The Persona 4 Comic by Peachifruit/Hiimdaisy was posted last night. Enjoy!

A cool-sounding band I heard about on NPR. Worth a listen.

Kevin Butler is at it again making not-so-subtle jabs at both the Natal and Wii. I love these commercials.

Laura Shigihara, composer for Plants vs. Zombies, plays the roof level theme in this youtube video.

It’s still just under two weeks before the MLB baseball season is set to start, but the NPB has already gone and started its season.

To be more specific, the Pacific League started its season last Saturday, but their second series won’t begin until the Central League starts on Friday. Are things looking good for my favorite squad? Nope, they’re 0-3 in their first series against the Orix Buffaloes. Tanaka and Iwakuma had pretty solid starts, but the run support wasn’t quite right to make either game a win.

In the meantime most every MLB team is getting ready to trim their rosters down to 25 men, finalizing their rotations and starting lineups. Most disappointingly, the Nationals have sent Stephen Strasburg down to their minor league affiliate in Harrisburg for further seasoning, experience, and to stave off his arbitration clock.

I’m finding it tough to focus any more on Spring Training, I’m just anxious for the season to start.

It was late fall or early winter. The precise season doesn’t matter; it was definitely cold. Equally cold was my companion riding shotgun. Her visit to icy Ithaca was, as usual, marred by the arguments we always found ourselves embroiled in, only this time I was living in a double with Min that should really have only been a single. The claustrophobia of such a tight space was so overwhelming that we traded it for the equally tight confines of my Corolla, but there’s something different about driving down a country road. Something that gives you the illusion of openness and freedom while you are crammed between lane lines and car chassis. The tension and anger seemed to flow away. We made peace and turned around about halfway to Lisle and didn’t look back that weekend.

Driving hasn’t always been this relaxing for me, but I don’t see how it ever could be for a kid. At age seven I can recall my mother telling us about her family’s weekend drives around California. They would pile in, drive around, and just enjoy taking in the sights. How incredibly dull life in the ’70s must have been if this was considered high family entertainment. This, of course, was her rationalization about why we were supposed to be looking out the window and taking in the sights instead of bickering, reading, or playing our Game Boys. It’s prohibitively expensive to fly a family of five anywhere for vacation, but that wasn’t going to stop my mother from taking us places. My family hit the road.

It’s fair to say that my love for asphalt stems entirely from covering so much ground in cars throughout my life. Beyond that, there’s power in driving to my destinations. Planes, trains, and public transportation all have me yielding control over departure times and the operation of the vehicle. Perhaps this is a male thing or maybe it’s just part of my personality, but I take great pride in getting myself places and I take great pleasure in taking in the sights that I ignored in my youth.

Out of character for me is that I actually enjoy solo drives more than a drive with passengers. I don’t hate having passengers, it’s plenty of fun, but I’m more of a fan of hitting the open road by myself, listening to music as loud as I want or to podcasts. The isolation affords me time to think, something I rarely give myself, and it even encourages me to catch up with my family and friends on the telephone.

The only thing that keeps me from driving to all my destinations is feasibility. I intend to see ballgames in Illinois, Texas, and Minnesota this year, but all of those destinations are more than ten hours away by car (take out Chicago and it’s twenty). Given that I’d only have a weekend to go to these places, it’s just a waste of my time and money to drive that far. Give me a destination within six hours and I’m already on the road.

I’m glad I don’t make a living on the road, but I hope that I’m able to hit the road a lot more this summer. There’s no greater feeling than escaping the confines of home life and taking to the expanses of the open road.

The whole time I was watching this video I kept thinking, “Man, she looks and sounds a lot like Zooey Deschanel.” I felt really dumb when I wikipedia-ed the group and found out that she is, in fact, Zooey Deschanel. I really like her voice (and she’s not so bad to look at).

There haven’t been too many turns played recently thanks to Eric moving to a new office, so I don’t have all that much to say.

Ethiopia

Those Phrygians won't even know what hit them!

France continues to survive while I finish researching Construction and gathering my forces. His research has been slow and I’ve been trying to monitor his forces to ensure that they don’t stray too far or found too many new cities, but I know at least one has been founded outside of Paris.

In the meanwhile, my forces are about to work off some aggression by destroying a barbarian city and maybe capturing it.

Khmer Empire

Remember that epic war that I fought to destroy the Holy Roman Empire? Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken so many cities in that conflict. I’ve all but collapsed by economy and I’ve got no one to blame but myself.

We just have to get by with less!

As my civilization slowly dies from lack of funds, I start to think about ways to re-invigorate my economy via things like warfare…I really should just go and raze some cities.

Portugal

Not much to say here except that I’ve started a march on Karokorum. Eric’s troops massed on the border worry me, but I’m confident that I can respond in time to his threats.

I sure hope this is enough... It's a recon mission, at the very least.

Ok, so the song is generic C-Pop and not that great, but the video is up because all the instruments were recorded using synthesizer tools on the iPhone. Quoth Gizmodo:

Through a slew of music generation apps, like DrumMeister, Bassist, iDrum, NlogSynthesizer, NESynth and iShred, plus photography software including a stop motion app and 5d2 (a remote for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR used for a few of the shots) and, of course, a laptop, PixieTea (and crew) created this 3:39 music video named “ABCD Said” from the ground up.

Any idea what she’s singing about there, Min?

Despite Ian’s claims that I’m insane for doing so, Final Fantasy XIII lays almost untouched on my coffee table each night as I’ve been spending the past week playing Mega Man 9, 10, and Yakuza. Here are a few more words on the Mega Man games and a few on Yakuza:

Mega Man 9 & 10

I still stand by my assertion that Mega Man 10 is just too easy compared to 9. It makes me seem like a masochist to claim that I had less fun with it because it was easier, but that’s part of the fun of Mega Man. There were definitely some frustrating moments in 10, but I never got angry like I did with 9. It was much simpler to beat. I’ll have to play it some more so that I can beat my friend Lee to more trophies.

Yakuza

Why am I playing a 2005 game when I’ve got the 2010, beautiful CG epic FF XIII sitting around? The Yakuza series has been touted as fantastic for years, but I’d never gotten around to sitting down and beating any. That’s about to change over the rest of March. So far the game is pretty good with plenty of fighting and Japan-ness to it, which was precisely why I wanted to play it. It’s almost like being in Tokyo again, except that I stayed far away from the Yakuza strongholds when I was there. Nothing worse than getting in trouble with organized crime in a country whose language you definitely don’t understand. I hope to have this beat by next week and I might give a more complete rundown then.