's all that went down April 17th to 19th.

GOOD SHIT ROB

Long story short, he qualified for BlazBlue SBO while in Japan!
Not using the foreigner qualifier.

Pani Poni Dash OVA redux

So I actually watched the thing.
It was amazing.
Was rooting for Serizawa the entire time.

MBAA PS2 Port announced

Old news but Famitsu announced it, said August 8 of 2009?
Ecole is doing it, but considering how much they fucked up AH2...
Then again MBAA is still running on Naomi hardware lol it should have no trouble.
Also Ryougi Shiki sighted as hidden character.

Pani Poni Dash OVA

Oh dear.

Secret Sabin Seth

Art was only half-joking when he said he was thinking of filing that Youtube notice to take it down.
He wants to hide the tech for Evo.

Taxes

I owe $1,400 of them.
UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

LIKE A BOSS

Arcana Heart 2 SUGOI! PC VERSION

No, this isn't the PC version.
This is the game running on an emulator, specifically PCSX2.
My computer itself is a q6600 with an 8800GT and 4 gigs of RAM running XP (yeah yeah I already know there's RAM being wasted Vista sucks blah blah)
You know it's bad when it runs better on an emulator than the console it was intended for.
The slowdown is almost completely gone.
Too bad it doesn't save the port, why the fuck should you need a beast PC to get normal playing speed?
At least I can go into training mode and do combos.
Then I'll just wait till Examu goes bankrupt or decides to do a PC/PS3/360 port.
Maybe they'll see some backlash from the locals after the travesty they released.

Arcana Heart 2 SUGOI! PS2 is out

And it is the worst port I have ever played in my life.





Seriously way to fuck up Examu/Ecole.

Small summary of shit that is wrong:
WHAT VERSION IS IT?
2.5? 2.6?
It has little bits and pieces from both, though it's probably closer to 2.5 than 2.6.
Lots of changes are not there, some are, it's really a mess.

SLOW DOWNNNN AND KICK HER WITH YOUR ENERGY LEGS!
The video above shows basically the AVERAGE frame rate when trying to play with Petra.
Catherine is just as terrible.
Lilica almost the same.
There was already a ton of hitstop in the arcade version, but now, if you super someone?
Holy shit prepare to wait 2x as long as it should take, good luck timing anything.

SOUND CUTS OUT EVERYWHERE
I honestly don't really care about this, hell I'd have been all for removing the music completely (even if it is awesome) if it'd help the game speed.
As it stands, anytime shit is going on (supers, certain character moves, existing), the sound will randomly crap out.

UGLY DITHERING TRICKS
Perhaps in a futile attempt to save the speed, the game COMPLETELY dithers the shit out of the sprites into crap land constantly when they are in motion.
It also has the effect of flickering the life bars.
In short, there are TONS of single stills of just terrible terrible shitty 16bit looking sprite work.
And it's still slow, so it didn't help jack shit.

IaMP is not hard

That's me I'm the loliball.

Bakuman

Done by the Death Note artist and writer team (complete your eye-rolling here)

It's about 9th graders!? who want to be mangaka.
There's something so hopelessly romantic about this manga that it hits me pretty hard.

You're going to jail joystick

I don't think this thing will get through customs.

Potchouli

The army is complete.

"New" SFIV Tier List

This one includes console characters.
And surprise surprise my weak purple thing is dead last.
No really, I think this list is far from complete and dead wrong in some areas.

Too fat to work

No it's not the USA, where everyone is fat.
This gem of a story takes place in Britain, where an entire family of fat people claim they are too fat to work and thus claim 22,000 pounds a year in compensation.

Million Knights Vermillion: A year Later

And you can see it's confirmed that Chihaya's voice actor will be playing an insane eyepatch openshirt and tie wearing AWESOME girl with huge scissors. (Already called Yuri)

Unfortunately the game footage looks extremely awkward as all heck, needs more frames.
You can't even really say "It's doujin" when you look at the credits, pro music, pro character design, pro seiyuu.
This supposedly comes out in a month?
I'll play it cause it has Yuri but like, come on a year of nothing sort of expected more.

Bachelor party...food only version

This will be a very trees instead of forest post for lots of reasons if you KNOW WHAT I MEAN.
I preferred Hagi 9000x to Hop Kee.
Perhaps it's because Allan stole all the crab.
Snails were decent (not filling at all), clams were also stolen!
Flounder? was nice.
But I wasn't filled up at all.
Was tempted to deviate a little to Chinatown Fair haha cause it was literally 5 feet away.

Hagi though was oh goooooood.
Eel tempura with citrus salt mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
The yellowtail? collar MMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
The tuna also was very nice (garlic was too strong), in all honestly, the chicken skin bacon, while really good, was probably bottom on the list in comparison to the rest!
Cause everything else was amazing!
Or maybe the fatty pork.
Again good, but below the amazing eel, yellowtail, tuna.
Also, tried some Choya (I don't drink.)
I could see myself drinking it again :V
Not beer though, if anything this weekend just REINFORCES the cold truth to me that beer is just fermented crap and you're just drinking fermented crap :V
I find it very hard to do more than sip.

Peter Luger steak is godlike, if you want to be a douche, ask for the burger at dinner.
"We make our burgers from the leftover steak so steak is better. What you don't like steak?"
"It's ok I guess."
"It's ok you guess?"
Then order salmon.
Then somehow eat that along with 6 slices of steak anyway!
As somewhat expected (I did research!) German potatoes were pretty unimpressive.
Creamed spinach was amazing though.
Steak was of course wow.
I actually felt they were different in toughness, probably just outside based.
Medium rare felt much tastier than medium.
I saved up hunger wise for this one so I ate like 10? or more pieces.
Also I could probably eat the whip cream (I think they actually make their whip cream right?) alone as dessert.

Hurf, chicken/lamb and rice, only good when hot.
Grays Papaya hotdogs are "ok," dohoho. (It's a hotdog, you can't really fuck that up.)
Zabar's was OK I guess, I didn't get the salmon bagel though so I probably CHOSE WRONGLY.

Yeah and that's all you get.

Mega Man 2

OVER 9000 SUIKA

Notice I don't say "Suikas."
Yeah some nut bought a limited edition Suika plushie on Yahoo JP auction for 916,000 yen.
That's over 9K for a Suika having her eyes closed

instead of open.

Maybe if she could split into 1000s of Suikas like real it'd be worth that much.
Or grow to Immaterial and Missing Purple Power size.
I would want my over 9000 dollar Suika to be able to crush houses.

Secret Meeting 2

Probably one of the best and worst things I have seen.
It seems like Matsuda (IaMP player, Youmu's wife), has been working on a fighting game based on...IaMP players.
As in, motion capped IaMP players.
It is so terrible and funny that all I can do is laugh.
There is a video of instant kills plus a combo video up.
It is...interesting, to say the least.
The characters, er players in the game include:
reize, ri-zu, matsuda, RIC, Joker, BT., Dark-man, uranagi, ym, honami, and B B B'
You can watch their IaMP matches on youtube.
I'll probably mirror both videos because of their terribleness.


Instant Kills


Combo Movie

BROFIST

Zun said fuck it.

Oh No!

Interesting Physics

So coming home from work today the Jeep in front me glanced against the divider, bounced off into the right lane of a two lane highway, overcompensated by swerving BACK into the divider, but by this time they were also rotating, and thus they were already somehow backwards, then flew UP onto the divider, finally resting on it while facing to the right.

This was directly in front of me so I was braking like crazy, luckily no one was tailgating my ass.

I had to go over the crash a couple times in my head to figure out how they ended up facing RIGHT, because it sure as hell didn't make sense for a few moments after.
But I do remember seeing the fire on the road as they were flying backwards onto the divider, so it helped me figure out their exact trajectory.

I drove right on by after stopping, ran over part of their plastic parts in the road.
In retrospect maybe I should have taken a picture.
The two girls are lucky to be alive.

MBAA ver. A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAel3HWyy_w#t=2m48s
Who is this character and why does she have this?

Game shit

BlazBlue announced for the PS3 and XBOX360, no solid release date.


7th Dragon by the Etrian Odyssey people is out.
Fun little game, music is really cool.


First Boss

Shaman King True Ending to be viewable online

via Zepy
Man I remember reading that silliness so long ago and raging pretty hard at the "ending."

American Madness 5

Flickr pictures here.
Warning, incoming wall of text.

So yeah last week was American Melty 5.
The flight was from JFK to San Francisco, then San Francisco to Orange County, then ride from Orange County airport to Temecula.
Met Rithli at JFK.
Flying sure has changed, only one bag now and they counted a backup and a laptop as two bags.
I had to pay 15 bucks for basically taking a pillow and a Standard Edition Joystick with me.
Also fagged out and brought along the sadlife Touhou plushies because I smelled stupid photograph opportunities.
Rithli actually had an 800$ or so camera along he wanted to try for his freelance graphics design work so he has some of the stupid plushy pictures as well.
Flight delayed (standard), we basically hit Orange County at rush hour time.
In California.
Awesome timing.
A thing about California traffic vs New York traffic, they are both terrible, however they differ in their terribleness.
Where as New York is windy ass streets and one way signs making it so you can never go directly to where you want, California is FIVE LANES of cars not moving.
Seriously.
Also we have to pick up HF-Blade who suddenly decided even though he has a car he does not want to drive.
Well actually he didn't have his car.
EITHER WAY the ride took entirely too long and we ended up arriving really late.
Stopped at an in an' out along the way, burgers were really decent for the price!
Never seen an in and out before in New York by the way, fast food franchises all seem different there.
Also Californian weather is amazingly amazing.
First thing I noticed was how warm it was, when I was going to JFK in the morning I left something in the car (receipt and directions!) by mistake so I had to walk back from the train stop.
My hands were going numb from the cold.
So yeah sort of a blur I remember playing SFIV and IaMP and watching Bellreisa rage play Comic in IaMP right off the bat (bad idea.)
Korean BBQ the next day, Bell's table destroyed the place, they started bringing out frozen meat.
Bleah it's been a week I don't quite remember the games, I just remember killing Swedish in Iamp, then Malty killed me a bunch while giggling, then holy shit Sp00ky is better and won more than he lost against me.
Didn't play Bell, probably for the best.
Oh right played against Comic some but I was sort of out of it then, didn't want to think.
Pho for dinner I think?
Poverty East Coast games, someone brought out Power Stone 2.
Then Bushido Blade 2, which it seems I missed when playing IaMP with spooky, though I came after and destroyed tempered.
Aika was harder plus whenever we went into mashing game I forgot you could back off so we would beat the ever living fuck out of the sticks until our arms hurt.
I was winning more than I lost though, then I settled into watching tempered do two hit frog combos.
In Bushido Blade 2, there's a girly kid whose projectile is a frog which makes any female character DROP her weapon and fall down, practically guaranteeing an instant kill.
Aika insisted on using a female character so tempered kept frogging her.
The funny thing is you could reversal frog, a sword could be going toward your throat and the frog would deflect it, make her drop the weapon and fall down.
All in all though aika seemed to be better, even with cheesy counterpick 2 hit kill tempered frogs.
Next poverty game was PowerStone 2.
I sat out for a little before playing but I noticed a trend.
Basically, XIE WOULD ALWAYS WIN.
Hustler.
No one else would go for him either, he'd run around collecting gems then supering the fuck out of everyone.
And then ANOTHER hustler joined, Malty, giggling the entire time, and for the first time Xie was losing games regularly.
Both of those clowns knew the broke characters too. (ninja girl and main character)
Last poverty game was Project Justice, which quite a few people knew.
I was really tired by then though so I only played one game with my scrub tennis loli.
Unfortunately Rithli and I forgot to play Vampire Savior.
Woops.
We hit the Korean BBQ place again the next day, but our table didn't go for the all you can eat this time, instead we all ordered SooDoonBu.
Unfortunately I find tofu very bland so I learned that SooDoonBu really isn't for me.
The Bul-Gok-Ki was good though.
SFIV tourney this day.
Sucked, went 0 and 2, I played 2nd place (jeffm, using balrog) first round and second round I played Dippy, using Chun Li.
Balrog is already terrible for Rose, and I had never played Dippy's Chun Li, or any Chun Li for that matter.
Not sure what normals are good against her, she was beating a lot of my pokes out.
Ironically, the guy who would have won the entire thing free (Justus, using Gen and random), left the day before, along with Stormlocke, who used Balrog, and who I thought was better than jeffm's rog.
In the end jiyuna the clown car won using Sagat.
Dohoho.

Flight back was delayed some 2-3 hours again, thank you America Airlines.
Got back way too late to take the last train home, stayed at Sp00ky's, didn't go into work and took and extra day (tuesday) off.
Tinshi and Zar came by later, got to watch the hilarity as both insisted on using pad because the first two rounds of the gamestop tourney I had missed going to because of AM5 were forced on pad.
Tinshi played blanka vs Zar Sagat
Then got to watch hilarious pad zangief vs pad sagat, which was making Zar rage so hard.

Anyway I've probably forgotten tons of shit but that's it for now.
Oh right, kijea (mech mbac player/aba ggac player/gilgamesh fuc player, best mbac in the usa at the moment) kept moving my plushies over to the Guilty Gear display.
Lost to Dippy in the sad life competition however as he brought a dakimura.
That eyepatch girl from Ikkitousen lol.

U MAD?

Something I knew before but only realized yesterday.
I have played the old school Street Fighting games VERY LITTLE.
I have played a grand total of TWO GAMES of Super Turbo in my life.
I've almost exclusively played new poverty/doujin fighting games.
You know, air dashes and stuff.
Even Vampire Savior feels like it belongs in the "new style" of fighting games because of its movement and play.

And you know why i only realized yesterday?
CAUSE I FUCKING SUCK AT SFIV.
Like never have I raged so hard at a fighting game that wasn't IaMP.
Freaking clownface EDIBLE, of all people, was going random select and basically destroying me while I was trying to play somewhat seriously.
It was really really idiotic.
Really unsafe move into ex anything all day.
Mashing reversals when I fucked up the c.mp qcb lk link (yes it's a weird link, not a buffer, feels odd)
Mashing reversals after getting hit on the ground by c.hp because THAT MOVE IS INSANE NEGATIVE ON HIT.
On and on.
My first round online in this game ended with me getting perfected by spin stick Zangief.
I lost like 15 matches in a row before I even scratched Edible's random roster win run. (How is that for alliteration?)
Towards the end of the session I was like fuck it let's see if I can do this shit and picked random.
Got Honda, and proceeded to basically destroy his mashy Rufus with equally mashy Honda.
EX butts EX Ochioed EX hands and headbutts all day, I completely crushed him.
Hell if I can win with Rose when I'm trying to think against that character.
Fucking terrible and just made me rage more that I could win with spazz hands.

Man, I fucking suck.
U MAD?
YES, I'M MAD.

Also, got the SE stick, took out the fucking washer of doom that scratches the PCB (thanks again MadCatz), took like two hours or something and cut myself.
I actually unlocked almost all the characters (except Seth, fuck him) with pad first, but like my thumb started hurting plus XBOX pads are the shittiest shit you will ever play fighting games on.

I need to play at least 1000 more matches I feel before I begin to get anywhere near competent level in this game.

The "truth" of TGA

This post is so real it hurts to read.
To have everything you worked for just die like that, I can't imagine how it feels.

Edit: He removed the post, probably because it was insanely depressing and suicidal and angry.

50% of charges dropped against Pirate Bay on second day

What has been shown in court today is that the prosecutor cannot prove that the .torrent files he is using as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker.

Woops?
You know, they really should have...figured that out before the trial started.

I'm all for nuclear power but...

So yeah, a British nuke sub and a French nuke sub COLLIDED in the Atlantic.
Both had sonar but of course both had awesome sonar jammers so we're back to square one.
Seriously though just makes me a TAD uneasy.

American Iamp 5?

I've made a terrible mistake.

Doujin Rice

Zepy reports circle Tsudoitei will be selling doujin-made rice.
As in Akita Komachi rice with a picture of Komachi on it.
The circle owner apparently is a farmer, so it will be grown by the circle also.

Rocket science

Now this is pretty cool, seems like China has built the highest suspension bridge in the world.
Their choice of cable spanning?
Not kites (Niagara Falls), not a helicopter (Akashi Kaikyo), not boats (Brooklyn), but rockets.

Poverty Ball Z

Welp, what can I say?

RIP Tokyo Game Action

Tokyo Game Action is officially closed forever. With no income and other problems due to the flood, we are drowning in bills it is impossible to recover and reopen.

To pay our creditors and to prevent my family from being thrown out on the street (literally), I am left with no choice but to auction all of TGA's assets.

TGA will be auctioning everything we have in May to pay our bills. Every game, pcb, poster, keychain, chair, plate, fork, Arch stand, figures, software, bowling ball, everything in TGA has to be sold.

Why him, of all the arcade operators in the US?
It's a terrible thing but I wish Planet Zero burned to the ground in retaliation, just to even the karma scale.
You owe us at least that, fucking cosmic deity of your choice.

I always get shitty housemates

So, anyone who somehow has heard me ranting about housemates will be familiar with the story.
First guy was a scumbag, didn't pay rent, then managed to get the entire place labeled as an illegal boarding house and shut down.
Went and found a new place.
Second guy was a stoner, brought over tons of friends who stole my shit, got evicted.
Now once again, the OTHER housemate (there were originally 4 of us, one got evicted, now three) is inviting friends over to sleep, and they are stealing my shit.
Yesterday they emptied out my orange juice jug and then, get this, FILLED IT HALFWAY WITH WATER.
Like wow, just wow.
Hell they'd have left a better impression if they left it empty.
But filling it halfway with water is just a fucking insult.
I'm sick of this shit, once again, another shitty housemate or maybe it's his shitty friends I don't care anymore.
GTFO.
Done.

Edit: Ahahah oh WOW. I didn't even notice until I went out for groceries this week.
They stole the two Breyer tubs of ice cream in the freezer too!

Star Ocean 4

Haha, "research papers."

Hard to tell if it's the same as SO3 Welch, I don't think she is.

Goonswarm wins Eve Online

http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?t=3604
Long story short, in a game where corporate espionage griefing is tolerated and even encouraged, where people will make internet friends over the course of years just to lure you somewhere and blow up your internet spaceship and take your internet corpse, the largest alliance in the game was disbanded from within by a traitor working for Goonswarm.

Eve always looked too boring on the micro-level and too serious on the macro-level, but the faction interactions of the game are truly fascinating.

Season 2 Haruhi a huge troll?

J-cast news reports that they have contacted Kadokawa for comment regarding the revelation that Haruhi TV series is starting in April, and Kadokawa says “Oh it’s a repeat telecast of the first season”.

So yeah, I was going to post on the announcement that Season 2 would start in April.
Now it seems like I was correct to wait on this!
But man, that's just too mean Kyoto Animation.
Too mean.

Plushies

So these came in the mail on Monday from a friend.


Sakuya just uses IRC at work.


Remilia hates Lipton but she'll drink it anyway.

Oh God I'm already posing them in cute situations.
Arghhhh.
And then also I heard that they released TWO MORE plushies.


Patchouli


Alice

Ugh Yen exchange rate SUCKS so much right now I know these will cost a shitload again (not saying how much Sak and Remi cost.)
I don't really care about Alice that much but Patchouli will probably be bought regardless of how expensive she is.

How to play Chun Li in SFIV

All you really need to know.

EXAMU does it again

So the upgrade from Arcana Heart 2 Suggoi! (called 2.5) to 2.6...
Will be a PAY UPGRADE AGAIN.
And it's 102,900 yen (about 1000, but more with the current exchange rate)
Adds balance changes and training mode and NOTHING ELSE.

Ok, so Examu pulled this shit before with Arcana Heart to Arcana Heart Full for SBO.
After lots of protests from arcade operators, they lowered the price to around 80K yen instead of 140K.
Then...they waited until this year's Super Battle Opera announcement and went ahead and did it again!
The full PCB is 176,400 yen.
Which means that if you had waited and never bought AH2 or Suggoi! until now, you'd have saved something like 2000+ dollars.
Operators are understandably livid, including the ones I know in the USA.
Training mode doesn't help either, arcade operators in Japan hate that shit as it increases credit time from 2-3 minutes to 5 minutes, plus in Japan everyone is polite so people don't interrupt training mode.

There's already bokutari (ripoff) threads on JPBBS, but more than likely arcade operators will bite it in the ass again and pay for the upgrade, as it's required for SBO.

[11:28] <@fubarduck> they have a way to fund Demon Bride now!
[11:28] <@fubarduck> since THAT'S not going to be purchased

Waveform

Dear sibladeko,

Your video, Guilty Gear Isuka - Completely Stupid, may have content that is owned or licensed by Avex Entertainment, Inc..

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,
- The YouTube Team

So the video has no sound now.
This boggles my mind.
I didn't even know the name of the song in the video, there are no tags pointing to it, there's no text they could have searched on.
So somehow, someone at Avex Entertainment, in Japan, COMPLETELY ASS BORED, had to have listened to the video and then checked, "Yup, copyrights."
Dippy suggested though that they could have used a waveform search.
As in rip the videos off youtube, search the sound file wave for similarities with stuff in their library.
I guess that makes it slightly easier but that's still insane.

V-13 unlocked

Final boss out in BlazBlue, confirmed on the TRF stream plus baod unlocked her on his own board.
Of course certain clowns have suddenly become interested in BlazBlue again.
Whatever.

In case you forgot, she's the girl who looks like she's Anubis from Zone of Enders.

We lost 100 million credit and debit card numbers but hey, how about that Obama?

The comic timing on this is hilarious.
They sat on this shit for a YEAR, wait till the inauguration to announce that hey, we may have been hit by the largest security breach in history.
Good stuff Heartland Payment Systems.
Hope no one here ate out in the PAST YEAR.

Is this some DRAMA?

Yeah if anyone knows me for any period of time it's that I fucking hate drama.
Sort of inevitable though whenever a clan depends on another for servers.
Long story is while I was first trying Team Fortress 2 for the first time, about a year or so after release (man was I late) I was looking for a server to call home.
My boss, a former Call of Duty {LaW} clan member and also owner of probably the most popular CoD4 server in the midwest, recommended me Smackcentral, as he said that is where his clan had grown from and that the crowd there was of the older generation.
(Yes we're old :V)
Anyway, I visited, and had a really rocking time.
Skill level was on average higher than usual, and certain people made really fast impressions on me as to their skill.
(NC-17[CIA], B-Man[CIA], Skro, Chaos, to name a few.)
I bounced around a bit testing other clan servers but nothing really said "home" like Smack.
Brought some friends from #shrinemaiden as well, namely Pickie and WhiteKnell, but Whiteknell has the attention span of a flea and also loves to be a jerk.
He was inevitably banned for map exploits and being an overall jerk :V, though there were quite a few accusations of hacking (which he didn't, honestly he's not the type of guy to care so much about a game to hack...more like gimmick bat for 10 straight rounds)
Pickie stayed around though, through thick and thin.

Anyway there was talk of starting a sister clan to CIA, it had existed before, called NCM, or Not Clan Material.
From experience I had sort of figured out that CIA wasn't really interested on being a super-competitive clan, membership was sort of based on other things besides pure skill, I was fine with that.
If I couldn't get into CIA though I'd love to join NCM, as it would be made of regulars of Smack.
I also have this weird sense of loyalty in games I play, I stayed with the same halo pc clan for all of its lifetime on TWL until it was removed from the game list.
Same with Melty Blood, Sp00ky will always be some sort of godfather figure to me.
So I turned down an invite to The Stolen Eye, a pretty well-established and good clan, and joined NCM under the leadership of Skro.

Competitive play is quite a different mindset than public or even private servers.
There's a whole different mentality you have to bring in, but the biggest one is "you're not expendable."
Every time you die you are potentially fucking up a push or fucking up a defense.
Let's just say that some of our members were less than stellar at their roles or didn't even have set positions.
We had a good core of maybe four-five, but outside that we had a lot of people who sort of filled gimmick roles but didn't excel at anything.
People were getting more and more inactive though as time went on, and I do the thing I do with a lot of competitive games where I rotate on how much I'm playing them so as not to get burned out.
In short though we started showing up short-handed to matches, running lineups that I was uncomfortable with and that really had no clue beforehand what they were doing.
It wasn't TOO terrible but we really had to shape up.
At the same time though it seemed like CIA was having roster issues as well, they had forfeited a lot of matches because of numbers.

In short, CIA held a poll that might as well have been called "How do we fuck up NCM by splitting their roster?"
This involved voting for the top three players AMONG THE NCM ROSTER.
Top three winners (Chaos, Pickie, and rdmqwerty) were approached with invitations to CIA.
Then the thread got wiped, so the new people couldn't see what went down.

This is uncharacteristically FUCKING GRIMY of CIA.
It also indicates to me three things:
1. No one in CIA objected. At least, enough of them participated in the vote to basically say YEAH LET'S FUCK NCM!
2. They actually think rdmqwerty has done more for the community or is a better player than Skro, which is downright hilarious.
3. The chance of me and Skro getting into CIA is fairly low.

So yeah, in their quest? to be competitive CIA split us in two.
There was a match directly after the split and of course we were undermanned and lost terribly.
The hilarious thing was all three of our former members were still online at the time, so we would have had more than enough players.
I had no doubt that we would have won that match with a full roster, how the hell do you even win once on Badlands with a man down?
Which we did somehow.

I feel betrayed.
I know we're dependent on CIA for use of their servers for matches but what the hell is this shit about poaching members behind our backs?
I feel even worse for Skro, because as the leader of NCM they told him jack and voted a worse player over him to boot (no offense rdm, but chaos is a better demo than you, and I'm a better medic.)
Like what a punch in the balls this has turned out to be.
Now we have lost two of our best players and a decent player and are left with a roster with more holes than a cheese grate.
I honestly don't know what we'll do from here.

Seriously though, Smackcentral, and especially CIA, is the last place I expected to run into drama llamas.

Sea kittens in seaweed

So yeah, PETA is a hilarious troll.

FFXIII

It's Steve Harvey before he went bald!
Seriously the black jokes you can make with this.


There's two of them now!
And they seem to have both been turned into motorcycles.

Arc Systems Interview

A rare interview with Arc System in English.
Quite a lot of good gems, such as the revelation that Sega more or less owns Guilty Gear now and that they basically stopped direct involvement at #R because they had made what they wanted.
Also they are very worried about netplay lag and competitive fighting games given the shrinking arcade scene (even in Japan.)
Finally, they have no clue what America likes, except they like FPS and Soul Calibur, which Daisuke thinks is trash.
Enlightening read all around.

Touhou vending machines

I'm surprised this is even allowed.

Shuriken Girls

So pulsr's job is basically an event coordinator type deal, he's currently helping run CES.
On the floor he saw an ad by Gainax that...begged him to capture it.
So he did.

An Amazing Review of The Secret

Please allow me to share with you how "The Secret" changed my life and in a very real and substantive way allowed me to overcome a severe crisis in my personal life. It is well known that the premise of "The Secret" is the science of attracting the things in life that you desire and need and in removing from your life those things that you don't want. Before finding this book, I knew nothing of these principles, the process of positive visualization, and had actually engaged in reckless behaviors to the point of endangering my own life and wellbeing.

"IMAGE IT!" -some gar guy

Megurine Luka = Star Ocean 3 spawn?

Unlike its previous two characters, Crypto advertised Luka's 3GB vocal database as "Japanese/English bilingual," and chose her name to express its hope that she will transcend borders and cultural barriers.

Blah blah blah, all I see however is a combination of:



I'm not crazy am I?

Pain...

I think I'd rather have two migraines than a stomach virus ever again.
I've just started "eating" substances that aren't electrolytes and colored water.

Ake-Bre

Is awesome.
Haven't had this fun in a while.
I want to say not that difficult too, expect it was a learning process.
That and Knell and I still do not know how to beat the final final part.
We are at a loss, and if you lose you lose all your continues and it's instant game over too :<
If you have any ears at all you'll probably recognize the two main character's voice actors.
Horie Yui and Kugumiya Rie.
I think if you unlock the third secret character she is voiced by Yuko Goto.
Seiyuu are pretty cheap!
Maybe.

2ch ownership transferred to Packet Monster Inc

2ch founder Hiroyuki just posted saying that he has completed transferring the ownership of 2ch to some company called Packet Monster Inc, and the FAQ on 2ch reflects that. No other information is given about the transfer.

[01:06] <Kilvear> where's splayko?
[01:07] <ShardZ> and splayko's around, just not talking in this channel atm
[01:07] <Kilvear> oh well
[01:07] <Kilvear> least if he was reading zepy's blog
[01:08] <Kilvear> the 2ch.net company that was transfered to doesn't exist
[01:09] <Kilvear> i went to the address listed but there's no such company on the whole street
[01:10] <Kilvear> lol
[01:11] <Kilvear> anyways the company cannot be registered as an Inc
[01:11] <Kilvear> the company 2ch is transfered to is called Packet Monsters Inc
[01:11] <Kilvear> locally there's only LLP or Pte Ltd
[01:12] <Kilvear> pictures when i get home
[01:13] <+sibladeko> kilvear
[01:13] <+sibladeko> you and your tinfoil hats
[01:13] <+sibladeko> so nothing at the address?
[01:13] <Kilvear> nope nothing
[01:13] <Kilvear> its a row of shophouses
[01:13] <Kilvear> most office workers are seen there eating
[01:14] <Kilvear> went down the street to confirm
[01:14] <Kilvear> don't see Packet Monsters Inc only finanical consultant firms
[01:14] <+sibladeko> should have knocked around
[01:14] <+sibladeko> maybe they are in a building :V
[01:14] <Kilvear> i took some pictures i will upload them tonight
[01:15] <Kilvear> its just 2 levels
[01:15] <+sibladeko> stop getting them in trouble kilvear lol
[01:15] <Kilvear> LOL
[01:15] <Kilvear> i'm a pesky reporter afterall