John Zeitler

Tired now, so no writing was done and no post of any kind of quality. Sorry.

I realize that I’ve been coasting along, phoning in pretty much all of my content and posts since, oh, 2007. I’m making an effort in 2010 to not have another bad year in terms of stuff for you folks to read. But for the interim, while I’m recovering from crunch mode and getting Frangible Time together, please bear with the inanity for just a little while longer.

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.

…yeah, so I was playing Rock Band all day. And putting together the last 40K figure I needed to for next week’s tournament thingy. All things considered, though, I came down with a severe case of writer’s block, and as a result I decided it was probably for the best if I just let the writing go for one day– and one day alone. This next week I am firmly committing myself to writing after work, no matter what. It’s a good thing that I don’t have any obligations after work this week either– my Japanese class ended last week, and I don’t think there’s anything else going on beyond the normal stuff.

Wish me luck, folks.

Nothing going on right now, folks. Today was uneventful and I’m too tired to go into too much depth of the game and anime news right now– let’s count on a big post tomorrow.

Today was another good slack-much-and-game day, wherein I managed to fill out an achievement in Rock Band 2 that I’d been working on for a while. It was, of course, the “play one set in every venue” milestone, which is made difficult by the fact that after a certain point, the fastest gigs available in some venues are four-song slugfests. No problem; I just made a list, checked it off as I went, and got the 30 points this evening as I kept my eye on the Steelers game.

Now, after that point, I noticed that my band’s fans total was teetering precariously close to the one million mark. There’s an achievement for that, too, so I went ahead and blew through a couple quick sets to put myself over the edge. Nothing happened. I went ahead and tried everything else I could to force the thing to trigger, including playing on Hard and on Expert (I wussed out on that one by playing vocals on two Beastie Boys songs– rap doesn’t care much about your pitch). Still no “plink”. I went ahead and looked online, even posting in the Harmonix forums.

It was only once I read through the other people’s posts on how to trigger it that all became clear: I had in fact already got the achievement, last October. It triggers when you play in a band that has over a million fans. Not necessarily your own. Which means that by playing online, I managed to set myself up for a ludicrous amount of frustration a year in advance.

I don’t need anyone else to drive me insane. I can find my way there just fine by myself.

I’m not ready to make a blog post about The Beatles Rock Band yet. Tomorrow.

In what shouldn’t surprise anyone, I’m up too late and I have no post for you yet. Still, it was a stressful day. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. Come to think of it, there’s no “hopefully” about it– tomorrow will be better, if only by default.

Sorry, folks. I have an early morning tomorrow and had a very, VERY long day today. This week is pretty much shot, just for the record, so I’m going to just call this a mini-hiatus and get back to you all on Monday. Sound good?

…I didn’t exactly get my brain back into full gear today. However, I do have enough presence of mind to dig up an AMV as bailout. This doesn’t excuse me, but… yeah.

On a completely unrelated note: if you have a 360 and liked Metroid, then you probably want to give Shadow Complex a try.

I tend to take a rather dim view of my capabilities and general handiness. If a task requiring any amount of physical exertion says it normally takes an hour, I’ll schedule three for it. On occasion I’ll surprise myself and finish the project in a reasonable amount of time.

And then there are times when, once I finish more or less everything without a hitch, I manage to spill an ENTIRE CONTAINER of jelly beans while MOVING A BOX.