Busy November.

First snowfall this week. I tried so hard to delay (and even avoid) the purchase of winter tires but I gave in hearing all the snowfall warnings. I'm glad I did get a set though seeing it really DID fall and there's still plenty of crazy drivers out there... crazy as in still driving at insane speeds regardless of road conditions. Funny enough, the roads were a lot emptier once the snow stuck. The drive home was quite pleasant 'cept very cold. The snow did come and go now that the weather's slightly warmer, the rain's been pouring like mad. I imagine we'll be seeing more snow later next month though.

I've finally submitted my JET Application earlier this week. I decided against sending it too close to the application deadline date (Nov 30) just in-case of unforeseen problems. I went through about 4 draft overhauls, more than I've ever done on any academic paper. I definitely wouldn't of gotten to my final version without the support of my English proficient friends (yeah you know who you guys are). Now that it's over and done with, I can get on with my next task - my portfolio. I'll have to try and not think about it for another 2 months before the next dreadful hurdle called the interview. :|

Amazon.com is the evilest POS (hint: not point-of-sale). They had a vid game promo for a buy 2 get 1 free and I somehow splurged. A week later some those games go on sale for even cheaper. UGH. On its way up the border, customs got a hold of it and literally attacked my special Record of Agarest War limited edition. No, sorry to disappoint but there's no bombs in the shape of oppai mousepads in there.




My porn has been spoiled. :(
Work's been a bit hectic. We recently (two weeks ago) opened a new location in Coquitlam and then followed to get robbed the next day. We also got a new POS (point-of-sale) system which we launched in the same month as all these happenings which is also a great POS (not point-of-sale). Outdated, unintuitive, slow, unfriendly, unreliable (crashes)... everything you'd want in an efficient software of the 21st century.

And so November comes to a close in a few days.

PS: Monsters is such a shitty movie. Don't watch it, even if's free!

Mass Effect: The Second

Overdue half a year.


Aloha, beaver teeth!
STORY 4.5/5
The "continuation" of ME1... The Normandy gets attacked by an unknown ship on the way to finish off the geth leftovers. The crew are forced to evacuate but Shepard gets blown out of the ship and falls into a nearby atmosphere. Supposedly dead, Shepard wakes up back in one piece in a Cerberus lab under attack two years later and is told to join them in facing a new threat. You gather a fresh group of teammates, old and new, and get a new ship. Although this time around, ME2's ending prepares the setting for ME3.

The story this time around was definitely more character development driven as all the members of your crew had some significance in the main save-the-universe storyline.

CHARACTERS 4.5/5
Where to start? I think I liked everyone. It felt like the characters were definitely more alive in their fluid movements, facial expressions and just had more personality in general.

Miranda's front two beaver teeth drove me up the wall though (much like Sookie's front two teeth gap).. until I eventually got used to it. Jacob was cool, but I somehow kept unintentionally triggering the flirt dialogue lines. Grunt, the Wrex replacement, was cute but not as cool as Wrex. Loved Thane's story. Was indifferent with Jack but apparently she's a popular choice for romance. Samara - Justicars are cool. Mordin! They made him so awesomely hilarious. I would've totally tried to date him if the choice was there. ;)

[Partial spoiler?] Tali'Zorah returns. Meh. :b As for romance I was actually able to choose Garrus this time! The whole romancing thing with him was a bit of a disappointment, but hey, he's not exactly human so I let it slide. My wish from ME1 came true though. :D As for Alenko, WELL, I'm glad we broke up![/spoiler]

SOUND 4/5
The delicious epic music and voice acting has lived on in ME2.

GRAPHICS 4/5
Great improvements since the first game. I'm sure that I couldn't stop staring at Thane whenever I had a conversation with him. The details on his FACE were stare-worthy. The loading of textures and details were not noticeable like ME1 where objects would load by layers.

GAMEPLAY 4/5
There's no more weapon swapping, just only between the different types. e.g. sniper rife or bazooka. Ammo is no longer unlimited. The Mako's been changed into a planet probing mini game and it's even more time consuming than before. I must admit, I grinned when I probed Uranus though.

The morality feature had been revamped into a simple Paragon/Renegade system which is opened up by dialog/actions you take throughout the game. Certain Paragon/Renegade actions became available during dialog/cut scenes to alter the story a bit. I felt less worried picking a few Renegade choices here and there this time around. (ahem, beating a guy three times to get him to talk)

Traveling the universe now requires gas. SERIOUSLY. Thanks for reminding us that gas is indeed expensive, ME2. I was always poor because of fuel costs.

OVERALL 4.5/5
It was neat how my PC Dragon Age bonus armor for Mass Effect 2 was able to transfer over but it sucked how my helmet was always on. I didn't really get to see my actual face much until I finally gave up on wearing my awesome blood armor. :(

Having played the first one, ME2 definitely stood out with returning characters and the development of a universe I'm already well aware of. Even the little Cerberus news update that changes every day was a nice touch to the game. If you login every day, some stories actually related which was neat. :D

Again just like the first, you get to decide the fate of something universe changing at the end... which will be transferred elegantly into the 3rd game! More cameos, returning characters and then a bunch of new ones all over again! I'm ready for some more ass whoopin'!

Who needs candy anyway

It's unbelievable how it's already November. Geez, slow down 2010.

So Halloween which usually involves costumes didn't happen so much this year. Had a pumpkin carving party at Saboo's new place (or at least I hadn't been there yet) where a lot of everything happened but most importantly, the pumpkin carving was definitely the highlight. The first half involved eating when food was available (live chefs!) and I didn't actually start carving until 11pm (mainly due to the amount of people carving at the same time and waiting on people).


Yeah, I carved a fat(ter than the norm) wobbuffet. Ended up staying until 2am to finish up. Still waiting on the pumpkin group photo from Saboo though.

The followup was a visit to the Dunbar Haunted House with Saboo and Kyle (new friend!). Even though I do not particularly enjoy scary things, I wanted to check it out anyway since the lack of Halloweeny partying this year's underwhelming. The wait was about an hour or so and fortunately when it started to rain I had my trusty sword umbrella with me. So alright, it wasn't THAT scary but the costumes and props were amazingly good and I did get freaked out maybe twice or.. so. The amount of people forced us to move quickly so there wasn't any gawking time. The rest of that night involved fooding, Batman: The Dark Knight and Another Century's Episode, game courtesy of another new friend Marco (?!?).

Sunday, I decided to stay in since it was Monday the next day. Oh work, I hate you. Rant for another day though.

Still busy on JET application. Seriously, this thing is more stressful than all my schooling combined.

Oh yeah, double rainbow today.

Busy October.

Not because of FFXIV. Well, FFXIV is one of the culprits eating up the little precious time I have left per day work leaves me with.

I've also been hacking away at my JET application. The actual app isn't even out yet although it's usually out by late September so something has gotten strange this year... the closing application date probably won't change, meaning the window will be shortened significantly this year. Reasons unknown but everyone's getting anxious.

Parents are actually out of town this week enjoying the World Expo. My daily routine feels like baby sitting at times, with a 役に立たない brother around at home.

Recently got a new (and cheap~) computer to replace my dad's dying video card computer. It didn't make sense to replace only the video card seeing his computer (or at least his mobo) was 7 years old. I'd have no idea what to get anyway (if there's anything out there that's for such an ancient system), so lessen stress and start fresh. Hopefully it'll be a nice surprise for when he returns.

Side note: Ugh why are GPT drives so complicated. If anyone has an awesomely free and easy solution for accessing GPT partitioned drives, send them my way.

Little work rant: Having being in the company for a very short time and had very little to do with the hits on their website (I've only been keeping their sales up to date), I was somehow blamed for their drop in web profit. What. Really? You must be kidding, right? Nope. They didn't even bother putting any of the other probably more influential and obvious factors into their conclusion before pointing fingers. I had them check their sales history and there's was no real trend. So how am I to blame. :| Believe me, I was plenty pissed and still am when I think about it.

One rant a day: done.

Quick touch on food experiences this month:

• I tried out Q-Go ramen. Not bad. I'd go back if it wasn't so inconveniently located.
• I made ricotta mashed potatoes the other day at Sty's house for Thanksgiving. We had TURKEY! SO GOOD.
• Had a crazy housewarming party food feast at Vee's. Numnumnum.

BRB, fancy dancing.

{My Life} {Where is it?}

Okay so Final Fantasy XIV was released last week.

My life is so screwed.


Cute fluffy [dangerous] things!
Let's put my screwed life aside for a moment and talk about FFXIV.

So CE version retail pre-release (before the 'official' release tomorrow) is finally upon us. The pressure's been on the XIV team for years now so I'm not surprised this got pushed out so quickly with yet so many flaws, bugs, incompletenesses... So yes, FFXIV is incomplete but so was FFXI back in the day. The main difference is that XIV's system/world is so much more complicated thus the amount of negativity and things to complain about are bigger than that of XI by ten fold. Everyone just needs to rant about it (so do I). We'll still keep playing though, no worries there. We just gotta get it out of our system.

But you'd think that they learnt something from FFXI being in service for 8(?) years now. NOPE. WHY IS THAT? Stop trying to make it a completely different game by removing everything that was good! Not saying they should make it the same... but the fact that we see no solution or the feature is missing completely, doesn't make things any better.


Hello, greetings.. tis I. I am actually female this time. For serious.
Here's a list of rants I can think of right now (besides the obvious bugs and glitches)... with bonus profanity, caps, and anger:

• FIX THE CHAT - Give back our hotkeys. Make our lives easier please.
• MENUS - This is effing menu hell. I don't use a controller so STOP IT.
• LAG - Inevitable... but fix it somehow! There's more people coming so why aren't you prepared??
• TARGETING - what is this shit? THERE IS NO REAL TARGETING SYSTEM.
• TARGETING 2 - The targeting keys for mobs and parties system are absent. WHY. Make some soon please.
• CHAT LOG - the visible area is too small and with all this spam it's useless since I can't scroll up easily. where's the easily accessible full chat log reader?
• CHAT CHARACTER LIMIT PER LINE - what is this limit crap? this isn't fucking twitter.
• AH please or at least a retainer bazaar catalog system - none of this stand around in Batallia Downs but 10 floors of it bullshit.
• SEARCH - I swear I'm not a stalker but I would at least like to know where my friends are so I don't have to ask them every time. Also for party forming.
• DEGRADING ARMOUR - Fuck. Make it easier for us to find out which piece needs fixing at least.
• DELIVERY BOX - should be essential.

Of course not everything is bad but negatives always outweigh the positives huh. Positives!

• Multi linkshell conversations (although not even fully functional yet :b)
• We can see the accessories we wear now yay!
• Retainers are cool; they're like slaves. My slave's spankin' gorgeous.
• Instant job change transformation is wunderful~
• There's some voice acting. Not too-too bad.
• Crafting is actually kinda fun
• Guildleves are enjoyable, reoccurring quests that are party-able.. although the cooldown timer is still too long.
• Traveling from crystal to crystal to node is quick.
• Job trait/ability/action sharing across jobs is awesome.
• No penalty when you die?

The strange thing is that I've been playing since closed alpha and it feels the same... just more crowded. Although I didn't play it much back then, I feel more comfortable learning things now than before.

They must be really behind.

Oh well. Now that it's released, they have all the time in the world... until we get fed up and leave.

I will finish this post with a bug.

INVISIBLE SYNTHESIS!