Thursday, September 9, 2004

I didn't know spines could break that way.
Comment Commentary

TheCrowChicky- I feel for ya.

Mal- School started around 8:30 for me when I was in sixth grade.. God, I loved that.

There are a lot of characters, yeah.. I'm keeping pretty good tabs so far, though.

Shin- At least it's not 5:45. :P

StarBound- I've never had a problem with bubble sheets, heh. I like being anal about making sure they're filled in perfectly.

Kat- I feel for you, too.

Godel- But still, how does that tie in with amateur journalism?

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As mentioned several months ago, I bought Devil May Cry at the Fry's Electronics in San Marcos around June. I loved it from the moment I skimmed through the instruction manual.. And things only got better once I started playing (Okay, okay, Dante saying "Let's rock, baby" in the menu intro is a bit lame). Now I'm not going to get into a big review or anything, as I did that in July, but I figured I may as well fill in anybody who's somewhat new to my mO.

Anyway, I got desperately stuck at the first Griffon (is that how they spell it in DMC? There are, like, five variations) fight. For a while I forgot about the game, but I came back to it recently after rewatching the DMC3 video on IGN. After a lot of trial and error (And redundant interrogation of Azure), I figured out his pattern, beat him, and had to move on to try and pummel some marionettes and these weird marionette-ish things with burning spinny weapons. According to the little enemy list, they're called Fetishes. I found that funny, but a bit of a damper was put on that when I looked up "Fetish" on Dictionary.com.

Fetish (n) 1. An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices.

Why does the dictionary always have to rain on my parade?

Anyway, today I backtracked into the castle and ran around for a while, with the goal of finding the shotgun in mind. I came across it in the library, as my brother had told me (I don't know how he remembered that- he's never played it and I had only found it once before). I still didn't acknowledge that he helped me, though; I was on my way to that room anyway.

Or so he thinks.

And God damn, there is no possible way that somebody could look cooler using a shotgun than the way Dante does it. It's one-handed, and he holds it out in front of him as he sort of stands sideways, and he cocks it just with a flick of the wrist. So awesome. It's insanely helpful against the Fetishes.. I spent, like, ten minutes talking about how amazingly useful it is to nobody in particular.

And then I got through the Valley of Mist level in two tries. The Phantom-impersonators weren't tough enough.

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Journalism was a hundred times cooler today. Apparently, the principal came in earlier in the day and told the teacher that he was excited to see the first issue, and he would like to see it out by the end of September.

Which, of course, sent the teacher into a frantic must-get-it-done state. Today was all Newsletter, no Yearbook, and we all decided on what we would like to do in it. I said that I would like to do video game, television and music reviews, along with a possible editorial column. I ended up just getting video games, along with some kid I've never seen before, which isn't that bad. It gives me a good excuse to rent and play video games on schoolnights, after all.

For the first issue, we decided we would do two reviews (one per person), along with a Games-to-Look-Out-For sort of thing. I'm going to review Pikmin 2 (because I'm lazy like that), and Cesar (I think that was his name) decided on Street Racing Syndicate. We need to hammer out the details on the preview column, but that will be fixed easily.

We got that all done in five minutes, while everybody else was still barely. It turns out that the guy I'm working with has a friend who's also into games, and he mentioned Metal Gear Solid 3. A bit of awkward conversation soon followed, and a friend of a friend of mine joined in, and after a sudden stop in conversation I walked away and pretended to be busy doing other things.

With all this newsletter business going on, I'm afraid we won't get that much done on Yearbook. I'm going to suggest altrenating our focus every day (Monday Wednesday Friday one thing, Tuesday Thursday the other, then we switch the next week), but who knows what'll happen?

With the recent announcement of several good friends of mine coming into the class and the coolness of today's hour, I think I'm going to like this class more than I expected.

Oh, one last thing on that topic. Last night I threw together a preliminary rough draft of my yearbook cover pitch. Gaze in awe at the edgy simplicity that shall attract critical demographics such as punks, Goths, gangstas and the rest of the Cabbage Patch Family (Don't ask). It looks just about how I had envisioned it. The problem is filling in the title, plus it may be difficult to get the theme to be consistent throughout, considering the only other student who knows Adobe PageMaker is a girl straight out of rehab for an addiction to pink.

Edgy = bigger sales, dammit.

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Black Hawk Down has remained consistently good so far. I found myself not paying attention as I was reading for a minute during Gym, which is not a good sign, but I've remained focused. I don't want to waste any more time reading the book if it's not on Accelerated Reader, though (I want to read it, but I don't have time to be reading two complex novels at the same time). My English teacher has a lot of kids reading this book called "Go Ask Alice," which seems to be a book about some teenage girl that jumps into drugs.. It looks like it's sort of interesting. I may have to drop Black Hawk Down temporarily, at least until I can see if it can play a role in the complex, illogical tapestry that is this school's AR program.

Teh SillyCircus Day 25- Whoa, I have an excuse to buy Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas now. "But mom, it's for school!"
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