January 2002
- 19 -
Slowly but surely
Azenera level
3 is done now. At least, it's done in the sense that you can
get through the level and do everything you're supposed to be able to do.
None of the Azenera levels will truly be done until I stop working on the
series for good, because the entire series is a work in progress and I'll
probably keep changing it around and adding stuff. I probably accidentally
left in some stupid bug in level 3 like a character saying the wrong thing
or a visibility toggler not working the right way, but I'll play through
it again and see if everything works. Maybe I'll put up a new version
while I'm at college by sending it to my family so they can get to the
server. I'll really try to get it done faster, because I can't keep
going at this rate and expect anyone to stick around and wait until the
whole thing is done. I should find some way to get motivated and
not be distracted all the time. Sometimes I wish I had some kind
of hyperfocus ability where I could spend most of the day editing and never
lose patience or not know what to do next.
It's almost time for me to go
back to college. Tomorrow's entry will be my last until I come back
and update during spring break and post the Big Huge February Update.
Want to know what classes I'm taking? I'm taking Japanese again,
even though it's getting really hard and I think my teachers know I'm not
doing as much as I should be. I'm taking another math class and another
computer science class for my computer science major, and I'm also taking
an environmental conservation class. I hope I do well in these classes,
especially Japanese, because it's going to take a hit from a lightning
bolt filled with fluency to bring me up to a reasonable level in that class.
Well, I've figured out most of
the changes I'm going to make to the structure of Azenera, and I'm now
almost done with level 3. I still have to put in some objects, set
some layer lighting, add some dialogue points and trigger sequences, and
I'm done with the close-fog swamp level. Level 4 will be a more dragon-oriented
level where you can really blast away at some enemy dragons, but you'll
also do plenty of exploring on foot. You'll also meet the new succubus
queen and find out more about your good friend Kalak, the death mage who
appears briefly in levels 2 and 3. I'm planning to add some kind
of weapon that's really weak, but it drains health from enemies and has
infinite durability, so you won't need to use healing items if you're skilled
with the weapon. This weapon will be in some kind of fortress where
you have to solve a puzzle or something in order to get it.
Last night I went and fixed the
fourth Japan Picture Page. If you saw it before, the page may have
scrolled horizontally instead of vertically. That's because I didn't
put the line break after every picture, and it looked normal in Netscape,
but Internet Explorer ignored the 600 unit width barrier of the table and
stretched it out. It should look better now.
I've been getting spammed by
people advertising porn sites lately, and I don't like it. I'm supposed
to be a sweet, innocent person untainted by the corrupt world around me
and sheltered from all the forbidden sins of the flesh, but the demonic
spammers still seek me out and try to steal my soul with their pornography.
Well, it's not going to work on me! You want to know why? Okay,
it's partly because the pornography these people advertise is probably
really poor quality stuff, or a virus, or some other scam, but mostly it's
because I have pledged to keep my soul clean from this kind of thing and
not lose my innocence so soon. But I'm still going to keep playing
violent video games, because those don't drain my soul so much in my opinion
because... um... well, I guess I can tell fantasy from reality, and they're
just so fun to play! This reminds me, I should at least try out Max
Payne and Perfect Dark before I leave for college again so I can see if
they work. I've been so caught up in Final Fantasy X that I've lost
track of time.
Today I have a few jokes to tell
you. Here's the first one. Why did the chicken cross the road?
The answer is two: one to screw in the light bulb, and the other to tell
the reporters about it! Ha ha ha! Okay, here's another joke.
A pirate walks into a law firm and says, "Serve me your finest sushi."
The receptionist looks at the lawyer and says, "We don't have any sushi
here." Then the pirate says, "Then why is that light on the ceiling
broken?" The receptionist says, "It's not broken. What are
you, crazy?" So then the pirate pulls out his saber and smashes the
light above him, and then he gives the receptionist this evil look and
growls, "I'm crazy like an elephant, because there's no money in the freezer!"
Wow, I am on a roll tonight! All right, all right, here's my last
joke. What's the difference between a mouse and a garmok? What's
a garmok, you say? Well, what's a garmok with YOU? Ha ha, I
am slapping my thigh as I write this, forcing me to type with only one
hand. Now I must type with my feet because these jokes are so funny
I wore out the first hand and am now slapping my thigh with the other hand
and I cannot stop because it is such a funny experience! If you don't
think so, then all I can say is that I guess you had to be there.
All right, enough with the filler
entries, it's time to get down and dirty as we discuss the circus that
is my life. I've been feeding my soul slowly but surely to Final
Fantasy X lately, and I've made some real progress. The good thing
about Final Fantasy X is that there's a real challenge to mastering the
game, and while I'm sure you can become so powerful that winning the game
normally is laughably easy, there are tons of really powerful monsters
in the arena who can give you a good fight rather than only one or two
powerful enemies like the Emerald and Ruby Weapons. So far I've gotten
5 of the maximum powered ultimate weapons. I still have to trudge
through the desert and find all the cactuars, and I haven't even leveled
up any of my blitzball players or practiced that part of the game that
much. Time to win the rest of Wakka's overdrives and then get the
Jupiter Sigil. There's no way I'll be able to do that before winter
break is over, so I'm not going to worry about blitzball for now.
I managed to beat the 200 lightning strikes challenge the first time I
attempted it, which was surprising to me since I don't usually have very
good reaction time. The chocobo race was really frustrating, and
I'm not even going to get started on the infernal butterfly game in the
forest, but the Mars and Moon Sigils were kind of easy to get because I
just had to capture some monsters and defeat my own aeons. It's amazing
how even though I said I was getting back to talking about reality in this
entry, it's mostly about a fantasy world in a video game. Well, it's
no different from people who live through movies, I guess, although watching
movies is probably not as tedious as pressing a button to dodge lightning
200 times, unless the movie is something like Battlefield Earth.
But then again, movie reviewers have to review boring and bad movies along
with the good ones, just like Final Fantasy X players have to endure the
butterfly game along with exploring new places and progressing with the
story. And just as the butterfly game eventually gets you one of
the items needed to power up the Spirit Lance, a viewing of Battlefield
Earth eventually gives you a greater understanding of how not to make a
movie, so the motivations of video game players and movie critics aren't
so separate after all. In fact, you could even say we're kindred
spirits walking the spectral plane of ethereal destiny together.
The word "personification" wasn't
always a real word. For example, it wasn't a real word back in 1000
BC, because the English language hadn't been invented yet. If you
went up to someone back then and said "personification" to them, they would
look at you funny, and then they would either stab you with an expertly
crafted sword or they would revere you as a god because you wore different
clothes and probably have a wristwatch which looks like magic to them,
those silly quaint people! But even when there was English, the word
"personification" didn't come around until a brave group of heroes decided
to make it. The heroes of legend saw the word "manifestation" as
a blight upon humanity, because the first three letters of the word indicated
that it was an antiquated artifact of a phallocentric culture that they
wanted to forget and leave behind as quickly as possible. So, they
sent up a howling wail to the night sky and made a sound which was overbearing
to the stodgy old language guardians, so the guardians wisely decided to
give in and let the heroes of legend have their way, or at least just part
of their way. And so the word "personification" was created because
of this effort, and although the brave ones did not succeed in making it
replace the word "manifestation" completely, and even though it's not a
true synonym for the original phallocentric word, the point is that it's
in common use by literary scholars to this day. Some people may view
this story as an example of politically correct thuggery getting in the
way of respectable tradition, but I see it as a story of how brave and
remarkable people, whose names I conveniently forget right now, managed
to change the face of language forever. Good night.
There's an old saying that goes,
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
This is a false statement, because words can hurt a lot, sometimes much
worse than sticks or stones. Take, for example, the case of Destructo,
the Giant Invincible Robot. Ever since that monstrosity started terrorizing
the big city of Ultropolis, the army tried everything short of nukes to
stop it. They fired bullet after bullet, artillery shell after artillery
shell, missile after missile, but nothing could even put a dent in Destructo's
armored exterior. But then, Destructo automatically self-destructed
after someone said the magic password. That password, my friends,
was "love." So you see, love can truly save the day, and words can
be much more powerful than sticks or stones or missiles. Good night.
I'm changing this entry because
I want to give you the latest report on my level series, Azenera.
I'm planning to add a spell called Sunflare, which is one of the only spells
that can destroy a ballista because it uses the poison effect. I
think it'll also work on armored enemies better than normal spells.
There's still the question of how I'll design level 5. It's going
to be a mountain and field combination level, like level 2, and I think
I'll have it so the first part is made up of three mountain ridges, one
which you fly across on Arokh and the others which you get to through caves
and can only explore on foot. Yes, slowly but surely, this level
series is coming together piece by piece.
Let me tell you a story.
I used to own a shop down in the small town of Cornerville, and we sold
salami by the hatful. One day we had this man who wanted to come
work for us. He looked really scraggly, his hair was all mussed up,
and he kept twitching around during the interview, and at first I was tempted
to reject him. But then I decided to take a chance and go against
my first impressions, so I hired him. Two days later, he burned down
the store and ran away. The moral of this story is that even though
this guy looked bad and actually turned out to be a psycho, there are probably
many other people who look different or bad but are actually good people,
and those are the people you should keep in mind rather than a single bad
seed. Um... stereotypes are bad, I guess. Good night.
Well, it's the 14th now and I
need to finish all my entries up to the 13th. I'm going to do my
new usual trick of dispensing my own personal brand of advice, so here
it is. Terrorism is bad, kids, so don't be a terrorist. This
has been The Sine Wave January 9, and this is your host Salix, signing
off. For the "day."
The links to the trip and field
study sections of this site don't have to be images, but I'm keeping them
like that because those are the most substantial part of this site, with
over 1000 files on the server. They're all in the same directory
because this server supports subdirectories just about as well as it supports
people trying to FTP in from Wisconsin. Anyway, I'm finally getting
around to cleaning up the archives list so it's smaller. As for the
games and stories, I'll keep them the way they are for now, with the descriptions
there, but I might move them to another page if the link list gets any
bigger.
Why do I still have most of these
links festering away at the edge of my web page, taking up space?
Nobody cares what sites I read, or in most of these cases, what I used
to read before they inexplicably withered away and died. I'll keep
the links here in this entry as a tribute, but I'll take them off the links
section. Goodbye The Sparrow's
Nest and Project 2501, which
were basically the same site. The owner of those sites was always
moving around and changing identities all the time, and as good as the
rants on those sites and the later ones were, I can't keep track of what
the latest "new" site is all the time so I just gave up. I'll keep
the Sparrow's Nest tribute around
but it's old and esoteric so it doesn't get full-time link status anymore.
I don't visit the Pretend K-Files
much, and it looks like posts are months apart there so it's too late for
me to join and do anything there anyway. The Dark
Café still seems to be thriving to some degree so I'll keep
that link in there for now, but it should know I've got my eye on it.
It looks like there are a bunch of Drakan forum members there too, so their
little secret hideout is secret no more! Wow, my Heretic II links
page is kind of pathetic, isn't it? I hardly ever go to those sites
anymore, or the Unreal Tournament ones either, and those are easy enough
to find on a search engine. In fact, everything besides my Drakan
levels, C++ Builder games, and rants and raves about Final Fantasy games
can be found everywhere else on the Internet, and the FF stuff isn't really
new and most of it has been said better elsewhere. Why do I even
run this site? Because it's there, I guess. I think now that
I have more than two years of archives, I'll tidy up the list of links
to those sometime.
Yuna's path on the Sphere Grid
is right next to the beginning of Rikku's path, separated only by a Level
2 Lock Sphere, so I went ahead and gave Yuna the Steal and Use abilities.
Add that to Rikku's abilities and the Mug ability I taught Kimahri, and
now I have three thieves in the group, so I can steal tons of items.
I've also started the arena stuff, and I've been facing a few monsters
there that are really out of my league. The worst so far is Earth
Eater, one of the "original" group monsters. It's immune to sensors
and probably most status effects too, and the first thing it did when I
fought it was inflict 50000 points of damage on my entire party with three
successive Megaton Punch attacks. And then there's Don Tonberry,
who counters all my attacks with an instant-killing Karma attack and kills
off all my aeons with Voodoo. How am I ever supposed to defeat all
these monsters? And when am I going to get more high-level lock spheres?
It was only because Kimahri could mug them from Biran and Yenke that I
ever got more than one Level 3 Lock Sphere. Maybe I should just get
to the Zanarkand Ruins already and get the airship so I can start capturing
more monsters.
If you go to bed early and wake
up early as well, you will become wiser and more fulfilled. I haven't
been doing that, so that explains most of the content on this site and
should be an even greater incentive for you to follow this particular piece
of advice.
Well, I've decided to give Kimahri
the first few elemental spells used by Lulu, and now I'm taking Rikku's
path in reverse until I reach Steal and Use, then I'll go over to the Reflect
and Dispel area and work my way back to Cure and Esuna, then if I have
time, I'll follow someone else's path. Maybe I'll have some other
characters learn Lancet too. I hope there's a way to get more Skill
Spheres or Special Spheres so I can activate more nodes and build up all
my characters more effectively. It's taking more and more AP to gain
sphere levels and I fear there may be a point where it will take days of
doing nothing but fighting the strongest monsters just to gain a single
level. I'll probably move on and beat the game before that point,
but it would be nice if every character had every node on the board activated.
I've reached the desert in FFX,
and I still can't decide what to do with Kimahri! I just realized
that the Japanese word for "decide" is very similar to the name Kimahri,
so maybe having a choice of paths for that character was intentional, and
the name was a clever play on words. Very funny, Squaresoft!
Kimahri is now up to 30 sphere levels! I think I will go the thief
and healer route, because now that Tidus knows Slowga and can give me more
turns in battle, it would be nice to be able to steal items with more than
one character since I need those items to customize weapons and give the
aeons their abilities, and I like to have a few around to use in case I
need them. I got a Level 2 lock sphere so now I can have Kimahri
do Yuna's path in reverse, starting with the place that has Reflect and
Dispel.
Intolerance stems from having
a low difference threshold, and therefore more difference catalysts that
lead to a fear response. You are only able to be civilized and peaceful
as long as the unfamiliarity of the sum of everything you sense is below
your personal threshold, but there is only so much difference from what
you are used to that you can take before you lash out and become violent
or scared. Everyone has their own threshold, and this is evident
in society. Truly enlightened people have a high threshold for difference
and are able to adapt and become accustomed to great changes and differences
in life. Bigots, gang members, and the like have an extremely low
difference threshold because they are only willing to be peaceful and tolerant
within their own small groups, and they hate everyone else. Do not
think there are any groups that have no low-threshold members! Even
if your identity or preferences are different from those of most people,
and so you may fall outside the threshold of unenlightened members of the
majority, there are those among you who are used to people with the same
unconventional identity, but are unable to stand variation within that
identity, and there are those among you who would, even after seeing how
the unenlightened members of the majority have ostracized them, would turn
right back around and oppress the majority if given half a chance.
The reason I say that you are invariably a potentially violent, intolerant
human being is because nobody's personal threshold is infinitely high.
Everyone is stubborn in their own way. I believe one of the greatest
goals in life is to raise your threshold and be able to adapt to greater
difference than you are used to, because in the long run, change is always
inevitable. Learn where your difference threshold is, and work to
make it higher. But do not simply adapt and do nothing, for that
leads to inaction. Try to come to a better understanding of the world
around you, and base your actions on your best understanding.
Well, I've reached the Thunder
Plains in FFX and it looks like this game is the first Final Fantasy that
doesn't have a world map area, or at least doesn't have a way to get to
it in the first 15 hours of play. There is a map that shows the locations
of different places in the world, but I have never gone to an area where
you walk across a continent from one landmark to another like you do in
all previous games in the series. I wonder how the airship is going
to be handled in this game, or even if there is one. The chocobos
have only been used on one of the roads, and they don't yet seem to be
part of any major side quest. I've noticed that in the past, the
even-numbered Final Fantasies haven't done as much with the chocobos.
While FFIV did have you ride two kinds of chocobos and use one to store
items, FFVI only had you ride normal yellow chocobos, and in FFVIII, you
never saw a chocobo until later in the game and their side quest wasn't
as extensive as the ones in other games. On the other hand, Final
Fantasy V started out on a chocobo and had quests such as riding around
the world on one, FFVII had chocobo breeding and racing, and FFIX had treasure
hunting and finding new abilities. So far FFX has been fun, but it's
kind of linear and formulaic. You spend some time in a town, go to
a temple to solve sphere puzzles and get a new aeon, and then travel along
a road while fighting monsters to get to the next town. There are
some events to break the pattern a little, like Operation Mi'ihen and the
shoopuf ride, and maybe there'll be some major plot twist somewhere down
the line. I just can't decide what to do with Kimahri! It would
be nice to have another thief and item user in the group, but then again,
a thief wouldn't get much use out of the MP draining function of Lancet
whereas a mage or healer would. Tidus and Auron are already the best
warriors so I'm not going to send Kimahri down Tidus's path just yet.
Maybe I should wait until I get a level 2 lock sphere and then send Kimahri
down the first part of Rikku's path, then move on to the part of Yuna's
path where you can get Cura. But then what do I do? Do I get
Cure and Esuna, or do I go for Curaga? It would be good to have someone
else know Esuna, but then again, it would be good to have someone in addition
to Lulu know some elemental attack spells and I just don't know what to
do! Why couldn't Kimahri have a path of his own where you could learn
some dragoon skills, like Freya's commands from FFIX? It would be
useful to have a skill that casts Regen on everyone like Reis's Wind or
draw MP from an enemy like White Draw. I'll just keep Kimahri where
he is on the sphere grid for now and figure out something later, and I'll
send all the characters down their own paths before I do anything else
with them.
The year is now 2002 and it's
time to party like it's 2999. I'm playing through FFX, but it's going
slowly because my brother is always playing when I want to, and the game
system is right there where my family likes to gather all the time and
I'm afraid they'll laugh at the voices and the graphics. The graphics
are really good and the voices are good too, but my dad is always asking
questions without knowing anything about the gameplay or underlying story,
and my mom always makes comments whenever a character looks weird or interesting
to her. I'm also working a little on Azenera, and in a short amount
of time I fixed a few major problems just by changing one animation.
I found it very annoying how Rynn was always getting tripped up by a few
monsters. Scavengers would trip her with their long arms, wartoks
would knock her down with their axes, and the most annoying problem was
where giants would shake the ground and trip Rynn just before they died,
so they would fall right on top of Rynn and kill her and there was nothing
you could do about it except reload and try again or kill it with long-range
weapons. Another possible solution would be to use ice, but I had
to take out all the freeze effects because they messed up the death mage
generators. So, for the Hit Reaction FSH animation, I just replaced
the default one with a much shorter animation called kneelpickup01, and
it really works out well. Now you have time to roll out of the way
before you get squished by a giant.