Will it ever be time?

[leene_chan]

I still haven't started my Shirley poppy seeds. It's been too cold lately. I've never done poppies from seed before, and all the annuals I started from seed last year were late summer as opposed to late spring/early summer bloomers, so I really don't know what I'm doing. :O I read that some people even throw the seeds on top of the snow, which is not plausible considering the amount of birds we have around here. Who knows? I'll probably try sowing one pot tomorrow.

If all else fails, I'll still have my breadseed poppy "Lauren's Grape" showing up some time in May. I ordered those as live plants from Select Seeds. I'm assuming I won't kill them. I'm determined not to kill a plant that shares my name.

So now that I'm editing Chapter Five, I realize that it's a badly-written piece of trash. It's going to need a lot of work before it's even fit to show to one person. And it happens every time...XD

On the gaming front, I had been trying the extra dungeon Zone Cage in Tales of Graces f for a while. I managed to beat the first five floors, but it's been giving me a real headache. So many flashing lights! So much spontaneous death! I'll probably go back to it later. For now I'm taking a break.

I had been wanting to replay Atelier Totori for a long time. I loved it when I played it last summer--it was so much better than Rorona, which I found to be disappointing due to its difficulty and excessive lolita fan service. I even purchased the downloadable characters, all three of them! So I'm at the beginning of Year Two in this playthrough, and even though I still think the game is enjoyable, it's not holding up in my eyes as a great installment in the series. At all.

Why not?

Because of the lolitas.

Don't get me wrong. Totori is far better than Annie, Judie and Rorona. But as a woman, playing a simulation game that consists of no fewer than five shrill-voiced lolitas shrieking at each other and constant panty flashing on the part of the preteen heroine is more than I can bear.

All the girls who aren't under-age squeal just as much, and their boobs all look really weird (especially Pamela's).

The Atelier series didn't always pander to 20-30-something otaku males with Lolita fetishes. In fact, Gust didn't start that crap until Rorona. ::cries:: The older games always had a variety of characters you could interact with, and the heroine was always ambitious and independent. Gust dumped their original fanbase to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I could go on like this forever...but I won't. I'm just making myself angry. I'm going to replay Atelier Lilie or something. Even Elie with its difficulty is better than this, because the heroine is a hard-working student, not some squeaky-voiced little girl and does everything by herself.

Also, the old Atelier games actually had good voice acting.