Experience has taught me that it’s much easier for me to buy video games than it is for me to actually play them. I played the heck out of my NES and SNES games, but the N64 and later consoles frequently made me motion sick. Consequently, I was slow to adopt the Playstation and PS2—and thereby entered into a cycle that I’m still in today, where I have a massive backlog of games yet continue to buy new ones that sound interesting.

Every once in a while I do get around to playing a game, though, and every once in those whiles (compounding!) I find one that blows me away. Tales of Vesperia was one, and Valkyria Chronicles was another. (OK, I have a fondness for Japanese RPGs, and story-based games in general.)

The ones dearest to my heart, though, have all been quirky DS games. The Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series lets you play lawyer and call people out on their lies. 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel/locked room puzzle where you have been abducted, locked away in a sinking ship, and forced to find a way to survive. Both are shoo-ins for a list of my favorite games of all time.

The latter is still (and only) available on the DS, but the former is out of print—save for an iOS port. I paid $90 for all three Ace Attorney games, and would do it again in a heartbeat; this iOS version is $17.

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The game I just finished playing yesterday—and the one that inspired me to post at all—is called Ghost Trick. You’ve died under mysterious circumstances, and have returned as a ghost that can possess inanimate objects; your main goal is to figure out who you were, and why you died. I’d be lying if I claimed I wasn’t misty-eyed at the end of it all.

Unlike Phoenix Wright, you can still find reasonably-priced (~$20) DS copies of Ghost Trick; like Phoenix, though, it has also been ported to iOS, for $10.

These are amazing games! If there’s any way you can find a way to play any of them, you should!

Marin: Don’t put me in check. I’m tired of being in check.

Brent: I’m not going to put you in check.

Marin: Don’t take my queen. I like my queen.

Brent: I took your queen several moves ago. It’s been so long, you don’t remember the board.

Marin: Ah, yes! Me and my pawn army!

I was poking around my logs, and it seems like someone’s using an instance of CommaFeed v1.0 running on AWS for their RSS needs. That’s nifty and all, but the feed fetcher is polling my RSS feed for updates every five minutes or so.

As you all can attest, I definitely don’t post enough to warrant that sort of schedule.

The server requests the feed twice (!) each time, and at best one of the two requests will 304. Best I can figure (and my server knowledge is admittedly sketchy), my server is 304-ing when it should.

I don’t know if these are bugs in version 1.0 (apparently 1.2 is the latest), or if there are screwy settings somewhere, but—whoever you are—you’re definitely using more AWS resources than you need to be.

Brian and I wound up at the New Morning Bakery yesterday, where we picked up lunch and dessert. [Insert food blog picture here.] I got a miniature key lime pie ($4.95), but the gal behind the counter couldn’t find it on the price list posted by the register.

She excused herself to go check the price in the display case, but because there were so many people looking at the cases she couldn’t move things around to get to the price stand. Reasonably, then, she asked the customer who was standing in front of the key lime display what the price on the card was.

The man paused for a half-second, and then answered forty-five cents. (I then pretended to pass him a buck as thanks.)

…

The guy looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him immediately. A minute later I made the connection: he was Bob Peterkort, the instructor who taught my Intro to Finance course in college. (This sort of mischief seems right up his alley, too.) Dunno if he recognized me; it has been ten-plus years, I was one of a few bajillion students he taught, and the entire interaction was practically over the moment it began.

I sat down yesterday evening to implement a simple feature in the Rails app I’ve been sporadically working on—a simple feature that quickly spiraled into a giant morass of head-desks and cussing at the stupidity of my previous work. (I know that being disgusted with your past work is a sign that you’re growing and improving, but I’m not convinced that’s supposed to happen quite so suddenly.)

By the end of the evening I was definitely suffering the programmer’s condition, as described by Noah Pepper:

“I want to travel back in time and murder myself”

 

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At least one “friend” has griped that I haven’t been liveblogging the royal baby birth. The truth of the matter is that I’m trying out a valium-variant drug (!) to moderate my hand tremors (“essential tremor,” which means it’s annoying but not a symptom of anything else), and I cannot drink alcohol while on this stuff. Without alcohol, there is simply no way for me to survive the inanity of that event and its coverage.

I’ve never handled pain very well: my tolerance is low, and my grumpiness per unit pain is high. A few years back I had plantar fasciitis in my right foot, and sulkily hobbled around for half a year. I might still be hobbling around today, but a co-worker eventually suggested that it might be caused by my calf being too tight and pulling on the fascia of the foot—an idea that was reinforced when I pressed on my calf and fell over in agony.

Just over two years ago I decided to pick some socks up off the floor using the styling of a tango lunge, and something went in my left knee. I’ve had variable (albeit present much more frequently than not) knee pain ever since. I did go to the doctor last year about that one, but my X-ray and MRI were both clean, and the pain was slowly subsiding. Then a guy did a samba back-step onto my knee (!!!) when I was changing my shoes one evening at dance practice.

That pretty much broke my spirit along with my knee.

But! Marin bought me a book on recovering from knee injuries, which caused me to reflect on what the orthopedist had mentioned (seemingly in passing) about my hamstrings being tight. According Marin’s book, darn near everything in the leg can influence the knee—so I figured I’d start stretching my hamstrings seriously.

It’s been two weeks, now. My knee still hurts too easily when I do normal activities (i.e. lifting any moderate weight), but the pain is now gone by the following day. My knee’s default state seems to be pain-free, which gives me hope that it’s finally getting the chance to heal.

All this pain (admittedly a small amount spread out over a long period of time), seemingly because of some tight muscles. Amazing.