I was able to double my "employment of time in a frivolous and non-practical way" today... with technology!

So I was listening to FF7 Lifestream, which led to listening to the FF8 soundtrack which led to looking it up and reading other people bashing it. Because it's terrible. But thereupon I came to a curious site with a curious postulation: that the monsters toughness was directly proportional to the level of all three party members. And so, if these party members were killed off and Squall was forced to tackle the entire game alone, he would seem to be much stronger then he was in actual practice because his two dead party members would drag down the average, granting him extremely weak monsters. 

Intrigued, I also recalled the person that beat FF1 with only a white mage and decided I would take up the challenge, and beat FF8 without benefit of my other two party members. So far in the ~7 hours I played today I died only once, and it was my own darn fault for being so cocky. So it served me right. The game is actually much better now that I am "meta-gaming" it rather then trying to play it seriously. I get all the GFs, all the magic, the two corpses I drag around with me merely a reminder of my holy mission. Ok, the game still isn't great, but it's going to be fun seeing how far I can go. Will I go all the way? To TIME KOOOOMPRESSION? It was also helped along that was I was only giving it a quarter of my attention, the rest going to the episodes of Supernatural Sean loaned me. 

This all was helped by technology because I knew I couldn't play a playstation game on an 79" screen via my projector. It's 640x480 resolution for crying out loud. But similarly I didn't want to play it in the basement, on the only analog TV in the house. So I recalled an old Carbon program that allowed me to just display video from a Firewire video adapter rather then using the whole iMovie window. I found a suitable replacement, and away we went. It looked not terribly crappy, and I got to see both windows side by side on my monitor. 

So ripping a DVD, playing a movie, and displaying playstation video content all in real time. I'd like to see a PC try that.

 

So that was my day today. Got some calls over the weekend, so I have two jobs over the next two days each. So I made them this evening.

 

Saturday was about what I expected. The far away job turned out to be "yeah, your proxy setting was on. Anything else?" But I took off his expired Norton (yay!) and at least made it look like I was doing some stuff so I could stay for 15 minutes, and get paid for half an hour, then drive 40+ minutes BACK. Yehaw! 

 

The other two were just cleanouts, as normal, nothing too fancy.

 

We finished the current story arc in the game, which was good. Thanks to good old Albert, actually. I've thought about it, and being offered any Demongate high power in real life, Alchemist is the way to go. I mean, who wouldn't want to work on creating transparent aluminum, live forever, be able to turn something into something else or reshape matter and people around you? They can make potions to cure any disease, or feed a person for a day with a single sip of water. Oh sure, firing off energy blasts or being an ESPer (a very, very close second) would be nice, but in terms of being useful, Alchemy every time. See, none of us could hit the guy, and then we had to go make a bunch of clones of himself so Albert just started turning them into rabbits. Because it wasn't an attack, which he was dodging automatically thanks to his funky armor, it got through and the battle was won. Only took us almost four hours. So we got to learn some stuff about him, and who he worked for, providing another piece to the puzzle of what's going on. 

 

Pieces so far:

Holy Chosen being asked to sacrifice themselves to "bring back" the All Father?

Naga queen wanting the book that can answer any question.

Mysterious woman who can command the dead back to life, who wanted the Mana Tree destroyed. 

Chaos lords from before creation poking their heads into our reality, firstly though cafeteria food and then Juno's pregnancy.

Spirit Hunter Society insisting on a "tournament".

The disappearance of Rosalie.

Odd effects at the Great Wall of China

 

There doesn't seem to be a common thread, but maybe we're still missing too many pieces.