So thanks to kawaiibishounen I am now probably going to be addicted to The Sims Life Stories. It’s what The Sims should have been from the beginning - you can guide them through all parts of their lives, not just going to work and earning money and reaching the top. They have specific desires and lifetime goals and everything. Plus you can still build their houses, and it all runs nicely on a laptop! You can even have other programs running at the same time. It’s awesome.

Unfortunately I’m not playing it right now. We came over to the in-laws’ house because they are going on a road trip tomorrow, and we were invited to say goodbye and stuff. I brought my laptop to make sure I could connect to their network, but I didn’t bring the game CD because I figured it wasn’t needed. Nope! You needs it, precious, you needs it. Ah well…I’ll play when I get home, probably. Riley is just back from her first day of work; I made a Sims Stories blog to post screenshots for fun.

• I just watched Hackers again for the first time in many years. It’s becoming more tolerable to watch as time goes on - back then, it was ridiculous. Now, it’s cute.
• Video games are fun. I haven’t played Driv3r in quite some time, and it’s fun to just tool around and rack up wanted points.
• I am reading Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father for English class and I think I will end up voting for the guy in the primaries.

I’ve just beaten Guitar Hero II on medium. Yes, I played Free Bird. Yes, I got abducted by aliens. No, I won’t be jumping straight to hard - I’ve done a bit of practicing on hard, and that orange key is just insane. I’ll probably try for 100% on all easy songs first (so far I’ve got two) and/or five stars on all medium songs first. Maybe then I’ll crack into hard. Oh, and yes, I have a headache. But I was in the zone!

I am so tired. VRS turns out to be a really intense job, and working 8 hours yesterday and 7 hours today has left me exhausted. A is suggesting I cut back on my hours, because she doesn’t want me to be overtired, but it feels like it would be weird to work less than 32-40 hours. Maybe I will cut back a little bit while I get used to it, I don’t know. I just feel like I have been exhausted forever, I feel like I’ve been neglecting stuff, I feel like everything is a mess and I’m too tired to deal with it! It doesn’t help that I am dealing with really bad hives…5mg of prednisone per day is keeping life bearable but it’s still not any fun. Plus the prednisone is making me so hungry…I feel like I might as well pause my NutriSystem because otherwise I’m just wasting the food if I don’t stick to the diet. I haven’t broken down and gobbled food yet, but I am hungry all the time.

In other news, my PS2 is broken. It is officially dead. It was giving me problems loading The Urbz a while back, and now that I’ve been playing Guitar Hero 2 it’s been acting up again. I finally looked up the repair people and contact them through their chat service, where the guy honestly admitted that it would be better to just get another for $90 at GameStop. That was nice of him, considering he could have just said “sure, send it in” and taken my $60. But it still leaves me without a working Playstation, and I am only partway through GH2 on medium! I placed an ad on Craigslist in case anybody is in love with their Wii, Xbox, or PS3 and doesn’t want their working PS2 anymore, but I am not optimistic in that department.

Today I picked up a new starter pack for Guitar Hero II and a used extra guitar for $105. So we’re having fun - it’s a game A actually enjoys, which is nice because she doesn’t like the button-mashers. We’ve been playing all evening; her band is called Anna Panic! after the bartender on the cruise last month. (No, Anna isn’t her real name.) My band is called Hot Cross Bunz because A calls me Bunz, and her sister’s band is Hiro Protagonist. When her husband gets home (in about an hour?) he’ll undoubtedly want to play but I don’t know what his band will be called. Damn, this game is fun!

Today was a bit of a bummer due to the first snow of the season. We were supposed to run errands, then go bowling, then go have cake at my in-laws’ house. The errands were going to include picking up a PS2 memory card, because when I tried to play one of my birthday presents yesterday, I realized that my only PS2 card has died…somehow. I have some games on PS1 cards, but whatever was on my PS2 card - including my 860m katamari - is gone.

I was really looking forward to the bowling and cake, because it was going to be kind of like a birthday party. Last night my sister-in-law went out to dinner and had friends over, and I could hear them downstairs having fun, and we weren’t invited. (Remember, her birthday is the same day as mine.) So next year I’m hopefully going to have my own party, but for this year it was going to be bowling and cake today…and I didn’t get it. We’re going to go over for cake anyway sometime this week, but the party atmosphere won’t be the same. I’ll hopefully be getting together with my mom this coming weekend (?) so we’ll see how that goes.

By the way, I’ve had a few margaritas tonight. So forgive me if I’m not making much sense.

I got a 10-day free trial of World of Warcraft from cynica, because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. First I downloaded the 2.84GB install file, which I had to delete after unzipping because I needed the space to do the install! Once that was finally installed, I discovered I had to download a half-gig update. I had a hard time getting that to install, and when I finally did I discovered I had another half-gig update to download! I ended up removing RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 from the machine, because I can always reinstall it; I also removed a bunch of my music, which freed up a few more gigs. After the trial is over, I will restore the music from my external hard drive.

So I finally got to play the game after hours of downloading and installing. I created an undead character first and then a human character; I ended up playing as the human for a while. I got her to be a Level 2 Mage by killing a bunch of demons - at least I assume that’s how that worked. One thing I really like a lot about the game is that all those gigs of storage on the computer translate to a much faster playing experience. One reason I’m not really into Second Life is because it has to download everything as you move around, whereas WoW stores everything on the computer and then just interprets the instructions it receives.

I wasn’t able to get any other human beings to talk to me. I saw some people talking on a general channel but I couldn’t figure out how to talk to them - I think it may be limited by the free trial account. I know several people who play WoW but I have no idea what server they’d be on or anything like that. I can see why WoW is appealing - it’s fun to run around killing things and improving your stats, and I imagine the role-playing servers are fun too - but I’m not sure why it’s Warcrack for so many people. I don’t expect to keep it past the 10-day trial, which means I have to remember to cancel because otherwise I’ll automatically be billed $15/month. I’m glad to see what all the fuss is about, but I think there are probably very similar combat/RP games - even MMORPG’s - that are less expensive, and perhaps less space-hogging on the computer. I might try to find some alternatives, just for fun.

I found a good place to play free online games - it’s called Excessively.net. They have a bunch of games converted to Flash, so you can play classics like Frogger and Arkanoid (well, a clone) along with some I’ve never heard of - “Boobs, Butt, or Shoulder” and its sequel, “Boobs, Butt, or Shoulder Part 2!” But the real attraction for me is the NES games. They have the first three Super Mario games, and although the emulation is a little slow they do seem to play pretty well. If you can’t install an NES emulator on your computer - like if you’re at work - then this is definitely a good way to pass the time. (But I don’t recommend playing Boobs, Butt, or Shoulder at work.)

Oh my god! I got ePSXe to run on my laptop and I can play Playstation games on my laptop! I haven’t quite got the configuration right…sound effects play but music does not, which means Bust-A-Groove is much harder to play than on the PSX. But it handles import games (it’s the Japanese version of Bust-A-Groove, which was called Bust-A-Move) beautifully! I might have to look into getting a controller thing so I can use the regular controller rather than trying to play off the computer keyboard.

Oh my god IT WORKS!

• The ants are still there after all. They’ve got their babies up there with them now. Oh goody. Fortunately there was absolutely nothing interesting in the mail today.
• I have not received any e-mails in over five hours. Not spam, not test messages sent to myself, not anything. I normally get 3500+ spam messages a day, and LiveJournal comments throughout the day, and Freecycle/mailing list updates throughout the day…none of them have shown up for five hours. I have contacted Gmail support, and replied to their auto-response (sent to a backup address), but I don’t really expect a response. I don’t know if this is an outage, a bottleneck, or what.
• I also checked out the “Problem solving” section of the Gmail category at Google Groups. While there, I found the dumbest person on the Internet. I hope it’s a joke, because the enter key has been around since the typewriter.
• Not having e-mail is extremely annoying, but fortunately I bought a mouse the other day and I can play Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 again now. I never got the hang of it before because the scroll wheel is an essential part of the camera controls, and there is no scroll wheel on a laptop’s touchpad. But I re-installed the game a couple of nights ago and it’s been great!