Ree’s musings

Our South Dakota weather:
It’s cruel as you can get!
It takes a lovely springtime
And bogs it down with wet.

You pray for something drier?
Dakota has that too!
It boils away the moisture;
Humidity accrues.

So sweaty South Dakotans
Wish back precipitation.
We find, upon our winter,
The most snow in the nation.

Be careful what you wish for
Within our South Dakota.
H₂0 from heaven? —
We’ve already had our quota.

The longer I go without writing, the more the blank white box mocks me. You may think I'm updating, but really I'm taking crayon to the whiteness.

I let the end of January pass unremarked; with its passing, I have kept some form of online journal for a full decade. I think the white box spooks me a bit because it makes me worry that I'm the same sad, frustrated young thing I was back then. It also makes me fear that I am getting too old for this journal thing, having been at it for a decade without getting markedly better at it. Logically, the pair of them should cancel each other out, but I find that distress rarely answers to logic.

I like reading my old comments, though, and I'm glad I backed them up. It's very silly, but one-line notes from years gone by saying "You are loved" do me a world of good, even now. I wish I'd worked harder to keep in touch with these people.

Maybe I should try some of those old email addresses and see if anything gets through.

Alas, I've not been kicking back and relaxing with my video games the way I said I would. No, I've been kicking myself.

To start with, I found myself wanting a certain video game related product. I found just one site that had it for a reasonable price.

Yeah, that should have been my first clue. After trying to place an order, my account was billed but their order form returned an error message. Swell. Their forums are down, their help pages 404, and their public email address bounces. Twenty-five dollars I'll never see again. As a bonus, when I did a search on their Paypal email address, I found an eBay account that shared the username and has been suspended. There's no way I could have known that until after I had already lost my money.

Next, my brother decided to cheer me up. He bought me a copy of a video game (Knights of the Old Republic) that he'd been long enjoying, knowing I too loved the subject matter. Yay! My computer's specs were all enough or more than enough, so the framerate might stutter but it'll all be fine.

But I installed it and it turns out that KOTOR hates the Sithly daylights out of my laptop's graphics driver (ATI Radeon Xpress 200m, no longer supported or updated). I can play the game - at one frame per second. Not even joking. I counted. One frame. I stayed up all night that night, trying various alternate drivers, searching for more clues, but nothing has helped. One driver did let me play the game enough to actually move around and enter a new room, but something terribly wrong caused characters' facial features to not actually be on their faces. It was creepy and disturbing and new topic!

Today I've been running System Restore to at least render my laptop usable for non-KOTOR activities. I attempted to alleviate a little stress by playing Earthbound Zero on my DS Lite while I waited. I got completely stuck in a maze of caves, but that was okay; I have the DS browser and Starmen.Net has an EB0 walkthrough with maps. Finally, something I can actually do!

Except it turns out that the PNG maps won't load in the DS Browser. At all. Not even a little. Which is weird, because my own site uses some PNGs and I'd swear they worked in the DS Browser, even had transparency, but these maps won't render even a pixel.

At this point I am afraid to even touch my NES for fear of it managing to explode or something. Also I think I may cry, because the frustration keeps building and I keep running out of ways to ease it.

The worst part is the KOTOR situation. EB0 can wait until my computer is available again, and $25 is not so terribly much to pay for an unfortunate learning experience. (All the same, I sent an email to that site's Paypal email address, and if I don't hear back, I'm filing a dispute in Paypal. No reason for more people to get suckered the same way I did.) But my brother did a very kind thing for me and I'm crushed to be so ungrateful. Why can't my reasonably recent laptop run a game as old as KOTOR? Something to do with poor OpenGL support, I gather, but there's still no excuse for that!

Have decided to read a book. If it tries to fall apart on me, I shall swathe it with enough packing tape to mummify a cow.

I got a PlayStation 2 so um yeah.

No, that's not a typo: a pea ess two, not three. Yes, I am behind the times. What else is new?

A PS2 wouldn't be huge news for most people, but the last time I've been able to rent a video game, it was for the Super Nintendo. (I have a PSone but I got it used, well into the PS2 era.) I went to the rental place today and was shocked at the number of PS2 games they still rent out. I think I'm going to have some fun. (I was also shocked that they want $40 for their old, rented-out GameCube copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I bet I could get a better-condition copy for $25 or less, and that's including any shipping fees.)

You guys, I was able to swing a copy of Persona 4! It's been out in America for less than a year, and I'm playing it, and I own it, and there are swears and other things to earn its M for Mature and that weirds me out like whoa. I grew up under the diktat of Nintendo censorship, so with every "bitch!", my eyes dart sideways and I wonder how this slipped past the censors. Heh. I guess I'm just too set in my ways.

Persona 4 is lovely, by the way. Turns out some of the things I liked in EarthBound, like enemies visible on the field (as opposed to random encounters) and gaining advantage in battle by sneaking up behind enemies, are alive and well here. I may go back and snag a copy of Persona 3: FES as well, before the prices get out of hand. I sort of want to get further in P4 before committing to another game in its series, but sealed, reasonably-priced copies of P3 and P3:FES won't be available forever...

On another note: I have two PS1 games with bad scratches. On my PSone, the first will play haltingly until a certain, unskippable cutscene, where it will hang forever; the second won't run at all. On my PS2, however, the first shows no problems at all; the second, a fighting game, will let me configure options and select fighters before hanging on a "CD Error" screen. I have no idea why this should be, but I'm very impressed with the backwards compatibility. My PSone is now in storage since my PS2 does everything even better!

ReeToes is a happy ReeToes. If nobody hears from me for another month, assume I'm holed up with Persona 4, GameFAQS, a case of Cherry Coke Zero, and a huge, dippy grin on my face. You won't be far wrong.