Welcome to The City of Desire.

Ah, it's fricking freezing today. I went out to get the mail without a coat on and had to wait for three cars to pass before I could go back inside and get warm (our mailbox is across the street). Time to drink lots of tea and knit!

Three hours. Even with the help of FAQs I found mostly useless, it took me three hours to finish that last puzzle in Moreau Castle.

And holy crap I unearthed a fatal bug! Thank God I didn't save or I would've had to start the game over from the beginning!

In that last block-pushing part in Moreau Castle, if when the water's drained you push one or two blocks close to the right edge of the rising platform and the other one or two slightly overlapping the edge from the the part where the water will fill in (if the platform rises a little bit of them will be covered), turn the water on, and turn it off again the blocks will stack on top of each other. You will not be able to move them again. The puzzle has no reset option. If you were unlucky enough to run back to the first save point and save after this happened you won't be able to continue with the dungeon and will be screwed forever. I've seen this confirmed on one Japanese site. In other words, if you manage to somehow stack any of the blocks on top of each other in any way other than the one that completes the puzzle DO NOT SAVE YOUR GAME. I almost had a heart attack until I realized I hadn't saved it like that!

Wow...I was watching the local news last night and found out that an English professor at Trinity College (where I graduated from) fell through the ice during a ski trip in Maine on 12/31 and drowned. I never took any of his classes but I remember always seeing him walking his dog around campus. He looked a lot like Willie Nelson--not the kind of person who would just blend in and even if you didn't have him as a professor you definitely knew who he was! He was sixty-nine years old. What a shame!

I finished The Pinhoe Egg last night. I'm afraid I can't recommend it, Diana Wynne Jones has written much better books than this, like Howl's Moving Castle and Dogsbody.

The main character (Tokio) of Barbara Ikai is the spitting image of Henmi from Oniisama E. ^o^ I think that more has happened in one volume of that manga than in seven of Fruits Basket. It was definitely worth buying new!

I have been having a hell of a time writing lately. Maybe I'm too distracted but I'm fed up with the way my words come out on paper. Buuuu.....

I'm 3 hours into TODr and I played a little FFVIa as well. This is my first time playing FFVI in Japanese and at this point I haven't noticed any major differences from the U.S version besides the Tina/Terra, Mash/Sabin thing. I can't see any reason why they changed Tina's name to Terra, and I also have to wonder why they changed Mash's name to Sabin. Considering how his name writes out in katakana, why not call him Matthew?

The music suffers from the port but the gameplay isn't broken a'la FFIV, where the random enemies kick your ass but the bosses are simple. Locke sucks. I don't think it's because of the port.