Rindis.com

It’s been a fairly odd last month for me. I could not convince myself that it was Christmastime at all. To just about everyone: sorry for a lack of presents. I could have afforded something, but just couldn’t make myself believe that Christmas was anywhere in the next six months.

However, Christmas happened on schedule anyway. For Christmas itself we actually hosted dinner for several of our friends. Overall, we had eight people in the house at once, which I think is a record for us, and it was great to actually host something beyond wargaming.

The actual gift-giving celebration waited for the next weekend, when Baron had more time off, and we visited Smudge’s parents. This had been a holiday tradition for us, but we’d stopped because of Smudge’s allergies. So it was great to get to go again, and Smudge only had very minor problems, a great improvement!

However, Comcast seems to have managed to really screwed up cable service while upgrading Sunnyvale (or really, their contractor did it for them). It hiccuped for a few days, then started on a cycle of being decent during the day and failing at about 6-7 PM and being down until 9 AM. At the end, it just failed completely. And all during this, the TV reception was screwed up (the good channels had moderate static) as well. This started a bit before Christmas, and finally resolved last Sunday. Maybe. Last night it was evident that there’s still trouble as WoW was having painful lag-spikes (two of us, on different servers, at the same time – it really looks like the line).

This was right during the bulk of my time off between Christmas and New Year’s, so no real work got done on BackBreaker’s site/database. >.<

To pass the evenings, I ended up watching about half of Nana with Smudge (which has been hard to find time for, as me and Drew were the only ones who expressed any interest when Smudge first introduced it).

And Smudge finally got around to finishing off Final Fantasy XII. Good ending. Generally, all the elements of XII are very good. Great characters, good plot—and for once, no one wants to destroy the world. However, as a whole it’s one of the weaker ones, namely because while all the side quests make sense, and make sense for the main character, they are completely disconnected from the main plot. You feel like you have to deliberately break the flow of the plot to go do any of them. This weakens the flow of the game immensely. Overall, I’d say it’s the third weakest main-series FF I’ve played/watched played (above VIII and V), and the fourth weakest in the full franchise (above X-2).

All of that has got me in the mood of console RPGs again, so I started a game of FF III on Smudge’s DS, after finally figuring out how to do regular saves on it. We’ll see if I get far. I’m also contemplating trying to get all the way through V on the PS2 (instead of Connectix’s emulator, which had some trouble with it), but I can’t see where I’d steal the time from.

Anyway, Live Journal year in review: I count 42 entries, nineteen tagged ‘gaming’, eleven ‘wow’, nine ‘sfb’, five ‘life’, four ‘onward christian soldiers’, two ‘comics’, two ‘humor’, one ‘a victory lost’, one ‘library’, one ‘internet’, one ‘pixar’, one ‘reading’, one ‘micca’, one ‘astronomy’, one ‘art’, and one untagged.

Pretty much as I expected. Number of posts is down from 2006, but most of that is a lower count of WoW-posts. On the other hand, I wasn’t expecting the large number of one- and two-off tags. My subject matter has spread out a bit. I’ve always figured this would turn into something of a gaming blog, and the tags show that, though I really need to try and get back on the wargaming news stuff.

I made one prediction in last year’s post: that my gaming budget would go down. I was right, and right that I wouldn’t be getting much outside the major life-stealing systems I’m already involved with. But, I attempted to spend as much as 2006. I have some fairly large outstanding pre-orders with MMP that I expected out by now that I’m keeping money in reserve for. That and I was right about Burning Crusade keeping me in WoW.