Brian Atene

Hey, the real Brian Atene finally showed up (as opposed to that prankster who had been pretending to be a grown-up Atene). He looks great, is funny, and is using his Internet Fame (based on a jawdropping 1983 audition tape that someone found and promptly youtubed several weeks ago) to encourage charitable donations to the Christopher Reeve foundation. He kinda reminds me of some of my more manic real-life friends, actually. I'm glad that crazy kid grew up into someone worth knowing. (Link from urbaniak.)

Feh

Sorry if you had to read my temper tantrum about Okami earlier. It ended up being an unfortunately misclued puzzle, such that it really looked like I was doing the right thing and it wasn't working. As it happens, the game assumed that I knew exactly what to do because I'd gone through simpler iterations of the same puzzle earlier, but managed to totally miss one of the solutions' key attributes out of sheer luck. (To not give too much away, the solution is a function of time and position, but I ignored the time attribute. The solution was simple enough to let me blundered through anyway, out of happenstance.)

So when I was failing to pick up on it today, my in-game buddy just kept saying "Don't you remember what you did last time?" and I was like "Yes! And it's not working!! Argh!!!" After cooling my head a bit the solution came to me and I got through.

Meanwhile, the game continues to be absurdly large, and I had maybe one of the most delightful video game boss fights I've ever had, even though it wasn't particularly difficult. (An earlier fight in the same game also qualifies.) This is all I've done today. Now I'm going to go see a movie. Bye bye.