Whoa birthdays. Eni's was yesterday but I was out all day. And today's is Selina's and Lumi's. I'm sending birthday wishes all over the place.

Still feel rather sad I'm not sending gifts because I like being generous, but right now being generous may not be a good idea. Still no financial aid yet and Jon is just starting a new job at the end of this month.

On the other hand I DID spend *some* money as I had some left over... namely, to get Dark Spire. FINALLY. XD And Jon bought some music CDs which I will talk about later.

Dark Spire is just... totally awesome so far. Mmmmm challenging dungeon crawlers. The premise is very simple (go to the top of the tower, kill the bad sorcerer, get back the treasure--it's very Nethack-ish actually), and the gameplay seems deceptively simple as well. But this game totally does NOT handhold you through much at all. Even the tutorial had this attitude of "just DO IT already, stop asking questions!" which amused me to no end.

PlayOnline name: darksiren
Character: Talliska (Gilgamesh - Windurst)

We'll see how long I stick with FF11 :D So far, though, it actually plays somewhat similarly to DR, at least in terms of the way skills are trained... Except there's more classes and the option to mix classes. It's still mostly Final Fantasy-ish though, of course.

The game servers seem pretty quiet most of the time... But that could be 'cause I'm in a noob area. The few people we've met both on Gilgamesh and Siren (when I was trying that... decided to switch to Lumi's server though we've not met there yet) have all been pretty nice though. Generally I have a good impression of the player base so far, but that could be 'cause there aren't any worldwide chat channels to disabuse me of that notion. :P

BTW--I had a really damned crappy second half of yesterday which is why I'm preferring to be alone right now. :/

Late last night Jon and I tried PSU Max Attack G again. The Ruins were recently added and boy, did we get our asses whooped trying the S-rank mission! It was just the two of us, since Clark and Jim's accounts are both screwed (argh) and my sis was too sleepy.

Man, we REALLY got owned. o.O And I was a little bit annoyed by it 'cause we slogged through something like an hour and 30 minutes of constant waves of enemies and breaks to return for healing and Scape Dolls (I must have used like... 30 of em total) only to die close to the end. It was in VR Ruins Block B... just this one room with seemingly endless waves of Deljabans and these tall SEED-forms with a big, nasty claw in one hand and a photon blade in the other (forgot the name).

The big ones were powerful enough to cut Reina down in 2 swipes, and she recently hit level 115, Fighgunner 18. Crazy. I still think we could've made it -- IF we didn't run out of Scape Dolls in that room.

Well, everything's been taken care of now. I've got my visa extension, I've arranged to take some time off from RP, I've told pretty much everyone I had to that I'll be gone. I even got my car back, it's running just fine, and gasp! We even got the new parts fitted on it. They're not painted, but my car finally doesn't look all ripped up on the front bumper/driver's side any more. Woo!

I just need to get my car registration done. :P But the appointment isn't until next week, so we're just going to go drive to my inlaws' tomorrow.

Right now the schedule looks like this:
- August 15-19 (or 20) at my inlaws' place.
- August 20-24? we'll spend back home just unwinding, cleaning up around the apartment and such.
- August 25-28, we visit Montreal.

The time periods are give or take a day, but the order is right. Right now I really ought to be packing... but before that, I'd like to post some words of support for Lumi and her boyfriend, who are going through tough times right now.

(Okay, 'cause I don't want Lumi to have to scroll through my grumpiness in order to see this: THANK YOU LUMI~! I know Jon and I already mentioned it before, but I am quite happy with my copy of Hoshigami DS. Which I am now playing on NORMAL mode. HOLY $|-|17, resurrection Coinfeigms!!! *gasp*)

I didn't end up running Emberdays this Monday. ;.; I just wasn't inspired enough. So it won't run again until August 13. :( I get all paranoid delaying my game because I think no one will be interested in it later. Also, I feel bad because that means Selina waits even longer to play... though that doesn't even change the fact that I don't know what her schedule will be yet, the time conflict with Kraken and so on and so forth. *sigh*