Month: October 2013

Photos: Disney Vacation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Y’know, I thought that there would be more to elaborate on when I got to posting the pictures, but it’s really nothing I haven’t already said in the previous post, summing things up.

The trip to Florida was as pleasant as I had hoped it would have been, and I don’t really have any complaints.  I spent a good bit of coin on a whole lot of food and more food, and lots of alcohol, and I rode a lot of roller coasters, got sunburned, and had a fun trip.  And despite taking a vacation from my vacation with a day spent mostly by the pool, I still found myself somewhat exhausted and slept for almost 12 hours in a single night this weekend.

Looking through these pictures makes me realize that there’s a long, long, long, long path ahead of me if I ever want to feel like I’ve got somewhat adequate control over my own camera, since a good 20% of the pictures taken were blurry beyond belief and therefore unusable.  But I kept in a few here and there, because hey, there was some drunken shenanigans, and the blur only adds to the accuracy of how such things might’ve felt.

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Vacation, in brief

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My Disney vacation was a great time.  I’m sure I’ll elaborate on several aspects of it in future posts as I comb through the litany of pictures taken during the trip, but I just wanted to artificially inflate my own brog post count by posting something fluffy and inconsequential, not to mention that I’ve got a little bit of downtime at work, and it seems like a good idea at the time.

I can’t really say that there was anything bad about the trip, so by default it means that it was a very good vacation as a whole.  Staying on Disney property was interesting and a somewhat educational experience, at the Wilderness Lodge, and I loved the idea of being privy to Magic Hours as resort guests, even if the one time we were at Epcot during a Magic Hour, we hardly got much privilege out of it, but it means something to look forward to in future years.

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Impending brog hiatus

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For about the next week, I’m going to be at Disney World.

Suffice to say, there will not be any substantial posts going up for about that time.

It’s safe to assume that any posts that miraculously emerge while I’m on vacation will likely be to a state of extreme relaxation, or inebriation.  Either way, I will have no regrets about them.

Have a good week everyone.

How to break Final Fantasy Tactics

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The following was accomplished on Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions for iPad, but is capable of working for all other iterations and platforms of FFT.

Final Fantasy Tactics is pretty much one my favorite games ever. It’s challenging, has a fantastic story to those invested into the game enough to decipher it all out, and is a long, rewarding journey of a role-player. When they released it for the iOS, I purchased it immediately, and it has been my go-to way of killing time on my iPad when I don’t have wifi, and don’t feel like/ are out of books to read on Kindle. I would be Tom Cruise on Oprah or Nintendo 64-kid levels of ecstatic if Square would go on and re-release FFT Advance and FFT Advance A2 for the iOS in the future as well.

Anyway, the game mechanics allow for the player to grind levels from the very start of the game. Due to the fact that all enemies scale with you throughout the duration of the game, there’s never the disparity of exceeding your opposition and being incapable of efficiently leveling. A popular belief is that if you grind yourself to way too high of levels too early in the game, you basically screw yourself, because some of the boss characters become unbeatably overpowered once their levels and abilities are scaled to match your own.

Such is true to some degree, but in the end, no enemy with a finite amount of hit points is unbeatable, and as long as they’re controlled by a fairly predictable AI, they’re still dog food on legs. Personally, aside from my very first foray in playing FFT, I have never had any difficulty in overcoming the game, no matter how much I have maxed out my characters as early as the first chapter.

Once you break FFT, the rest of the game is a breeze. No boss or any particular fight is necessarily difficult once you create at least three or four completely maxed out characters, because you will be able to run roughshod through anyone if you play your cards right.

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Marriott rooms and the importance of failure

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago, I wrote this manifesto on Talking Chop about the importance of defeat.  Braves fans were getting a little too complacent with the idea that the Braves were a competent potential contender that season, and the populous got a little too out of control insufferable when the Braves lost a series against a non-contender, and me being one of the Nazi mods of the site at the time, took it upon myself to instead admonish and ban people, to educate them about the importance of losing.

The main point was basically that victory has no importance if there was never any risk of losing.  Victory cannot be sweet if defeat is not bitter.  Without the fear of failure, there is no gratification when there is success.

Not only does this apply to just sports, it applies to just about any endeavor, where there is either success or failure.  The greater chance for failure versus the difficulty of success makes victory that much sweeter if it’s achieved.

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The 2013 Braves’ ironic conclusion

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Blah blah blah apathy, etc, etc. Yeah, all of my seven readers have read it before. But I’ll be damned that seeing the Braves in the playoffs again after a few years has been some of the most tension and excitement-filled baseball I’ve watched in quite some time, and I have to admit to feeling somewhat invigorated by it, in spite of the unfortunate way the season came to a close last night.

Ultimately, I’m not surprised that the Braves lost the series, because my educated guess was that they simply didn’t have the pitching to hang with the Dodgers, or any other World Series contender, but it didn’t meant that I wasn’t going to root for them regardless. And it doesn’t make that feeling of exhausted and draining defeat suck any less when it did happen, because in the end, that’s not what I wanted from my team. I wanted them to win the whole fucking shebang, and not get bounced in the first round yet again.

But it’s how it all transpired that I felt like writing about, because it defied all logic and convention, and as far as making educated guesses go, was not how it was supposed to happen. And like all high-tension critical games go, it was of course, the emotional rollercoaster that makes victory sweeter for those on the winning side, and defeat that much more painful for those on the losing side.

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Photos: Scarecrows in the Garden

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As has been the case over the last two years now, I decided to hit up the Atlanta Botanical Gardens for their annual Scarecrows in the Garden exhibit where local individuals, groups and businesses throughout the area create various scarecrows that are displayed throughout the garden grounds.

None of it’s necessarily Scary Stories in the Dark caliber, but it’s sometimes nice to just walk around and see what people come up with.  And the weather this time of year is often pleasant, and it’s something that really feels like the start of the fall for me.

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