Dream Smoke

Some games I finished since May, taken from my post in the UTAMA forums:

Finished Lux-Pain recently. Yes, I suffered through the whole thing in english. They really ruined what could have been a pretty good story experience, imo. The artwork, voice acting, and plot was pretty good. They could have had the decency to actually try translating the text properly rather than using Babelfish (which is what their finished product resembles).

Also finished playing through Trauma Team. That game is godly. I especially enjoyed the Diagnostics and Forensics modes. I've been keeping the game's soundtrack on loop~. I liked that the Diagnostics mode strongly reminded me of the things we learned LMP301, and I thought the new game modes was a pretty good success playing off the surgery from previous games.

Trying to play through Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days now, with a bit of Animal Crossing: City Folk.

Now some random Pokémon stuff, due to Pokemon BW hype.


Enough to make a Bonsly cry real tears.


Why is that so creepy. ;_; But Dragon/Poison sounds pretty cool.


All the Gen I-IV (+2 from Gen V) gather for a group photo. Very nice.

Chicken Under a Brick

Finally stopped being lazy and decided to update with a summary of the Florida trip. Despite there being thunderstorms for a variable amount of time each day, the trip was pretty amazing. It started off somewhat eventful - our trip with Air Transat (or rather, delegated to Canjet for Florida flights) was supposed to depart at 6:20am on Sunday May 30. This ultimately turned into a flight with Miami Air International departing at 8:45pm on the same day.

There weren't any major initial problems with the check-in and security. After spending lots of time waiting, either for customs to open up or in front of the gate, we boarded the plane and I was surprised at the plentiful room available. The plane was barely filled with passengers, and our seats were all along one of the emergency exit rows, which meant extra leg-room. The seats themselves were surprisingly comfy too. The plane then began taxiing down to the runway. After 5 minutes of movement, we found ourselves looping back to the airport gate, and due to "a malfunction with the steering equipment" we were forced to disembark the plane. The flight was delayed for another hour...then two hours...then... Yes, it was cancelled.

The flight that almost happened...

So close... Tempers flared among some other passengers when we were further forced to wait in confusion to reclaim our luggage. We were given the option to either have a taxi take us home, or if our residence was far enough away, get to stay at the hotel in Pearson. Luckily we managed to get the hotel option, and were given vouchers for lunch and dinner. Ended up being a pretty sweet deal. We mostly fell asleep in the hotel room between the meals at "Mahogany Grill". In the end, Miami Air International was recruited to save us from being stranded in Pearson, and we boarded a much less-impressive and significantly dustier plane to Orlando.

View from the Sheraton Gateway hotel room in Pearson.
After procuring a Chevy Impala from National, we drove to Summer Bay Resorts and settled in. Was quite late, so grocery shopping had to wait until the next day.


Chevy Impala, which probably has a higher top speed than an actual impala.
Now for a photo dump~

On the first day, after breakfast at Denny's (you could feed two Canadians a hearty breakfast in under $6 there) and grocery shopping at one of those ubiquitous Walmart superstores, we embarked to Animal Kingdom as the first theme park destination.


Animal Kingdom - because this was the only day of that week it opened until 8pm.


Stone structure in the middle of the lake may contain primates.


Statues spotted while moving ahead in the queue for Kali River Rapids.


The monk whose office we thoroughly trampled through in the queue for Expedition Everest will brb.


Flamingos really just don't care about the humans gawking at them on the Kilimanjaro Safari ride.


Mirrors, such as the one in the line for Primeval Whirl, are somewhat useful for self-taken group shots in lieu of a tripod.


Disney seemed to have changed the FastPass system so that now there is even a delay between getting FastPasses for different rides, greatly limiting their use. I'm not sure if it was like that the previous time I went. Later on that day, it was further reinforced how absolutely dirt cheap fast food is in the US after take-out from Chick-fil-a. Speaking of which, these two flow charts could possibly have been useful had I found them before the trip.

Throughout the trip when we didn't immediately collapse from exhaustion upon returning to the resort, we often indulged in some Dokapon Kingdom, a multiplayer game featuring a Mario Party-style game board with RPG elements. If you can properly recruit a bunch of friends to play this regularly, it quickly gets intensely addictive.


Dokapon Kingdom: the so-called "friendship-destroying game." Ironic, because it really requires a bunch of friends to play it regularly due to lack of online multiplayer and an unbalanced AI system.

EDIT: At this point I left the rest of the post for another day, which eventually became never. (natch) Instead I'll just post up the photos I had previously cropped here and you can visually guide yourself through the vacation without more of my dry narration!


Entrance to Epcot. Don't ever be fooled by the beautiful Florida skies and think that the weather will be nice for the next few hours. It lies.


Look it's that obligatory shot of Spaceship Earth when visiting Epcot!


A taste of Canada, as part of the International Showcase. Surely the tourists all recognize our iconic landmark, the CNChâteau Frontenac! ...Right?


Got to see a lot of those performances around the International Showcase, such as taiko drumming, belly dancing, and even a bar entertainer. (She was a real hit with some students from Iowa.)


It's Universal Studios! I don't remember why I took all these back shots.


The new roller coaster with a vertical drop. Unfortunately we didn't get to try it due to the risk of being electrocuted.


Visited Upham Beach, left with mild sunburn.


This infamous sign from Upham Beach. We dutifully abstained from clambering onto any groins of any kind while at the beach.


The new ride in MGM based on Toy Story. Line wait time was still over an hour, even though it was less than 30min to closing time. Disney attractions are serious business.


This picture is entitled "The Pole".


And of course, we rounded off the trip with Magic Kingdom to see the fireworks show. The fact that it was isolated from the rest of the attractions and accessed via a monorail ride led to insane lineups after the fireworks show.


Pirates descend upon the castle! Instead of shooting cannonballs and incendiary devices at the stronghold, they shot fireworks into the sky. It didn't work too well for them, but the tourists enjoyed it.

Schiggy

Whoa super blog redesign. Just switched over to the newer "layout" style for Blogger...something which I apparently neglected for a really long time. I actually tried to go back to see an older post and noticed there was no such link available to see previous posts. That's when I realized that I really should have tried to update the layout a long time ago. There's also way more room in the actual blog body now so I don't need to shrink/crop images so much just to post them here. Overall I'm pretty happy with this layout. It's a bit spartan, but at least it's easier to work with than before.

It's a bit sad to see that I have basically made the same number of posts in this blog over my undergrad stint as I did in grade 12 alone, but it seemed that I didn't really have too much motivation to post in the blog. In any case, I'll consider that finally revamping the blog makes up for some of that apathy. I think the fact that I even update at all is a testament to how I'm really using it as a sort of "public diary bank" to store random memories of mine in case I feel like perusing them again the future. In a silly recent happening, it seems I was getting quite a few hits to the blog via a post I made a while back due to the post title (now changed). I only noticed when the Photobucket-hosted images I placed in that post were gaining an unnaturally high number of views. Oh internet... you never cease to amaze me.

Finished with biomedical toxicology undergraduate...four years in the bank, with another possible four more years to come...? Probably the thing I enjoyed most about the university years were the times I was able to stay in residence downtown. Being able to walk around the city and to class without needing to bother with a 4 hour daily commute is rather refreshing. Being able to walk to the local store or fast food place without driving is nice too. Over those years I started to dabble more in cooking and baking (still not proficient though), extended my creative proclivities from iSketch into sites like Sporcle and BPT, and have expanded my anime repertoire. Wow that sounds geeky, but in any case, I think these are the main things that I actually bothered to make some blog posts about during these years.

Lastly, after discovering the Pages gadget thingy I decided to go ahead and make a page for the quizzes I create in Sporcle so I don't need to stuff the end of my blog posts with tons of links as I was doing before. Go ahead and check them out, if you please :) Don't mind the tons of Pokémon quizzes since I kind of got into a frenzy due to playing Pokémon Soul Silver again, but I assure you if you try them that I've tried to make them as refined and enjoyable as possible. >_>

I'm very surprised and flattered that I somehow have three quizzes voted as Editor's Choice. Of course, that's nothing compared to the seasoned Sporcle quiz creators, but it's good enough for me~ I was especially lucky with the latest quiz, Name the Theme - Symbols. I took some time over two days to gather the images and arrange them together, and then posted it shortly after completion. In an unfortunate stroke of timing, just as the quiz was getting its first plays, someone decided to enlist the aid of a second duplicate account and post about 10 quizzes in a row in the same category as my quiz, and thus effectively shoving it out of the Newly Created Quizzes list. (You're normally only allowed to post 7 quizzes/month, to be fair to others.) In a sudden turn, the new editor for the category decided to post my quiz as an Editor's Choice, awarding it with great visibility, (and the credit of being approved by an editor) and so more people were able to try it.

From my observations, the initial phase in the Newly Created Quizzes is really the only way your quiz can garner any notice and possibly become well-played. Normally once your quiz is off the list, it'll only ever be seen if someone happens to search for it or some key terms related to it. If you managed to attract enough plays, it might remain on the Most Played or Highly Rated lists for a while. There's also the Editor's Choice list which has very high visibility, but how long it stays depends on how often the editor posts quizzes up. Usually when Sporcle editors or well-known quiz creators post a new quiz, their quizzes stay visible for a long time. Essentially it's like a positive feedback loop - if you get a lot of plays, your quiz will likely continue to get a lot of plays and thus stay even longer in high visiblity. If your quiz doesn't get enough attention early on, it'll take some luck to get it back on the radar. And that's along the lines of what happened to me. I wish they'd really extend the Newly Created Quizzes list (a scroll bar would be an easy fix) since with so many quizzes being created, it's very easy for quizzes to be overlooked and buried for a long time.

EDIT: Haha wow, just after I made this rant, I go onto Sporcle and find they went and added a way to see a much longer version of all the lists, including Recent Additions. Kudos, Sporcle.

On another note, finally got that terrible desktop computer fixed up with a new hard drive. Some combination of the hard drive being really old and a bunch of other things led the computer into the most ultimate start-up infinite loop ever, where it would continually loop upon start-up, not even letting me into Safe Mode. Let's just hope it manages to run more like a normal computer now, although I'm not keeping my hopes up too high.

Future plans - a trip to Florida with friends in June, for some serious theme park action. Looking forward to it very much~

And yes, check out this webcomic if you haven't already - hilarity is sure to ensue.
Axe Cop

Mockingbirds Know Who You Are

Extremely busy nowadays - March is always the worse month, I find. I have been averaging probably 4-5 hours of sleep at night... Severe anime backlog too :(

I started drinking coffee for the first time recently. I had never before drank coffee, it was all just tea. I was surprised that it seemed to work as I was no longer dosing off every 5 minutes in lecture, but I don't want to become dependent on it so I'm trying to limit its use to midterm days or Tuesdays (the long day). And wow, Starbucks coffee really does taste burnt, I should have used more sugar... I also want to try McDonalds, which is apparently having a free coffee promotion until this Sunday. Stangely, there aren't any McDonalds nearby the St. George campus except the one up at Bloor, so I would have to make quite a detour to go there.

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Anyway, another Sporcle update! Rather science-filled~

Anime Blitz: Opening Themes (clips)
Rapid-fire Anime Name That Tune, can you identify the anime by listening to short clips from their opening song? There's also an overlying theme common to all the songs, did you notice what it was?

Eponymous Diseases A-Z
In most of these cases, although it's called X's disease, X never really sufferred from the disorder. It's more of meant as an act of commemoration.

Serendipitous Inventions/Discoveries
The quiz promised from a previous post, can you name the inventions or discoveries made by chance, by accident, and probably by improper laboratory etiquette?

Animals Used in Scientific Research
My tribute to all of those rats that I had to work with over the past year.

"What is this ominous light that threatens to engulf us?!"

Yesss Reading Week, gotta take this chance to catch up on things because this is the only downtime I will have before March, when all hell breaks loose. This also marks the time when I'm finally done actual experimenting in my research lab, but now need to read up on tons of articles to prepare for my write-up.

I'm only casually following the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, mainly just to see the medal counts and for which events. Apparently, we have broken the "curse" of never winning a gold medal while we are hosting the Winter Olympics, so that is good news.

The exam schedule for April has been released, and interestingly all of my exams take place on Wednesdays. Of course, I'm not complaining; I would much rather have the exams spread out over a longer period of time than to be forced to write all the exams at the beginning to finish early. Cramming for several courses at the same time never works really well, even for things you have been reviewing throughout the semester, because you have to keep switching your focus between subjects.

Distemper

I guess I'll just throw in a post with some links to my user-created Sporcle quizzes. I've placed a badge linking to the site in the Links section. In short, Sporcle is a site with a bunch of fun trivia quizzes on many topics. Popular ones include:
Countries of the World
NFL Teams
The Simpsons Characters
Periodic Table
Commonest English Words

They enabled the creation of user-made quizzes sometime around September last year. It doesn't have the full capabilities as some published quizzes, but a lot of pretty impressive and creative quizzes have already been made thus far by various users. Ones that are popular enough or really novel may get published by Sporcle as an official quiz.

I am already rather humbled that any of my quizzes managed to garner some level of popularity, but I'm not sure if any of them will be published. The most well-accepted ones so far are:

Shape-Describing Words
How would you describe in a single word something shaped like a cross, or a star? This quiz might help... Definite plus if you know some Latin or Greek vocab, but there are a lot of words whose meanings can easily be inferred.

Look-Alikes: Hidden Objects [pic]
I took a picture from the book Look-Alikes by Joan Steiner (amazingly creative, I read it when I was younger and loved it) and asked you to identify all the everyday objects Steiner used to create the picture. She uses objects in a way such that they "look alike" to something else, such as using slices of bread to create a sidewalk or a lemon juicer to look like a spinning carnival ride, all rather convincingly.

Pokémon Trainer Classes (Gen I)
Pokémon Trainer Classes (Gen II)
Hopefully if you played Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow back in the day, or even the Gold/Silver/Crystal versions, this might give you a nice nostalgic blast. Can you remember all those annoying trainers from the game who stop you in your tracks, walk up to you to say something completely non-sequitur, and then challenge you to Pokémon battles?

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Here are also some of my other quizzes. There is a bias on Pokemon-based quizzes since those were mostly the ones I started making first before branching out to other topics. I do have some more pending release, like "Accidental Inventions/Discoveries" which I'll release soon...

Classical Mythology Lovers
Identify the lovers from famous classical mythology couples. For example, the woman whose face "launched a thousand ships"...?

Common Drug Delivery Forms
You'll find examples of all of these around the local pharmacy or hospital somewhere. What common methods exist to deliver medicine/drugs into the body?

Pocky & Pretz Flavors
If only I was able to try all of these flavours...Mmm Pocky.

Pokémon by Cry I
Pokémon by Cry II
This was an interesting idea to put together. Can you identify the Pokémon based on the sound they make in the game? Too bad it's not what they say in the anime, since that would make the quiz rather easy. ;)

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And now, all the really niche quizzes/rest of the many Pokémon quizzes.

Non-Evolving Pokémon
These Pokémon defy the laws of evolution. Then again, so do the ones that do evolve since individuals do not evolve. Oh well.

Pokémon Supporting Characters (Game)
No single quiz would be able to encompass all those supporting characters from the anime, so I compromised with supporting characters from the games.

Pokémon Without Footprints
Pokémon by Footprint
Ever wondered what it's like to be a Pokémon forensic podiatrist? ...Me neither. Yet these quizzes exist!

Foreign Pokémon Names
It seems English Charmanders say "Charmander!" while French Charmanders say "Salamèche!". Weird.

Digimon Partners (anime)
Strange that all the world-dominating digital supervillains always seem to show up at Japan first.

Word Disassociation Lyrics
This quiz is flouncy, panicky redundant.

D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-duel

I received the deck of Hanafuda cards from Club Nintendo, which are a type of Japanese playing cards. The cards we're used to has numbered and face cards (13 total) divided via four suits. The hanafuda cards are instead separated via the twelve months instead of numbers and face cards, with each month represented by a certain type of plant, and also containing four cards.

However, the four cards of each month aren't just separated into one of four suits, but into a more complicated configuration. Some of the months are unique from the others. Each month has at least one Special card, which features another element like an animal. The Nintendo deck slightly redesigned most of the Special cards to feature Nintendo characters. Pretty nifty. :)

The Special cards from the hanafuda deck. Some months have more than one Special card so there are more than 12 in total.

There are also Ribbon cards which have a ribbon shown in the picture. Of these there are red, purple, and poetry ribbons. The poetry ribbons look like red ribbons but have writing on it. (see the Jan-Mar cards) The remaining cards are considered Normal cards.

The full deck of Club Nintendo's hanafuda deck. The left column from top to bottom is Jan-Jun, the right column is Jul-Dec.
January: Pine [Matsu (松)]
February: Plum Blossom [Ume (梅)]
March: Cherry Blossom [Sakura (桜)]
April: Wisteria [Fuji (藤)]
May: Iris [Ayame (菖蒲)]
June: Peony [Botan (牡丹)]
July: Bush Clover [Hagi (萩)]
August: Chinese silver grass [Susuki (薄)] (Nintendo has it as Pampas grass)
September: Chrysanthemum [Kiku (菊)]
October: Maple [Momiji (紅葉)]
November: Willow [Yanagi (柳)]
December: Paulownia [Kiri (桐)]



Case the hanafuda cards came in.

They do look much nicer than regular playing cards, and it requires you to familiarize with the deck to remember which cards belong to which month. I'm still trying to learn the rules of the game Koi-Koi so I might be able to get someone to play these cards with. :D