I was told that I could run somewhat faster and easier if I could just widen my stride. This is accompanied by digs at despite how I had longer legs than the commentator, I ran at half the speed and look twice as tired. Or something like that.

SO TODAY I WIDENED MY STRIDE AND TRAVELLED AT 1.5 TIMES MY NORMAL STRIDE. AND I WENT AT 3/4 OF MY NORMAL RATE OF STEPS TAKEN. AND I WENT FASTER! AND FASTER! AND FASTER!

I probably looked quite a sight because I wasn’t so much running as a cross between striding and skipping. In slo-mo. The first lap was ridiculously relaxed. The second not quite. The third got worse. And I gave up on the fourth.

8:25 after 4 laps and I couldn’t breathe fast enough. I try to breathe every other step and the whole slo-mo striding screws with the pattern.
Next up: New shoes + Variations on the whole striding thing.

The first Tony Hawk I played made me want to skateboard. After feeling more than a little self-conscious about being female and skateboarding, I eventually picked up unicycling. But I got myself a skateboard some years later all the same.

I still can’t skateboard (well).

BUT I got Skate for the Xbox360 and it’s so bloody cool I want to learn ollies all over again.  Unlike Tony Hawk, Skate features more realistic skateboarding. That translates to street skateboarding without the 720 grab-flip-plants over halfpipes. The left thumbstick controls your body motions (turning/rotations) while the right controls your board (flips/grinds). The trigger buttons act as grabs and the face buttons lets you propel your board with either leg depending on what you press. Not the most intuitive of schemes and not something you can get used to in the first 2 or 3 hours.

I’ve this compulsion to press the face buttons each time I want to do a trick and having to push the thumbstick up or down, then swivel it around takes a LOT of getting used to. I feel almost spastic trying to get my brain to work both hands spontaneously.

The game’s definitely fun but the praise lavished on it by various game sites is a little disbelieving. Mostly because the game’s quite buggy. I’m into my 3rd hour and I found at least 2 bugs already. Lipsyncing stops suddenly mid-cutscene and the audio would play while the character stares on without moving his lips. During one of my quests where I’m supposed to follow a skater around, the skater refuses to move and when  I moved out of a certain radius, I lose instantly. Very glaring faults that are unforgiveable.

But hey, I’d still say it’s more fun than the hype machine that’s Halo 3. I’ve the limited edition and am looking for a buyer. It’s sealed still and untouched. If anyone wants it, quote me a price.

…ports.

PowerStone Collection was one. Pa Rappa was another. And what about rehashes of old franchises like  Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core,  and Grand Theft Auto? Some of these might be good but the only innovative game I’ve played on the PSP thus far is LocoRoco and that’s likely to remain so for some time.

My cousin didn’t play many games. She watched me through 10 minutes of Ratchet and Clank and agreed that the camera was horrid - you can’t see the enemies coming from behind unless you center the camera manually. This from a 9.0 game on IGN. Today, I’ve Prince of Persia Revelations on loan. I’ve played a little of Sands of Time and almost 1/4 of Warrior Within on the Xbox and decided that while the game had potential, the camera and controls was very very wrong, making it almost unfun to traverse the game. They could have improved it for the PSP iteration right? RIGHT?

Wrong.

Revelations is unfortunately, a PSP port of Warrior Within - the WORST PoP game on the Xbox in my opinion. To compound the problems already present in the game, the graphics were much much worse and the controls were mapped more awkwardly than ever before - centering the camera’s done with the < button while movement is controlled by the analog stick (the one directly below the d-pad). If you haven’t played a game before, I’d still believe you could imagine that you’d need to center the camera when you’re on the move and you don’t have enough fingers on the same hand to do that with the control scheme.

Speaking of bad controls, I armchair-played Bioshock on the 360 today. “Armchair-played” because I’ve severe motion sickness when playing FPSes and can only tolerate looking over the shoulder of players. The concept intrigues me a great deal and the whole grotesque/retro-60’s feel is very appealing. The game has a very distinctive style and feel BUT it’s sadly, not great. I like simple control schemes and playing a game, to me, would entail minimal effort in learning how to coordinate my fingers. There also seems to be a couple of rather retarded spots in the game that ruins the experience, the most obvious of which is how you can’t ’search’ a corpse or object for goodies unless your view is directly centered on it. That seems like a rather good way of conjuring your already-consumed lunch from the annals of your stomach though so maybe the bad controls are intentionally done to add to the grotesque theme.

I shall try out Lair over lunch tomorrow. There’s so much said about its crappiness.

From what I gather from my reads, you can’t have abs or any sort of muscle definition show until and unless you get rid of the layer of fat on it Which means that you might have the best six-pack in the world but no one can see it if you’ve got jelly gut.

The last time I saw any semblance of abs on me was sometime 2 or 3 years back. It appeared and stayed for 2 weeks. I should have gotten photos. It’d make a great memento for my walls - a talking point for when I have grandkids as proof that there used to be a time when I didn’t have to drag my belly from the floor (I think that’s what happens after you have kids). But I digress.

I have a belly. It’s pretty cool. It’s not as wobbly as my old belly from around a year or so back but it brought up the same inner conflict - is it bad taste if I showcase the many faces I can make with my belly in a video? A quick check around (I muse randomly aloud) received mixed responses - some let out a restrained “yes”, some didn’t know what to say while the rest seemed to suddenly go deaf (”What?”). If there’s any conclusion to be made from this, it’s that no one appreciates my belly’s talent.

At the very least though, my belly’s got a confidante in my butt. No one wanted to hear about its ambition to grow a few more cheeks either.

I found this entry very intriguing.

http://ideasinfood.typepad.com/ideas_in_food/2007/09/sparkling-salt.html 

This being the Mid-Autumn Festival in the Asian (specifically chinese) part of the world, I really should get some pictures of mooncakes up here. For the uninitiated, mooncakes are pastries traditionally filled with lotus paste with optional salted egg yolks that you eat on the 15th of the 8th lunar month (when there’s a full moon). If you’re into the whole atmosphere and tradition deal, you’d probably enjoy them out in the balcony while sipping tea and chatting with family or old friends. During this period of time, kids would also be out with lighted (candle-lit or battery-fuelled) lanterns for a walk around the neighborhood. The older kids (ie those without sensible adults following them or ARE senseless adults themselves) would later set fire to their lanterns in a mass bonfire. Very fun stuff that I’d really indulge in if I had the company… hmm come to think of it I should get to calling some friends up.

ANYWAY, mooncakes. Marketing mooncakes is a whole creative exercise in itself. I’d wager that promotions are won or lost based on the marketeers’ success in selling their mooncakes. They now come in pretty little boxes (photos tomorrow) and have all sorts of interesting additions to spruce up the package - tea, cake, pieces of fake jake ornaments, anything that can be thought of!

Apart from that, mooncakes also come in all sorts of strange shapes and sizes with all sorts of fillings as well. I saw chocolate-coated cheesecake in the standard mould of a mooncake the other day and Haagen Dazs has a chocolate-coated  ice-cream version with a sherbet center to imitate the egg yolk. Today, I had a strawberry yoghurt flavored one that, though authentic and made from real strawberries, didn’t taste as good as regular yoghurt. My personal preference is really for snow-skinned mooncakes with a yolk in it. Preferably the mini versions because you can eat the whole damn thing in one gulp and NOT have to lick your fingers clean (I don’t like the feeling of wet fingers from slober).

And really, I would have gotten photos of everything if I weren’t so greedy and ate everything before I had a chance to. My mom called me up at work one day to ask if  I was fine - apparently, one of the mooncakes I ate the day before was mouldy all over.

Tomorrow I will have photos.

I bought a new sponge.

It is a regular sponge.

It is just a sponge.

Ran.

2 rounds later, I realised that my timer was stopped. Restarted.

Time for 2.4km - 12:59.

Will hit twelve thirty next week.

Today I went to collect my new cable modem from my new ISP. I signed up for a new plan under Starhub while previously I was on Singnet. I’m currently on a 1Mbps broadband plan and will be on a 12Mbps one in days to come as soon as I get myself a wireless router. However, I’ve yet to figure out why I’m paying the extra $20 a month because I don’t use the net as often as I’d like to. I’d tell myself though that it’s not that bad a deal because

1) The promo comes with a free Xbox360 and some assorted freebies.

2) The Xbox360 can be linked to my PC (I think). I can also use it to go online (I’m not sure if I like multiplayer games though).

3) I want a Wii and will be getting one near Christmas. Animal Crossing anyone?

In the wake of the recent uproar over some company procuring a list of IP addresses and sueing regular you-and-I’s over illegal downloading of their licensed anime, it does seem like a waste to get a high-speed internet access but I’ve never really got to download any full TV shows anyway because my current internet access gets disconnected every few minutes. If I can live without downloading anime for the past 10 years I’ve been online, I think I’ll be able to survive the next 2 contracted years.

As I was saying, I went down to the Starhub shop today and was told that modem collection was at another shop. I asked where. The guy told me to use the Singtel building as a landmark. They’re just across. Let me explain the irony (though that’d lose the effect of actually being sort of amusing). That is like asking for the location of a Microsoft shop and being told that it’s opposite the Apple building.

I’ll be collecting my 360 on Tuesday. Hopefully it isn’t as ugly as the pictures make it out to be (it’s the Halo 3 edition). I’ll also be getting the limited edition Halo 3 along with the deal. I’m getting a friend to buy me Skate so I can relive my 2001 Tony Hawk days and another promised to get me a wireless controller. I love gamer friends. Big shoutout to them if they’re reading this (probably not).

I’ve never been a huge fan of shooters and I wasn’t too impressed even with Halo 2. Now, I could choose to sell off the game and get 2 2nd hand games I actually like (Viva Pinata comes to mind) or try to mess around with it, probably in multiplayer mode. For someone who’s not even remotely interested in the Halo franchise, I sure seem to be amassing quite a lot of Halo merchandise. I’ll get photos up after I get a new table and my ‘Halo shrine’ set up.

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of 360 games I’d want to play at the moment. The only ones that come to mind would be Skate, Spore, Rock Band, Blue Dragon (perhaps) and Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun. The latter because I’ve lusted over the PC version and my PC can’t run it. I’d probably use my 360 to watch the Simpsons and other assorted movies.

It sounds a little weird but Ikea’s one of my favorite places to walk around in. Alone. Perhaps it’s how there’s so much to see and no over-friendly sales assistants every 20m. Perhaps it’s how everyone’s so caught up in their own little world of furniture-shopping, no one notices if you look out of place - if it’s possible to look out of place in Ikea to begin with. Or maybe it’s the novelty of the items sold having only a Swedish name.

An Ikea opened in my area rather recently. It’s huge and there’s a Courts outlet (home electrical products and furniture shop) and a Giant (huge hypermarket befitting of its name) alongside it. The three buildings, as you’d expect given the scarcity of land here, is in the middle of nowhere.

Scenery along the route 

 There wasn’t any direct buses from my workplace so I unicycled there. As usual, I lost my way and clocked twice the mileage. Still, it wasn’t too bad because I’ve never noticed how barren the surrounding areas were.

I was, in particular, on the lookout for a giant table, a chair and perhaps a display cabinet. I think I found them but have yet to work out if they’re worth their price.

One of the show-areas… and my uni.

 The trolley repository was further down the path and I got one to dump my uni in. It’s tiring to have to look for a good spot to park my uni in each time I make a stop.

I have been sort of looking for some wine glasses as well but the ones at Ikea looked really ugly. They’ve got the fattest, clumsiest looking stems and are in all the wrong colors (ie. not colorless).

At the food section, after parking the trolley along the aisle, I bought a bag of flat bread (nice!), a tin of herring (very salty), some cheese (cheap and good!) and this:

It’s apple cider and supposedly has a 4.5% alcohol content. I’ve never had apple cider so I can’t say if it’s good or bad cider but on its own, it’s fantastic. It’s sparkling (as opposed to being overtly fizzy) and tastes of apples and summer. It has a tinge of sourness but is overall sweet although not cloyingly so. I can’t taste much of the alcohol in it but could detect a mild tone similar to beer. There’s also pear cider as well which I’ll be trying the next time I’m in the area. $5.80 a can (approx US$3.50?). Pretty decent.

When I returned to grab my uni, I saw that my trolley’s gathered a security guard seemingly unsure as to what to make of it. There has been quite a lot of public service announcements about unclaimed baggage and terrorist threats so I’m not sure if that’s what was going through their heads. I went over, pulled my trolley away amidst his puzzled stare and then he spoke up and asked if I rode that thing.

As I made my way home, across the road, a guy with a heavily pimped chopper bicycle was heading the opposite way. He stared at my ride while I stared at his. I’d think that was a rather ironic moment.

Total mileage for the day: 15km thereabouts. Not fun in jeans.

I want to get my act together but there’s usually half a zillion things to be doing all at once. I’m tired but there’s so many things that keep me going. For now. How long more? Beats me but I’ll probably keep at it until I fall flat. Which is bad.

Someone once retorted that I shouldn’t bite off more than I can chew. I don’t. But I didn’t count on being fed as well. I’m not trying to flatter myself but keeping at my lifestyle with my capabilities (and I’m not talking about maintaining a standard of living or anything material like that) is tough.

I wish I were smarter or more capable. One of my teachers once told me that I’ll never survive in school with just smarts alone. Apparently the ’smarts’ left me once I left school. How opportunate.

I went running. 1.7km later (which is 4.25 rounds on the track), security guard scurries smack in the middle of my path and waves at me to stop (had headphones on). Closing time.

Timing: 8:32

Might run timed again tomorrow.

Popcorn Workers’ Lung

Otherwise known as bronchiolitis obliterans. Apparently, it happens when you inhale too much of the artificial butter flavor inherent in popcorn.

Wikipedia Link 

I’d never have picked up this game if not for the fact that Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops and Power Stone Collection were utter crap. It’s always been around but I’ve never had the inclination to pick it up because previous Star Wars games weren’t exactly non-fan-friendly. Take Knights of the Old Republic for the Xbox. It’s a great game I’m sure- plenty of room for exploration too- but for someone who hasn’t watched most of the Star Wars flicks (yes, I haven’t. Embarassingly.), it became boring really fast.

Now Lego Star Wars II was based on the movies - all 6 of them. The game is separated into episodes - remakes of the movies - and each is further divided into chapters. The gist of the story is still there but it retells the tales of Luke Skywalker and his merry gang in a much much more palatable manner.

There’s tons of humor injected into the game - Chewbacca’s hugely funny (you can plant a stormtrooper’s helmet on him and have him pass off as one in front of security cams to gain entrance into places) and Darth Vader’s a joke. The Siths are all so deformed and cute you want to give them all a group hug. The game takes the mickey out of the whole Lego concept and you have little figures falling all over the place and smashing into little pieces of bricks. The puzzle-solving element of the game has your little Luke/Han Solo/Princess Leia/anyone else bend over a pile of bricks to rebuild starships or vehicles or whatever needs to be rebuilt.

And of course there’s that famous scene.

Because there’s no voice acting in the game, the ‘Luke, I’m your father.’ scene has been remade. As Luke hangs over the edge of the bridge, Darth Vader pulls out a family portrait and points to the baby. Cue horrid expression from Luke.

I’m playing the PSP version and I must say, for a handheld title, the replayability is immense. 8 hours through and I’m but 26% complete. What’s truly applaudable is that the designers have structured the game in such a way that there’s no Game Over or Replay state. When your character dies, it just loses coins and it respawns in the same area. What IS frustrating however, is how the camera seems to swing a little too freely at times, blocking your view and making it impossible for you to time jumps correctly. In some instances, you can’t see the coins you’re collecting because they’re behind some wall.

Supposedly the PSP version is a stricter port of the console versions than the DS one is (due to technical restrictions and possibly the dual screen of the DS). The DS version has bad reviews all round and is reported to be prone to crashes. The only engine-relevant issue plaguing the PSP is that there are slow-downs at times. You will notice the flaw but it’s not serious enough to make you want to tear your eyeballs out.

If you’ve a console or a PSP, go borrow/steal/buy/rent/beg for the game. It’s hilarious regardless of if you are a Star Wars fan.

Tags: Star Wars, PSP, game review

I think I’m addicted to adrenaline. I like how it feels for blood to rush to my head and for that split second in time, nothing matters, yet everything does. I like the excitement and the feeling of anticipation and how you can feel every single beat of your heart so distinctly.

I like how it makes me want to move - somewhere, anywhere - and the glazed-over daydream-y sensation it brings forth. It makes me want to wake up and get out and do something, anything and it makes me look forward to tomorrow.

And then I remember I’ve got to work tomorrow.