Man, been so tired these past few days. I've only been up 8 hours or so and want to sleep some more. Maybe I'll finally even out and start waking up normal hours again. *crosses fingers*

I've also been watching this awesome anime that Clark sent Jon and me (real DVD copies. Cause he got them from work, he works at Media Blasters.) It's called Twelve Kingdoms. It's another take on a popular anime theme, the "person from real life Japan gets thrust into a fantasy world" (think Escaflowne, Fushigi Yuugi, etc.) Except I'd rather compare it to Escaflowne because I actually *liked* that series. :D

And Twelve Kingdoms is also very good. The mythology and even the setting associated with it, have some elements that remind me of why I like Exalted. Probably because it seems strongly inspired by Chinese mythology. As for the eponymous kingdoms, they are each ruled by a king or queen assisted by a holy creature, a kirin. (I love kirin! awww unicorns. *ducks*) The kirin chooses the ruler, and so long as the king/queen rules the land justly, it prospers. Otherwise the kirin grows sick, the crops go bad, people revolt, etc.

Jon and I watched the first arc involving how the Queen of Kei (who was originally from Japan) was crowned. Looking forward to seeing more... after I have some epic sleepz! All I did of note today was RP Ryshy going shopping with Alexsei in DR, edit the document I wrote last post, and watch Twelve Kingdoms. Yet to me, this is an ideal vacation. Who needs the real world? :P

Jon and I never actually even cooked our dinner. We got sleepy midday and just snoooored our way through the day. Kind of sad! But turkey and potatoes and yule log are on for later today!

I totally got Talliska to circle 42 on Christmas Eve though. Also went looking at a Dragonrealms fest with some of Talli's in game friends. That was a lot of fun. :)

I'm a dork for being on DR on Christmas Eve. I was on RPoL too, handing out holiday bonuses in a couple of my games. n.n While tallying up the experience, I I wrote and tested the most amazing script ever to help Talliska train hiding and stalking. Now I can finally get those two skills to catch up to my other survivals. It's truly epic. :3 And I'll need it, my dream title for Talli is "Penumbra" which takes 400 hide/stalk. Such a long way off! ;.;

Though I'm proud that Talli now has Trailmaster (175 scouting) - that took quite a bit of work to achieve!

Lastly, I'm in love with Kokia's album The Voice. I'm not big on her pop albums, but I LOVE when she goes for more 'new age' style musicI got me some mp3s, only because I have no way of getting a hard copy any time soon and was so eager to hear it. It's definitely on my "to buy" list though!

I totally slept for 2/3rds of yesterday.

And it was good.

I'm starting to think just getting more sleep and relaxing is really going to kick my writing mojo back into gear. I may be able to hang on to all my games on rpol, even. (Though, just the GMed ones. Have discarded most of the ones I was playing, already.)

Just that one day of rest made my mind SO MUCH CLEARER. Hard to believe how much that helped. I even managed to get my brain started on some cool new Academy events. Hopefully by the 7th or so (January) I should be ready to jump back into my other games as well (particularly the ones that require combat posting. My bane, given that it takes both inspiration AND fiddling with numbers/stats.)

But for now I have over a week of rest to go and I am going to enjoy it. Whee! Actually, we have to run to the grocery store too, to get our turkey for Christmas dinner (yum yum).

...you decide to code a bit of (not terribly well-written) php to access the last.fm API and print a "most recent track played" link in text on your current status block (see above). :P

I realized it's easy enough with the API being open to users who sign up and get an API key. This is the function being used, which fetches the most recent tracks played by a specific user. I just specified my own user name, limit = 1 for one track and the key I signed up for here.

Pretty easy stuff, didn't take me long after I poked around at the PHP XML parser documentation. Right now I'm using xml_parse_into_struct with a switch nested in a foreach (with a shortcut break as soon as I get all the info needed), but there's likely a cleaner way to do it than that. For now, it works, so I'll use it. :P I'd been wanting to have a self-updating "currently listening" app for a while now.

Still, took time I could've been writing rpol posts for. I'm going to seriously regret the time lost. :/ I'm incredibly sleepy. However I am going to upload some new, smaller gif versions of the Dark Siren and Ryshy chibis by shurelia. Woo. (Edit: All done, saved nearly 60kb in all!)

Well we couldn't really go out today due to lack of money (well, sorta... we were waiting for Jon's money to come in but it hadn't yet) and also the fact that it's incredibly cold out today. :( On top of that, I have been sleeping totally screwed up hours lately and can't seem to fix that.

We are going to formally celebrate sometime early January though... already booked the hotel and stuff. I'll stick an announcement up about that later! Jon and I are going to spend some alone time with each other then. <3

I am terrible at multitasking... It makes me slow at everything. When I was doing RPoL, DR, chatting to Kalli and others on AIM, AND poking at my facebook account, that was pretty crazy. o.O It's especially made me incredibly slow in RPoL, which means I will have to be stricter with myself. Stay off IMs and script DR while writing... play DR fully while chatting... write RPoL and chat a bit, maybe. And etc.

I think my limit is 2 ;) Should remember that when I'm back in college again!