why I love HoopyCat, part n in a long-running series

Transcript from #soc.bi, a few minutes ago. All times local to me. HoopyCat is hoopycat (who no longer uses lj), fluffymormegil is fluffymormegil, astra is me, anathema is geminigirl. Posted with permission.

[23:54] HoopyCat: so, dawn had her first day o' work today. exciting, for sure. :-)
[23:59] HoopyCat: and i'm feeling nice, so i'm going to go refuel the car dawn is driving in the most confusing fashion possible
[00:01] HoopyCat: bbiab
[00:02] fluffymormegil: You're going to summon the petrolpixies to refuel it? :)
[01:04] HoopyCat: woohoo, mission accomplished
[01:06] HoopyCat: and i think i won a round of Perplex the Vagrant Bicyclist
[01:07] astra: oh?
[01:08] HoopyCat: (a toyota prius briskly enters a parking lot, windows down, blasting bob segar, driving right past a stopped bicyclist in the middle of the parking lot. it parks by backing into a spot between two cars. the driver then gets out of the car, locks it, walks up to the car next to it, unlocks it, starts it, rolls the windows down, and blasts freezepop, leaving the parking lot the same way the prius came in.)
[01:08] astra: that's... pretty bizarre, yes :D
[01:13] anathema: Well, we knew you were odd, Hoopy

I didn't just lol, I had a laughing fit that lasted for around 20 seconds of continuous laughter.

some video gaming luck

I have been annoyed with Pokemon for a couple of weeks now. (I didn't write about it at the time because it happened at the same time as the Burma stuff, and I... felt like I'd be the biggest hypocrite on Earth if I'd spent time getting sympathy about ooh, a problem in my video game when there was such awful stuff happening in the world.) This is because I dragged myself through Pokemon Ranger, which was a rather tedious game, to get the Manaphy egg. The time on my saved game was a little over 10 hours, but that didn't include all the times I messed up a capture and quit without saving - so it was probably closer to 15 hours. Got the egg, transferred it to my Pearl cartridge, saved both games - and the egg disappeared! I think it was because my Ranger is a US cartridge and my Pearl is European, but this is honestly the first time I've run into any kind of region locking on a Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS game, and I am not impressed!

It might just have been a random occurrence not to do with anything - maybe I needed to save the Pearl game again or play it for a while before shutting it down, but in the meantime I've been too pissed off to want to play Pokemon. So all my efforts have been going into Sims 2, although I still don't have any brain for creative stuff. Instead, I have been installing downloads and updating hacks - and trying to clear space off my hard drive by deleting some of my more compulsive backups. I managed to delete all my backups older than November 2006 from all three drives. Now I only have the CDs *lol*. I also deleted all my Sims 1 stuff off the file server downstairs, except for the things I'd made myself, and freed up over 4 GB of space!

My paranoid backup system was, however, justified over the weekend: when someone else suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure and lost everything - including a 1.52GB shared Neighbourhood made by someone who has since died in real life (genuinely!). As I am a Compulsive Hoarder (TM), I still had the original file, and was able to extract the useful parts, rezip it, and upload it to my Sims 2 site. I spent around 7 hours working on the thing plus another 10 hours of computer time uploading (without me needing to watch it), but it was worth it to make someone happy. I mean, I wasn't feeling well yesterday & was planning to spend the day fiddling with Sims stuff anyway.

Today, I went to a shop that exchanges games for other games or cash, and traded in my US copy of Pokemon Ranger for a European edition. I was worried that I'd get a save game with the Manaphy egg already extracted, but the guy whose save game I have is right at the end, so it'll only take me an hour & a half or so to get the egg again, rather than 10+ hours if I had to start from scratch! That is definitely A Good Thing.

I note that I still need to acquire enough spoons to finish writing about the situation in Burma :/ I knew there was a reason I have a livejournal rather than a blog :/ No one cares if I don't update this thing, as long as you know I'm still alive, whereas people expect blogs to get updated.