Dam Impressive

Last night was another of my infamous “you no can has sleep” nights as my brain absolutely refused to shut down.  I really need to get some melatonin and give it a shot when that sort of thing happens.  I was extremely tired, but my brain was spinning on some completely useless project, and like the software you have to manually close when restarting your machine…  it kept gumming up the process.  As a result I am borderline catatonic, and find myself getting sidetracked by the simplest of things this morning.  It is going to be a not so enjoyable day.

General Celes

I spent most of the morning playing the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy 6 on my PSP in an attempt to catch up to where I had gotten previously with the native PSN version.  Taking screenshots is a bit more of a pain in the ass… so I did not take very many.  As a result you get something I found from Google image search of the same basic spot I am at currently.  Apparently the above example chose to rename their General Celes to Moghan…  for whatever reason I have never really renamed my characters.  I prefer to just accept the name they are given by default, since that tends to be how they are referred to out of game.

Yesterday I had encountered an odd glitch, where I was unable to talk to Kekfa and start the “Figaro Submerge” sequence.  I had a previous save luckily, so I could load that back up and sure enough the second time it worked just fine.  The big negative so far of playing the GBA version, is that you only have 3 save files.  As a result you keep having to round robin your way manually through the saves.  I pretty much save every time it is possible, and hate saving over whatever my latest game is, so this process just becomes more cumbersome.

I made my way back to the Mog screen that allows you to pick which batch of adventurers you will follow.  As a result I picked Locke first, as he is generally my favorite character in FF6.  It took me a bit to remember how this whole sequence worked, but after some trial and error I managed to get into the underground passage, rescue Celes and make my way out of South Figaro.  When we needed to shower and get ready yesterday, I was standing just ouside South Figaro on the world map.  So I will head my way back to Narshe and that should be the end of that sequence.  I will likely play the river journey next…  for whatever reason I tend to save the Sabin for last always.

Dam Impressive

Yesterday we had plans to eat dinner with my wife’s mother at 4 pm in Grove Oklahoma…  which is on the edge of the Grand Lake of the Cherokees about an hour and a half from Tulsa.  There are multiple ways to get there, none of which extremely straight…  and some of them way more contorted than others.  Since we had not really been out on one of our photo jaunts in awhile my wife suggested we take one of the extremely contorted ways so we could look for interesting scenery.  As a result we took this hour and a half trip and extended it to be a little over three hours long.

The weatherman said that the day would be clear and sunny..  but the end result lead us to constantly check the weather on our phones as the sky was pretty much filled with rain clouds the entire trip.  As a result the lighting was less than favorable, and especially so as we travelled past places we would normally stop.  To the weathermans credit, it never did rain… just looked like it was going to at any moment.  While we had been along the route at various segments of our planned trip, we had never actually been the totality before.

I am hoping this actually works… because I have never really attempted to create a linkable Google map for something.  But this is the route that we ended up taking to get from 169 to Grove via Highway 20.  When we got in the Spavinaw hills we encountered the extremely cool Spavinaw lake dam.  Basically Spavinaw lake is where the bulk of the water for the City of Tulsa comes from.  In the 1920s the City realized it would need to draw water from outside of the immediate area and as a result created this massive waterworks that spans from Lake Spavinaw, through other smaller lakes and ultimately ends of at the water treatment facilities inside of Tulsa.  As we drove along the road it took us right beside the extremely cool looking spillway pictured above.

Luckily the sky had cleared a bit by the time we got there, so we pulled off into the parking lot and roamed around.  Normally I have a no trespassing rule when taking photos…  I will not cross any fences or barriers… however if there is a way around said fences that do not involve actually crossing one… I am game.  As a result I ended up walking around a fence that was locked over at the power station near the spillway… and this allowed me to get some interesting shots close up to the water flow.

When I go out and take photos I end up uploading them all in bulk to Google+ albums, then create what I call a keepers album for sharing.  I had not dumped my memory card in awhile, so I had photos from mothers day, the house work, and then these of Spavinaw… so the end result was that I uploaded 182 photos.  After I did my culling and singling out the ones I really liked the most… that became whittled down to the 42 keepers you can see in this album.  I think there are some pretty good shots in there, and it has honestly been awhile since I have felt like uploading what I shot…  so I think this is a good thing.

Gaming Restlessness

When we got home from our little jaunt, I had to fight with the Google+ photos system for a good deal of time.  They have changed something, so that it does not work nearly as well for bulk uploads.  As a result I was pretty pissed by the time I finally finished with that mess.  I ended up flitting back and forth between several different MMOs… never quite finding the fit for my mood.  I played my Melee Mage in Rift for a bit, but ended up getting frustrated because I had not kept up my butchering… and was going to have to go back into Silverwood and grind wolves until I raised it enough to do Gloamwood.  This is the negative side effect about leveling through the instant adventures system…  you end up in a bad place skill wise.

After logging out frustrated, I went over into SWTOR and tried to play my Sith Warrior.  Right now I am knee deep into Imperial Balmorra yet again…  and that kind of frustration just made things worse.  I managed to complete three or four quests before ultimately logging out again.  I patched up Guild Wars 2, because for whatever reason… the fact that I have real internet and can patch things quickly. that would have taken me leaving a game running over night…  still amuses me.  That more than any other change has meant the most to me…  the fact that we have real internet finally!  There have been some negative side effects however…  I used to host a small web server out of the house, and with Cox blocking port 80… we have lost access to most of that content.

I played GW2 for all of ten minutes before remembering why I don’t really play the game much.  The gameplay choices they have made just are not that enjoyable to me.  No matter how much I have tried to play it… I still find the lack of quests off putting.  So I feel like I am running around aimlessly with nothing of any importance to do.  Once that sets in, everything I do feels extremely grindy…  since very little of it actually matters other than your world completion score.  I wandered around in the 40-50 zone near Hoelbrak but quickly logged as the game almost immediately bored me.

I would have gone upstairs to the loft and played some PS3 or XBOX, but I fear that they would have had the same result.  I was just in a restless and frustrated frame of mind… that was only made worse when I actually attempted to go to sleep.  For whatever reason my mind latched onto the nettop computer I am building for the loft.  I started going over all the things I would need to do, evaluating what the best emulator and video front ends would be…  all of which were not at all important.  Especially since I have yet to even move the computer out to the loft from my office.  I was just restless in every sense of the word… and as a result am paying the price today as I struggle to keep my eyes open.

Wrapping Up

I am hoping that I survive the day as one of the sleep deprived masses.  I will be mainlining five hour energy shots in a vague attempt to be alert and responsive.  Right now I am honestly not sure what has to get accomplished today, but I am hoping by the end of my web service staff meeting I will be able to determine that.  I hope you all have a productive start of the work week…  and that you are not going into it nearly as tired as I am right now.  Hope you all have great days.

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