This hasn't been a spectacular week so far. Monday I got my mom a cell phone so she can keep in touch, but in the course of straightening out a (nonexistent) billing problem I wound up driving 60 miles out of my way and catching a mower-flung rock in the windshield. Tuesday morning I got a call from my debit card service informing me that over the weekend someone had attempted to charge a small amount in Thailand over the weekend, and while I was rushing to take care of computers at other libraries the new chip in my windshield became a rather large crack......

I've also not gotten my usual amount of sleep thanks to having to be at the library two hours early on Monday and Tuesday for a company's training session (they needed to use a number of computers, which we had, and they needed to do it at a time when they wouldn't interfere with the library's business). I didn't mind doing it, but it's really thrown my sleep schedule out of kilter.

There have been some good things as well. I've finally got all my library's computers up to date--we have over a dozen Windows 7 machines with Microsoft Office 2010 available to the public, which means no more headaches from computers running out of memory because someone was watching videos while playing whatever the Facebook flavor-of-the-month game is. I've taken advantage of a nonprofit organization which exists to get extremely discounted software into the hands of libraries, which is how we were able to afford those copies of MS Office in the first place.

Also, I've started experimenting with a different sort of old-school pixel art in my free time--I'm looking into the 8-bit Final Fantasy games, and seeing how well/poorly some of my standard characters convert over to them. The limitation of only having what are basically two palettes to choose from for player characters does make for a bit of a complication (I can understand the reasoning for it, given the severe limitations of the NES). I need to do a bit more with the sprites, though--as it stands the set I made for Piri is little more than a minor modification of the sprites for Maria from Final Fantasy II (then again, so was the sprite sheet for at least one other playable character in FFII......). I like some of the ways Square attempted to get around the palette limitations of the NES, the major example being using using three light colors for the hero battle sprites and letting the black (or dark blue) background fill in the dark outlining. They used this as well for the portraits from FFII, which look very good for being three-color 24x32 images. Once I've actually got the sprites a bit more individualized I'll see about posting them--they're a lot of fun to work on, not to mention the mental challenge of adding detail when you don't have the memory or resolution available to do so......

As I type this, it's almost two hours before I'd normally be at my computer, but I have to go into work early to get five new computers set up. I won't have them finished before we open, but they'll at least be in place and in the process of updating. Unfortunately half my time working on them will be cleaning garbage and bloatware off them. Given that these computers were custom-built for us, I shouldn't have to do that. I'd really like to not get computers from that supplier again, but that's up to whoever gets the directorship of the library when my boss retires......

I'd have preferred to have worked on it over the weekend, but was a bit too drained to do so, thanks to my bimonthly visit to the Red Cross. The last two times I've donated platelets I've been too tired to move the next day. Which this time was bad because the next day was Mother's Day. My mom was happy enough with a call, though, especially as I'd just visited her on Friday (her actual birthday, and the date of the nursing home's Mother's Day party).

I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm burning the candle at both ends and in the middle as well (not for the first time). Unfortunately I don't see things slowing down in the near future......

Every time I read former Doctor Who star Colin Baker's newspaper column I find myself nodding in agreement. His most recent column makes a point about politics of which every politician everywhere would do well to make note. Perhaps I'm growing more curmudgeonly as I grow older, but Baker's occasionally grumpy posts make more and more sense to me, even on the rare occasion when he and I are on opposite sides of the issue in question.

Does anyone else find it disturbing that the Red Cross is receiving timely sponsorship from the makers of the new Dark Shadows movie?

Apparently they've now released the character creator for Phantasy Star Online 2, so you can find out how it works before they release the game. Thanks to aoichan, I found out where to download it, and this is what I've come up with:

「画像は『PHANTASY STAR ONLINE 2』キャラクタークリエイト体験版において撮影された実機画像です。」
『PHANTASY STAR ONLINE 2』公式サイト
http://pso2.jp/
(Apologies for the Japanese disclaimer, but it's required, I think......)

As you can see, it's easily possible to recreate my character Tara (as a Human Ranger, or RAmarl, just like she was in PSO and PSU). It was fun to create her, and I was amused to find out that the character creator actually tells you your character's height--and it changes depending on their footwear. Tara, for instance, grows six centimeters in her high heels ^_^

The game releases sometime later this year in Japan, and hopefully soon after over here. Fortunately it's free to play (SEGA makes money through the usual store system); I may find myself with another MMO to play later this year......

It has been announced that the Daleks will be returning to Doctor Who this season. Fans everywhere, concerned by the recent redesign of the Daleks into a larger and brightly-colored form, asked Steven Moffat which Daleks we would be seeing: the newest design, or the gold versions introduced in 2005. Moffat replied, "ALL OF THEM!" (emphasis his)

Whether anyone took him seriously was debatable, as the Daleks have had several forms in their forty-nine-year history. Then he posted this photo:

For the uninitiated, that is a Dalek as it appeared in 1965's "The Chase" (and, to be perfectly honest, for the entirety of the remainder of the black-and-white series). Needless to say, my heart sang at this picture. It's proof positive of how well the original design still holds up. I must admit it's a bit dusty, but what's a bit of dust when you've got such a classic Dalek with the current cast?

I'm going to try and keep this non-spoilerish, but last night I saw The Hunger Games with the book club. It was a week after its release, so the hype's died down a bit, right? Plus, it was at an unpopular time and on a non-3D screen, so most people would be waiting for a 3D showing, yes?
( Failed at non-spoilerish. Enthusiastic babbling below the cut. )
It's rare when every part of a film--source material, script, casting, design, music, and direction--all come together perfectly. This movie was nearly two-and-a-half hours long, but I didn't notice. I was completely absorbed in the story and the setting, and probably forgot to breathe for the entire last half hour. (I also had a bit of trouble standing afterward, but that was more from my blood donation earlier in the day......) The best movie I've seen all year; probably the best I've seen in a long time.

And now it's been two weeks since I last updated my journal ;_; I've been busy, but with nothing especially exciting, and at least one weekend day was spent sleeping in and recuperating from a way-too-busy last couple of months. I've put in a lot of time on Champions Online, creating a munitions-based character who has now reached level 27 without doing very much at all outside Millennium City. Between that and spending far too much time in the character creator, that's accounted for a lot of my spare time.

I'm working on wading through the next book club selection, George Orwell's 1984, and had a quiet day for reading yesterday. I'm now more than halfway through the book, and finding it more than a little bit frightening in terms of present-day events. I'm also very tempted to read the sequel to The Hunger Games, though one of my co-workers has claimed it for now.

My own novel is on hold again, as thanks to messing around with some sprites I'd originally made over a year ago I'm now inspired to go back for a third attempt at Flame of Justice. I should probably see about actually outlining it and planning events out this time. I'm planning on writing this outside of NaNoWriMo in an attempt to get away from the "50,000 or bust" mentality which turns it into a sprint but leaves me unwilling to go past the first chapter break after the fifty-thousandth word......

The reason I've started playing with sprites again is that I've finally made a DeviantART account and have decided to actually try and populate it with something. I'll see about posting pixel art and photos of Battletech miniatures, and maybe other things if I come up with them. I've got two vastly different spritesheets posted so far, and will start trying to figure out where I hid my photos of recently-painted minis...... ^_^;;

Since I last wrote here, a lot has happened. Book club met to discuss Edgar Rice Burroughs's classic novel A Princess of Mars, then the week after we met to watch John Carter, Disney's attempt to reintroduce it as a flagpole franchise. (Unfortunately box-office results don't bode well for that happening......)

The book club generally enjoyed the book--and the animals presented therein (one person wanted a thoat, and at least one other wanted a calot like Woola ^_- ). Given its age and pulp background we wisely chose to disregard any scientific inaccuracies (else we'd have been complaining all night); I think everyone was more surprised by what Burroughs got right than what he got wrong ^_^;; Burroughs definitely presented the idea that Right and Wrong existed, and that who fell into which category could generally be picked out. Thankfully, though, ordinary people (for Martians/Barsoomians) were generally good except for the choices made for them by their leaders. Even Sab Than who would have stolen the hand of Dejah Thoris was not overly bad except for being the scion of Zodanga; in fact, at the end he earned the respect of John Carter with his display of swordsmanship (not that it helped him by battle's end). John Carter himself wasn't absolutely perfect: he had a horrible habit of not thinking, especially when it came to courtship customs in an unfamiliar society. Titular princess Dejah Thoris had, of course, very little patience for that despite her overriding love for Carter (poor, doomed man--as if we needed any more proof that immortality was a curse......)

Not that we could have told much of this from the movie. The movie managed to remove much of the subtlety (yes, there was some) from the book, adding a lot of bombast and a supervillain in the form of Matai Shang and the Therns (themselves lifted from a later book and given a lot more power). John Carter was given a bit of backstory which provide him with a Tragic Motivation and probably eliminated his immortality, and Dejah Thoris was given a title and position which had not existed in the book. To be fair, Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL*E) captured some of the book's scenes well, especially Carter's attempts to learn how to walk in the much lighter gravity of Mars, and illustrated the Tharks and many other of the Martian creatures very well. The book's underwritten Sab Than became a power-hungry lunatic in the movie, given power beyond his imagination by the Therns to hasten the destruction of Mars. I spent the length of the movie being torn between lamenting the liberties taken with the source material and just having fun with what amounted to a very good popcorn movie (albeit a VERY expensive one). Plus, they did get something very right for the film:

Also, congratulations to tench_rln on the birth of his son. He was born a bit late for the Rams to draft him for the defensive line this year; maybe next year, though ^_^

On a completely unrelated note, I've started working on my book again. I think it's going to end up in the 80,000-100,000-word range by the time it's finished, though it's nowhere close as yet. I've thought of a few things I'll need to add to the second draft (and probably will edit out of the third draft because they make no sense to my proofreaders ^_^;; ). I'm building up to what was going to be the climax of the 50,000-word NaNoWriMo version, but which will end up being the midway point since there are still a bunch of things to resolve......

It's almost my favorite season again--baseball season! Spring Training is underway, and the Cardinals are playing their first games under first-time manager Mike Matheny. they lost their first one yesterday 4-3 against the Miami Marlins, despite a ninth-inning comeback attempt. Today they had fallen behind the New York Mets (who I still think of as "Pond Scum" thanks to the 1980s St. Louis sports announcers) when prospect Matt Adams hit a grand slam to give the Cards the lead for the first time this year.

From what I've seen, the Cards are looking pretty good so far. Their pitchers seem to be ready, and the team as a whole appears to be ready to come back in late innings. I just wish their offense would get started earlier in the game ^_^;;

But that is what Spring Training is for. Hopefully by next month they'll have all the bugs ironed out.