The Journal

That didn't go as well as I hoped.  I decided to completely re-design my defenses such that I would have an actual wall with fortifications my archers could hide behind and shoot arrows into goblin invaders from, and it went really great up until I finished.  After testing to make sure it worked I decided that I didn't like my draw bridge because it was only one square wide, so it wasn't obvious if it was up or down just by looking at it and decided to replace it with one that was 2 squares wide.  Quite literally, 2 seconds after deconstructing the bridge, "A VILE FORCE OF DARKNESS HAS ARRIVED".  Which, means a Goblin Siege by the way.

So, all my brand new defensive walls, and the main gate wasn't just down, it had been completely obliterated.  That was the beginning of the end.

I only saved about 15 of the 40 dwarves I had left up until then.  And I didn't feel like waiting 2 hours for the siege to go away, so I decided to go Hellsing style and give one of my vampires an adamantine sword and send him out to fight the goblins all by himself.  He stabbed one of them, then they hacked off his arms and legs and he bled to death.  My 10 untrained craftsmen didn't survive long after that, even with mostly adamantine armor.  I was rather disappointed with it to be honest.  I swear I've had better success in previous fortresses with full steel.  The one guy who I know had a complete set ended up falling down my well and drowning, so I suppose that was a partial success for the armor.  It ended with children running through the hallways being hacked down by chasing goblins.  Oh, and one last Vampire that I had walled up was just listening to the slaughter, he was a double arm amputee and couldn't free himself even after I gave him the order to deconstruct the wall.  I just abandoned the fortress and left him to rot in his dungeon forever, since Vampires don't ever die of starvation or dehydration or sickness.

Tomorrow I'll start a new fortress.  I want to try out some efficiency improvements to my workshop layouts anyway.  And I really need to work on my defenses, at the very least I need a squad of crossbowmen to reinforce my infantry.

Goblin Sieges in a fortress without an Iron source are just brutal.

4 guys in Adamantine can NOT handle 30 or 40 goblins all by themselves, they kill more than their fair share, but it takes just one unlucky hit to bring them down.

The only metal I've been able to find in large quantities is copper and silver, copper is a bad choice for armor and weapons, and silver is worse. 

I had about 120 dwarfs at my peak.  I'm down to 36 now, 9 of which are pretty useless children (they need to grow up faster so I can draft them to go fight the goblins), and 2 of which are Vampires that I've sealed into their jail cells permanently.  I would consider drafting them to go fight the goblins, but one already did that and doesn't have any hands left and the motor nerve functions in his leg are damaged, which makes him a hilarious vampire btw.  Took me forever to find him because he never killed anyone.

If I don't get some large migration waves soon I'm going to be in trouble.

Lesson of the day, don't eat a bowl of warm apple pie and vanilla ice cream at lunch followed by a bowl of warm apple crisp with another scoop of vanilla ice cream at dinner when counting calories.  It put me ~1100 calories over my daily limit since I'm counting every day to try to lose weight, which means to compensate I had to do a ton of extra cardio this evening.  I actually did two workout videos, one at 55 minutes and one at 30 minutes, but it still probably only came to about 900 of the 1100 calories I needed to burn.

Also, apologies to my neighbor who was probably trying to go to sleep at 9:45 PM.  Or at least that's what I'm guessing they were trying to tell me when they punched the connecting wall while I was doing single leg hops that involve jumping straight up in the air and landing kind of hard.  Normally I try to do my workouts in the afternoon, not the evenings, but I hadn't already done a workout today and after I ate dinner I was so far over my calorie limit that I had to do SOMETHING to keep from wiping out the last 3 days worth of weight loss progress.

In other news, I should be home sometime in the next 2-5 weeks, approximately.  Theoretically I should actually be able to lose weight even faster at home, because I can buy and cook my own much healthier food than what is served in the DFAC (what they do to vegetables should be criminal), but that is contingent upon me not hitting every restaurant within a 50 mile radius within the first week of getting back.

Watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, on the Endless Eight Arc.  Up until about the 4th time, it was cute and/or clever.  After the 6th, it just got stupid, and I've started just skipping to the end of each episode to see if it's the same episode repeated yet again.

http://spicytunas.com/2009/07/haruhi-suzumiya-how-endless-eight-should-end/
( Cut for images )

Bioware makes good linear games, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, etc., but they are annoying to no end with their illusion of choices. 

I just started playing Fallout New Vegas and it's surprisingly refreshing to be able to make real choices.  If I get pissed off, I can kill someone, anyone.  I completed a quest for an NPC, and he pissed me off, so I shot him in the head.  Earlier in the game I came across some Legion soldiers that had massacred a town, and they talked to me and tried to walk away after accusing me of being a coward.  So I ran ahead of them, pulled out a fucking grenade launcher, and opened up on their entire group, and finished them off with my pistol when I ran out of grenades.  There's nothing stopping me from going on a killing spree and killing every god damn person in the world.  In fact, my character refuses to give up her weapons, for anyone, and they aren't going to tell me that I can't go somewhere either, so I've shot up more than a few casino security forces that tried.  They are all dead now.  You can pick to side with any of the major factions, or you can side with yourself, or you can just kill everyone and leave the world in anarchy.

That's amazingly open after playing games like Dragon Age where it doesn't matter what you do, who you kill, or the choices you make, the game play is going to proceed the same every time.

Message for all Terraria tutorial creators:

Just write your god damn stupid tutorial, I don't want to watch your video, I just want you to explain how to play the game.

Even better, include a tutorial IN THE GAME instead of making me google for one.

This is pissing me off.  My internet can barely handle loading images, and why would I want to watch a bad or mediocre 5 minute video instead of reading for 20-30 seconds anyway?

Finished my play through of Dragon Age 2 today.

In case you are wondering, it's an excellent game.  I racked up 32 hours of play time (enough to beat it) in just 2 days.  Also, in case you are wondering how I did that, my job mostly consists of sitting at my desk waiting for something to go horribly wrong, and it rarely does.

However, like all recent Bioware games (Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 1 & 2), it goes to great efforts to present the illusion of choice, but regardless of what you do at any point in the game, it ends up at exactly the same spot.  There is absolutely no way to stop or change the outcome.  You get one choice, at the last 5 minutes of gameplay, and all that changes is what your character does in the end-credit narration, the world still does the same thing either way.  So that it will smoothly flow into Dragon Age 3 presumably.

Also, particularly Act 2, the storyline feels a little weak.  They are trying to draw you into a Qunari conflict but you have no justification for involving for yourself except that the Viscount asked for some help, and not very convincingly.

Still, it pisses me off because the game is so good that I want to play through it again, but all that gets me is the chance to listen to the companions that I didn't pick the first time.   I might do it anyway, the combat is a hell of a lot more fun than the Dragon Age: Origins.

Smallpox vaccine sucks.

Portal 2 is pretty cool, not quite as amazing as the original simply because it lacks that surprise factor of being so unexpectedly awesome.  You already expect Portal 2 to be awesome, therefore it doesn't blow you away because it just meets your expectations.  

Going to play through Dragon Age again.

 I started playing City of Heroes again, and it took me a day to realize why the game seemed so empty.  When I play from 0800-1800, during my work day, then that's actually midnight to 10 AM Central time, not exactly prime time hours.

4 days until my promotion to 1st Lieutenant, which isn't much to speak about since all that means is that I didn't get court-martialed in the last 18 months.  Still, not going to complain about a bump from $2784 to $3202 / month.  And then next month on May 27th I'll hit my 2 years service mark, which bumps that $3202 to $3652.  Nothing wrong with a $868 / month pay increase at all.  

And then in another year it jumps to $4207 / month, that's at 3 years service as a 1LT.  And another year after that I would make Captain, $4542, and then hit 4 years service at about the same time, $4951 / month.  That's $2200 / month MORE than I make right now, almost double.

That's the one thing that I think the Army does well, you know what you need to do to get promoted, and you know how much money you'll make when you do.  Whereas in a civilian job about the only way to get that sort of pay increase is to quit and find a new job with the experience you gained working at the old company.