I should go about making more rings, which are the circular images on the top of each page on here. There are like 150-200 of them right now IIRC. I'm not sure why I called them rings, but they're one of my favorite features of this here charhut.

It was snowing this morning, and pretty fiercely at that. But now you can hardly tell it was snowing at all. I wasn't really aware that it could be so much like rain or whatever such that it could change so quickly like that.

Also I'm almost done putting together the cosplay costume of Recette for Kristen for Fanime! It turned out pretty well, although I'm thinking that I should go get some wire or something to make sure the apron doesn't fold oddly on the bottom. It has a bunch of yellow clay things on the bottom that weigh it down in a weird way and make it fold such that it doesn't look quite like Recette's. If I could wire it up then the bottom of it would try to stay fairly round around the waist. Usually I have this problem with skirts with my cosplay outfits but I used wool to make this skirt which is a lot stiffer and heavier. It actually puffs out on it's own pretty well! I could always get the wire and just safety pin it on underneath before going to the con, maybe, if it ends up not working to sew it in. I also don't know if it would make it uncomfortable to wear... maybe not, since it's in two pieces. I'll give it a shot.

I spent a good amount of time resetting passwords earlier this week because of the Great Kotaku Password Leak of '10. It was hard to think up a new password but I got a pretty good one. Unfortunately it was my universal password that I used so there was quite a bit of password changing to be done. It's not like I even commented all that often on Kotaku.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is pretty sweet so far. I've been playing it for 45 minutes or so each night, fitting it in alongside Starcraft 2 and Minecraft and things. It definitely does feel like a Metal Gear Solid game although there's a bit too much faffing about. There's a lot of base management that doesn't really have any purpose besides giving a reason to gradually unlock new weapons and items, and the game is broken up into 'Missions' that break it up too much. Sometimes the missions start off where the last ended, but sometimes they don't. Since it's not one continuous mission, it doesn't have the same feeling you had in MGS1-3 (and kinda 4) where you were doing things in and around a large, continuous area. Also it has some boss stages that aren't quite as fantastic as Metal Gear bosses should be. (Fighting a tank, for instance. Not a tank driven by a vulcan-wielding shaman with lots of ravens mind you - just a tank and some dudes.) But the storyline is, so far, as epic as a Metal Gear game, and has a similar sort of humor.

I have more single player games I need to play and finish though before I can allow myself to purchase other games. I really want to get Power Gig and Rock Band 3 to have their really nice guitars. And other games that I've seen around too. I'll probably wait until January to get them.

I've been working on the Recette cosplay costume for Kristen for Fanime, and it's almost done! I just need to make the red ball hair band thing, get Kristen a yellow shirt, fit the apron on her so I can measure out the rest of the ribbon on the back (where to cut it off and make the little yellow end-bits) and then get some boots that I can modify. It'll be sweet, the stuff I've got so far looks really nice. Maybe I can also put together a Kirino cosplay from Ore no Imouto for Megan, since that would be perfect for her.

Although once I'm done with Recette I'd like to restart work on Mahjong Sky. It doesn't look like there's a real solid Riichi Mahjong game for Android or iPhone out right now (or Windows Phone 7 either, cough) so I could really, really fill that niche.

So two weeks ago now I packed up and came up to Redmond, Washington to start working at Microsoft. Me and Mom got a big moving truck (too big, since they were out of the smaller ones) and drove on up. We got to stop in Vancouver to see my brother Davin and the next day finished the journey up to this place.

Once we got here and got to the apartment complex I had pre arranged to move into, the next couple days were spent acquiring essentials and stuff. We went to Target and Fred Meyer alot and picked up all sorts of various things, to Goodwill to get a Desk and some bookshelves, and Ikea to get a queen sized bed (since I'm used to that size from San Clemente) and a mattress and a dresser. Finally we went to the Mini dealership in Seattle and I got a Mini Cooper! So I have a car now. It's great and awesome and I sprung for the more featured 'S' model which is faster. It's an automatic but it has a manual transmission mode that works like the Initial D arcade games where you push up on the stick to shift up and down to shift down (or the other way around, I haven't really played around with it yet.) Cool stuff! It's nice and small and fast and I can't wait to do stuff with it with people.

It was snowing and icing recently though, so I learned pretty quickly how to navigate in those conditions. It's been interesting. Also I found that if I make use of the "Sport" mode the car has, I can get much better traction and control on the more slippery parts of the road. The car is pretty good.

Next up I'm planning to fly home for Thanksgiving. It leaves rather early which will hopefully work out for me... I'm not entirely sure when, like, I should leave for the airport. If the roads are anything like they were the other evening, it would have to be pretty darn early. But if they're going to be anything like this morning it won't be an issue at all. There's also that like... Thursday, which is Thanksgiving... see, I'm leaving around 9:30 in the AM which gets there noonish. That's a good time to arrive, plenty before anything's going on. But it's been said that this is a very busy time of the year to travel. Do most people do so the day before Thanksgiving? How many people also find it very workable to leave Thanksgiving morning? So those are two possible issues, the weather and the people, that I might have to fight with to successfully plane it up. Also the flight back is also 9:30 AM ish but on Sunday. That might be even more busy - I imagine a Sunday would be prime time to head home from this holiday... hrm.

I have a bunch of pictures from Japan I'd like to put up here. I've been updating this here Charhut pretty effectively so maybe I'll get to it soon!

The other week I went to Tokyo! In Japan! It was for 6 days and 5 nights or so, although 2 of those days were half days where you arrive in the middle of the day and leave in the middle of another day. I went with Kristen and we stayed at a hotel near Tokyo Tower. Since I was starting at Microsoft in a couple weeks and was sitting on a decent savings, I decided to take this trip. It's not something I could have ever expected to do, since going places isn't really something I've ever done. But yeah!

We got to Japan, and took the Keisei Skyliner into Tokyo, and took the metro using a stack of 2-day metro passes we got at the airport. Once we finally got all the way to the station closest to our hotel ( the Toranomon station on the Ginza line ) we went top side. Woo! Tokyo is a big city for sure. We found a pretty legit ramen place to have dinner. They have very impressive setups when they do road work. Lots of lights and inflatable things and robot things flagging cars over or just people flagging cars. Really cool.

We then went to Akihabara! Took a couple minutes to find the main area from where the subway let out, since there's lots of exits from each subway station... I picked the wrong exit, kind of. So once we found it, wow! There's lots of stuff to see, lots of shops. Since there's such a wide variety of anime goods, you can't really see it all by only looking at one store. That day in the morning we only had time to look through the two Toranoana stores that are right next to each other. We then went to Asakusa to see the Tokyo Jidai Matsuri, which had all sorts of shops and food and stuff at the Sensouji temple as well as a parade! Kristen bought quite a few things amongst all the shops and did temple stuff, and we both got some ice cream. The ice cream person said to eat the ice cream around the area of the little shop, since we wouldn't want to bring food into the other shops selling nicer goods and stuff. She said it in Japanese, and we understood pretty good! I'm not confident enough in my Japanese to say or understand fairly complicated sentences, but I can do the simpler ones alright. After that we got lunch there in a shoutengai next to the shops leading up to the temple. I got a rice omelet which was good stuff! Twas a recommended thing for me to try and it worked out well.

We spent the rest of that day in Akihabara, where we looked around for games and stuff. We checked out the arcade there with all the claw machines with various prizes to win. Lots of figures and other anime goods. Kristen got a little plushie on her first try, which was really cool - I spent quite a bit of yen trying to win some Working and Saki figures. The claw machines in Tokyo are different than most. While most machines have the claw that goes down and back up, trying to pick up the item, the claw machines there in Akiba have a large item perched on shelves in different ways and you need to use the general claw machine mechanics to nudge and push the prize into the hole. With the better prizes there's no way to get the prize in one try - there's even a 500 yet for 3 tries coin slot. The prizes really good so it's pretty worth it. I tried a gundam and mahjong game on the higher levels, and then we looked around at some more shops. Looking around at games, I picked up Love Plus and Saki Portable. We then tried to hurry to Tokyo Tower because I saw online that they had bands play up there on Wednesday nights. Unfortunately they didn't have a band booked for that night, but we did get a good look at Tokyo from way up high.

On the thursday we went to Tokyo Disney Sea! We were there all day and it was great. I had seen a long time ago images of the Mysterious Island area of the park where they had the Journey to the Center of the Earth ride. It was so long ago I was looking at those pictures and I remember being so pumped and excited about it. It was the highlight of the trip for me and we did it last (since we got Fastpasses and they were for, like, right before the park was closing) and it was so worth it. It was like... firstly, it's a Disney ride with a long line with lots of stuff to see while you wait. All the stuff is so amazing though, thematically, and really immersive. There's no nonsense about it - you wind through an awesome line and get into a Haunted Mansion like elevator. It goes down and makes great, powerful, mechanical steampunk noises and lights on the way down, and then there's more at the bottom. There wasn't any narration or anything because it didn't need it. The ride itself was awesome with great things to see and lots of speed and man. So worth the hype from many years prior.

We also saw a sweet live show that's really hard to describe and a waterfall that was on fire. Super cool! We walked around alot and were there all day. Saw most of everything but we didn't really find Port Discovery until near the end. That place is a lot like Tom Sawyer island which I love to just run around. I could have spent way more time there. Also the train rides there and back were quite tiring - changing trains at Tokyo station involves a really, really long tunnel you need to walk down.

The next day we wen't all over Tokyo for shopping and stuff! We went to Ikebukuro, looked at the Toranoana store for stuff for Megan and also looked in Sunshine City for Ice Cream City! We got some good ice cream. We had a hard time deciding on where to eat and settled on another ramen place, which was good. We got to try out the vending machine / sit down style of place, where you buy a ticket for your meal from a vending machine and then had the ticket to the people working there. We went to Shinjuku where I spotted some high school girls with guitar backpacks. Awesome! We got some stuff at a big department store there and went to Shibuya. Shibuya is a pretty cool place! We only got to touch on a small portion of each of these places, really. In Shibuya we finally got to goto a Mahjong parlor called Shibuton. I played two games and they were pretty darn intense. I managed to use my Japanese well enough to talk to the guy and play the games, and I got to play on a sweet automatic table. Games move pretty fast (since it takes a long time to play a full game, you need to be snappy) so I'd often have to decide what to discard before I've finished arranging all my tiles. Playing at a real mahjong parlor is the kind of place where if you pon or chii, you need to discard before you reach for their tile, just to keep the game going.

After that we looking into Shibuya 109, and spotted some of the really expensive, fashionable things they had for sale. We went to another place nearby that had some men's fashion stuff as well, where I got a sweet 7000 yet jacket. Kristen was beginning to build up an outfit so we could have a nice dinner in Roppongi Hills, so she got a shirt there. We saw some nice shoes we hesitated on in Ikebukuro, so we went back to see if they were still open. They weren't so we tried out a Japanese McDonalds. My Japanese was spot on, we ordered, and it was good.

The last day we started off going to Odaiba! We didn't really get to see too much of it, unfortunately, since we were strapped for time. While in the area we got up close to the Big Sight, and I got to bask in how big it was and imagine how cool it would be to be there for a Comiket. We got back on the Yurikamome to another Metro station and went to the Ageha nightclub in Shin Kiba for an all day concert with eight bands, most notably being Sambomaster! I'm glad that I got to see one of my favorite Japanese bands while I was there, since I do quite like seeing the bands I like live. They were super excellent, and I'm hardpressed to decide whether a Sambomaster or a Dragonforce concert has more energy. I'm not sure if I got so sweaty from jumping and stuff at any other concert, although it's possible. There was another band there that I hadn't heard of before that kicked a lot of ass. I was actually able to find their name just now - it was in all in kanji so I couldn't really catch or read the actual band name at the time - Dohatsuten. Man, they were super cool. After that we went back to Odaiba to buy the shoes we couldn't get before, going to a concert and all. We went back to the hotel to get cleaned up a bit, and then had dinner in Roppongi Hills. It's an amazing place, and again, we didn't really get to check it out too throughly or really anywhere else in Roppongi. After dinner all the subways stopped running, which was fairly inconvenient. You'd think that they'd run later, especially those that service Roppongi since it's supposed to be a place with a rocking night life. We managed to negotiate a taxi and made our way back to the hotel.

Before we went to the airport the next day we managed to squeeze in an hour and a bit more in Akiba. I really wanted to get the Lynette Bishop plushie but they were pretty sold out. We saw some cool stuff, but definitely not enough. We didn't even really have time to check out any maid cafes! There were plenty of stores to check out as each is fairly small and all of the goods are fairly spread out. We probably could have found one if we had more time. But yeah. After that we came back home and there isn't too much to say about that.

I have a lot more I'd like to write about, such as moving up to Seattle and stuff about starting at Microsoft. I obviously can't say too much, but yeah.

Since I'm starting a job soon and I won't have to worry too much about money, I decided to use my savings and goto Japan! With Kristen, of course. I plan on going to Akiba, a matsuri at Sensouji temple, Tokyo Tower, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi, and Tokyo Disneyland! Also Sambomaster is playing at a place called Ageha that Saturday, so I want to see them and a bunch of other bands that will be playing. Should be awesome!

I also need to get a lot better at SC2. It's starting to match me up against platinum and diamond players who aren't affected too much by my Kimani Special 3 Rax push. I'm getting some ideas here and there - like if it's TvZ on cross positions on Metalopolis, do a non-reinforcing Special harass into expand into Tank/Marine and some Medivacs into Marauder/Viking. I say mass marauder at the end because that would effectively handle the eventual Ultralisk transition that can easily run you over. You can handle it with lots of tanks but that's a lot easier to mess up if you're caught out of position. It relies on you killing them before they get to your tanks, which isn't realistic. Another possibility is Thor/Banshee. Thors handle the mutalisks, Banshees kill everything else. Maybe a handful of Vikings to handle Brood Lords. Not very mobile though.

I went to Redmond this last week to interview at Microsoft with the Windows team. The interview went very well and I could have a very good shot at getting a job up there in Washington. I'm waiting to hear back from them before I decide what to do. If I get the job, great! I'll use some of my savings (since I won't have to worry about money, really) to do some fun stuff, and yeah. Otherwise I get to stay home and I'll look for stuff around here. I'm fine with things going either way.

What else... internet was down for a bit, but I got a chance to watch Day9's funday monday today finally. I'm stoked for next week, it's going to be great! I was trying to do some games tonight that we could possibly submit, but it wasn't working too well. We instead decided to win a game or two of 2v2. Good ol' winning.