Okay, here are my mostly-spoiler-free reactions, as I had them:

• Tallis isn't so bad, actually... even if she does sound like Felicia Day.
• OMG I want to kill the Duke. I hope that's an option.
• Amazing banter so far between Hawke & Bela alone
• HOLY FUCK don't touch the Creepy Altar without a healer mage!!! LMAO (optional boss)
• Skullkid? Nope, "ghasts" says Tallis
• What is it, Lassie?? Oh, that's.... kinda sad.
• Seriously? THAT is what they have me wear as finery for the banquet? Couldn't I have brought that cute skirt-robe-thingy from home?
• Cameos yay! Teagan!! Isolde? Leliana!!!
• Didn't know Bran was into that sort of... thing
• Tiptoe / through the tulips... Or at least through a manor full of Orlesian guards.

To be fair, I should probably go ahead and clarify the above statement. As of yesterday, Brian started playing Dragon Age II. He never finished Origins, claiming that his entire goal was to bed as many people as possible in a single night at camp and once he'd achieved that he had no reason to play. Keep in mind that he already had healed Arl Eamon and completed at least two of the three, if not all three, treaty quests in the first game. He was practically done and just decided to stop.

DA2 plays much differently than Origins, though, so he started that up yesterday. Since he didn't have a completed save to import, I had to provide a bit of a Cliff's Notes for each of the prebuilt histories the game provides (primarily "Who's ruling Ferelden, Alistair, Anora, or the two together?" "Did you let Loghain live?" "Did you complete the ritual?" and "Which of you killed the Archdemon?¹") so he could decide which back story to use. He ended up taking the default Hero of Ferelden story, since with the exception of his character was a human mage rather than a noble, everything in that scenario matched his answers.

Then, he broke my heart.

Since he preferred playing as a mage in Origins, he took that class for his Hawke in DA2. He knows about how only one twin makes it out of the prologue alive and which twin survives based on your player class (though he didn't know how the other died and was a bit surprised by that) and yet he still chose to play as a mage. It made me extremely sadface to see Bethany die by the ogre's hand, but at least Brian agrees with me that Carver's a pain in the ass little twit. I don't remember if Brian knows how to kill Carver later in the game, and I haven't decided yet if that should be spoiled at the last minute when the time comes.

Anyway, he only got as far as recruiting Varric and initially meeting Sebastian when I decided he was okay to play on his own without me there to answer questions and give advice (mostly advice that was requested, and questions about the events in Origins). I went to the other room to take a nap, and I think he saved and quit for the afternoon shortly afterward himself. I forgot to ask last night specifically how much he did before turning it off, and if he intends to even continue the game, so I'll have to check with him later today. If he does continue, I already see him being just as furious with the game as I was the first time I finished it, since I gave him the same advice I've given everyone--PICK A SIDE--and he said no, he'll just answer each time based on what he feels is right. Or maybe he said whichever response was "evil", I can't remember. :p

At any rate, if he continues with the game then this could be interesting. Or it could be really, really frustrating, depending on if he asks for advice throughout the game or not. I don't mind discussing how I felt about certain parts of the game, but if he takes the alternate paths and then gets mad at the game for being "wrong" it's going to get old really quick. After all, I've already been through that set of emotions with this game. ^_~

¹This question brought up a whole slew of other questions that weren't entirely related to starting his character, since Brian didn't get far enough in Origins to learn how an Archdemon is actually killed. Somehow I'd told him about Morrigan's ritual, but not the reason behind it. >.<

1. What the hell is that headline supposed to mean and/or how is it supposed to be read?
2. What the hell is the actual post on SavannahNow.com supposed to be?

At any rate, whatevs. It's too early to think too hard on this.

Okay, so I confess. I skim the headlines for a lot of the items in my feeds but don't read the actual posts. I knew there was an in-house Twitter photo service being rolled out, but I honestly thought it was just announced & done. On the other hand, I heard a few days ago that I might get to try out something new. I was very intruiged, but waited patiently for my turn at whatever this "something new" was.

Me, being the idiot that I am sometimes, didn't even realize at first (once I received notification tonight that my new feature was activated) what the new feature was. Like I said, I thought the photos were already implemented when they were announced. Then I logged in with my other account in another browser to compare the two screens, and realized how wrong I was. 

Now, if I'd read the original announement post--the link to which is below--I'd have known already that Twitter was partnering with Photobucket for their service. Anyway, in my very brief experience so far:

• Uploads appear to be fast--faster even than TwitPic via web. Granted, I've barely played with it so far, but what I have tried has seemed almost immediate.
• Image quality gets reduced a bit if the size is too big. I believe this is a Photobucket image size thing, but I haven't uploaded any large images to that site in quite a while so I don't remember.
• It's using Photobucket! While I'm sad that I can't change my username there to match most other sites, I've been using Photobucket for as long as I remember and I still adore it.

Now then, for things I want:

• Auto-link between our Twitter/Photobucket uploads to our pre-established Photobucket accounts! We can already link these accounts on the Photobucket end to tweet our uploads, how about going the other way around? Give us a "Twitter Uploads" album in our Photobucket account that they can go to, and we can later move them to other albums later. I don't know the back-end of the arrangement at all, but I'd imagine this would eventually save time and money on Twitter's end with the users hosting their own PB accounts, plus there has to be someone who uses Photobucket Pro, saving Photobucket on a little bit of costs as well.
• Mobile support! As of now there's no integration for the official mobile apps or TweetDeck, but the original announcement post states that mobile support including MMS support is coming. I'd assume this won't happen until the main site's feature is more established, but who knows? What I haven't tried is the mobile website to see if that works in place of an app or MMS uploads. I'll try that out in an hour or so and edit in my results when I get it done (or not, whichever the case may be).

Anyway, like I said I just got the ability to try the Twitter photos feature tonight, so I'll have much more time in the future to play with it more & report more on it later. 

Original post discussing the new photo hosting service: http://blog.twitter.com/2011/06/searchphotos.html

I don't think I've ever done a review for an album before, but there's a first for everything I suppose. The new Lady Gaga album was on sale for 99 cents yesterday, so I went ahead a jumped on it--so long as I liked just one song in addition to the title track Born This Way, I figured I was getting my money's worth. I almost never enjoy Gaga's songs until I've heard them a dozen* times or so and they kind of get stuck in my head. While the album itself I wouldn't pay the full $6.99 Amazon MP3 price for (at least, that's the price today for the version of the album I got yesterday), there are a few songs I've liked enough to not regret my decision to download while it was on sale. Overall, here's my impressions of the various songs on the album, listed in the order that I decided each song belongs in each category:

Songs I liked the first time through
Yoü And I
Judas

Songs that required 2 or more plays
Born This Way (though I heard this whenever ago when the single was first released)
Americano

Songs that required 5 or more plays
Bad Kids
Scheiße

Songs I'm still not thrilled with
Bloody Mary
Marry the Night 

No opinion so far
Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)
Heavy Metal Lover
Hair
Government Hooker
Electric Chapel
Edge of Glory

Of those "no opinion" songs, I'm thinking "Heavy Metal Lover" & "Government Hooker" I'm going to like eventually, it's just going to take time for those two to grow on me. No clue about the others yet, though. Regardless, I got two songs I love and four more that I like--more than worth the dollar spent on the album, and maybe (almost) worth the retail price, even.

*In this case, "dozen" = I haven't got any clue how often it really is.

Okay, so I've mentioned on Twitter how I'm going through DA2 again, trying to pick up the last few trophies that I hadn't gotten on my other three and a half plays. There are only three trophies that I need to get the plat, plus the friendship/rivalry trophy for Sebastian. In addition, I'm trying to get the Sebastian romance completed, just to say that I have. All's been going well--made a rogue, avoided flirting with everyone else, and was about to head into the Deep Roads to finish Act 1. I had been very careful in any quest-related areas that I knew I couldn't return to, making sure I'd gathered up every crafting resource in each area, since "Supplier" is most time consuming of the three trophies I need. It occured to me more than once that I should probably print out a list of every resource in the game with its location, but with the exception of the Bone Pit Mines, I knew I had gotten every item out of every quest area, and I could always go back to the Mines to get anything I'd missed there.

The good news, I guess, is that I did in fact check my list for Act-One-completion before heading down to the Deep Roads and I was right! I'd successfully found every single crafting item I thought I had, and the only ones left were in areas I could return to any time, like the Wounded Coast in general. Unfortunately, when I went back to the Bone Pit to recheck the mines (I figured I left some lyrium down there) the icon on the map for the mine entrance was still on the map, but the entrance itself was invisibly roped off by the game and I couldn't get inside.

Well fuck, there went about 10 hours of gameplay.

Anyway, I went back and remade Ria (all my Hawkes outside of the first Marian and Garrett have names that are a play on the original default name, omitting letters or syllables here and there) last night and started Act 1 over. I'm just shy of five hours back into the game, I'm a bit over half way through the Act, and I'm marking each material off a list before continuing from one area to the next this time. I've got all the items but the ones in the Bone Pit and the Tal-Vashoth cavern, excluding those found during the Deep Roads expedition.

As for the other two trophies I need for completion, that's just Master Craftsman & Archaeologist. I should have had archaeologist last time through, but forgot in Act 3 to get a third "Band of Three" codex entry. Master craftsman should be much easier, since you only have to craft everything from one of the crafting trees, the potions tree only has six recipes to begin with, and from what I understand (I'm marking these off on a list as I go as well) you get all of those recipes by the end of Act 2.

In the meantime, as inspiration for my goal of getting the Sebastian romance this game, I've been reading DA2 fics featuring him lately. Lots of these are angst-ridden, but the best ones are by far the ones that either feature Isabela being a bad influence on Hawke and convincing her to taunt the poor choir boy, Isabela taunting him herself, or are complete and unabashed smut that turn out to be Varric embellishing the story to Cassandra again, pissing her off and having her call him on his bullshit. Actually, I might just switch from searching for Sebastian fics altogether and set my search to character = Varric / genre = humor and see what I find overall. I can't imagine any character in the game would be as much fun to tease as Sebastian, but I'm sure there have to be a few good fic authors out there who can handle Varric's story-telling prowess.

Thank god it's been a slow day at work today, and I haven't had to go out in this but twice so far. I do not envy our maintenance guys when they're scheduled during weather like this, however.

...Especially after my little tirade around this time last year about being disappointed by others for saying and not doing. I honestly intended to honor my commitment to Jules's virtual art gallery, but even while personally failing and feeling guilty, I figured I'd be the exception to the rule, the one person who fell through. Surely others with much more talent would pick up the slack and I'd be the only one aware that I was missing.

Judging by some Facebook posts today, though, I couldn't be more wrong, and it makes me feel even more sick about my own failure. For fuck's sake, I was even tested for lupus myself this week, among a host of other things! Yes, all of my bloodwork came back normal in the end, but for roughly 24 hours? It was possible. Not likely, but possible, and I'd never wished more for a positive mono test in my life. 

Jules, I'm so sorry, more than you could ever know. Internet-only-friend or not, I'll find a way to fix this. It may be soonish, or it may be closer to the October update, but I'll find something. And if you have any particular request, just let me know, and I'll do everything I can to meet it.

Brian's younger sister works at a vet clinic, and whenever there's an animal that is especially cute she uploads a picture of it to her Facebook. Normally the pictures are of cats or dogs, with the occasional bird, rodent, or in one case a deer. Yesterday, the upload was the following pic of a box turtle sporting a little bandage:

The turtle's name is General Grevious, and she (I'm taking Abby's word that it's a she, cause hell if I know how to tell the difference between turtle genders) was brought into the clinic after being attacked by a dog.

The thing is though? Look her in the eye.

At first I thought GG was just annoyed by the bandage and not feeling well. When I looked again, though, I realized she's actually in the midst of an ice cold rage. That turtle is murderous and is actively plotting a calculated revenge on both the dog that attacked her and the humans who have subjected her to the indignity of a bandage and photo.

Let's all hope she doesn't come across any ooze, lest she suddenly mutate into a form that will let her put her plots into motion.

What began as my video driver crashing & restarting itself when I watch anything on YouTube has expanded to cover any and all flash video it seems. Not only that, but this morning it started giving me a completely bonkers Blue Screen, seen briefly below. I don't know if you can hear it around/behind my "ZOMGZ ITS POSSESSED" commentary, but it has a funny, broken little buzz to it, too.

(download)

Click here to download:

VID_20110423_105020.3gp (3.03 MB)