A bunch of things I have been meaning to post about

August 20, 2010

This post has been sitting around for nearly a month now. I am going to post it even if it kills me. Or you.

I spent several weeks doing nothing but work on OmniFocus for iPad (after several months of doing little else than working on it). Then I took my overdue vacation and spent a week buried in books and video games.

The Ar tonelico 3 DLC is starting to become available, and I still had ¥400 in my account from when I bought Xenogears. So I am grabbing that up; it’ll be more motivation to go back and give that game some more opportunity to please. (Time passes.) Okay, thanks to the Skip button and my New Game+ leveled-up guys, I blew through Phase III in a couple of hours. Now I’ve got Tilia and I’m following her storyline; she may just be cool enough to make up for all of the game’s shortcomings. (Time passes.) Okay, Tilia is cool enough to make up for all the game’s shortcomings, and then some. I took the first couple of days of my vacation to play through her binary field storyline and get her two good endings. I may need to go back and do one last Ar tonelico 3 post, to set the record straight.

While on PSN I also found Shin Megami Tensei, the remake for PSX, as a Game Archive release. Last time I was in Tokyo, Book-Off was asking ¥3000 for a used copy, so that will be a deal at ¥1000 instead, although without the cool box.

Speaking of SMT, I finished the Persona remake, first with the bad ending (really not a fan of games that let you get a bad ending for a choice halfway through the game) and then with the best Snow Queen ending. That Snow Queen quest is like another complete game, and it was brutal. The encounters with the tower guardians in that storyline were among the most memorable and original scenes in the whole series for me.

After At3, I started in on Persona 4. It feels like Persona 2 in the way it’s confidently pushing the hardware to all of its limits. I’m glad that my biggest complaint about Persona 3, the disconnectedness between the story and the dungeon, is gone.

In San Francisco I was found by a terribly tempting opportunity that would change my life in ways you probably wouldn’t even believe. Really, really huge stuff. I passed it up; there is still a lot for me to do here in Seattle.

I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Another one of those books that makes me look at the world in a new, clearer way, and that I wish everyone would read. I may do a post about how it applies to demographics in the technology industry.

I rushed to the end of that book so that I could start using iBooks. about 250 pages into The Name of the Wind, it is still striking me how miraculous it is to read this way, after so, so many physical books. Even just not having to deal with the book light and holding the thing open with one hand is tremendous. That will deserve its own post once I’m through the book. (Time passes.) Finished that book. I guess I’d better do that post soon.

There was my stuff. I want to start posting properly again.