"Are you getting enough vegetables in your diet?" "Well, that depends. Is seaweed a vegetable?"

I fi-fricking-nally finished MGS3 last. In short, it was as fantastic as everyone said, and I eagerly await MGS4 next week so I can wait 4 years to play it as well. Next games up on the list is God of War 2 and Beyond Good and Evil.

Speaking of games, I’ve been getting into free MMORPGs lately. It’s a bit of a long story of how I got into them, but it basically started with me buying an EEE 701 ultra portable laptop from Akiba (this makes laptop #3 if you’ve been counting). To test how strong that little beast of a PC was, I started throwing many mid-spec games at it in the hopes some would stick.GTA3, Beyond Good and Evil, Ether Vapor and Warcraft 3 ran perfectly on it, to my surprise. Then it started. It dawned on me that having a strong machine which a good wifi card and ultra portability meant MMO games were a perfect fit. While it took a bit of display finagling, I’ve gotten the following games to run near perfect and find myself playing them when I have time to spare: GunBound, Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst, Maple Story, Ghost Online and Arad Senki (I’ve tricked myself into thinking this is a form of study by setting the games to Japanese, but it’s a lie I tell you!). I’ve also started on Grenado Espada (Sword of the New World) and Rohan, but that’s on my bigger PC. So that’s that, don’t test games on a new PC or you’ll find yourself swooning at their siren songs when you should be learning archaic verb forms.

Speaking of archaic verb forms, I’ve officially studying for 1-kyuu. I have no delusions of passing it, nor do I have any need for the certification, but I find that I have to take it. I took 2 kyuu and did ok, so not taking 1 kyuu now would be a retreat (and we all know you can’t go back), a ‘Game Over’ if you will. At least when I fail it, they’ll always be the ‘retry’ option. Even though I say all this, I don’t want studying for a test I don’t need to mess with my real Japanese studies. My speaking skills still suck, I’ve been hovering at 700 for Heisig for a while, and my everyday vocab is still weak. If anyone knows of a good speaking test, let me know. Maybe focusing my energies on something like that will break me out of this rut.