I started playing Vampire: Bloodlines, and it seems pretty good so far. I don’t think it would make much sense unless you’ve at least taken a glance at an old World of Darkness book, but luckily I have, so I’m lucky in that respect. I’m playing a Malkav, and it’s great fun talking crap to everyone…

HL2 Episode 2 has been great, but I really, really hate the Hunters. Especially in the last big fight, there’s heaps of other stuff going on, and they’re taking away 1/3 of your health and armour in one salvo. And they are difficult to kill with your standard weapons… It seems you basically have to run them over with your car to kill them quickly. Unfortunately, my machine struggles with rendering car + everything else going on…

In a completely unrelated note, presented for your edification, intro sequences for the same cartoon.

Firstly, one you may be familiar with:

And next, one you probably haven’t seen before – the Japanese intro for the same show.

It seems to me that the Japanese one contains a much higher awesome quotient than the Western one. Plus, they somehow manage to make Jubilee look bad-ass. I wouldn’t have thought it was even possible.

I also finished God of War II the other day. I’m really impressed with God of War overall – they’re entertaining games to play, although God Mode on GoW2 is a son-of-a-bitch at times. I don’t think I’m game to try Titan Mode, which is harder still…

I learned a valuable lesson on configuring routers yesterday: Always assume it’s not going to work, no matter how much preparation you do. All you can do is mitigate the amount of time it takes you to figure out the inevitable problems by having as much reference material as possible easy to hand.

I didn’t have any reference material yesterday, so it took me six hours to find the two commands I needed to enter. I was tired.

Saturday, we helped Mal and Elspeth move into their new place (conveniently just across the street from Trang and I). This was a surprisingly large amount of physical labour. Still, it’s all exercise. Then Saturday night, we went out to Summer Hill to watch the Tigers beat St George with Trang’s family. Watching sports with them is a lot of fun, as they tend to the rowdy, which I am not good at. Had an awesome Guiness and Steak pie as well.

Sunday morning was wushu, as always, but being the last training before the end of term, it was a bit quiet and I left early. Which was of course so that I could make it to lunch at Trang’s parent’s place, and have Trang’s mum’s Pho. Which is really, really good. Bummer was, one of the hoses from the water-cycling system decided to break as I was driving out there. Luckily, it was only a few minutes away from Trang’s parents, so I managed to limp back after having run out of water. Turns out that someone had done a dodgy fix a while ago on that particular pipe, and left it in place. Which is kinda odd, as a replacement pipe was only 8 bucks at Super Cheap Autos… Anyway, all fixed and better than before now.

Got a busy long weekend coming up as well, with LAN party action, multiple movies to see, and a Grand Final to watch. Should be great! In preparation, I’ve bought a new video card, which is very exciting. This means that Half-Life 2 now won’t look like this:

Instead, they’ll look like this:

Woohoo!

Work is OK – the big upgrade went in OK, and things aren’t too bad.

Been playing KOTOR2 more, it really is lots of fun – playing the dark side first is actually making me look forward to replaying as light side, and seeing how many of the party I can turn into light-side Jedi. Not only that, but in this game, they really go all out on the dark side choices. You can really be a complete and total bastard. Quite surprising, really.

Wushu Website is now upgraded and using WordPress as a CMS. Now all I have to do is get a gallery up and running.

Form wise, you can see from the new section on the right that I’m still learning the same stuff. Which is good, because it’s going to be some time before I’m comfortable with moving on. It’s funny though – I’ve been doing a fair bit of wushu teaching lately, and the extent to which my body has adapted to the exercise I’ve been making it do for the last four years or so is quite amazing.

It was my first time actually deep-sea fishing, and I was surprised by how big the swell was. Seriously, we’re talking 2.5-3m swell – taller than the roof of the boat we were on when we were in the troughs. And for the first time, like, ever, I actually caught something – a leatherjacket and a flathead. The biggest bugger about the whole trip was that we had to be at the dock at 7am. On Sunday. When I’d been out till midnight playing Halo 2. Needless to say, we all had a lovely nap that arvo.

Eve Online is great – I’ve recently been able to afford to buy a destroyer, which is one step up from the starting frigate class. Now, to equip it with good guns and go on a trip…

Oh, and the wushu website is now live. Check it out, if you like. The current version is an interim one until I can build a wordpress-based site.

I failed my Ps test. Again. I’ve got another one booked soon.

Been to see heaps of exhibitions and concerts lately:

• Harry Connick Jr and the Sydney Symphony: Was very good, if a little bit less symphony-ish than I expected.
• Bugs Bunny on Broadway: Lots of fun, especially if you’re like me and have seen a fair percentage of all the Warner Bros cartoons ever made.
• Eye on Photography: A history of Australian photography. It was kinda cool.
• Egypt Exhibition at the Australian Museum: Awesome. I mean, what else could it be? It had mummies, and mummified heads as well!
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2004: Truly an awesome photography exhibit, with some truly amazing photos.

As you can see on the right, I’m playing Eve Online at the moment. It is very good. Think Massively Multiplayer Elite, and you’ve got an idea of where it starts.