So I wrote all about Dante's Inferno and Lancelot and courtly love, not to be confused with Courtney Love, ha ha ha!  I'm so funny, I just keep making these puns.  I swear that's the highest level of humor, puns!  At the lowest level there's toilet humor, then above that there's situational irony, and then biting satire, and finally at the top there's the pun.  I could write a whole essay on how puns are so great, but I'm all essayed out, thank you very much!

Finals are over and it's time for winter break!  Woohoo!  Sorry about the short and frantic updates, I haven't had time to write entries lately because of finals.  But now that finals are over, it's like a great weight has been lifted from my back.  I've been continuing my adventures in Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna.  I think I'm close to the end of the Aranna quest, but I don't know because this game just keeps going on and on!  My characters' levels are keeping up with the standards, but I've decided to have three characters where one is a combination nature and combat mage.  I've been building both of those magic skills equally and the result is that I can cast a bunch of spells, but only the lower-level ones!  It's like having the Red Mage from Final Fantasy 1 in my party, but without the fighting abilities or the extra hit points.  This game seems to really reward specialization, so next time I think I'll have a four-character party with a character for each of the four skills.  You know, the more I think about the world of Aranna, the more it reminds me of Morrowind.  Both games have an island whose native inhabitants are people with blue-gray skin.  In Morrowind it's Vvardenfell with the Dunmer, and in Aranna it's the island of Aranna with the Utraeans.  Also, both games feature cat people and lizard people who fill roles that are similar in some ways but totally different in others.  In Morrowind, the catlike Khajiit and lizardlike Argonians inhabit Vvardenfell, and some are free citizens while others are slaves.  In Aranna, the catlike Hassat and lizardlike Zaurask were created by the Utraeans to be slaves, but they rebelled and broke free, and now they are under the control of a ruthless warlord who's trying to conquer all the cities of Aranna, so they're the main enemy in the game most of the time.

What the?  Index of refraction?  Snell's formula?  Lorentz-Lorenz who?  You can write this jargon, George, but you can't say it.  What is a tensor, anyway?  You could say that these finals are tensors because they make me tense.  Oh my god that's such a funny pun, ha ha ha!

My algorithms final is done and I don't know how I did.  I know I screwed up the network flow model, but the test was already over before I discovered a better solution.  Oh well, I hope I at least get credit for figuring out the basic problem to be solved.

No final today.  Must study must study... gah!  Can't resist lure of TV... what's on tonight?  Some good stuff... no!  Must study!  I... have... to... know... those... algorithms!

Well, I took it.  I think I did all right, but we'll have to see.

It's the beginning of finals week, and let's see if I can get through it.  Tomorrow there's my numerical methods final, and two days after that there's my algorithms final, and the day after that is when my Japanese translation final is due, and then there's my Western Civilization final.  Oh boy, this is going to be a load of fun.

Can you believe that Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna still has no FAQs or guides available at GameFAQs?  Sure, there are some codes available, but usually people come out in droves to write FAQs for every single game out there.  Well, every game except possibly the bad ones, and Dungeon Siege doesn't seem like such a bad game to me.  It might be too new, because according to the information posted on GameFAQs it's only been out for a month.  It's not that big a deal, since the Dungeon Siege puzzles I've seen so far aren't too hard to figure out.

It's done!  The final boss has been beaten, and also I killed the evil overlord Gom.  By final boss, I mean my energy resources final exam, which I think I did pretty well on.  Gom is also a final boss because he's the ultimate enemy in the Ehb campaign of Dungeon Siege, and I went into his volcano lair and pounded him with weapons and magic until he was defeated.  He did one of those things where at first he's this kind of unimpressive enemy, but then he's resurrected as a mega-powerful giant being that hits you with a bunch of heavy attacks.  He would shoot you with lightning, which was actually his weakest attack, and he would pound you with debris and acid rain, and his worst attack was summoning a bunch of tough monsters.  If you're playing with only a few characters, you can't assign a bunch of people to kill the monsters one-on-one, so I ended up having to run away every time Gom summoned monsters.  After I had killed Gom, the screen faded to black and displayed a message saying that the evil had been vanquished, but that there was a new evil brewing in some unspecified place, so please buy the sequel and the expansion pack available soon in stores near you.  Actually, it didn't really say to buy the sequel, but it was such a blatant setup for one... like the one I'll be playing next, the Aranna campaign.  Anyway, it was kind of like the worst ending ever, even worse than Drakan 1.  Maybe I'll try multiplayer, but I don't know of anyone I could play with and I'm too busy to live by other people's playing schedules.

I really need to keep up with my writing for this webpage, and also I need to get back to Azenera.  I have finals, but I've been spending all this time getting through Dungeon Siege.  You know, now I think I realize what the inspiration for Progress Quest was, because this game is kind of like the 3D mode for that "game" that everyone keeps talking about.  Some aspects of the game are interesting, but a lot of it is busywork and chores like that inventory management I mentioned yesterday, shopping for supplies, and waiting for my characters' health and mana to replenish because I'm too cheap to use potions (which is one of the many reasons I always specialize in magic to the exclusion of everything else in Drakan 2, by the way).  Tomorrow I have my energy resources final, so I'd better stop playing this game and start studying.

Guess what game I've been playing?  No, it's not another first-person shooter like all those demos I've been downloading.  It's Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna.  It contains both the Aranna expansion pack and the first game, which I didn't have yet so it was a pretty good deal for me.  I've been playing the original Ehb campaign and it's all right, but it's kind of repetitive and there's a lot of inventory management.  There are two pack mules in my party, but my inventory is still filling up pretty quickly even with all that space.  I had the same problem in Morrowind, but in that game I could always use a bunch of spells to boost my inventory capacity up to over 1000.  Also, in Morrowind, items usually didn't disappear, even when you left them on the ground in the middle of Balmora, whereas in Dungeon Siege, items will disappear if you leave them behind.  That saves a lot of pointless backtracking, but it's annoying.  Another thing that discourages backtracking in Dungeon Siege is the fact that enemies don't respawn, at least not in the single player game.  That takes some of the pressure off you because you can always retreat to safe territory, but if you ever do feel like backtracking to do an old quest that you forgot, you're going to have to do a lot of walking over empty ground.  Are you at Fortress Kroth and you just remembered that you forgot to get those books for the guy in Glacern or clear out someone's basement?  Well, if you want to do those quests, then you'll have to spend at least 10 minutes slowly trudging over land you've already seen with nothing to do on the way except possibly renew some buff spell you've been casting on your characters.  There's no way to speed up this process, except possibly by using the group haste spell, but that takes a lot of mana and doesn't help that much.  I've heard that there are teleporters in the Aranna quest, so that should make it less tedious if I want to go back to some old place.  One of the things that surprises me about Dungeon Siege is that the physics system and collision detection seem more advanced than what is required for a party-based dungeon crawler with actions based on character stats.  Bombs bounce off walls and have explosions with radius damage, items drop and come to a rest realistically when they land on the ground, and arrows and bolts are affected by gravity.  This isn't a bad thing - in fact, it's rather welcome - but sometimes it just feels like I should have the ability to break out of the style of the game and play it like an action game, where I can move a character with the keyboard, turn with the mouse, and attack in any direction at will instead of ordering characters to attack specific things, and it's frustrating that I can't get that much control.  But then again, even that wouldn't solve the problem of being mobbed by monsters all the time.

In October, I had Shalo Kitie come in and give the current mood and music.  That was my "thing" for that month.  For November, my thing was being really moody and stuff.  This month, my thing is coming in late.  I got back from Thanksgiving break on November 30, which wasn't really much time at all that I got to spend at home.  I played Jak II and got a good way through it, but some of those minigames are just next to impossible.  I mean, I have to collect 60 green eco things in 2 minutes, and they're scattered around this big city waterway area on top of railings and everything?  Come on!  Well, I hope I get some kind of speeder upper thing that lets me get around faster.  Maybe I just have to memorize a pattern.  Since I'm taking an algorithms class, I could probably come up with some polynomial-time algorithm to determine the shortest path that takes me through all the green eco blobs... oh wait, no I can't because it's a variation on a Hamiltonian path problem and that's NP-complete.  Oh well, there's probably a FAQ somewhere on the Internet that has a map or directions for all these minigames.  Despite the occasionally frustrating minigames and the lack of gun aiming in first-person view mode, Jak II is a really good game.  It has great gameplay and graphics, and the main city in the game has a real oppressive and gritty atmosphere to it while still being humorous.  There are loudspeakers scattered around the city that broadcast propaganda, and there are guards patrolling the streets everywhere.  If you get in a fight with a guard or get in trouble in some other way, then you can't just defeat the whole town like you can in games like Morrowind because the guards will keep coming and bringing in increasingly heavy reinforcements, and there aren't any health powerups in the city so eventually you'll be beaten unless you can run and hide.  Usually you can walk or ride a hovercraft through the city without being hassled, but sometimes you'll get a mission where you have to escort someone to another place in the city or deliver cargo in a limited amount of time.  When you start missions like that, the guards go on alert and attack you as soon as they see you, so you have to race against the clock while keeping track of where you're going and avoiding enemy fire.  It can get pretty hectic sometimes.  The game's storyline is interesting because it has ties to the first game while being very different in nature.  You'll meet old characters, but they'll be in new roles.  I can't wait to get back to Jak II, but I'll also have other games waiting for me such as Ratchet and Clank II and Final Fantasy X-2.  This winter break is going to be too short.