For reasons I can’t (and shouldn’t) disclose, last week I experienced the psychological equivalent of a swift punch to the gut—equivalent in that it knocks the wind out of you and sobers you up real quick. And while nothing has actually changed since then, I’ve now had the time to come to terms with recent events—and that’s made all the difference in the world. When I posted my last message, I hadn’t yet recovered; now that I have (to some degree; life really did set me up the bomb) I think I might be able to pick up where I dropped off.

That’s a convoluted way of saying that maybe I won’t need to drop back to sporadic posting after all. With any luck, this weekend was the break I needed.

I spent Friday night playing Soul Calibur II, Virtua Fighter 4 10th Anniversary mode* (awful, low-polygon-count characters and stages), and Twinkle Star Sprites** with Nate, Kevin, and Brian. We then capped the evening off with a midnight showing of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. The showing was marred by a really, really bad subtitle track; seems the fansubbers were more interested in getting their copy out fast, rather than translating for comprehension or timing their subtitles to when the characters were talking. The movie was visually stunning, and the plot seemed to make more sense in retrospect… though it did wind up being mostly a cop/buddy flick.

[*I somehow figured out a devastating combination that led to many victories: a punch-punch-punch-kick combination would knock the other character to the ground, and you could follow that up by jumping and kneeing them in the groin. It was great.]

[**Twinkle Star Sprites remains the greatest non-street-fighting two-player competitive game with the most awful name. Some of the characters you can choose are comprised of two people—Macky and Pentell, or Tinker and Linker—which gave me ample opportunity to blather on about being able to handle two girls at once. Most of the time Nate trashed us, though, which led inevitably to comments about not being able to handle that.]

As for the rest of the weekend: er, well, I slept a lot. (I don’t think I slept all that well this last week, and some opportunistic bug seems to have attacked me as well.) I’ve also started the slow, painful (did I mention slow?) process of entering my various account information into Quicken. It’s absolutely thrilling—trust me.