I hope that everyone had a Merry Christmas! If you know me then you know that I’m not a religious person and identify myself as an Atheist/Agnostic. But I did have a Christian upbringing and attended private Catholic schools growing up, so I do say “Merry Christmas” and celebrate this religious holiday, with all that entails! As long as we’re all celebrating Peace on Earth, who cares if I’m the biggest hypocrite on it, right? *L*

I ordered both sets of Team Fortress 2 Christmas cards from the Valve Store and framed my favorites in a collage. I only intended to hang them during the holidays, but even after all our Christmas decorations have been packed away, I still have these on my wall. I just love them too much to take down and pack away for another year. They make me giggle whenever I look at them, whatever the season!

Thanks to everyone who sent me gifts, either IRL or on Steam. I will probably be spending 2010 playing all of them. *L* BTW, I don’t give gifts with an expectation of reciprocation. If you received a gift from me then don’t stress about returning the favor. I only wish I could have given out more during that crazy sale on Steam.

Poupee Girl is having its annual New Year’s event. This will mark two years of regular and continuous use of the site for me (one Snapshot every day) and quite frankly, I can’t believe it! I thought that I would have grown bored of playing with what amounts to vectorized kamikisekaeningyou (紙着せ替え人形) by now. But the cute doll clothing designs and the upload of real fashion items by other girls continues to keep me interested enough to login every day — even if it does make me feel a bit childish! =X

Poupee as a service has really grown and improved a lot since I first started using it two years ago. There is much more English language support, site navigation is easier, and there are more payment options for foreign users (who now outnumber the Japanese users that the site was originally directed towards). Poupee Girl is definitely making a lot of money from the Jewel system, if not all of its recent site advertisements and Dress Up item endorsements. I wish there was a way to invest in Pupe or Ameba.jp stocks, because they certainly would have outperformed my Sony and Toyota stocks this fiscal year! ww

Speaking of fashion, I got some cool stuff for Christmas that I plan to post in my next diary update, including some new Hunter wellies that I bought for myself and a wicked-looking Berserk necklace that I received from JoHny. I can’t wait to post the necklace — it is totally “JoHny style” cool and I love, love, LOVE Berserk!!

Yesterday was my Mom’s birthday, so we made her favorite Christmas cake from scratch (chocolate cherry avalanche). But someone decided to start early… so with a giant chunk missing, it didn’t really resemble a cake once finished! *L* It was still yummy though, although very rich. We’ll probably be eating it all week.

My Dad is always finding new and inventive ways to injure himself and about a week ago he managed to break his nose. I was really worried, but luckily it turned out to be nothing serious. My Dad however decided that he wanted to see his doctors up at Stanford straight away to have his DBS checked, so he told me that he scheduled and paid for an appointment on the earliest date available… December 29th. When I pointed out that this meant I would be driving him home on New Year’s, he just said “oh”; as if it was an interesting little detail he had overlooked, but one which wasn’t worth ruining his digestion of cake over. My Mom just shot me one of her knowing looks, like “this is why we divorced!” *L* When my Dad went home, I sent him an e-mail explaining why I don’t feel comfortable driving on the holidays. This was his immediate reply:

“It is a bit more dangerous to be on the road between holidays than at other times, but California no longer has many drunk drivers. We rank 40th among the states in alcohol related traffic deaths. Only 19 states have fewer fatalities per 100,000 population. Weather & road conditions are a big factor, too. Our trip to Palo Alto will be mostly on freeways — where it’s safer to drive.”

He is just so predictable… and irrefutable… and completely missed my point! ArGh. D= So, I’m stuck driving.

Double the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, double the fun?

I decided to get the X360 version of MW2 at launch because all of my friends were boycotting the PC version. Activision removed support for a lot of things in MW2 that were present in WaW: No third party servers, no admin functions, no console commands, and no custom maps/mods. That was enough to turn me off from Multiplayer entirely, so I decided to get the X360 version solely for the sake of Single Player Campaign. But a week after MW2 launched, people started hacking the PC version to support things like third party servers, and all of my friends who had been “boycotting” the game began to purchase it on Steam. Now that I too have the PC version, I’m having a difficult time justifying the existence of my X360 version. *sigh*

One of my favorite Christmas movies to watch every year is Hogfather, based on a book from the popular Discworld series of comedic-fantasy novels by Terry Pratchett. My favorite character from the books (who by no coincidence happens to be the main character of the movie) is Death; or as he calls himself, mankind’s “anthropomorphic personification” of death. The Death of Discworld has developed a fascination with humans over the years, even going so far as to adopt one of them as his own, and his observations ironically remind us of what being human really means. This is my second favorite scene from the movie, when Death explains to his granddaughter Susan the paradoxical nature and necessity of human Belief.

One down and four to go on Still Something To Prove.

This Thanksgiving I completed Dead Center on Expert with three other girls (we coincidentally searched for an Expert Lobby at the same time and were matched up with each other). The last stand of the campaign, when you gas up Jimmy Gibbs Jr.’s Stock Car, was the most frustrating and took us over an hour to complete.

On Normal or Advanced, it is easy enough for two people to stay on the ground floor gassing up the car while two others search the top floors for gas cans and throw them down to the Food Court. This just didn’t work in Expert because the Director was spawning too many Hordes and Special Infected for the people on the ground floor to handle on their own while also being expected to gas up the car. The two people on the upper floors also took too long collecting the gas cans because a Tank would spawn before they finished.

When our lobby leader (and token guy on the team) left, one of the girls suggested a new strategy. If both teams searched for gas cans on opposite floors first, we would collect them faster, and stand a better chance of gassing up the car afterwards as a team of four. Our goal was to do this before the Tank spawned. Mapping out the most expedient routes for both teams to take took a lot of trial and error, but a hundred deaths later, we practically had it down to a science. All four of us escaped before the Tank spawned.

My guy friend (who joined us at the end) joked:

“Of course GIRLS would have no problems beating this Campaign on Expert. Their strategy involves memorizing the layout of a MALL. That’s like, their sixth sense IRL.” LOL

I forgot to post this delicious Juicy Couture Cake Bank (I purchased it along with the Etiquette Pony for my birthday). The Marie Antoinette palette and delicate flower details give it an elegant appearance that is almost reminiscent of Capodimonte. I could have done without the gold scroll though, because as cute as I find Juicy’s catchphrases, I’d prefer to not have them shamelessly plastered all over everything! Anyways, I’ve been using this to store lipgloss and other small things, since I don’t really keep loose change around.

I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead 2 waaay too much! I’ve put about 20 hours into the game so far according to my Steam profile (not including my Demo time, which is about 13 hours) and I haven’t even played Versus, Realism, or Scavenge yet. Right now I’m just having fun playing through the campaigns and discovering all of the alternate routes that the AI director can open up. My favorite is Dark Carnival (Whispering Oaks).

The first thing that I noticed about this campaign: stuffed animals, everywhere! Seriously, how cute is that?! They’re supposed to add to the “creepiness” of the campaign somehow, but they’re too cute! When I see them, I just want to hug them. *L* I think that the alligator plushies have the best design overall, but I might be just a little bias (alligators were my favorite animal as a kid, so I have a ton of alligator plushies). XD

The elephant plushies do remind me of the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence from Dumbo, which gave me nightmares as a kid. I think it is because of the carnival atmosphere and their pink coloring.

This is something that I wish had been in the original L4D: mini-games! The Peanut Gallery is my favorite because it reminds me of the target shooting games that I always play at our county fair. If you get 750 points you win a Gnome Chompski (carrying him to the end of the campaign earns you the Guardin’ Gnome Achievement). Does anyone else think that he looks just like the gnome from Half Life 2: Episode 2? I am easily amused by posing him next to stuff and pretending he’s from the Travelocity commercials.

I had to do this Achievement in Single Player, because everyone always hits the little peanut man! ArGh!! Why is it easier to get 750 points as one person with one pistol, as opposed to four people with guns akimbo?

“What IS Moustachio?” Of course he is the cartoony stereotype of an oldtime Italian strongman, but just what IS he exactly? None of my friends could figure it out, until someone finally made the connection between Moustachio and a pistachio. I just thought he was wearing a green hat the whole time! *L* Valve had way too much fun designing this stuff. Now I want to know more about the other nutty characters on the meter!

What carnival would be complete without Whac-A-Mole? This reminds me more of Chuck E. Cheese’s actually. *L* We all tried different melee weapons on it (Baseball Bat, Crowbar, Guitar), but the Fire Axe seems to have the best range. You’re able to shoot the little ’stachios too of course, but that would be cheeeeeating!!

While sorting through my L4D2 screenshots I noticed something interesting about the Desert Eagle. Trademark on a real Mark XIX would read: “DESERT EAGLE PISTOL” followed by “MAGNUM RESEARCH INC.” or “ISRAEL MILITARY INDUSTRIES” on the slide (depending on the manufacturer). The texture in L4D2 however is more in line with Valve’s quirky sense of humor than reality and reads: “1337 WEAPON INDUSTRIES (y0gi) PWN. MADE IN SHYVILLE.” It made me chuckle, but seems out of place amongst the other, more realistic gun textures in the game. TBH, something about fake gun branding in videogames really rubs me the wrong way. If a gun model is based on a real gun, then I prefer to see a realistic texture. For example, I like being flashed the Colt logo whenever I reload the M16A3 in Left 4 Dead, because it reminds me of my IRL Colt AR-15. Fake textures make me feel like I’m using the virtual representation of an Airsoft gun. Bleh.

Valve appears to have been so preoccupied in coming up with something witty for the texture, that they forgot to add a muzzle to the in-game model as well. *L* I find that more humorous than the trademark. =X

I watched a very touching children’s cartoon recently called Stormy Night (Arashi no Yoru ni or 嵐の夜に). It is about the unlikely friendship between a goat and a wolf who struggle against the natural order that keeps them apart. One of my Japanese Steam friends (who goes by the same name) recommended it to me.

While looking for the book that inspired the film, I discovered that there was a DS game. Reviews made it look cute and semi-educational, so I searched everywhere until I finally found it in-stock at JGamers.com.

Although this game was made for children (note the furigana above the kanji in the second picture), I bought it as a learning/motivational tool for myself. The dialogue is rudimentary enough to work through understanding and because it is printed entirely in hiragana (with spaces to show where words begin and end), I can read it. Using a game intended for children to study a language as an adult might sound pathetic, but it really does help me in my spare time! I memorized hiragana by doing the flashcard games in AIUEO Study with Anpanman, which also expanded my vocabulary. Ubisoft’s My Japanese Coach didn’t do squat for me in comparison and that was a game intended for adults. =P Now if only I could get over my shyness and stuttering when I try to speak Japanese. I wish that I could take a class, because I care more about learning how to communicate with Japanese people, than I do about learning to read Japanese. *L*

The game itself is really cute too. The mini-games have different themes (puzzle-solving, RPG, platformer), and achieving a higher score treats you to more dialogue. Some of the sprite artwork is very detailed too.