Midnight cooking adventures!  It's 2:00AM and I'm currently attempting to stew up some lamb curry--although I seem to have not gotten enough lamb, so most of it will end up being be onion and carrot...took a long nap after coming home and eating a really light and quick dinner, not waking up until like midnight.  Feels great!  Like I'm back at Munger in Stanford having the time of my life and trying to learn how to live by myself.  Difference is that I am now much much much better at cooking (not saying much)...Now I'll have this lamb curry to eat before going back to sleep, and then I'll pack the leftovers to use as a dinner before MtG drafting tomorrow.  Whee!

Work stuff continues to be work stuff...there was quite an interesting development today!  Juicy, juicy~  More importantly, I was tearing it up as Makoto in 3rd Strike, only losing a match when I started trolling and picked SA3 instead of SA1.  I've switched to using SA1 lately, with great results...it's sad not having as much EX meter but being able to actually land supers (usually from a karakusa) is great.  I still have to look for more karakusa opportunities and just go for the karakusa more often after resets, after dashbacks, after knockdowns, even after hayates, so that's something that I still need to work on.  I actually pulled off a dashback->kara-karakusa today on their wakeup which felt super-pro. :D  After watching Kuroda's Makoto (sort of an unconventional style) I realized it's probably good if I do less gung-ho guessing with my play.  Sometimes it's fine, like on their wakeup I should probably just go for cr lk into hayate sometimes even though it's a free punish if they block.  But there are other situations where I could just be more conservative and play safer, focus on reacting well and spacing/poking them out.  Turn it into less of a guessing game...just make sure to hit all of the easy punishes with cr mp into hayate, or whatever.

Going to go get my hair trimmed at Saga salon at some point soon!  I keep on considering something like trying to color the ends of my hair...but maybe let's just stick to first things first now. ^^;

Finally broke my streak of bad play in MtG, it feels like.  Drafted last week and although reading signals was really weird I think I ended up falling in a good spot and ended up 2-0-1 after the first match went to time (I got paired down).  I made a misplay in the 3rd match but it ended up being OK.  I got knocked out of the playoffs bracket at work after finishing 5th or 6th in pools...but that wasn't really any fault of mine, I think my play was fine.  Game 1 he just curved out and ran over me with RW aggro stuff, so I sided in a bunch of more defensive guys, trying to also lower my curve.  Game 2 I had an interesting decision where he was at 6 with an untapped (just played) sprinting warbrute on the board (5/4, must attack each turn).  He is tapped out and my board is 2 1/1 goblin tokens and a 5/4 feral krushok.  I am at 21 or 22, have summit prowler (4/3) in my hand and he has like 3 cards in hand or something.  I have two lines of play here: one is to just attack with everything, which forces him to trade sprinting warbrute for my krushok, he goes down to 4 and i play prowler.  I do have sarkhan's rage in my deck so that is relevant, but I'm pretty sure in the end the better play is to just play summit prowler and pass.  Then next turn he attacks with warbrute and I take it which is fine since I've got life to spare, and he loses unless he plays 2 blockers, or has a blocker and a removal spell.  Warbrute is effectively gone as a blocker from that point on which is good since I'm way ahead on the race.

So I take that line, he attacks with warbrute and I take it as planned, then he plays a morph and passes with 3 mana up.  I draw a land and now I have another interesting decision, do I go for the kill?  If I attack and he has nothing then he is just dead on board so he loses.  If he has something, I'm guessing it's a removal spell of some sort--my best guess was sandblast but thinking about it again I should have also considered tail slash since that is slightly more likely (number of DTK packs is greater than FRF).  Even with sandblast though, he has to sandblast my krushok and then chump with his morph, which is great for me.  I make the attack but then get 2-for-1d as he flips his morph--it's Hidden Dragonslayer, so he destroys my krushok, trades with my summit prowler, and gains 1 net life and I'm behind on board now.  I don't draw enough gas and it's over.  Still the right play though, I just needed to "make him have it" and unfortunately he did.  Actually, thinking back, I guess I should have also considered atarka efreet--if I attack into that, he flips it up, trades with krushok and kills a goblin, but he also goes down to 1 and is again dead next turn unless he has 2 things, so I would have still made the same attack in that case.  *shrug* can't play around rares, what are you gonna do?

My mom bought me a meat thermometer!  Woo-hoo!  I've got wine for cooking now as well.  Ready to try cooking a legit steak again--maybe this time I'll get one from Whole Foods or something.  The meat thermometer will help a lot!  So useful!  Haha, if I want to really go all the way though, I'd ask for one of those beer coolers (I'm sure we have one at home) and do the whole ghetto sous vide cooking thing.  I donno if that's REALLY worth the effort though, maybe it's good enough if I just use the oven.  Man, cooking steaks is so extremely complicated...

I ordered my pair of monitor speakers!  Finally!  I went all out, partly because I've been putting this off for so long.  Ended up settling for the Yamaha HS8s, which are pretty massive.  They are LEGIT speakers, apparently the pair weighs like 50 lbs together or something, lol.  It's going to be a whole different world when I get to listen to my mixes on these!  Excited for them to come in!  Have to go and find the right cables to hook em up though.  The cool thing is that the music commissions I'm doing for Mysterious Space have been helping to pay for those, so that's nice--self-funding hobbies, yay!

Progress has continued on the Journey cosplay sewing project!  I finally bit the bullet and did away with the whole convertible cloak<->dress idea, as it just wasn't going to work out...so it's just a dress now.  I'm still going to go with the toggle buttons on the front, as I think that's just really cool, not to mention convenient for putting it on and taking it off.

Seems like I always keep on thanking people for what they've done, and apologizing for mistakes I've made.  Always living in the past, I guess...but that's not really anything new.

Rhythm Gunner has gotten a lot of positive feedback!  I haven't really gotten a chance to sit down and add new content and features to it, but...that's actually fine, as my priority right now is the Journey cosplay.  One thing at a time!  Sigh...I still have to finish working on the Journey plate that I didn't finish at Fireworks Ceramics...maybe this weekend?  Don't worry though, Rhythm Gunner is definitely good enough that it deserves more work.  Come to think of it, even Ripple Runner could use more content, but...ehh, the 6 stages that are there are probably good enough.

Went to a different WCS venue yesterday! (Monday night)  Went to Dance Boulevard down in San Jose...it's a farther commute but not too bad since it's after traffic dies down a bit.  I had already paid for the lesson over at Stanford WCS but apparently Dance Boulevard was free that night because of national dance week, so I decided to go check it out.  It was nice!  Richard Kear's class was pretty clear and helpful, and...since the dancers are actually OK it was much easier to actually see whether I was doing it right or not (still tricky sometimes).  The dance was fun as well!  It's a better crowd--just more people and more actually-good dancers, which is super nice.  I'll definitely be heading back there again--it's just what I was looking for!