• Played more than 5 hours of TERA Rising unintentionally. Finally got a character beyond the starting areas to the first big city/town/thing with tons and tons of characters of all levels hanging out and doing stuff. Joined a guild for the MUSH I used to hang out on. Elin Healer and Elin Berzerker are now both level 11.
• Drew the picture above for Puppy. Drawn with my old Wacom Bamboo. Still waiting on the new power supple for the EP121 to come in. If all goes well, that power supply should arrive in three days from now.
• Made a catalog of mother’s medicines with usual use schedules and guidelines as well as purpose, known side effects, and warnings. Now I just need to turn that into a schedule to make sure she gets what she needs each day.

Today, I received OTG USB cables to use with my Moto G android phone. And my wireless usb keyboard in particular has an attacked touchpad for mouse cursor control. Ultimately, this means that in a pinch, my phone can now work well enough as a third backup PC should my others fail.

And to make sure that I can in fact do well enough with it, I am writing this blog entry in the described fashion.

I also found out I can use it with my Logitech gamepad to play emulators and things much better than with on-screen controls.  I found a little gotcha though, in that if I want to switch from keyboard to gamepad, I must *unplug the OTG cable from the phone*. Simply swapping the device connected to the client end of the OTG cable isn’t recognized correctly by the OS. Once I figured that out, I finished SSB on an emulator with Yoshi on Normal with 3 lives, and defeated/unlocked Ness. Almost started another playthrough as Ness, but felt kinda drowsy, and descided to get on to writing this blogpost.

Power/water/net was out earlier for a little while. A few months ago, a debit card went missing and a replacement was ordered. The replacement kept the same numbers, but had an updated expiration date. So when the lost card was invalidated, all bills coming out of autopay were failing due to the incorrect expiry. Gotta make sure I don’t fall into that same trap in the future.

Played a few more matches of Dead Island Epidemic’s Scavenger mode. It’s really important to go after the horaders when they show up as they drop a lot of supplies. Supply points are important for an early advantage and it’s good to harass them to deny the leading team, defeating the horrder gets far more points in much smaller time than capture points can, and can make a huge difference in finishing or getting the first-to-fill-the-truck bonus. Also, if you fill uncomfortable carrying the resources back to base, use G to toss them at an ally and let them carry it. If they’re overburdened, consider guarding them back or asking them to split the load with you using G.

I also updated my Tera Rising client, made RydBloons the Elin, and playerd around for a little while with the secondary healer/buffer class. It’s interesting. While I would prefer an active, direct heal, this character produces healing orb items that stay onthe ground for quite a while after being summoned. I like to imagine she’s just going around making magic healing balloons for everyone and giving them away for free. And that was a class decision I would not have through to try if not for me missing out on the Soothe ability in WildSTar when they were running the open beta. Soothe uses a variety of affects- including a bunch of balloons that burst- as an ally-target healing skill. My time back in TERA was cute and fun, but like MMORPGs tend to do, it was reallyt repetitive. I think I got up back to level 5 before I lost interest.

Listened to an Idle Thumbs podcast. Got hpyed for Gamecube adapter for WiiU and SSB Invitationals. Saw news that has me convinced I should try to get my brother and sister to switch to eCig. While some potential harms to it are unknown, for the most part, it seems to be a hell of a lot less deadly thanks to the lack of tabacco, so… yeah. The problem is the cost. They’re obviously not going to attempt the switch without assistance.

Read the new chapter of Fallout Equestria: Better Days. With the MoM warehouse demolished and the characters surviving only due to a matter of fortune, I can’t help but admit I was a little disappointed by the lack of balloons,confetti, streamers,  pastries, and chocolate milk. But there was an explosion, and that’s a good thing! also it’s entirely possible Sandy just hoarded like tons and tons of stuff she found in the building and didn’t tell anyone about. Especially if the raincoat jacket thingy has pockets.  There’s also some romance elements at play now that I dislike, but I’ll live, I guess. Long as the laughter outshines how much I dislike romance=y type things, then I will probably keep following. Or something.

No programming was done today, but I did download AIDE and Terminal IDE or something like that for Android, so in theory, I should now be able to use this phone as a programming tool with a battery life that outshines any of my laptops. So that’ll be interesting to try out. If it plays well with git, things’ll work out fine.

Ate: Broccoli and Cheese Hotpockets.  Honey Turkey Slice + Oatmeal Cream Pie.

Did:

• Folded and placed towels/rags.
• Took out trash. Twice.
• Washed dishes
• Played Dead Island Epidemic (Finally tried the PvP. Also did PvE with peeps from EqDawn. ), Brave Frontier, Magicka Wizard Wars (the tutorial only. Got Code:SLUG over and over afterwards).
• Had PC Problems on Windows and Linux. I suspect a hardware fault from when this box was assembled.
• An odd sequence of events lead to me having to be very direct about my sexual activity with parents. I suspect a combination of miscommunication and paranoia was the cause for what was suggested.
• Subscribed to tracking emails for all mail orders.

PnP day today. The crew woke up, discussed stuff, found a shack, searched the shack for loot, found a bunch of fancy expensive wine and mints. Though the group has also conceded that it is probably being goaded or tracked, not chased, as they’ve been caught-up-with already.

Installed MyPaint into Ubuntu with Wine. Haven’t tried it out yet. Saw lots of pretty pictures on Tumblr.

Mother ordered pizza. Niece left pizzabox open on the counter. Roaches got in it. Retl is stubborn and scared the roaches away and ate a lot of pizza. Retl didn’t feel very good for a few hours mid-PnP, but was mostly fine.

I have no idea where the time went today.

1: My brother cooked BBQ meats and made a salad and beans and stuff. It was pretty tasty. Drank sweet tea.  That was dinner. Brunch was hot dogs and hamburger with hickory smoked provolone on white bread.

2:  After pondering it a while, I changed the structure of the skill stats like barter to use arrays instead. While it means we’ll probably need to write dedicated accessor and mutator methods for each of those properties so that other objects look at the sum instead of the array directly, it also means that things like level-ups and skill-point assignment don’t need to spaz out recalculating the stat directly. Just change the base (index 0) with level ups and ranks (index 2) when skillpoints are assigned after level up. And tags would be assigned during character creation or when taking certain perks to a value of 15.

Also, added Level Up button.

3: One of these days, I will die. And it will be permanent. Would that mean I saved after my death and therefore can’t undo it? o_O

• Tried RPing again on Equestrian Dawn. It was OK. Character interactions were reasonable and all.  But I wasn’t very entertained. I just simply don’t enjoy the whole RP thing much.
• Net connection going in and out repeatedly for no obvious reason. Second time this has happened this week. It didn’t make the whole RPing thing any easier.
• Niece decided to catch a ride with someone to church in advance of a pool party she wanted to go to. Then she was upset when she was late to the party. She didn’t plan that out well.
• Split a meal order with my father. Got nachos and a taco. He got a chicken thing. When we split up, he accidentally took the taco instead of the chicken thing. It tasted OK, but was a disappointment. Nachos were OK too.
• Keep seeing a tumblr post reblogged about Misogyny, but no guide on how to actually get help for those feelings. Doesn’t help that some of the responses about it jump to cartoonish extremes to the point of being garbage as real world advice.

Ate: Hotdogs, jalapeno montery jack cheese, saukraut, on hotdog buns. + white chocolate kitkat bar.

Looking forward to: FoE Radio Play episode 2. Which I might end up strongly disliking, depending on how it goes. We’ll see. But it’s never been the grim, violent, and unpleasant things that I appreciated FoE or any sidefics for.

Did: Went grocery shopping again. Hardly bought anything due to distractions and lack of planning.

Let my mother use my phone to search for things and listen to articles with Text to Speech. She nearly lost the phone and had trouble getting my attention to help her. When I got up there, she called my phone with her phone and we got them both.

Mother just took a ride to the hospital with father and someone she used to work with. Said that something felt wrong with one of her legs. Niece wanted to go. Brother and sister showed up and told her to stay. She’s unhappy about that.

Brother seems angry about something. Didn’t tell me why. Not gonna bother asking. The noise is a bother though, but he’ll probably be leaving back to work shortly.

Sister was here. Also went back to work. Yay work.

Also I’m like 3 or 4 days behind on replying to Tumblr comments now.

Ate: Brunch: Open Reuben sandwich (Partially shared with mother). Dinner was Beef Franks with thousand island dressing, Monterrey jack and Jalepeno cheese on french bread + side of Marshmallow Mateys.

Did: Played videogames ALL FREAKING DAY.

Except for three hours.

• Brunch, and making sure mother is OK.
• Started working on the project I mentioned previously. Slapped together a template HTML page. Did a bit more reading about Object Oriented Design in Javascript (I’m not used to the whole class-less prototyping-based thing, but it doesn’t seem too tricky), reviewed when to use ‘var’ when declaring variables (always when in strict mode. Otherwise, use it to indicate local scope for a variable inside a function, else it will be grabbed at nearest available scope.) Glanced at ‘man man’ and ‘man gittutorial’ to remember the process of cloning, staging, committing, and pushing via commandline. Talked with father to order replacement powerplug for EP121. Discussed OTG cable for phone.
• Dinner (Listening to FoE Heroes audiobook Chapter 29), and making sure mother is OK.

Games played: Brave Frontier, Awesomenauts, Dead Island Epidemic (New gift! Thanks, Inkie!) And I’ve been seriously considering buying into Wildstar for maybe at least one month. It turns out that Aurin can be Espers and Espers can be healers. And the healer ability ‘soothe’ makes a bunch of balloons appear for a little while and then burst. Which is like. WHAT I HAD BEEN LOOKING FOR THE WHOLE TIME I WAS PLAYING OPEN BETA AND DIDN’T NOTICE. so I’d like to try that again or something

And uh. No movie night today due to Bubblegum’s vacation. A forgettable day, but not a bad one at all.

I am what I ate: Noon: McDonalds fries and plain quater pounder with cheese for breakfast, brought by one of my mother’s attenders. With ranch dip and bbq dip as my niece did not specify her usual sweet and sour. 7PM: Made two Reuben sandwiches. Seedless Rye. Corned Beef. Swiss Cheese. Saurkraut. Thousand Island Dressing.  Drank water. Also ate some Marshmallow Mateys cereal because I wanted more sweet taste.

What I did with my life:
[11:28:54 PM] Retl: So-so. I’m falling into that overly comfortable routine of playing lots and lots of games (mostly just Awesomenauts and occasionally Brave Frontier, but BF is getting really grindy now). Tried to draw a thing after t he chat was like DO IT DO IT DO IT, only to be told I drew the wrong character. Still haven’t updated my daily log thing. Wrote up an introductory paragraph to remind me of that CMS style game I sorta wanted to make. Installed and setup the development environment for the Dart language. I’m not entirely sure why I shouldn’t just write my code in javascript to begin with, but I haven’t actually USED Dart yet. Just skimmed the intro tutorials and setup.
[11:30:09 PM] Retl: And just a few moments ago, I was looking up typography for mobile and website templates for futuristic themes. I know I probably don’t need to focus too much on the look right now as opposed to just getting my ideas for the game down, organizing it, and then implementing the most important bits. But I’d really like it to look nice to start with. 6.9 Even if it were nice looking placeholders or something
[11:30:19 PM] * Retl copypastes response as daily blog.

—

Also, got a phishing/prank email from irs.gov-irs on Outlook. Not nice. And my niece wanted me to raise the height of her tireswing, so I spent about half an hour trying to make it higher.