Wordpress

I now have a wordpress blog.
Actually, I had it since December but it's development was so sluggish, so it's only officially alive today.
Uhh... What else....
Ah, this place will still be alive until my wordpress is old enough to take on the cash stuff I do in this place. Maybe I'll even keep this alive even when that time comes. That would depend on whether I can actually get opportunities here that I can't get on the other one and stuff like that.
The brand new twin link in the "nav bar" leads to the said wordpress blog.
o/

Read More >>

The Colorful Politics of the Philippines

So if pink is so closely related to red, why are some of the reds in our country so against pink? (or, as one particularly witty friend of mine put it, “I read that the reds think pink stinks”). I am referring, of course, to a recent resolution filed by left-leaning lawmakers Satur Ocampo and Teodoro Casiño (both representatives of Bayan Muna), Gabriela Representatives Liza Maza and Luzviminda Ilagan, and Anakpawis Representative Rafael Mariano urging the House to investigate the use of Metropolitan Manila Development Authority’s (MMDA) use of the color pink in building their road signs and structures. And yes, I am talking about that House, as in our country’s House of Representatives, where the Philippines’ best and brightest minds supposedly convene in order to enact meaningful laws. Apparently, the color wheel and its various applications are now a matter of great national importance. What’s next? Filing a motion to ban congressmen from taking the floor if their shoes and belt don’t match?

What is this...? I don't even begin to...
o.O

No. I don't have the words for this after all. -_-

Read More >>

Luna Online

I looove cute game characters. :D
It's 3D cutey goodness~

This game, Luna Online, is, according to my possibly failing memory which based its knowledge about this somewhere on the internet, a Korean MMORPG. If I recall correctly, Ragnarok Online was Korean too, and so was the manhwa (thus, manhwa, right? La~lala~). Anyway, I just had to mention RO because, well, it was the first MMORPG I ever played and it was also the first one I was ever hooked on. I tried a bunch of other online games like gunbound and O2Jam, but I never got hooked on it like in RO. I also recently tried Secret of the Solstice, but I got tired after a bit too. I guess I only liked it because it reminded me of RO and it was free to play, yay! kinda... As for RO, I got tired of it after my friends disappeared from it one by one. I think I'm the type who likes MMORPGs when I'm playing it with people I actually know, like how I played Solstice mostly only when my brother or sister was around too. Yeah, yeah, so I'm bad at socializing in both real life and virtual life. What can I say? I'm consistent like that. :3
Also, I'm not really a gaming addict, so, it's not like I've played lotsa games, but I'm not a complete noob either. Just wanted to make that clear, lest I seem like I'm pretending to be a game god.
Moving on to the actual topic of this post as the title depicts...

General Impressions (Ramblings without Screenshots)
I don't really read up on games much until I get to play them for a bit. In fact, make that a lot. I usually just play through them first until I'm interested enough to go gather extra information, etc. However, as this game is still in Open Beta which includes some glitches like broken text (in my case), I think I may have to read up on some things soon, like how the system works, etc.
I've browsed the official website (If you're interested, go click my new flash clock with a dancing person-cat. It's better than putting a link here~ so cute! XD) though, and my brother read up a little on the classes, etc. Supposedly, this game has what they call a family system. I have no idea how that works, but, well, maybe you get together and decide that you're all one big family. Maybe it's a guild equivalent? As the site itself seems to be a Beta version as well (hello to lots of coming soons and broken links :D), there wasn't really much information in it. Another incomplete piece of info that caught my attention (the cute emoticons don't count, I think...) was the mention of some sort of farming system. I think you can own a farm and, well, do farming, and protect your farm from monsters and all that. Uhh, online Rune Factory? Not that I got to continue playing that game much. Oh, my incomplete life~! As for the jobs and all, first, there are two races to choose from: Elf and Human. After which, you can choose from one of three classes: Rogue, Fighter, and Mage. I have no idea if I got the names right, I can't quite remember. But, yeah, pretty much a sword type, a magic type, and a bow/dagger type. Not respectively, but easy to match. Matching type test, yay. According to my brother, it seems that as you move along, you have a number of choices for your jobs or something. If you choose, job A over job B for your first job under a certain class, you get the skills of job A, but not job B. So you can build yur skill tree depending on what job you choose, it seems. I kind of like that. :D I hope my statements made sense too. Not that it matters much, I guess. *shrug* This game also has a PVP/PK system. You can request other people to battle with you, it seems. On the character info window, the number of times you've killed a player is also listed. Well, actually, the number of monsters you've killed is also listed, it seems. I wonder what that's for... Anyway, moving on.
Basically, the only things I've done are make a player, try out a quest, and kill a couple of monsters, the last two being closely intertwined as the quest only involved killing monsters.
Let's go rewind to making a character then. :D
I have no screenshots for this part, but unlike Solstice and RO where you only get to choose hairstyle and hair color, in LO (hahaha), you get to choose the eyes/face. However, as anime-like-faces are 50-75% eyes, we can just assume it's the eyes you choose. The downside is you don't get to choose the hair color. But they might have a patch for that later, like the dyeing system of RO. Yes, please, I want! Ahem. Anyway... There are different sets of hair and eyes for the elven and human races. And I think that's all there is to place here~ It's already too long as it is.

Betaness (More Ramblings with one Screenshot)
I know it's still in Open Beta stage, and has only been so for less than a month, so I guess glitches are forgivable. There are only two problems I've had so far, both of them major, one of which I solved crudely, and the other I may attempt to solve (if it's even possible) or just learn to ignore.
The first one was a problem with the launcher that made us unable to play the game. Of course I tried to do something. I wanted the cute game!!!
Problem #1: Double-click launcher. Crash. Try again. Crash. Try again. Crash.
At this point, you know something's wrong, right? You had to press "Don't Send" 3 times, after all. Anyway, it seemed other people were having problems too, so we looked it up. Some person said it was that webpage like area of the launcher that's making it crash. That area where the news and stuff are, etc. This person's solution was even cruder than mine which involved some kind of bandwidth stealing through downloads and stuff and a race with the launcher webpage area or something like that. No offense meant, but the English was rather hard to understand.
But all thanks to that person, I knew the cause and used the windows HOSTS file so that the webpage area won't load anything. :D However, as the website it accesses is the official website, you can't access that while launching. Though I don't see any reason why you'd want to... Anyway, when you want to access the site again, you'll have to re-edit the HOSTS file and all, so it's a bit of extra work, I think. Not that I mind.
Problem #2: Text gets cut off everywhere.
Not that bad, but it looks bad. Most stuff still make sense though, but it does make me not want to read through stuff in-game because all the text is kind of messed up. Also, I can't see the freakin' item information properly!! Grr. Sigh. I have yet to find out what causes this and if there is a solution out there somewhere.
Other Betaness stuff would be... Hmm... I find the interface a little messy, but that's probably because I played the game in 800x600 mode, and the screen was just too small.

This is how it looked like when I chose pink. I learned my lesson and chose gray later.

Unlike solstice, this game has no widescreen mode, so that's sad. :( It also seemed to me like if you open a window using the mouse, you can close it by clicking the X button, however opening a window through the keyboard requires that you close it with that key as well. Uhh. Weird. But I'm not entirely sure about this. Maybe I'll try again......
I guess that's all for Betaness.

General Graphics/Drawings/Art/Etc (Screenshots Section)
CUTE CHARACTERS!!! And from the videos, it seems the gears and equips are cute too~~!!!! Waaaaaai~ Something like that. After all, the reason I started playing this game was because I thought it was sooo cute.

A closeup of my character in the "safe area". As you can see even in month-old worlds, kids possibly named after Paypal can be found lying around on the streets.


Etc, me, etc. (Or... Back, Background, NPC, and Giant Crab)

However, I cannot say the same for the monsters. The RO monsters were just much cuter. Poring~ Savage Babe~~

Giant mushroom. Yummm.


Other monsters.

The cute speech bubble stuff can make up for it though, I guess. :D

I dunno whether to laugh because it's cute or laugh because it's funny.


The last screen was right before he died.

So... They all term their kindred as "brothers". LO - the world of all male asexually reproducing monsters? Well, all the monsters just spawn out of nowhere, after all. Still though... Anyway, I haven't really met that many monsters yet, so it may just be that I have yet to meet the female monster race. Lalala~

General graphics impressions would point to okay, and possibly quite good, actually. I haven't played an extensive array of online games, so I'm not really qualified in this area, and I also played it at low resolution and possibly at low settings, I dunno if I actually changed the options? The broken text and everything was frustrating me, haha. I just played this 'til I was level 5, which wasn't much.
From what I saw on the videos though, and my short adventure, character movement is rather good, in my possibly very limited opinion. I love it when hair moves. :D (Hello, some-CG-show-I-watched-before-something-with-a-name-and-impenetrable-fortress-in-the-title-or-something-I-forget-lalala, hair moves, it's not stiff. Well. Normally.)

The hair


The light

Last among the screenshot comments... The drawings of the NPCs when you talk to them looked really good to me. :D Also, they're very animated when they talk to you and all. :D Which is just cute~ I guess the best part of this game for now would be the characters. :D So cute! The anime-style semi-chibi type of chars are just the cutest!!! I love semi-chibi~~ Lucky Star is soooo cute toooo~! XD XD Well, the NPCs aren't semi-chibi, but they're animated and come with very nice drawings, imo. :D

Online visual novel...?

Anyway, I guess that would be all for now.
Temporary final verdict: This is a potentially fun game. :D Cute cute cute!! XD

***
Disclaimer(s), etc:

1. I don't claim to own what isn't mine.
2. My other blog is almost ready. :D I didn't do much with it 'cuz, well, lalala. But it's almost good enough to post in. I have only one more issue with the smileys. Smileys are life!!!

Read More >>

It can be very easy to confuse French with Math.

As your teacher drones on in what seems to be incomprehensible gibberish, you begin to wonder whether you (a) did get lost and somehow wandered into an advanced French class, but no, wait, they don’t offer advanced French classes in your school, heck, you don’t even change classrooms, do you? And so you conclude that (b) you must have been abducted by aliens who are now performing an experiment aimed at finding out just how easily high school students can confuse French with Math.
Let us now steer away from this weird dream and wake up to Brightstorm, your potential new and wonderful online learning friend.
For those of you who find your teacher’s lecture to be like a string of foreign words that make no sense at all, Brightstorm offers online courses to help you with your studies. They offer various subjects, among which are Math and Writing courses. I took a peek at one of the Geometry courses and the lessons seem to be very illustrative and they offer practical and useful examples that will help a teenage student visualize and understand geometry concepts more clearly.
Before you daydream about aliens and French-Math confusion experiments in your next Algebra or Geometry class, or worse yet, exam, sign up at Brightstorm now for a free account that includes a free episode in every course. It might just blow away all those storm clouds of confusion on your lessons with its bright rays of enlightenment courses. ;D

Read More >>