2010 in review!

I wish I had done this for past years, but I guess there’s no better time than the present to start!

Movies
Movies I saw in the theatre: Shutter Island, Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3, Inception, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, The Social Network, Tangled, Tron: Legacy 3D, Black Swan
Movie that made me cry the most: Toy Story 3
Favorite movie of the year: Black Swan
Still want to catch in the theatre: I Love You Phillip Morris, Blue Valentine
Waiting for Netflix: Love and Other Drugs, The Kids are All Right, Nowhere Boy, Paranormal Activity 2, Let Me In

Music
CDs I received/bought this year: She & Him - Volume 2
Concerts I attended: Julian Casablancas, Imogen Heap, She & Him
Favorite live performance of the year: Imogen Heap, although She & Him are very, very close behind

Travel
Places I visited this year: Las Vegas, Gatlinburg, Atlanta

Games
Games I received/bought this year: Final Fantasy XIII, Just Dance 2
Games I beat this year: Dragon Age: Origins
Older games that I tried to pick up again this year: Lost Odyssey, The Sims 3
Favorite console game of the year: Dragon Age: Origins
Favorite iPhone game of the year: Angry Birds

Dining
New local restaurants I tried this year: Bosco’s, Sweet Cece’s, Allium, McDougal’s, Grilled Cheese and Crab Cake Co., Chuy’s, Pizza Perfect, Diana’s, Pfunky Griddle, Five Guys, Swanky’s Taco Shop, Cafe Coco, Rita’s
Favorite new eatery of the year: Sweet Cece’s
Coolest new dining experience: Pfunky Griddle
Current food-related mayorships on foursquare: Cheeseburger Charley’s, Chick-fil-A, Little Caesar’s, Manny’s House of Pizza [recently lost SATCO and another Little Caesar's...]
Number of times I ate at Melting Pot: four

News
Biggest local news event of the year: the flood!
Where I was when the rains came: at the Sheraton Music City, attending MTAC

Clearly the theme for 2010 was “dinner and a movie”! Any other categories you can think of?

I was looking through my Sims photos today and found a bunch of good ones that I hadn’t yet posted. So enjoy.

Kids and Pets

The Supernatural

Fun With Water

Proposals

Miscellaneous

If you were ever curious as to how many Sims are in my neighborhood, this post is for you.

I downloaded a Family Tree maker and entered all of my Pleasantview Sims into it. I estimated birth and death years using my self sim as the basis (I put my peer’s birth year as 1980 and went from there). Of course, before I started really keeping track of all my sims, it was a little confusing, which is why you see Steve having children at age 16, but the way I organize the game now is much more manageable, so I can make sure that older siblings are actually older than younger siblings, etc.

Anywho, the program constructed this little webpage, where you can see a list of all the sims. I plan on adding pictures of all of them eventually. http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/w/i/n/Jessica-Winn/index.html

And for the true effect, check out this PDF of the entire family tree: http://www.sweetvenus.org/images/2007/03/simstree.pdf

It’s insane how many there are.

Don’t worry, the Wii party is still on. I guess.

On Friday, Wayne was visiting and we all decided we wanted to play Tales of Symphonia (yes, again). So I put the disc in the Wii and turned it on. Nothing. After messing around with it, it eventually turned on, but said that the system was corrupted. Our poor Wii. Of course, we are supposed to have “Wii Party, Part 2″ this weekend, so this was even worse.

Ben called Nintendo and they said they would overnight us a new Wii and then we could ship our old one back. They would then transfer our account to the new Wii, so we wouldn’t lose our points or the games we had downloaded. We bought an SD card and backed up Zelda, WarioWare, and Wii Sports, and put all our Miis on the remotes. We thought we were in the clear.

Out of curiosity, Ben decided to try formating the Wii to see if that helped at all. He came back after a while and said:
(15:28:53) Ben: made it to the option
(15:29:17) Ben: wanna format it?
you sure?
you wanna do it?
yes yes yes
formating…
(15:29:19) Ben: …
(15:29:20) Ben: …
(15:29:41) Ben: system format complete restarting console noEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHGG
(15:29:52) Ben: restart
(15:29:54) Ben: nothin
(15:29:58) Ben: restart
(15:29:59) Ben: nothin
(15:30:02) Ben: restart
(15:30:13) Ben: figure i’ll wait a minute (no idea why)
(15:30:21) Ben: push the A button
(15:30:25) Ben: k
(15:30:30) Ben: select language
(15:30:45) Ben: now on this screen i thought it was very interesting
(15:30:50) Ben: it froze almost instantly
(15:31:05) Ben: but right before it did i was able to move the pointer for a couple seconds
(15:31:13) Ben: and somehow it was upside down
(15:31:32) Ben: like as if i had the remote completely turned upside down to make the finger point down
(15:31:52) Ben: now if whatever is wrong with it can make it do that im pretty sure its compltely screwed

But we were content in knowing that Nintendo had shipped out our new Wii already. (By the way, they said that a few of the first wave of Wiis had an issue with the latest update and that’s why this may have happened).

And then….

I was checking on the price of Mario Party 8, since it was supposedly coming out today and I was going to pick it up on my way home from work.

The date got pushed back.

To June.

…

So, we are still having the party. And we should have a functioning Wii. But we won’t have Mario Party. *sigh*

Top ten reasons why I dislike MMORPGs…

10. More like a glorified chat room than a real game.
9. In addition to the $50 I paid for the game, I have to pay another fee EVERY MONTH??
8. They are just boring and a waste of time.
7. Having to play consistently so your friends aren’t 20 levels higher than you the next time you play.
6. Having to revolve your schedule around a game. Can only play when friends are on, can’t do other things if there’s a raid scheduled, etc.
5. Cannot get to higher levels without being part of some group. Which is fine if they are friends, but see #6.
4. Endless grinding to level up. Ugh.
3. The lack of storyline. They try to have a storyline, but it’s nearly impossible for a game in this format to actually have a good one.
2. The idiots that play them. (Not saying that everyone playing them is an idiot, but there are an abundance of “1337-speaking” morons on them.)
1. The “game” never ends. There is no sense of accomplishment from finishing it, because you never finish it.

I will direct anyone wanting me to play World of Warcraft or anything else to this post.

Almost December…so, what does everyone want for Christmas?

We’ve been having so much fun with the Wii! We rented Excite Truck last week and had a blast with it, and we’re about 10 hours into Zelda now. Of course, we’re also still trying to beat Tales of the Abyss on PS2 which has kind of gone to the back burner since the Wii came out, but we’re about 50 hours into that.

Games that I’m looking forward to:

• WarioWare: Smooth Moves (Wii)
• Mario Party 8 (Wii)
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
• Fire Emblem (Wii)
• Blue Dragon (360)
• Lost Odyssey (360)
• Final Fantasy VI (GBA)
• Spore (PC)

There were also a couple games in this month’s issue of Nintendo Power for the DS that looked interesting.

And here’s an article I found yesterday about the tingly music post I made a few weeks ago: http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/mm_061120_music_chills.html

My birthday has come and gone.

It went pretty well, despite the fact that most of my friends were unable to make it to the party. There are pictures in the photos section.

I picked up my Wii at midnight during the party. It’s so awesome. We’ve been playing Wii Sports off and on as well as Zelda (which is spectacular). If anyone has a Wii, my Wii code is 3593 1974 7004 3701.

I also received a Heroscape figure, gaming chairs, Final Fantasy V, and the first season of Scrubs on DVD from Ben.

Who says Friday the 13th is unlucky?

Emails went out yesterday announcing that Gamestop and EB Games would be taking pre-orders for the Nintendo Wii today. The EB Games in Bellevue Center also called to tell me this (since I had pre-ordered Zelda from them). Most stores would be opening at 10 am. This kind of bummed me out to begin with, because I, of course, would be at work and would have to do it on my lunch break and hope that there were still some available at that time (the email said they expected them to sell out in minutes).

So, at 11 am today, I took my lunch break, armed with phone numbers and directions to every Gamestop and EB in Nashville, as well as those in Brentwood and Franklin. I started with the closest store to downtown. Sold out. Next store. Sold out. After about six stores, I was starting to get discouraged. I had only the two stores in Opry Mills left to call, as well as the ones outside of Nashville. I called Opry Mills. They still had a couple!

Quickly, I put my car in reverse and got out of the parking garage. I hit every red light imaginable on the way to the Interstate. And then I flew. (Not too fast because the last thing I needed was to get pulled over and thus get delayed…although my current mindset was, if that happened, to beg the officer to follow me to the store and THEN give me a ticket, lol.)

I made it to Opry Mills in 15 minutes. I parked the car, and then went inside. I glanced at the mall directory and noted where both EB and Gamestop were located (I couldn’t remember which one I had called). EB was closer, so I began speed-walking in that direction. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever walked that fast in my life. My legs were burning, but I had to make it. Gamestop was on the other side of the mall, so I was praying EB would still have some pre-orders left because my legs were about to fall off.

I run into EB. The cashier was on the phone. I wait and wait, thinking if they were out, I was so screwed since it had now been at least 20 minutes since I had originally called. I was sure I was too late. Finally, he hung up the phone. “Are you still taking reservations for the Wii?” I asked, desperately. He confirmed that they were. A chorus from above began to sing, and I made my reservation.

Okay, layout issues fixed.

The only things I know of that need to be done now are work on the smileys and I’m still deciding on pagination for Stuff I Own. I did it in the DVDs section, so check that out and if you think that’s better than a long list, let me know.

I called EB/Gamestop last Friday to check on preordering a Wii. (I’ve been calling every payday for about two months.) They said I still couldn’t preorder the system, but I could preorder games and they would call me when they started taking reservations for the system. So I went down there and preordered Zelda, along with Final Fantasy III on the DS and Tales of the Abyss on the PS2. So hopefully I’ll be getting a call from them soon about the system.

Random stuff…

Anyone who has talked to me lately knows that I’ve been sucked into the obsession that is Guitar Hero. I’ve been playing for about two weeks now and am progressing. When I first started, I couldn’t get through the first song on easy, and today I just beat “Bark at the Moon” on medium (and the medium level as a whole) and the first five songs on hard. It was a big accomplishment for me to get through “Infected” on hard, simply because it is the song that really introduces you to quickly moving your hand up and down on the frets. I didn’t do it well, but for awhile I had the rhythm going with a 4x multiplier.

Also, if you hadn’t heard, the Wii was announced to be coming out on November 19th for $249. That misses the window for my birthday party (which will either be the 11th or the 18th depending on if Sabrina is coming up or not), so we may have to have an encore party a few weeks after (so you should buy me Wii-motes for my birthday).

Ben and I are going to go to Atlanta this weekend. We’ll be going to the see Tom Petty and The Strokes on Friday night and to Anime Weekend Atlanta all day on Saturday. We were going to go see “The Science of Sleep” as well (the new Michael Gondry movie), but apparently it’s only in limited release this weekend. We did, however, go to see “The Last Kiss” last weekend, and it was good. I wanted to absolutely murder a few of the characters. But good.

Massive Sims update…

I realized I haven’t updated my blog on my Sims in almost two years (last Sims update), so here we go. I can’t possibly mention everyone in Pleasantview because there are probably about 200 sims living there, but I’ll touch on the basics (aka, the stuff I took pictures of)…

Ben and Jessica:
When I last left off, we had twins, Eric and Jewel. When they were teenagers, we also had a second son, Ezra. All three of the kids are adults now. Eric has four kids and Jewel has three, the oldest of which are in college. In fact, Jewel’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, recently got engaged. Ezra is not married but is living with his girlfriend Joy. Leia (Ben’s alien daughter) had a tough time starting out in college, but she soon got into the secret society and gave herself a makeover. She is now at the top of the Paranormal career.

Jewel playing in a band in college (she is playing drums…Sorsha, Evil Ben’s daughter, is on guitar…Wendy, who later married Eric is on bass):

Ezra and Joy:

Leia:

Eric’s daughter Rachel burning the house down:

Elizabeth’s proposal:

Steve and Tina:
Steve and Tina have both died of old age. In addition to Maria, they had a child together named Sheri. Maria met a man named Gabe and married him, but they have no children. Sheri married the son of Maynard James Keenan and they have a son, if I remember correctly. Before Tina died, she opened a semi-successful children’s store. Maria is now running the store.

Frances and Joe:
When I last mentioned them, Frances and Joe had twin girls. Both girls are now adults with teenagers of their own. Elaine married Trent Pleasant (Trent Reznor’s son) and they both soon soared to the top of the Natural Science career path. I mean soared quite literally, because they flew to work (like Superman) until they got cars. Now they drive. They are easily the (naturally) richest family in town. In addition to their successful careers, they are both the inventors of the only robots in Pleasantview. Their robots are married.

Gardeners overtook Elaine and Nadia’s house:

Elaine and Trent flying to work:

Robots in love:

Sabrina and Matt:
Their two kids are both married with children. Brianna married Steve’s son, Adam, for some reason in the nude:

Evil Ben:
Evil Ben turned into a zombie (as did Jason). He now amuses himself in his castle by playing chess with the Social Bunny.

Kris:
Kris married Sera Autonomous (remember the Autonomous family?) and had a child, Kyle. Kyle married Amy Reznor (the daughter of Jewel (the singer, not my daughter) and Trent Reznor) and had twins, Monica and Phoebe. At the same time, Sera became pregnant again with Kris’s son, Jeremy.

Kris does not really get along with Sera’s brother Paul. Here they are fighting while Jeremy lies on the kitchen floor:

Other:
One of my college Sims, Nick Freeman, married a streaker. She still has streaking tendencies:

Cloud and Aeris moved into the neighborhood. They have a daughter and another baby on the way:

Ramona Powers (the twin sister of Elizabeth’s fiance…confused yet?) got stuck with her mouth open for awhile:

A funny shot of the Grim Reaper:

This is what happens when a vampire comes to your birthday party:

It’s mage love.

Wow.

As you may or may not know, I haven’t played The Sims 2 in awhile (like 6 months to a year). This is basically due to the fact that several months ago the first disc of my Nightlife expansion went missing. This is the disc I need to run the game. I knew I took it out of my laptop when I bought The Movies last fall, but I hadn’t seen it since. When I got ready to move, I searched high and low for the disc, but never found it. I checked every CD and DVD case I had, but it was nowhere to be found. I concluded that when I was cleaning one day, it must have found its way into a trash pile.

So, not even a week ago, I buy a new copy of it on Ebay. Since the Pets expansion is coming out in October, I need to migrate all my files over to the new desktop and install Open for Business, which I hadn’t played yet. The new copy is supposed to come in tomorrow.

I was bored this afternoon, so I decided to install some games on my desktop. I took the box for The Movies out of my desk, when a thought occurs to me. The box is one of those that has a flap on the outside that is velcroed so you can open it up and learn more about the game. What if, by some chance, I had stuck the Nightlife disc inside there? I had checked the inside of the box and case a million times. But this had never occurred to me.

I slid my finger under the flap. There was a disc.

I open it up. There it is.

So, does anyone want to buy a copy of The Sims 2: Nightlife? Cause now I have two.

On a similar note, I went to open a can today for lunch and found out my can opener wasn’t working. I tried two different outlets and nothing. So I went to the store and bought another one, came home, tried it out. Nothing. I tried a completely different outlet with the first can opener and it worked. So now I have two can openers and two outlets that apparently don’t work.

Our Xbox 360 came in yesterday.

We have no games. None we really want right now. But my gamer tag is SweetVenus if you want to add me.

So, before I graduated, the question I was most commonly asked was, “What are you going to do when you get out?” and my answer was always, “I’m not sure.” Now that I have graduated, I keep getting “Have you found a job yet?” and the answer is, “No.” I still don’t know what I want to do. Let me rephrase: I know what I want to do, but I don’t have the education or experience to do anything remotely related to that right now. And I don’t know how to get my foot in the door to start doing that. I’m pretty sure the only way to get my foot in is to get a job doing something that I will despise. Which I don’t want to do. So, no, I haven’t found a job yet. In the meantime, I’m looking for jobs maybe with web design, but I really don’t have enough experience with that either (even though I’ve been making them for 11 years, just not getting paid for it, so it apparently doesn’t count since I don’t have a portfolio).

I would like to move out of Knoxville. There are basically two places I would consider going: Nashville or San Francisco. There are many pros and cons to both places. Nashville, obviously, is close to my family, cost of living isn’t too bad, and I won’t have to move too far from my friends here. San Francisco, however, is like my dream. As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live out there. Plus computer jobs are fairly easy to come by, so it would be a good place to get my foot in. However, it means probably an apartment half the size of my current one for twice as much money and not being close to anyone I know. I’ve applied for jobs in both places and I haven’t heard from anything yet, so I suppose it really doesn’t matter. I guess I’ll just end up going wherever I can finally get a job since I’m apparently not qualified for anything I want to do despite having a BS in computer science.

Okay, I got Animal Crossing as well.

I was just biding my time with Mario Kart. But, unfortunately, I know NO ONE with Animal Crossing, and you can’t just meet up with random people. So someone go get it so I’ll actually have a town to visit. My friend code is 2577-6115-5396.

Happy 2006!

I hope everyone had a great time bringing in yet another year. You can probably tell I did, from the super silly pictures. And don’t ask why my hair is pink now.

So, board game party on the 28th. New games I have are Alibi and Loaded Questions. They are both pretty fun. I wanted to wait till the party to play them, but we are impatient.

I’ve got Mario Kart DS. My friend code is 146091 502849 if anyone wants to add me. I’m having quite a difficult time getting carts unlocked though, so I’m still a little slow. Be gentle.

Here’s an interesting read in light of all the controversy that’s been going around.

http://gr.bolt.com/articles/violence/violence.htm

Geez, it’s hot outside. I think I lost ten years of my life just stepping outside today.

Anyway, not a whole lot going on. Hence the lack of updates. Summer school got out about a week ago. I was taking Western Civ, and I got an A. Yay. Fall semester starts on the 24th. I’m taking exciting classes such as “Introduction to Scientific Computing,” “Graphical User Interfaces,” and “Writing, Layout, and Production of Technical Documents.”

I beat FF3 (or 6, whatever) for the first time yesterday. Someone please tell me: is Shadow okay?

And to Scott’s “friend”: get over it.

The “Dear Friends - Music from Final Fantasy” concert was last night.

I thought it was pretty awesome. I haven’t really played most of the games, so I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as Ben did, but I did recognize several pieces and thought it was all wonderful. The setlist was as follows:

“Liberi Fatali” from FF VIII
“Zanarkand” from FF X
“Terra’s Theme” from FF VI
“Theme of Love” from FF IV
“Dear Friends” from FF V
“Vamo’ Alla Flamenco” from FF IX
“Love Grows” from FF VIII
“Aeris’s Theme” from FF VII (Ben made me close my eyes since I’m currently playing this and he didn’t want me to see any of the scenes they showed, bleh.)
“Not Alone” from FF IX
“Ronfaure” from FF XI
FF I-III Medley
New Melody from FF VII Advent Children
“Final Fantasy”

After that, they did an encore, playing Sephiroth’s theme from FF VII. And then they played it again for the second encore.

I probably enjoyed the Final Fantasy theme the most. That was just awesome.

As a side note, I would just like to say that Atlanta’s street system is horrible. What is the point of having 14th street intersect with 14th street and Peachtree running parallel to Peachtree? When you’re trying to find the intersection of Peachtree and 15th street, it makes it impossible. Especially when most of them are one way streets.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Been uber-busy lately.

Ben’s birthday was this past weekend. We ended up going to Murfreesboro to hang with one of his friends and to an anime convention in Nashville. Whenever I find my USB cable, I will upload some pictures.

There’s less than a month of class left. Needs to hurry up.

Been playing a lot of Sims lately, since the expansion came out a month ago. They recently announced another expansion that’s coming out in fall.

Bonnaroo is only two months away.