Dream of Waking

I’ve deleted like every category because now I’m using tags to mark crap, which in my opinion eliminates the need for categories entirely but WordPress insists on using them so I’ll play its little games. If you’re (god forbid) looking for something I’ve written in the past, the search box would be way more help than tags or categories right now.

They have too much money. They can’t afford not to suck. … And Justice For All was their magnum opus, the black album was overrated, they chopped off all their hair, and started to cater to the radio crowd. I downloaded … And Justice For All and I’ll never buy another copy (I did own one at one point) and I don’t owe Lars Ulrich anything, he can just die.

Money ruins everything.

I’m not coming to Springfield this weekend. It sucks. I have the time off to come but my brakes are kind of screwed up and the cost to get them fixed will negate any money we could spend to make the trip.

In other not so depressing news, I’ve re-listed the site for Google. I mean, why not?

Why in god’s name does the local cab company have a myspace? More importantly, why does it want to be my friend?

It’s impossible for me to say anything about this but the boss fight against Krauser in Resident Evil 4 is easily the best one so far. It demands that I go find the Resident Evil 4 action figures so I can get Leon and Krauser and have a permanent tribute to their standoff.

That is all.

I’m back on Resident Evil 4. Getting to the end now. Now that I’ve shot enough cultists I got to go back to shooting what I’ve affectionately nicknamed the villagers; duders. Actually, every enemy in the game is a “duder”. I can’t explain why every thing in this game that’s out to kill me is a duder but they are. All duders. Resident Evil 4 could’ve also been titled “Animal Crossing: Duder Edition” as I’m killing duders for points and selling my points to some guy (not unlike Tom Nook) for more guns and stuff for my guns, where the game also becomes “pimp my guns”. The more I play it the more I want to play the original Resident Evil remake for gamecube that would just remind me how goddamn impossible that game is and how much better Resident Evil 4 is.

It also brings up a painful question; where’s Resident Evil 5? Where’s any Resident Evil spinoff using the Resident Evil 4 gameplay? 4 has been out for quite a while now. I’d expect something out of Capcom by now. Surely they couldn’t have spent all their time doing the PS2 port. I’ve heard a lot of good things for Dead Rising but that’s an Xbox 360 title with no plans for any other releases. Here’s hoping we can get at least one more solid action title out of Capcom before they’re totally focused on tomorrow.

Why does it take so much paperwork to get the free laser eye surgery that the Army owes me? Why can’t I just walk up to the clinic, tell them I’m blind, and let them put the pewpew in my eyes and give me pain pills and send me away?

After two weeks I finally got the signature I needed to really get the ball rolling on this laser surgery. Two weeks. For one guy to sign one piece of paper. This same piece of paper had to go through at least two other people as well, I couldn’t just take it straight to the person, I had to give it to one guy to give to another guy who maybe gave it to somebody else to approach this person to sign my paper. Maybe I have no fear of rank or maybe it’s because I know the guy who signed it knows who I am but it would’ve been really easier if I threw protocol out the window and just asked the guy to sign it myself.

I get my paper back yesterday. It’s actually part of a two page packet, the first page being signatures and the second page being medical clearances. I fill out the little portion of page two that I’m allowed to fill out and wait until today to get another portion filled out by a doctor. You see the medical clinic doesn’t work past 11am if it’s not an emergency. I couldn’t take it to them after lunch when I picked the paperwork up.

I get there, the receptionist tells me I need to get my medical records first. It’s a desk across the hall, no big deal. Wait for my records, then go back to get told to have a seat. Sit around, watch some CNN, apparently Pluto is not a planet and everything I know about astronomy is a lie and the morning after pill is called Plan B. I think that’s the pharmaceutical companies’ tip of the hat to Chris. Then the doctor will see me. Except he’s more or less a physician’s assistant and not a full blown doctor but that’s okay, he’s just asking me ridiculous questions such as “do you have a history of lupus?”. I don’t even know what lupus is, no.

I’m done there and now I can go to optometry but oh god, optometry doesn’t work on Thursdays. At all. I can’t make an appointment, can’t get my little blocks checked, nothing. I have to come back tomorrow between 6:30am and 9:00am. So now I’m waiting again. Optometry (rightfully) takes up half of that page of blocks that need checked so hopefully they can get that all taken care of tomorrow and I can get a date set. I’m somewhat nervous about getting my eyes lasered, not because of the risk of blindness but because it sounds like I’ll have a really crappy couple of days following it. I’ve been asking everyone I know who’s had it for horror stories so I know what I’m getting into but the upside is that after a couple days of misery I’ll be able to see again without contacts or glasses or any of that crap.

I’ve added some links. They’re on the right. Under the old-ass pictures.

I’d up some more pictures to Flickr but Katie has commandeered my camera and I find putting more Iraq pictures up there rather depressing.

Oh jesus, Katie just found the quacking hand puppet.

For whatever reason, I really like this picture. Does this make me some kind of enormous perv?

I’m back to dreading Mondays already. It’s not that I really have a whole lot to do, it’s just that I have to wake up early in the morning and get dressed and in uniform and whatnot. It’s a pain. I’m looking forward to everyone else coming home because I know that’ll bring a ton of four-day weekends and three-day work weeks.

So what did I do this weekend? Katie and I planned on going to see Clerks 2 but it’s already out of our local theaters and something tells me the post theater won’t be showing it. Saturday night she punished me with The Nun. Here’s a three word review of The Nun; The Nun sucks.

I took Chester for a walk at around 11pm that night too and he always loves to run back to the house after he’s taken a big dump so we’re running home and I step in something like a gopher hole right in front of where the grass turns into concrete and end up tearing up my right knee and scraping up my right palm again. When I get inside I asked Katie to get Chester his cookie (he always gets a cookie for taking a dump) and I try to clean off the scrapes and we have no hydrogen peroxide. We had some but Katie used it all to clean up some paint while I was gone. So we made a not-so-emergency trip to Wal-Mart to get more first-aid items. Of course we had to make a stop at the cheap DVD bin and Katie found a couple movies and I found Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier and we chastised at ourselves for buying more movies.

Today Katie took me and Chester to the park. We didn’t do a whole lot of walking because my knee hurt but it was nice. I watched some X-Files season one while Katie made pizza for dinner. Court TV was showing a healthy amount of Cops and Katie stopped me from eating a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

Ahh how I missed weekends.

I’m not hardly playing anything right now. I’m bouncing around. Can’t decide what I want to really play so I’ve fallen back on an old standy, Super Metroid.

Work is boring, blah blah blah. Does anyone really care?

My birthday is in two and a half weeks. So far the only plans are to watch the entire extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in one sitting. One movie after another. Unless someone can come up with something better, that’s all I’ve got.

Who’s the fucking man? I’m the fucking man.

Katie’s playing the Mercenaries minigame for RE4. She keeps dying. I’m being my supportive self and laughing at her. It’s always the chainsaw guys getting her. So she says “fine, if you think you’re so good, you play it!” So I take the controller and get to work. I start off in a corner and Katie tells me to stay there and let the zombies come to me. That’s not the way I roll. I run up and start pistol-ing every zombie in sight. Anyone can do this. Then the chainsaws start revving up. One starts running at me. Katie’s yelling at me to run. That’s not how I roll either. I’m standing my ground, giving him shotgun blasts to the face and he dies. She’s like “you are so lucky, you should’ve died”. I don’t think so. Why not? Because I’m the fucking man. It’s not long after that I hear another chainsaw. I find the guy on a roof and run up right behind him. Katie’s yelling “what the fuck are you doing!? You don’t run up on chainsaw guys!” but I do and I shoot him in the back repeatedly and he dies. He dies because I’m the fucking man. There were no more chainsaw guys after that so the rest of my time was spent collecting time-boosts and scoring more points. I end up with something like 67,000. A five-star score.

There’s a reason I got a score like that. It’s because I’m the fucking man.

So I got some uh games since I got home. My travel voucher settled and it was like a bonus paycheck so Katie and I put nearly all of it in savings and gave ourselves double allowances. I spent mine on games. Some might say that buying more games even though I already have plenty of games to play might be a waste. Well screw you! I don’t care! I spent a painful amount of time tracking down Drakengard 2 and ended up getting Shadow of the Colossus and Xenosaga 2 along the way. Now I’m trying to go back and beat some of the other games I’ve started and near-completed and it’s harder to do than I imagined. There’s a reason why I stop playing these games usually.

Like Halo 2. I hate to say it. I’m getting bored of Halo. I’ve played too much and the end of Halo 2 is no different than the beginning.

Breakdown is another I might not finish. There’s lots of jumping now and it’s a pain and then they put you up against some ridiculous combinations of bad guys with no extra ammo for the big guns.

Metal Gear Solid 2 just plain sucks as Raiden. Or maybe I liked the game better on PSX when the enemies were dumber and the way the game worked was more easily exploited.

King Kong on xbox isn’t an old one and I might actually beat it. It’s like a first person adventure in that there’s no stats or heads-up display and it’s kind of hard to die.

Even though I bought Xenosaga 2, I’ll probably never finish Xenosaga 1. I’m stuck on some ridiculous boss with no save point anywhere near it. It’s an enormous pain in my nuts.

Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders requires entirely too much strategy for a Dynasty Warriors clone.

And finally, I started and will finish Resident Evil 4. Believe the hype, kids. It really is the best of the series. And there’s nothing better than turning it into Animal Crossing by shooting birds and fish for points to upgrade your weapons. And horrifying Katie by shooting the cow but Edd says the cow will kick you so I was just preemptively stopping it!

Katie made me start Resident Evil 4. I’m at the enormous fish. It eats me.

Since Katie got a Blockbuster Online subscription, we’ve been watching a bunch of movies. We watched Aeon Flux Sunday night. It was much better than I was expecting. Every review seems to have trashed it. I thought it was a decent action/sci-fi if it was much blander than the animated series. According to Wikipedia Peter Chung did an interview for a livejournal fan group and said he was ashamed and humiliated by the movie. I didn’t think it was that bad.

Last night was Scary Movie 3. Good god that was bad. It took itself entirely too seriously and spent way too much time on plot rather than stupid laughs which made the first one so funny. I’d already heard all kinds of negativity to this one too so I was by no means disappointed. I was expecting crap and that’s what I got; crap.

Totally un-Blockbustered, I watched Rahxephon: The Motion Picture tonight. I loved the series and wanted a refresher since I’ve got other anime I need to watch before I can think about rewatching the entire seven volume series. The movie just emphasizes that it’s impossible to condense so much into a two hour movie. Rahxephon is more or less a giant robot series with a love story tied in as a subplot. The movie instead focuses on the love story. Okay, it gets straight to the point on the main plot of the movie (the part involving the giant robot) and it has to to fit within the two hours, but it skips a lot of what I enjoyed of the series; the goddamn giant robot! It ends up being a lot of talking heads, some robot fighting, a lot more talking heads, and a conclusion. So now I’d have rather I started on watching the series over again and gotten two hours into it than have wasted my time with the movie.

Best Buy was having an insane movie sale so we picked up V for Vendetta (not a part of the insane movie sale but released today), Van Helsing (probably crap, but only $4), Men in Black, The Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Mission Impossible, and Target had the special edition of American Psycho on sale. It was so much that we had to move my video games to make room for the new movies and future new movies.

I had a followup eye exam today. Apparently I have an astigmatism in my left eye and the contact the doctor gave me wasn’t strong enough. After he’d gotten the prescription right he asked to dilate my pupils so he could examine more of the surface inside my eyes. He told me the sideffects to that would be I’d be sensitive to sunlight and unable to read for four hours. Seeing how I had Katie to drive me, my sunglasses in hand, and no work for the rest of the day I figured today would be as good a time as any and agreed. He put some drops in my eyes and told me to wait around for 15 minutes. I played some Rebelstar Tactical Command on my DS for a while but then I failed the mission and once I’d turned it off I was at the “can’t read” point so I sat there. Katie showed up and I explained to her why I was still in the lobby and then the doctor was ready to check my eyes. After an excruciatingly long time of having bright lights in my eyes he was finished.

Katie and I are leaving and the sun is overpowering my sunglasses. I bascially held Katie’s arm and stumbled blindly to the car. I guess he wasn’t joking about the sensitivity to sunlight either. So now I’m unable to see things close to me, blinded by sunlight, and my vision is half-screwy due to my weak left contact. When we got home I figured then was as good of time as any to take a nap. When I woke up I could see close things a lot better and I wasn’t as sensitive to the sun but I was still looking like I’d been licking frogs.

This just serves as more or less of a warning to anyone with crappy vision whose doctor recommends getting their pupils dilated: just say no unless you’ve got the rest of the day off. It really sucks.