Real life, but mostly videogames
I literally just spent the entire day playing FF13-2. I haven't had that kind of glorious gaming binge in years. And I'm still only maybe 30% of the way through! Although I am perilously close to maxing out all the skills in the Crystarium, which might be why battles have been way too easy recently.
I get all weepy and fangirly over Hope every time he is so much as mentioned. I just want to say - everyone else in the cast of FF13 , you are all horrible, horrible friends. (But I guess it doesn't matter because Hope is badass enough to practically single-handedly change the course of history whenever Serah tells him to. Sure, Serah and Noel deserve some credit, but really, who is doing the hard yards there?)
Also, that Caius wears purple and shared Kain's voice actor is doing weird things to my brain. He's the best damn villain FF has seen since Sephiroth, though, and has the music to prove it.
I have been doing things other than just drowning myself in Final Fantasy, of course! I've also been playing Virtue's Last Reward , and that game is off the hook awesome . It's basically a novel game version of the prisoner's dilemma combined with the room escape genre! It has Liar Game vibes, and conspiracy, and betrayal, and a dude in a robot suit with amnesia, and a psycho AI killer rabbit, and and and I actually shouldn't really say anything more than that lest I spoil it for people. I'm actually only fairly early in myself though, since, you know, Final Fantasy. And as a bonus, all Japanese voices! Just as well, I hate to imagine what localisation would have done with Zero-III.
In other non-video game news, I've been watching a lot of movies - specifically Wreck It Ralph, Rise of the Guardians, The Hobbit, and Les Miserables which were all excellent movies in their own right and I recommend them to everyone. Have to try and cram in Life of Pi sometime over the next week or two as well, though I still struggle to comprehend how that book can make the jump to the screen. I hope they don't spend the first third of the movie on his childhood spirituality like they did in the book, also.
I've been working on cosplay things for an upcoming convention, and am horribly behind schedule because Final Fantasy. I will probably make a separate progress post on that in a few days. Also friends from overseas have been popping up like mushrooms and I've been more social in the past month than I sometimes manage in an entire year. It is frankly exhausting!
It has involved some trips to the arcade though, where I discovered that this is a real thing and it is glorious:
Also a visit to the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, which has improved vastly since my last trip there some five years ago (just after it opened.) Now it's actually pretty cool! I have long forgotten anything I used to know about non-commercial art, but my general barometer of 'is it any good' is linked more less directly to 'how much effort must that have taken to make', and I was pleased.
This slightly blurry photo cannot do justice to the incredible detail and sparkiliness of this massive piece. There was a set of three murals (surprisingly violent) and they were all incredible.
This was literall thousands f tiny blown-glass figurines of animals arranged in migratory pattern.
This piece reminded me of the Magical Kingdom of Zeal from Chrono Trigger, but I don't really know why because it's nothing like that at all.
This piece was just nuts because viewing it from the doorway it looked like a 2D painting on the wall. It wasn't until you approached it that you realised it was actually a physical object!
This is the big expensive million-dollar statue GoMA got for their fifth birthday. Not pictured is the tiny water rat on the other side giving the sideways elephant stink-eye. A million dollars sounds like a lot, but I'd say it's money well-spent compared to Perth' million-dollar sculpture. Plus the kids love climbing on it, it was actually impossible to get a shot without some kid climbing all over it.
Went up to Mt Coot-tha for the first time since my brother's wedding too, also went on a rather boring hike around the 'mountain' trails that was one of the more boring hikes I've been on in my life. The view of the city from the lookout was great, though.
Also found a cool new Japanese restaurant in the ritzy part of the Valley, too. It was on the pricier side, but good food in Brisbane often is. Their mini-okonomiyaki was to die for, though.
One thing Brisbane does have going for it in the food department is that there are a lot of very, very good Japanese restaurants. When someone decides that we want to eat Japanese for lunch or dinner or whatever, it's really difficult to choose which one to go to!
Christmas also happened somewhere in the middle of all that. My folks wound up staying at my place since my flatmate was out of town visiting her family and since it's a small town of course my folks knew about it and could lean on me to provide accommodation. The fun part though was that my mother didn't start her Christmas shopping until about three days before Christmas, and since they spoil the grandkids rotten, she was wrapping presents for most of Christmas Eve. I felt sorry for my nephew-in-law, though, since he got a truly awful and boring present from them (a water bottle and lunch box). I sought to soothe his disappointment by wrapping his present in such a way that it pre-disappointed him. Surely a lunchbox is an awesome consolation prize for a seventeen-year-old boy after thinking you're getting a giant toy duck?
It is also tennis season right now, and so exciting! I will no doubt be posting on that soon too. January used to be an awful month of the year for me, but it has become so jam-packed in recent years! Seriously, life needs to slow down a little!
P.S. Anyone else getting weird problems with italics in LJ? Formatting seems to be eating random letters. :( Argh, back to editing in HTML again.
I get all weepy and fangirly over Hope every time he is so much as mentioned. I just want to say - everyone else in the cast of FF13 , you are all horrible, horrible friends. (But I guess it doesn't matter because Hope is badass enough to practically single-handedly change the course of history whenever Serah tells him to. Sure, Serah and Noel deserve some credit, but really, who is doing the hard yards there?)
Also, that Caius wears purple and shared Kain's voice actor is doing weird things to my brain. He's the best damn villain FF has seen since Sephiroth, though, and has the music to prove it.
I have been doing things other than just drowning myself in Final Fantasy, of course! I've also been playing Virtue's Last Reward , and that game is off the hook awesome . It's basically a novel game version of the prisoner's dilemma combined with the room escape genre! It has Liar Game vibes, and conspiracy, and betrayal, and a dude in a robot suit with amnesia, and a psycho AI killer rabbit, and and and I actually shouldn't really say anything more than that lest I spoil it for people. I'm actually only fairly early in myself though, since, you know, Final Fantasy. And as a bonus, all Japanese voices! Just as well, I hate to imagine what localisation would have done with Zero-III.
In other non-video game news, I've been watching a lot of movies - specifically Wreck It Ralph, Rise of the Guardians, The Hobbit, and Les Miserables which were all excellent movies in their own right and I recommend them to everyone. Have to try and cram in Life of Pi sometime over the next week or two as well, though I still struggle to comprehend how that book can make the jump to the screen. I hope they don't spend the first third of the movie on his childhood spirituality like they did in the book, also.
I've been working on cosplay things for an upcoming convention, and am horribly behind schedule because Final Fantasy. I will probably make a separate progress post on that in a few days. Also friends from overseas have been popping up like mushrooms and I've been more social in the past month than I sometimes manage in an entire year. It is frankly exhausting!
It has involved some trips to the arcade though, where I discovered that this is a real thing and it is glorious:
Also a visit to the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, which has improved vastly since my last trip there some five years ago (just after it opened.) Now it's actually pretty cool! I have long forgotten anything I used to know about non-commercial art, but my general barometer of 'is it any good' is linked more less directly to 'how much effort must that have taken to make', and I was pleased.
This slightly blurry photo cannot do justice to the incredible detail and sparkiliness of this massive piece. There was a set of three murals (surprisingly violent) and they were all incredible.
This was literall thousands f tiny blown-glass figurines of animals arranged in migratory pattern.
This piece reminded me of the Magical Kingdom of Zeal from Chrono Trigger, but I don't really know why because it's nothing like that at all.
This piece was just nuts because viewing it from the doorway it looked like a 2D painting on the wall. It wasn't until you approached it that you realised it was actually a physical object!
This is the big expensive million-dollar statue GoMA got for their fifth birthday. Not pictured is the tiny water rat on the other side giving the sideways elephant stink-eye. A million dollars sounds like a lot, but I'd say it's money well-spent compared to Perth' million-dollar sculpture. Plus the kids love climbing on it, it was actually impossible to get a shot without some kid climbing all over it.
Went up to Mt Coot-tha for the first time since my brother's wedding too, also went on a rather boring hike around the 'mountain' trails that was one of the more boring hikes I've been on in my life. The view of the city from the lookout was great, though.
Also found a cool new Japanese restaurant in the ritzy part of the Valley, too. It was on the pricier side, but good food in Brisbane often is. Their mini-okonomiyaki was to die for, though.
One thing Brisbane does have going for it in the food department is that there are a lot of very, very good Japanese restaurants. When someone decides that we want to eat Japanese for lunch or dinner or whatever, it's really difficult to choose which one to go to!
Christmas also happened somewhere in the middle of all that. My folks wound up staying at my place since my flatmate was out of town visiting her family and since it's a small town of course my folks knew about it and could lean on me to provide accommodation. The fun part though was that my mother didn't start her Christmas shopping until about three days before Christmas, and since they spoil the grandkids rotten, she was wrapping presents for most of Christmas Eve. I felt sorry for my nephew-in-law, though, since he got a truly awful and boring present from them (a water bottle and lunch box). I sought to soothe his disappointment by wrapping his present in such a way that it pre-disappointed him. Surely a lunchbox is an awesome consolation prize for a seventeen-year-old boy after thinking you're getting a giant toy duck?
It is also tennis season right now, and so exciting! I will no doubt be posting on that soon too. January used to be an awful month of the year for me, but it has become so jam-packed in recent years! Seriously, life needs to slow down a little!
P.S. Anyone else getting weird problems with italics in LJ? Formatting seems to be eating random letters. :( Argh, back to editing in HTML again.