Current mood:	sick
Current music:	Split Enz

Tick
I’m getting progressively slacker at updating this. I would blame that on the great Uni Gradshow deadline creeping up little by little on me, but somehow despite that I’ve managed to take on a number of extra tasks aside from Dream, so maybe it’s just generally being slack. I gotta love student culture; admitting you’ve been slack is almost more something to take pride in than it is to be ashamed of. A fair amount of stuff has happened, but I can’t remember much of it. That’s probably a mixture of my usual less-than-perfect memory and the fact that I currently feel a bit head sick, and am having trouble maintaining focused thought at the moment. It probably didn’t help that I spend most of yesterday in the cold further up the mountains. I hadn’t seen Jeremy in some time, probably about a half year, and it felt like an appropriate moment to catch up again, especially since we needed to work a little on some of Dream’s soundtrack. We got one piece fully altered and mostly perfectly down. I’ll have to try putting it to the scene I hope to use it for yet, and some tweaks may be needed, but it was a pretty productive few hours that I feel pretty good about. The rest of the day consisted of watching some John Safran Versus God highlights, finally getting to see a few episodes of Samurai Champloo (which I was suitably satisfied with), eating vindaloo, and playing a little of the now banned Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Ah, now that’s a quality link for a new paragraph. I’m still pretty pissed off that this game got the hard end of the stick over some very stupid looking softcore sex. I’d like to feud over this to the OFLC except for, unlike the hideous and obnoxious rating logos they’ve come up with, I can’t really pin the blame on them. There is no 18+ rating for games in Australia, which means they can’t give it one, and unless the Government does something about that. They’re not going to though; Howard isn’t exactly the liberally minded type (which is rather ironic, given that he heads up the Liberal party). As for the game itself, well, I didn’t really play a whole lot but I was somewhat taken by it. People are probably divided on this, but I personally really appreciated the fact that they really set it up and put things into motion, rather than essentially going ‘here, that’s you, and this is you’re polygonal playground. Now do stuff.’ Plus it opened itself to moments of the more tame and quietly appreciated type. I have run over a lot of people and caused a good amount of general mayhem in GTA 3, but one moment of answering my cell phone, and talking on it while casually walking down the middle of a hazy sunset bathed street in San Andreas has etched itself much more firmly in my mind. The city has character, the characters have character, and the plot balance seems suitably scaffold like, and looks to balance things nicely. Not sure if I’ll ever get past those thoughts now – the game can’t be purchased quite so easily anymore and even then I’d be stuck with the PC version. I blame the keyboard and mouse combo for preventing my proper immersion into GTA 3, because, even though it could be argued to be very practical, it also felt very, very interface like. That's a bad thing. I see the second analogue sticks role in allowing you to just casually survey your environment as integral.

Uni is of course now back and kicking, and it’s going to prove interesting to see just what this does to Dream as the Grad Show committee organization seems quite disorganized at the moment. I really hope I can afford to skip out on most of this, and just be cooperative when it’s necessary. I have one more essay to worry about (but it feels kinda dry now as I was saying that my previous paper was my pinnacle essay before it equal high-scored in the class and got me a $250 book voucher), and deciding to write for Anime Fringe is looking to have further working implications. Granted, that stuff I actually want to do.

Still waiting on my Saturn, I dug up Gabriel Knight 3 and completed it through in its entirety since my last entry. The game is every bit as addictive as I remembered it, although the faults of note were still there. But that would make sense as they’re mostly graphics related and the game was never king of the hill in that department, technically or artistically. IT still has what is probably the best voice work I’ve come across in a game though, and it’s only really rivaled by the likes of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon and, well, San Andreas. If it were clear where Gamimag were standing, and that the ground it was on was solid concrete, then I probably would have written up a nice little concise review of it by now. As it stands, I’ll just hold my breath and be depressed over how, at my current rate of updating things, I’ll probably be 21 no more by my next update. But that comment is pointless, and is only really there to serve as a reminder for Jacky to drop a message so we can get stuff organized for the 20th.