Ant Wars II: The Ant Empire Strikes Back

Be forewarned: This is not for the faint of heart.

As I mentioned in Facebook seconds ago, I got back home from work to another desk full of ants. Unlike other times there's a lot more ants than normal, so I was able to trace the ant trail back to the source, behind my CD shelf...

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

Do note that I've been placing ant traps all over my room in the last few months... but this kind of shenanigans obviously requires immediate Raid action (the spray, not the computer configuration).

And here's the aftermath. As it looks like, the warmth of the power adapter apparently attracted the ants enough to dig a hole around the wall (this wall you see here leads straight outside). They chewed through the carpet and built a nest beneath the carpet, it seems. and that patch of white to the right? That's the ant trap I've been placing. Much good that did - it probably kept them fed during the winter and now they're bold enough to come out for more!

So the lesson of the day is: Ants are nasty and if they come into my room they all deserve to die a horrible death.

Yo Dawg I Herd You Liek Arcade Controllers...

...so I built an arcade controller inside yo arcade controller box so you can game while you game...



Well. This one sure took awhile. If you just want to see the goods, feel free to skip the text all the way to the bottom. This story is going to take awhile.

It all started back in July. Street Fighter IV just came out (or was it about to come out?), and since all the arcade style controllers that we own did't seem to work on the PC, I've been hunkering to get myself a new controller from somewhere. MadCatz is promoting their tournament edition stick at the time, and it looks promising... except that it's made with Sanwa (read: Japanese style) arcade parts.

Now, don't get me wrong... the Sanwa parts were built to last and they're probably more sensitive and expensive than their American counterparts... but I took a stab at the one that they put out at Fry's, and it was really a no-go for me. I really did't like the short joystick with the sphere top, and the stick felt too sensitive, I was going all over the place. So I searched furiously on the net for a perfect solution, and I came upon this:

http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/blog.php?b=5037

Just look at that picture from the post! It looked pretty much like what I was looking for: solid, custom made stick using whatever arcade parts I wanted. The process sounded fun, and there's none of that soldering mess involved. I was all excited and ready to start ordering up the components... and then the first wave of complications started to crop up.

I's the casing. The site that's recommended by the blog post (http://www.norrisarcadesticks.com/) only build cases that fit Sanwa/Seimitsu parts, and on top of that, they only churn out about one case a month and it went to the highest bidder in a "silent auction". Price posts from previous winners seemed to go in the range of $170 or more, so the nice looking wooden case was definitely out.

At that point, I was determined, I was ready to go and nothing was going to stop me. My dad was an expert craftsman and so I watched him churns out pretty looking woodwork time after time. How hard could it possibly be to nail down 6 pieces of wood together and call it a day? (As it turns out: too hard for me to handle)

Next came the parts. The control board that handled the signals could be bought pre-assembled, an option that I went with (no soldering fuss, remember?)... it jacked up the total cost quite a bit, but I've started this and by George I was going to run with it. For the joystick and the buttons, it's Happ all the way, which was the whole reason I started this homemade business in the first place. Fortunately they're all made in China so they're a bit cheaper than their Japanese counterparts. All things accounted for though... it still came to a whoppin $72.75. That's $40 for the cthulhu control board, $10 for one joystick, and $16 for 8 buttons at $2 each. I could have gotten three more buttons for L2/R2/Home (the cthulhu mainly maps to the PS3), but at the time I was still thinking that I could come out in the black (compared to just buying the aforementioned $150 MadCatz stick).

The parts had a bit of delay before coming through, but they all arrived safe and sound sometime in August. However, as soon as I started playing with the stuff that I had, I ran into more problems:

1) The joystick and the buttons all required holes with precise dimensions in order for them to settle properly. Additionally, further research into the woodwork had shown me that it's going to require a lot of elaborate effort, something that's definitely not for someone who hadn't touched a 2x4 in ages. That shoebox controller I saw on Kotaku a couple of months earlier was starting to look awfully appealing at that point.

2) I had no idea what the joystick and button layouts were suppose to be. Sure, I could fudge it, but I had a feeling that I would really regret it if the layout was unfriendly and terribad, which would probably override the benefit of using custom parts.

3) The wiring. Oh god the wiring. Despite extensive searches, I couldn't find conclusive evidence on how to wire all the parts together, or even what wire to use. All I knew as that there's wires involved, there's some sort of clamp like thing in all the pictures I saw, and I had no idea what those things were. I just assumed that those would be the clamps that's used for testing electronics, but when I checked the price at Fry's those things were way too expensive, plus they didn't have flexible length - not good if you're wiring stuff all over the place.

So I did what any reasonable man would do when they came upon a difficult problem... I sat on everything that I've gotten so far and wait until something came along that would magically solve it for me. Usually that solution meant the attic is getting another box of crap, but luckily this story had a happy ending - rare, but so glad it turned out that way.

Fast forward to a week ago. I purchased Street Fighter IV on Steam (while it was on sale of course) in the mean time, and played around with various packing boxes and the shoe box for the new pair of shoes that I bought (which I briefly mentioned). It's fine for the buttons, but the joystick needed something more stable in order to work, plus the wiring problem was still getting nowhere... I would search for a solution every now and then, got frustrated, and stopped looking.

It was thanksgiving weekend and like all the other crazy shoppers, I was in a spending mood. I wasn't going to do the crazy Black Friday thing so I looked up deals online, and lo and behold the MadCatz arcade stick was 33% off on Amazon. I was a little bitter about the whole affair at this point, but what the hell, I still need an arcade stick one way or the other, so it was credit card whippin time and down goes more money to the drain (well, for a very decent arcade stick, and a "bargain" compared to the rest of the cost involved on the custom stick...).

The MadCatz stick came in on a Tuesday. More so than the stick itself though, I was more impressed by the box that it came with. The top layer of the box opened to the left and right, and the second layer of clear plastic (showcasing the stick itself) opened up and out. Styrofoam pads the inside of the box... With three layers of padding at right angles to each other, this was about as secure as a cardboard box could get. On top of that, the cardboard was super sturdy. I'm talking about at least twice as thick (and dense) as any of the packaging I've seen before. The cherry that takes the cake, though - there's just enough room for me to slip the joystick between the top and middle layer, hiding a rather ugly top section of the joystick that would have to go on top in any other "cardboard box" configurations. Actually, there's one more thing - the pictures on the top of the box were appropriately themed (it is a SF4 stick after all) and gorgeous to boot! There's no more excuse. I got to get my stick done now!

So it's with more luck on my part that I realized I should start searching for help on the microswitches that connected the mechanical parts (the joysticks and the buttons) to the control board, instead of trying to find help on either "custom sticks" or the cthulhu board. Doing that search immediately yielded helpful results. First of all, the clamp like things that I was looking at were called "quick disconnects". Specifically, I found one site that mentioned using 0.110 sized quick disconnects for Sanwa microswitches. Whatever, I was sure that the ones used by Happ parts were similarly sized. On top of that, I found the exact thickness and type of wires that I was suppose to use: anywhere between 22 and 28 gauge, stranded for easy handling. Things were starting to come together!

So, back to Fry's for a bit of shopping. I've actually done some half arsed effort to get the project rolling again so I bought myself two rolls of 25ft wires, but they're both solid and one was 20 gauge - no good. So the wires had to be repurchased, and from what I've read I needed a crimping tool and a wire stripper also. There's a two-in-one crimping tool/wire stripper right next to the wires, score. For the quick disconnects, there's only one reasonable looking size - it's .187", but from the looks of it should fit the microswitches perfectly. So that shopping spree cost me $25 ($13 for the crimping tool, one roll of 24 gauge wire and one roll of 26 gauge at $3 per roll, and 2 boxes of quick disconnects with 19 (must be baker's minus dozen or something) pieces in each box, for $2 per box.

I came home after work (this is Thursday night now) and soon discovered that the crimping tool was a POS. The quick disconnects were too small to fit into the slots for the tool, but the wire stripper only ran sizes from 10-20 (and I tried... you really had to get the right size). I reluctantly dug through my father's tools collection and found a crimping tool that worked, but no wire stripper in sight. So back to Fry's I went. There's actually more wire strippers, but the geniuses at Fry's placed those 5-6 aisles away... and I had to either get one wire stripper that only went up to 24 gauge, or two to get a range all the way up to 38ish. Since the wires were cheaper, I went with the one wire stripper solution - so now the 26 gauge wires that I bought were too thin to use. The new wire stripper cost $15 (jesus) and that's $3 for another roll of wires.

From this point on, it's mostly smooth sailing. One not so minor hitch - the joystick had to be assembled from top to bottom all in one go, and because the topmost part opened to the left and the middle part opened up and out, it's geometrically impossible for me to put the entire stick together the right way and still had access to the wiring at the bottom. I could cut off the left side of the top cover that hinges it to the box, but that would completely undermine the integrity of the setup, so in the end I had to put the entire joystick together in the middle flap and put the stick itself through a hole on the top cover. At least the ugly part were still being covered up. The left side of the stick now bulges a bit compared to the right side though.

The wiring was a breeze and it's the one part of the project that I truly enjoyed. It's like a giant connect-the-dot puzzle for adults, except that when you connect the dots properly a button on the controller started working. The basic idea was to first set up the common/ground wires, the ones that would complete the circuit with the wire that's hooked to the "switch" on the microswitch. FYI, the ground wire connects to the "Normally Open" (or NO) connection, not the "Normally Closed" (NC) connection. It's labeled on the microswitch, but it was easier for me to just remember that the NO connection was the one closest to the signal connection, which juts out on the long side of the microswitch. For the cthulhu board the ground wires could be daisy chained and I could use any of the 4 ground connection points on the board. I used one for the start/select group of buttons (I also used that group to test my wiring skills, which was good since I was able to get my wire lengths straightened out and discovered that my diagram had the switches on the board flipped upside down), one for the 6 top side buttons, and one for the joystick switches (up/down/left/right). To use the quick disconnects, strip about 1/2 inch off the end of the wire and use the crimping tool to crimp a quick disconnect to the wire, and by daisy chaining there would be parts where you make a connection from one microswitch to another, and for those you strip two wires and tie the end together and crimp it into one quick disconnect. It's those times that I discovered why the relatively thin wires were necessary - the wire thickness doubled when I tied the two strands together (duh)! Once all the ground connections on a section of microswitches were all connected, there's one more wire at the end of the chain that would connect to the control board, on one of the designated ground points. The connections on the control board side clamped down on the wires with a screwdriver, and I found it easiest to do the same 1/2 inch stripping and fold the wire strands once to make a wider connection point.

The signal wires were even easier to do. they were just one to one wires from switch to board - quick disconnects on the microswitch side, none on the control board side. Just had to go back to the board diagram and figure out which wire went where. Besides tossing out a lot of quick disconnects due to some terrible crimping jobs, I wasted very little wires and everything worked once I had the diagram oriented properly and wired everything up. It was magic.

So yeah, this post doubled as a guide for me to document how to build this damn thing from zero electronics/wiring knowledge to completed product. Now to tally the cost for the first time:

Components: $72
1st Fry's Trip: $16 (for the solid wires, and I almost forgot... the board needed a A->B USB cable to connect to the PC so I bought it earlier)
2nd Fry's Trip: $25
3rd Fry's Trip: $20
SF4 Fight Stick Tournament Edition box: Approximately $10

Total: $143, which is barely cheaper than the MadCatz controller at retail price ($150), but more expensive than the price point when I picked it up ($100). Obviously, if I get to do this again I can toss out the unused crimper from the equation, and I can reuse the wire stripper and a whole lot of wires (I used up almost all of the quick disconnects though). The most expensive piece that can't be easily circumvented is the $40 cthulhu board, but for something that's so easy to wired up and works like magic the moment I hook it up, it's totally worth the money. Best of all, I walk away with some basic knowledge about buttons, joysticks, microswitches, and solderfree wiring that would allow me to maintain my new controller with confidence (save for the control board failing, unfortunately).

I would definitely want to do this again at some point. Anyone else want to pony up the cash for the components?


This is what the box look like when the top flaps are opened. The huge plastic rectangle on the joystick is the part I wanted to hide. Also note the giant hole where the buttons are - unlike the joystick the buttons are stuck to the top flap so to get it to drop smoothly from the side with all the wires intact, I had to forgo the plan to get two layers of neat circular holes for the buttons. I am a bit worried about the giant hole posing some integrity problem for the joystick (which wobbles the most), but so far so good. We'll see how long that lasts.


And here, the guts and the wiring. The control board is screwed down at the upper right hand corner of the box, with a hole cut out to connect to the USB cable. The absolutely humongous size of the box helps the wiring quite a bit, I have plenty of room to run the wires all over the place without risk of tangling myself. I'm also able to split the wires cleanly into sections - the start/select button clumped in one group, the 6 top side buttons in another, and the joystick far away in yet another group.

P*S* In the process of taking these pictures I discovered that my camera battery is dying. And this being a crappy Sony camera that I bought years ago for under $100, I'm more than happy to just let the thing die. So on top of everything else, I'll be taking recommendations for a new camera...

The Urge to Start Over

Think I'll dump the relevant life updates first and quasi-philosophical babble afterward.

A series of events that happened one after another kept me busy for the past few weeks. First, my home desktop broke down, and the subsequent hardware hunting took me some time. This time I've decided to buy all the parts from a local Microcenter instead of online to save delivery time. Not long after my computer is up and running again, I picked up a guitar for my birthday and began spending time to practice it. In between all those things I've spend more time then I'd like to admit on Borderlands. Oh, and I had some sort of jaw/gum/tooth problem that floored me from last weekend till the middle of this week. That pretty much wraps up everything that happened between my last updates and now.

The pain from my jaw is still there. I'm actually not sure if it's related to my wisdom tooth since at its worst I've gone down with a fever, but the pain feels totally different - there's no bleeding, the wisdom tooth is still hiding under the gums and there's no throbbing except for the muscles between the jaw and the cheek. It's been reduced to a minor numbing pain since Wednesday but it still hasn't gone away. I'm getting a bit worried.

My guitar self tutorial had been a bit rough - the free instructions that came with the guitar lacked details, so I fumbled through a lot of things and hoped that it's the right way to do it. More importantly I recently discovered that I skipped a lesson and was half wrong with what fingering belongs to which chord, so between going back to the missed lesson and relearning the proper chord names, it had me wishing that I could just start the whole guitar learning thing over...

And it just seems to be a thing that I do (or try to do) a lot, on every aspect of life.

Take Borderlands, for example: I screwed up the questing order for the first character that I made and instead of rolling with it I started over. Same thing happened with Fallout 3 too - I got very irritated whenever something went off my plan and I'd get this urge to just delete whatever progress I've made and start over.

When I'm starting out a new coding project, I'd look at my old code and feel extremely uncomfortable reusing it, and I would start a new code library from scratch, even though most of the time I just end up rewriting the same thing anyways with a few name changes.

It's like somewhere down the line in my life I've lost the ability to improvise and now I insist that things go according to plan or I'll have nothing to do with it. This usually doesn't go over too well when there's other people involved. It's something that I'm actively aware of, and one of these days I'll relearn how to roll with unexpected turn of events again.

Naga Day 1 Impression

So, I've played around with my Naga for 4-5 hours now, and I've gotten enough out of it to write down a first impression.

First of all, the mouse is a lot smaller than I have imagined for something that's packed with 12 thumb buttons plus a few more. It's actually smaller than the Logitech G7 that I used up until now. I don't know how uncomfortable it would be for folks with bigger hands, but that's obviously not my problem!

And props the Razer guy for not including an install CD in the package. It's an MMO mouse. We have internet connections. The driver on the CD is almost never up to date. Finally, someone that put thoughts into the whole driver ordeal. Installation is extremely smooth. The "numpad" keys are actually recognized without the official driver (which is just there to control DPI and backlights).

I'm not sure why, but you'd think for something as forward-thinking as a mouse designed from the ground up, they'd at least include some instructions on how to hold the mouse properly. I've mostly figured it out on my own, but it would be nice to know that I'm doing it the right way instead of fumbling around randomly for a few hours until it works.

The numpad buttons are about cell-phone key sized, and currently the tip of my thumb actually rests between 2 and 5. 1-3 are easily reachable without adjustment, and 4-6 requires some effort to move my thumb back ever so slightly. Now comes the weird part: after some experimentation I've found that it's much better to knock on 7-9 with the knuckle of my thumb, and 9-12 with the base of my thumb. That way, my thumb never moves far enough from the neutral position to force me to manually readjust.

Make no mistake: there's a training period associated with the mouse. 1, 2, 4, 5 are relatively easy to cycle between, but 3 and 6 forces the thumb to curve in and 6 especially makes me lose my positioning at times. 7-9 are the slowest for me to hit, but outside of high pressure situations I can press any single button without fat-fingering into other buttons now.

The second half of the training, of course, is to rebind all the action bars (in WoW) from a left hand oriented layout to use the thumb keypad buttons. The official addon for the mouse is no help (as expected). Way too many icons dumped onto the screen, and ugly to boot. There's a noticeable drop in my dps currently since I have to keep consciously think about what button to press, then recall how to press it, then press the button. One thing that I *do* notice though is that my attention is strangely detached from the action bar icons - I'm much more situation aware, but I'm not paying as much attention to my cooldowns as I normally am.

I've also fired a couple of other games: Team Fortress 2 for the usual FPS romp, and Alien Shooter 2 to get a feel for pointer aiming. I do run into some problems with TF2... the mouse seems to have a unitask design of handling MMOs and MMOs only. Both the left and right buttons are very recessed, which makes continuous weapon firing (i.e. the Heavy's minigun) very uncomfortable. I'm still getting used to the new mouse contour though, so hopefully my trigger sense will come back in time.

One thing is for sure: there's no going back once I make the full transition from using my old keybinds to using the Razer buttons. I am kind of worried about being too attached to a specific peripheral, especially since I do run into the occasional emergency sessions on my laptop nowadays. The thought of hauling the mouse around in case I need to log into WoW is a little unsettled, but hopefully I can get used to it.

I'll probably do one more post for the Naga, around the time when I decide to keep or give up on the mouse. I've dumped macro pads into storage before (they're for sale, by the way!), so this would not be the first time I deep freeze a new shiny peripheral. I have a good feeling about this mouse, though.

Here's the link between some guitar video game and the issue of abortion

I was listening to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the umpteen time on my way to work today, and I just had an epiphany.

I can see myself in the pro-choice position in the abortion debate. I guess those guys are not crazy people after all.

I know, I have some explaining to do.

So, everything starts with the whole "Kurt Cobain in Guitar Hero 5" controversy. Long story short, apparently after years of negotiation the Guitar Hero guys (well, the guys that picked up the license while Harmonix moved to greener, more "Rock Bandy" pastures) finally got the deal to put the likeness of Kurt Cobain (of Nirvana fame) into Guitar Hero as an unlockable character. Yes, you can make him sing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the game... and so much more. You can pretty much pick him to sing and dance to the tune of any song that's in the game, like a nice little puppy that follows your every whim.

Of course, if you know anything about who Kurt Cobain is and what he stands for, you can at least understand the context of why this is so horrifying to some people. The torches and pitchforks had been out for awhile now - the most obvious solution, they say? Patch the game so that Kurt Cobain can only sing his own songs. Simple, right? It's not like you're adding features. You're just removing existing ones. I don't care how complex the code is behind the game, you can put a lid on this explosion of bad press in a week or less if you put your mind to it. So why didn't they do that, but instead opt to repeat their rhetoric about how they got all the proper paperwork and it's all legit?

Because, from one point of view, there's really nothing wrong with the idea. Nobody is forcing you to make Kurt Cobain sing other songs for you. If you want, you can create your custom avatars or use the other stuff that Guitar Hero provides you or whatever. You. You have a choice. If you respect Mr. Cobain's memories, then just don't choose him when you're playing songs that he didn't sing. Or don't choose him, ever. Your experience with the game is not going to be affected by some guy 3000 miles away who decides that it's funny to make the ghost of Kurt Cobain sing a girl band song or something. That guy is certainly not hurting anyone. If he wants to exercise his freedom of speech and piss on the memory of some dead guy who blew his own brains out, that's his own prerogative, right?

Except that the idea feels so wrong to you that you want nobody to take any part in it at all. You feel so strong about it that you're going to be the party pooper that says "if I don't do it then you won't either."

And this is where I lead myself to the pro-life versus pro-choice argument, and to completely misquote something from the Matrix movies because it sounds cool anyway, "The problem is choice."

You see, my internal logic about the debate had always been "two options are always better than one". If you believe that abortion is wrong, you don't have to do it. Go ahead, nobody is stopping you. Abortion is not mandatory. If you can convince enough people, it is possible to create a scenario where everyone is given a choice and nobody wants to get an abortion anyway. The same can't be said for the reverse - an option removed is an option that can't be taken. How much do you really believe in the concept of freedom when you stand so firm on removing an option in a situation where the result of either option is entirely personal and bears no ill effect on you - You, who somehow think that you are a better judge on what someone else is going through?

Unless, of course, when you believe in something so much that anyone doing it is an affront to your moral belief, that offering a choice equals to an eternal torment in your mind that someone, somewhere would choose to do it, because the option exists.

Mind you, I personally have no beef in either matter - I'll never have to face the fear of possible pregnancy and I neither own a console that plays Guitar Hero 5 or care enough about Kurt Cobain's legacy to swing one way or another. Although, I still think that it is important as a human being to be empathic about other people's points of view, why they think the way that they think, and no matter how wrong the idea seems to you, do the things that they do.

Laguna Art Museum and How Google Maps Finally Failed Me

So, I took a Sunday off last week to hit the WoW exhibit down at the Laguna Art Museum. My boss, one Robert Nideffer, was giving a talk on the piece that he had done that weekend, so it was as good an occasion as any to drag myself over and have a look. I'm actually a contributor to the exhibit, after all, even if they're showcasing one of my older project.

And here's the part where I explain how Google Maps totally failed me on this one particular trip.

If you go to Google Map and try to find the location of one 307 Cliff Dr, Laguna Beach, CA 92651, it'll point you to some random location in Laguna Beach that's tucked in the middle of nowhere (it's not even sitting on Cliff Dr for that matter). I smelled something fishy about that location, so I went to the museum web site and followed the get directions link from their visitor information page... yup, points to the same place. Never mind that if I don't get ahead of myself and just google Laguna Art Museum, the first result comes up with a map that gives you the correct location of the museum. I R SMRT, okay?

Since I thought the museum was located at some no name street to the left of me as I drove south, I was looking nervously to the left on my whole way down the Pacific Coast Highway. I looked for the street to turn left in as well as the street before it (McKnight Dr), the street after it (Crescent Bay Dr), and apparently I missed all three streets and I kept driving... until I saw a lovely statue that said "Welcome to Dana Point". By that time I was 45 minutes late to the talk that I was suppose to attend, and I was royally screwed.

On my drive back north my map was on my lap, and I was checking my position every three or four blocks. All things looked grim as the streets (all three of them) that I was looking for was still nowhere to be found... Until I saw a huge sign at the corner of my eye that said "WoW" to the LEFT of me (I was driving north so I expected to find the museum to my right). The intersection ahead of me said "Cliff Drive". Yeah, facepalm moment right there.

Next came the parking problem. The summer heat drove a lot of people to the beach - so much so that there's next to no parking space anywhere near the museum. I started driving down Cliff Dr. (it's a side street) to see how far I had to go to find a spot... and I had to drive all four blocks down Cliff Dr. plus another two blocks before I found a metered parking spot on the street. Note to self: if I'm coming back, I'm definitely carpooling.

The front desk of the museum gave me trouble, but I was able to get in by claiming to be invited by my boss (which was partially true) to the talk (which was amazingly still going on). I caught the tail end of Q&A, and missed most of what I wanted to hear - C'est la vie, and it's much better than hearing nothing or getting lost somewhere in Laguna Beach all day long.

The exhibit itself was great . It's roughly divided into two types of work: official art drawn by Blizzard artists for World of Warcraft, and works of art inspired by the game and/or the player community around the game. The official stuff was actually pretty standard fare: I've seen almost all of the work there, including the fan art and the machinima collection. It was really more of a trip down memory lane for me, like looking through a family album. The second half of the exhibit was very "artsy" and very interesting... and being "artsy" stuff, your mileage may very. Younger visitors that I saw scoffed at it, the older ones would look around and pretend to understand... I was confused by most of it too, but I've come to understand that art interpretation could be very personal and it's not really necessary to "get it" in order to appreciate an artwork.

I took my time with it and spent a whole 2 hours walking around, plus about 15 minutes sitting through the last part of the talk. The walk to my parking spot was 15 minutes each way and the meter maxed at 4 hours... I ended up missing a chance to look at half of the displays there. There's still another month before they rotate in the next seasonal exhibit, so I'll definitely find time to go back - possibly on September 13th since my boss's colleague would be the one giving the talk that day (and her exhibit was very interesting as well).

Another first, but certainly won't be the last firsts.

It's 3:30 in the morning. It's my power hour. Might as well start writing updates!

When I first made the move from LiveJournal to Facebook, my original intention is just to do posts like this: long, all encompassing, and touting the virtue of long, well thought out posts over all the bite sized ADD updates from Twitter/MySpace/Facebook...

But there's a certain kind of pleasure to doing constant updates. Some people used their LJ that way (and still do, from the updates that I'm still tracking), and sometimes there's blips that needs to be spontaneously sprout... but no Twitter sized posts, please. Poor guy from one feed that I follow had to use three posts just to finish a joke. It's like they try to constantly punish you for trying to finish your thoughts.

And that's enough about that.

In the interest of making new friends and getting others interested in what I'm following currently (because I don't think they ever will, or I'll never know, either way), I'll dedicate this post to all the things that I've been doing in my work time, my spare time, and everything in between...

Except that I have to keep a lot to myself this time around.

You see, posting on Facebook is both a blessing and a curse - I'm happy that most people do keep a profile of their real life on Facebook, as opposed to all sorts of alias and hidden agendas on other social network sites, but with that I'm no longer under the protection of my anonymity... my family reads this now, and so do my co-workers - no hiding space here. So if you will excuse me, I'd rather not have my family offended or have me removed from my job over something I write here.

Oh yeah, I like tangents. In case you haven't figured that out already. Let's see now, where to begin?

Manga:

My latest obsession. Well, not so much a new obsession, but now that I've found easy sources for scanlations (is that the correct term to use?), I've been devouring old series that I missed and new series that are coming out with a fanatical zeal. I wrapped up Absolute Boyfriend in one sitting and almost did the same for Ichigo 100%, but about 200 chapters in I finally gave up and read the ending first so I can get to sleep.

As for shounen stables Bleach and Naruto, I haven't been able to find sources to read either one from chapter 100 something onwards, and I'm too lazy to read all the fluff in-between, so I've only been catching up on the last few weeks of stuff - I don't feel like I've missed a thing. Naruto is still pretty single-minded, Sakura is still mostly useless, Sasuke is still a jerk, Ichigo is still trying to find ways to become more powerful so he can protect his friends... what did I miss again?

I'm also following to-LOVE-ru purely for academic purposes, since the art style is something I'd like to emulate, and rounding up the miscellaneous slots are Ane Doki, Onidere, and K-ON (yes, there's a pattern here, and no, it's not that hard to figure out). I more or less would be able to kill brain cells for 5-10 minutes at my leisure whenever I want to, which is much more convenient than some of my other interests...

StartCraft:

Oh yeah, I'm trying to follow pro-StarCraft now. If there's ever a time bender for my already screwed up schedule it'd be this one. Daytime program in South Korea usually means 2-5 AM here on the west coast, and it's just not as fun to be able to watch games live and follow the live thread on teamliquid.net and get other people's reactions as the games unfold. Supposedly it's already past the golden and silver age of pro-StarCraft in Korea (since SC2 is coming out), but even at its twilight years I've never seen games taken so seriously, stats tracked so rigorously, with all the drama and personalities that you'd expect from oh... a "real" sport? Here's to hoping that one of these days I don't have to feel like a wierdo for following e-sports, and preferably watching coverage in a language that I can understand.

Anime:

I've been lukewarm about following the latest anime series for the past 2-3 years now, mainly because it's a more time consuming hobby and I never seem to hit the "right" series. My usual habit of pick up new series is to randomly download the first episode of whatever I see on the front page of fansub sites, and then dump any series where I feel the first episode lost my interest. This selection method is terrible at picking out the "fan favorite series of the year". Remember the year when Naruto got big? Totally missed it myself. Haruhi? I had to catch up on the entire series the year after it's the talk of the town. Gurren Lagann? Never heard of it, until everyone is talking about it *last* year. I'm not a fan of playing this game of catch-up, and now that I've had access to a healthy library of manga, I can see why every other person prefers the manga to its anime adaptation - plot changes, missing details, mostly for the worse.

Lately I've rounded up Tora Dora (highly enjoyable), Regios (completely passable) and been lazily following Valkyria Chronicles. I've backlogged the entire Clannad After Story, but the first episode was soooooooo slow going that I wonder if I'll ever pick up the rest of the episodes to finish the series. Oh yeah, and then there's the "second season" of Haruhi. At this point, I'm not going to bother watching the episodes until I see other people discussing the ending of the Endless Eight arc. I've never been a devoted Haruhi fan, and as much as I understand that no animation is reused for this entire story arc, I'm still drawing my line after episode 4. Oh, and here's hoping that I didn't spoil anything by saying this much - and if I did, my apologies.

Games:

Plants vs Zombies! One of the best game from my recent memories. I also picked up Mirror's Edge for less than 10 dollars for the PC (shipping included), and I feel sad that it isn't as popular as it should be - it's very innovative, expertly executed, and highly replayable. I'm going to play through it again and again like Max Payne did it for me years ago - it just hits a nerve to make you feel good, even if you've been through it a million times... and for the first time I feel like I want to try and get better on doing speed runs in Mirror's Edge, since that's sort of the whole point of the game.

I bought Braid when it was on sale on Steam, but didn't really have the heart to start playing it, and same goes for Zeno Clash. I tried finishing BioShock a couple of times, but since I already know the ending (late night Wikipedia browsing...) I keep losing steam about 3-4 hours into the game. Assassin's Creed is on infinite haitus... I just don't have the heart to pick up the game, then go through 4-5 loading screens just to start playing, not to mention all the travel times and mini-tasks involved before I can advance the plot. I love the game, I don't mind the minor tasks either, but it's just all so time consuming and I don't have the time to sit through and play for that long right now. Freedom Force and its expansion pack was a lot of fun while it lasted, but I feel like I don't get to use my custom hero enough in the expansion - look, I like their pre-made characters just fine, but I thought the whole point was to bring in my totally ass kicking imba custom characters and blow everything in sight up, y'know?

And I still play Team Fortress 2 once every blue moon. I stopped playing Left 4 Dead since my work schedule hyped up again and playing that game with strangers is about as fun as pounding nails through my... hands and feet. Considering that I paid full price for one of the two copies of the game, I feel a little ripped off in hindsight. I'm so not buying Left 4 Dead 2, no siree Bob.

WoW:

And last but not least, my job besides my other job besides my other job that I have to pay money to work at. Patch 3.2 hit live way too soon, and knocked me off guard - I'm nowhere near ready in terms of gear I should get or time I can spend. The whole "here's loot for everyone that just completely invalidates your last four months of raiding" puts a bit of bile in my mouth, now that I'm on the other side of the coin (previously, sitting outside of raids and badge gearing in Sunwell made me a happy man). But really, I should be happier than this. It's free gear for everyone, but it's free gear for me as well...

Immediate plan is to get more champion seals for the mount upgrade (bank access from anywhere, squee) and replace my last few i219 item slots.

Personal Projects:

I've been meaning to start/restart one of my many webcomic ideas ever since AnimeExpo got me all pumped up about working up my rusty art skills. And then I got hit hard by my job... and I got hit harder by my *other* job... and then I got hit even harder by my other *other* job (the one with the patch 3.2, yeah....). I keep telling myself that this time, it won't be a "dead in the water" effort, that's I'd at least get a few pages done and post it up to encourage myself. Here's to hoping that it'd still happen. Fingers crossed.

On a completely unrelated tangent, I've been reading up on Street Fighter 4 a lot lately and since it's coming out on the PC, I wanted to get myself a proper arcade stick that works on the PC (my previous Nuby univeral stick apparently doesn't work with a PS2 to USB converter). My best hope was originally placed on the premium MadCatz stuff, since a bunch of avid SF fans swear by it (and justifiably so, since most people seem to be packing one for Evo this year), but when I got my hands on it at Fry's I was less than impressed. Sanwa parts... I can never get used to that loosey Japanese stick feel. Give me that solid, durable American stick feel and I'm right at home. So I went back to the search, and apparently no decent company seems to be in the business of providing quality arcade sticks for the PC with American (and by that I mean Chinese manufactured) parts.

And that I read something like this... and got myself completely stoked to do a custom stick on my own. After all, my father is an expert craftsman and an able electrician, and I always feel like I'm missing out a connection with him doing all these "online" and "digital" nonsense... so yeah, the components all arrived, and I'm currently extremely frightened about doing my wirings wrong and frying all the components up (they're not *that* expensive, but still...). Not to mention the woodwork involved in building a proper box also seem to be very intimidating... I'm almost tempted to stick with the mail order box that I'm using to prototype the layout, and that's a pretty crappy solution for someone who's set out to build a "genuine arcade stick"...

Oh well, I do have plenty of excuses to push this side side project to another time, maybe far far away...