Romii

Katsucon. A bit late to be talking about Katsucon 16, but who cares! It was amazingly fun! The maid cafe went (more or less) well, and luckily I had none of the “bad” customers. My poor friend had a drunken table and handled it pretty well, from what others have said in comments. Other than that, I don’t think we really had to escort anyone out of the cafe itself! Yay for behaved otakus! The panels I was able to go see were pretty interesting too; they had one on Vocaloids! There were a lot of things that could be improved, but hopefully they learned from this year and will work on it next year! Oh, and it was at the Gaylord National Harbor Hotel! It’s such a sweet, expensive, and beautiful place! Stressing on expensive though…it was hard to find a cheap meal anywhere!

Apartment hunting. So it’s apartment-hunting time, only this time I’m all alone on it. I’ve looked into one place in particular so far, which is a “room in the house” type of setup, and it’s really nice, not too far metro-wise, and cheap. The people are friendly too – one of them is a long-time worker on campus in the Construction and Planning department. It’s going to be an arrangement until the end of next year (aka. when I graduate), so…my original plan of living with a friend went flop because her mom doesn’t want to do that. Let’s hope for the best!

Spring break. It’s spring break! So I’ve been playing games and NOT doing the work I should be doing for classes. Hah fun!

Time Hollow. Remember the Nintendo DS game I bought a while back? I finally played through it once. It was interesting – what you chose in the very beginning strongly affected the path you took for the rest of the game. That being said, the rest of the game wasn’t as dynamic as that – once that path was chosen, you were kind of stuck on that path. It wasn’t bad, but it’s not a game that I would play through over and over and over to see the many endings I could get…as I don’t think there are that many to begin with.

Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online. Just started playing this MMORPG – it’s pretty fun. It’s like a mixture of an actual RPG (with cutscenes and a specific story plot that you must follow) and an MMORPG, where you battle with friends and have side quests and whatnot. I like it so far – people have been extremely friendly and helping me learn the game, which I find somewhat rare in a lot of MMORPGs I used to play. Plus, it’s based off of Persona. Gotta love it.

Persona 3. I bought Persona 3 for the Playstation 2 the other day, which also came with Persona 3: FES, the “add-on” game. The only reason it came with it is because the used copy I was buying didn’t come with the soundtrack it was supposed to, and we (the store employee and I) had no clue what FES was. So she threw it in for me in case it was the soundtrack – but turned out to be another game. Pretty nice overall though. So far it’s been pretty straightforward – cut scenes and automatically following other characters. Supposedly the place where I stopped playing is where the real action and choice-making begins, so I’m looking forward to picking it back up when I get the chance.

Suikoden Tactics. Also bought Suikoden Tactics, but haven’t played it yet. I’m looking forward to it though!

Skate or Die 2. My boyfriend and I were playing the original Nintendo game of Skate or Die 2 last night. For the ramp mini-game that’s in it (not the main storyline), we were making the high scores over and over…kind of. The highest we made was around 66k, and then next one down was 65k (both by me). That’s around 4-5th place on the actual high score list for the game, but apparently better than 3rd place on the Twin Galaxies scoreboard. That kind of made me happy. One day we’ll actually videotape our runs and try to get on Twin Galaxies! But for now, we just took a picture of the screen near the end of the night…though he has the picture at home.

Yes folks, Washington, D.C. has shut down and been snowed in! You have no idea how much fun a group of my friends and I were having yesterday running around Maryland in Brendan’s small family Impala before the blizzard got too bad (and even then, we cut it very close at the very end of the craziness), and having snowball fights and wars and whatnot. Here are some pictures I just took from my window…it’s STILL snowing! You can view larger sizes by clicking on it; the images are posted on Flickr.

Yeah. I have to say, yesterday was so much fun, minus one very angry and terrible event that we all felt slightly obligated to go to. I really wish at this point that we didn’t go. Really wish it to be honest. I felt a lot of malice toward one particular person that had I not restrained myself, I would have done some really nasty things to him during the snowball fight we all had really late at night. Just that ruined that part of the night for me, because I spent most of my time during our second snowball fight avoiding this guy just so I wouldn’t feel urged to smash a really icy snowball in his face multiple times. That was how bad it was. I’m glad I was able to restrain myself, but at the same time I knew that if I didn’t restrain myself and did something like that, I would not feel any guilt at all for it. And that’s the part that scared me enough to restrain myself even more.

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Merry Christmas everyone! I hope everyone enjoys their very white Christmas. I’ll be at home until the 4th, which is when I’ll head back to campus early to work for a week before classes start. It’s also an excuse for me to go back early so I can see Brendan. I’m awfully bored at home, and while catching up on sleep is nice, there’s only so many days of not leaving the house that I can deal with.

Highlights of the past month:

Snow. The large snowstorm hit the weekend that I went home (last weekend). Needless to say, it messed up plans quite a bit. My mom came down earlier (on Friday) because a friend of the family died. She was going to stop by my place and bring me along with her, but it didn’t work out well with the snowstorm – didn’t want her driving around DC/Maryland too much in the snow. She came to my dorm Saturday evening after the funeral to stay the night. We left Sunday afternoon after dropping my roommate off at the airport (Reagan). It was very hectic, to say the least. Everyone I know of made it home safely, though, so that’s good.

Suikoden Tierkreis. I bought Suikoden Tierkreis for the Nintendo DS. Suikoden has been a long-time favorite of mine in terms of RPGs, and knowing that they came out with a new Suikoden legacy for the DS was a major factor in my decision to buy it. I have to say, as a companion to the rest of the Suikoden series (that is on the Playstation), it’s not so great. They created a whole new world for it, and the only thing reminiscent of the actual series is the fact that you need to recruit 108 stars of destiny and deal with militaristic movements. It made me a bit sad. BUT as a RPG just by itself, it is AMAZINGLY fun. If I don’t think of it as part of the series, it’s just awesome. I do wish it was still within the realm of the old games, the same world and all, but it’s still a great game. I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve never played the previous games before.

Finals and classes. Finals went over well…I guess. I panicked and broke down by the time of my last final exam since it was my hardest exam, but everything eventually smoothed over. I was done by Thursday night, and was just glad everything was over by then. I’ve gotten my grades back: A’s in everything but Arthurian Literature and Contemporary Art, in which I got B-. My GPA’s been a steady 3.4 since freshman year, so I’m not too worried. As much as I’d like to do better, I also don’t put in all that much effort in some classes, so it’s understandable.

Monk. Monk is now over. I’m sad because Monk is my favorite TV series, next to Law and Order. They finally solved Trudy’s murder case, and Monk now has some closure on a lot of things. His obsessions, of course, have not died down at all and he gained a new one at the end (not spoiling). I’m borrowing the first season from another Art Studio major who has been in my classes since Freshman year. Brendan was absolutely lovely and bought me the third season for Christmas. Apparently it’s only part of my Christmas present though…I’m slightly frightful and excited for the next half of it.