This year’s Christmas holiday definitely was different from the other years. First and foremost, you can read the prior post. Secondly, I actually got gifts for people! I know, quite the shocker. I on the other hand, got some quite interesting gifts. I got a Sudoku book, a 24 pack of juice (with the intentions of curbing my non-existant energy drink addiction), a plastic wavy toy thingy, a $50 Amazon gift card (which was promtly spent of textbooks), a $20 Bestbuy gift card (which was spent in getting a new headset to see if my laptop was working or not), a valise (which I requested to make the trip home easier), a pocket German-English dictionary, and a Baliyo butterfly pen (like a butter knife, but with a pen instead of a blade). However, I must say, the greatest gift of all, hands down… was my financial aid money. You see, since Fall Quarter started, I’ve been hearing about fee increases, protests, and the like. Well, eventually, that fee increase did hit. I remember hearing something about a 32% increase.
Thus, I got this email on November 24th:
“Dear Student:
On Thursday, November 19, the UC Board of Regents approved a mid-year fee increase for the 2009-2010 year. Specifically, the Education Fee portion of the Registration Fees increased. You can see a detailed breakdown of Registration Fee components at the Office of Budget & Institutional Analysis
Website: http://budget.ucdavis.edu/studentfees/preliminary-fees
Most students who receive Cal Grants or University grants will likely receive additional grant funding to cover the fee increase. Other students may request additional loan support to cover the increase, if necessary.”
The deadline for payment is December 28th, aka today. But here’s the thing, ever since that email hit, I’ve been worrying about whether or not I’d have to get some more financial aid or not. I mean, even before the increase I knew people who had to still pay from their own pockets. Fall Quarter the financial aid covered me, but what about Winter with its newfangled 32%? For the subsequent weeks, I’ve worried about it. On top of all that, they changed the format of the website where you handle your student fees, so I had no idea how to read it at first. Eventually I emailed the Financial Aid Office, and they responded by letting me know that financial aid would not be distributed until December 26th, two days before the payments are due. If you weren’t able to pay on time, they drop you from the classes you’ve registered for.
Paranoid, I finally discover that yes indeed the money came in, and I am indeed fully covered. Like I said, greatest Christmas gift of all.
I’ve hung out with Martin a lot since we gotten back. I’ve seen Maily, Tejinder, Tony, Jessica, Victoria, Nahida, Alan, Alex Antoku, Ed, Henry, Jesse, Yacoub, more of Jesse’s friends, Emil, Alex Bui, Kevin Van, Daniel, and even met some people from out neighborhood (and age group) that I’ve never met before. Speaking of which, about a week or two ago (I can’t really remember since the days have begun to blur together), on the day I was hanging out with Emil, Alex Bui, Daniel, Kevin Van, and Martin, I met a French Magic: The Gathering player! We went out to Superstars, a card store in downtown San Jose, so that Emil could pick up some singles for his deck. While playtesting, we noticed a guy watching us, so Emil offered him a seat at our table to play. He responded that he was up for playing, but that his deck was “Type 2.” Now those quotes have a double meaning. The first being that it is indeed MTG terminology for what kind of cards he uses (the 2 most recent blocks and the most recent Core set). The second, is that when he said “Type 2,” was went I noticed his accent. As it turns out, he was from France, visiting his cousin (I think?) in America. But because his cousin worked (or something like that) he had nothing to do during the day but play Magic. So we played some rounds. As it turns out, he plays like, competatively. He has a DCI badge, is up to date with all the latest cards and etc. He used a mono-black aggro deck with a Vampire basis. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the deck I threw together in one night put up a decent fight against him. Martin’s Type 2 deck did not, but that’s only because he miscounted how many lands he put in. Overall, Hugo was a cool guy. I think the coolest part was when he and Emil traded the French and English versions of the cards they had, haha. It was a big plus for both people, since Hugo wanted English cards to show off and Emil wanted French cards.
Over the break I’ve also managed to watch James Cameran’s Avatar, not to be confused with Avatar: The Last Airbender which has been announced a while ago. F–king amazing movie. I loved almost all of it. I actually watched it twice. The first time was with Jesse and her friends at Oakridge in 3d, and the second time being with Ed, Henry, Alex A and Alan at Oakridge in 2d (Henry says the 3d hurts his head/eyes). That movie is a visual feast. Like, it’s beautiful. Specifically the environment and creative creatures of Pandora, but the mechs of the human forces were also kick ass. There’s a small, subtle thing that particularly jumped out at me; something is being displayed on a projected moniter, and one of the scientists brings up a handheld monitor, and uses the touch interface to drag the display on his handheld, and bring it with him to other parts of the lab. That’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen come out of sci-fi movies. Storyline-wise, I resonated with Victoria’s opinion that the movie was like Pocahantus in space. While during my first viewing, I could not help but think that the protagonist Jake Sully was very much like John Smith.
Hanging out with Jesse and her friends was of course very cool. It’s always nice to see/be around my Jessebell :3. At first I got the impression that her friends were pretty strange, then of course I remembered myself and my friends are pretty strange as well, hahaha. That was a good day.
Christmas dinner involved deep-fried turkey, a first for me. That stuff is delicious. The skin, holy crap, the skin is amazing. And of course, as usual my family always ends up with an extra turkey, so we had antoher one, except my dad combined frying it for a bit then finishing in the oven. The turkey may have losts its amazing color and the crunchy skin, but damn that was a juicy turkey.
Also, by leeching onto Alan and Alex A, I managed to get up to HR6, just one quest shy of G rank in Monster Hunter Freedom Unite.
Although, not everything is peaceful in the hunters’ world of Minegarde. Things exploded when Alex A accidentally awaken a monster I had just put to sleep. You see, as the Bow wielder also equiped with armor that boosts my ability to inflict status ailments, i play the support role. Paralysis and Poison status are self explainitory, but Sleep is special. Sleep status puts the monster to sleep, and the next hit (usually stacks of high powered bombs) deals quadruple damage. Against an incredibly difficult monster known as the Akantor, we needed to hit it as hard as possible. Alex accidentally woke it up as soon as I put it to sleep, and I snapped. See, I had been playing with him frequently beforehand, and his lax attitude about hunting began to pile on. For instance, while fighting a monster which the real enemy is the timer, he instead choose not to focus on the main monster and went for clearing a pathway we would use later on. This wouldn’t have bugged me too much if it weren’t for the fact that you can just run past the small monsters in the pace if you’re careful enough. We needed to pile on enough damage so that the monster would flee when time ran out, something I knew we could not do easily being that 1) Alex was not experienced enough to actively and consistantly assualt the monster’s weakpoint and 2) I use a bow, which arguably puts out the least damage in the game. Going back to the point, Alex manged to die against one of those small monsters. In Monster Hunter, each death reduces the total reward by 1/3 of maximum, and at 0 reward, the quest immediately fails. He had taken one death due to not being able to avoid the monster’s tail as it just walked (understandable, this is a BIG creautre), and 1 death to a small monster (not so understandable). I was watching his health bar. He had a tiny sliver of life left, and when I was expecting him to heal, I noticed that he wasn’t going for it. He died due to swarms, which could have been avoided if he left them alone, which I did indeed suggest prior. The third death was on my head, but that was to the monster we were focusing on, and that was because it went to attack me directly, something it only does at the end (notice the difference from being accidently killed). Once again, an acceptable situation exacerbated by another small detail. There was less than 4 mins left in the mission. I knew we had the repel. I knew it. All we had to do was hang on until the end. But, all of our efforts failed in the last few minutes due to avoidable mistakes.
Back to that Akantor with the accidental waking. After we had killed it, we were talking about the hunt. At one point, Alex decided to bomb the Akantor’s face while it was awake, to make use of the bombs we were planing on using while it slept. He knocked Alan out of his attack with the bomb, which after the match Alan explained wasn’t the wise thing to do, since Alan’s attack would have been stronger than the bomb anyways. Alex apologizes. Having snapped, I demand an apology for his accidental awking of the Akantor. However, he was not aware that I managed to sleep the Akantor. Still waiting for my apology, Alex replied: “You have no evidence :<” despite Alan, the veteran hunter, confirming that he had woke it. I managed to type out a “fuck you” just was he was going to apologize, but he quickly rescinded it. “Hi, my name is Alex Tran and I can’t take a joke. Monster Hunter is srs bznz.”
Easy for him to say. That fight was insanly fucking easier for him. As a Great Sword wielding Blademaster, he gets in the neighborhood of 400 armor and the ability to block Akantor’s near impossible to dodge tackles. I’m a Bow user who can’t block and must take devastating hits with my armor reaching its peak at 250. Not only gamewise, he can’t just swallow his pride and say, “Hey man, I’m sorry. Geez, no need to get pissed off.” But no. He insists that my perspecive be ignored by condescnedingly mocking me. I stated that he had no idea how much harder it is to bow, to which he instantly logged off, aparently fed up with my bitching. But you know something, I have to try extra fucking hard in this game, not only because Bows are difficult, but to cover for his ass, and I can’t get an apology? Video game or not, I have to put in a lot of effort so that I don’t fuck up the hunt that everyone else is also involved in.
In brighter news, I finally managed to bring Nahida pumpkin pie. That’s one vow accomplished!
Timestamp – 1:53 AM
