John Zeitler

Perhaps it’s a side-effect of the whole early rising thing that I do, or perhaps it’s because I just happen to pick series that, if they were any more potent, would have big ol’ warning labels on them about not using them while operating heavy machinery, but I’ve been struggling to get through more than two or three episodes of this current anime before falling asleep. There’s just something very comforting and relaxing about, well, comfort and relaxation.

Come to think of it, it would be a bad idea to use pretty much any DVD while driving. I think I need to do more research on this. The anime-sleepiness thing. Not driving while watching anime. I could really only do that once anyway, and I likely wouldn’t be able to write down coherent notes afterwards.

I’ll keep this short because I’m still a little unsteady– I’m surprised that I had the focus to finish CS just now. Anyway, I mentioned a while back that I was sick, right? Well, colds for me always seem to go in a fairly predictable cycle. I have the first inklings that something’s wrong when my throat feels scratchy. Then my sinuses flood with cement for a few days and I have fever dreams that would make George Romero wet his pants and cry for his mommy. After I bury myself in every blanket I own to break the fever, I then have one more day where I’m not entirely sure I’m over it or not as my nose becomes a snot faucet. That night, just to be safe, I stay under all those blankets and roast to death instead of sleep as the infection resurfaces in my chest, now causing me to hack and cough whenever I try to breathe through the only unobstructed airway I have left. After a day or so of this wonderful experience I’m usually back on my feet.

Today was, fortunately, that last bit. I was kind of hoping not to have to miss work, but then again it couldn’t be helped. In any event, tonight should be fine and tomorrow should be better.

Oh, as a final little coda: I found out last night that Video games New York is going to be at Tekkoshocon this year, meaning I may be able to snag one or two of the last few ridiculously-elusive games on my list, or more likely pick up something new and interesting to play. As always, we shall see.

I lied, yesterday, when I said I’d have FF13 thoughts. Today was busy, and apparently I hadn’t quite beaten all of the whatever-pestilence-Grandfather-Nurgle-’blessed’-me-with, which means that in about an hour I’m going to take some NyQuil and time-travel to tomorrow morning. But I can talk a little bit about the game I played last night… a pretty basic 1400-point Space Marine on Space Marine battle. Nothing particularly interesting in and of itself; we played a scenario from the Battle Missions book (which I did wind up picking up last night, too– more on that in a bit). Of course, I lost, but I learned a lot more about the metagame and how other things work. I tried to analyze what I did wrong beyond “rolling poorly” and in the end I was pretty much able to identify my mistakes almost as soon as I made them. Didn’t help me all that much in the immediate, but I now have a far better understanding of what sorts of mechanics work in my favor and what don’t.

I then spent today, in between errands, putting together the last of the infantry for my highly-mechanized Imperial Guard army, which will play radically different from the Marines. At the very least my vehicles should last longer than the first turn.

I recently had occasion to deal with someone who believed that, just because I happened to be looking for a job currently, I had all the free time in the world to do, well, pretty much anything I wanted. Naturally, between the three trips out I had to make today, some cleaning that I’d been putting off, and phone calls from a dozen different administrative tasks left hanging after last week, this obviously isn’t the case for me. More to the point, it’s caused me to a) revert to college-bachelor cooking (ie instant mashed potatoes mixed with tuna and some leftover shredded mozzarella), and b) made me so tired that even though I’m getting up later in the morning (read: 6:30a instead of 4a), I’m dead on my feet here at 9:30p.

I understand it’s gonna take time to adjust my sleep schedule, but dammit, this is just not fair to me right now, because now is when I have the ambition to do all this cool stuff.

So, yeah… I got sick. Like, seriously sick. The kind of sick that begins with coming to on the kitchen floor and ends with three nights doing nothing but huddling in bed waiting for the NyQuil to knock me out.

I’m better now, of course. But the writing has kind of stalled. Um, completely. So that’s my big plan for the next few nights, at any rate– to get back into working on the book. Tomorrow I should have an update on where I’m at with that.

Later, folks. Don’t catch what caught me.

Self Aware Games: “Make up a word that describes Word Ace. Can’t be a real word.”
Me: “QUYZYXY. Not only is it pronounceable and has a quasi-sensical answer (‘possessing the quality of quyzyx’), it is also the single highest-scoring pronounceable word in the game (10+1+4+8+4+8+4, bonus 2+5+20 = 66 points) and stays within the letter distribution (uses all three Ys, the single Z, X, and Q, and one of the four Us).”
Rest of the Internet: “You’re a damn nerd.”
Me: *sobs in agreement*

I would love to say that today was normal, but when I didn’t get home until 12:45a last night and didn’t get to bed until almost 2a, one could easily say that I needed the rest. So I did.

Catch you folks tomorrow; hopefully the world will go easy on m– sorry, I really thought I could get through that sentence with a straight face.

The weekend is starting off in a good way. I had a fun time at an extra Smash session, then had a chat with Rick for a while. And now I’m off to bed, with nowhere to go in the morning. I can dig this.

(Yes, I know the lyric is actually “Situation: no win.” It just makes more sense as it’s misheard for the context… plus, it’s too peppy of a song to have such a depressing phrase as “no win”.)

This weekend has been… let’s not talk about it. It’s been frustrating. However, I’ve found the source of the trouble. See, every time I’ve needed something to happen, I’ve used the phrase “With any luck…”, forgetting one very important point.

My luck is, traditionally, horrible.

I would love to tell of the festivities partaken of over this past weekend. I would tell of grand adventures, heartfelt conversations, and an epic quest not soon to be forgotten.

But a) I’m really, really tired still and b) getting to the merrymaking was a journey through several levels of Hell.

On the bright side, I did get a lot of reading done. So there’s that.