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Suppose I could let the entry I posted in the wee small morning hours be my entry for today, but that feels like cheating. I should make sure to do at least one entry between every two sleeps, so this will be that one.

Stayed home, played City of Heroes a bunch today. Focusing on running through some solo mission arcs just to experience the nifty storytelling on the City of Villains side of things, which doesn't seem to be explored as much as the hero side. There's an arc where you're doing missions for the anthropomorphic personification of television, replete with many amusing satires on well-known TV shows. It was really rather hilarious.

Ordered out barbecue via Grubhub for lunch. I really shouldn't do that much, but I just got paid, it's the weekend, and I'd earned $10 off an order. So it worked out. Nifty food, at least. And I guess the Grubhub and other food delivery people are doing well. I hope that all the delivery and take-out business is making up for the business that the restaurants can't have right now since they have to close their dining rooms.

Video called my Mom and spoke briefly this evening. They've got better Internet service down there now, so the video quality was really very good. I was then inspired to write an article for TeleRead about video calling and virtual watch parties as ways to keep up social interaction with friends even while quarantined for Corona. I generally don't do that much stuff that isn't directly related to ebooks, but it seemed like a good bit of advice to offer people who're probably using the same technology to read ebooks as they would to make video calls anyway.

Numbly watching the Corona matters proceed apace, wondering whether the hospitals will be overwhelmed, and whether this will make all those skeptics who think we're cracking down too hard as it is change their tunes. Either way, the answer will come a lot more quickly than the one will about global warming.

One more weekend day to go before work beckons again. Monday's going to be awfully busy, especially with half the downtown office building still closed.
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Just to note: I have the ability to dispense free 10-day trials to City of Heroes. (Full disclosure: if someone on one of my trials goes ahead and buys in, I get a free month of gameplay.)

This coming weekend is one of City of Heroes' periodical Double XP Weekends, where everything in the game dispenses twice the usual amount of experience, Influence (money), and Prestige (base-building money). It's a great time to give the game a shot and see more of it because you progress twice as fast.

Anyway, if anyone wants a 10-day trial overlapping with that weekend, drop me a line. Note that you will need to be able to download a couple of gigabytes worth of game client in a reasonable period of time to be able to make use of it.
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Tomorrow morning, I get up at 6 a.m., eat a meager breakfast, and then head up to the airport to rent a car. From there, I go to St. Louis, thence to see Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, something I've been looking forward to doing for quite some time; I've got plans to wear my Robotech T-shirt from GenCon and everything. I'll be meeting my friend Captain JTF of Roboblog III: The Odyssey, as well as my brothers Aaron and Alex. I'll be able to pick up the sword-canes I purchased at GenCon. Then afterward I'll turn around and drive back home. I got a pretty good deal on the rental car, too; $15 for the economy car, from Thrifty Rental via Travelocity, plus $10 for liability insurance (have to comply with state law) + $5 for an additional 250 miles, which I need to get me to Saint Louis and back. And I'm getting refunded the $5 from Travelocity afterward, because their site lists the mileage as unlimited instead of a 250 mile limit. And I have to pay for gas too—but even so, it'll still end up being cheaper than a round trip bus ticket, and more convenient too.

But that's not all. ) I love being able to accomplish not just one but three distinct goals with that one trip. Makes me feel like I'm really getting stuff done.

Edit: And even that may not be all. I've just discovered that the Schlafly microbrewery is also located in that area, and offers hourly tours on Saturday. So I may just stop in there before heading home. After all, I toured Anheuser-Busch last time I was in St. Louis...

So now I'm prepping for my trip. I've got Google Maps printouts out the wazoo to help me when I hit the St. Louis area. I've dug up the cigarette-lighter-to USB power adapter I got somewhere, for to run my iPod off of while in the car. Hopefully it will have a tape deck that I can buy a cheap cassette adapter to throw in. If not, I'll get by somehow. I am set. Depending on the weather tomorrow morning, I may try to bicycle the eight miles to the airport, lock my bike there, pick the car up, and drive it back down to my house to load my stuff into it before setting out for St. Louis. Then I will repeat the maneuver in reverse when I return tomorrow evening—drive the car home to unload my shopping purchases and stuff, then up to the airport to turn it in and retrieve my bike. If the weather is just too bad to pull it off, I may take a cab in both or one direction instead, but I'd rather save the money.

I just hope I'll be able to drive safely. It's been a few years since I was last behind the wheel for any length of time—though to be honest, that's part of why I'm looking forward to this trip. I love travelling...although I'm not a Catholic, I've always figured it was appropriate that St. Christopher is the patron saint of travel.
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Well, about to go to bed for my last night of sleep in my own bed until Monday night. Wow, I'm psyched. In 24 hours, I'll be sitting on board a big grey doggie just about ready to pull out of the doggie-station, and nervously wondering if I'll be able to get any sleep at all on the trip. I'm still undecided as to whether I should take a blanket to go with my travel pillow (on the one hand, it'll just be one more bulky thing to keep track of, I don't know for sure whether I'll need it on the way in, and I definitely won't need it on the way back; on the other hand, it might help me sleep better on the bus). What if I've packed too much stuff? Which bag should I check?

What's more, I have to worry about the Linksys router I'm getting in tomorrow. I need to set it up as soon as I get home, so it will be fully-functional for the trip when I won't be home to reset it, and I'm concerned that the couple of hours I'll have for the task might not be enough. Ah, pre-trip jitters…

At least I've got the latest version of Xjournal on my Wallstreet (well, the latest that will work on OS X 10.2.8, anyway) so I can livejournal from the event if I find a place to plug in and set up. But more likely I'll be using the LJ phone-blogging feature to drop in some audio chats. If I do, it would be nice if someone would transcribe them for me, but I won't hold my breath too hard.

Got a call from a City of Heroes friend (well, actually a pair of them) a couple hours ago, we talked for ten minutes. They're already at the con, were disappointed I wasn't. Oh well. The important stuff from my perspective doesn't happen 'til Friday anyhow. I'll be seeing them then.

Well, time to go get in bed, and dream about forgetting important things on my trip.
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Well, it was a decent enough day. Woke up a bit early, couldn't get back to sleep, so I listened to my friend [livejournal.com profile] demiurgent's newest project, a podcast. Kind of neat. Not your usual review or day-in-the-life 'cast, this was more a sort of artistic thing, combining writing, delivery, and music. It was about fatigue and its effects, which fit as I was feeling fatigued myself. It was something to think about on the bike in to work, when I had the thoughts to spare. Stopped off for a croissant and shortbread cookie (to go) from Panera, then headed into the office.

Nothing much doing; ticket queue was fairly slow, and boss was out all day on one of his local networking projects. I did a bit of noodling around on the Internet, wrote a LJ entry and a post or two for my essay journal…and accidentally wiped out my entire terrania.us www directory while trying to test something for a client. Fortunately, our ISP does weekly backups, and I hadn't actually updated any of my stuff in a coon's age except for the journal, and it's a blogger.com journal so all my stuff was automatically backed up. In the end I lost about four days of site statistics, and some Motivator images I'd just uploaded from my home computer to have a place from which to link them. (I'll probably post those at some point when I get around to it, either here or in [livejournal.com profile] robotech since that's what they're about.)

I picked up my paycheck from work, then I caught a bus out west to the BioKinetics clinic, where I picked up my paycheck from them too. Taken both together, I essentially got about 2 1/3 paychecks today. A nice little influx of funds; now I can pay off my $513 credit card bill (I know, I'm a big spender) and my monthly utility bills and maybe have enough left over that I won't feel too guilty about renting a car sometime soon and going to visit a friend. Biked on home after that, and by the time I got here I was soaked with sweat. Fortunately some air conditioning and electric fan action took care of that.

At the moment I'm sitting in City of Heroes not real sure what, if anything, I feel like doing. Maybe some friends will show up. Maybe I'll watch a movie. Maybe I'll take a nap. Maybe I'll post in my Livejournal. Hey, that's an idea!
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Hello, it's me again.

Falling out of the habit of writing in this thing is always a bother. I feel like there's no point in trying to begin chronicling my life again because I've missed out on chronicling so much of it over the last few months. And then I feel like it's going to be some kind of an obligation to write about my life every day when I don't even know for sure that anybody's going to want to read about it. But what the heck, figured I should give it another try. Not even sure where to begin.

The LJ isn't the only writing project that's been kind of neglected by me lately. I haven't written all that much in my essay journal lately, either. Or at least I hadn't up to about a week or so ago. Lately I've posted written versions of some of the segments I've done for a podcast.

But I'm kind of getting ahead of myself there. What have I been doing with myself lately? Well, in my spare time it's been largely City of Heroes/Villains, on and off. Though in the past few weeks it's been more off than on, as I got bored with CoH a bit and sought other things to do with my time. And I found them, in the form of the Robotech Remastered DVD set I got earlier this year, and the Genesis Climber Mospeada DVD set I bought lately. RightStuf.com had it (and Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross) for sale for $25 each—and bearing in mind that the list price of each of those sets is $80, needless to say I snapped them right up. (Even sent Mospeada sets as birthday gifts to my brothers, at that price.) So I watched episodes of Robotech and episodes of Mospeada in tandem, comparing the changes. It was an interesting experience, and it led to me getting back into Robotech fandom a bit more. Part of it I'd done already, of course, when I got together with Peter Walker and some other folks to do new revised material for the Robotech Reference Guide (I rewrote a lot of the personal weapons section, including coming up with expanded histories for the Owens (Wolff) SMG and Gallant rifle).

But I'd also happened upon a fellow Robotech fan who was doing his own podcast, RDF Underground. Originally I'd been moved to record a brief audio feedback to one of his editorials, about an inane fandom issue involving an Internet poll. Then I got to thinking: given my audio production experience in college and in putting together the Cagliostro commentary, I might be able to put together some actual interesting review segments for the thing. It would be a way of getting into podcasting without the obligation of putting a show together myself, or feeling bad about stopping if I got tired of it, since it isn't "my" podcast—and it would be a way of giving the podcaster some more content to cover given the dearth of Robotech news lately. (In fact, RDF Underground has, for as long as I've been listening to it, been a combined Robotech and Doctor Who podcast, featuring reviews of the new Doctor Who as it has. Lately he decided to make it a de facto combination topic podcast and started covering Doctor Who news as well.)

So I've done a few review segments for that, mostly of Mospeada stuff but also segments on Kamen Rider Faiz and Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Much of the stuff has or will make its way to my essay journal in one form or another, but only after it airs on the podcast. I didn't have anything in this week's episode, but I should have both an editorial and a Mospeada-vs-Robotech music review in next week's, assuming I get the latter finished on time.

Lately there's actually been some rather big news out of Robotech fandom, as the long-awaited Shadow Chronicles has, after a whole year of nothing, finally found a distributor. Funimation will be distributing it, and there's talk of DVD, TV, and theatrical releases. Maybe we'll even see it by the end of the year. I'm pretty excited, though this isn't really the venue to talk about that.

Speaking of my Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro mp3 commentary track, in the last few months I got bitten by the update bug and went back through it and rerecorded a bunch of segments and added a bunch of new stuff, too, filling up a lot of the "dead air" where I'd previously not had anything to say. Along the way I discovered that there's a new Windows DVD player app called Sharecrow that will automatically synchronize commentaries to episodes. Pretty slick. There's also a new site called Commentary Central where people can host or link their commentaries.

As for City of Heroes, like I said I've been kind of blasé about it lately. The funny thing is that part of it was that the character I was mainly playing at the time had gotten some nifty temporary powers that would expire in a certain amount of game time, and I wanted to save that game time along until I could do something special with it. As it happens, something special came along; this last weekend was a "double XP" weekend, where we were granted twice the normal amount of XP and the like on our characters. I took advantage of this to put a couple more levels on my level 41 Energy/Energy Brute; by then they just don't come all that fast anymore.

Though this was a bit complicated by the fact that I was also doing another Biokinetics study this weekend. Thankfully, the food was better than the last go-round; apparently they'd switched to a new caterer. It was the last weekend of a three-week study, and for the latter two of that I got to stay in the pristine new just-opened study facility. It was very nice, they had new widescreen HDTVs set up. Oddly enough, the DVD players that hooked to them were in a staff-only room, so the staff had to load or unload them, but the remote control would actually control them via the TV set. Wireless Internet, too, with a very very good connection. I'm definitely going to look forward to future studies there.

I guess that's about all I have to say for now. Future updates will hopefully be a bit shorter.

August 2020

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